Athens 1944: Britain’s dirty secret

Hacker News isn't generally the place for Reddit-style emotion baiting; the request for proof is another way of saying "don't just rant, help us be objective." An opinion isn't of much use if it's baseless and prejudiced.

As it is, the comments about British and US interventions in Greece are illustrative of what I'm sure is a modern history of Greece less known internationally and are surely interesting.

What does this have to do with "Nazi-like"? Is "Nazi-like" just a shorthand for anything you disagree with?

If by "unelected dictators" you are referring to the council, these are ministers appointed by the democratic governments in the individual member states.

That's still not "Nazi-like". There are plenty of undemocratic systems that are not equivalent to the Nazi regime.

The commission can be toppled by the parliament -- it has been a real parliament for quite some time. Not only that, the European Parliament de facto has the right to dismiss individual commissioners and each individual candidate commissioner has to be accepted by parliament before they can be appointed.

(One entire commission was dismissed in 1999, a candidate was not accepted a few years back -- I think she was from Romania. Might have been Bulgaria, though.)

I'd say that as quite good as democracy goes.

"Extremely" is certainly a hyperbole. You can point out accountability problems in the EU governance system, which is based on a commonwealth of independent states tied together by the Treaty of Maastricht, and that some people want to convert into a federal USE (which I oppose), but "extremely undemocratic"? Bah.

That is self-inflicted.

I'm from Romania, another former communist country from the Eastern block.

First of all you are comparing third world countries like Chile or El Salvador with European countries that were doing well before WWII. At least Romania was. This makes your comparison flawed, because when a country is somewhat rich, with a working middle class, with somewhat working institutions, it does have the resources to spare and it will still be doing OK.

Because of the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact between Hitler and Stalin, we've lost territories like Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina to the Soviet Union, by force of course. And I must say that this was happening in 1940, with a Romania that hadn't entered the war yet. Russians later blamed us for giving support to the Germans on their invasion, but that's why they say you reap what you sow. Bessarabia is now the republic of Moldova. We still think of them as being Bessarabia, as Moldova is also the name of the adjacent region in Romania.

After the war, the soviet induced famine has hit us as well, but it hit Moldavians much harder. Hundreds of thousands of people have died of hunger and the official numbers are actually lower than what happened (my grandfather lived to tell me the story). But furthermore, we had to pay war reparations. And during their invasion on our territory, they've established what are called Sovroms, which were enterprises meant to deplete the resources of our country, with the effect that we've paid much, much more than the war reparations that were demanded. The soviets also mined us, for example we've shipped thousands of tons of uranium ore which ended up being used in their atomic bomb project.

In Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina the soviets did what Russians do best when invading a territory. They arrested, executed or deported to labour camps in Siberia hundreds of thousands of people and they also planted Russians on those territories, with the purpose of completely destroying their national identity. And this strategy of theirs does wonders. In the eyes of many Moldavians, the Russians are their "brothers" and Romania has had a "colonial policy" that has to be terminated. In return we've started granting them dual citizenship that has been their gate to the EU. We wouldn't have any economic benefit in an eventual unification of course, the difference between Romania and the Republic of Moldova being the difference between western and eastern Germany in the eighties. This is why Ukraine is so divided btw, as this is their usual modus operandi and anybody that says Russia's actions there are justified is either an ignorant or full of shit.

But back to the soviets, in Romania the result was poverty of course. But as a fun fact, even our former communist government was anti-Russian. For example at some point under Ceaușescu we declined to place our military forces under the Warsaw Pact's joint command and we also refused to increase our military expenditures. We also refused to side with Russia on several political conflicts. And Romania was actually isolated from the rest of the Eastern block. We were the pariah of the Warsaw Pact. Our neighbors had it easier.

But by far the biggest damage that the soviets did to us is the mentality, which is the cause for the corrupted system we've inherited after the communist block fell. We've been recovering quite well, but it's far from over, being much like cancer extirpation. And while our brethren from around our country are sometimes giving signs of missing the USSR, we don't. In fact that's the reason I'm proud of my country - we've always been at the intersection of empires, we're still here, we're still speaking a romance language and we hate everybody :-)

The correction does not point that "the article has no historical basis", it points out that the specific allegation that British soliders were among those to fire upon the demonstrators in the December confrontation is based only upon the recollection of those there at the time, and is not generally considered to be true.

Many eastern countries was traded away for Greece at Yalta :)

"Greece was to be portioned 90/10 to the West, while Romania was to be divided 90/10 in favour of the USSR"

See more at: http://www.historytoday.com/blog/books-blog/taylor-downing/y...

> yes Greece lied but so did Portugal, Spain, Italy, Ireland and many other countries.

Absolutely false. There is no record of national account abnormalities on any country other than Greece.

Yes, I just saw that one last week, very nice. John Perkins, writer of Confessions of an Economic Hitman, is a big part of that documentary.

However, I see a change here happening over the past two decades: before, the opposition painted by Soviets and puppets was usually "fascism". Now it is "nazism"

I believe this was simply because nazi is "national-socialist", which inconveniently rhymes with "international-socialist", which was the officially perfect doctrine of the Eastern Block. Therefore, "fascist" was the preferable enemy, even if it was the name of the lesser, Italian variant which was not quite as nasty and murderous.

You can see this in all sorts of memorials in Russia, as well as textbooks.

Nowadays there is less talk of international socialist, so Nazis have become a better term - perhaps because it is more useful in propaganda work in the West.

Discussion around what happened in the Ukraine is generally presented as a false dichotomy. As much as I dislike Putin, his mafia style regime and everything it stands for, as an EU citizen, I'm embarrassed by how our (and the US) leaders acted. It was provocative and dare I say at a similar moral and ethical level to how Russia acted. I'm not sure it would have been possible to handle it perfectly given the situation but we handled it especially poorly. There was a possibility to take the middle road without unnecessary ultimatums and possibly by trying to instigate inclusive policies that straddled the line between Russian, Ukrainian and EU interests but instead the EU waded in with a heavy handed inflexible policy. It was clear that following the path we did would only result in violent confrontation and now that it has mostly settled down again I feel that the region is worse off and more fragile than before. All that death and destruction for what!?

> That money doesn't go to the Greek people. It's used to preserve the international banking system.

Stop lying. That money went to the Greek people. If the Greek people had not squandered their income for years on ridiculous levels of social spending and had maybe considered collecting taxes, they would now not need additional loans to “preserve” their local banking system.

> That money doesn't go to the Greek people. It's used to preserve the international banking system.

That money goes to the Greek treasury, which is run by the Greek government, the elected, representative administrative body of the Greek people.

These banks and other sovereign states hold debts that Greece issued in exchange for capital it needed to fund its national budget. Greece needs to make payments on its debt, unless Greece wants to ruin its credit and not be able to participate in international economic trade.

The money does go to the Greek people, but their elected government needs to generally be responsible and use the money to pay their national debts.

You assume that all members of EAM/ELAS were communists. They were not. Also, there really was a window for them to take over: after the Nazis left and before the Allied forces arrived they were practically the only armed force in Greece. However they chose to wait.

Mark Mazower's "Inside Hitler's Greece: The Experience of Occupation 1941-44" is an excellent book on the subject.

I think you are oversimplifying the events. I'm not suggesting there was nothing wrong with EAM. However, the article is about the British involvement that lead to the December '44 events. They freed and armed the Greeks who collaborated with the Nazi regime and they disarmed (or tried to disarm) only ELAS members. Of course Greek citizens would protest against that. And it was policemen armed by the British who opened fire against a peaceful crowd. I really can't see how you can justify this.

The Communist Party in Germany took a serious beating from the SD-headed government immediately following WW I. They were a relatively minor factor in the troubles of the 1920s and 1930s. While everyone was quite rightly concerned about the influence of the Soviet Union, its sphere of influence was extremely limited until the end of WW II. It lost a great deal of population, but so far from being contained by WW II, it moved its control as far west as the Elbe.

You are of course correct that the French and Italian Communist parties had no real prospects of successful insurrection with American troops stationed there.

Unfortunately, the reading of declassified documents that have surfaced in the last couple of decades shows a great capacity for the United States to destabilize countries (even allies) that might have otherwise had a chance of integrating socialist and moderate communists in the political arena in their home countries. To the aim of blocking any chance of success for alternative to the hardliner liberal and neo-con, the official discourse from the United States, has been to confuse all variation of communism into one blob: the destroyer of economical growth and private property. Such a reading of a political movement is naive to say the least.

I clearly remember an article about a CIA plan to have a puppet government in France in case the "civil war" (event) of May 1968 would turn into the favor for the French Communist Party (PC). And this is despite the fact that the PC could have never formed a government on its own, and had already had political alliances and a good relationship with the French Socialist Party (PS).

This is the same right of interference that was invoked when the United States decided to invade Vietnam and other countless countries, often with the help, active or not, of its allies.