Antiquity as Cold War Propaganda

The Visual Politics of Fear: Anti-Communist Imagery in Postwar Greece

“…94 Moreover, the two main attempts of the postwar Greek state to construct what a growing scholarship today calls 'a state of phantasy,' 95 namely the nationalist myth of Enosis with Cyprus and the dream of rapid industrialization, either backfired or met with limited appeal. 96 Meanwhile because of wider Cold War priorities and Washington's habitual (albeit inconsistent) preference for parliamentary solutions, the Greek anti-communist state had to project a liberal image that prevented it from portraying itself in neo-baroque style as a fearful Leviathan, following the model of General Franco's visual propaganda in post-Civil War Spain. 97 Consequently, to engineer a mass culture of fear to achieve popular obedience, the Ethnikofron state had no other option but to build a deflected image of a fearful power that was not its own.…”