The Visual Politics of Fear: Anti-Communist Imagery in Postwar Greece

Abstract

From the mid-1940s to the fall of the Colonels’ Dictatorship in 1974, Greek society was defined by an official anti-communist discourse that divided it into ‘nationally-minded’ Ethnikofron citizens and left-wing ‘enemies of the nation’. The article shows how this power discourse deployed visual media to construct an emotional regime of fear around communism during and after the Greek Civil War. It uncovers a large volume of propaganda imagery, including posters, illustrations, book covers, photographs, newsreels and feature films, which was used alongside texts and corporeal practices to vilify the Greek left. The article argues that the visual language of Ethnikofrosyni patterned itself on older scripts of negative othering embedded in Greek popular culture, such as lycanthropy, teratology, witchcraft, Islamophobia and Orientalism to discredit communism without engaging with its twentieth-century ideas and policies. Communists were therefore portrayed as monsters, beasts, barbarians, Muslims, Turks, Jews and unfeminine women to arouse primordial fears that threatened the deepest symbols of Greek national identity. The article stresses the centrality and relative autonomy of images in the discourse of Ethnikofrosyni and uses comparisons to unveil the processes of circulation and domestication operating across different national strands of anti-communism in the Cold War.