Dangerous Citizens:The Greek Left and the Terror of the State

The Greek Left and the Terror of the State

Neni PanourgiÃ¡

Publication Year: 2009

WINNER OF THE 2011 VICTOR TURNER PRIZE, Society for Humanistic Anthropology WINNER OF THE 2011 EDMUND KEELEY BOOK PRIZE, Modern Greek Studies Association HONORABLE MENTION IN ARCHEOLOGY & ANTHROPOLOGY, 2009 Prose Awards This book simultaneously tells a story-or rather, stories-and a history. The stories are those of Greek Leftists as paradigmatic figures of abjection, given that between 1929 and 1974 tens of thousands of Greek dissidents were detained and tortured in prisons, places of exile, and concentration camps. They were sometimes held for decades, in subhuman conditions of toil and deprivation.The history is that of how the Greek Left was constituted by the Greek state as a zone of danger. Legislation put in place in the early twentieth century postulated this zone. Once the zone was created, there was always the possibility-which came to be a horrific reality after the Greek Civil War of 1946 to 1949-that the state would populate it with its own citizens. Indeed, the Greek state started to do so in 1929, by identifying ever-increasing numbers of citizens as Leftistsand persecuting them with means extending from indefinite detention to execution. In a striking departure from conventional treatments, Neni Panourgi\~ places the Civil War in a larger historical context, within ruptures that have marked Greek society for centuries. She begins the story in 1929, when the Greek state set up numerous exile camps on isolated islands in the Greek archipelago. The legal justification for these camps drew upon laws reaching back to 1871-originally directed at controlling brigands-that allowed the death penalty for those accused and the banishment of their family members and anyone helping to conceal them. She ends with the 2004 trial of the Revolutionary Organization 17 November.Drawing on years of fieldwork, Panourgi\~ uses ethnographic interviews, archival material, unpublished personal narratives, and memoirs of political prisoners and dissidents to piece together the various microhistories of a generation, stories that reveal how the modern Greek citizen was created as a fraught political subject.Her book does more than give voice to feelings and experiences suppressed for decades. It establishes a history for the notion of indefinite detention that appeared as a legal innovation with the Bush administration. Part of its roots, Panourgi\~ shows, lie in the laboratory that Greece provided for neo-colonialism after the Truman Doctrine and under the Marshall Plan.

Published by: Fordham University Press

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This book had its origins in less turbulent times, before 9/11, when the ascending neo-liberalism of the Clinton years gave the false impression of a placid and prosperous future, carefully obscuring politics and neutralizing dissensus. The question that I was asking then concerned the collusion of the political and the existential...

From Now On . . .

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pp. xxiii-xxiv

This is a text split into two parts. They do not take up the same space, although they both have things to tell, stories to recount and account for, histories that refuse to be forgotten. They bleed into one another; they cannot stand independently of one another. That was the greatest challenge I faced in writing this book: How could...

A Note on Parerga

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pp. xxv-xxvi

Parerga are not simply notes; they should be thought of as the extremities of a body, without which the text is truncated. They are notations to the text that make the text show its complexities, as they bring into the main narrative the realities of multiple positions, make interventions that show that there is no stability in this history, that the story itself constantly shifts ground, that any attempt to produce...

A Note on Transliteration

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I have looked at many attempts to create a systematic approach to transliteration, and the one that I find most convincing and agreeable (with minor adjustments) is the one proposed by Robert Fitzgerald in his translation of the Odyssey, because it retains the complexities of Greek orthography and shows the affinities between...

Abbreviations

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pp. xxix-xxx

1. 1963 – 2008: History, Microhistory, Metahistory, Ethnography

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pp. 3-38

It was late one evening on a winter preceding the junta. The day the junta came to power was April 21, 1967, when I was about to turn nine years old. This incident happened two or three winters before, in 1964 or 1965. There was a knock on the door, and when my mother answered a middle-aged man (or so he seemed to me) was standing there, dressed in not tattered but certainly old-fashioned...

2. 1936 – 1944: The Metaxas Dictatorship, the Italian Attack, the German Invasion, German Occupation, Resistance

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pp. 39-62

On May 8, 1936, a major strike and demonstration by tobacco workers was organized in Thessaloniki. The response of the gendarmerie was immediate and brutal. The next day the strike spread to other professions, and a new demonstration took place. This time the response of the gendarmerie, aided by the army, which sent in an equestrian force and a motorized unit, was not only brutal but...

3. 1944 – 1945: The Battle of Athens

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pp. 63-77

Early one morning in the summer of 2005, at our summer house, where my entire family was spending a few days together, I went downstairs and outside to the garden to have coffee. My uncle-in-law Kostes and his wife were already there. Before I could...

4. 1945 – 1946: White Terror

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pp. 78-80

Following the Dekemvrianá and the retreat of ELAS from Athens, the vacuum in policing and surveillance in the country became acute. It was felt not only by the Greek government but also by the British, who, as Mazower notes, needed their troops elsewhere as quickly as possible (1997: 143). In haste they expanded the already...

5. 1946 – 1949: Emphýlios

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pp. 81-116

In a letter written in 1972, Foucault mentions in passing that his real interest was not “to analyze the phenomena of power, nor to elaborate the foundings of such an analysis” (2003: 284). In a sense, Foucault was not interested in producing laundry lists of where power can be found and what that power did. He was far more...

6. 1950 – 1967: Post – Civil War

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pp. 117-123

Western European governments saw the end of the Greek Civil War as a victory in the fight against world Communism, so much so that President Lyndon B. Johnson later considered Greece the Vietnam of the 1940s.¹ The greatest irony about both the British involvement and the Truman Doctrine was that the Soviets neither actively nor implicitly supported the Communist Party’s efforts to assert its size and become...

7. 1967 – 1974: Dictatorship

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pp. 117-123

On April 21, 1967, a group of colonels from the far Right, some of whom had been trained at the War College in the United States, some of whom had participated in the Tágmata Asphaleias, some of whom had been members of “X,” and others of whom had been torturers in Makrónisos and Yáros, seized power from the government, using as an excuse...

8. 1974 – 2007After History

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pp. 150-179

The fall of the junta, on July 23, 1974, was precipitated by a number of things: a botched attempt at a coup in Cyprus by the junta; a botched attempt at the assassination of the president of Cyprus, Makarios, by the “unionists [enotikoi]” of ex-Chi leader George...

Appendixes

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pp. 181-

Chronology

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pp. 183-202

Documents

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pp. 203-210

Parerga

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pp. 211-272

Works Cited

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pp. 273-294

Index

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pp. 295-302

E-ISBN-13: 9780823247141
Print-ISBN-13: 9780823229673
Print-ISBN-10: 082322967X

Page Count: 256
Publication Year: 2009