The Road to Hellas

Palaistra: School for the education of young men in reading, writing, Homer, music, history, mathematics, astronomy and training in wrestling and boxing. Olympia, Peloponnesos, Greece. Photo: Evaggelos Vallianatos

Tourist Greece

For a tourist, Greece is a dream destination. Here’s a country in the heart of Europe with long history and a civilization second to none. Hellas, the name Greeks-Hellenes know their country, shaped the West and, to some degree, the world. 

Evidence of antiquity is all over Greece, with museums full of beautiful marble and fewer bronze sculpture of mostly naked men, women, heroes, and gods; ceramic pots painted with scenes from everyday life, athletic competition, mythology, and war; and jewelry of gold and silver. 

In Athens, there are two ancient temples still standing: the bombed, looted, gutted and restored Parthenon on the Acropolis, and the temple of Athena and Hephaistos below the Acropolis in the agora-market of ancient Athens.

In other archaeological sites like Olympia in Peloponnesos, there are vast unearthed ruins of a gigantic athletic and religious establishment. Among the excavated buildings, one sees the ruined columns of the Palaistra School. This is where young men learned reading and writing, Homer, history, music, mathematics and astronomy, including training for wrestling and boxing. The surviving fragments of the temples of Zeus, his wife, Hera, and Rhea (mother of the gods) give the wrong impression of minor buildings. 

The temple of Zeus alone was a large masterpiece of architecture and art. It was as beautiful as the Parthenon. The chief treasure of the temple was the gigantic statue of Zeus sculpted by the Athenian artist Pheidias – the same artist who played a major role in the building of the Parthenon and sculpting of the Parthenon’s masterpiece of Athena. Pheidias made the chryselephantine statue of Zeus with gold and ivory. This was one of the wonders of the ancient world for centuries. A Christian emperor looted the statue of Zeus. The Christians converted the workshop of Pheidias into a church. The ruins of the workshop survive near the ruins of the temple of Zeus. There’s also the stadium where sprint running took place.

Another asset of Greece is its physical beauty, with its blue seas, clear light, exquisite beaches, healthy fruits and vegetables diet and olive-oil rich cuisine, millions of olive trees, hundreds of villages, and dozens of islands in the Aegean and Ionian Seas.     

What Greece means to me

However, I am not a tourist going to Greece for some enlightenment and fun. I visit Greece because Greece gave me life and light. I am a life-long student of Greek history. 

History taught me thousands of things, good and bad, about Greece. But I am still  thunderstruck by that “ancient marvel” that gave birth to democracy, science, advanced technology in the form of gears – more than 2,000 years ago. Then Alexander the Great spread that civilization all over the world.

Now, in 2019, things are not what they should have been or seem to be. I am looking at Greece not merely with Greek eyes but eyes that have been shaped by my studies and living in the United States for more than fifty years. 

What do I see? 

Underneath the country’s surviving ancient ruins and modern veneer, there have been domestic and international forces at work unseen by the tourist and not a few local Greeks.

In the Spring of 2018, I was visiting Greece for conferences and for seeing my relatives. At the conferences (at the University of the Aegean in the island of Lesbos, the Ionian island of Cephalonia, and at the University of Patras in Patras, Peloponnesos),  I denounced the poisoners and destroyers of the planet, urging the Greeks and foreigners in the audience to learn from the ancient Greek experience. 

That lesson is straightforward. Yes, science and technology are important, but only if they contribute to human flourishing (eudaimonia).

As for my relatives and friends, they did not cease complaining about the Greek government (now run by illiterate “communists” doing the bidding of foreigners). They also moaned over the continuing impoverishment of the country.

One day in May, in late afternoon, I was relaxing at a wooden bench  at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. A man sat next to me also exhausted from walking through countless exhibits in this great store of Greek civilization. We started talking in Greek. He, like me, had left Greece decades ago. He is now teaching engineering at a German university. We agreed both of us should have stayed home, teaching in Greece and trying to make the country what it could become and can still become: a model for science and civilization in love with the Earth.

The reality, however, is startling. Greece is a blurred image of its ancient self. In appearance and practice of Hellenic civilization, tourist Greece is far removed from what it was 2,500 years ago. 

The Roman conquest of Greece in 146 BCE was symbolic of the country’s slide into oblivion. The destruction of Greek sculpture and temples by Christians and other barbarians took place in the context of the Roman blow to Hellenic identity and freedom. The dismantling, in 1204, of Orthodox Christian Greece by crusading Venetians, Germans and French prepared the highway for the Turkish conquest of 1453. Foreign occupation for centuries and the plunder and degradation accompanying foreign occupation, made Greece the country it is today: weak in self-esteem, and weak in political and military power, uncertain about its role in building Western civilization, and fearful of its Turkish menace across the Aegean Sea.

With such friends, who needs enemies?

Then, in the last decade, the country received a devastating blow from its “Western allies.” It was the fifth crusade without crusading armies. 

Greece was suddenly caught in the unforeseen demand for paying back its foreign debt. This was considerable, but not beyond the standards of other indebted European countries. Yet, in October 2009, the Greek prime minister George Papandreou, born and educated in America, invited the International Monetary Fund to fix the country’s finance. 

This unexpected move brought Greece to its knees. The award-winning investigative journalist Greg Palast is right that Goldman Sachs of Wall Street had also something to do with the Greek financial meltdown. Goldman Sachs, which “advised” Papandreou, designed “fraudulent currency swaps” that ended costing Greece dearly. 

Excessive interest payments to all forms of debt have been a stone drowning the country. But it is the IMF that runs the show. IMF is an agency of the US Department of the Treasury and a tool of US foreign policy. It has a reputation for hurting poor countries. Indeed, I remember from my experience on Capitol Hill in the late 1970s, IMF was something like the enforcer of large banks. It used to bankrupt Latin American and African countries that toyed with socialism or communism. Its presence in Greece in the second decade of the twenty-first century has been boosting debt peddlers serving banking vultures. 

These imperial forces came under the control of no less a “friend” than Europe that owns its civilization and name to Greece. 

But now Europe is no longer the continent of the Renaissance, the French Revolution, the Greek Revolution, and the Enlightenment. It is rather a block of countries responsible for the two bloodiest wars in human history. American troops still occupy Germany, the seed and epicenter of European destruction. So, Americans call the shots in Europe and banks call the shots in America.

 Greece came under the dictates of the European Union, European Central Bank, the European Commission, and America’s International Monetary Fund.

Greece forced to give away its sovereignty

The fear of Turkey freezes Greek politicians to the point they sold the sovereignty of their country to the consortium of the EU-IMF. 

This transfer of power trashed the Greek Constitution and international law. George Kasimatis and other Greek scholars on constitutional law denounced the EU-IMF for economic and political blackmail. They said the Greek government has no right to pass on Greek sovereignty to foreigners. It is outrageous and illegal. It took place in the dark, and in the inscrutable language of lawyers writing in English. Their Memoranda, which Greek prime ministers signed blindfolded (without understanding the texts of the agreements they “approved”). 

But on the light of the day, something extraordinary happened in this past decade, 2009-2019: Two foreign institutions serving international banks, EU-IMF, took effective control of a country, Greece, stripping it of all its assets, handing the largest Greek port of Piraeus to China, airports and telecommunications to Germany, and railroads to Italy. 

As if these humiliating and colonial measures were not sufficient, other EU-IMF policies were responsible for slashing the economy of Greece by a fourth, making the taxes Greeks pay the highest in Europe, and throwing millions of Greeks out of work.

The Europe Third World Centre, CETIM, is a non-governmental organization based in Geneva, Switzerland. It is working closely with the United Nations. On August 24, 2015, it submitted to the United Nations Human Rights Council a statement arguing that EU-IMF policies in Greece are wrong and harmful. The debt and austerity measures imposed on Greece are violating the human rights of the Greek people and international law.  

In addition, these forced measures are usually results of war and occupation. And yet they took place and have been enforced without a shot being fired. The world has been watching in puzzled silence. 

The perpetrators of these war crimes-like policies and effects give the image of being symbols of prosperity, friendship, even Western civilization: EU-IMF: acronyms standing for the countries of Europe and the United States. 

These countries pride themselves for “democracy,” which they borrowed from Greece. Yet that did not bother them in the least because they have pushed democracy out of the way. They turned around and stabbed their benefactor. They covered up their atrocities with their propaganda symbol of “austerity.”

I am not suggesting Greece in the last decade was virtuous only to be torn apart by Western bad guys. Yes, corruption has been rife, but by no means worse than in other European countries and America. Greek politicians are practically all American educated. Greek bureaucracy does what other bureaucracies do: protect its interest and please its political bosses. What I am saying is that the Greek tragedy has both domestic and foreign actors. There’s plenty of blame and selfishness all around.

This al but disappears in the reporting of the crisis by a Vanity Fair writer named Michael Lewis. He spent a few days in Athens and travelled to Mt. Athos, interviewing a few politicians, a couple of unnamed bureaucrats and two monks. On the basis of such insufficient experience and knowledge of Greek politics, he indulged in exaggeration and propaganda, in a sense, justifying the punishing EU-IMF blows to Greece. He talks about “economic insanity” and “breathtaking binge of tax invasion, bribery, and creative accounting.” He asserts that Greek society “has endured something like total moral collapse” and the Greeks “no longer really even want to govern themselves.” 

This racist metaphysics translates into seeing Greece like a third world country of selfish atoms in a void in need of a savior. Such view of Greece is full of distortions. Lewis quotes unidentified IMF officials to add substance to his ignorance of Greek history. He does not like democracy, describing peaceful demonstrators as the mob. He says Greek bankers should shame Greek citizens. He only admires two monks who hoodwinked Greek bureaucrats out of public land for a real-estate empire. 

Lewis writes like the Greeks are from another planet, all alone committing suicide. He does recognize the bad influence of Goldman Sachs, but no more than that. 

The American context of the Greek crisis

The financial meltdown of 2008-2009 in America (triggered by Wall Street) resulted, among other bad things,  in the foreclosure of about three million homes. This means that something like three million families found themselves homeless overnight. Now depending on the members of each family, let’s say from two to five, the number of Americans who became homeless ranged from six to fifteen million, nearly double the population of Greece.

If so many Americans could be thrown into the streets without a national revulsion and protest against the irresponsible and immoral bank lending practices of Wall Street tycoons, then all other (moral) crimes received a boost. They became normal and “doable.” 

Does this make American society thoroughly immoral?

 President Barack Obama did not exactly lose sleep over the Wall Street looting of the country. He supported his predecessor’s initiative for a trillion dollars bailout of the Wall Street thieves. That’s why he did not punish any of them. In fact, he appointed Timothy Geithner, a central banker in the fold of Wall Street, to run the Department of the Treasury. 

The message was clear. Wall Street rules. Inequality is good for America – and the world. Why should it not be good for Greece? 

The Greek political class fainted from reading the mind of Obama. It knew Greece had to pay the ultimate price of humiliation. The political parties offered no resistance to the dreadfully insulting economic measures and money scarcity foreigners heaped on them -- and Greece. They became a laughing stock. They were now traitors, oblivious to their oaths to protect the Greek Constitution that prohibits undermining of freedom and the independence of the country. They convinced themselves there were no alternatives to being obedient servants to low level bureaucrats from Brussels and Washington, DC. 

Greek politicians cannot understand, or refuse to understand, that the debt, however real, was a trap for the foreign control of their country. 

The Greek parties are also under the delusion that as long as Greece remains faithful to NATO – America’s military alliance for the control of Europe – the country remains immune to the daily threats of its Turkish nemesis. But that is nonsense. Militant and Islamic Turkey with a million-soldier army is also a member of NATO. 

Greek decline and fall has been going on since the Romans stepped into Greece. 

What to do

The only way to stem and end this foreign domination of their country, is for Greeks to abolish the political parties and return to the direct democracy and ostracism of their ancestors. 

Direct democracy will eliminate the influence of the parties, always tied to the influence and money of their foreign sponsors. It will also minimize the impact of commercial radio and television, channels of advertisement revenue and power.

Ostracism will give an opportunity to citizens to banish politicians or other persons threatening Greece. The ostracized person is not charged with a crime and retains his property. He leaves the country for ten years.

Second, a direct democracy government would need to send a considerable number of the city folk back to their villages. That way the country can become autarkes, self-reliant in food. If the returning urban Greeks find no land, the monasteries have plenty. Confiscate that land for those willing and able to produce organic food. At the same time, create agricultural schools throughout the country to assist in the agrarian education and training of the new farmers. 

Revitalizing village Greece will make the country healthier and stronger and correct the threatening demographic decline. 

Third, Greece also needs to end its dependency on imports. The country has a plethora of well-educated people, especially in engineering. Greece has always had a tradition of trade and shipping. Put these people and traditions to work to produce the country’s necessities. 

Moreover, Greece should become self-reliant in energy. Harvesting the rays of Helios-Sun would be more than a good policy for fighting global warming. It would also bring the country a step closer to its ancient tradition of including Helios among the gods.

This would be especially true for the island of Rhodes, which for millennia worshipped Helios. In the third century BCE, Rhodes had a giant statue of Helios at its harbor – known as the Colossus of Rhodes. Restoring this colossus, which was one of the wonders of the ancient world, would be a step in the right direction. 

If the Greeks adopted this or similar programs of self-reliance, self-esteem and economic and political independence, they must throw out of the country the EU-IMF and stop paying usurious interest rates for real and problematic debt. Perhaps, if the EU-IMF faced a patriotic Greek government, they will probably leave the country on their own.

This potential development does not mirror hostility towards America or Europe. One hopes that both Americans and Europeans would applaud the Greeks trying to rebuild their country. 

This new Greece could also take the road to ancient Hellas: reviving the quadrennial ancient Olympics, restoring and improving the country’s archaeological sites, and rebuilding Hellas with the temples of the gods.

Start with the rebuilding of the temples and other facilities of the Panhellenic athletic and religious festivals: Olympia (Olympic games honoring Zeus); Delphi (Pythian, Apollo); Isthmia, near Corinth (Isthmian, Poseidon); Nemea (Nemean, Zeus); Athens (Panathenaea, Athena); Rhodes (Halieia,  Sun god Helios); Dodona in Epirus (Naia, Zeus).

The Orthodox Church is likely to resist the revival of Hellenic piety for the gods, love for Hellenic civilization, and its inevitable decline. 

Orthodox bishops live like medieval despots. The priesthood is a state bureaucracy. And the monasteries are feudal landlords. However, a government fighting for the good of the country should be able to restrict the Church to its religious functions, removing excess wealth and land from bishops and monasteries and terminating the obscene policy of paying the salaries of the priesthood.

I am not suggesting the country becomes “pagan” or a theme park for the entertainment of tourists. On the contrary, rebuilding of Hellas would create millions of jobs lasting for decades. They would help the Greeks back to prosperity and self-reliance. It would be a mirror for understanding their intimate connection to the ancient Hellenes. If in that process, some Greeks start paying their respects to the gods, that should be perfectly normal and not different than Christians visiting churches on Sundays. 

Pride based on knowing yourself is a virtue. Tourists, of course, will also benefit from going to a country in search of its real origins and civilization. They are likely to become philhellenes. And the new Hellas could then become the Delphi of civilization for Europe and the world.

I would hope that classical scholars and lovers of antiquity, including millions of tourists who love Greece, think about the revival of Hellas and, in their way, try to make it possible. 

The idea here is to use the ethical standards of Greek civilization to save us from extinction. The industrialization of agriculture, the burning of fossil fuels, and the onslaught on the natural world have been sending strong signals of global warming and decay. Reviving Hellas, even a poor model of the original, would have a healing effect on the Greeks of today and the rest of us.