Once upon a time there were two Papandreous—Papandreou plre and Papandreou fils—and one Caramanlis. Now there is only a Papandreou fils, Andreas.

The last of these to depart the political scene, President Constantine Caramanlis, was the man who Queen Frederica and the United States had chosen over many more senior heads of the conservative Right for the premiership of Greece in 1955. Then a mere forty-eight, he reigned over an ultraconservative government that was at times severely repressive and not above rigging elections or making use of political thugs. Forced out by Frederica in 1963 amidst the scandal of the Lambrakis case—the subject of the highly successful film Z—Caramanlis went into selfimposed exile in Paris.

The current international debt crisis is a relatively new phenomenon and one that, imposed on a malfunctioning international monetary system, threatens a catastrophe far worse than that of the 1930s. Already several Third World countries are facing total economic collapse and political anarchy. How this came about, how the problem is being diagnosed, and what is being proposed to meet the crisis makes a sorry story indeed.

Modern Greece has been a hapless country. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Greece was occupied for almost four hundred years by the Turks. The War of Independence, which began in 1821, continued for twelve years before it was finally resolved and the Triple Alliance implanted the Bavarian King Otho on the throne. Great Britain soon came to dominate Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean—a dominance that lasted, except for the German occupation of 1941-44, until 1947, when the U.S. stepped in with the Truman Doctrine. Thus began the period of the latest domination of Greece.

At the outbreak of World War II, Greece was under the dictatorship of General Metaxas. When, on October 28, 1940, Mussolini issued his ultimatum to Greece, Metaxas replied with his now famous “Ohi” and the Greek troops humiliated Mussolini's minions in the mountains of Albania.

The colonels’ coup in Greece on April 21, 1967, caught everyone by ṡurprise - the Right, the Center and the Left. Mikis Theodorakis, Greece's most gifted popular composer and maverick political “revolutionary,” was tipped off by a right-wing journalist who telephoned him in the early morning hours of the coup. He went immediately into hiding and started organizing the Patriotic Front, a left-wing resistance movement based on the Lambrakis Youth Movement, of which he was the founder and president.