And these must have been at least some of the interests that Philip Agee, the CIA officer, had said the Americans would never let go. Varoufakis wrote in his book The Global Minotaur that Volcker would later give a speech in which he admitted that the Americans had unleashed “a controlled disintegration of the world economy.”
“So the Americans unpegged the dollar from gold,” Varoufakis continued. “Then Volcker comes in in the late 1970s, and pushes interest rates up. Suddenly, there is a complete reversal of the old plan. Before the 1970s, you had America being the surplus country: exporting products to Europe and Japan, importing a surplus of capital, and then taking this money and loaning it back to them. When these surpluses ended, they engineered something else. American consumers were now buying products from Europe and Japan and later China. What was financing America’s deficits? German and Chinese profits. They were flying into Wall Street.”
And then the whole thing collapsed.
Varoufakis was speaking from an economic or scientific point of view, but all I could think of was an ordinary Greek’s emotional or psychological reaction to this history, the sense of helplessness when the European Union suggested that raising taxes or cutting pensions would somehow assuage a crisis sixty years old. The Greeks, like many other peoples around the world, had once been victims of a military coup, and thus would not necessarily assume such calamities could be entirely their own responsibility.
*
ON THE DAY of the Greek junta, the writer Neni Panourgia was a child. She remembers walking outside and seeing only military trucks instead of cars. Military music played on the radio, but the world otherwise felt hushed. In the next weeks, thousands of people were arrested. Books and rock albums were banned, press freedoms curtailed, prisoners tortured. The Greek military establishment, which was close to the Pentagon, had been worried about the rebellious rule of Prime Minister Georgios Papandreou, whom they accused of installing left-wing generals in the military in order to foment revolution. His son, Andreas, was also an outspoken critic of the United States. On April 21, 1967, Greek colonels launched an anti-Communist military coup. Some of the colonels had been educated at the War College in the United States, and some had been torturers in the Greek internment camps.
Many Greeks at the time wondered about the so-called American Factor. In her book Dangerous Citizens, Panourgia recounts the experience of two Greek prisoners in a cell on the very first night of the dictatorship. One man, Tzavalas Karousos, hears someone saying, “This smells like Indonesia. American stuff.” He was referring to the coup of 1965 against Indonesia’s President Sukarno, a nationalist who sympathized with his country’s Communist Party. What followed was a campaign of lawless violence, in which the military incited militias of ordinary men to behead, shoot, and stab anyone Communist or accused of being Communist. Between five hundred thousand and one million people were killed. Today, thanks to the 2001 U.S. State Department publication Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, it is known that CIA officers and embassy officials supplied the army with a target list.
Tzavalas Karousos didn’t know the details of the U.S. role in Indonesia, but there was a kind of shared consciousness among the citizens of the non-American world, acquired mostly through news reports, images, and intuition. Did Karousos also think of Arbenz in Guatemala? Did he think of Mossadegh in Iran? Did he think of Lumumba in the Congo? Was there an archipelago of shared memory—experiences strung together with news from across the world? Those men in the Greek jail already had a sense of forces larger than them; a feeling of helplessness. “The unknown weighed heavily on us,” Karousos says. “This is the result of the modern disease, anticommunism.” After the junta, a statue of Truman in Athens would be repeatedly knocked down and defaced.
The years that followed in Greece were not as bloody as Indonesia, but no less damaging to the unity of the nation. That year of the coup, James Becket, an American lawyer for Amnesty International, arrived in Greece to investigate allegations of torture by the new regime. He had been hoping that the Greek victims might appeal for assistance from the American government, but State Department officials were defensive. As he investigated further, interviewing torture victims and their relatives, he discovered that the United States’ “involvement in torture went beyond simply moral support.” In his book Barbarism in Greece, he writes, “If American support is obvious to the Greeks, it is vital to the torturers”:
The torturers themselves not only use American equipment in their military and police work, but they rely on the fact that the U.S. supports them. Hundreds of prisoners have listened to the little speech given by Inspector Basil Lambrou, who sits behind his desk which displays the red, white, and blue clasped-hand symbol of American aid. He tries to show the prisoner the absolute futility of resistance: “You make yourself ridiculous by thinking you can do anything. The world is divided in two. There are the communists on that side and on this side the free world. The Russians and the Americans, no one else. What are we? Americans. Behind me there is the government, behind the government is NATO, behind NATO is the U.S. You can’t fight us, we are Americans.” [italics mine]
Contrary to Truman’s hopes to rescue a people from the pressures or occupation of an armed Communist minority, Becket writes, “The Greeks, a free people, would be subjugated by a minority armed by the United States, and the outside pressures would be American.”
Panourgia draws a line from the Greek case to the usage of illegal detentions and torture in the Americans’ twenty-first-century war on terror, which she argues “has a history that reaches back to a space and place used as a laboratory for neo-colonialism at the outset of the imperial expansion of US power after the Second World War: namely, Greece after the Truman Doctrine and under the Marshall Plan.” Like the Greek man in his jail cell thinking of Indonesia, Panourgia also draws on a constellation of shared experiences to make sense of her world.