Skip to main content

Georgios Papadopoulos Biography

Georgios Papadopoulos

(Eleokhorion, 1919-Athens, 1999) Greek military and politician.Graduated as a second lieutenant from the Military Academy in 1940, that year he fought against the Italian invader in Albania and during the German invasion of 1941 he followed the royal family to Egypt.There he continued his studies at the Middle East Officers Training School and joined the Greek battalions that fought alongside the British on the fronts of the region, including guerrilla warfare in occupied Greece.

In 1943 he reached the rank of lieutenant, in 1944 he joined as an intelligence officer of the General Staff of the Greek Army and in 1946, a year after the end of World War II, he was promoted to captain and commander of an artillery battery.From that moment he fought in the Greek National Democratic Army (EDES), mostly monarchical, against the communists of the National People's Liberation Army (ELAS) until the end of the civil war in 1949, which ended with the rank of major.Throughout the conflict he served as an instructor officer in the Artillery School (1946-1948) and commander of units 131 (1948) and 144 (1948-1949) of the Mountain Artillery.

Without supporters in high places and with only his impeccable record of service, Papadopoulos made a dark and slow military career, until reaching the ranks of lieutenant colonel (1956) and colonel (1960).He regularly followed short courses at the Greek Military Academy and received supplementary special training at academies in the US and the UK.

On April 21, 1967, he held a post on the Integrated General Staff In the NATO forces, he starred with Brigadier General Stylianos Patakos and Colonel Nikolas Mazarekos in a bloodless coup that ended the parliamentary regime and the government of Panayotis Kannelopoulos.A government chaired by the civilian Konstantinos Kollias was constituted in which Papadopoulos appeared as minister without portfolio, but as a result of the thwarted counterattack of December 13, 1967 led by King Constantine II, in which Kollias was involved, he seized the Presidency of the Government and the Ministry of Defense, at the same time that he was promoted to brigadier and immediately afterwards he ceased active military service.

Anti-communist and convinced patriot, and imbued with regenerationist purposes of a marked reactionary nature, Papadopoulos was progressively personalizing the so-called "regime of the colonels", of a strictly military and dictatorial nature.With the consent of the United States, which appreciated the service rendered to contain communist influence in the region, Papadopoulos repealed constitutional guarantees, banned political parties, imposed harsh information and cultural censorship, and established a police state in the region.that thousands of opponents or suspected of being so were arrested, imprisoned or deported, including prestigious politicians and figures from the artistic world.

On September 29, 1968, he approved in a referendum (with 91.8% of the favorable votes) an authoritarian Constitution that legitimized the "Revolution of April 21".On November 29, 1970, elections to a "Legislative Advisory Committee" were held through corporate channels and without a party base.

On the outside, he had to face the harsh opposition from Western Europe in the first years, such that on December 12, 1969 he had to withdraw the country from the Council of Europe to avoid the humiliation of an imminent expulsion.Faithful guarantor of the strategic interests of the US, he applied a flexible and moderately pragmatic diplomacy (as opposed to the ideology that guided his internal management), which went through a prudent stance on the Cyprus question (reception by Archbishop Makarios in January 1970), the rapprochement with the Arab world and the communist countries of the Balkans (resumption of diplomatic relations with Albania on November 13, 1971) and, notably, the recognition of People's China in 1972.

When On August 3, 1971, the US House of Representatives decided to suspend military aid to the Greek regime for its violation of human rights, President Nixon came out in defense of Papadopoulos, and later reached an agreement with him to turn Greek ports into the main bases of the 6th US Fleet in the Mediterranean.

Papadopoulos added to his functions that of Minister of Education in 1969 (until 1970), that of Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1970 and own head of state on March 21, 1972 as regency, a position that General Georgios Zoitakis had held since the king's flight in December 1967.On June 1, 1973 he accused Constantine of having prepared the failed royalist plot "the Armada "dismantled in March and announced a law to abolish the monarchical institution and proclaim the" Parliamentary Presidential Republic ", a project that was effectively approved in a referendum on July 29 with 78.4% affirmative votes.

The entire political arc, from the monarchists to the communists, gathered in a Parliamentary Committee for the Restoration of Democratic Legality, denounced the consultation as "a fraud and a disgrace for the country" and "a maneuver to prolong the dictatorship." Be that as it may, on August 19, 1973, Papadopoulos was sworn in as President of the Republic for a seven-year term.

At his inauguration, he announced the appointment of Spyros Markezinis to preside over a new civilian government., the amnesty for all political prisoners since 1967 (including the man who attacked him in August 1968), the lifting of martial law in Athens and the holding of pluralist legislative elections in 1974.This institutionalization of the regime and its alleged defeat Liberal was understood as an attempt to perpetuate the dictatorship.On November 17, 1973, in the face of serious disturbances caused by students, who had called for a popular uprising, Papadopoulos had to declare martial law in Athens, but the following 25 a group of soldiers commanded by the chief of the military police (ESA ), Dimitri Ioannides, removed Papadopoulos from power and installed Lieutenant-General Phaidon Gizikis as president.

The maneuver saw the alarm of the extreme right sector of the army before the latest normalizing initiatives of Papadopoulos, inclined to a certain legalistic solution to the crisis and reaffirmed in its promise to hold legislative elections in 1974, which, they feared, they could lead to chaos.The new junta accused Papadopoulos of being incapable of containing public disorder, of "betraying the aims of the 1967 movement" and of "obstructing the return to a healthy parliamentarism." However, the disastrous military adventure in Cyprus caused the collapse of the regime in July 1974 and in October Papadopoulos was arrested by the new democratic authorities.

In the process that was opened to the heads of During the dictatorship, in August 1975, Papadopoulos was found guilty of insurrection and high treason and sentenced to death, a sentence that would be commuted to life imprisonment.He was held in Korydallos Prison, where he died in 1999.On January 29, 1984, he launched a far-right party, the Greek National Political Society (EPEN), which did not achieve a major impact.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Arthur Penn Biography

Arthur Penn (Philadelphia, 1922-New York, 2010) American film director.After World War II he joined a theater company as an actor and attended drama classes at the Actor's Studio; in 1951 he entered the NBC television network as a program manager.In 1958 he made his first film, El lezurdo ; the cold reception he received at its premiere meant a temporary brake on his film career, but he prospered as a theater director in Broadway plays.In 1962 he returned to the cinema with The Miracle of Ana Sullivan, a film for which Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke won Oscars.In 1964 he suffered a new setback with Acosado (1965), while La huría humana (1966), with Marlon Brando, was received with divided opinions.His next film, Bonnie and Clyde (1967), was a resounding success, finally achieving his talent.Like Bonnie and Clyde , some of his other films address the past in terms applicable to the present, and his films of the 1960s are regarded by many as the most relevant American work...
Post a Comment
Read more

Apartheid

In the history of Africa, one of the most significant moments and periods was that of Apartheid, and that consisted of a racial segregation lived in the twentieth century that lasted until the early 90s in South Africa. It is hard to believe that in a country like Africa , and specifically in Sufafrica , the colonialism of the first white powers, will end up in a period of segregation in which the black population barely had rights and that I ended up separating them from everything. Article index How it was born and what is Apartheid: In the mid-twentieth century and although the black population was mostly over the white, appears what we know as Apartheid , derived in fact from a certain white supremacy that had been imposed since the beginning of this Century (In fact in 1910 only the whites could access the Parliament and a 1913 law on indigenous lands limited the land that could be in the hands of blacks to 21 million acres. This word is translated from African...
Post a Comment
Read more

Antoni Rubió i Lluch Biography

Antoni Rubió i Lluch (Valladolid, 1856-Barcelona, ​​1937) Catalan historian and scholar.He studied at the University of Barcelona, ​​where he was a student of Milà and Fontanals.Doctor in 1878, in 1885 he succeeded his teacher in the chair of History of Literature at the University of the Catalan capital, from which he formed several generations of disciples, until his retirement in 1928.From 1908 he also held the chair of Catalan literature founded by the Catalan University Studies. He collaborated assiduously.in Catalan and Spanish, in the main academic publications in Barcelona.He was a member of the Institute of Catalan Studies.His trips to Italy and Greece put him in contact with the documentary and monumental sources of the history of these peoples in relation to that of Catalonia and especially with that of the period of Catalan-Aragonese domination in the Duchy of Athens.As a tutor and literary critic, he methodized the teaching of the history of Castilian literature. Am...
Post a Comment
Read more

John Bissel Carroll Biography

John Bissel Carroll (Hardford, 1916) American psychologist.Specialized in the psychology of language, he has studied the problem of different individual linguistic aptitudes and their pedagogical consequences.His works include The teaching of French as a foreign language in eight countries (1975).
Post a Comment
Read more

Camilo Torres Restrepo Biography

Camilo Torres Restrepo (Jorge Camilo Torres Restrepo; Bogotá, 1929-San Vicente de Chucurí, Santander, 1966) Priest and Colombian guerrilla.After being ordained a priest in 1954 and completing his training with sociology studies in Belgium (1954-1959), he participated in the founding of the Faculty of Sociology of the National University of Colombia, where he taught between 1959 and 1962. Camilo Torres Restrepo Worried since his youth about deep social inequalities, the charismatic personality of Camilo Torres Restrepo, the coherence of his progressive message and his initiatives in favor of the classes most disadvantaged had made him, since his return to the country, a figure of great relevance.The expulsion from the university (1962) increased its public projection and marked the beginning of an approach to revolutionary positions, which culminated in the abandonment of the priesthood and the incorporation of the National Liberation Army into the guerrilla (1965).Since then cal...
Post a Comment
Read more

Guillermo Cabrera Infante Biography

Guillermo Cabrera Infante (Gibara, Cuba, 1929) Cuban writer, nationalized British.In 1951 he founded the Cuban Cinematheque, of which he was director until General Batista ordered its closure, a work that he combined with his articles on film criticism for the magazine Carteles, which he published under the pseudonym G.Caín (1954-1960).He also directed the literary magazine Monday of Revolution, banned in 1961 by Castro.In 1966 he published his first renowned novel, Tres tristes tigres, whose experimental nature lies in the ingenious use of language in its most colloquial register and the constant play of winks and references to other literary works.He was a diplomat in Brussels, until he definitively broke with the Castro regime and settled in London.He has written other outstanding novels, such as Vista delmanecer en el tropico (1974), Exorcismos de esti (l) o (1976) and essays such as Vidas para leerlas (1998).In 1998 he received the Cervantes Prize.
Post a Comment
Read more

Isamu noguchi Biography

Isamu Noguchi (Los Angeles, 1904-New York, 1988) American sculptor and designer whose works are representative of the expressive power of organic abstract works developed by 20th century American sculpture. Isamu Noguchi Son of the Japanese poet Yone Noguchi, his training was broad and cosmopolitan.He studied at Columbia University and, after residing for a few years in Japan, he moved to New York, where he continued his training with Onorio Ruotolo.During 1923 he traveled through England, China and Mexico, and later moved to Paris, where he was Constantin Brancusi's assistant for two years, between 1927 and 1928.There he met and related to sculptors such as Alberto Giacometti and Alexander Calder and developed a enthusiastic abstract sculpture.It was also influenced by surrealism and the work of Picasso and Joan Miró. His first exhibition was held in 1929 in New York.In 1938 he won the national competition to decorate the Associated Press pavilion at New York's Rockef...
Post a Comment
Read more

X-ray history

The X-rays were discovered in 1895 and from there they became a very revolutionary application in many branches of science, from astronomy to radiographs that we have not done so many times.the 120th anniversary of the X-rays knowing his inventor and the research that led him to such an important scientific advance. Article index Who invented the X-rays? The inventor or, rather, the person who discovered the X-rays was Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen , a German physicist who was focused on the field of electromagnetics Nothing else to present his discovery, Rontgen's theory received great attention from critics and public, and was translated into French, English or Russian. Although it is not a name as well known today as that of others you celebrate writers, the name of Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen is written in gold letters in the medical field, where he has had and has and numerous applications.The importance of his discovery was such in his day that he was the first Nobel Prize ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Josep Yxart Biography

Josep Yxart (Josep Yxart i Moragas; Tarragona, 1852-1895) Spanish literary critic.He studied Law in Barcelona by family tradition, but very soon he dedicated himself to literary activities.The novelist Narcís Oller, Josep Yxart's cousin, introduced him to literary circles in 1877. Soon he was attracted to criticism, especially theatrical.At the Floral Games of 1879 he was awarded a monograph on Catalan theater entitled Lo teatre: son passat, present i pervenir .Later his remarkable biographical essay on the painter Fortuny appeared. He collaborated as a literary critic in La Renaixença , La Vanguardia and La Publicidad in Barcelona, ​​and La España Modern and The Time of Madrid.He was director of the publishing house and magazine Arte y Letras (1883), for whose collections he wrote substantial prologues and very careful translations; its Castilian version of Schiller's dramas is notable.His articles were partly collected in the five volumes of Last year (18...
Post a Comment
Read more