Who was Metaxas? A quick overview for the non-initiated

Ioannis Metaxas is among the most prominent personalities in Greek history since the War of Independence, but outside Greece he is a quite unknown figure. What follows here is a short biography of Metaxas, intended to be a quick overview of him and certainly not an indepth article.

Ioannis Metaxas was born born in Kefalonia, Greece, an island of wonderful beauty in the Ionian Sea. A career soldier, he served in the Greco-Turkish War of 1897, studied military science in Germany and fought again in the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, in which he was assistant chief of the general staff. He was later chief of staff, but was exiled (1917) to Italy, along with most other prominent figures of Constantine I's government, as pro-German when Greece joined the Allies in World War I.

He returned in 1920 and became prominent as a royalist politician during the Republic of 1924-35. After the monarchy had been reestablished in Greece, Metaxas became premier in April, 1936. With the support of King George II, Metaxas dissolved parliament on August 4th, 1936 and established a National Socialist regime. Hence the name of his regime.

Metaxas' grandiose vision was to create a Third Greek Civilization based on its glorious Ancient and Byzantine past, but what he actually created was more a Greek version of the Third Reich. Within 6 years, he implemented dozens of social, industrial and economic reforms while stabilizing the tumultuous political situation of those years. Furthermore he gained estability for the country's macroeconomic figures and engaged himself in an intensive diplomatic activity with foreign countries and especially those in the neighbourhood. As a curiosity but also as a remarkable trait of his personality, Metaxas, despite being nationalist, favoured demotiki, the folkish dialect of the Greek language.

But Metaxas is remembered chiefly for his reply of "OKHI" (no) to Mussolini's request to allow Italians to go across Greece at the beginning of WWII, thus maintaining Greece's policy of strict neutrality. The Italian ambassador to Greece Grazzi, had visited Metaxas and had handed to him Mussolini's ultimatum. Mussolini was demanding his troops to occupy Greece throughout the war claiming to ensure Italy's safety against any English incursion. If refused to do so, Italy would attack Greece.

Metaxas response, expressing the wish and the spirit of the Greek people, was simple and worthy of the one Leonidas, the Spartan King, gave the Persians two thousand and five hundred years earlier: "MOLWN LAVE" ("COME AND GET ME"). It was worthy of the one Konstantinos Palaiologos, the last emperor of Constantinople gave the Ottoman Turks when asked to surrender the city: "ELATE NA THN PARETAI" ("COME AND TAKE HER").

Metaxas response was OKHI - NO.

The Italians then attacked but Metaxas, who had been long aware that the greatest foreign threat to Greece was Italian expansionism, had long prepared the Army and the Nation in general for a war eventuality. After Mussolini's attack, Metaxas personally took command of the Army, leading and organizing it in such an efficient way that the Greek army, being much weaker (8 times smaller in numbers) than Italy's, humiliated the Italians, bringing them back to Albania, the Italian headquarter from which the attack had been enacted. The victory proved Metaxas' skills on military strategy and raised him as a new, contemporary Leonidas.

It was during his succesful leadership of the military operations against the Italians that Metaxas died. It was a mysterious death, and some rumours circulating at the time pointed out that he was in fact assassinated by either the Italian secret services or the British, the latter because he had refused the British to intervene in Greece. In fact, after his death the king replaced Metaxas with Alexander Koryzis, who agreed to allow British forces to enter Greek soil, so the picture is nothing but suspicious. The fact is, that Metaxas died as a true hero and as an ancient Greek chieftain, leading his fellow men to defense the Fatherland. Either naturally died or murdered, Metaxas' decease meant that Greece would have lose the greatest man of modern Greek history since the Independence War in 1821.

Benito Mussolini Was Once a British Agent

(AP) A historian says Benito Mussolini was well paid as a British agent during World War I.

The Guardian newspaper reported Wednesday that Peter Martland of Cambridge University discovered that Mussolini was paid 100 pounds a week by Britain in 1917 - equal to about 6,000 pounds ($9,600) today.

The late Samuel Hoare, in charge of British agents in Rome at that time, revealed in his memoirs 55 years go that Mussolini was a paid agent. Martland found more details in Hoare's papers, including that Mussolini also sent Italian army veterans to beat up peace protesters in Milan, a dry run for his fascist blackshirt units.

"The last thing Britain wanted were pro-peace strikes bringing the factories in Milan to a halt. It was a lot of money to pay a man who was a journalist at the time, but compared to the 4 million pounds Britain was spending on the war every day, it was petty cash," The Guardian quoted Martland as saying.

The salary detail also was in historian Christopher Andrew's newly published history of the British intelligence agency MI5, to which Martland contributed.

In 1917, the future Italian dictator was editor of the Il Popolo d'Italia newspaper, which campaigned to keep Italy on the allied side in the war.

http://tinyurl.com/ykhxf9a

Solzhenitsyn & Bogus Mythology of WWII

By Eric Margolis.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who died this week aged 89, will rank with literary immortals Tolstoy and Dostoevsky as a great chronicler of Russia’s soul and its profound suffering.

Solzhenitsyn’s epic works Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago are literary monuments for all mankind. After years as a political prisoner in the Soviet gulag, Solzhenitsyn declared, "a writer’s goal is to fight the lie" – meaning propaganda, historical distortion, and perversion of facts.

Thanks in good part to Solzhenitsyn and fellow dissident writers, the world finally learned the Soviet Communists had murdered over 30 million people and imprisoned millions more.

At the 1945 Yalta Conference, Stalin boasted to Winston Churchill that Commissar Lazar Kaganovitch, who had supervised the murder of at least seven million Ukrainians and sent 2 million to concentration camps, "is my Adolf Eichmann," referring to the Nazi official responsible for killing millions of Jews.

In 1945, the Soviet Union – the close wartime ally of Britain, Canada and the United States – had 5.5 million prisoners in its prison system, the gulag, of whom 25% died annually from cold, hunger, exhaustion and disease.

Though Stalin’s worst crimes were committed before World War II, the full horror of his system of industrialized murder and slave labor were barely known outside Russia until the 1980’s. To this day, the world is constantly reminded of Germany’s crimes during the National Socialist era. But Stalin’s victims, who surpassed those of Hitler by a factor of three times, are almost forgotten. Why?

History is the propaganda of the victors. Few photographs of the gulag have survived, evidence was destroyed, and witnesses have died. Churchill and Roosevelt could not admit they were allied to the greatest mass killer since Genghis Khan, and complicit in his crimes. Or reveal that Communist agents of influence had shaped White House policy. The feeble-minded Roosevelt even hailed Stalin as "Uncle Joe."

The world’s Communist and Socialist parties managed to suppress the full scope of Stalin’s crimes even after Nikita Khrushchev denounced him in 1956. Solzhenitsyn warned that socialism, and big sister communism, inevitably led to totalitarian states.

Many Western liberal intellectuals were infatuated with Stalin’s brute power and didn’t want to know about their idol’s crimes. The French leftist thinker Jean-Paul Sartre even refused to admit the gulag existed.

Revealing the truth about the Allies’ role in supporting Stalin and his crimes would undermine the whole bogus mythology of World War II that has become the state religion for the political right in North America, Britain and Australia.

Those who considered the Jewish Holocaust a unique historical crime were not eager to bring attention to Stalin’s genocide lest it diminish or dilute their own people’s suffering.

The Soviet Union punished Solzhenitsyn by making him into a "non-person." He was exiled to the United States, where he was at first hailed as a hero. But the uncompromising Solzhenitsyn, ever the Old Testament prophet, fulminated against the "soulless capitalism system" and "mindless western consumerism."

Then he published a book about a hitherto taboo subject, the prominent role of Russian Jews in the Communist party and secret police. The book provoked a storm of criticism in North America. Solzhenitsyn was branded anti-Semitic and quickly became a non-person for the second time.

Solzhenitsyn returned to the new Russia after the fall of Communism and became the leading exponent of the revived cult of reactionary 19th-century pan-Slav nationalism. He championed Russia’s Orthodox Church as guardian of the nation’s soul, proclaimed Russia’s manifest destiny, and advocated a form of modern czarism that looks remarkably like today’s Kremlin run by Vladimir Putin and Dimitri Medvedev.

Being a prophet in the wilderness is a hard, thankless profession. But Solzhenitsyn’s dauntless courage and tenacity shone the light into some of the darkest cellars of Russia’s tortured history. He influenced a generation of writers, including this humble one, whose goal, like his, has always been to "fight the lie."

The Fraud of Neoconservative "Anti-Communism"

By Max Shpak

Neoconservatives and their apologists would have the public believe that the neocons were former Leftists who saw the light and came to reject liberal or Marxist ideology as a matter of conviction and principle. Regrettably, this official line has come to be conventional wisdom, no doubt reflecting neocon efforts to hide the fact that their transformation was neither sincerely motivated nor sincerely enacted. To understand the real agenda that drove and continues to drive much of neoconservatism, one needs to look back to the origins of the movement and the cultural backgrounds of those who lead it.

It is a well-established fact that many of the early luminaries of neoconservatism (most famously Irving Kristol in the 1940's, a more recent famous example being David Horowitz) came from Marxist backgrounds, and that neoconservatism (like Marxism itself) began and continues to be a largely a phenomenon of Jewish intellectualism. In the early part of the 20th century, Marxism attracted a disproportionate pool of Jewish recruits for a number of obvious reasons. There are a number of complex psychological and social reasons for the attraction, all of which largely stem from the fact that Marxist internationalism is an ideology which by its very nature finds disciples among a rootless, anti-religious urban intelligentsia.

More important for the purposes of this analysis, however, are the practical reasons for Jewish sympathy with Bolshevism. European and American Jews alike carried deep-seated hatreds for the traditional regimes and religions of the European continent, particularly Czarist Russia and various Eastern European nations due to (real and imagined) "persecution" and "pogroms" that occurred there. Thus, when the Bolsheviks overthrew the Czar, destroyed the hated Orthodox Church, rendered powerless the landed religious peasantry, and replaced traditional Russian authority with a largely Jewish Commissariate, world Jewry (including alleged "capitalists" like the Schiffs and Rothschilds) embraced the Revolution and Marxist ideology alike.

With Russia becoming an effective Jewish colony where "anti-Semitism" was an offense punishable by death and the native gentile culture was effectively stamped out (thanks to a leadership consisting mainly of Jews such as Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Severdlov, held together under the stewardship of the obsequious philosemite Lenin), Jews throughout the world put their hopes in the possibility of similar revolutions elsewhere. Indeed, their comrades in arms were hard at work affecting similar changes in Hungary (Kuhn), Austria (Adler) and Germany (Eisner). The rise of Fascist and Nazi movements only served to further polarize Jewish support in favor of international communism.

This near unanimity would change as a result of two developments: a shift in the character of Soviet Communism on the one hand and the foundation of the State of Israel on the other. Stalin's purges of many of his former Bolshevik colleagues (including Trotsky, who was assassinated while in exile), his 1939 pact with Hitler, and rumors of Stalin's own anti-Jewish prejudices gave many would-be supporters pause. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, it became clear the Russian masses would not fight for the sake of Bolshevism, an ideology that brought them so much misery, but rather for the sake of Russian blood and soil. From then on, the Soviet leadership had to court the very Russian nationalist elements that the early Bolsheviks had worked so hard to stamp out. This lead to an increasing tolerance towards the Russian Orthodox Church and a decreased Jewish presence in the Soviet politburo and KGB. Thus, the USSR was "betraying" the very elements that made it attractive to the Jewish establishment to begin with.

Perhaps even more significant a factor in the origins of neoconservatism was the emergence of an independent Israeli state. While many Jewish Marxists eagerly supported the Zionist state, the more intellectually consistent Left opposed Zionism on the grounds that all nationalisms, including Jewish ones, are enemies of global proletarian revolution. Thus, Jewish leftists who once advocated internationalism for gentile nations were forced to come to terms with the implications of this ideology for their own nationalist sentiments. Thus, they needed an ideology which would let them have their cake (opposing gentile nationalism) and eat it too (by supporting Israel), and they found just such a worldview with neoconservatism.

At the same time, although the Soviet Union initially courted Israel during the 1948 wars of independence, it became clear to the Israeli government that in world polarized between the United States and the Soviet Union the former would be wealthier and more pliant cash cow to milk. By the 1950's and the coming of the Suez Wars, regardless of residual Jewish loyalties to Communism, the battle lines were already drawn, with Israel in the US/Western camp and the Arab nations forced to make alliances of convenience with the Soviet Union.

It is hardly a coincidence that the changing character of Soviet Communism and the status of Israel as a US ally came at the same time that neoconservatism was becoming an influential political movement. For all of their talk about "capitalism," "democracy," "freedom," and "free markets," the fact that so many Jewish leftists turned on a dime to back the US in the Cold War because America could serve as a life support system for Israel and a bulwark against resurgent Russian "anti-Semitism" makes their real agenda entirely transparent. One can witness an identical phenomenon taking place today, as many Jewish liberal Democrats switch party ranks and join the GOP because of the latter's stronger support for Israel and harder line with the Arab nations. All of the window dressing about their newfound "patriotism" and "Americanism" is a sham designed to mask the fact that the question for the neocons has always been and will always be "is it good for the Jews?"

The different agendas driving neocon Cold Warriors as opposed to their erstwhile Old Right allies could be seen on any number of fronts. The most obvious one has been the different reactions in the two camps to Russia after the end of the Cold War. While paleoconservative leaning Cold Warriors such as Pat Buchanan have pushed for normalized relations with Russia, the neocons continue to fight on the Cold War, enthusiastically supporting Chechen separatists as "freedom fighters" and advocating NATO expansion. The reasons for this difference are entirely obvious: the Old Right's enemy was Communist ideology, while neoconservative Jews nurtured a hatred for Russian nationalism. Thus post-Communist Russia is still very much a threat to the latter, particularly with resurgent Russian "ultra-nationalism" and "anti-Semitism," while in the absence of Communist rule the above are of little concern to the Old Right.

For all their talk about "anti-Communism," the real engine driving neocon Cold Warrior instincts was punishing the hated Russian goyim for the sin of "anti-Semitism," not any opposition to residual or latent Marxism. As further evidence that this is the case, one need only consider the fact that while the Old Right championed Christian dissidents such as Solzhenitsyn, to the neocons the only legimate "dissidents" were Zionists like Natan Sharansky, just as the only "refugees" championed by the neos were invariably Jewish (including today's shady Odessa Mafiosi). Solzhenitsyn represented the Russian nationalism and Orthodox Church that made so many of the neocons' predecessors embrace Bolshevism, thus Solzhenitsyn and the plight of Christian dissidents were relegated to obscurity in neocon publications, while Zionist noise-makers in the USSR were given a hero's welcome.

In this regard, the neocons are the true heirs to Leon Trotsky, who condemned Stalin and his followers not so much for their brutality (as commander of the Red Army and overseer of Lenin's terrorist CHEKA, Trotsky was no stranger to brutality and sadism) but for their "anti-Semitism" and "betrayal of the Revolution." Trotsky's main critique of Stalinism seemed to be that Stalin was moving Russia in a nationalist direction rather than working towards the establishment of an international "proletarian" vanguard. The fact that the intellectual ancestors of neoconservatism had not an unkind word to say about Bolshevism while Leninist-Trotskyite goals were being fulfilled suggests that it was not so much ideological reconsideration as tribal self-interest that drove these most unlikely conversos.

Because their move from the Left to a pseudo-right was insincere, one would expect to find a whole range of issues where the neocons retain leftist instincts and remain true to their Trotskyite heritage. Indeed this is the case. In their portrayal of the Cold War as a struggle between "capitalism" on the one hand and "socialism" on the other, the neocons try to minimize the fact that in many ways the conflict between the Bolsheviks and the West was over much more than economic systems. To most on the Old Right, the economic issues were at best peripheral: Marxism was opposed because it was materialistic, atheistic, and because it rejected nationalism and patriotism in the name of global revolution.

Most neocons came from a culture that was every bit as materialistic and cosmopolitan as the early Bolshevik leaders, so it is rather unlikely that they would have any quarrel with these aspects of Communist doctrine. The fact that neoconservatism is an ideology which is materialistic in nature and internationalist in focus (with its talk of "global democracy" and "global markets") makes it obvious that the fundamental underpinnings of the Marxist Left are alive and well among the scribblers of Commentary and The Weekly Standard. Their "conservative" pretenses seem limited to the fact that they oppose "socialism" (of the nationalist variety) in the name of "capitalism" (of the internationalist variety), and for all too many naïve people that seems to be sufficient and believable.

Understanding the true nature of the neoconservatives illuminates the essence of the struggle between the Right and the Left. It was never a struggle between "capitalism" and "socialism" as neoconservative or Communist progaganda would have one believe. Rather, it was always a conflict between spiritualism and materialism, between nationalism and globalism, between tradition and subversion, between the defenders of Western Civilization and its enemies. With the battle lines drawn as such, it is abundantly clear where the neocons stand. Many "capitalists" understood that economic means are not significant, only the desired end. Jacob Schiff understood it when he financed the Bolsheviks, just as Rupert Murdoch, Ted Turner, Marc Rich, Boris Berezovsky, and George Soros understand that their form of "capitalism" is fully compatible with the essence of the Left, and that they can find friends and allies among the ostensibly conservative neocons.

Unfortunately, many Rightists are not nearly as perceptive in their choice of allies.

May 15, 2002