3/ NEO-FASCISM (Ι): “NATIONAL-MINDEDNESS”, “PARASTATE” AND “DEEP STATE” As in other European countries, the legal prosecution of those who had collaborated with the Axis occupation in Greece was subordinate to the logic of securing the State’s continuity. A irst period was characterized by an intense activity in the special courts, numerous convictions, and drastic administrative purges. This was followed however by a wave of acquittals, a progressive diminution of prosecutions, and inally, in the early 1950s, an amnesty for all pending cases.11 It was not long before the judicial purge of collaborators was put in the service of monarchist restoration and the reinstatement of prewar elites. While a few members of collaborationist governments were subjected to the famous “collaborators’ trial” in the spring of 1945, the vast majority of prewar elites who had collaborated or who had sought extremist political solutions were acquitted of all charges – usually without even having to stand trial. This was true not only for those who had engaged in occasional or casual collaboration with the conquerors but also for some of the most blatant cases, including people who were prompt to insert themselves in one way or another into the postwar regime. Cases of industrialists or high-proile entrepreneurs who escaped justice were numerous. The apparatus that most indelibly shaped the postwar regime was undoubtedly the military. This grew not only out of its rich tradition of active interference in politics. It also saw an exponential rise in status, as by the end of the civil war in 1949 it had become the most massive organized military in Western Europe. The short history of the “Holy Unity of Greek Oicers” (IDEA), the largest royalist and anti-communist organization inside the military, sheds much light on the Ovidian transformations of “parallel state” mechanisms within the military. Rooted in the repression of anti-royalist mutinies among Greek troops stationed in the Middle East in 1943 to 1944, IDEA was a secret organization founded by royalist oicers in Egypt just before the liberation of Greece. Its operational centre then moved to Athens, where it formed clusters of active middle and high-ranking oicers with the explicit goal of establishing a military dictatorship. Widely discussed during the civil war, this secret society made a dynamic appearance in a failed coup attempt of late May 1951. Ater that the organization oicially ceased to exist, yet its various transformations and/or branches continued to play an active political role up until the military junta of 1967 to 1974. The most (in)famous of these branches was the so-called “Pericles Plan” for an intervention of the military and the police to contain communist inluence using both political and military means, which became most active ater the party of the United Democratic Let (EDA) emerged as the oicial opposition during the 1958 election. The later junta’s immediate reinstatement of former Security Battalion members underlines the internal continuities within the extremist reactionary/fascist wing of military oicers with a collaborationist past. 11. 16 | Cf. Kousouris 2012. ROSA LUXEMBURG STIFTUNG