The Poison Hand and 17N is included in full in this book of Short Stories.
How 23 targets died in retaliation for the deaths of 40 students following the Papadopoulos led Religious Right Junta attack on November 17, 1973.
The Three Rs (Press Release)

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Greece has a long history of resistance to right-wing-religious oppressors, starting with the Muslim Terrorist invasion in Thessaloniki in around 1,350.

Greece is a mountainous country, with a long tradition in andartiko (αντάρτικο, “guerrilla warfare”) dating back to the fourteenth century emergence of anti-Turkish bandits, who by executing right-wing-religious oppressors, the barbaric Turkish occupiers, often enjoyed folk-hero status.

During the 400 years of Ottoman occupation, the “Tourkokratia”, resistance became ingrained into the Greek culture, especially the need to prevent the unwelcome occupiers from normalizing their presence in occupation and lowering their guard believing the battle to be won.  If ever there was a moral justice in the ambush killing of strangers, this was it for Greece resistance fighters. Supply and demand created the need for men willing to kill, mercilessly, for a just cause. Either that or accept Islam and submission to the Turkish warlords.

Any Greek education allows for awareness of the 400 years of Turkish occupation. The Tourkokratia, along with the multiple atrocities committed against Greeks post-liberation, like the Smyrna killings in 1922. The atrocities that accompanied the various right-wing abuses of Greek culture, in which Greek resistance to oppression was never extinguished despite the numerous instances of enormous barbaric persecution by the oppressors.

Prior to the emergence of militant Guerilla Resistance, Greek aspirations for freedom were controlled by the Orthodox Church, sustained by a collection of prophetic and messianic beliefs that foretold the eventual overthrow of the Turkish yoke as the result of divine rather than human intervention. Greek Orthodox faith united the majority in this imaginary hope. But in the end it was the bullet and the willingness to kill that won the day; not hopes and prayers. The Greek clergy’s willingness to make common cause with the occupier encouraged an Atheist awareness, that provided an alternative to waiting for God to save Greece by rewarding bent priests with riches in this life.

Many of the ‘Andartes’ as the Greek resistance fighters were named, lived rough in the mountains, striking in small, fast guerilla attacks to kill strategically significant Turks as a steady reminder that they were not welcome. That Greece did not accept this brand of right-wing-religious occupier denying them their choice of freedoms.

I visited the location where a relative of mine from Crete was skinned alive in front of his family by the Pasha ruling Crete at that time of Turkish Muslim occupation. The story was explained to me for its relevance in “he never made a sound throughout his torture.” I learned that our Resistance Greeks are as good as it gets when it comes to courage and placing dishonor below death as a motivation.

Greek culture is older than most; raised on Plato’s Republic and stories of intellectual inheritance through Socrates in ‘the cradle of civilization.’  But also, we are raised in awareness that all we value most – freedom, our right to self-autonomy – and to believe what we choose to believe – the cultural values taught worldwide in any proper “Classical education’, cannot survive without pushing back against the persecution of these rights.  In this defense it is hard not to associate the common thread in all occupiers of Greece as representing the three Rs. Racist, Religious, Right.  

Globally, the occupiers of the current threat to our freedoms to choose what freedom means are currently represented by the political choices of the dominant racist-religious-right, starting with the USA and the UK, but by no means ending there. The balance in the right left axis has been badly askew since the curious events of 2016. Behaviors that defy the historical trend in the axis of left and right. Suddenly all levers of power appeared in the hand of the religious racist right and lies became the only truth that mattered. But is it the first time this imbalance has occurred/

After the emancipation from right-wing-religious racist oppression following the war of independence waged by Greek revolutionaries against the Ottoman Empire between 1821 and 1830, modern Greece emerged. A new nation struggling after those 400 years of barbaric oppression, Greece could not revisit its past glories without many hiccups along the way as it lurched between a governing axis of right and left.  

It would take time to restore the zeitgeist to the common Greek aspiration, historically speaking. Governance became an endless confusion between  right-wing monarchists, with their ‘Great Ideas’ harking to impossible past glories and an emerging left, often educated outside of Greece to return progressive-thought criteria to the moribund establishment, increasingly drawn to social solutions affecting the majority of Greeks who were poor.

Endemic poverty was the most significant inheritance and challenge for the first post occupation Greek Governments.

The post-occupation generations were helped by friendly European nations including England and France, towards finding  an economic model for a prosperous Greece for all. That help was usually contingent to supporting the right in opposition to the left, considering the majority of Greeks were poor and a stronger representation of socialist ideals would undoubtedly have benefitted the majority. The monarchy of England supported their fellow monarchs in Greece.

And then along came another supreme Greek tragedy, in April of 1941. HitleRs racist-religious-right had tasked Axis allies Italy with the occupation of Greece. In her defense, Greece was managing to deal with the Mussolini attacks that began in 1940 with the military skill their past had prepared them for in killing religious-racist-right fascists. But when an impatient and frustrated  Hitler sent in his Wehrmacht to overwhelm them completely, in no time at all Greece was once again under the yoke of the racist-religious-right. Similar to the Turkish occupiers, only this time the worst behaved were Catholic not Muslim.

At the outset of war in the 1940s, Greece was already poor and underdeveloped.  State control outside the cities usually exercised by the Greek Gendarmerie was weak at best, but after the occupation,  and especially because the German policy was to starve their occupied territories into total submission, by1942, due to the collapse of central government in Athens, the countryside became free from any ‘federal’ central Government direction. In this vacuum of authority self-autonomous cells emerged, united by one common purpose; To resist right-wing-religious-racist Germans, motivated by Greek National Pride. The multiple Greek Resistance groups opposing the mighty German Army developed a firm and wide-ranging organization replacing the ineffective ruling by the official state.  Following the German victory, in June of 1941,   the Greek  Communist Party (KKE) called for national resistance. The KKE, together with minor parties of the Left, formed a political structure called the National Liberation Front. They were joined by other center-left or non-politicized Greek Resistance militants.

On February 16, 1942,  a communist veteran, known as Aris Velouchiotis was charged with establishing an armed resistance movement, which led to the Greek People’s Liberation Army (ELAS). ELAS initiated its first actions against German and Italian forces of occupation in Greece on 7 June 1942. Velouchiotis, with a small group of 10–15 guerrillas, entered a remote, small village,  Domnista in Evrytania where he announced to the surprised villagers “we are about to start the war against the forces of Axis and their local collaborators“.

Initially Velouchiotis recruited traditional local mountain-living bandits, like the infamous Karalivanos, able to draw on their andartes experience going back some 500 years, in order to create a small group of experts in guerilla warfare. They were, in military terms, brutally successful. Raiding Germans at every turn and preventing the occupier from withdrawing more manpower and machinery much needed in other theaters of war as the Third Reich’s world conquest ambitions continued.

Resistance successes affected the popularity of the left, and especially the Communist Party in Greece.  When the tide of war took its landmark turn, specifically that moment in 1943 when the Germans failed to take Stalingrad, losing the bulk of their military resource,  Greece was once more subject to internal political friction on the axis of right and newly empowered left, many of whom had communist affiliations. In brief, the heroic contribution and sacrifices of those Resistance fighters associated with the communist label was overlooked in the Churchill led anxiety to defeat communism.

In May 8, 1945, HitleRs successors signed Germany’s capitulation. By that point, Greece had already been liberated for six months. Across more than three years, the Greek people, and particularly the resistance fighters had waged a mass resistance against the fascist occupiers showing heroic courage in the face of a boundless terror. Losing many lives in the fight without losing heart. The resistance would attack German targets. The Germans would retaliate by massacring civilians.

Sadly for Greece and especially the Greek Resistance fighters, Churchill anti-Communist prejudice over-rode fairness and justice in their post war allocation. Churchill was nuts about communism. He would have attacked Stalin when the German war was over if he could have won American support to end communism before it took root in the ‘Cold War’ he believed would follow the post War peace.

In post occupation Greece, Churchill’s communist prejudice saw Greek officials who were Nazi collaborators during the occupation, preserve their posts at the head of the army, the police, and the organs of state power, while many partisans were persecuted, deported, and executed anew. Their former allies became their new enemy.

My own Grandfather, Christos Evangelou, was denounced as a Communist (He wasn’t, bless him, he could barely read his Greek Orthodox Bible, let alone Karl Marx) but the climate at the time rewarded Greeks with Civil service jobs if they denounced Communists. So many victims were borne of this disgusting expedient provided by Churchills anti-communist inflexibly binary position. The Greek resistance was presented as a criminal enterprise by successive governments, installed, enabled and directed by Churchills ‘right-wing anti-communist’ will. 

Here is Churchills actual instruction to the Greek Government following eviction of the Nazi occupiers. This was in December 1944:

You are responsible for maintaining order in Athens and for neutralizing or destroying all EAM-ELAS [National Liberation Front – Greek People’s Liberation Army] bands approaching the city. You may make any regulations you like for the strict control of the streets or for the rounding up of any number of truculent persons…. It would be well of course if your command were reinforced by the authority of some Greek Government…. Do not, however, hesitate to act as if you were in a conquered city where a local rebellion is in progress…. We have to hold and dominate Athens. It would be a great thing for you to succeed in this without bloodshed if possible, but also with bloodshed if necessary.

Greece was now overwhelmed by right wing opportunists and the service of its resistance rewarded with prison terms and extreme persecution for anything even rumored as ‘Communist.’ Empowered in this way by Churchills direction, right wing elements assumed all levers of power in Greek Government while many resistance partisans were either executed or jailed. The same fighters who saved countless British, Australian and New Zealanders lives in the Cretan invasion, quietly snuffed out.

Just read the astonishing story of George Psychoundakis, a twenty-one-year-old shepherd from a small village when the battle of Crete began. In the absence of communication equipment, he served as dispatch runner between Petro Petrakas and Papadakis behind the German lines for the Cretan resistance and later, from 1941 to 1945, for the Special Operations Executive (SOE). A man who laid his life on the line for Britain with heroism that is beyond spectacular. Running multiple marathons to deliver messages – taking him through German lines with intelligence that would have certainly led to a most painful death had he been caught.

After the liberation, Psychoundakis was honored by the British with a BEM (Medal of the Order of the British Empire for Meritorious Service) and £200 as an award for his services during the war. Right after which, he was identified as a communist and was jailed for 16 months. His book The Cretan Runner is a must read for any WW2 Historians and particularly  those researching Churchills reputation.

The forties ended and the fifties passed with successive right-wing governments supported by both the UK and the USA suppressing any communist gains, although there were many political parties then running as communists, most notably, the KKE. Communist Party of Greece (Interior)  (Eurocommunism) (1968–1986)

Others included National Party of Greece. Ethnikon Komma Ellados E.K.E. (Monarchist-Conservative) (1946–1967)

………….

The complete story appears in full in this book  The Three Rs (Press Release)

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