Security Battalions were an institutional creation and arose from a security policy logic that favored paramilitary operational units. They functioned as the fulcrum in the subsequent civil war. Oicially disbanded ater the occupation, some of their members were recruited into the State’s new security forces, with rights of preference no less (Vidali 2007: 535). The State formed ater the occupation not only did not acknowledge the criminal nature of the actions of collective violence perpetrated during the occupation years. It also went on to selectively persecute the political let and give amnesty to collaborationists, thus contributing to an impenetrable complex of “self-censored memory” (Kostopoulos 2005). Despite this veil of silence, it is no secret that those who had collaborated with the Germans were not systematically pursued, but were instead used in the later anti-communist struggle. In the oicial view, participation in the EAM-ELAS resistance was considered a worse crime than collaboration with the occupation forces. The basic mechanism for the institutional reformulation and the political expiation of the Security Battalions ater the war was the recruitment of its members into the cleansed and renewed security forces. The policy combined rupture and continuity. The rupture was in the public and obligatory forgetting of collaborationism. The continuity, on the other hand, was in reproducing the consolidated institutional memory of these forces with regard to their image of the enemy. The struggle against the “Communist danger” was both the main reason and the main pretext for the postwar constitution of the Greek security forces by using a personnel that had already proven its anti-communist credentials, and even if they had done so through collaboration with the Germans against the political let. This is how the Greek police state was stafed – a State oicially “under Communist siege”, where the security forces played a primary role in safeguarding and implementing a new philosophy of social control. This philosophy elaborated upon the ideology of “national-mindedness”, in the context of the “anti- and un-constitutional practices” of the so-called paraconstitution (Alivizatos 1986: 203, 447-600). The inluence exerted by the military both on the gendarmerie and on the municipal police forces was very important in the consolidation of a police subculture founded on impunity and the view that the sole legitimate judge of security force actions and omissions were the security forces themselves, “as if they were self-suicient entities that obeyed to their own rules and followed their own criteria in estimating their situation” (Meynaud 2002: 521). In this sense, the Greek Security Forces became a pocket of “a state within a state”, a virtual parastate long before the term was coined and came into wide use during the 1960s. The relationship of the parastate and the police came to function as an organized enterprise with political and constitutional goals. In every city, there were attack squads manned mostly by criminal groups acting as agents provocateurs. These squads took orders from the police but sometimes claimed and gained some degree of independence (Lentakis 2000: 78-80). In this peculiar relationship, the gendarmerie wholly assumed the role of guardian of the “social regime”, as opposed to the municipal police, who were mostly concerned with common crime. With this historical burden carried by the security forces, MAPPING ULTRA-RIGHT EXTREMISM, XENOPHOBIA AND RACISM WITHIN THE GREEK STATE APPARATUS | 29