9

Anti-Torture Politics: Amnesty International, the Greek Junta, and the Origins of the Human Rights “Boom” in the United States

BARBARA KEYS

In 1970, Tower Books, publisher of such mass-market titles as The Amazing Hypno-Diet, Games Women Play, and ESP and Psychic Power, released a pocket-sized paperback edition of Barbarism in Greece. Authored by James Becket, a Harvard Law School graduate who had worked for Amnesty International (AI), the book was a grim compilation of firsthand accounts by political prisoners of torture by the military dictatorship in Greece, supplemented with the texts of investigative reports. The cover reminded readers that torture was a crime with tangible victims and victimizers: on the front, the face of an attractive young woman was captured in an agonized scream, the Acropolis visible in the background; the back featured a photograph of a man identified as “a practicing torturer” in Athens. Among the enthusiastic endorsements of the book were five by members of Congress.¹

The book was part of a concerted liberal campaign in the United States against the Greek junta that seized power in April 1967. Although the repercussions of repression in Greece for the development of post-1970 human rights movements have been given scant attention, anti-junta activism helped lay the groundwork for the worldwide “human rights boom” of the 1970s.² Junta opponents cultivated public interest, provided tactics, and shaped priorities that would influence later, more powerful campaigns. The overthrow of constitutional democracy in the “cradle of democracy,” combined with tales of brutal tortures inflicted on well-educated, middle-class Greeks who opposed the regime, energized left-leaning groups in Europe and the United States into activism that began to draw on the language of human rights. Overshadowed by the national obsession with the Vietnam War, repression in Greece never attained in the United States the prominence it did in Europe, where proximity and the power of socialist parties gave Greece a higher profile. But as Becket’s book suggests, Greece generated enough attention in the United States to offer a testing ground for new strategies of political mobilization and a new liberal foreign-policy agenda.³

Surveying the U.S. response to repression in Greece through 1970, this chapter argues that tales of Greek torture—or physical and psychological maltreatment loosely labeled torture—became a nascent liberal human rights coalition’s most effective tool in mobilizing public opposition to the Greek junta and, more broadly, in U.S. strategies for fighting the Cold War. Amnesty International’s reporting on Greece raised torture to the top of the human rights agenda.⁴ American liberals then made torture a central part of the indictment against the junta, successfully using allegations of torture to transform the nature of the debate about U.S. support for right-wing dictatorships. Their concern and outrage at abuses were genuine, but they also consciously designed strategies to engage the public at an emotional level. At a time when the Cold War consensus was crumbling, leftist outrage about torture helped develop a new political language, one that abandoned Cold War dichotomies in favor of purported universalisms.⁵ By the mid-1970s, condemnations of torture, tested in the context of opposition to the colonels’ regime in Greece, had become a critical catalyst for surging interest in human rights. In the public mind, torture attained the status of the most recognized and most reviled of all human rights abuses.

The Greek campaign taught Amnesty International officials valuable lessons about credibility and documentation.⁶ As historian Kenneth Cmiel noted, the human rights movement of the 1970s was a product of the information age, and AI officials created a “politics of the global flow of key bits of fact” by devising ways “to collect accurate accounts” of abuses.⁷ By the late 1970s, Amnesty’s reports would be lauded for their reliability and regarded as required reading for the world’s diplomats, and the organization’s success was driven by what one historian calls the “meticulous and verifiable accuracy” of its reports.⁸ But achieving this status was neither simple nor easy. The allegations in AI’s two Greek reports were weakly documented and vulnerable to counterattack. They generated media attention, but they also sparked two years of charges and countercharges in a battle for public trust and credibility.⁹ For every charge lobbed by Amnesty and its supporters, the Greek regime, its supporters, and nonaligned skeptics denied that there was credible evidence of mistreatment. It was not until the December 1969 leak of a European Commission of Human Rights report that substantiated charges of torture, in hundreds of pages of detailed legal analysis, that public doubts were quelled and the mainstream media began to treat claims of official torture as established fact.¹⁰ In building public trust, Amnesty officials learned that reports were perceived as credible when they provided names, dates, and firsthand testimony.¹¹ Meticulous detail and a clinically detached style became a form of prophylaxis against the charges of propagandizing that inevitably greeted criticisms of rightwing regimes.

The dividing line between those who accepted the early allegations of torture in Greece and those who disputed them was not determined by evidence but by political ideology: liberals believed, conservatives denied. Liberal receptivity to torture charges was heightened by a loss of faith in American benevolence that was a legacy of the Vietnam War. A new sense of moral responsibility for crimes committed by U.S. allies coincided with rising public consciousness of the Holocaust, the central lesson of which equated silence with complicity.¹² These developments shaped the liberal political response to the Greek regime. Anti-junta groups united around a single goal: cutting off U.S. aid to Greece, choosing the limited objective of moral dissociation over positive incentives to mitigate abuses.¹³

The focus on torture as the preeminent symbol of repression and on reductions in aid as the solution, hallmarks of the anti-junta campaign, would also become central to the more broad-based U.S. human rights campaigns of the mid-1970s. As the Greek case shows, the roots of those campaigns lie in shifts that began in the late 1960s. Liberal human rights initiatives prioritizing the promotion of civil and political rights abroad gained momentum after the Vietnam War ended, but they originated earlier, in tandem with growing opposition to that war after 1967.

Opposition to the Greek Junta

In April 1967, following two years of parliamentary instability in Greece, a group of right-wing military officers headed by Colonel George Papadopoulos seized power in a bloodless coup. Fearing that new elections called by King Constantine would bring a swing to the left, the colonels seized power in the name of anticommunism and promptly imprisoned or forced into exile thousands of leftist, centrist, and monarchist Greeks, including union leaders, journalists, and intellectuals. Replacing democracy with dictatorship, they instituted martial law, prohibited strikes and political demonstrations, and severely curtailed civil liberties, empowering the police to arrest people for making statements “likely to arouse anxiety among citizens or lessen their sense of security and order.”¹⁴ Many of the regime’s edicts, including bans on modern music, long hair on men, Russian caviar, and books by Sophocles, invited ridicule at home and abroad.¹⁵ Until it was brought down in 1974 by an ill-advised attempt to “reunite” Cyprus with Greece, the junta faced ineffectual resistance, including small-scale bombings.¹⁶

Intelligence services and civil and military police routinely used brutal methods in the interrogation of political prisoners; estimates of the number of torture victims run into the thousands.¹⁷ State-sanctioned maltreatment of prisoners on this scale was not new. Earlier Greek governments had held thousands of political prisoners, and physical mistreatment of prisoners, criminal and political, was a common practice. The Metaxas dictatorship of the late 1930s engaged in widespread torture of political prisoners, and during and after the Greek civil war of the late 1940s, torture was widely practiced in concentration camps holding tens of thousands of communists.¹⁸ Whether mistreatment was significantly more widespread and brutal under the colonels is difficult to determine given the lack of hard numbers and questions of what constitutes torture. The post-1967 junta was the first to use electric shock, but it also favored a method with a long history in Greece: falanga, or beating the soles of the feet.¹⁹

Governments on both sides of the Atlantic responded temperately to events in Greece. West European governments saw the suppression of democracy as regrettable but outweighed by Greece’s value as a NATO ally and trading partner. Britain and France continued to sell weapons to Greece; West Germany imposed a ban only in 1971. Public opinion in Europe, particularly in Scandinavia, was responsible for moving some governments—in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and sometimes Italy, West Germany, and the Netherlands—to oppose Greece in European forums such as the Council of Europe. In a significant move, the Scandinavian countries brought a case against Greece before the European Commission on Human Rights in late 1967. The list of charges, initially based on the suppression of democracy, was amended in 1968 to include torture after AI’s reports received significant media attention. After a year-long series of hearings in Strasbourg and elsewhere, the commission ruled that democracy had been suppressed without justification and that torture was officially sanctioned. Under threat of expulsion from the Council of Europe, Greece withdrew in December 1969.²⁰

The Johnson and Nixon administrations adopted a position one official characterized as “do business with the Junta but do it with some show of reluctance.”²¹ Viewing Greece as an important NATO ally and eager to maintain valued Mediterranean bases and overflight rights, neither Johnson nor Nixon exerted genuine pressure on the Greek junta to moderate repression or to return to democracy.²² Under pressure from liberals, the Johnson administration cut off the supply of heavy weapons to Greece immediately after the coup, but the suspension was first evaded and then ended.²³ U.S. support for the colonels offered legitimacy to the regime and identified the United States with the dictatorship in the minds of many Greeks, contributing to the rise of anti-Americanism in Greece after its return to democracy in 1974.²⁴

Making Torture Credible

The junta’s suppression of democracy and civil liberties was the initial trigger for foreign public opposition, but the issue soon became intertwined with, and in many ways overshadowed by, allegations of torture.²⁵ To many opponents of the regime, nothing symbolized what was wrong with the colonels’ regime more than its embrace of torture. Yet torture in Greece might have remained a historical footnote if not for Amnesty International’s efforts. Still a young, small organization with a weak financial base, it was weathering an internal crisis over the clandestine acceptance of British government funding and the resignation of its founder, Peter Benenson, when the Greek colonels seized power.²⁶ Amnesty’s handling of the Greek case proved critical for its future development, spurring its growth (and its tiny, new U.S. section), by at first testing—but ultimately enhancing—its credibility, garnering a bonanza of media attention, and providing a blueprint for future campaigns.

A few scattered reports of torture in Greece appeared in the European press in the last months of 1967, but it was AI’s work that made torture a prominent issue.²⁷ At the end of 1967, AI’s International Secretariat in London sent two attorneys to Greece to investigate the Greek government’s announced amnesty for political prisoners. British barrister Anthony Marreco and American lawyer James Becket published their report in January 1968 after four weeks in Athens.²⁸ Its findings on the amnesty were unremarkable, and the few paragraphs they wrote on the status of political prisoners might have languished unnoticed in AI’s files if not for the inclusion of an incendiary final point that caught the attention of the European media. At the end of the brief and inconclusive report, the authors noted that they had come across charges that the Greek government was “practising the infliction of pain as an aid to interrogation.” They concluded that “torture is deliberately and officially used” against political opponents as “a widespread practice.” The report listed eighteen techniques that allegedly constituted torture, including falanga, electric shock, pulling out fingernails, and sexual torture.²⁹

In retrospect, the report appears to have been accurate in its essentials, but it offered such weak substantiation that doubters had solid grounds for skepticism.³⁰ The lack of firsthand testimony from victims willing to be named in public left AI open to charges of propagandizing. Becket and Marreco found sixteen people who testified to having been physically or psychologically brutalized, as well as others who offered secondhand reports regarding the alleged torture of thirty-two victims who remained in prison. The two lawyers “verified” the claims of victims though “oral testimony” and the testimony of (unspecified) “professional people” and relatives. They found secondhand claims of torture “convincing” when offered by more than one person.³¹ Although neither lawyer had medical training, they verified torture claims by seeing “scars,” despite that even medical professionals find linking scarring to torture notoriously difficult.³² Becket later recalled being persuaded by signs of psychological trauma: shaking hands, chain smoking, and emotional distress. They had hoped that victims would sign an affidavit to be stored abroad with a “reliable person” who would attest that the affidavit was signed without revealing the name of the signatory, but even this weak measure was abandoned when they met the first victim. “One look into this woman’s eyes,” Becket said, “and any legalistic demands on her suffering were out of the question.”³³

The Greek junta’s efforts to defend itself were often clumsy and inept, but its vociferous denials of Amnesty’s charges were taken seriously in the press. Public relations firm Thomas J. Deegan Co., hired by the government to burnish its image in the United States, assailed the charges in AI’s first report as “totally undocumented … political propaganda” and noted that opponents of the junta had close ties to communists.³⁴ Greek officials dismissed torture allegations as communist propaganda and suggested the alleged victims claimed torture to justify divulging names of co-conspirators during interrogation.³⁵ Occasionally the regime engaged in factual rebuttals, pointing out, for example, that one prisoner who claimed to have had teeth broken had a full set of healthy teeth.³⁶ When the foreign press reported that Alexander Panagoulis, who had attempted to assassinate Papadopoulos, had been brutally tortured, Greek officials allowed foreign correspondents to observe him looking healthy and fit as he played soccer in the prison yard.³⁷ When the wife of arrested law professor George A. Mangakis told foreign news agencies in July 1969 that her husband was wounded from “inhuman tortures,” reporters allowed to visit him found him in apparent good health. He denied he had been tortured, and a pathologist who examined him found no signs of torture.³⁸ Both cases demonstrated the unreliability of cursory examination: when the post-junta government put torturers on trial, it was revealed both Panagoulis and Mangakis had been subjected to brutal maltreatment.³⁹ On several occasions government officials admitted that isolated cases of violence may have occurred, but the regime never initiated its own investigations or punished offenders.

A second AI report in April 1968 failed to settle the controversy. Marreco was allowed back into Greece at the request of Francis Noel-Baker, a British Labour MP who was a large landowner in Greece and a staunch defender of the regime. Marreco gathered testimony from nine current prisoners who claimed to have been tortured and a tenth prisoner who refused to confirm or deny in the presence of prison officials.⁴⁰ What Marreco called “prima facie evidence” that ten men had been tortured did not sway the junta’s allies abroad. Noel-Baker told the press that the allegations of brutality were grossly exaggerated.⁴¹ Two other MPs toured Greece and publicly discounted claims of torture.⁴²

Of most significance to the debate was what Becket characterized as the “skeptical and unresponsive” stance of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).⁴³ Concerned more with detention standards than with interrogation techniques and wedded to private diplomacy rather than public shaming, the ICRC had a different agenda than AI. In early 1968, the ICRC wrote a favorable report on detention conditions on the island of Yáros. A separate report on police headquarters at Bouboulinas Street in Athens, notorious as an alleged torture center, maintained strict neutrality: the ICRC representative interviewed prisoners who claimed to have been tortured, but noting some inconsistencies, as well as denials by authorities, the representative confined himself to relaying “these contradictory declarations” without drawing “conclusions about the reality of the alleged tortures.”⁴⁴ In keeping with its practice of maintaining confidentiality in its dealings with governments, the Red Cross did not publish its report. Taking advantage of ICRC’s policy of silence, in 1968 the junta used selective quotations from ICRC reports to refute torture charges.⁴⁵

Not until May 1969 did a major media outlet in the United States give significant play to torture allegations, in the form of Look magazine’s breathless exposé by Christopher Wren, who had been given “abundant information and documentation” by Becket.⁴⁶ Wren’s article adopted a trope common in media reports on torture: disbelief followed by conversion. The article opened with the statement, “I didn’t believe [the stories]”; they were “so grotesque as to seem unreal.” Torture victim Pericles Korovessis, a young actor from Athens who became the most well-known Greek torture survivor in the West, was the central character of Wren’s article. Wren emphasized that Korovessis had not believed the stories either—until he was arrested and tortured. “Smuggled reports,” mostly anonymous, of “nearly 200 cases” of “torture” helped convince Wren; but, above all, it was his visit to Greece where “a succession” of former prisoners let Wren “see, and touch, the scars,” that persuaded him “thousands” had been tortured.⁴⁷

The Greek leadership was apoplectic about the Look article, but its rebuttals, as the Australian ambassador aptly characterized them, were “abusive, undignified and irrelevant.”⁴⁸ Government officials labeled the article “a cheap collection of stories by mentally unbalanced persons, anonymous informers,” or communists. Papadopoulos called a press conference to condemn the article, denouncing Korovessis as “a mentally deranged person, who has been an inmate in an asylum for disturbed persons.”⁴⁹ Korovessis’ father, apparently under pressure from the Greek police, wrote to Look that Pericles had complained of “hardships” during the first days of his interrogation but had never “mentioned to me the miseries … in your article,” and suggested that the claims of torture were “the exaggeration of an imaginative editor’s pen.”⁵⁰ Government officials did not stop at questioning the sanity of the alleged victims; in their view the article also raised questions about Wren’s “mental equilibrium.”⁵¹ In a similar vein, Catherine “Kitty” Arseni—another torture victim who became well-known through AI reports, testimony to the European Subcommission, a memoir in Italian, and television interviews—was publicly described by a police officer as “mentally retarded.”⁵²

Conservative Skeptics

Prolific conservative columnist William F. Buckley Jr. was among the most ardent supporters of the colonels. Although he would later join the board of Amnesty’s U.S. section and was an early critic of the Brazilian dictatorship’s use of torture, Buckley questioned charges of torture in Greece.⁵³ In a July 1968 column on Greece with the skeptical subheading “Who Put the Scar on Mr. Ambatielos’ Foot?” Buckley drew on the Greek government’s selective release of ICRC reports to argue that the Red Cross had found the charges of torture “circumstantially implausible.” He concluded, “the case against the Junta is not sustained, as of this moment, by documented charges of torture as state policy.”⁵⁴ In other columns, Buckley railed against charges of torture “used for the sake of advancing a political movement.” Casting doubt in 1974 on a torture account from Chile publicized by the muckraking journalist Jack Anderson, Buckley concluded, “it is callousing to read about torture while never quite knowing whether the accounts of it are (a) accurate; or (b) fictitious, and politically inspired. Those who give currency to account of torture of this kind are friends not of the tortured, but of the torturers.”⁵⁵ As late as 1976 Buckley called for a definitive investigation to “discover who was right” about torture in Greece—an issue that by then was settled both in Greece and abroad.⁵⁶ When corrected, he issued an apology, conceding that the evidence showed the junta had engaged in systematic torture. Although he maintained that the colonels may not have used torture more than some earlier Greek governments, it was, he wrote, “embarrassing to conscientious inquirers who, in 1968, having done their best to investigate the situation,” had concluded that the charges “were for the most part politically inspired.” Amnesty’s reports “were, on the whole, justified; sad to say.”⁵⁷

Unlike liberals, who took umbrage at human rights violations in proportion to the degree of U.S. support for offending states, conservatives claimed to use an absolute measuring stick, according to which the worst violations were committed by communist regimes. This attitude sometimes blinded them to abuses committed by anticommunist regimes. In early 1968, Buckley’s National Review colleague William Rickenbacker visited Greece at the invitation of the junta to “have a look for [himself].” He found not “even the basic symptoms of mass repression,” baldly declaring detention of political prisoners to be “humane” and arguing there is “no satisfactory documentation” of torture. In a footnote, he dismissed Amnesty’s second report as dealing merely with the “mistreatment of ten prisoners,” and found more persuasive the reports of the ICRC that allegedly uncovered no evidence of torture. Above all, in Rickenbacker’s view, “Greece isn’t Cuba.”⁵⁸

Until 1970, U.S. conservatives sympathetic to the Greek regime remained skeptical of allegations of official torture. They argued that Greek police had a long-standing reputation for brutality, and they saw accusations that the junta was unusually brutal as politically motivated. New York Times correspondent C. L. Sulzberger, a friend of the regime, wrote in October 1969 that “systematic use of torture is certainly not government policy, although it is occasionally practiced. Greek police under all regimes have been given to brutality.”⁵⁹ An American expatriate in Greece wrote the State Department that reports of torture had been proven to be “vicious … lies” and that the “sex-angled” Look article was designed to “sell many copies” of the magazine.⁶⁰

Behind closed doors, Western diplomats admitted that some prisoners had been brutally treated, but were slow to conclude that such treatment was officially sanctioned or to define it as torture. In early 1968, Amnesty’s reporting pushed the British and U.S. embassies into investigations of their own. As British Ambassador Michael Stewart put it, the findings were “not agreeable” but “not as bad” as the AI report.⁶¹ The Australian, American, British, and Dutch ambassadors echoed the same world-weary refrain: sorting fact from fiction in allegations of torture was “exceedingly difficult”—the U.S. embassy repeatedly claimed it was beyond its capabilities—but brutal treatment of prisoners in Greece was neither new nor unexpected.⁶² What was new was “the interest taken by journalists and parliamentarians outside Greece” due to the fact that those arrested and tortured were no longer villagers or “lower order elements” but middle-class citizens, often with Western educations and Western connections.⁶³

The Look article alone prompted at least ten congressmen to express concern to the State Department, but officials steadfastly denied that torture was officially sanctioned or widespread.⁶⁴ Before 1970, the department’s standard response was that there had been cases of prisoner mistreatment—most often of communist prisoners and primarily in connection with the investigation of terrorist bombings—but these were mostly in the past.⁶⁵ In the department’s view, many of the charges in the international press were “false or gross distortions by political enemies of the regime.”⁶⁶ In private discussions, the U.S. embassy seems to have uncritically taken up the Greek government’s line, parroting, for example, the claim that Korovessis was mentally unbalanced and that charges of torture were often “aimed at the gallery and to Pravda and Izvestia reporters.”⁶⁷ The U.S. ambassador to Greece told the press that ICRC had not found evidence of systematic torture.⁶⁸ The State Department also tried to take advantage of a lack of coordination between AI’s International Secretariat and its U.S. branch, which at the time did not have official relations. The department noted that the U.S. branch had “not adopted” the first AI report on Greece “as an official report,” but instead issued its own in March 1968. The department also claimed that Paul Lyons, executive director of the U.S. section of Amnesty International (AIUSA), had “informed us that with the exception of the case of Patriotic Front prisoners, the American Chapter of Amnesty International does not have evidence of systematic mistreatment of Greek prisoners.”⁶⁹

The battle for credibility devolved into farce at a session of the European Human Rights Commission in Strasbourg in November 1968. Two former Greek prisoners, scheduled to testify on behalf of the Greek government that they had not been maltreated, reversed their testimony and then sought asylum in Norway. One of the men then reversed his testimony again, apparently after the Greek embassy threatened his family in Greece with reprisals. He explained his first reversal with the implausible story that he had been kidnapped by the Norwegian counsel and a Greek opposition group.⁷⁰ U.S. Ambassador Phillips Talbot reported that the “publicity debacle” made the Greek government look both “guilty” and “stupid.”⁷¹ But defenders found ways to explain away the incongruities. David Holden, a prominent critic of torture allegations, saw in the “black comedy” of the Strasbourg affair more reason to believe that some of the “atrocity stories” were “exaggerated, if not fabricated.” Even if “this sort of thing” (beatings) had increased under the colonels, he wrote, it would have been “remarkably un-Greek” for the regime to have entirely avoided physical maltreatment.⁷²

It was not until the commission’s investigation gathered more witnesses over the course of 1969 that the debate died down. Late that year, when its detailed and legalistic report chronicling 213 cases of torture in hundreds of pages of analysis was leaked to the press, the mainstream media was reporting torture as a proven fact. An eight-minute-long primetime NBC news segment on August 5, 1969, reported that the commission had heard “sworn testimony” from “several Greeks,” which was “verified by Amnesty International,” to the effect that “the ugly rumors were all true”: torture was “a tool of government.” The segment included interviews with three victims who described falanga, psychological torture, and pressure clamping the head.⁷³ When Greece withdrew from the Council of Europe in December 1969, NBC ran a three-minute-long interview with Korovessis, then living in London, who recounted in halting English his experience with falanga and electric shock.⁷⁴ These were the first in what would become a steady stream of young, sympathetic, and well-educated victims of brutality who would tell their stories to the world in the 1970s.

Liberals and the Torture Issue

Public opposition to the Greek junta in the United States came from a committed group of liberal Democrats. The vast majority of the Greek-American community was either supportive of the junta or indifferent, and the handful of Greek-American congressmen, unwilling to antagonize projunta donors, adopted supportive positions.⁷⁵ A few Greek-American academics spoke out against the junta, along with the indefatigable exiled journalist Elias Demetracopoulos, who acted as a one-man lobby in Washington.⁷⁶ In Congress the leading anti-junta voices were those of non-Greek liberal internationalists searching for a new moral basis for U.S. foreign policy.⁷⁷

In building a case against the junta, liberal internationalists made torture one of the key indictments against Greece. In a July 1968 interview on NBC, Paul O’Dwyer, an antiwar liberal who had recently won the Democratic nomination for New York’s U.S. Senate seat, cited widespread reports of torture “à la [the] Middle Ages” as the prime example of how the Greek junta has “suppressed every symbol and expression of democracy.”⁷⁸ Minnesota Congressman Donald Fraser, an early opponent of the Vietnam War who became a leader of congressional human rights efforts in the mid-1970s, later saw Greece as a turning point in shaping his views. After visiting Greece in May 1968, he concluded that it was “a full-blown police state,” in part because of torture.⁷⁹ For a time, Greece was the primary concern of the fledgling AIUSA, headquartered just outside Washington in Chevy Chase, Maryland. In March 1968, its newsletter ran a special issue on torture in Greece titled “The People vs. Papadopoulos.”⁸⁰

The liberal Democrats who came together in the U.S. Committee for Democracy in Greece played an important role in laying the groundwork for the human rights movement of the 1970s in the United States—and in centering the human rights agenda on issues such as torture.⁸¹ Formed in October 1967 and headquartered in Washington, DC, the committee was intended as “a fact-finding service” aimed at lobbying Congress, policymakers, and other opinion makers.⁸² It was the brainchild of social activist Jack T. Conway, an AFL-CIO official and executive director of the liberal organization Americans for Democratic Action. Jack’s wife LuVerne Conway, a former attorney working on the staff of liberal California congressman and civil rights proponent Don Edwards, had a long-established interest in Greece, and it was the Conways who spurred both Edwards and Fraser into anti-junta activism in 1967.⁸³ Edwards and Fraser would each later serve as chairman of the committee. Other prominent members included liberal establishment names, most with backgrounds in civil rights, antiwar, and labor issues, including John Kenneth Galbraith, Michael Straight, A. Philip Randolph, United Auto Workers International Director Victor Reuther, old New Dealers such as Francis Biddle, journalist and former socialist Maurice Goldbloom, and Senators Joseph Clark and Claiborne Pell.⁸⁴

The committee raised the issue of torture early, writing in the opening paragraph of a May 1968 fundraising letter that many opponents of the Greek junta “have been subjected to sadistic torture,” and its publications often gave prominent attention to torture.⁸⁵ A draft of one early appeal, later toned down, described the junta’s torture as “unspeakable in its bestiality, unprintable in its detail, [and] unshakeably documented.”⁸⁶ Many members of Congress who eventually came to support efforts to cut off aid to Greece cited torture in their reasoning. Senator Birch Bayh said “the regime’s policy of torture and denial of constitutional rights had been a matter of deep concern to me.” Pell wrote in 1970, “What most distresses me is their past practices of permitting torture.”⁸⁷ Spurred also by contacts with European parliamentarians who were equally outraged about torture, bills to cut off aid to Greece were introduced in 1969 and 1970, failing on close votes until the Hays Amendment, after a long fight in 1971, cut off aid to Greece at the beginning of 1972. Nixon promptly took advantage of the loophole for a waiver on national security grounds, but the legislative effort was an important precedent for later congressional human rights efforts.⁸⁸

In the postscript to his 1969 memoir of torture, Korovessis wrote, “This book would never have been written but for peace-loving and fair-minded people all over the world, who by their silence and indifference have contributed to the continuation and spread of the tortures.”⁸⁹ This view resonated with a rising liberal sense of responsibility for abuses perpetrated by U.S. allies. Christopher Wren’s Look article suggested that the Nixon administration’s support for the junta linked Americans to torture: U.S. equipment—M1 rifles and hospital blankets—were used in Greek prisons; the torturers even smoked American cigarettes. In large font over a picture of Korovessis’ haunted face, the article asked, “Why should we hand over American taxpayers’ money to a government that rules by torture?”⁹⁰ Korovessis, Wren, and the liberal internationalists in Congress saw a clear solution: cut off aid to the regime. As Becket wrote, “If American support is obvious to the Greeks, it is vital to the torturers. The torturers themselves not only use American equipment in their military and police work, but they rely on the fact that the U.S. supports them.”⁹¹ As Edwards put it, the Greek junta, and hence Greek torture, “could not survive” without the United States.⁹²

By 1970, the debate over whether the Greek junta sanctioned torture had largely been settled. In a 1971 radio interview Republican Congressman Guy Vander Jagt, when asked why hearings before the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe had persuaded him to support the Hays Amendment banning aid to Greece, answered: “I think probably one of the reasons was [that during the hearings] we’ve had all kinds of witnesses, eye-witnesses, former members of government, journalists, who have brought back a unanimous report of the torture that is taking place in Greece.”⁹³ In 1968, the presidential campaigns had ignored Greece; by 1972, all prospective candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination went on record opposing aid to the Greek junta.⁹⁴

Many of the well-meaning liberals who campaigned against the Greek junta went on to lead or to participate in similar campaigns in the 1970s against Brazil, Chile, Argentina, South Korea, the Philippines, and other right-wing dictatorships allied with the United States. All of these campaigns featured charges of state-sponsored torture. Beginning in 1972, AI’s International Secretariat led a global “Campaign against Torture” that depicted torture as a growing “epidemic,” and much of the energy of the human rights boom in the 1970s was directed toward ending state-sponsored torture. In the United States, torture in Greece proved an important stimulus to the rise of a liberal coalition that would push to integrate human rights into U.S. foreign policy in the 1970s.⁹⁵ Among a vast spectrum of human rights abuses in the world, it was “gross abuses,” defined, above all, as torture and prolonged detention without charges that congressional activism on human rights targeted. This activism began with Greece in the late 1960s, rather than, as most accounts have it, with the 1973 hearings on human rights held by Fraser’s Subcommittee on International Organizations. The agenda for those hearings, which in turn laid the groundwork for the human rights legislation of the mid-1970s and for the Carter human rights policies, was in many ways formed in the crucible of opposition to Greece.

Although Buckley and other skeptics were proven wrong about abuses in Greece, their critique of the anti-torture campaign was not entirely without merit. The embrace of torture allegations combined genuine outrage with political calculation. Tales of torture did “sell”: accounts of “barbarism” generated headlines and helped mobilize opposition. However well intentioned, the preponderance of attention devoted to torture necessarily obscured other human rights abuses, many of which affected vastly greater numbers of people in even more prolonged and debilitating ways—often with attendant physical pain.⁹⁶ Tales of torture simplified the story of injustice in the world, reducing it to stereotypes of good and evil, and suggested that eradicating abuse was a matter of changing U.S. aid policy. Cutting off U.S. aid to the Greek junta may well have been good policy—it might have weakened the junta, hastened its end, and prevented the rise of Greek anti-Americanism. But the craving for moral dissociation also amounted, in part, to an evasion of hard choices and a preference for easy solutions that assigned “bad people” to other countries while affirming U.S. goodness.⁹⁷

NOTES

I would like to thank Katerina Lagos for sparking my interest in Greece, and Roland Burke, Jan Eckel, and Sarah Snyder for useful comments on a draft of this essay. Research for this article was supported by an Early Career Researcher Award from the University of Melbourne, a United States Studies Centre research award, and a Visiting Scholarship at the Center for the Study of Law and Society at UC Berkeley.

1. James Becket, Barbarism in Greece (New York: Tower Books, 1970). Congressional blurbers were Don Edwards, Edward Koch, Abner Mikva, and Stephen Young; Claiborne Pell wrote the foreword. Becket’s book was also translated into several European languages and excerpted in “Inquisition Greek Style,” Ramparts, April 1970, 45–8; and “Torture in Democracy’s Homeland,” Christianity in Crisis, May 27, 1968, 115–20. See also Becket, “Greece: The Rack and the Bomb,” The Nation, July 7, 1969, 6–7.

2. There is no detailed study of anti-junta efforts. Studies that mention the European public’s response to events in Greece typically laud it as an admirable moralism that helped transform the international status of human rights from mere principles into genuine guides to action. See, e.g., Effie G. H. Pedaliu, “Human Rights and Foreign Policy: Wilson and the Greek Dictators, 1967–1970,” Diplomacy and Statecraft 18 (2007): 185, and A. H. Robertson and J. G. Merrills, Human Rights in the World, 4th ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 136–8. Ann-Marie Clark’s study of Amnesty International presents the organization’s efforts to publicize torture in Greece as an effort to get “the right information” to governments, to combine “facts” with “pressure,” and thereby to strengthen “underdeveloped” norms against torture: Diplomacy of Conscience: Amnesty International and Changing Human Rights Norms (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 42–43. In studies of official U.S.-Greek relations, the role of U.S. public opinion is typically mentioned only in passing. See James Edward Miller, The United States and the Making of Modern Greece: History and Power, 1950–1974 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). Uta Devries passes over Greece in a sentence: Amnesty International gegen Folter: Eine kritische Bilanz (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1997), 81. There has been very little Greek scholarship on the junta; Neni Panourgiá, Dangerous Citizens: The Greek Left and the Terror of the State (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 126–7.

3. James Green has argued that a similar campaign against the Brazilian regime, which began in 1969 (slightly after the one against Greece), “initiated a gradual shift in official and public opinion” that laid the basis for more extensive campaigns against human rights abuses in Latin America beginning in the mid-1970s. James N. Green, “We Cannot Remain Silent”: Opposition to the Brazilian Military Dictatorship in the United States, 1964–85 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

4. Just a few years earlier, the systematic torture of hundreds of thousands of Algerians by the French army had elicited no audible global outcry.

5. On this point, see Tom Buchanan, “‘The Truth Will Set You Free’: The Making of Amnesty International,” Journal of Contemporary History 37 (2002): 579.

6. For AI’s own analysis of the Greek case, see Amnesty International, Report on Torture (London: Duckworth, 1973), 23, 75–95.

7. Kenneth Cmiel, “The Emergence of Human Rights Politics in the United States,” Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (1999): 1232–35.

8. Paul Gordon Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 77.

9. American opponents of the Brazilian dictatorship similarly highlighted torture and worked to gain mainstream media attention in 1970; see Green, “We Cannot Remain Silent,” ch. 5.

10. The credence given to allegations of torture in Greece is, in part, a story of diminishing media deference to government.

11. AI, Report on Torture, 83–4.

12. Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 255. Rising fascination with the Holocaust also made “evil” fashionable outside a Cold War context.

13. Barbara Keys, “Congress, Kissinger, and the Origins of Human Rights Diplomacy,” Diplomatic History 34, no. 4 (November 2010): 823–51.

14. Quoted in Keith R. Legg, Politics in Modern Greece (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1969), 238.

15. C. M. Woodhouse, The Rise and Fall of the Greek Colonels (London: Granada, 1985), 35.

16. The opposition published leaflets and underground newspapers; there were also two assassination attempts. Ibid., 36–8.

17. Becket, Barbarism, 1. On the training of Greek torturers, see Mika Haritos-Fatouros, The Psychological Origins of Institutionalized Torture (London: Routledge, 2003).

18. Haritos-Fatouros, Psychological Origins, 23–25; Polymeris Voglis, Becoming a Subject: Political Prisoners during the Greek Civil War (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002), 131–4.

19. On the centuries-long history of falanga, see Panourgiá, Dangerous Citizens, 260–2. On electric shock, see Darius Rejali, Torture and Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 181, 202.

20. Woodhouse, Rise and Fall, 39–40, 51–2, 67–72.

21. Quoted in David Schmitz, The United States and Right-Wing Dictatorships, 1965–1989 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 77.

22. See Miller, United States, 157–75.

23. Woodhouse, Rise and Fall, 40.

24. That U.S. support of the junta undercut U.S. interests when Greece returned to democracy was acknowledged almost immediately; see “U.S. Policies on Human Rights and Authoritarian Regimes,” n.d. [1974], Policy Planning Staff, Director’s Files (Winston Lord), Box 348, RG 59, National Archives, College Park, Maryland.

25. Many reports attest to the centrality of torture in shaping public opinion; see, e.g., Becket, Barbarism, 19.

26. Jonathan Power, Against Oblivion: Amnesty International’s Fight for Human Rights (Glasgow: Fontana, 1981), 29–31.

27. The first significant report was Cedric Thornberry’s “Letters Tell of Plight in Greek Political Prisons,” The Guardian, October 21, 1967.

28. Becket, Barbarism, 11–13. Amnesty’s focus was on political prisoners, and it did not formally include torture in its mandate until 1968. Becket recalled that torture had not been part of the team’s mandate, and that it was only as he heard secondhand reports about torture that he grew interested in the issue, but other reports suggest the delegation was sent in order to gather reliable documentation on torture. Clark, Diplomacy of Conscience, 39–40; Torture in Greece: The First Torturers’ Trial 1975 (London: Amnesty International, 1977), 11.

29. Situation in Greece: Report by Amnesty International, January 27, 1968 (London: Amnesty International, 1968). Thanks to a lengthy appendix listing torture techniques, three of the report’s four pages dealt with torture. Its findings on numbers of prisoners and their backgrounds took up less than half a page. The report is reprinted in full in several books, including Becket, Barbarism.

30. According to torture expert Darius Rejali, false claims of torture are not uncommon. Rejali, personal communication, October 28, 2009. In Greece the hurdles to gathering credible evidence were significant. Whether released or still in detention, victims of maltreatment feared that public accusations would invite retaliation against themselves or their families.

31. AI, Situation in Greece.

32. See, e.g., Council of Europe, Yearbook of the European Convention on Human Rights, vol. 12a (1972), 288.

33. Becket, Barbarism, 11–12.

34. “Greece Using N.Y. Firm to Aid Image,” Washington Post, March 4, 1968, 8.

35. Council of Europe, Yearbook, 222–3.

36. Enclosure to Airgram A-538, April 6, 1968; and Telegram, Athens to Washington, “Torture of Greek Political Prisoners,” April 9, 1968, Box 2154, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland, Record Group 59, Central Foreign Policy Files 1967–1969, Subject-Numeric (hereafter NARA).

37. Airgram, Macomber to Washington, May 27, 1969, Box 2155, NARA.

38. Athens to Canberra, “Arrest of Professor Mangakis,” August 20, 1969, Barcode 56242, National Archives of Australia, Canberra (hereafter NAA).

39. Torture in Greece, 48–9; Haritos-Fatouros, Psychological Origins, 5.

40. “Torture of Political Prisoners in Greece,” reprinted in Becket, Barbarism, 155–61.

41. Becket, Barbarism, 196–7.

42. Ibid., 24; Telegram, Athens to Washington, April 27, 1968, Box 2154, Pol 23–9 Greece, NARA. It was later revealed that one of them, Labour MP Gordon Bagier, had been paid by the Greek government’s British public relations firm.

43. Becket, Barbarism, 13. Some detainees on Yáros reported that the Red Cross covered up evidence of torture and at times even participated. Panourgiá, Dangerous Citizens, 146.

44. ICRC, “Political Detainees in the Hands of the Police Authorities,” reproduced in Becket, Barbarism, 165; Roland Siegrist, The Protection of Political Detainees: The International Committee of the Red Cross in Greece, 1967–1971 (Montreuz: Éditions Corbaz, 1985), 114. Note that Yáros is alternately rendered Yioura.

45. Becket, Barbarism, 164–73; “Political Prisoners in Greece,” The Guardian, April 9, 1968. The quotations appeared in a brochure entitled “The Truth About Greece.” Pressure from international public opinion and NATO allies led the Papadopoulos regime to sign an agreement with the ICRC giving it access to all police stations, places of detention where political prisoners were held, and the families of detainees, from late 1969 to late 1970. ICRC access resulted in some improvements in conditions of detention and some releases on medical grounds, and may have diminished the use of torture—one likely reason the agreement was not renewed in 1970. Siegrist, Protection, 120–2; David P. Forsythe, Humanitarian Politics: The International Committee of the Red Cross (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 76–84.

46. James Becket, letter to the editor, International Herald Tribune, June 11, 1969.

47. Christopher S. Wren, “Government by Torture,” Look, May 27, 1969, 19–20. U.S. embassy officials in Athens speculated that Wren’s editors, fearing a libel suit, had left the article deliberately vague and imprecise. Athens to Canberra, “Greece: Allegations of Torture,” June 27, 1969, Barcode 562242, NAA.

48. Gilchrist to Canberra, June 1969, Barcode 562242, NAA.

49. John Corry, “Greece: The Death of Liberty,” Harper’s, October 1969, 72. Papadopoulos famously promised to execute anyone found guilty of torture in Constitution Square. See also Airgram, Athens to Washington, “Greek Government Answers (in a way) Look Article on Torture,” June 4, 1969, Box 2155, Pol 29 Greece, NARA.

50. Quoted in Council of Europe, Yearbook, 282.

51. Report on Greek Government comments, May 31, 1969, p. 36, Barcode 562242, NAA.

52. Testimony of police officer Evangelos Mallios, March 1969, in Council of Europe, Yearbook, 230.

53. Charles Lam Markmann, The Buckleys: A Family Examined (New York: W. Morrow, 1973), 214. AIUSA director Paul Lyons, responding to the National Review article, noted that “Amnesty is getting ready [for] a delightful fight” with Buckley. Lyons to Fraser, July 3, 1968, Box 41, F. 4, Don Edwards Papers, Special Collections, San Jose State University Library, San Jose, California (hereafter Edwards Papers).

54. Buckley, “Understanding Greece,” National Review, July 16, 1968, 711–2. Anthony Ambatielos was a Greek Communist and torture victim who testified to the European Commission.

55. William F. Buckley, “Assessing Torture Claims,” Washington Star News, December 24, 1974. Anderson’s response offered no further evidence or rebuttals, but accused Buckley of taking the word of the U.S. Embassy and the Chilean government without consulting the victim. Jack Anderson, “A Rebuttal to William F. Buckley,” Washington Post, January 3, 1975, D15.

56. William F. Buckley, Jr., “What’s Going On in Chile?” National Review, April 30, 1976, 467.

57. William F. Buckley, Jr., “On the Right,” National Review, July 23, 1976, 803.

58. William F. Rickenbacker, “Greece under the Junta,” National Review, June 18, 1968, 607–8.

59. C. L. Sulzberger, “Foreign Affairs: Greece: I—Frozen Custard,” New York Times, October 5, 1969, E12.

60. Nicholas C. Cummins to William Rogers, November 8, 1969, Box 2146, NARA. Mangakis’s wife served a year in prison for “falsely” alleging torture. “Greece: Escape by Red Carpet,” Time, May 1, 1972, 27.

61. Michael Stewart to London, March 11, 1968, FCO 9/141, United Kingdom National Archives.

62. Telegram 8115 (2), Talbot to Washington, December 4, 1968, Box 2155, NARA; Airgram A-558, Athens to Washington, April 29, 1968, “An Assessment of the Situation in Greece a Year after the April 21, 1967 Coup,” Box 2146, NARA; Telegram 2047, Athens to Washington, May 20, 1969, “Look Article,” Box 2155, NARA; C. D. Barkman, Ambassador in Athens (London: Merlin, 1989), 4–5. “Exceedingly difficult” is from Airgram A-558; “interest” quotation from Gilchrist to Canberra, “Greece: Torture Allegations,” December 3, 1969, Barcode 562242, NAA.

63. Gilchrist to Canberra, “Greece: Torture Allegations,” December 3, 1969, Barcode 562242, NAA.

64. Letters from Thomas Foley, William Dickinson, Claiborne Pell, J. W. Fulbright, Jennings Randolph, William Saxbe, Herman Talmadge, Charles Teague, Lloyd Meeds, and Robert Michel, in Box 2154, NARA.

65. Lucius Battle to Claiborne Pell, April 9, 1968, Box 2154, Pol 29 Greece, NARA.

66. Lucius Battle to Clairborne Pell, July 10, 1968, Box 2155, NARA. In March 1969 Secretary of State William Rogers acknowledged the existence of torture, telling the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: “Yes, Senator [Pell]! We share your concern not only for the torture but for other civil liberties.” Quoted in Maurice Goldbloom, “United States Policy in Post-War Greece,” in Greece Under Military Rule, ed. Richard Clogg and George Yannopoulos (London: Secker & Warburg, 1972), 246.

67. Athens to Canberra, 27 June 1969, Barcode 562242, NAA; Telegram 114, Thessaloniki to Washington, May 23, 1969, Box 2155, NARA. The consulate in Thessaloniki reported in July 1968, however, that many Greeks believed torture was widespread and that the consulate had come across enough reports to believe torture was “regularly employed” there. Telegram 291, Thessaloniki to Washington, July 16, 1968, Box 2155, NARA.

68. “Two Groups Accuse Greece on Torture,” New York Times, October 18, 1972, 12.

69. William Macomber, Jr. to Frank Thompson, Jr., May 10, 1968, Box 2154, NARA.

70. Woodhouse, Rise and Fall, 57; Becket, Barbarism, 13–6. In another problem of evidence, a film of a torture session on the infamous terrace on Bouboulinas Street that came to the commission’s attention was discounted because its provenance remained obscure. John Barry, “Watching Torture,” Newsweek, December 10, 2007.

71. Telegram 8115, Talbot to Washington, December 4, 1968, Box 2155, NARA.

72. David Holden, Greece without Columns (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), 241–2.

73. “First Tuesday: Greek Victims,” Media ID M690805, n.d. [August 5, 1969], NBC News Achives, at www.nbcnewsarchives.com (accessed September 28, 2009); NBC News press release, Box 74, F. 35, Edwards Papers; and George Mougious to Senator Sam Ervin, October 20, 1971, Box 41, F. 2, Edwards Papers.

74. NBC News, December 12, 1969, 443693, Vanderbilt Television News Archives, Nashville, Tennessee.

75. Jim Pyrros, “Memories of the Anti-Junta Years,” 1991, Box 2, Greek Junta Papers, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan.

76. Russell Warren Howe and Sarah Hays Trott, The Power Peddlers: How Lobbyists Mold America’s Foreign Policy (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977), 410–34.

77. On liberal internationalists, see Robert David Johnson, Congress and the Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 190–241.

78. Film abstract, Paul O’Dwyer interview, July 15, 1969, NBC Archives, www.nbcarchives.com. O’Dwyer’s campaign officially came out in favor of a cut-off in aid to Greece. O’Dwyer press release, July 15, 1968, Box 74, F. 24, Edwards Papers.

79. Donald Fraser in Congressional Record vol. 114, May 27, 1968, E4666. Fraser’s views on Greece are discussed in Sarah B. Snyder, “The Rise of Human Rights During the Johnson Years,” in The United States and the Dawn of the Post-Cold War Era, ed. Francis J. Gavin and Mark Atwood Lawrence (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

80. Memorandum, Paul Lyons to Board Members and Key List, July 10, 1967, Box 29, AI 1967 folder, International League for Human Rights Records, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library, New York City, New York (hereafter ILHR); Amnesty Action, March 1968.

81. I have found only two discussions of the committee, both brief: James G. Pyrros, “PASOK and the Greek Americans: Origins and Development,” in Greece under Socialism: A NATO Ally Adrift, ed. Nikolaos A. Stavrou (New Rochelle, NY: Aristide Caratzas, 1988), 228–33; Howe and Trott, Power Peddlers, 435.

82. Paul Lyons to Michael Carsiotis, January 29, 1968, Box 41, F. 1, Edwards Papers.

83. Pyrros, “Memories.”

84. U.S. Committee for Democracy in Greece, Newsletter, n.d. [1968], Box 41, F. 4, Edwards Papers; Pyrros, “PASOK,” 228.

85. “Dear Friend” fundraising letter, May 17, 1968, Box 34, Greece 1968, ILHR.

86. Draft, Committee Newsletter, n.d. [April 1968], p. 2, Box 41, F. 5, Edwards Papers.

87. Quoted in Common Heritage, April 1970, 18.

88. Clifford Hackett, “The Role of Congress and Greek-American Relations,” in Greek-American Relations: A Critical Review, ed. Theodore Couloumbis and John O. Iatrides (New York: Pella, 1980), 132–3; Woodhouse, Rise and Fall, 94.

89. Pericles Korovessis, The Method: A Personal Account of the Tortures in Greece, trans. Les Nightingale and Catherine Patrakis (London: Allison & Busby, 1970 [Greek ed. 1969]), 87.

90. Wren, “Government by Torture,” 20.

91. Becket, Barbarism, 42.

92. Don Edwards in Congressional Record vol. 114, April 27, 1970, 12634.

93. U.S. Committee for Democracy in Greece, News of Greece, 4 no. 4 (July–August 1971), 1, Box 41, Edwards Papers. New York Democrat Ben Rosenthal, a good friend of Edwards and Fraser, chaired the committee.

94. The candidates were Muskie, McGovern, Humphrey, Jackson, and Wilbur Mills. Goldbloom, “United States Policy,” 245, 253.

95. As Van Gosse suggests, the antiwar movement did not dissipate after the war ended but consolidated in the 1970s; “Unpacking the Vietnam Syndrome: The Coup in Chile and the Rise of Popular Anti-Interventionism,” in The World the Sixties Made: Politics and Culture in Recent America, ed. Van Gosse and Richard Moser (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), 111.

96. For an incisive view of how claims to care about suffering abroad have been co-opted for “false ends,” see Samuel Moyn, “Spectacular Wrongs: Gary Bass’s Freedom’s Battle,” The Nation, September 24, 2008; on how a focus on acts such as torture can obscure less visible wrongs that cause pain, see Moyn, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” The Nation, March 29, 2007.

97. See also Novick, Holocaust, 13–15.