A brief history of the anticommunist surveillance in Greece and its lasting impact

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Contemporary Greece is a post-authoritarian surveillance society with a painful surveillance history and negative surveillance legacies. State surveillance in Greece has been highly politicized as a basic political control weapon, used by the anticommunist police state throughout the post-civil war period from 1949 to 1974 towards repressive ends. Hence, the study of surveillance in Greece, as in all post-authoritarian societies, necessitates a socio-political and historical orientation (Samatas 2004). Anticommunism is considered here as a defensive state overreaction policy, based on the perception of a threat from below. It justifies gross discrimination against any person or any organization which, because of its politicoideological beliefs, is perceived as presenting a fundamental challenge to existing power relationships or to key governmental policies (Compton 1973; Goldstein 1978: xvi; Haynes 1996). Institutionalized anticommunism in Greece was not just an ideological campaign but a state repressive policy for mass political conformity, reflected in specific laws, policies and actions; it was undertaken by formal political authorities and para-state organizations using mass political surveillance. In this chapter my socio-historical analysis starts with the origins and first legal and institutional measures of the anticommunist surveillance in the interwar period (1910-1930) initiated by the liberal premier Eleftherios Venizelos. Key to that political control armoury was the so-called “idionym law” regarding thought-control crimes against the security of the regime. Next, I analyse the post-civil war repressive surveillance system (1949-1974), which ended with the collapse of military dictatorship in 1974. From 1949 until the end of the military dictatorship in 1974 the anticommunist winners of the bloody Greek civil war (1946-1949), operating with considerable US guidance and assistance, organized a police state and an oppressive anticommunist socio-political control system with a parliamentary facade. It used mass political surveillance based on specific US anticommunist laws of the McCarthy period to impose a form of generalized conformity and to coerce individuals to express loyalty to the regime. I conclude with the lasting impact and legacies of the anticommunistsurveillance to democracy and civil liberties, emphasizing the detrimental effects on state-citizens’ relations in post-dictatorial Greece. This chapter is part of my socio-historical approach to the study of surveillance in Greece, which has consequently focused on the structures and functions of the Greek state over the past 60 years. My project is to try to understand socio-political change and modernization in Greece by comparing the transition from the traditional anticommunist, authoritarian surveillance in the post-civil war era, to the post-dictatorial “new surveillance,” considering the analysis of Gary T. Marx (2002). Yet, rejecting technocentrism, my comparative historical and socio-political approach relates surveillance dynamics to socio-political forces and larger processes operating in Greek society, such as foreign intervention and dependence. Of special interest in exploring this post-authoritarian transition is the continuing legacy of anticommunist surveillance on Greek society and on state-citizen relations. Hence, my research involves particular attention to the process of contradiction and resistance, and an attempt to connect surveillance practices with large-scale issues of democracy, social justice and social control (Lyon 2001: 154). In the post-Cold War era traditional political control surveillance either by anticommunist or communist regimes may be considered old-fashioned compared to the new electronic surveillance (Marx 2002). Yet, the essence and methods of political control surveillance, like the anticommunist one in Greece, as I analyse its history in this chapter, again become timely in our post-9/11 environment, due to the war on terror and the hysterical global antiterrorist campaign (Beck 2002; Gandy 2006; Lyon 2003; Schulhofer 2002); because communists nowadays may have been replaced as the prime “usual suspects” (Fiske 1998) by members of certain minority groups or anyone else who is perceived by the global homeland security apparatus as a terrorist threat to public order and national security.