LGM Film Club, Part 122: Civil War in Athens

This extremely British view of the Greek Civil War is tonight’s film. The irony of the early Cold War (and really, most of the Cold War) is that the West ended up supporting the fascist-friendly forces in the postwar world because the partisans who actually fought the Nazis were mostly communists. So the British and Americans end up giving succor to the oppressors, which was very much what the Truman Doctrine was about, which of course Churchill strongly supported. As we saw around the world during the Cold War, when people wanted the same rights that we enjoy at home such as freedom of press, freedom of speech, and freedom to fight poverty, they were labeled as communists and the U.S. and Britain would support military dictators sure to crush all these rights. The Greek situation of course was complicated by the unfortunate specter of Stalin, so it’s not as if a communist Greece would have been any great paradise either. The best case scenario here would have been basically a version of Tito’s Yugoslavia, which obviously had plenty of limitations of its own.