Volume 20, Number 12 · July 19, 1973
The Case for the Colonels
By Richard Clogg
Greece Without Columns: The Making of the Modern Greeks
by David Holden
Lippincott, 336 pp., $7.50
One of the few welcome by-products of the Colonels' regime has been to stimulate a flood of books on the recent history of Greece. Almost fifty titles have been published, ranging in seriousness from Pavlos Bakojannis's sociopolitical study Militärherrschaft in Griechenland (Kohlhammer, 1972) to Melina Mercouri's I Was Born Greek (Doubleday, 1971). Most of these are anti-Colonel, some are unashamedly pro. But another, much smaller, but in many respects more interesting group seems to take the position that, while military dictatorship is generally undesirable, nonetheless the Greeks are such an unregenerate and incorrigible rabble that the rigors of martial law are the only means of keeping them in line. The most sophisticated proponent of this view is David Holden, the author of Greece Without Columns (whose subtitle is The Making of the Modern Greeks, a little presumptuous, perhaps, on the part of a writer who appears to know little or no Greek).
Review, 3392 words
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