Robert Zaller
There are two ways for a nation to lose its freedom: by conquest from abroad, or by subversion from within. The first means is by imposed force, and the second from internal division, typically climaxing in a coup d’état. Greece experienced both events between August 1936 and April 1941. On August 4, 1936, a politically ambitious general, Ioannis Mextaxas, seized control of the country with the support of its controversial monarchy. Metaxas dissolved all political parties, suppressed free speech, and jailed political opponents. He also adopted many of the trappings of the fascist dictatorships that had established themselves in Italy and Germany, and shortly would in Spain.
The Metaxas regime could well be described as fascist itself, and Metaxas had his own ambitions as well. Where he drew the line, however, was in subordinating Greece itself to the larger dictatorships that surrounded his own. That meant, particularly, avoiding the aims of Mussolini’s Italy, which meant to dominate southeastern Europe. To do so, Metaxas walked a diplomatic tightrope, steering between the fascist powers while maintaining as much as possible of Greek independence and thereby his own rule. This became more difficult when Mussolini occupied Albania in 1939. Next on the map was Greece.
Among the great powers of Europe, only one, Great Britain, had any substantial interest of its own in the Eastern Mediterranean, which linked it to its empire in the Middle East and Asia. But Britain, weakly led by Neville Chamberlain, still hoped to appease Nazi Germany and avoid the war that by now loomed over the Continent. The flashpoint in this was not Southern Europe but Poland, Germany’s immediate neighbor. The war that came, with Poland’s rapid fall, now turned on the Franco-German border, where much of the First World War had had been fought in stalemate. This front, too, collapsed with the swift defeat of France and, with it, virtually all of Western Europe. Only an embattled Britain remained, its eventual surrender considered by most only a matter of time. Stalin’s Russia alone remained outside the fascist orbit, having bought a temporary truce by a rapprochement with Hitler that no one expected to last long or to protect it from conquest in turn. In the autumn of 1940, no state on the European Continent could hope to resist the Nazi juggernaut, nor did any attempt to do so. Certainly Greece, its southernmost tip, could only endure what it must, and stay as far as possible out of harm’s way.
That was not to be the case. Albania was a poor prize for Mussolini. Greece, whose ancient cultural glories had once been a feather in Rome’s cap, would be so once again in Mussolini’s new empire, just as his navy would be the new master of the Mediterranean in the wake of Britain’s imminent defeat. Metaxas, his forces thin and his armory obsolete, would have no choice but to submit on command. The order came on the night of October 28, contemptuously delivered. It was not even an order, but merely an information. Italians had already crossed the border into Epirus. We do not know exactly how Metaxas spoke, but what he said was soon boiled down to a single word: “Oxi.” Presumably the Italian envoy regarded resistance as futile. No doubt the Greek lines would be shattered on contact. The descendants of Caesar’s legions, victors in Ethiopia, would at last have defeated a country whose name anyone had heard of.
Radio Athens had broadcast the news of the invasion by dawn. The result was a spontaneous national uprising in which crowds filled the streets from the largest cities to the remotest hamlets, voicing their resistance to the attackers with the universal shout of Oxi! The day also turned Metaxas into something he had never been, a popular leader. He turned in quest of an alliance to Britain, with whom he had dallied before, as he did with Turkey, the only powers deemed capable of offering serious resistance to Italy. His sudden death in January 1941, however, left his government in the hands of subordinates.
It was the Greek people themselves who repelled the invaders, inflicting the first defeat suffered by fascism in World War II. The odds were overwhelming. Greek forces were greatly outnumbered, and the Greek navy and air force virtually nonexistent. Bulgaria, promised territorial concessions by Mussolini, joined the Italians, distinguishing themselves by major atrocities in Drama and elsewhere. But Greece had its own reserves in the civilian population, which spontaneously joined the military effort and hindered Italy on every front. By the third week of the war, Greece had taken the offensive, which drove deep into Albania. Not since the wars of the French Revolution had a nation risen more nearly as one, and in no case more swiftly. Although German divisions finally brought an end to the war, the effect of the Greek resistance, which ended only with the fall of Crete, was profound. Hitler himself would credit the delay of his planned invasion of Russia from early spring to the beginning of summer 1941 to the diversion of his forces to Greece, but no less critical if not more so was the cost of the failed Italian campaign to its planned conquest of North Africa. The Italians had hoped to take Greece with 87,000 men; they ultimately invested 565,000 in their failed attempt, suffering a total of 154,000 casualties.
These losses essentially eliminated Italy as a factor on the North African front, leaving the struggle for it to the Nazis while they faced their battle with the Red Army in Russia. But no less important was the impact of Greek resistance at the moment it came—and would continue to Germany’s final withdrawal from Greece in October 1944. Britain had only just fended off the devastating air assault known as the Battle of Britain, and, battered, it stood alone before a Continent under German dominion. That a small nation on its fringe should not only defy the undefeated Axis powers but repel them against all odds gave heart to democratic forces abroad as nothing else could, particularly in the United States where Time Magazine featured an Evzone in traditional warrior dress on its cover. England’s own savior, Winston Churchill, was even more direct: “Today we say that Greeks fight like heroes; from now on we will say that heroes fight like Greeks.” Nor, though finally occupied, did Greek resistance ever cease, and not by Greece alone. To this day the war of Oxi is remembered as fascism’s first defeat, and Europe’s first step toward victory.
The final liberation of Western Europe’s fallen democracies—France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, and in considerable part Germany and Italy themselves—would be largely the work of American forces. America had been the descendant of antiquity’s first democracy, Athens, and through revolution its triumphant heir. After World War II, it was Europe’s defender. It had had its challenges, notably the great Civil War that had tested its own commitment to freedom and equality. But it had defeated every foreign foe, and by the end of the twentieth century it was incontestably the most powerful nation on earth. No other could challenge it, and its model of government was the acknowledged standard across most of the globe. It could be undone, it seemed, only by itself.
When historians of the future consider the American experiment it will be in these terms. It will be said of our country’s democracy either how it survived the greatest crisis since its founding, or failed both democracy and itself. At the moment, this historian cannot tell how its fortunes will swing. In any case, it will be a hard story to tell.
Greece itself in 1940 was not a democracy. Its parliamentary system, unstable at best, had been overthrown, and its political parties dissolved. Its ruler, Metaxas, had come to power in alliance with an unpopular foreign monarchy imposed on the fledgling Greek state a century earlier by the powers of post-Napoleonic Europe. A brutal dictator at home, he was a patriot in one respect only: his determination to keep Greece as independent as possible in a Europe rapidly succumbing to fascism. Fascism as such was not alien to him; he had adopted much of its trappings. Where he parted company with it was in its aggressive nationalism, which in the ambitions of Hitler and Mussolini threatened Greek autonomy. To avoid becoming a servile if not colonized state, he cultivated ties with a traditional antagonist, Turkey, and a democratic state with imperial interests of its own, Britain. It was not enough. Mussolini’s conquest of Albania made Greece’s fate clear. The sinking of a Greek battleship, the Elli, on a national religious holiday, roused the country in the summer of 1940. As Italian forces massed in Albania at the same time, an ultimatum if not invasion was imminent. Metaxas prepared for war while hoping to avoid it as long as possible. When it came, his answer was ready. But it would likely have been of little avail had the Greeks not risen as one.
What were the Greeks fighting for? It was certainly not for the Metaxas regime, which was only the weapon at hand. It was what they had fought for against Persia at Marathon, at Pydna against Rome, at Constantinople against the Ottomans and again at Souli and again at Navarino. Some of those battles were won, and some lost. But freedom was always the objective. So it was again in the mountains of Epirus in the autumn of 1940.
Freedom and democracy aren’t always coextensive, but they more nearly go together than any other political value and its institutional expression. The resistance that sprang up in the aftermath of the German occupation was not a mere call for the resurrection of the old parliamentary system but a spontaneous manifestation of the democratic instinct, rallied behind self-organized military units in the Greek hinterland and generically referred to as the Mountain. Soon they had begun to inflict significant losses on German and especially Italian forces. Meanwhile, the monarchy of King George II had taken refuge in Cairo with the British army, whose client it became.
Democracy would not easily return to Greece in the postwar period, as it was enmeshed in the struggles of the Cold War and would endure a new bout of tyranny in a second military coup, that of the Junta. The latter’s fall in 1974 fall would coincide with that of the monarchy, leaving Greece at last a secular republic with a full spectrum of political opinion represented. Once again, autocracy would return in the 2010s, as the European Union inflicted savage penalties on the country in the wake of an imposed insolvency. Sacrifice does not always bring honor, nor heroism reap gratitude.
Our present moment has brought us a different spectacle. Almost a century and a half ago, the first great observer of the young United States, Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote of it that “If there be a country in the world where the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people can be fairly appreciated, where it can be studied in its application to the affairs of society, and where its dangers and its advantages may be foreseen, that country is assuredly America.”n Tocqueville saw in popular government the irresistible tide of the future, even as a generation of reaction seemed to have swept it aside in Europe. But change, inevitable as it might appear, was not necessarily progressive, and, tellingly, Tocqueville pointed to its “dangers” not only beside its “advantages” but ahead of them.
The advantage of democracy, as Tocqueville saw it, lay in the principle of majority rule, which with its frequent rotation of officers and administrators could more easily correct the errors to which it was by the same token more readily prone. Majority rule, that is, aimed at the general welfare which the majority by definition sought for itself, whereas rule by a minority—“aristocracy”—was self-interested, and, even if more competent in achieving its more restricted goals, less able to maintain them in the long run. Tocqueville had the example of the two great revolutions of the eighteenth century before him. The thirteen colonies of America, by gradual experience of self-government, had developed their own customs, institutions, and interests, which inevitably diverged from that of a distant mother country that subordinated those interests to its own. In France, a self-anointed aristocracy monopolized wealth and power at the expense of the population at large, enforcing its will by violence. But the only will capable of sustaining itself in perpetuity was one based on general consent, which, if enlightened, had been called by Rousseau the general will. Tocqueville was skeptical that this could be achieved, but the self-correcting mechanism of democracy, seeking not particular interest but the general welfare, could most nearly approximate it.
The principal danger of democracy, in Tocqueville’s view, was precisely in its advantage, a majority misled by mistaken opinion or a demagogic leader. Such had been the experience of France under Napoleon. Another danger lay in the exclusion of minorities by the majority, in America’s case those of its Black and Native populations. A tyranny of the majority, might, if inflexible, be the worst government of all.
The America Tocqueville studied was a rural, pre-industrial one, with vast, unclaimed spaces and unexplored riches. Immigration filled it. Capitalism developed it. Oligarchy inherited it. By the late nineteenth century, finance capital controlled it. By the late twentieth, it had become the world’s greatest imperial power, but also among the most inegalitarian. By the early twenty-first, it had elected a brazenly corrupt and authoritarian leader as its president, whose contempt for democracy was evident, whose institutions he had set about dismantling, and whose former allies he had systematically alienated.
One would have thought that such enormous changes would have required sudden and catastrophic conditions: economic collapse, a major war, an incurable pandemic. But no such conditions obtained. America, as measured by its trade and profit, has remained the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth. It fights no foreign war. It faces no pandemic, although it invites one by the ongoing destruction of its public health system. Its previous administration, although imperfect, was the most progressive in the past sixty years. This was no imperial Russia, defeated in a great war and in a state of political and military collapse. It was no Weimar Germany, its fragile democracy overcome by a depression with a quarter of is population unemployed and rival militias dueling in its streets. It was no postwar China, engulfed in civil war after a decade of brutal foreign occupation and massacre.
America’s situation is unique. That does not mean it is without causes, or beyond recovery. But as no nation has ever been as globally powerful, so none has had a fall as swift. To correct its course will take time and come at cost. It will have rivals, and its place in the world may be significantly different. Above all, it will require a nation willing and able to face itself as it has not satisfactorily done before—to exercise democracy as Tocqueville asserted it must, in pursuit of the general welfare, and of social justice for all.
What, then, can the world’s first democracy offer us? Ancient Athens, the most creative, experimental, and daring of all societies, certainly gives us much, if not most of value in what we have. But now we must take what we most need. America has known division and crisis before, but as it seems to me never since the Civil War has it been so polarized. The causes will be complex, and we may be long in fully understanding them. But we will need a stroke of transcendence to overcome them, in the example of others if not necessarily ourselves. That example is before us today more than ever. It is Oxi Day, a day that belongs not only to Greeks but to all those who cherish freedom, the fundamental value that sustains all the rest. It was the single call that summoned a single cry on October 28, because it was the only word that could answer it. We saw then a people knit together in a thousand places, bearing the temple of its unity. It did not lay it down until victory.
America can answer that call too, if it wishes.
Note: Alan Ryan, On Tocqueville: Democracy and America. New York and London.
Liveright Publishing Corporation. 2014.
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