Dangerous citizens : the Greek Left and the terror of the state / Neni Panourgia.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Panourgiá, Neni, 1958-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Political persecution--Greece--History--20th century.

Political persecution.

Greece--Politics and government--1935-1967.

Greece.

Greece--Politics and government--1967-1974.

Greece--Politics and government--1974-.

Greece--History--Civil War, 1944-1949.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (343 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

New York : Fordham University Press, 2009.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

This book simultaneously tells a story—or rather, stories—and a history. The stories are those of Greek Leftists as paradigmatic figures of abjection, given that between 1929 and 1974 tens of thousands of Greek dissidents were detained and tortured in prisons, places of exile, and concentration camps. They were sometimes held for decades, in subhuman conditions of toil and deprivation.The history is that of how the Greek Left was constituted by the Greek state as a zone of danger. Legislation put in place in the early twentieth century postulated this zone. Once the zone was created, there was always the possibility—which came to be a horrific reality after the Greek Civil War of 1946 to 1949—that the state would populate it with its own citizens. Indeed, the Greek state started to do so in 1929, by identifying ever-increasing numbers of citizens as “Leftists” and persecuting them with means extending from indefinite detention to execution.In a striking departure from conventional treatments, Neni Panourgiá places the Civil War in a larger historical context, within ruptures that have marked Greek society for centuries. She begins the story in 1929, when the Greek state set up numerous exile camps on isolated islands in the Greek archipelago. The legal justification for these camps drew upon laws reaching back to 1871—originally directed at controlling “brigands”—that allowed the death penalty for those accused and the banishment of their family members and anyone helping to conceal them. She ends with the 2004 trial of the Revolutionary Organization 17 November.Drawing on years of fieldwork, Panourgiá uses ethnographic interviews, archival material, unpublished personal narratives, and memoirs of political prisoners and dissidents to piece together the various microhistories of a generation, stories that reveal how the modern Greek citizen was created as a fraught political subject.Her book does more than give voice to feelings and experiences suppressed for decades. It establishes a history for the notion of indefinite detention that appeared as a legal innovation with the Bush administration. Part of its roots, Panourgiá shows, lie in the laboratory that Greece provided for neo-colonialism after the Truman Doctrine and under the Marshall Plan.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Illustrations

Preface

From Now On . . .

A Note on Parerga

A Note on Transliteration

Abbreviations

1. 1963 – 2008 History, Microhistory, Metahistory, Ethnography

2. 1936 – 1944 The Metaxas Dictatorship, the Italian Attack, the German Invasion, German Occupation, Resistance

3. 1944 – 1945 The Battle of Athens

4. 1945 – 1946 White Terror

5. 1946 – 1949 Emphýlios

6. 1950 – 1967 Post – Civil War

7. 1967 – 1974 Dictatorship

8. 1974 – 2007 After History

Appendixes

Parerga

Works Cited

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9786612698903

9780823237531

0823237532

9780823247141

0823247147

9781282698901

1282698907

9780823229697

0823229696

OCLC:

475018048