A View on the Greek Dictatorship from the "Lighthouse" of The New York Review of Books (1967–1974)

Abstract

The New York Review of Books' coverage of the Greek military dictatorship of 1967–1974 connected the emergence of the right-wing regime to the turbulent sociopolitical sphere of the 1960s and 1970s in America. The Review's analysis of events taking place in Greece, as well as its focus on two prominent Greek poets, George Seferis and C.P. Cavafy, was caught in the crossfire of disputes of intellectual legitimacy and served two interrelated purposes: to criticize American overseas aggression from an ideological position affiliated with the New Left, on the one hand, and to exemplify this position by bringing forward artistic and intellectual manifestations of antiauthoritarianism, on the other. By extrapolating in this way the case of Greece toward a critical surveillance of opportunistic Western agendas and their links to humanitarian crises overseas, the Review's erudite contributors at once shed light on the junta's relevance to timely concerns and coopted its repercussions to reflect upon American intellectualism and its shortcomings.