A Slav Macedonian Greek Fascist? Deciphering the Ethnicophrosyne of Sotirios Gotzamanis
Spyros Marchetos, «A Slav Macedonian Greek Fascist? Deciphering the Ethnicophrosyne of Sotirios Gotzamanis», στο Alexandra Ioannidou, Christian Voss (eds.), Slavic Studies after the EU-Enlargement: Challenges and Prospects. Proceedings of the First Interdisciplinary Slavic Studies Conference. University of Macedonia, Salonica, 29/9-1/10/2006, Berliner Slawistische Arbeiten (Peter Lang Verlag), Βερολίνο 2009.
Contents
Contents 1
1. Fascist or Conservative? 2
2. A Radical of the Right 5
3. The Right Unites 11
4. Ethnicophrosyne 15
5. The Spectre of Alexander 18
6. The Heritage of Fascism 23
Bibliography 27
1. Fascist or Conservative?
In the evening of 14th of March, 1957, Salonica witnessed a bizarre scene that would be considered scandalous, if not outright national treason, had it happened in any other place of the war-ravaged Europe. The local social and political elite, including all important state functionaries, from the bishop, the military governor and the prefect downwards, gathered in the grand hall of the semi-official Society for Macedonian Studies to honour a white-haired politician. They received enthusiastically his speech, on a subject hardly appropriate for these postwar times (‘The conquest of Asia by the Greeks under the leadership of Alexander the Great’), amid applause that would scarcely let anyone imagine that very recently this same old man had been condemned to death by a Greek high court, for nothing less than collaboration with the enemy. He was Sotirios Gotzamanis, the powerful Finance Minister during the Nazi occupation of Greece, infamous for presiding over the worst economic catastrophe in the country’s history, that included a colossal transfer of wealth from poor to rich, caused untold misery and left tens of thousands dead from hunger. The people had blamed exactly this politician for the hyperinflation of those years, calling «Gotzamanakia» -the little children of Gotzamanis- the worthless banknotes that bore his signature. Nationalists had hated bim for his perceived support to plans for the bulgarian domination of Macedonia. And yet, while all over Europe lesser collaborators of the Nazis had been hunted, imprisoned and often executed, here he was in postwar Salonica -free, prosperous, respected, lionized by everyone who counted, and even continuing to preach to the local elites trademark nazi notions -vital space, race, «Hindoeuropean warriors», and the providential Leader of the nation. His slav macedonian ethnicity, not hidden but flaunted during his long career, made the conundrum even greater.
The ambiguity surrounding this man’s politics has not lessened since. “Who was, finally, Sotirios Gotzamanis? A visionary, a reformer or perhaps a rabble-rouser?”, asks his biographer. “Here is a characteristic case”, he concludes sotto voce, “of a charismatic politician who, because of his love for power, and of a tragic destiny of choices [sic] finally not vindicated, was scornfully driven to the margins of collective history. He was no innocent himself, but no one can deny that he served faithfully his ideology; an ideology which, notwithstanding its temporary maeanderings, made him always a stout defender of the interests of Macedonian Hellenism. And this is, for [Gotzamanis], a posthumus vindication”.
An ideologist, indeed… What was this ideology so faithfully served by the honorable Gotzamanis? The biographer gives an approximative answer: «many Greeks who collaborated with the Axis powers in the 1940s were not necessarily deserters or turncoats, but conscious followers of certain ideological currents, mainly of fascist tendencies that had emanated from Germany and Italy in the interwar years. One of them was Gotzamanis».
Could it really be so? Was fascism that «ideology» that safeguarded «the interests of Macedonian Hellenism»? Gotzamanis had indeed been among the systematic promoters and servants of nazism in Greece. His fascist pedigree was long, extending to the period before Mussolini’s rise to power. In the early 1920s he had envisaged the creation of a protofascist party; in the 1930s he advocated an alliance with the Axis and tried to turn the Metaxas dictatorship towards national socialism, while from 1941 to 1943 he participated in the Quisling governments. But again, his appeal extended far beyond the fascist camp. He had acted in the interwar years as champion of the oppressed slavophones, and later, after the Civil War, he was endorsed by the conservative Prime Minister, the legendary Marshall Papagos, as candidate mayor for Thessaloniki, garnering almost half of the popular vote in this city. His memory today is claimed by people who are not really fascists themselves.
Close as Gotzamanis might have been to fascism for a good part of his career, he could also pass as a conservative too; and conservatives did not reject, but mostly embraced him. Till his death in 1958 he straddled both the fascist and the conservative regions of the Right, moving with equal ease in both, at times accepted and at times loathed by this side or the other, and permanently quarrelling within both. The fact that such ambiguous behaviour was possible, and even proved successful, a skillful adaptation to changing political junctures, illuminates wider issues pertaining to fascism: Gotzamanis’ exploits indicate that there were no fixed ideological or political boundaries between fascism and conservatism in mid twentieth century Greece. On the contrary, these two currents were symbiotic, even on occasions intermingling, both invoking the ideological tenets of ethnicophrosyne and forming a continuum on which their activists moved freely and often changed places; if certain intellectuals or politicians could safely be placed at the one or the other extreme of this spectrum, most occupied its crowded middle space and almost all tried to stay united against the Left.
Certainly the case of Gotzamanis strenghtens the general point of scholars like Robert O. Paxton and Robert Soucy, who emphasize the complicities, affinities and continuities between conservatism and fascism. It also illuminates three salient facts about mid twentieth-century Greece: first, that the high-tide moment of fascism came here not in the Twenties nor in the Thirties, when it was ascendant in most of Europe, but in the Forties -that is, only after the Left had posed a real challenge to the regime; second, that ethnicity, even when construed as «race», could be of secondary importance for fascists and conservatives alike; and third, that the Greek Right, contrary to the mainstream European Right, from the Gaullists to the Italian and German Christian Democrats, was rebuilt during and after the Second World War not in opposition to fascism, but in collaboration and collusion, and occasionally in fusion with it. This Greek Right incorporated the fascists and fought side by side with them against the Left, from the days of the German Occupation, through the December 1944 Uprising of Athens and till the end of the Civil War; their ways parted, really, only in 1974.
In the pages that follow we will trace the political activity and ideas of Gotzamanis before and during the Second World War; in the next part of this essay we will specify the context of the incorporation, in the 1940s, of the fascists into the mainstream Right; then we will present ethnicophrosyne, the ideological form through which this incorporation was effected, as well as its reasons and objectives. After this we will discuss some aspects of Gotzamanis’ version of ethnicophrosyne, while in the conclusion of this paper we will review and develop the points outlined above.
2. A Radical of the Right
Holding for a while our judgement on these matters, let us first visit the topoi of our subject’s life. Sotirios Gotzamanis was born in 1884, in a powerful family of notables of Yannitsa, then Yenidje, an important town of Ottoman Macedonia. They were slav-speakers, but sided with the Greek and not the Bulgarian church in the bitter struggle between Patriarchists and Exarchists. After finishing the Greek secondary school of Salonica, Sotirios left for Italy, where he studied medicine thanks to a grant from the Greek state – a clever bid to tie his powerful family to the national cause. Soon his articles in greek dailies of Thessaloniki showed his political ambition. Combining a virulent nationalism with blatant hypocrisy, he developed motifs that would also resonate in his interwar rhetoric: the exploitation of local macedonians by unscrupulous governments protecting the interests of their far-off capitals, the need for fiscal prudence, and the defense of small owners from the encroachment of big capital. Juggling of national identities – at that time, the Greek and the Ottoman – was also practised with gusto. His prose already showed the hallmarks of his later political discourse: opaqueness, bombast, grandiose rhetorical sweeps, and efforts to include fashionable slogans rather than be coherent. If the contents of his discourse were not yet fascist, its style was recognizably influenced by that of the politicians and public intellectuals who gravitated towards the Italian Nationalist Association and were soon to participate in the building of fascism.
After the Young Turk revolution, which he supported but not for long, Sotirios got his Ph.D. from the medical faculty of the University of Padua in 1909 and started work at the gynaecological department there. In 1912 he reached Greece, a
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