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

[Henk Elegeert]

Ach, Oto liet het weer eens na om zelf na te denken, en komt met pulp uit
het brein van Bill Van Auken van de wsws.org dementerenden aankakken ...

Hij (zwamzak Oto) had het - er even over nadenkend - dus niet eens hoeven
denken ... !!

Nee, ik filter het (Oto's wsws.org pulp) niet de delete bak in, al hoort
het daar wel in thuis overigens ... maar lees het nauwelijks nog.

Henk Elegeert


2011/11/3 Antid Oto <protocosmos66 at gmail.com>

> 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
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