December 6, 2007
A Forgotten Anniversary Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:00 AM EST Monday was an interesting anniversary—the date conventionally given for the start of the Greek Civil War. In late 1944 the Communist-controlled Greek resistance movement ELAS controlled most of the country; the Germans had evacuated Greece and the Allies had simultaneously landed in that country in October of 1944. On December 3, 1944, fighting broke out in newly-liberated Athens between ELAS and the British Army. The civil war was complicated, as was the history that preceded it, probably too complicated to even summarize here. The war lasted until 1949 and was pretty brutal, at least 40,000 killed and more than a million people relocated during the fighting. The Greek right was supported first by the British and then by the Americans, in a long and ugly contest. I think it is worth remembering the start of the Greek Civil War because of the way it ended. It is nowadays fashionable to say that guerrilla wars are unwinnable, so what seems worth pondering today is that ELAS lost. That loss is a particularly remarkable outcome if one assumes that revolutionary nationalists are particularly likely to win guerrilla wars, and forces compromised by collaboration with imperialists and occupiers peculiarly likely to lose them, which are the assumptions one sees almost every day in newspaper commentary on modern war in general and the Iraq war in particular. In Greece, as it happens, the resistance, while brutal, had indeed fought the Germans, while the Greek right was markedly tainted by collaboration with the country’s occupiers and by a near-fascist prewar dictatorship. All through the civil war the Greek right murdered and tortured thousands of often heroic anti-Fascist partisans as well as considerable numbers of civilians, which by the conventional wisdom should have doomed it. But it won. It is not pleasant to acknowledge it, but this even may have been the best outcome for the people of Greece. A Communist-controlled Greece, had Stalin in fact wanted such an outcome, which at the time he did not, would have almost certainly have been an even nastier place than the Greece the right’s victory produced—but one does not have to assume that the right’s victory was the least bad outcome to reflect on the fact that the right’s victory was, by the conventions of modern pseudo-historical wisdom, an almost impossible outcome. In fact, guerrillas lose almost all the time, much, much more often than they win. Sunni Arab guerillas, for example, are extremely unlikely to win in Iraq. What is amazing is that for the last three years much of what passes for respectable opinion has insisted on the contrary, invoking history as proof of that contention. History, of course, is usually remembered very selectively. Here’s another piece of history: It took a long time to produce a stable and democratic Greece. Greek politics were nasty and volatile for decades, and in 1967 an ugly rightist coup brought back torture and authoritarian rule to the country. Greek politics is to this day marked by very ugly anti-Americanism, some of it deserved. Greek political culture remains in many respects unattractive. Almost 50 years after the start of the civil war, Greece is also, as far as one can tell, a moderately prosperous and very stable democracy, an outcome that would have seemed impossible in 1944, or even in 1974, the year democracy was reestablished in Greece. Thirty years after the outbreak of the current round of the Iraqi civil war will be 2033. It seems slightly perverse to insist that in 2033 Iraq will almost certainly not be a democracy, but I seem to read and see such an insistence almost every day.
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