Becoming a Subject: Political Prisoners During the Greek Civil War

Rating:
Summary: A meticulously researched and documented analysis
Review: Becoming A Subject: Political Prisoners During The Greek Civil War by Polymeris Voglis (Center Fellow at the International Center for Advanced Studies at New York University) offers the reader an unflinching examination of the harsh reality of political prisoners during the Greek Civil War (1946-1949), the last major conflict in Europe before the end of the Cold War. Drawing comparisons with political prisoners in Germany and Spain, this meticulously researched and documented analysis presents an candid and revealing history of torture, deprivation, hunger strikes and other forms of protest in prisons. A sober and often disturbing account, Becoming A Subject is a welcome and appreciated scholarly contribution to 20th Century Greek History and "Cold War Era" International Studies collections.

Rating:
Summary: Ex post facto assertions
Review: It is an agitprop masterwork involved presenting the communist wolves as innocent victims of a heartless state; repackaging Jack the ripper as a feminist would have been, by comparison a child's play.
Reading the book savored all too obviously of the proverbial chutzpah-exemplar who murdered his parents and then pleaded for mercy as an orphan.

Rating:
Summary: Creating the past
Review: The author does not discover a past as much as he creates it; he chooses the events and people that he thinks constitute the past, and he decides what about them it is important to know. Who were those people to and why had to be imprisoned? They are described as romantic freedom fighters upon whom had fallen the fury of the post war "reactionary' governments. This is far from the truth. In fact, some of them had committed horrendous crimes against the Greek people, (Andreas Papandreou:"Democracy at Gunpoint"), most of them helped to those crimes, and all of them fought to make Greece a communist "paradise" being ready to bargain chunks of Greek territory to our neighbors (Antonio Solaro: History of the Communist Party of Greece") The murders and the horrible atrocities committed by ELAS scattered network of killers are a forbidden subject in today's Greece and practically all Greek storytellers avoid it. There is a conspiracy of silence about it as there is about many other things that occurred during the war years. The Greek translation of "Captain Corelli's Madolin" has been expurgated of all the passages which describe how totally useless, perfidious, parasitic, and unspeakably barbaric ELAS was, Who remembers and who knows that Spyros Linardatos, the well known communist storyteller had been General's Tsolakoglou private secretary, when the later was nominated Prime Minister of the first "collaborationist" government of occupied Greece. The slaughtering of 1537 people in Meligalas, ages ranging from14 to 80 year old is absent from the pages of the contemporary storytellers. Colonel Psaros was not just "killed" as so elegantly the author puts it. The communist murdered Psaros after surrendering himself to them (C.M. Woodhouse, Something Ventured). Dekemvriana is just the December events (sic). No one word is uttered about the killing fields were thousands of Athenians, among them the great actress Eleni Papadaki, the Rector of Athens Polytechnic Institute Koronis together with twelve of his students and colonel Chamodrakas with his three sons age 14 to 20! were murdered by the "heroic" communists. Reading the book we do not have a cause and effect relation. He is motivated by a need to have the Communists perceived as victims and thus minimizing the sufferings of the Greek people in the hands of the British mercenary and communist controlled ELAS by creating a moral equivalent.
Suggestion for future research: The extermination camps run by the communists after the war was over it will be a rewarding experience for the author, unless a faustian bargain forbids it.