The Plot Against Greece

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SHOTS are being fired and men killed in Greece in the same war which elsewhere is waged with words -- a war between eastern totalitarianism and western democracy. In Greece this conflict began in the darkness of Axis occupation during World War II, and has never stopped. Each day there is some violence to report. A guerrilla group -- a lawless element acting nonetheless under the strictest discipline and directed by a Kapitanios, or political commissar -- attacks and destroys some Greek village -- a unit of society organized according to a pattern familiar and human. Each day men and women are enticed to take a part in a new type of society coldly disciplined and fiercely aggressive; or if they decline are abducted and forced to do so.

Every outbreak of fury, be it the skirmish over a village, a railroad, a powerhouse or a gendarmerie post, or a more ambitious attack on a town, illustrates the method this totalitarian system uses -- the spread of terror. Its specific purpose is to dismember Greece, the last free country between the Baltic and the Aegean, and bring it piecemeal into the Russian-controlled Balkan group. Each day the Greek armed forces give battle. Each day Greece loses some of her lifeblood in the process. Each day her ability to resist is impaired. Nearly half a million of Greece's total population of about 7,000,000 have become victims of guerrilla excesses. Most of them are women and children, now homeless and hopeless, trekking from town to town and village to village. During January, according to the Ministry of Social Welfare, the impoverished Greek Government has had to spend the sum of $3,800,000 on alms to this army of afflicted souls...