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| Renaissance map of Greece modeled from the Greek maps of the Greek geographer and astronomer Ptolemaios of the second century. Courtesy Bank of Greece Cultural Institution. |
Ambiguous dream
The idea of Western civilization has always been an ambiguous dream among rulers and thinkers in Europe and North America. It sounds good, yet it’s beyond individual or state control. And since the ties of this Western civilization are Greek, and the living Greeks are barely visible, the advocates of Western civilization are always on the defensive.
Advocates of Western civilization are right saying we inherited all that makes us distinct – the rule of law, science and democracy – from the ancient Greeks. They document such claims with museums packed with stolen beautiful Greek art, statues, architecture, codes of law, poetry, dramatic plays, and samples of scientific writing in mathematics, astronomy, cosmology, medicine and technology.
Underneath the legitimate claims of the advocates of Western civilization, there’s a void. Western states have largely been ignoring the living Greeks who are the only people directly related to the ancient Greeks, their ancestors.
Western civilization without the Greeks
The reason for this continuing ambiguity and deception about Western civilization is history and geography. Just look at a modern map showing Greece and Turkey. Turkey occupies Ionia, the heartland of Hellenic culture.
Europeans for several centuries, and Americans since the nineteenth century, have embraced the Moslem Turks who have been the greatest enemy of the Greeks.
The Turks are nomadic people from western Mongolia. They reached Asia Minor (Anatolia and Ionia) for the first time around the eleventh century. Greeks controlled Asia minor. But the coming of these aggressive Mongol tribes in the neighborhood of the medieval Greek empire set a chain reaction of perpetual war.
Greek defeats at the hands of Turks and Christian crusaders
By late eleventh century, the Turks replaced the Greeks from most of Asia minor, a catastrophe that changed Greek and Western civilization.
In 1204, Western Christian crusaders inflicted another lethal blow against the Greeks. Instead of going to Jerusalem to fight the Moslems, Germans, Venetians and French attacked and conquered medieval Greece. They dismembered the country. The damage of the Western attack and occupation was so destructive and lasting that, without doubt, it opened Greece to Turkish conquest. It happened in 1453.
Despite papal plans for helping the beleaguered Greeks, Western powers did nothing.
Making of the Renaissance
The collapse of the Greek state in the fifteenth century had its silver lining. Greek scholars flooded Italian cities with the treasures of their ancestors: manuscripts of scientific, literary, artistic and philosophical import. Their translation into Latin started the Europeans on the path of science and the construction of our world.
Unfree Greece
However, the Western Europeans made no effort to free Greece . The Turks frightened them to death. By the fifteenth century, the Turks had their own empire, which included Christian southeastern European countries.
The Greeks survived the Turkish occupation. They never ceased their struggle for freedom. In 1821, they revolted against the Turks. This revolt inevitably brought the European powers (Russia, England and France) on their side. In 1827, they destroyed the Turkish navy and secured the political independence of Greece.
However, the Europeans, who started talking about their Western civilization, did not abolish the Turkish (Ottoman) empire. World War I did that. A core Turkish state survived in Asia Minor. The consequences of that oversight have been unpleasant and potentially catastrophic for all.
Turkey manipulating Western powers
Turkey has resurrected its carrot and stick diplomacy of manipulating one Western power against another. It knows that European states, including the superpower of the United States, are jealous of each other, their business classes always going for profit and ignoring virtues and civilization.
Second, the Cold War taught Turkey to have its feet planted securely in both Soviet Union (Russia) and NATO with the Americans. This allowed and allows Turkey to continue its own cold war against Greece: sending its warplanes almost daily over Greek islands in the Aegean and threatening the very survival of the islands and, indirectly, Greece.
What about America and NATO, which America created to face the Soviet Union- Russia?
NATO Turkey against Greece
I don’t know how American generals run NATO. I do know that the Turks care less about American leadership of NATO. At the height of the Cold War, in 1955, the Turks smashed the Greek communityin Constantinople. That barbaric blow did not exactly unnerve America or change American and NATO policy toward Turkey.
In the mid-1970s, America gave permission to the Turks to invade the Greek island of Cyprus. They did and grabbed nearly half of Cyprus.
The plight of Greece
Meanwhile, Greece, governed largely by America-educated Greek politicians, is frozen into impotence. America has a large naval base in Crete. That, however, does nothing to safeguard Greek interests against the aggression of Turkey.
In addition, since 2010, America allowed its International Monetary Fund to impoverish Greece. The IMF, in concert with the European Union, has been taking advantage of the vulnerable debt straits of Greece. Instead of investing in the country in order to enable it to pay back its unwise loans from European and American banks, the IMF-EU have been acting like a scrooge, slave drivers undermining Greek economy and bringing the country to its knees.
Like the 1204 crusade and its annihilating effects, the IMF-EU enforced austerity-poverty on Greece. In other words, the IMF-EU acted like subcontractors to Turkey: doing its dirty work and spurring the aggression of Turkey against Greece.
Moreover, the 2003 American destruction of Iraq and its seismic effects throughout the Middle East has opened the gates of a river of refugees towards Europe.
Turkey is the highway for many of these refugees. Turkey has been directing a substantial number of those Moslem refugees to the Greek islands in the Aegean, the better for weakening an already humiliated and impoverished country.
How does one explain this hostile behavior of the countries of the Western civilization towards the very country that sparked their civilization?
Racism towards Greece
One explanation is racism. The 1996 book of the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington sheds light on this dark side of the beneficiaries of Western civilization. On page 162 of Clash of Civilization, Huntington argues that “Greece is not part of Western civilization.”
Huntington, educated on the benefits of an American superpower and empire, defined Western civilization to be obedient to American hegemony and hatred for Soviet Union-Russia. Second, countries in the Western club have to be capitalist and Christian (Catholic and Protestant) and obedient members of NATO and the EU.
In contrast to these ideals, Greece is Orthodox (right ideology) Christian that, in cultural terms, leans more towards Russia than the American-led Western countries. Christian Greece Christianized Russia, after all. Then when president Clinton bombed Serbia, Greece rejected the hostility of NATO and kept giving humanitarian support to Serbians. Greece also tried to have Russian oil pipelines avoid crossing Turkey, and delivering oil to the Mediterranean through Bulgaria and Greece. Finally, Greece denied a former Yugoslav province the name Macedonia. In addition, Greece was a constant enemy of Turkey, a Moslem pillar of NATO.
These are the reasons behind the racism and hostility of Huntington. Greece, he said, “is an anomaly, the Orthodox outsider in Western organizations [NATO and EU].”
Huntington’s views are the views of the policy makers of Western civilization. Their ideology made possible the humiliation and economic grinding of Greece under the excuse of debt. These politicians are blind to Homer, Plato and Aristotle. They use Turkey as a convenient excuse for degrading civilization, even divorcing Greece from its own civilization. They find the dark ages appealing, which sparks their esteem for Turkey. They fail to see the rising hatred for America and Western civilization in Turkey.
Defending Western civilization
Those in Europe and North America who still admire Hellenic science and civilization need to defend Western civilization in its original meaning of a planetary idea for virtue, democracy, the protection of the natural world, and good life.
Greek Americans must also defend Hellenic civilization with works that illustrate the civilizing benefits of the rule of law, science and democracy. In addition, they should start investing in Greece, making it a more prosperous and stronger country.
A strong Greece can defend the West and Western civilization from imperial Islamic Turkey.
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