It did not take long, once Congress rubber-stamped the Truman Doctrine, for American military equipment to begin pouring into Greece: 74,000 tons was sent in during the last five months of 1947, including artillery, dive bombers, and stocks of napalm. Other factors also worked against the rebels. The Tito-Soviet split of 1948 led to factionalism among the Greek Communists, poor military tactics, and ugly, desperate measures against villagers whose support they needed. A group of 250 U.S. Army officers, headed by General James Van Fleet, advised the Greek army in the field; Van Fleet also initiated a policy of removing thousands of people from their homes in the countryside to try to isolate the guerrillas. The final blow to the rebel cause came when Yugoslavia closed its border in the summer of 1949. A few months later they gave up—two years after the first American guns had arrived. What was won for Greece by American intervention? Richard Barnet summed it up in his book Intervention and Revolution:
For the next twenty years the Greeks struggled to solve the staggering economic and social problems that had led to the bloody civil war. Despite massive U.S. economic and military aid the Greek government has remained unable to feed its own population. … Despite improvement in the economy, the same basic conditions of the forties—widespread poverty, illiteracy, shortage of foreign exchange, repressive and ineffective government—remained in the sixties, leading to a series of constitutional crises and, most recently, to a particularly brutal and backward military dictatorship. …
From 1944 to 1964 the United States gave Greece almost four billion dollars, of which a little over two billion dollars was in military aid. … Although private U.S. capital had flowed into Greece from such U.S. companies as Esso, Reynolds Metal, Dow Chemical, and Chrysler, and large sections of the economy are effectively controlled by U.S. capital, the financial health of the country remains precarious.
Twenty years after the first American guns arrived to fight against “the suppression of personal freedoms” in Greece, a military dictatorship, this time under the leadership of Colonel George Papadopoulos, took over the country. Roy C. Macridis, a political scientist and specialist in European politics, wrote shortly after the 1967 coup:
Last Sunday, May 28, free elections were scheduled for Greece. Instead, a military junta is in power, thousands of political prisoners are in jail, the newspapers are under control, and local representative institutions are set aside. …
Two years later, an American journalist interviewed two hundred persons, some still in Athens, others who had escaped, who told sickening stories of torture in Greek prisons. Special military courts sentenced hundreds of Greeks to years in jail for being guilty of distributing leaflets stamped LONG LIVE DEMOCRACY.
On September 19, 1970, the New York Times reported that the United States, which was supposed to have diminished its aid to the Papadopoulos regime in the midst of the horror stories that came out of Greece, was now resuming full-scale military aid. In return, Greece was to institute a “liberalization” program, ending the special military courts. The military junta, however, would maintain the state of siege in order that security cases could still be referred to military courts. Two weeks after the Times report appeared, the release of formerly secret testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee by State and Defense department officials disclosed that the United States had sent $168 million worth of military aid to Greece during those three years in which the government had publicly announced a selective arms embargo against that country’s military rulers. The committee transcript includes the following exchange between Robert J. Pranger, deputy assistant secretary of defense, and Senator J. William Fulbright, committee chairman:
FULBRIGHT: Do we supply the Greeks with ammunition?
PRANGER: Yes, sir. …
FULBRIGHT: You have no practical way to prevent the Greek forces from using your ammunition for internal security purposes, have you?
PRANGER: Sir, as far as the ammunition which we are supplying today, no.
FULBRIGHT: In other words, we can supply the bullets which they used to kill their own citizens, can they not? I mean, we do.
PRANGER: Well, sir, that is not our intention.
The statement “that is not our intention” tells the story of modern civilization, which has so institutionalized cruelty that it takes place without “intention.” It also tells the story of American foreign policy after World War II. Behind a liberal language so persuasive it often gulled its users lay the working creed of the United States: the drive to extend its power—national, economic, and political—into other parts of the world, and the use of “such means” as it deemed “fit” to do it successfully. For the public, American aggressiveness was rhetorically disguised as “stopping communism” or “saving the free world.”
What this verbal device concealed was that Americans came to use the word “communism” to represent a wide variety of situations: actual Communist invasions, such as those by Soviet Russia in Hungary and Czechoslovakia; civil wars between Communist and non-Communist areas, as in Korea; popular Communist uprisings, as in China and Vietnam; and left-liberal movements, as in Guatemala and the Dominican Republic. Americans have used the phrase “the free world” in connection with a few western democracies, but they have also applied it to dozens of military dictatorships in Europe, Asia, and Latin America.
This same contradictory relationship between promise and performance was to characterize American foreign policy in the twenty years following intervention in Greece. And this was true—with slight variations in language, or in tactics—whether the administration in Washington was Republican or Democratic, conservative or liberal. The parallel between American intervention in Greece and American intervention twenty years later in Vietnam is striking. Although the Greek intervention was on a much smaller scale, it had begun with a small group of “advisers” and military aid to prop up an unpopular, corrupt, dictatorial government. In Greece the United States took over the imperial burden from the British, in Vietnam from the French. In both cases, the justification was based on the need to suppress a Communist-led rebellion, one reason being that if Red uprisings succeeded in one country, they would trigger revolts in others.
The policy of the United States toward China is another example of the breach between the promises of its rhetoric and the results of its working creed. In his memoirs just after the war, Secretary of State Byrnes said:
If we regard Europe as the tinderbox of possible world conflagration, we must look upon Asia as a great smoldering fire. There, civilization faces the task of bringing a huge mass of humanity, the majority of the people on this earth, from the Middle Ages into the era of atomic energy.
Through the rhetoric of a secretary of state, America is here citing the usual task of Western imperialism in its more paternalistic mood: to “civilize” backward peoples, in this case Asians. No doubt the secretary missed—as the survivors of Hiroshima would not—the tragic irony of mentioning the need to bring Asia “into the era of atomic energy,” but his statement exemplifies the kind of official justification used to support the tyrannical regime of Chiang Kai-shek while “stopping communism” at the same time.
China after World War II endured four years of civil war between the Nationalist government of the Kuomintang party, headed by Chiang Kai-shek, and the Communist forces spread out from the north central province of Shensi, led by Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai. At the end of 1945, Truman sent General Marshall to China to negotiate peace between the Communists and the Kuomintang, and to try to establish a coalition