Book excerpt: By the time of the unexpected military coup of 1967, the state and society of Greece had reached a specious political stability, one imposed under the tutelage of the right, the increasingly reactionary monarchy, and the American hegemony as expressed by the U.S. Embassy and the Pentagon. They dominated the armed forces and the Western-oriented elite, which agreed to the suppression of dissent from the marginalized and persecuted left. Although The Iron Strom appears to concentrate on the shocked and overwhelmed intelligentsia as it launched its counterattack with dissident publications, it is more accurately a large-scale study of Greek literary culture from the time of the Nazi Occupation, the Civil War (the final manifestation of the Greco-Greek War) unresolved since the founding of the state and the decades-long post war era. Since the Greek nation was part of the European community and NATO, the Greeks assumed that these provided them with rights and privileges that could not easily be negated and ignored. But it was the Junta, brutal toward the elite as well as the left, that showed them how meaningless these were and provided them with insights into how they should go about viewing their role as a vassal state and achieve a true stability.