anticommunist, and were fiercely anti-liberal (for example: IDEA, the Sacred Bond of
Greek Officers; EENA, Union of Young Greek Officers) (Danopoulos & Gerston 1990;
Gregoriades 1975). All this culminated in 1966 and led to events that would change
Greece forever.
During this period it could be argued that the various internal and external forces
vying for control of the country had, if not dismissed then at least overlooked, democratic
principles and became absorbed in increasingly dangerous posturing, chicanery and
manipulation to gain power. In the meantime, citizens were left to observe the situation
through the media which was in turn divided into three distinct political camps mirroring
the socio-political fractures that had divided the citizenship since before the 1930s:
monarchists in support of democracy; anti-monarchists in support of democracy; and
communists, obviously not interested in either democracy or the monarchy. Thus, there
was an uncoupling between state-level players who were vying for power and control in
both overt and covert ways, and citizens who were viewing state-level politics through
polarized outlets. Greece had reached a condition Ofpolitical inertia: neither was the
government able to act nor was the divided, distracted and increasingly polarized
citizenry able to effect change. We can take this period in Greek history to once again
promote localization. As individuals became further entrenched in party politics and
came to view detractors as potentially dangerous, one’s network of politically like-
minded contacts took on a meaning of safety. During this time the anarchist agenda was
again largely irrelevant to the majority, although the movement’s voice was not
completely silenced. Some anarchist propaganda from this period indicates the
movement sought to cut across the political spectrum, to reveal the stalemate that had