Greece and the Global Sixties
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-hayden/greece-and-the-global-six_b_398634.html
Tom Hayden
Former state senator and leader of Sixties peace, justice and
environmental movements
December 20, 2009
I am here as a witness to the importance of memory to the future.
Direct action to build a participatory democracy in the image of the
Greek city state was the chosen ideal of the first activists of
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the early 1960s. The college papers
of the young Martin Luther King Jr., written in the 1950s at Crozer
Theological Seminary, included 13 references to Greek thought,
typical of students in those years. That the Greeks held slaves in
the midst of their democracy only meant that the struggle for a
democratic polis was unfinished or not even begun for the many.
It was apparent to Martin Luther King and millions more that the
representative democracy of elected officialdom could not, and would
not, meet our needs, most obviously because we were disenfranchised
-- 27 million young people and African Americans in our South.
We could not wait for the older generation to notice that the future
they had prepared for us was nothing more than the past recycled,
history as a Xerox machine. We believed in action to win our freedom
in the moment, to create communities of resistance, and to challenge
the tired and complacent. With Henry David Thoreau, we wanted to vote
with our whole lives, not with a mere piece of paper. We believed
that everyone deserved a voice in the process of making decisions
that put their lives at risk (like the Freedom Rides), or threatened
their expulsion from school or their forced draft for Vietnam (the
same issues faced by Greek students under the dictatorship). Our
decision-making assemblies became latter-day versions of the ecclesia
(at least as we imagined it), with sometimes as many as 3,000
participating in decisions, and with rotating leadership. Socratic
dialogue, though not the notion of philosopher-kings, was basic to
community organizing. We wanted people to gain their own authentic
voices, not follow charismatic demagogues.
An organizing principle of our movements, and of the new society we
aspired to build, was that every person should have a voice in the
decisions affecting their lives. Only such a commitment, we believed,
could motivate people to dedicate their lives to a cause that might
take a lifetime.
We were aware, of course, that ancient Greeks were themselves divided
about the ideas of participatory democracy, and how American
conservatives would cite the Greeks against our experiment in
democracy. Like my experience with Irish-Americans, the face of
Greece in Sixties America was Spiro Agnew. Then during the resistance
to dictatorship we met and admired the Greece of Ritsos, Mercouri,
Theodorakis, Lambrakis, Costa-Gavras, Pappas, and Andreas Papandreou.
We never resolved how and whether participatory democracy could be
constructed after our revolution, but it suited the needs of a
seemingly spontaneous movement that was challenging all hierarchies.
But I am here to acknowledge the contribution of the early Greek
city-state vision to the global change of the Sixties, in which a
younger generation cast off the repressive yoke of the Cold War
nuclear arms race and sought to throw open the future to more
democratic, communal and sustainable possibilities.
The Sixties at Fifty
I have yet to meet anyone who realizes that next month, January 2010,
marks the beginning of the fiftieth anniversary of everything we
experienced in the Sixties. We never aspired to be Immortals, and now
our time is passing rapidly. But the nature of the media offers us
one more opportunity to engage in the battle for memory.
Put simply, there are many who want to erase the memory of the
Sixties, because they still consider it a virus to be contained. When
the first George Bush invaded Iraq, for example, he declared that
"the Sixties syndrome was defeated," as if the "syndrome" was a
weakness that had to be removed if America's reputation as global
policeman was to be restored.
Others like myself are champions of the legacy of Sixties social
movements with an interest in teaching and transmitting those
principles of participatory democracy to future generations.
Still others I describe as the politicians of memory. They wish a
selective memory that proves their belief that America's system is
flexible, responsive, the most adaptable in the world. They have a
point, but the danger with the politics of memory is that the
radicals who made change possible are forgotten or reduced to faces
on postage stamps. There are no monuments to the movement against the
Vietnam War.
The Long Sixties
We need to understand the roots of the Sixties in the global Cold War
which began with the Truman Doctrine here in Greece, extended through
years of repression and silence in many countries like ours, but also
contained the seeds, or precursors, of the Sixties before they were
noticed. For example, the process of African decolonization, and the
rise of the Non-Aligned Movement, stimulated alternatives to the Cold
War nuclear arms race. One indirect result was the US decision to
desegregate public schools -- partly in response to global criticism
by the Soviet Union and newly-independent African countries.
These undercurrents burst to the surface in 1960 with the release of
Epitaphios here in Greece and the assertion of a new sensibility. In
America there was the so-called Beat Generation of oppositional poets
and lifestyles suddenly attracting a new generation to a counter
culture far outside conventional politics. The consciousness of the
Beats was built in large part on the African-American blues culture.
In Greece perhaps a similar development occurred with the rebetiko
cultural revival.
The end of this "Long Sixties" should be drawn in the mid-Seventies,
I believe. The date is important, for it partly answers the question
why the period came to its end. There were many false moments when
the death of the Sixties was declared; for example, the killings at
Kent State University in 1970. Our innocence, according to this
autopsy, died under the onslaught of extremism on all sides. Our
generation died of an overdose of excesses, it usually is added.
This is nonsense. The Sixties ended when our causes succeeded,
leading to the decline of our unified focus, and the opening of new
channels of expression within the mainstream. A parenthesis spanning
the decade of our twenties came to an end with the end of the Vietnam
War, the uncovering of Watergate and purging of Richard Nixon and
imprisonment of his cronies (Agnew among them). Then came the end of
the 21-year-old vote, the end of the forced draft, the return of
thousands from exile in Canada.
In Greece, I believe the Sixties ended with the collapse of the
dictatorship in 1974. Perhaps the closure was represented by the huge
concert in Athens, "the most legendary musical concert in modern
Greek history" honoring the return of Democracy, captured on film in
the documentary Songs of Fire. The banned songs of Theodorakis, and
the banning of Theodorakis himself, ended with the composer on stage
side by side with Ritsos. November 17, the date when the tanks
occupied the Polytechnic and the killing commenced, became the date
of the first democratic elections after the dictatorship and a
national day of commemoration ever since.
I have titled a recent book The Long Sixties, from 1960 to Barack
Obama because I believe the print of the Sixties is felt
reverberating even five decades later. The demonstrations against
corporate globalization in Seattle, Genoa, Cancun; the massive social
forums begun in Porto Allegre; the elections in Latin America of
former guerrilla leaders and political prisoners; and even the youth
uprisings in Greece in recent months, constitute a recycling of the
human desire for justice that arises when the old institutions fail.
Barack Obama was conceived in 1963, the time of the great Washington
March, a time when interracial sex and marriage was criminalized in
much of my country. In time he became president, not simply on the
strength of his political gifts, but because the Sixties made him
possible -- the changes in voting rights laws, the crushing of
segregation, the achievement of affirmative action, the reforms of
the formerly-segregated Democratic Party and the presidential primary
process allowing greater popular participation in elections, all as a
direct result of the Sixties in America. But I am getting ahead of my
narrative.
The Global Sixties
There has been too little research on the global nature of the
Sixties, since the Sixties were experienced mainly on local and
national levels, not through some sort of international Comintern of
the old model.
There were transnational movements before in history, like the
European working class movements of the 19th century. And there were
periods, such as the 1770s or 1840s, when multiple currents of social
activism erupted surprisingly at the same time around the world.
More reflection is required on how these global upheavals occur so
spontaneously. One of the best analyses is the book 1968 in Europe by
my German friend Martin Klimke (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Another,
oddly enough, is the declassified CIA report titled "Restless Youth,"
sent to President Johnson in 1968. These attribute the Sixties to the
Cold War, Vietnam, and the expanding enrollment of alienated youth in
colleges and universities. The CIA report concludes that the
movements were far from being "communist-inspired"; in fact, it says
youth rebellions were occurring in the Soviet bloc as well. Of course
the CIA report was unable to depict itself -- and other clandestine
and faceless bureaucracies -- as the target of the rebellion. The CIA
concluded delicately that "the role of the United States in world
affairs, particularly US involvement in Vietnam, is most evocative"
in sparking student passions.
The Greek student movement is little mentioned in these reports. The
CIA analyzed 18 countries, but not Greece, despite its hand in the
1967 coup. The newer book 1968 in Europe covers 15 separate
countries, but with Greece lumped in a chapter with Spain.
I looked through 15 histories of the Sixties, with titles like 1968:
The Year that Rocked the World, The Global Revolutions of 1968, and
1968: The World Transformed -- and found no references to Greece --
with the exception of the $549,000 secret check to Richard Nixon from
the Greek dictators' intelligence service, passed through Thomas
Pappas (in Ric Perlstein's Nixonland, 2008, p. 518).
Perhaps "Greece in the Sixties" is remembered in another historical
category because of the dictatorship, but the omission in Sixties
historical literature is a serious one, promoting the popular
understanding of the Sixties as mainly concerned with middle class
lifestyles. This is distorted historiography. Greece after all was
the fulcrum of the Cold War which dominated the Sixties generation.
The 1967 coup was one of many CIA-assisted ventures that were typical
of the time. The Greek dictatorship was imposed in response to the
departure from Cold War politics that the Center Union coalition
represented. The November 17 movement's resistance to tanks on the
Polytechnic campus was a symbol as great historically as that of
Tlatelolco Square in Mexico City five years earlier. If I may say so,
Melina Mercouri was as great a global figure representing a
revolution in the arts as was Jane Fonda -- and Mikis Theodorakis as
great as Pete Seeger, and Costa-Gavras as great as Stanley Kubrick.
So I think it is very important to write Greece into the history of
the Sixties. And not only Greece, but all the countries of the global
South, who have been neglected by the media's preference to obsess on
music, marijuana, long hair, lost bras, and the end of innocence.
Movements Against Machiavellians
Finally, I would like to spend a few minutes on an alternative model
of the Sixties, a model of social change drawn from my experience,
research and teaching over the years. (If I may say so here in
Greece, I feel like something of an archeological site myself, with
decade buried under decade. This long experience does bring the gift
of perspective, which I now want to share).
Definitions: by social movements, I mean determined gatherings of
unrepresented people outside the hierarchal institutions bringing
pressure to bear to address moral injuries or material grievances. In
time, their longings consolidate into more moderate (pragmatic) and
militant (radical) tendencies.
By Machiavellians, I mean those technicians of power who seek to
preserve power and advantage for such institutions as the state, the
corporation, the military, and the media, drawing on the maxims
contained in Machiavelli's small book The Prince. They too divide
over time into moderate reformers and militant fundamentalists or dictators.
There was one figure whom Machiavelli was unable to conform to his
philosophy of power, that of the prophet Moses, who represented
another sort of power. Machiavelli uncomfortably classified Moses as
a religious agent of God, and therefore irrelevant to the exercise of
power. In doing so, he left Moses as the enduring symbol of the
spirit of social movements against slavery, at least in the West.
As I have said, social movements germinate at the margins, usually
invisible from the contented view of the Machiavellians. They erupt
by surprise, as with the poem "Epitaphio," based in the memory of a
suffering woman and child from an old photograph.
They must pass through moments of trial where their cries, if not
stifled, will reach a broader constituency and become a movement. The
1963 murder of Deputy Grigoris Lambrakis, meant to stifle protest,
turned instead into a mass movement of dedicated young people. (The
Mayor of New York City, John Lindsay, later told me that he held a
private screening of Costa-Gavras' film Z for the hierarchy of his
police department, so concerned was he about a similar pattern in the
United States.) The first killing of a student leader, Sotiris
Petroulis, in 1965, only mobilized greater anger among the Lambrakis'
generation.
The murder of John F. Kennedy, shortly after he began supporting the
civil rights movement and alternatives to the Cold War, had an
opposite effect to the Lambrakis' killing, causing a confused
depression that only worsened as murder followed murder in America,
effectively decapitating the potential leadership of a progressive
majority governing coalition.
The movement marches towards the political mainstream, becoming a
measurable factor in public opinion surveys and the electoral
process. In time, the demands of the movement reflect a majority of
opinion, testing the willingness of the Machiavellians to
accommodate. In the case of Greece, this majority was reflected in
the Center Union's 53 percent parliamentary vote in 1964, and its
momentum towards a future prospective victory at the polls in 1968.
This probability was too much for the national Machiavellians, and
their backers in Washington, to accept. And so there came the coup,
and a more ferocious coup after that, leading to 28 deaths on the
campus in 1973. But the repression only deepened the public
disenchantment and resistance, which led to even more irrationality
from the elites, culminating in the Cyprus crisis, finally ending in
their demise in 1974. (At the risk of misunderstanding, the Greek
unraveling seemed not unlike Watergate, in which a generalized
constitutional crisis brought more moderate Machiavellians to force
Nixon from office.)
When the movement succeeds in its main objective (democratic voting
rights for disenfranchised people, ending an unpopular war,
dissolving a dictatorship), the resulting paradox is that the
movements tend to demobilize and divide. Many people enjoy the return
to normalcy with new protections, and they return to their private
lives in everyday life, enriched by the reform. On the other hand,
the Machiavellians, having conceded an enormous reform under popular
pressure, are mobilized to redefine and do battle for their core
interests (preventing a left-wing government from emerging from the
new democratic process, protecting investment opportunities for their
patrons, covering up their unpunished crimes, polishing their
reputations anew, urging the population to "not look back," etc.)
The activists who have been deeply revolutionized by their
experiences often are unable to join the more pragmatic of their
generation in plunging into the new democratic space. Instead, they
can become bitter avengers, as happened with violent underground
groups in most of Europe and North America, typically in the late
Sixties but later in Greece. These factions in Germany, Italy,
France, and North America (the Weather Underground, the Black
Liberation Army, the Front de Liberacion du Quebec, etc.) were
mirrored by the November 17 faction in Greece, and their violent
aftershocks lasted for decades. [I found the recent novel about the
November 17 group by Tobias Hill, The Hidden, as well as the recent
German film The Baader-Meinhof Complex to be fruitful in portraying
the dynamics of these undergrounds.) My point is that these patterns
of violence are rooted in sociology and history, not the defects in
ethnic character which are almost always alleged.
On the Reforms of the Sixties
The Sixties era ended in significant reforms almost everywhere in the
world as a result of the clash between movements and Machiavellians.
In my country, the following happened in a short historical period:
- voting rights for southern black people and 18-21 year olds,
totaling 26 million Americans
- the end of the Indochina wars
- the end of the compulsory draft
- the fall of two presidents
- new oversight of the imperial presidency, the CIA and the FBI
- amnesty for 50,000 draft evaders in Canada
- normalized relations with Vietnam
- the freedom of information act
- the media fairness doctrine
- the Roe v Wade supreme court decision legalizing abortion
- the strongest environmental, consumer and health and safety laws of
the past 40 years
- democratic reforms of the presidential primary, delegate selection rules
- union rights for public sector employees
- fundamental reform of school and university curriculum
- freedom of sexual desire and lessening of censorship
- expanded participatory rights for marginalized minorities, from
college students to disabled Americans.
There are lessons here. After 50 years of personally supporting
generalized revolutionary aspirations, time and again I have
witnessed reform as the result. These reforms would not have been
achievable without revolutionaries of one sort or another. These
reforms cannot be dismissed as superficial, because they created new
openings for the disenfranchised and reallocated resources in
positive ways. They were won through the power of social movements,
not because the established powers decided on their own to become
more generous. For these reasons, those who call themselves radicals
and revolutionaries might want to take some credit and embrace these
reforms before the memory of how they were achieved fades away.
On the other hand, the more radical among us are not wrong in their
complaint that the powerful institutions remain the same, that they
have co-opted some of yesterday's radicalism to regain a certain
legitimacy. But it seems wrong and indulgent to maintain that the
more things change the more they remain the same. Tell that to
African-Americans, to American women. Tell that to the people of
Bolivia, Chile, or Venezuela. It is not exactly so. And where the
Machiavellian institutions still dominate, there are communities of
meaning everywhere where progressive people pursue their cultural,
political, educational and environmental rights in an atmosphere
where struggle is encouraged from one generation to the next. Only
remember Earth Day in 1970 and look at Europe's environmental
policies or the streets and halls of Copenhagen today, and one sees
that the struggle is progressive, expanding, and ongoing.
Reform is the space of cross-pressures where movements and
Machiavellians negotiate new norms versus old privileges, not in a
final sense but only in a provisional one.
I urge you to reflect on the reforms that emerged from Greece in the
Sixties, from greater democracy to women's rights, from the margins
to the mainstream, from confrontations to unnoticed acceptance. I
think you will find the paradox I have found, that great things have
happened in our lifetimes and yet the poison of undemocratic power
continues to threaten our very lives.
From Vietnam to Afghanistan
Let me conclude by noting an example of how these Sixties memories
influence our perception of the present. Our American president, whom
I strongly have supported, recently began a speech on his decision to
escalate the Afghanistan War with a reference to Vietnam. He said the
two wars were not alike, in part because "the world" -- or 41
countries -- support the broad coalition. It was multiculturalism in
defense of a military occupation led and controlled by the United
States government, despite grave reservations by the public in
America, Europe and around the world. But Barack Obama could not
speak of unilateralism. Barack Obama is trying to use the image of
European and NATO support to convince the Congress, the media and the
doubting public that this is truly a war supported by a supposed
"international community."
Have we come full circle? Is the Cold War being replaced by a
Pentagon doctrine of The Long War against international terrorism?
Are NATO nations expected once again to be satellites of the United
States or face the consequences? Are domestic liberties to be limited
by new anti-terrorism laws? Are whole subpopulations of Europe to be
considered an enemy within? Is the bombing of faraway Muslim
countries the response to Muslim grievances in Europe? Many American
and British counterinsurgency officials actually say that Europe is
becoming the new "center of gravity" in this Long War.
I have been in four European countries in recent years -- the UK,
Sweden, Norway, Germany -- before coming here to urge another
alliance, an alliance for peace, before all of us are swallowed in an
old alliance in new packaging, the same North Atlantic Treaty
Organization, now killing and bombing across South Asia.
Recently, Gen. James Jones, President Obama's current national
security adviser and the former commander of NATO, said that "NATO
has bet its future in committing the alliance to sustained ground
combat operations in Afghanistan. If NATO were to fail, alliance
cohesion would be at grave risk. A moribund or unraveled NATO would
have a profoundly negative geo-strategic impact."
There you have it. This is an American war with a NATO cover, a
reminder of Andreas Papandreou's long ago warnings about superpower
dominance. A war fought to maintain the distribution of power and
resources in the world. A war that will destroy any hope for a
renewal of the Great Society in the Sixties. A war based on deficit
spending for militarism for the few and cuts in social expenditures
for the many.
Greece is only a tiny part of this venture, with official reports of
$260,000 (US) in spending and 145 troops in Afghanistan. (Europe as a
whole has spent over $4 billion (US), sent over 35,000 troops,
suffered at least 450 deaths and some 1,500 wounded.) Greece, I
understand, has refused to send additional troops as President Obama
is requesting. I hope that Greece, with its progressive tradition and
government, will go even further, and announce a firm deadline for
the withdrawal of all its troops from Afghanistan in less than 18
months, the time President Obama says he will begin to draw down.
Greece could lead Europe towards a new approach to NATO's role in
Afghanistan and beyond. That is my hope and my appeal to you.
--
Tom Hayden was the keynote speaker Dec. 14 at month-long festival on
Greece in the Sixties in Athens. He is the author of The Long Sixties
(Paradigm, 2009).
.
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