Report from Greece
CAPSIS, JOHN P.
Center's failures, Right's greed, U.S. errors help Reds REPORT FROM GREECE By John P Capsis Athens The Greek Civil War (1944-48) was the first battle of the Anglo-American cold war against...
...When Papagos died in 1956, the U. S. Embassy intervened again to have the King name Karamanlis Premier and leader of the Right...
...In short, the rich have gotten very much richer, while the poor have stood still...
...The failure of the non-Communist Center dates back at least as far as 1946...
...Small wonder that the EDA got a majority or near-majority of the votes in the big cities...
...The errors of U. S. policy in its interventions into Greek affairs...
...When King Paul also dissolved Parliament at Karamanlis's behest last March, many felt that the monarch himself was becoming the real leader of the Right...
...America's role in bringing this situation about is viewed here as another indication of its general incapacity to meet its responsibilities as the leading democratic power—an incapacity noted elsewhere...
...Karamanlis's party got 40 per cent of the vote this year, as compared to 49 per cent for the rightist Greek Rally six years ago...
...The new wealth has not been distributed among all classes of the population...
...Its power-hungry co-leader George Papandreou is generally distrusted after a career of switching from one party or faction to another...
...The masses drift steadily leftward, while several prominent old reactionaries have recently deserted the Radical Union because of the Premier's alleged "soft" policy on Cyprus...
...the old guard controls the party organization...
...In the years that followed, the Liberals and other Centrist groups grew more and more conservative and removed from the popular masses...
...Today, the Liberal party, which got less votes than the EDA in last June's election, badly needs new leadership...
...This party was regarded as the illegitimate offspring of the traditional Right and the U. S. Embassy, and its formation under such circumstances demoralized Greek intellectuals...
...At that time, the right-wing Populists won 203 of the 300 seats in Parliament, but their crafty leader, Constantine Tsaldaris, induced the Liberals to join a coalition government as a patriotic move...
...The Cyprus question which has stirred great anti-Americanism, is only one reason...
...Karamanlis was chosen, many Greeks believe, because the U. S. thought him least aggressive on the Cyprus question, even though he was among the younger leaders of the ruling group...
...The other co-leader, the shrewd Sophocles Venizelos, seems to have been demoralized by U. S. support for the Right, and has taken no decisive action to rebuild his party...
...Under Rightist rule, Greek national production has risen 50 per cent above the prewar high, and per capita income has nearly tripled: from $35 to $250 a year...
...This tradition was continued by U. S. envoys until 1952, when the late Premier Venizelos to resign and Parliament to adopt a complicated election law which put all past gerrymanders to shame...
...There is little hope of new faces coming to the fore...
...Most are non-Communists or even anti-Communists who wish thus to express their resentment of stagnation at home and frustration on Cyprus...
...The result was that the Greek Rally under Marshal Alexander Papagos, with less than half the popular vote, got 239 of the 300 seats in Parliament...
...The maimer in which he was selected also revived criticism of the royal family, which had been dormant since the Civil War...
...But the averages are misleading...
...The self-enrichment policies of the Right, which has been in power almost continuously since the war's end...
...Those who remember the interwar feuds between royalists and republicans are most disheartened, and blame the U. S. for putting the King in this position...
...These factors have resulted—despite $2 billion in U. S. aid to Greece—in the rise of the pro-Communist EDA party from 10 per cent of the vote in 1952 to 24 per cent last June...
...In the early postwar years, when Greece was considered in the British sphere of influence, Whitehall carefully distributed its support among all the non-Communist parties, so that there would always be a reliable democratic opposition ready to take power at any given moment...
...The EDA voters, by and large, are not Communists or even fellow-travelers...
...It has continued to lose influence since the election...
...How is it that, a decade after that bloody conflict, Communism is again on the ascendant here...
...Meanwhile, the Right has gone through several changes of name, culminating in the formation in 1956 of the Radical Union headed by Premier Constantine Karamnalis...
...errors help Reds REPORT FROM GREECE By John P Capsis Athens The Greek Civil War (1944-48) was the first battle of the Anglo-American cold war against Soviet Communism...
...There three others, perhaps more important: • The inability of the non-Communist Center parties to express the aspirations of the working masses...
...Although there have been no impartial surveys, most economists agree that about 400 families still control all the key positions in the Greek economy and a scandalously high proportion of the national income...
Vol. 41 • November 1958 • No. 41
