Another Greek Myth

...Another Greek Myth Greece Without Columns By David Holden Lippencott 324 pp $7 50 Reviewed by Theodore A. Couloumbis Associate Professor of International Relations, American University In this witty, elegantly written but monumentally superficial book, David Holden, a British journalist and historian who has spent two decades observing the Greek scene, resembles a literary Samson pushing at the columns of a temple that has no roof Indulging his iconoclastic impulses, he sets out to destroy the naive, Byronian myth of the super-Greek" namely, that the ancient Greeks could do no wrong and, as the worthy offspring of demigods, modern Greeks deserve greatness and democracy at home as well as umversal admiration abroad This fantasy, cultivated by idealistic classicists and opportunistic tourist promoters, he falsely takes to be the actual belief of Westerners and Greeks at large Having thus set up a perfectly vulnerable strawman, Holden proceeds to topple it with a gay if not intoxicated abandon He hastens to warn us about the braggartry of Pericles, the schizophrenia of Greeks torn between the rationality of the West and the emotionality of the East, and the hypocrisy of tour guides who show off temples but hide all traces of slavery in ancient times He notes that the Parthenon, beautiful as a rum but originally painted m garish colors, was probably built with forced labor and financed by funds expropriated from Athens' imperial dependencies As if revealing the ricks in the shiny Hellenic armor for the first time, he accuses the Greeks of fighting and gutting one another with monotonous regularity since antiquity Their modern state, he says, was born of foreign intervention, maintained by foreign props, and psychically warped by being expected to match the "glory that was Greece" He finds pervasive delusions of grandeur in a country whose music reflects the melancholy and despair of poverty and long years of Ottoman occupation, and whose contemporary literature is obsessed with alienation Repeatedly, Holden blames the problems of modern Greece on its national character "It is scarcely possible to review the Greek record of internecine war-tare, crumbling governments, fissile parties and bickering oppositions, coups, plots and countercoups, without suspecting that all these things are at least as much an expression of the fundamental character of Greekness as the result of mere historical misfortune Their cumulative message, at first glance anyway, is of a compulsive urge to self-destruction, and if one accepts even as a half-truth the popular adage that people tend to get the government they deserve—or, as Plato put it, that the political structure of the state reflects the soul of its people?then the Greeks must appear singularly undeserving of good government and their souls must be supposed to be in a state of unusual torment" Holden may well convince the casual reader that Greece is a uniquely violent, unstable and politically immature country singularly deserving of its present military dictatorship According to a recent study by Arthur S Banks, however, "Levantine" Greece is approximately as stable as "Western" Belgium, considerably less violent than Italy and France, and far behind the United States in such areas as assassinations, riots and antigovernment demonstrations From 1946-66 Greece experienced 3 political assassinations, 2 general strikes, 18 governmental crises, 6 political purges, 19 riots, and 6 antigovernment demonstrations, by comparison, France had 6 political assassinations, 26 general strikes, 39 governmental crises, 13 political purges, 62 riots, and 34 antigovernment demonstrations The equivalent Italian statistics make Greece look like a girl-scout camp, and even reputedly placid Great Britain tallied 18 riots and 25 anti-government demonstrations, all prior to the heating up of Ulster A number of other quantitative analyses have also placed Greece in the middle range between extremely harmonious and extremely violent societies, sharply contradicting Holden's assertion of a uniquely" violent and unstable Greek national character Furthermore, Holden exhibits an unjustified impatience with multiparty systems and frequent successions of coalition governments to power Instead ot judging govern mental performance by how often administrations change, he would have been better advised to consult socioeconomic criteria such as economic growth, income distribution, employment rates, living standards, etc After all, is the Soviet Union's single political party preferable to Holland's 28 parties9 Is the "stability" of Franco's Spain better than the instability of the French Fourth Republic...

...Indeed, Holden seems to overlook Greece's economic record in the 1950s and '60s, when it was one of the fastest growing nations on earth, the economic statistics he does cite are questionable and their sources are not identified Throughout the book, he relies on somewhat loaded single-case allegations rather than on comparative data Impressed by the peasant origins of the present Greek military regime, he christens Colonel Georgios Papadopoulos and company "populists ' Yet the record so far shows that these men were coopted into the upper-middle class when they entered the officers corps Their policies, accordingly, seem to favor the interests of the upper-middle class, the economic establishment, and the Armed Forces In an absolutely charming chapter entitled the "Manifest Destiny," Holden outlines with perceptiveness and poignancy this small and strategically located nation's dependent status vis-a-vis the great powers Its dependency and penetrability, I sub mit, offer better clues to the causes of Greece's relative volatility than its so-called national character Greece Without Columns would have been a vastly better book had it pursued such realities instead of substituting the myth of a "hypo-Greek" for that of the "super-Greek...