MIM Notes 216
by MC5
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The Wall Street Journal has touched off a controversy by speculating that Greece's hosting of the Olympics in 2004 will be a financial failure because of so-called terrorism. Such speculation by business papers has a way of becoming self-fulfilling prophecy as panic spreads. Greece correctly responded that it was the Atlanta Olympics in the U$A that had a bomb go off right in the Olympic park.(1) The Boston Herald of June 6th issued an editorial defending countries not usually mentioned in the U.$. list of "terrorist" sponsors--Greece and Pakistan. The U.$. imperialists are weighing cut-offs of arms sales to Greece and Pakistan. In Greece, Kurdish nationalists do not earn the label "terrorist." Greece harbored Kurdish revolutionaries including PKK organization leader Abdullah Ocalan and this has angered Turkey and the United $tates. Greece and Turkey have a long-standing war going on over the island of Cyprus. The war between Greece and Turkey has always complicated things for the U.$. imperialists and their NATO military alliance. Now a Greek organization called November 17 is really angering the U.$. imperialists. On June 8th, the November 17 organization killed a British military official in Athens, Brigadier Stephen Saunders.(2) The British and American military have a history of working together in Greece and elsewhere. An attack on one ally is regarded as an attack on the other by these imperialists. The imperialist media managed to whip up a furor over the righteous killing of Saunders. Instead of people asking, "what was a British military official doing in Greece?" the question became one of opposing so- called terrorism. Historically, the real terrorism in Greece has been practiced by British and Amerikan intelligence and military people. The prize for hypocrisy goes to the ex-CIA chief James Woolsey. November 17 got its start by killing the CIA station chief in Greece in 1975. We must say that November 17 has had an impeccable sense of targets, not blindly firing at the masses but focussing on the real enemy. Woolsey spoke with confidence in front of the media regarding Greece, because he must have realized that few people know the history of the situation and certainly the monopoly capitalist mouthpieces standing in front of him were not among those few. Woolsey went on the attack saying, "I believe there are some people in the Greek government who know certain members of November 17."(3) According to the British imperialist media corporation BBC, Woolsey said that the Greek government would be embarrassed by a trial of November 17, "which might reveal details of their own activities against the military junta in the 1970s."(1) This was a really mixed up thing for Woolsey and the BBC to say. There is no reason for anyone to be embarrassed by being associated with the fight against a military junta, even by bourgeois standards. What is more, the junta in question was a U.$.-imposed regime in Greece, one that inspired the movie "Z" (and then the insipid social-democratic magazine "Z" which has not learned a thing about imperialism despite its name). The reason that November 17 has never suffered an arrest (according to CIA reasoning) is that the Greek government backs it, which might actually be true. If so, MIM supports the Greek government in its decision despite its denials. Amerikan and British intervention in Greece well justify attacks on military and intelligence officials from those countries.
Amerikan President Lyndon Johnson: "Fuck your Parliament and your Constitution. America is an elephant. Cyprus is a flea. Greece is a flea. If these two fleas continue itching the elephant, they may just get whacked by the elephant's trunk, whacked good..." MIM: It's do what Uncle Sam wants or else. It's impossible to have democracy under capitalism.In April 1967, the CIA installed a military junta in Greece to prevent the elected leader of the Greek people named George Papandreou (not the same one as the Foreign Minister today) from winning another election and extending power. He had won an outright majority of the vote in February 1964. He had gotten his start as a British puppet installed as prime minister in Greece during World War II. He sided with the British troops against Greek communists who had led the fight against the Nazis. By the time of the 1960s, the elected premier's son was a U.S. citizen on the CIA payroll and a supporter of Adlai Stevenson and Hubert Humphrey. However, U.$. President Lyndon Johnson thought Papandreou showed too much independence and the son was arrested during the coup of colonels (1967) and held in prison. The father died in 1968 and the torch passed to his son who formed a socialist organization that brought him to power as premier from 1981 to 1989 and again in 1993. Since the 1970s, Greek politicians have agreed not to expose the U.$. role in the military coup in Greece in exchange for better relations with the U.$. Government. It is little wonder that some may now be outraged when Woolsey talks about fighting the military junta in the 1970s as if fighting it were some kind of crime. (The junta fell apart when it went to war over Cyprus and lost in 1974.) Here is what President Lyndon Johnson said to the Greek ambassador to justify U.$. intervention: "fuck your Parliament and your Constitution. America is an elephant. Cyprus is a flea. Greece is a flea. If these two fleas continue itching the elephant, they may just get whacked by the elephant's trunk, whacked good... We pay a lot of good American dollars to the Greeks, Mr. Ambassador. If your Prime Minister gives me talk about Democracy, Parliament and Constitutions, he, his Parliament and his Constitution may not last very long."(4) As MIM has said all along, there is no democracy. It's do what Uncle Sam wants or else. It's impossible to have democracy under capitalism. MIM is unaware of the conditions for armed struggle in Greece. MIM does not claim that Greece is similar to the United $tates in conditions. It is a country that requires more examination with regard to how it benefits from the flow of superprofits arranged by U.$. imperialism. Nonetheless, MIM does have a unique and novel suggestion for those Amerikans and British concerned about violence in Greece: Get the military and intelligence people out of there and then they won't be killed like the occupying force they have been in the last half a century. What happens in Greece is an important lesson in imperialism. While the U$A calls itself a free and democratic country, in fact it imprisons more people per capita than any other country and it overthrows more elected governments than any other country. That's what imperialism is in its political essence. We must learn to ignore imperialism's rhetoric and pay attention to its practice, country by country, decade by decade. Only real communists will not whitewash this kind of "democracy." It's fine to start with a theory or principle of "democracy" as long as one examines how things actually work. Otherwise, if one always works for political progress with ideas that do not work, and never come true, one becomes a figleaf for something else. In the case of U.$. imperialism, people speaking for "democracy" are covering up the U.$. role and becoming figleafs for military regimes, like the one in Greece installed by a supposedly "democratic" country, the United $tates. The democratic socialists, social-democrats and hordes of phony communists are not really scientists, because the best and most innocent of them proceed from what they wish were true instead of what actually happens. They wish there were this thing called "democracy" when it fact democracy is rhetoric used to fool people into putting up with interventions to overthrow elected governments. At this time in the imperialist countries, only the scientists of Marxism in the genuine communist parties can be counted on to expose this truth. The "democracy" mongers are only spreading socialist ideas that get people killed at the hands of military and intelligence forces, as in the 1967 coup in Greece. Various social-democrats and phonies calling themselves Marxist have not learned this. "Z" magazine regularly whitewashes U.$. style democracy and fails to admit that the people can only manage their own destiny if they are willing to take up arms against Yankee imperialism. Otherwise, Uncle Sam crushes any elected government that Uncle Sam does not like. The so-called Communist Party in Greece is also phony. They and the social-democratic mush collection called "The Coalition of the Left and Progress" opposed the killing of the British military official in Greece, with the latter calling it "a blind act of violence."(2) Far from blind, the act was highly organized, targeted, and mindful of history.
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