El-Sisi: The Churchill Test
No Man of God, but Maybe Our Man…
On Christmas eve 1944, Prime Minister Winston Churchill left family celebrations and flew to Athens to mediate the Greek civil war. Communists and royalists were fighting it out, but, armed with one promise Josef Stalin actually kept, Churchill thought he could give Greece a chance at democracy.
(Stalin’s kept promise was the roundly-condemned “percentages agreement” in Moscow a few weeks earlier, which gave Britain a sphere of influence in Greece in exchange for Soviet spheres in pretty much the rest of Eastern Europe.)
Churchill had never heard of Archbishop Damaskinos, the man his Foreign Office said might reconcile the factions and head off a Communist takeover.…
