How many of us were aware of these?

  • Makan ☭ CPUSA
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    12 years ago

    I’m aware that the Nazis literally blockaded and starved Greece wholesale.

    • Anarcho-BolshevikOPM
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      2 years ago

      This is tangentially related, but while we’re on the subject of anticommunists starving Greece:

      Since yesteryear I have been studying Greece c. 1916 on behalf of some amateur game developers, who are planning on making a level based on the country in that year. Eventually I learned that in December of 1916, the Entente installed a blockade with the goal of pressuring the Greek populace into overthrowing the local monarchy. Even though the monarchy gave several concessions to the Entente like disarmament, greater foreign control, &c., it still wouldn’t lift the blockade.

      I really don’t have the endurance to describe the new “living” conditions myself. You can read this chapter for the details.

      Suffice to say, the blockade did basically nothing to promote antimonarchism and everything to demote the Entente and Greece’s provisional government. (Yes, even a dinky old monarchy was probably more attractive to the average Greek than whatever snake oil that the Entente was trying to sell. I can’t make this shit up, although I’m sure that George Mélas would have insisted otherwise.)

      Anyway, out of curiosity I did a search online to see if there were any articles on this event. I looked up ‘Greek famine 1917’ and the gentler ‘Greek 1917 blockade’ just to be thorough.

      There is almost no reference whatsoever to it (in English). Most of the results were either for the Persian famine of the 1910s or the Axis’s Greek famine of the 1940s; the blockade is hardly even hinted, and even in Google Books there is a scarcity of works mentioning this atrocity. Here is one example:

      The shrinkage of the 1916–1917 cohort and possibly that of 1917–1918 were almost certainly associated with the 1915–1917 national schism that almost resulted in a civil war and which included the May 1916–June 1917 blockade imposed on ‘Old’ Greece by French and British forces, which led to hunger and increased mortality; although it has remained understudied and ‘forgotten’ among historians, elderly informants did refer to it during my interviews, comparing it to the major famine of 1941–1943.

      (Emphasis added.)

      The fact that anticommies can just omit massive events like these from history is a testament to how effective their propaganda is.