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Organization 17 November.Drawing on years of fieldwork, Panourgiá uses ethnographic interviews, archival material, unpublished personal narratives, and memoirs of political prisoners and dissidents to piece together the various microhistories of a generation, stories that reveal how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

During the 1940s Greece was torn apart twice, first by World War II and second by Civil War.Beginning in 1941, the occupation of Greece by Germany was intensely brutal. Children starved on the streets of Athens. The Jewish population was decimated in the Holocaust. Heroic acts of resistance - performed in concert with the SOE - were met with vicious reprisals. When Greece was finally freed from Nazi rule in 1944, the fractured and embittered nation became engulfed in civil war, as conflict flared between the British and American-sponsored government and communist-led rebels. Acclaimed historian of Greece David Brewer here investigates this tumultuous decade in Greece’s modern history, providing a compelling military and political history.

The Greek Civil War (1946-1949) was one of the few instances in the post-World War II era of a clear-cut and permanent victory by right-wing government forces over an insurgent communist movement. Spyridon Plakoudas here explores the factors which ultimately caused the downfall of the communist insurgency in Greece which had, at some points, seemed undefeatable. He questions whether the guerrilla movement fell victim to the feud between Stalin and Tito or whether the significant British and, above all, American aid in fact rescued the Greek monarchist regime from collapse.

An authoritative history of the Greek Civil War and its profound influence on American foreign policy and the post-Second World War period A In his comprehensive history AndrA(c) Gerolymatos demonstrates how the Greek Civil War played a pivotal role in the shaping of policy and politics in post-Second World War Europe and America and was a key starting point of the Cold War. Based in part on recently declassified documents from Greece, the United States, and the British Intelligence Services, this masterful study sheds new light on the aftershocks that have rocked Greece in the seven decades following the end of the bitter hostilities.A

America’s experience in Greece has often been cited as a model by those later policymakers in Washington who regard the involvement as a “victory ” for American foreign policy. Indeed, President Johnson and others referred to Greece as the model for America’s deepening involvement in Vietnam during the mid-1960’s. Greece became the battlefield for a new kind of war--one that included the use of guerrilla warfare, propaganda, war in the shadows, terror tactics and victory based on outlasting the enemy. It was also a test before the world of America’s resolve to protect the principle of self-determination. Jones argues that American policy towards Greece was the focal point in the development of a global strategy designed to combat totalitarianism. He also argues that had the White House and others drawn the real “lessons ” from the intervention in Greece, the decisions regarding Vietnam might have been more carefully thought out.

Peter J. Stavrakis offers the first comprehensive analysis of Soviet conduct in Greece during the most critical period of Greek history in this century--the last months of World War II and the years of the Greek Civil War.

Review(s) of: Memory and migration in the shadow of war: Australia's Greek immigrants after World War II and the Greek civil war, by Joy Damousi, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. xi + 261, AU $155.00 cloth.