Children of the Dictatorship

Putting Greece back on the cultural and political map of the “Long 1960s,” this book traces the dissent and activism of anti-regime students during the dictatorship of the Colonels (1967-74). It explores the cultural as well as ideological protest of Greek student activists, illustrating how these “children of the dictatorship” managed to re-appropriate indigenous folk tradition for their “progressive” purposes and how their transnational exchange molded a particular local protest culture. It examines how the students’ social and political practices became a major source of pressure on the Colonels’ regime, finding its apogee in the three day Polytechnic uprising of November 1973 which laid the foundations for a total reshaping of Greek political culture in the following decades. 

Putting Greece back on the cultural and political map of the “Long 1960s,” this book traces the dissent and activism of anti-regime students during the dictatorship of the Colonels (1967-74). It explores the cultural as well as ideological protest of Greek student activists, illustrating how these “children of the dictatorship” managed to re-appropriate indigenous folk tradition for their “progressive” purposes and how their transnational exchange molded a particular local protest culture. It examines how the students’ social and political practices became a major source of pressure on the Colonels’ regime, finding its apogee in the three day Polytechnic uprising of November 1973 which laid the foundations for a total reshaping of Greek political culture in the following decades. 

List of Figures
Abbreviations

Introduction

Chapter 1. A Changing Society

• Universities between Progression and Regression
• Student Activism
• Teds and yé-yés: Youth culture
• Generation Z
• Continuities and ruptures in contentious politics

Chapter 2. Phoenix with a Bayonet

• Passivity, Consensus, Resistance
• Tidying up the university
• ’68 as a point of reference
• Life is Elsewhere: Greek Students Abroad
• “The first square meters of liberated Greek soil”
• The Greek Carbonari
• Home-grown revolutionaries
• The terrible solitude of Rigas Feraios
• The historical generation retires

Chapter 3. A Mosquito on a Bull

• Competing youth cultures
• Heirs and defectors
• Tale of two cities
• Political opportunities
• Technocracy and its discontents
• Marx’s children
• The Reformists
• The Robespierres
• The “other” among student groups

Chapter 4. Cultural Warfare

• Media and Publishing Strategies
• The arrival of the 3 M’s in Colonels’ Greece
• Cinema as a Gun
• “Tickets to freedom”: Theater
• The musical culture wars
• Gendered militancy and “sexual revolution”
• Revolutionizing everyday life

Chapter 5. Ten Months that Shook Greece

• The Movement Gains Prestige
• “Anything But May ’68”: The Law School occupations
• The Cost of Participation
• A “glocal” movement
• The mission of the youth
• “This is what Revolution must be like”: The Polytechnic events
• The copycat occupation
• After the Revolution
• Metapolitefsi and beyond

Epilogue

• “Everything Links”
• Events
• Medium-length: Utopias and outcomes
• Future’s past: Cultural changes

Bibliography

• Interviews
• Periodicals
• Archives
• Published Sources
• Secondary Sources
• Film
• Documentaries
• Television Documentaries
• Music