For us Greeks, it not a secret. The 1947-1949 Greek Civil war that created a bloodshed between the Greeks who fought the Germans, was all a British creation, just like it has ever been throughout the years in most countries (just read history to see that the British Empire did in Middle East and Far East)
Then the Americans came, who saved us from the "communists" and who openly supported dictactorships; dictaroships that challenged the basic human principles such as freedom of speech.
Unfortunately, Greece has been for a long time a vassal state, British and American interfering in our political life down to very basic levels. Even today, IMF, which is an American institution promoting privatization and looting of public resources, along with the Nazi like EU, govern our miserable life.
You need not go to far. Substitute the British actions of 1946 in Greece with the American actions in Ukraine supporting the puppet nazi government over there or supporting the so called "freedom fighters" of Jihad in Syria who have murdered thousands of innocent civilians.
The world would be a better place if England and US had kept to themselves and never interfered in other countries. But that would be asking a wolf to not kill a sheep if the wolf finds one.
What is worse, though, is that the British/American public support the governments, thus making them complicit in their crimes against humanity, which in essense, is quite tragic.
I think he doesn't have to do that. It's not a comparison he needs to prove for me. Not that I agree, but it shows his feelings, and it probably shows the sentiment of many Greeks.
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.
The EU is certainly extremely undemocratic. We "elect" MEPs, who satisfy the illusion of democracy, but they can't actually do anything apart from rubber stamp the laws made by the unaccountable unelected dictators.
And the aims are clear - to unite Europe into one undemocratic state and remove individual countries and cultures.
And it appears to be completely controlled and driven by Germany.
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.
It is abundantly clear that the EU is a step backwards in terms of democratic accountability, by now there have been several laws passed in Germany for example that were based on EU decisions, which were later declared to be unconstitutional by the Bundesverfassungsgericht.
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.)
Quite good? The people creating laws are still unelected. The EU has shown time and time again, that if they can't get what they want via the democratic channels (Referendums, votes, etc), they'll just steamroll it through anyway.
The EU is controlled by Germany, and its aims are to unite Europe into a single state. There is one winner in the EU project - Germany.
Hopefully in our lifetimes it will all collapse as the USSR did, and we will once again have a bit more freedom.
That is, by the way, true everywhere. In Western democracies, laws are typically initiated by a government who is not elected directly but formed by the parliament, based on who has a majority or who can come up with a working coalition. The the actual text of law is created, written, by civil servants who work for the government. It is reviewed by a number of unelected parties who propose changes. Then it is approved, or not, by the parliament. You cannot really say that you'd have "elected people creating the laws".
There are exceptions, of course; most notably the process in Switzerland where direct polls actually sometimes create laws and can even change the constitution. Elsewhere, this is uncommon.
The MEPs are elected. The commissioners are appointed by democratic governments (and have to be individually accepted by the EP!). The two councils (no use in trying to distinguish them) consist of the democratic goverments in the EU.
European Directives have to be passed by the EP. You can't create European Law without directly elected MEPs.
"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.
No one voted for the Maastricht treaty. It was steamrolled through shrouded in secrecy.
Some people? Some people want to convert into a federal USE? It's there in black and white. Crystal clear. "Ever closer union".
You can oppose it all you like, but the people behind the project won't care one bit. The end game is a united states of Europe, with a single army, single parliament, abolition of individual state parliaments etc etc
Then when people have forgotten they'll just rename it United states of Germany. You can understand why those who don't win from a United states of Europe (Everyone apart from Germany), would associate it with Nazis.
At least I voted for Maastricht treaty (as a part of a referendum for joining the EU). In other countries, it was approved by the parliament whose job it generally is to approve of laws and international treaties.
France voted against the european constitution (referendum), only to see it instated through Lisbonne treaty, this time without referendum.. So much for EU democratic values..
It is all right to point out that there are problems in accountability or democracy in the EU, but that "absolutely no" is so manifestly untrue that it takes away credibility from anything you say.
The constitution treaty (TCE) was rejected, and the Lisbon treaty is not the same. Lisbon treaty did change the previous treaties of Rome and Maastricht, but again, saying "only to see it [TCE] instated through Lisbonne treaty" is disingenious.
The Lisbon treaty does not cover the same things as the TCE did, only a subset of which there was consensus.
Ignoring the fact that the question of a referendum for european treaties is one to be had at the national level, as each country can decide that for itself, the statement "No one voted for the Maastricht treaty." is demonstrably false as both the French and the Danish people did vote for it.
It's ok to have a difference of opinion, but please keep your facts straight.
You are lucky that your country have not endured Soviet occupation like other states in Eastern Europe. Event today the economical and social signs are clearly visible on those states.
This was magnitude worse that British/American influence.
Well you could dispute that for young people living in Greece right now, without any future, with a huge debt that will last for generations. Former Eastern European states now part of the EU may have a future that is a lot brighter. Even if people there are poorer than the average Greek right now, they are on the rise, and the Greek are falling down. Given a basic level of wellfare, I know what I would prefer, knowing where you came from.
I disagree. There are examples and counterexamples on both sides. It's really hard to decide where the blame should go.
I am from Czech Republic, a former communist country. And it was nowhere as bad as Chile or El Salvador. Or, if you want just to compare Russian atrocities, occupation in 1968 was nowhere as bad as mass rapes in Germany after the end of world war, or Ukrainian famine, or Stalin's purges.
It's not just it's not black and white, it's not even one-dimensional. You can have regime without freedom of speech that puts couple tens people per year into jail (like Czech Republic in the 70s and 80s), or you can have a regime with freedom of speech that commits torture and war abroad, killing hundreds of people. To ask/answer which one is worse is meaningless.
And to compare it from economic perspective is just outright disgusting. Even if killing some people would indeed cause higher
economic growth, no human should agree to such a trade.
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 :-)
"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."
Moldova is bigger than just "the adjacent region in Romania", Moldova is that and Bessarabia together. What's in Romania now is Moldova without Bessarabia.
I strongly agree with "damaging mentality", but we don't hate everybody! Nowadays we don't resent anyone other than the russians (with their wishful "sphere of influence" over us), and I hope that that will pass too.
Funny, you don't seem to complain about the invasion of our engineers, software developers or doctors :-)
Also, we don't need to "thank you" dude, as the EU is not a charity, but a mutually beneficial arrangement. If it's not mutually beneficial, then we can negotiate, but don't give me this condescending attitude and we really don't have to apologize for giving citizenship to Moldavians or for having a gypsy minority. This is who we've always been and speaking of gipsies, we've been lectured for years in how we aren't doing a good job of integrating them in society. Well, here's your chance.
> (Don't put all the blame on the Soviets, the Ottomans didn't treat you so well, either.)
Yeah, no shit, we were amongst the ones that engaged the Ottomans in battle, helping in preventing their expansion into Europe. In 1475 for example our own Stephen the Great delivered what is said to be the greatest defeat of the ottomans until that time. He was then denied European assistance, yet he kept waging war until 1484. He was a Moldavian ;-)
I absolutely do apologize for the condescending attitude coming from Western Europe regarding the "oppressed gypsies" who were "totally good people who just never got a chance". It was wrong. They were and are more like parasites on better functioning peoples.
I was myself only briefly one of those Gutmenschen until I got hold of better data (which I actively sought and which were contradictory to everything I was taught in University).
On the other hand, this is pretty plonk-worthy:
> but don't give me this condescending attitude
and, yes, you probably should apologize for letting random Moldavians into the Schengen area.
All of the states in the Holy Roman Empire did pay extra taxes to pay for wars against the Ottomans a few decades later.
We aren't in the Schengen area, that's a different treaty. And we aren't letting in random Moldavians. Applying for citizenship still implies submitting an application for review, which includes things like a criminal record, birth certificates from parents and from grandparents as proof that they were Romanians, plus proof of legal residence in Romania for 48 months. The process is for "regaining citizenship", being easier than the full process. And no, we shouldn't apologize, our relationship with them is no secret, some of us also want the unification.
It needs to be made clear that the decision making process also did not know about the "good" Czechoslovakia of the 1980s, it knew about the brutality of the Spanish Civil War and Soviet Purges, mass starvation of Ukraine. Stalin had more blood on his hands than Hitler at that time when these decisions were being made.
Plus, because it seems to have slipped further down the list that the GP the Guardian ran a correction pointing out the article has no historical basis and the damage these incorrect allegations have done to Greece in plainly visible in the writing of the GP.
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.
That blows a pretty significant hole in the narrative of the article! How seriously can I take the rest of the "eye witness" reporting that makes up much of this piece if that "specific" allegation was likely simply a convenient legend?
For example, how sanguine should I be about the claimed non-violent, non-Stalinist goals of the revolutionary forces?
We can nitpick over who pulled the trigger or who gave the direct order, but the larger issue is that Churchill was waging a dirty civil war. We can discuss how violent and Stalinist the goals of the revolutionary forces may have been, but meanwhile we know about torture and concentration camps that actually happened, which seems more pertinent.
They're not nitpicks; they're major factual concerns with what is ostensibly a piece of journalism.
For that matter, the use of the term "concentration camp", while accurate, is not provided the context to differentiate it from the modern connotations associated with Nazi death camps.
If you read the correcting article, it makes it clear that confusion on the part of those present is understandable: the British did apparently fire tracers over the heads of the demonstrators; the Greek police were firing from concealed positions; the Greek forces were dressed similarly to the British Army; and there were British soldiers present on the rooftops.
As I read it, the major claim of the article is that the British supported elements of the Greek state who had been collaborating with the Nazi occupiers in purging the EAM resistance. This does not seem to have been disputed.
If you wish the Americans and the IMF had kept out of Greece, then do you also wish that the IMF had not bailed Greece out and instead had let it collapse?
You (Greece) borrowed money from us and promised to pay it back at a certain date. You are failing to do that, and you say that we're the bad guys? Pay your debts, assshole.
Plus you CHOSE to join the EU, and the single currency. You chose to follow their rules. You can't complain now about that!
The EU is very vocally anti-totalitarian or racist, and Greece's people were betrayed by its own government when it colluded with accounting firms to ensure Greece's entry to the Euro. Which, then, because Greece wasn't economically strong enough to compete with the larger, less social-welfare-reliant Northern European countries, led to the need for massive financial intervention and the mess the Greek youth are now today left with.
All for the egos of some politicians who wanted to feel important. The Pasoak leaders from the late 90's / early 00's should be ashamed of their short-sighted greed.
It very well might be the best thing for the long-term wealth of the Greek economy for it to exit the Euro and reestablish the Drachma, to better facilitate trade/labor growth with what would initially be the much more expensive Euro group. Manufacturing, generally, moves to places where labor and total production cost is cheaper, increasing the economic productivity of the region it moves to... this could only be a good thing.
They've reduced the status of the last three Greek governments to hollow bureaucratic institutions which rubber stamp Troika diktats. That is not anti-totalitarian.
The EU excels at criticising others when it comes to it's own they are just as 'racist' as everyone else case and point their latest dance with illegal immigration from N. Africa, and their intervention in Libya to preserve Italian and French energy interests.
There aren't many countries in Europe that can support the lavish social programme of the EU, yes Greece lied but so did Portugal, Spain, Italy, Ireland and many other countries.
There is just as much blame to be placed on the big financial players as onto Greece at this point.
You had me until 'Nazi-like EU'. For all its faults, the EU is not a despotic regime killing millions of civilians just for being different. To compare one to the other is disingenuous.
> Greece has been for a long time a vassal state, British
> and American interfering in our political life down to
> very basic levels
"A long time" being 2,000 years, since ~ 146BC.
Then the UK, France and Russia helped it become an independent country in 1830, an "interference" without which a Greek state may not have existed in 1947...
> The world would be a better place if England and US had kept to themselves and never interfered in other countries.
I strongly disagree with that. England and US not interfering in other countries would not have stopped other countries, most notably the USSR, in interfering with other countries. And the places where other countries, not England and US, had major influence, generally had much bigger problems with civil rights, freedom and material well-being.
A significant indicator in this respect is the need to build walls to keep in the population in a country, because otherwise it would flee (and then call this "anti-Fascist protection wall").
Your hyperbole about "puppet Nazi government" in Ukraine pretty much proves the point: the Poroshenko government, elected with rather clear majority in what is a relatively free election, does have its problems in corruption and whatever, but not any worse than the previous one, which was an actual puppet of Putin.
The EU has many problems, but being "Nazi like" is not really one of them.
The "Nazi" label has been used by the communists, being their common and invisible enemy, the modern equivalent being "terrorism". For example all political opposition that they arrested, executed or deported during communism were labeled with Nazi, or the local variant. Labeling Ukraine's government as being a "puppet Nazi government" shows a clear bias to Russia, as that's were this nonsense came from.
I wonder why he hasn't mentioned the struggle of the people against the imperialist bourgeoisie.
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!?
You're making it sound like what happened is the fault of Europe and the US. How could you possibly reach such a conclusion?
If anything, I believe that the reaction was not aggressive enough and that the mild economic sanctions and ultimatums have been the only thing that prevented a serious escalation of the conflict, a conflict in which I must say, Russia illegally occupied a territory and created the rebels in the east, trampling on the sovereignty of another nation and they did so in your own backyard. This wasn't an ego fight, but a calculated move that would have happened regardless of the western reaction. Because lets be honest, Putin was losing in popularity, there's nothing like a new nationalistic drive to keep an impoverished population in line, plus occupying some territory, while teaching the neighbors what happens when leaving the party does have benefits.
I'm also disappointed, but my reasoning is different.
What's more, Russia set a precedent of trampling down the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) - the Budapest Memorandum where Ukraine gave away its nuclear weapons in 1993 after USSR collapsed, in exchange for an assurance that others (specifically Russia) will "refrain from the threat or use of force against Ukraine’s territorial integrity."
So, we now know how much worth the NPT is in Russia's eyes. Nothing.
Don't forget that the US and UK both guaranteed Ukrainian sovereignty in exchange for that. The lesson from this and what happened in Libya after Gaddafi gave up his chemical weapons is left as an exercise for the reader.
Of course you can call it "EU expansionism" if Ukraine slipping away from Russia's sphere of influence and making a trade deal with EU since it believes this will be in the long-term interests of its people. However, I believe in the right of people and nations to decide their own destinies. A "catalyst" is not a reason, nor is it a justification.
If you look at it from an entirely neutral perspective it is clear provocation. This has nothing to do with democracy. It is pure empire building and it is dishonest to dress it up as anything else. The terms of the trade deal were EU exclusivity and the termination of strong existing Russian ties. This is nothing but provocative. It's reckless and incendiary.
Sure I would prefer people to have European values over Russian ones (I'm very happy we just legalized gay marriage in Ireland for example), but not like this. Ukraine is much more Russian culturally than it is European, and if it came to a EU wide referendum I would vote against Ukraine becoming an EU member. I wouldn't be surprised if I am part of the majority in this opinion. The EU, a project I strongly believe in, is struggling to hold itself together as it is without pissing in the hornets nest. We need stronger ties with Russia, not weaker ones. Weaker ties only bring us closer to a hot war and that will help nobody. What happened in Ukraine was a microcosm of what could happen on a much larger scale if we do not act more subtly and inclusively.
If you look at it from an entirely neutral perspective it is clear you are an idiot... or maybe that's not actually such a neutral perspective after all?
One of the reasons I enjoy this forum is because of the lack of the type of comments such as yours. This isn't Reddit. Under the guideline of the site, which I'm sure you have read due to it getting posted regularly (here's the link in any case https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), it states the following:
In Comments
Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face-to-face conversation. Avoid gratuitous negativity.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
I'm pointing out that your "neutral perspective" really isn't in a way you couldn't miss. That's all. I don't find you an idiot but I do find that you are strongly biased. Please refrain from that in the future and provide arguments and sources instead.
Well you could have phrased it more eloquently. Please feel free to elaborate on what a truly neutral perspective is.
Memories seem to be short when it comes to politics. Timeline... Russia has historically strong ties with with Ukraine and a bunch of trade agreements. NATO make noise about Ukraine joining (dangerous provocation, imagine Russia got Mexico on board with military strategy) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7312045.stm .... Yanukovych gets democratically elected (accepted as legitimate by international monitors... whether it was or not in reality I don't know so I will take this at face value. You can read the wikipedia on Ukraine Election 2010 for more infos).... EU push for trade deal that will bring Ukraine closer to Europe at the expense of Russia (despite all the marketing fluff about shared values, democracy, good governance that the EU like to roll out I think we are all smart enough to read between the lines. There is also a side story here in that EU were trying to slow the NATO expansion by stepping in first https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/16/1653792_us-embassy-cab...).... Euromaiden happens after a tug of war between Russia and EU ... Yanukovych gets booted (undemocratically... it's ok when it suits us but not when it doesn't)... The likes of John McCain turn up in Ukraine to supports the demonstrators (wtf is he doing there?)... Russia invades the Russian parts of Ukraine and takes over.
I am a little biased in that I think peaceful methods should be pursued almost exclusively and I think the EU has been largely successful with this internally so far. Ukraine was a step too far. All parties involved in Ukraine acted deplorably and it pains me to see people taking sides based on a perceived moral superiority. I find it hard to buy into the good guy bad guy narrative when everyone is slaughtering each other left, right and center. Having a soft border, both geographically and economically, between the EU and Russia is probably best for everyone involved in regards to Ukraine.
To paraphrase a famous quote: "for Danzig". Some things are worth fighting for.
Abandoning 45 million people to 17th century "spheres of influence" is extremely cynical.
The EU might not be great, but on its worst day it's better than Russia (in all its forms) on its best day. I really hope that Russia can prove me wrong. But 500 years of Russian history back me up.
> What is worse, though, is that the British/American public support the governments, thus making them complicit in their crimes against humanity, which in essense, is quite tragic.
What a silly sentence to finish with. Does the Greek public support the government? Can you give me an example of what 'not supporting' would look like? Why are you combining millions of people in a sweeping generalisation?
This whole democracy thing (which I'm quite sure you know about) is a ugly blunt tool that allows the general public some vague influence on what their nation does. But most of these things happen due to self perpetuating systems that have been there for generations and which are invisible to the public.
The greeks are miserable because none of your politicians thought they ever had to pay their debt.
Your debt ( Greeces) is like 177 times your GDP... And the politicans of the EU made the mistake of accepting greece in the European Union, because they all lied about there economic numbers.
Now you are dependant on the EU, yes, but you still have a lot of financial help. If you would have fallen without the EU ( sooner or later), there wouldn't be anyone to pay debts for you and forgive them ( partially).
I'm a Belgian and even every Belgian pays 1000€ for Greek financial support... And there are many other countries. Every European citizen is paying for the Greek mistakes. But i don't mind.
You still have to do a lot of yourselve, but it isn't our entire fault.
Stop blaming this on other things/people/instituations, it isn't a "one side has right" situation..
> 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.
The greek people had a choice between two bad options: Default, with all the consequences that entails or continuing loans, with all the austerity measures that come with those
I won't deny that there was pressue by other EU countries, but you make it sound like as if there was no other option for the greek people.
> 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.
If Greeks really believe that the EU is "Nazi-like", then why don't you just secede? Article 50 of the EU treaty allows you to do that, you know. Not really a freedom that the Nazis granted to the nations they conquered...
> Even today, IMF, which is an American institution promoting privatization and looting of public resources, along with the Nazi like EU, govern our miserable life.
Right, that's what you say after voting in power an incompetent socialist government which only prolonged the continued borrowing of funds to pay for your socially assisted and your corrupt and inefficient public institutions, funds that are fueled by all EU taxpayers, including countries that have much lower average salaries than yours, that did implement austerity measures and that now have to support your bill. This after you lied about your budget deficit for years, even before your admission into the Eurozone. Speaking of which, your government didn't even had the balls to take responsibility for their own actions, imposing that referendum on financial matters on citizens that don't have the competence to vote on such issues, being the textbook example of the tyranny of the majority effect.
But yeah, blame the americans and the masons and the german banks. It's never you, it's always some invisible and powerful puppeteers governing your life, right? I personally blame the lizard people.
This comment is well outside the boundaries of civility. Please don't post inflammatory attacks to Hacker News, regardless of how wrong you think someone or some country is.
Interventionism seems everywhere... wasn't there a time in history where countries would be a lot less contrasted (It seems the 'rich' countries are tempted and invited to put their hands and resources into less wealthy ones... creating problems on the long run) and thus more stable ?
> Unfortunately, Greece has been for a long time a vassal state, British and American interfering in our political life down to very basic levels. Even today, IMF, which is an American institution promoting privatization and looting of public resources, along with the Nazi like EU, govern our miserable life.
South Korea is another US "vassal state". So is Taiwan. So were Japan and Germany after WW2. I'd say that the Greek problems have other sources.
As a Romanian I wish they traded Greece for Romania in 1944. So that you'd learn a painful lesson.
Frankly, take that part of the article out and it's still a chilling indictment of our treatment of Greece. Clearly this was still one of the more shocking episodes in Britain's 20th century history and one I certainly wasn't aware of.
A similar situation played out in Italy; however, a combination of American instincts and Italian Communist calculations kept things substantially cooler than they could have been. When the head of the Communist Party was shot, in the early '50s, both sides were ready for the final confrontation; luckily he survived and made a different choice. Ironically, NATO probably owes more to him than to its own "trusted friends".
As the Cold War intensified, though, things got very ugly again. NATO was directly or indirectly responsible for literally hundreds of casualties throughout the '70s and '80s, usually by covering far-right groups planting indiscriminate bombs targeting civilians. This was all to contrast the electoral rise of the Communist Party, which was making huge gains thanks to Soviet financial backing and a cadre of skilled administrators forged by resistance movements during the war. Eventually, the communists basically bartered peace for a de-facto acceptance of the fact that they would never rule. New generations saw that as a betrayal, and the party started a slow decline, moving towards social-democratic positions and eventually rebranding completely.
For countries lying directly on each side of the Iron Curtain, that war was not very cold.
Mind you Italy bordered Yugoslavia which was not part of Warshaw block (it was non-aligned) and did not have Soviet troops either. Agree with everything else you said.
Links between the Italian military and secret services, Nato and far-right extremists are there. In particular, look at the spontaneous and legally-irrelevant declarations Vinciguerra made. I mean, the Italian ruling party was directly financed by Americans, who had even fixed the first round of elections (this has been historically accepted); it makes sense that they would help them stay in power in whichever means was necessary. Losing one of the most strategic countries in the Mediterranean to Moscow was simply unacceptable.
And of course, there is Ustica -- the fact that it was a NATO job is now historically accepted beyond any reasonable doubt. That's a direct killing of 81 people.
What an absurd article. Extreme lying by omission. It doesn't even mention Tito and Stalin, the people who were directly controlling the Greek communists. This wasn't about the British vs a genuine Greek uprising, it was simply one of the early proxy battles in the cold war. And the Greeks were extremely lucky that the communists did not win.
>But what the freedom fighters wanted, insists Glezos “was what we had achieved during the war: a state ruled by the people for the people. There was no plot to take over Athens as Churchill always maintained. If we had wanted to do that, we could have done so before the British arrived.”
What did you need all those weapons for, then? The truth is that ELAS had already taken over of most of the country, and only stopped because Stalin directed them to. Unlike Tito, he wanted to avoid confrontation with the Allies at that point.
Ultimately one of the most important events that led to the end of the civil war was the split between Tito and Stalin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tito%E2%80%93Stalin_Split); Tito had been providing support for DSE (the military wing of the communist party), allowing them free movement in Yugoslavia and setting up training camps, re-supply stations, hospitals, etc. After the split, the Greek communist party sided with Stalin (they didn't even pick the "benevolent" dictator!) and Tito closed the border with Greece.
The idea that this military organization, allied with and directed by two communist dictators, had any interest in a democratic state is insane.
So since some of the Greek fighters - meaning those who allied with the British against the Nazis, had communist ideals you assume that all they wanted was a violent take over and establishing communism. And based on that assumption you justify the British for (a) arming Nazi collaborators and (b) opening fire against civilians in a peaceful demonstration.
Stalin was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's from 1922 until his death in 1953. In the years following Lenin's death in 1924, he became leader of the Soviet Union and the ComIntern.
One cannot have been a communist in Europe in these times without being in an active supporter of Stalin. The ComIntern and essentially all European communist parties were under strict control of Moscow/Stalin. Those who opposed Stalin typically faced a violent end.
Of course after Stalin's death and the concommitant weakening of communist power, most communists active during Stalin's times lied about their involvement.
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.
The communist party participated in the Greek government after Greece was liberated. The reason they quit? They disagreed with the disarmament of their military wing.
Another thing that deserves mention is that the civil war actually started years before the Nazis left. The communists had been attacking not only the Nazis, but also right-wing resistance groups (EDES, PAO, EKKA)! The Brits actually brokered a ceasefire in early 1944, which the communists broke 2 months later by murdering resistance leader Psarros (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimitrios_Psarros).
There is no assuming involved; they didn't simply "want" a violent take over, they actually tried to do it and lost.
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.
>They freed and armed the Greeks who collaborated with the Nazi regime
This is not really the case. Two "groups" were to be left armed (and transformed into a national army): the 3rd Greek Mountain Brigade and the Sacred Band. Both groups were formed by the Greek government in exile, and were under the control of the Greek government. Both groups fought in battles against the Nazis. There is no question of collaboration among them.
As for the cops I'm sure there were collaborationists in their ranks, and obviously firing on the crowd was both wrong and a massive mistake. But this is no justification for anything the communists did.
One could argue that the cold war was just a prolongation of the political antagonism seeing in the 20s and 30s between the European communist parties and the conservative ones. The Nazi partly benefited from the fear in Germany during the 30s to get into power. A lot of pro-Nazi throughout Europe were in fact anti communist.
As for the fear of Stalinist parties, the French Communist party was one of them and the country did not fall into Stalin's arm. I guess the setup was different, but it shows that alienating part of your population for fear of their political belief is not the solution.
On a side note I am not even surprise of how this play out considering the other dictators (and criminal organisation) that had support from the British and the Americans (and from others "allied" countries).
The Nazi partly benefited from the fear in Germany during the 30s to get into power. A lot of pro-Nazi throughout Europe were in fact anti communist.
An entirely justified fear, we must never forget, as inconvenient as this may be! Even after the Soviet Union was massively weakened and contained by WWII and and subsequent US anti-communism, the communistist ruined many countries, with the Cultural Revolution in China under Mao and the Rape of Cambodia by Pol Pot (politicised by the French communist party, trained in Moscow and Belgrade, and armed by Moscow via China and Viet Nam) being the most well known examples today.
One shudders to think what Stalin and his followers would have done had their planned global expansion not been contested by the west.
As for the fear of Stalinist parties, the French Communist party was one of them and the country did not fall into Stalin's arm.
And this was in large parts because Nato made it very clear that further communist expansion would not be in Europe.
the other dictators (and criminal organisation) that had support from the British and the Americans (and from others "allied" countries).
The existence of nuclear weapons on both sides arrested the cold war in an uneasy standoff, and proxy wars were fought in the developing world, where nations and their leaders were only too happy to play west/east off against each other.
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.
It seems to have been a close shave in Italy. They barely avoided a civil war and their communists still poisoned the political scene for many decades since (and still do).
Slightly offtopic: the regime in Spain was taken into discussion during the Potsdam conference with the outcome of not intervening after II WW, being the main expressed motive that Spain was neutral on the war (which is true but biased, since Franco was clearly not neutral to the Third Reich, fascism or sending prisoners to execution camps).
Stalin was pro-intervention, at least symbolically, but had cards on the issue having Franco sent volunteers to participate on the Eastern Front with the German army, Truman did not want more war on Europe and Churchill didn't want to hurt the commercial relations with Spain (to say, oranges and wine).
My gut feeling says, though, the decision was more on the line of "better an irrelevant regime in Spain that a communist ally on the west".
This article, as much of what's published in the west nowadays, is a terribly shameful and outright dangerous reinterpretation and re-writing of history from a communist standpoint. Stalin wouldn't have done a better propaganda job.
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 193 ms ] threadAsian and African nations? Those are "open secrets"
Then the Americans came, who saved us from the "communists" and who openly supported dictactorships; dictaroships that challenged the basic human principles such as freedom of speech.
Unfortunately, Greece has been for a long time a vassal state, British and American interfering in our political life down to very basic levels. Even today, IMF, which is an American institution promoting privatization and looting of public resources, along with the Nazi like EU, govern our miserable life.
You need not go to far. Substitute the British actions of 1946 in Greece with the American actions in Ukraine supporting the puppet nazi government over there or supporting the so called "freedom fighters" of Jihad in Syria who have murdered thousands of innocent civilians.
The world would be a better place if England and US had kept to themselves and never interfered in other countries. But that would be asking a wolf to not kill a sheep if the wolf finds one.
What is worse, though, is that the British/American public support the governments, thus making them complicit in their crimes against humanity, which in essense, is quite tragic.
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.
And the aims are clear - to unite Europe into one undemocratic state and remove individual countries and cultures.
And it appears to be completely controlled and driven by Germany.
If by "unelected dictators" you are referring to the council, these are ministers appointed by the democratic governments in the individual member states.
(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.
The EU is controlled by Germany, and its aims are to unite Europe into a single state. There is one winner in the EU project - Germany.
Hopefully in our lifetimes it will all collapse as the USSR did, and we will once again have a bit more freedom.
That is, by the way, true everywhere. In Western democracies, laws are typically initiated by a government who is not elected directly but formed by the parliament, based on who has a majority or who can come up with a working coalition. The the actual text of law is created, written, by civil servants who work for the government. It is reviewed by a number of unelected parties who propose changes. Then it is approved, or not, by the parliament. You cannot really say that you'd have "elected people creating the laws".
There are exceptions, of course; most notably the process in Switzerland where direct polls actually sometimes create laws and can even change the constitution. Elsewhere, this is uncommon.
European Directives have to be passed by the EP. You can't create European Law without directly elected MEPs.
Some people? Some people want to convert into a federal USE? It's there in black and white. Crystal clear. "Ever closer union".
You can oppose it all you like, but the people behind the project won't care one bit. The end game is a united states of Europe, with a single army, single parliament, abolition of individual state parliaments etc etc
Then when people have forgotten they'll just rename it United states of Germany. You can understand why those who don't win from a United states of Europe (Everyone apart from Germany), would associate it with Nazis.
The Lisbon treaty does not cover the same things as the TCE did, only a subset of which there was consensus.
It's ok to have a difference of opinion, but please keep your facts straight.
This was magnitude worse that British/American influence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_military_junta_of_1967%E...
In any case, justifying the application of violence with the possibility of preventing more violence some 20 years later is kind of outrageous.
I am from Czech Republic, a former communist country. And it was nowhere as bad as Chile or El Salvador. Or, if you want just to compare Russian atrocities, occupation in 1968 was nowhere as bad as mass rapes in Germany after the end of world war, or Ukrainian famine, or Stalin's purges.
It's not just it's not black and white, it's not even one-dimensional. You can have regime without freedom of speech that puts couple tens people per year into jail (like Czech Republic in the 70s and 80s), or you can have a regime with freedom of speech that commits torture and war abroad, killing hundreds of people. To ask/answer which one is worse is meaningless.
And to compare it from economic perspective is just outright disgusting. Even if killing some people would indeed cause higher economic growth, no human should agree to such a trade.
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 :-)
Moldova is bigger than just "the adjacent region in Romania", Moldova is that and Bessarabia together. What's in Romania now is Moldova without Bessarabia.
I strongly agree with "damaging mentality", but we don't hate everybody! Nowadays we don't resent anyone other than the russians (with their wishful "sphere of influence" over us), and I hope that that will pass too.
Not the best way to say "thank you" to the European Union -- not only do we have to suffer your Gypsies, we also get your Moldovans :(
(Don't put all the blame on the Soviets, the Ottomans didn't treat you so well, either.)
Also, we don't need to "thank you" dude, as the EU is not a charity, but a mutually beneficial arrangement. If it's not mutually beneficial, then we can negotiate, but don't give me this condescending attitude and we really don't have to apologize for giving citizenship to Moldavians or for having a gypsy minority. This is who we've always been and speaking of gipsies, we've been lectured for years in how we aren't doing a good job of integrating them in society. Well, here's your chance.
> (Don't put all the blame on the Soviets, the Ottomans didn't treat you so well, either.)
Yeah, no shit, we were amongst the ones that engaged the Ottomans in battle, helping in preventing their expansion into Europe. In 1475 for example our own Stephen the Great delivered what is said to be the greatest defeat of the ottomans until that time. He was then denied European assistance, yet he kept waging war until 1484. He was a Moldavian ;-)
I was myself only briefly one of those Gutmenschen until I got hold of better data (which I actively sought and which were contradictory to everything I was taught in University).
On the other hand, this is pretty plonk-worthy:
> but don't give me this condescending attitude
and, yes, you probably should apologize for letting random Moldavians into the Schengen area.
All of the states in the Holy Roman Empire did pay extra taxes to pay for wars against the Ottomans a few decades later.
Plus, because it seems to have slipped further down the list that the GP the Guardian ran a correction pointing out the article has no historical basis and the damage these incorrect allegations have done to Greece in plainly visible in the writing of the GP.
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/mar/28/readers-editor-...
For example, how sanguine should I be about the claimed non-violent, non-Stalinist goals of the revolutionary forces?
For that matter, the use of the term "concentration camp", while accurate, is not provided the context to differentiate it from the modern connotations associated with Nazi death camps.
This isn't journalism, but historical propaganda.
As I read it, the major claim of the article is that the British supported elements of the Greek state who had been collaborating with the Nazi occupiers in purging the EAM resistance. This does not seem to have been disputed.
"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...
You (Greece) borrowed money from us and promised to pay it back at a certain date. You are failing to do that, and you say that we're the bad guys? Pay your debts, assshole.
Plus you CHOSE to join the EU, and the single currency. You chose to follow their rules. You can't complain now about that!
You are so lucky that Churchill got an agreement out of Stalin to keep Greece out of the Soviet sphere of influence.
All for the egos of some politicians who wanted to feel important. The Pasoak leaders from the late 90's / early 00's should be ashamed of their short-sighted greed.
It very well might be the best thing for the long-term wealth of the Greek economy for it to exit the Euro and reestablish the Drachma, to better facilitate trade/labor growth with what would initially be the much more expensive Euro group. Manufacturing, generally, moves to places where labor and total production cost is cheaper, increasing the economic productivity of the region it moves to... this could only be a good thing.
They've reduced the status of the last three Greek governments to hollow bureaucratic institutions which rubber stamp Troika diktats. That is not anti-totalitarian.
There aren't many countries in Europe that can support the lavish social programme of the EU, yes Greece lied but so did Portugal, Spain, Italy, Ireland and many other countries.
There is just as much blame to be placed on the big financial players as onto Greece at this point.
Absolutely false. There is no record of national account abnormalities on any country other than Greece.
Then the UK, France and Russia helped it become an independent country in 1830, an "interference" without which a Greek state may not have existed in 1947...
I strongly disagree with that. England and US not interfering in other countries would not have stopped other countries, most notably the USSR, in interfering with other countries. And the places where other countries, not England and US, had major influence, generally had much bigger problems with civil rights, freedom and material well-being.
A significant indicator in this respect is the need to build walls to keep in the population in a country, because otherwise it would flee (and then call this "anti-Fascist protection wall").
Your hyperbole about "puppet Nazi government" in Ukraine pretty much proves the point: the Poroshenko government, elected with rather clear majority in what is a relatively free election, does have its problems in corruption and whatever, but not any worse than the previous one, which was an actual puppet of Putin.
The EU has many problems, but being "Nazi like" is not really one of them.
I wonder why he hasn't mentioned the struggle of the people against the imperialist bourgeoisie.
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.
If anything, I believe that the reaction was not aggressive enough and that the mild economic sanctions and ultimatums have been the only thing that prevented a serious escalation of the conflict, a conflict in which I must say, Russia illegally occupied a territory and created the rebels in the east, trampling on the sovereignty of another nation and they did so in your own backyard. This wasn't an ego fight, but a calculated move that would have happened regardless of the western reaction. Because lets be honest, Putin was losing in popularity, there's nothing like a new nationalistic drive to keep an impoverished population in line, plus occupying some territory, while teaching the neighbors what happens when leaving the party does have benefits.
I'm also disappointed, but my reasoning is different.
So, we now know how much worth the NPT is in Russia's eyes. Nothing.
Sure I would prefer people to have European values over Russian ones (I'm very happy we just legalized gay marriage in Ireland for example), but not like this. Ukraine is much more Russian culturally than it is European, and if it came to a EU wide referendum I would vote against Ukraine becoming an EU member. I wouldn't be surprised if I am part of the majority in this opinion. The EU, a project I strongly believe in, is struggling to hold itself together as it is without pissing in the hornets nest. We need stronger ties with Russia, not weaker ones. Weaker ties only bring us closer to a hot war and that will help nobody. What happened in Ukraine was a microcosm of what could happen on a much larger scale if we do not act more subtly and inclusively.
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Memories seem to be short when it comes to politics. Timeline... Russia has historically strong ties with with Ukraine and a bunch of trade agreements. NATO make noise about Ukraine joining (dangerous provocation, imagine Russia got Mexico on board with military strategy) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7312045.stm .... Yanukovych gets democratically elected (accepted as legitimate by international monitors... whether it was or not in reality I don't know so I will take this at face value. You can read the wikipedia on Ukraine Election 2010 for more infos).... EU push for trade deal that will bring Ukraine closer to Europe at the expense of Russia (despite all the marketing fluff about shared values, democracy, good governance that the EU like to roll out I think we are all smart enough to read between the lines. There is also a side story here in that EU were trying to slow the NATO expansion by stepping in first https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/16/1653792_us-embassy-cab...).... Euromaiden happens after a tug of war between Russia and EU ... Yanukovych gets booted (undemocratically... it's ok when it suits us but not when it doesn't)... The likes of John McCain turn up in Ukraine to supports the demonstrators (wtf is he doing there?)... Russia invades the Russian parts of Ukraine and takes over.
I am a little biased in that I think peaceful methods should be pursued almost exclusively and I think the EU has been largely successful with this internally so far. Ukraine was a step too far. All parties involved in Ukraine acted deplorably and it pains me to see people taking sides based on a perceived moral superiority. I find it hard to buy into the good guy bad guy narrative when everyone is slaughtering each other left, right and center. Having a soft border, both geographically and economically, between the EU and Russia is probably best for everyone involved in regards to Ukraine.
Abandoning 45 million people to 17th century "spheres of influence" is extremely cynical.
The EU might not be great, but on its worst day it's better than Russia (in all its forms) on its best day. I really hope that Russia can prove me wrong. But 500 years of Russian history back me up.
What a silly sentence to finish with. Does the Greek public support the government? Can you give me an example of what 'not supporting' would look like? Why are you combining millions of people in a sweeping generalisation?
This whole democracy thing (which I'm quite sure you know about) is a ugly blunt tool that allows the general public some vague influence on what their nation does. But most of these things happen due to self perpetuating systems that have been there for generations and which are invisible to the public.
Your debt ( Greeces) is like 177 times your GDP... And the politicans of the EU made the mistake of accepting greece in the European Union, because they all lied about there economic numbers.
Now you are dependant on the EU, yes, but you still have a lot of financial help. If you would have fallen without the EU ( sooner or later), there wouldn't be anyone to pay debts for you and forgive them ( partially).
I'm a Belgian and even every Belgian pays 1000€ for Greek financial support... And there are many other countries. Every European citizen is paying for the Greek mistakes. But i don't mind.
You still have to do a lot of yourselve, but it isn't our entire fault.
Stop blaming this on other things/people/instituations, it isn't a "one side has right" situation..
177% of GDP, which is 1.77 times. For comparison, Belgium is at about 100% of GDP.
> I'm a Belgian and even every Belgian pays 1000€ for Greek financial support
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.
Financial support "to Greece" now goes to the holders of those bad debts: mostly governments, the IMF, and the ECB.
I won't deny that there was pressue by other EU countries, but you make it sound like as if there was no other option for the greek people.
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.
Right, that's what you say after voting in power an incompetent socialist government which only prolonged the continued borrowing of funds to pay for your socially assisted and your corrupt and inefficient public institutions, funds that are fueled by all EU taxpayers, including countries that have much lower average salaries than yours, that did implement austerity measures and that now have to support your bill. This after you lied about your budget deficit for years, even before your admission into the Eurozone. Speaking of which, your government didn't even had the balls to take responsibility for their own actions, imposing that referendum on financial matters on citizens that don't have the competence to vote on such issues, being the textbook example of the tyranny of the majority effect.
But yeah, blame the americans and the masons and the german banks. It's never you, it's always some invisible and powerful puppeteers governing your life, right? I personally blame the lizard people.
South Korea is another US "vassal state". So is Taiwan. So were Japan and Germany after WW2. I'd say that the Greek problems have other sources.
As a Romanian I wish they traded Greece for Romania in 1944. So that you'd learn a painful lesson.
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/mar/28/readers-editor-...
As the Cold War intensified, though, things got very ugly again. NATO was directly or indirectly responsible for literally hundreds of casualties throughout the '70s and '80s, usually by covering far-right groups planting indiscriminate bombs targeting civilians. This was all to contrast the electoral rise of the Communist Party, which was making huge gains thanks to Soviet financial backing and a cadre of skilled administrators forged by resistance movements during the war. Eventually, the communists basically bartered peace for a de-facto acceptance of the fact that they would never rule. New generations saw that as a betrayal, and the party started a slow decline, moving towards social-democratic positions and eventually rebranding completely.
For countries lying directly on each side of the Iron Curtain, that war was not very cold.
Links between the Italian military and secret services, Nato and far-right extremists are there. In particular, look at the spontaneous and legally-irrelevant declarations Vinciguerra made. I mean, the Italian ruling party was directly financed by Americans, who had even fixed the first round of elections (this has been historically accepted); it makes sense that they would help them stay in power in whichever means was necessary. Losing one of the most strategic countries in the Mediterranean to Moscow was simply unacceptable.
And of course, there is Ustica -- the fact that it was a NATO job is now historically accepted beyond any reasonable doubt. That's a direct killing of 81 people.
>But what the freedom fighters wanted, insists Glezos “was what we had achieved during the war: a state ruled by the people for the people. There was no plot to take over Athens as Churchill always maintained. If we had wanted to do that, we could have done so before the British arrived.”
What did you need all those weapons for, then? The truth is that ELAS had already taken over of most of the country, and only stopped because Stalin directed them to. Unlike Tito, he wanted to avoid confrontation with the Allies at that point.
Ultimately one of the most important events that led to the end of the civil war was the split between Tito and Stalin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tito%E2%80%93Stalin_Split); Tito had been providing support for DSE (the military wing of the communist party), allowing them free movement in Yugoslavia and setting up training camps, re-supply stations, hospitals, etc. After the split, the Greek communist party sided with Stalin (they didn't even pick the "benevolent" dictator!) and Tito closed the border with Greece.
The idea that this military organization, allied with and directed by two communist dictators, had any interest in a democratic state is insane.
Well done!
One cannot have been a communist in Europe in these times without being in an active supporter of Stalin. The ComIntern and essentially all European communist parties were under strict control of Moscow/Stalin. Those who opposed Stalin typically faced a violent end.
Of course after Stalin's death and the concommitant weakening of communist power, most communists active during Stalin's times lied about their involvement.
Mark Mazower's "Inside Hitler's Greece: The Experience of Occupation 1941-44" is an excellent book on the subject.
Another thing that deserves mention is that the civil war actually started years before the Nazis left. The communists had been attacking not only the Nazis, but also right-wing resistance groups (EDES, PAO, EKKA)! The Brits actually brokered a ceasefire in early 1944, which the communists broke 2 months later by murdering resistance leader Psarros (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimitrios_Psarros).
There is no assuming involved; they didn't simply "want" a violent take over, they actually tried to do it and lost.
This is not really the case. Two "groups" were to be left armed (and transformed into a national army): the 3rd Greek Mountain Brigade and the Sacred Band. Both groups were formed by the Greek government in exile, and were under the control of the Greek government. Both groups fought in battles against the Nazis. There is no question of collaboration among them.
As for the cops I'm sure there were collaborationists in their ranks, and obviously firing on the crowd was both wrong and a massive mistake. But this is no justification for anything the communists did.
As for the fear of Stalinist parties, the French Communist party was one of them and the country did not fall into Stalin's arm. I guess the setup was different, but it shows that alienating part of your population for fear of their political belief is not the solution.
On a side note I am not even surprise of how this play out considering the other dictators (and criminal organisation) that had support from the British and the Americans (and from others "allied" countries).
One shudders to think what Stalin and his followers would have done had their planned global expansion not been contested by the west.
And this was in large parts because Nato made it very clear that further communist expansion would not be in Europe. The existence of nuclear weapons on both sides arrested the cold war in an uneasy standoff, and proxy wars were fought in the developing world, where nations and their leaders were only too happy to play west/east off against each other.You are of course correct that the French and Italian Communist parties had no real prospects of successful insurrection with American troops stationed there.
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.
Not much Vergangenheitsbewältigung there :(
Stalin was pro-intervention, at least symbolically, but had cards on the issue having Franco sent volunteers to participate on the Eastern Front with the German army, Truman did not want more war on Europe and Churchill didn't want to hurt the commercial relations with Spain (to say, oranges and wine).
My gut feeling says, though, the decision was more on the line of "better an irrelevant regime in Spain that a communist ally on the west".