[D66] Are Obama and NATO plotting a military coup in Greece?

[Antid Oto]

Are Obama and NATO plotting a military coup in Greece?
3 November 2011

The sudden dismissal of the Greek military’s high command Tuesday night, amid
international uproar over a proposal for a referendum on an EU debt plan, has
all the hallmarks of an action taken to preempt the threat of a military coup.

A measure of this political magnitude would not have been take lightly. At the
very least, one must assume that Prime Minister George Papandreou had strong
reason to believe that his government, and possibly his own person, was facing
an imminent threat from the country’s military.

The Greek minister of defense, Panos Beglitis, a close political ally of
Papandreou, summoned the four highest-ranking Greek military officers—the chiefs
of the general staff, the army, navy and air force—to a hastily convened meeting
to announce that they were being removed from their posts and replaced by other
members of the Greek military brass.

Last month, Defense Minister Beglitis was quoted by the EU Observer web site as
describing the Greek military hierarchy as “a state within a state.”

The Greek government should make public what it knows about the conspiracies of
this “state within a state” and with whom it was allied. Given the record of
Papandreou’s PASOK party, however, this is exceedingly unlikely. The last thing
that it and its pseudo-left apologists want is to alert workers to the dangers
they confront.

A number of daily papers in Europe have raised the question of whether the
sacking of the high command was aimed at preempting a military coup. These
include both the Telegraph and Daily Mail in Britain. Among the more blunt
pieces written on the matter came one from Gabor Steingart, the editor of
Germany’s main financial daily, Handelsblatt.

Under the headline “If I were Greek”, Steingart acknowledges that the supposed
rescue plan for the Greek economy is in reality another bailout of the banks at
the expense of Greek workers, who will be compelled to pay for it through the
wholesale destruction of their jobs, wages and social conditions. These measures
will only deepen the country’s depression and indebtedness, laying the
groundwork for even more terrible austerity demands in the future.

Comparing the plan to the “shock” treatment implemented in the former Soviet
Union, Steingart writes: “If I were from Greece I would be amongst those who are
alert and worried. I would keep a wary eye on that military machinery which
governed the country until 1974 and which might lie in wait for an opportunity
for revenge. We know from many countries: Dr Shock is an enemy of democracy.”

The manner in which this affair has been covered—or rather censored from
coverage—in the US media is telling. Neither the New York Times nor the
Washington Post, the two publications that function as the newspapers “of
record” within the US political establishment, have printed a word about
extraordinary shakeup within the Greek military command.

On Tuesday, the Times web site posted an article on Greece predicting that the
Papandreou government was about to fall. The assessment would have clearly
served as an explanation and justification for a coup taking place under
conditions of a political breakdown. But, apparently, what the Times editors
expected to take place didn’t happen. It recalls the newspaper’s premature
celebration of the short-lived overthrow of Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez in
2002.

Now the media silence suggests that the editors at the Times and Post are
desperately scrambling for a political line on what they clearly regard as a
highly sensitive matter.

One thing is certain, if a military coup was being prepared in Greece, given the
stakes involved, it could only have developed with the approval of the major
European powers—Germany, France and Britain—and, of course, the United States.

While the history of Greece is replete with the military’s interventions in
politics—no less than eight coups in the 20th century—the last military junta,
which seized power on April 21, 1967 and ruled until 1974, bore the clear stamp,
“Made in the USA”.

The so-called “colonels’ coup” followed two years of political instability that
began with the Greek King Constantine’s removal of the government of Georgio
Papandreou—the current prime minister’s grandfather—after he had himself
attempted to replace the military command.

The leader of the coup, Col. Georgios Papadopoulos, was a former collaborator
with the Nazi occupation of Greece in the 1940s, who in the postwar period
entered the Greek army and received intelligence training in the US. He became
the main liaison between the CIA and the KYP, the US-founded and US-funded Greek
intelligence agency. Papadopoulos himself had been on the CIA payroll for 15 years.

The coup was carried out under the guidelines of a NATO contingency plan known
as “Prometheus.” This plan was supposedly designed to forestall a communist
takeover by the military seizing control and rounding up all those considered
subversives.

The junta imposed martial law, suspending basic democratic rights. It soon
imprisoned some 10,000 people, including political leaders, trade unionists,
social activists, students and others suspected of opposing its
counterrevolutionary agenda. Thousands were tortured. The junta’s police beat
political prisoners with rubber hoses, shocked them with electricity, sexually
violated them and ripped nails from their fingers. One of the junta’s most
infamous torturers is said to have kept a red-white-and-blue symbol of US aid on
his desk and to have told his victims, “Behind me there is the government,
behind the government is NATO, behind NATO is the US. You can't fight us, we are
Americans.”

These hideous crimes were carried out with the direct aid and approval of the
liberal Democratic administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson.

In his first press conference after seizing power, Papadopoulos defended the
ferocious repression unleashed by the junta. “We are facing a patient on the
operating table,” he said. “Unless he is tied to the table, he cannot be cured
of his illness.”

No doubt such logic has a great deal of appeal today within international
financial circles, where Papandreou’s proposal to submit a program of drastic
austerity measures to a popular referendum has been denounced as
“irresponsible,” if not insane.

The Greek prime minister made the proposal based on his own political
calculations, which have nothing to do with democracy. However, the very idea
that working people would be allowed to vote on whether to accept massive social
cuts in order to bail out the banks provokes the intense anger and dismay of the
financial aristocracy in every country.

The brutal character of these measures and the immense social inequality that
lie at their heart cannot be imposed by democratic means. The “patient” must be
“tied to the table”.

In 1974, when the military last ruled Greece, during a period of economic and
political upheaval that spanned the globe, two of the other countries cited as
the next dominos likely to fall in today’s European sovereign debt crisis—Spain
and Portugal—were also ruled by fascist military dictatorships. The same was
true for most countries in Latin America.

The events in Greece signal that the age the colonels and generals is returning.
Under conditions of the deepest crisis of global capitalism since the Great
Depression of the 1930s, the old mechanisms of bourgeois democracy can no longer
contain ever mounting class antagonisms and international tensions.

While the threat of dictatorship manifests itself first in the weaker capitalist
economies, it is like a disease that spreads from the extremities to the heart.
There is no country in the world where working people can afford the illusion
that “it can’t happen here.”

Bill Van Auken

http://wsws.org/articles/2011/nov2011/pers-n03.shtml