“A historic sham”: Zelensky’s speech to Greece’s parliament sparks national outrage, opens WWII-era wounds

By inviting an Azov fighter to address Greece’s parliament, Zelensky opened the country’s historic wounds and triggered angry demonstrations that have shaken its pro-US government.

 

by TJ Coles

 

Part 2 - The CIA guides Greece’s post-war plan to “kill the communists”

 

In 1936, Greek Prime Minister Ioannis Metaxas became a pro-Nazi dictator with the support of King Geórgios II. Metaxas’ death in 1941 bolstered the Greek Communist Party’s (KKE) anti-Nazi resistance. The KKE had established ELAS, the People’s Liberation Army, to fight the occupying Nazis. Until 1943, ELAS was initially trained by the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), a top-secret unit designed to train European paramilitaries. Indicative of the power of Greek leftism, ELAS’s political wing, the National Liberation Front (EAM), boasted 2 million members.

The British Foreign Office fought to restore Geórgios II, explicitly citing his anti-left credentials. Working with Cyprus’s fascist battalion X, the Brits set up a new army unit, the Hellenic Raiding Force, to hunt and kill ELAS members. The Syntagma Square demonstrations in 1944 against the British and fascists ended in a massacre of 25 protestors, including a young child. A year later at the Yalta/Crimea Conference, Stalin agreed to allow Britain and the US to occupy Greece in exchange for Bulgaria and Romania. In 1947, Britain asked the US for support to purge leftist ideologies from the Greek public’s mind.

The Holy Bond of Greek Officers (IDEA) received help from the CIA and its predecessors, which worked with the FBI to send information on “leftists” to the Greek Embassy. In his book on post-War, US collaboration with Nazis, Blowback, Christopher Simpson reported that secret Pentagon papers revealed how the US “poured millions of dollars into IDEA … in order to create what it termed the ‘Secret Army Reserve’ made up of selected Greek military, police, and anti-Communist [officers].” Typical of the US imperial mindset, the “left” included everyone from right-wing republicans to religious minorities.

General Napoleon Zervas, the so-called Minister for Public Order, told US General William Livesay that the goal was “to kill the Communists.” US Ambassador Lincoln MacVeagh warned PM Dimitrios Maximos that US public opinion opposed “rightist excesses” against “non-subversive political opponents,” such as the imprisonment of 36,000 suspected leftists, including thousands of women – some of whom were nursing their babies. However, the US chargé, Karl Rankin, considered such measures to be “quite necessary.”

Dwight Griswold, the director of the USAID precursor known as the American Mission for Aid in Greece, described mass state child abduction from detained parents as an “unusually effective” psychological warfare device, particularly against the “Slavic minority.” With the left crushed, IDEA teamed up with NATO when Greece became a member in 1952.

Source, links:

https://thegrayzone.com/2022/04/20/nazis-us-greece-route-russia/

[1][3][4][5][6][7][8]

Related:

Zelensky and two Azov fighters speak inside the Greek parliament: One of the most disgraceful moments for the country that suffered most from the nazis