You cannot speak about something that only few know, something that is under the radar, something that remains a secret. In the case of Greece, it’s difficult visualizing a war against Greek culture. On the surface, and with tourists all over the country, all seems to be in order.
This order breaks down, however, if you read between the lines and listen to those who protest against existing conditions in Greece – in 2017. The underground reality threatening Greece is none other than the Greek government of Syriza, with roots all the way to the civil war of the 1940s.
During WWII there were Greeks nationalists who sided with the allies (Americans, British and French) and Greek communists who sided with the communist allies (Soviet Union / Russia and Yugoslavia / Serbia). Both Greek camps fought the occupying forces of Germany and Italy, thought the Germans set up a collaborator government to run the country.
Greece changed dramatically during the bloody decade of the 1940s. First of all, Greece was the first European country that defeated one of the fascist powers, Italy. But Greece was extremely poor and could not keep the mechanized war machine of Hitler much at bay. So the Germans marched into the country determined to punish it severely for shaming the Italians and resisting them. In fact, the Germans almost starved Greece to death: their atrocities and ferocity easily matched the Mongol destruction of the Middle East in the thirteenth century.
Coming out of WWII slaughter, the surviving Greeks took revenge on each other. Some supported the British-Americans and the communists fought to establish their rule. They naively bought the Stalin communism. Yet Stalin sold them to the British. The result of this savage civil war was a wrecked Greece funded by the allies. It outlawed the communist party all the way to the 1970s.
Syriza came out of this atrocious lawlessness. Its trademark is hatred for Greece.
Today’s anti-Greek temper of Syriza parallels the rise of oligarchies (in America, UK, France, Germany, Russia, China and several other large and small countries). Why? Oligarchies or plutocracies are, by definition, enemies of the rule of law and democracy. The very existence of Greece that, in addition to many arts of civilization, invented democracy is an anathema to oligarchs.
Even a bankrupt Greece ruled by the International Monetary Fund, European Central Bank, and the European Commission has been giving headaches to oligarchies. This is because Greece has always been a cultural superpower. European and American scholars have been documenting for centuries the cultural supremacy of Greece. This was the country that invented science. This was the country of Alexander the Great that civilized Europe and the world.
“My aim has been to show that a new thing came into the world with the early [Greek] Ionian teachers – the thing we call science – and that they first pointed the way which Europe has followed ever since, so that … it is an adequate description of science to say that it is ‘thinking about the world in the Greek way.’ That is why science has never existed except among peoples who have come under the influence of Greece,” wrote in 1920 the British philosopher John Burnet in the Preface of the third edition of his “Early Greek Philosophy.”
If you want to find the origins of present-day knowledge and science, especially natural science, go to ancient Greece and Aristotle in particular, said the Dutch historian of science E. J. Dijksterhuis in 1959.
This kind of talk is anathema to Syriza ideologues that rule Greece. They outsmarted the right-wing New Democracy government and the “socialist” Pasok bureaucrats who did the bidding of IMF, ECB and EC in squashing Greece with austerity. The Syriza experts became zealots of austerity, the bitter pill of Greek impoverishment. The Syriza Prime Minister, Alexis Tsipras, is the beloved obedient servant of Angela Merkel.
But in addition to giving Greece the austerity poison, the Syriza fanatics declared war on Greek nationalism and Greek culture. Their guns turned against ancient Greece, Medieval Greece or Byzantium, and anything historical that showed the Greeks intelligent, daring, courageous, and patriotic. In their muddled thinking, Greece should be leveled to the indistinguishable masses of the largely Moslem immigrants now flooding Greece.
So the Syriza department of education continued, with new vigor, the atrocious anti-Greek policies of the leftist and right-wind governments: rewrite Greek history textbooks for elementary schools and high schools. The propagandists of Syriza, usually university professors, keep talking against nationalism, ancient Greece, and Medieval Christian Byzantium. But they never get tired praising globalization, multiculturalism, homosexuality and Moslem migrants.
The Syriza beast is a hybrid of communist factory thinking tempered by capitalist blue jeans and oligarchic brutality.
Syriza is putting its harsh agenda to action in Greece. It is planning to rewrite the Greek constitution to guarantee its politicians will not be prosecuted for treason. Syriza lawyers are talking about a constitutional provision separating church and state. This may sound right, but it’s not quite right.
If the Orthodox Church is knocked off its centuries-old pedestal in Greece, what new religion will replace it? Islam? Or making Islam equal to Orthodoxy? Is this why the Syriza government is so welcoming of Moslem immigrants?
And if Syriza is really concerned about religion and justice, why is it leaving the vast property of the Orthodox Church intact? Wouldn’t be better that monastery land being at small farmers’ hands producing food?
A friend professor in the know said to me the Orthodox Church could easily buy the Greek debt. Why has it not? Is the Archbishop of Athens, CEO of the Church, in collusion with Tsipras and the lenders?
Greeks should resist Syriza and its reforms (low level warfare against Greek culture). Teachers, professors and parents must become the defenders of Greece. In no way or form should Greece become a multicultural or globalized country. Its ancient culture and virtues are vital for human survival.
