Neni Panourgia – Kant, civil war and the folds of meaning

Do Civil Wars determine time? Or, otherwise, are Civil Wars determined by time, asks Neni Panourgia. With particular reference to the Greek Civil War, she answers that this depends as much on what one might mean by “time” as much as what one might mean by “civil war.”

A US soldier who had been deployed twice to Iraq, plunged in the depths of despair over (as he put it) the lies and the deception of having fought in another country’s civil war, said to me: “If I had a Kantian universe available to me then I might be able to manage this experience. But I don’t.” A Kantian universe that would afford him the possibility of finding himself at another time, where nothing would be willed for any that would not be willed for all.

Do Civil Wars determine time? Or, otherwise, are Civil Wars determined by time? Obviously the answer to this depends as much on what one might mean by “time” as much as what one might mean by “civil war.” Attempts have been made, both Right and Left, to name “civil war” all forms of armed battle that happen within a singular ethnic group. Under this understanding the French Revolution, the October Revolution, the Battle of Athens in 1944, are as much civil wars as the Russian Civil War, the Spanish Civil War, and the Greek Civil War are. But time is, among other things, a political “thing” (perhaps, even a “site” in Alain Badiou’s terms) that determines the naming of events. The US administration is as adamantly opposed to calling the war in Iraq a civil war as was the United Nations Special Committee on the Balkans to name the Greek war a civil war in 1947 for exactly the same reasons: so that the involvement of neighboring countries and outside sources would not be disputed. The US delegate to the Committee, Mark Ethridge, charged the Greek Prime Minister Tsaldaris with “monumental stupidity” because he had managed to succeed in doing exactly what the Commission had been trying to undo. “Namely, focusing attention upon Greek domestic affairs only.” But what is a civil war, really, and how has it developed, conceptually, over time?

The original designation for this type of war is Emphýlios Pólemos, which literally means: interracial war, a war between races although this is not an unproblematic translation. First of all one should resist at all costs the temptation to think here about race as a biological category, the way in which the term has been developed and received in the romance and Anglophone languages. The problems of translating the Greek term phylē into English are immensely complicated. As Liddel and Scott, the lexicographers of antiquity note, the term phylē primarily meant a congregation of people by nature distinguished from each other but, as they also note, this very general and broad meaning was almost never used. The term was used most often to denote the equivalent of the Roman tribus and means “a body or sum of people united by an assumed kinship and common ancestry, such as the phylai of the Dorians.” In ancient Athens the phylai comprised the ten different groupings delineated by Peisistratos according to their place of residence, not unlike the (later) European boroughs. As phylon (the neutral of the noun) it means simply any segmentary delineation other than the one to which the speaker belongs, as, for instance, when Sophocles, in Oedipus Tyrannus talks about the phylon of the birds, Hesiod about the phyla of the singers, or the phylon of women. In a much more restrictive meaning phylon means nation, such as the phylon Pelasgōn (the nation of Pelasgeians), and, even more restrictively, a segment that is related by blood ties, what in anthropological jargon one would call cognates, as it appears in Homer in reference to the blood relatives of Helen (phylon Helénēs). Emphýlios had the meaning in Greek antiquity of belonging to the same phylé, to the same génos [genus], therefore emfýlioi were the blood relatives, the cognates. Gé emphýlios, in Oedipus in Colonnus denotes the place of origin, the homeland. Both in Antigone and in Plato’s Laws, emphýlion haima [haima: blood] means the murder of a cognate, of a blood relative. The term Emphýlios as a term to denote a war between Greeks appears in Plato’s Politeia, in reference to the Peloponnesian War, in Theognis, in Oedipus Tyrannous, in Aeschylus’s Eumenides (as Ares emphýlios), in Theocritus as men’s emphýlios battle (máchēn emphýlion andrōn), and in Polybius as war (pólemos emphýlios); in Plutarch it means mutiny (stasis) although Nicole Loraux makes the distinction between stasis emphýl(i)os as the term used in the case of a war that happened within the city when the city understood itself as belonging to the same phýlon, and oikeios pólemos as a civil war in the city when the city understood itself as part of a maison (in the sense that Boon has used the term in his reading of Lévi-Strauss to denote all the segmentary categorizations that are produced when a common ancestry of a large kin group that includes both affines and agnatics is deployed).

The Roman empire dislocated the nexus of the emphýlios from the phýlon and its emphasis on blood relations, and relocated it to the city, and its emphasis on civic associations. Hence Julius Caesar’s Comentarii de Bello Civili, the famous account of Caesar’s war in 49-48 B. C. against Pompey and the Roman Senate. European languages, with the exception of Greek that has retained the ancient locution, have adopted this political formulation (Bürgerkrieg in German, guerre civil in French, guerra civile in Italian).

In the context of post-Ottoman Greek history the term is used in reference to the two civil wars that erupted during and after the War of Independence from the Ottomans (1821), and then for the Emphýlios that broke out in Greece in 1947. The two civil wars of the Greek Revolution occurred in November 1823- June 1824 and in November 1824. Ioannis Makryiannis, in his memoirs uses the term “fatria” (counter-party, clandestine resistance) in reference to the First Emphýlios, when he mentions that “in the Peloponnese Koliopoulos and others had opened a fatria on the side of the government whereas Deligiannes, Zaimes, Londos and others went to other side… We asked what sort of thing this fatria was (where we came from we didn’t know this word although we knew other things that the kapetanioi [captains of the revolution] were doing). They ordered me to go and try this good thing, to eat fatria with my people. I told them “I did not take an oath to pick up my arms and fight other Greeks; I took an oath to fight the Turks. And we did not go” (p. 71). He uses the term emphýlios in reference to the Second Emphýlios when he recounts the offer made to him by Zaimes of 1,000 grosses a month as a salary in exchange for his allegiance to the party that Londos, Notaras, Zaimes, and Mavrokordatos had formed fighting Kolokotronis, Deligiannes, and Sisines. Makryiannis mentions that he rebuked Zaimes by saying: “Even if you give me 50,000 I will still not sell meat for a civil war (kreas dia emphýlion pólemon den poulō)” (p. 79). The term also appears in the Greek translation and edition (by Yiannis Kordatos and Tassos Vournas) of George Finlay’s History of the Greek Revolution (as it appears in Finlay’s original text as “civil war”).

Not surprisingly the term Emphýlios (along with the term Déftero Andártiko: the Second Partisan War) was used in Greece in regards to the war from 1946-1949 by the Left, whereas the Center and the Right used the term Symmoritopólemos: Brigand War. Rizospastis, the official newspaper of the Greek Communist Party, used the term emphýlios as early as 1947 in its leading articles. The emphýlios has been periodized by the Right, by British, and US historiography from the beginning: the First Round (1943), the Second Round (the Battle of Athens in 1944), the Third Round (1946-1949), a gesture that left no doubts as to the specificity of its timings: when it started and when it ended and how time was spent in between. Such specific allocation of time, however, an allocation that can claim the ability to discern the minutiae of time, bespeaks of the desire to set specific beginnings and specific ends to the event of the emphýlios: it started in 1943 when the competing resistance armies ELAS (of democratic anti-royalist and Left forces) and EDES (of the Right, and, eventually, monarchist elements) fought for the right to claim exclusive power over the movement of the resistance to the Germans; and it ended on August 29, 1949 when the National Army (EES) triumphed over the Democratic Army (DS) at the decisive battles in Grámmos and Vitsi. Such a periodization, however, does not take into account the schism that had set into the country with Dichasmós in the 1920s, (when monarchists and republicans, trying to settle the question of the form of government, engendered a deep rift in the country), the trauma of the Metaxas dictatorship in 1936, the handing over to the Germans of the political prisoners by the Metaxas government in 1941, and the creation of the Security Battalions by the Germans and the collaborationist government of Ioannis Rallis in 1943. Neither does it take into account that the war could not have ended on 29 August, 1949, when the concentration camps at Makrónisos, Yáros, and Trikeri were in full operation receiving the returning and captured soldiers of the Democratic Army, their families, friends, relatives, and fellow villagers, all of them “symmorites” [bandits] for the government, its forces, and its mechanisms, and andártes [partisans] for everyone else. Neither does it account for the fact that the term post civil-war is not a temporality that sets apart the civil war from the rest of time, is not a term of closure, but it is an existential adjective, a term that has participated in the production of a political reality, the reality that did not end with the defeat on Vitsi, but that continued to exist until and including the junta. The term, metemphyliakós, always an adjective in Greek, delineates the specificity of the experience of living- while- leftist after the end of the military struggle. It is a term that requires no explanation as to the images that it conjures: state-of-exception military tribunals and state-of-exception death sentences; laws against political engagement, and against the peace movement; exile, imprisonment on false or no counts, false police reports; political murder, political rape, political torture. Nothing is past in the post civil war site, as it produces a space that keeps time in a state of purgatory.

The term emphýlios became the official locution after the restoration of parliamentarism in 1974, when the Communist Party was made legal again and, especially, after the act of reconciliation by the PASOK government in 1981. With that gesture of reconciliation the files that were being kept by the Central Information Service and the Special Security on dissidents were burned in 1989, by the coalition government of the Right and the Left parties (including the Communist Party) in the furnace of the Athens Steel Mills, and the Left was finally forgotten. Nevertheless, during an interview that I conducted in the summer of 2006 with a man whose father had been executed by the communists during the Battle of Athens, on 3 December 1944, he started off by setting the ground for me, when I mentioned to him that I am researching the emphýlios: “So that we don’t misunderstand each other” he said “I am Right-wing (dexiós); for me there is no ‘Emphýlios’ but only Symmoritopólemos.”

The periodization of the emphýlios into three rounds is particularly seductive, as it presents a coherent narrative for the perpetual threat posited by communism (with or without quotation marks), taking for granted the presumed revolutionary character of the Greek Communist Party and its perpetual struggle for power, a presumption that would be correct if the GCP was truly revolutionary. But everything points towards the opposite, towards the fact that, despite what the personal illusions of some of its leadership at times might have been, the Party itself (in its true, Marxist meaning of the people who comprise it) never really engaged in an attempt to engender a radical political reformation, not during the Metaxas dictatorship, not in 1943, not in December 1944, not in 1947. Therefore the adoption of this tripartite periodization can only be a gesture that belies the common understanding that in Greece history has been written by the loser (another idea that comes from the Right), to underline the fact that, in the final analysis, one way or another, history is always written by the winner. A most un-Kantian universe, indeed.

Further links

The Greek Civil War Historiography, 1945-2001

Greek civil war: an online archive

Special issue: recent articles, time/governance
Tags: Greece, historiography, neni panourgia, war