Fall of a General
The change of Government in Greece is one of the less easily foreseen repercussions of the Korean war. In all the small nations which sit uneasily on the perimeter of Communism—Greece, Persia, Turkey and Burma, for example—the lessons of Korea have been taken very much to heart ; sometimes, indeed, there has been a tendency to strain the analogies. At. any rate General Plastiras, who had been Prime Minister since April, may reasonably regard himself as a victim of the war. In his few months of office he had tried to pursue a policy of what was described as " moderation ": in other words, he had tried to pursue a more lenient policy towards the known and suspected Communists than had been possible while the civil war was still being fought, and he had done his test to win them back to a normal life in the community. It was too soon to say whether or not this policy would have succeeded"; the General has not had a chance to go on with it. His critics have seized the opportunity of the Korean crisis to justify their thesis that any form of leniency to the rebels encourages a fifth column and is, therefore, little short of treason. This is, to say the least, a pity. The fall of General Plastiras will almost certainly be followed by the rise of, among other forces, some of the less agreeable currents in Greek national life. The immediate agent of the General's downfall is M. Venizelos, the leader of the Liberal and second largest party in Parliament. He has now formed a " skeleton " Cabinet which he modestly claims is at any rate better than no Cabinet at all. But the last time M. Venizelos caused the downfall of the Cabinet the result was a general election and, all things con- sidered, that might not be the least satisfactory solution of the present crisis.
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