That narrative can be more than a mechanical recitation of events is epitomized in Thucydides’ challenge to historiographical paradigms current during the fifth century B.C. In his definitive history of the war between Athens and Sparta, the Athenian general in effect tells a “story” with a beginning, middle, and end. Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War is anything but a neutral description of events. Instead, the collection interprets the conflict for the reader. The tale contains a discussion of the role of alternative military strategies and of the war’s wider political implications. According to Thucydides, the fractionization and polarization engendered by war as a mode of resolving political conflicts is too high a price to pay for victors and losers alike. Thucydides warns of psychic as well as material costs. Thus, the ancient political scientist tells the story of the Peloponnesian War to assert that the “sequences of real events be assessed as to their significance as elements of a moral drama” (White 1987: 21).
In a 1982 review article, Theda Skocpol asks the question, “What makes peasants revolutionary?” She analyzes the conclusions of authors who endeavor to explain what leads peasants—a stereotypically powerless group—to engage in collective action that challenges the economic or political status quo. The above example suggests a useful paraphrase of the question: was Stathoula's case exceptional, and if not, what made a Greek working-class woman during the 1940s revolutionary?
my birthplace vanished, my citizenship earned, in league with stones of the earth, I enter, without retreat or help from history the days of no day, my earth of no earth, I re-enter the city in which I love you. And I never believed that the multitude of dreams and many words were vain.-Li-Young Lee The Greek resistance movement began to take shape soon after the Axis onslaught, when German troops invaded the country through the Yugoslavian corridor in April, 1941, initiating a tripartite German, Italian, and Bulgarian occupation. In September, members of the small prewar communist party (KKE), newly released from prisons of the Metaxas dictatorship, inaugurated the EAM or National Liberation Front. The movement began as an organized effort to resist Nazi occupation but by 1942 had also devolved into a populist movement designed to grant disfranchised groups unprecedented political voice and to teach mass citizenship. This inclusive ideology was both a critical symbolic gesture and was to an extent played out in movement organizing strategiesthrough institutions such as popular courts, literacy campaigns, and assertiveness training for girls within a network of proto-organizations-though inevitably many remained untouched by the movement's mass incorporative ideals and aims. The evacuation of Axis forces throughout most of the country in the autumn of 1944 2 brought the hope of liberation from fascist assault, both internal (the Metaxas regime held power from 1936 up to the eve of the war) and external. Public discourse was guardedly optimistic. In 1946, the opening battles of the Greek civil war marked, however, the beginning of a more protracted conflictone firmly rooted in the resistance period itself-which would last beyond the formal armistice of 1949 and continue into the 1950s, 60s, and, 70s, as differing conceptions of the postwar state and politics clashed on various fronts. Indeed, to describe modern-era Greek politics as a continuous bifurcation between left and right glosses over historical ambiguity and yet provides a reasonably faithful backdrop to twentieth-century events. Begun in earnest with the 1909 officers' coup at Goudi, 3 the split culminated in a civil war that was constituted as, in the broadest of terms, a struggle over which side would define the Greek nation. political prison culture in greece 483 and paper and write slowly/Their first letters will be sent to their grandchildren, who will receive them with joy./And if in their old age, many problems weigh on their hearts/Closed up just like the young inside the prison, they are learning to read and write./Spreading their gentle caresses among us, they remember the old days/Our every storm, they weathered first, and they put glasses on us." 2 The island of Crete was liberated in the spring of 1945. 3 In August 1909, officers from Athens mutinied in support of the demands of the Military League. Inspired by the Young Turk rebellion, the League directed its attack against elitism, favoritism and other antidemocratic practices in the army....
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