Greek lesson
Sir: I regret to see that The Spectator misses no opportunity to publish biased and inac- curate articles about Greece.
Thus, following Mr Noel Malcolm's dia- tribe against Greece on 15 August, to which the distinguished English author and war- hero Patrick Leigh Fermor gave an appro- priate answer on 12 September, I noticed that Mr Murray Sayle in his article ('Fight- ing the good fight', 29 August) referred to Eleutherios Venizelos, an acknowledged great statesman and friend of the liberal leaders of the Western democracies at the time, as a . . . 'dictator'.
In the words of another distinguished English academic and politician, C.M. Woodhouse, E. Venizelos was simply 'a genius in diplomacy, a humane and farseeing statesman and an unchallenged leader of his fellow-countrymen' who, moreover, always respected the democratic process.
Anyone with an elementary knowledge of history ought to know, for example, that E. Venizelos left power in 1920 after a defeat at a general election, and returned later to represent his country at Lausanne in 1923, where he negotiated with Ismet Inonu (and not Kemal Ataturk, as Mr Sayle writes).
It is, indeed, sad to see such disrespect to the memory of a great democratic leader and to simple historical facts.
George D. Papoulias
The Ambassador, Greek Embassy, la Holland Park, London, W11
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