Shame and fury: british citizens protesting against their government’s military intervention in Greece (1944)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15448/2178-3748.2019.2.33620Keywords:
Great Britain. Greece. Guerrillas.Abstract
In the last days of 1944, after the end of Nazi occupation, Greece’s National Unity Government came into armed conflict with the left wing Greek People’s Liberation Army (ELAS), a guerrilla group which had
spent the last three years fighting the Nazi invaders. The British soldiers who were then stationed in Greek soil ended up joining the National Unity Government against ELAS, in accord with Prime Minister Churchill’s
agenda of defending the Greek government, London’s traditional ally. That policy received a great amount of criticism, not only in Parliament, but also among ordinary people distant of political power. We aim to study how ordinary people expressed their views in order to understand on which grounds such opposition was elaborated. By analyzing readers’ letters and news published in The Daily Worker newspaper between December 5th and December 25, 1944, we have deduced that, according to its opposers, British intervention in Greece was against the very ideals of democracy and freedom for which Britain fought the Axis powers.
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