Greece: Perhaps a "Fourth Round"?

What we learned in my school days about civil wars was the following: there are bad guys (typically the Communists) and good guys (typically all the others), and - thank God - the good guys always win. Except for Cuba where the Castro's were still in power but they, of course, wouldn't last very much longer (so was the prediction in the mid/late 1960s...).

I have always been fascinated with historical and other writings about the Greek Civil War. The fascination was due to the fact that it really didn't fit the simple model of good guys and bad guys. In fact, my impression was that the ELAS during the Italian invasion and the early German occupation were really the good guys. The true patriots. Those who told the Greek youth that "it is for you that we all embark on this struggle! To put shoes on your feet, food in your children's mouths! We are fighting to change your life, to raise you up from poverty and humiliation, to make you men!"

There was the First Round, the Second Round and after the Third Round the then Communists were routed. But do the wounds of a civil war ever go away? Particularly when they are never treated? As far as I can tell, the Greeks closed the book on their civil war so that it be forgotten. But the wounds, particularly those of the humiliated side, last for a long time, for generations.

When one talks to Southerners in the USA, one often gets the impression that, in their minds, they still haven't capitulated to the Yankees. In Greece, I have never been able to have any meaningful dialogue about the Civil War. The subject was always blocked out of the conversation. I have met a number of people whose mindset was such that I got the clear impression as though they were grand-children or great-grand-children of ELAS fighters but they seemed very secretive about it. As though one would have to fear, even today, to show that one had sympathies for the alleged bad guys.

I recently corresponded about this with a Greek who is a well-known intellectual with a SYRIZA orientation. His response was: "The civil war is in us, deeply embedded in our cultural and spiritual DNA".

Are we perhaps seeing now the Fourth Round, the political and economic alternative to the military version? If the intellectual turf of today's SYRIZA has any relation to the ELAS of the early 1940s, then SYRIZA should learn from the past. The reason why ELAS eventually failed, so I read, was they they could't keep their act together. From what I have read, ELAS could have had Greece in 1944 but they were more focused on their internal divisions.

Allende had wonderful ideas and visions for a better Chile. Over time, he got carried away by his ideas and visions and lost touch with reality (supported in that process by Fidel Castro, just like SYRIZA is now being supported by Podemos). He also lost control over the movement which he had started and he became more and more autocratic. At the end, he even violated the constitution, thereby giving the military an alibi for intervention. But - Allende is still the darling of intellectuals and others throughout the world.

So here is a perspective for Alexis Tsipras. He really can't lose. If he fails, he will go down into history as the Greek who would have changed Europe if only the evil powers of the world had not sabotaged him. And if he succeeds, he deserves a Nobel Prize, anyway.