From: c23st@kocrsv01.delcoelect.com (Spiros Triantafyllopoulos)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.greek
Subject: More on Greek liberation wars
Date: 20 Nov 1992 20:48:43 -0600
Organization: UTexas Mail-to-News Gateway
NNTP-Posting-Host: cs.utexas.edu

rmc@wang.com (rmc) (R Mark Chilenskas) wrote:
> > Given 1, 2, and 3, is it any surprise that the Greeks did what they
> > are alleged to have done? I mean, they were not fighting a conquering
> > war, they were simply trying to liberate themselves.

> I have, in all fairness, to agree that the Greek reaction was not
> surprising.  After all, 90% or so of all people are ****ing ****heads
> 99% of the time, and given an excuse to act immorally, most people
> will take it.

You give humanity less credit than it deserves. There is little question
of morality when one is trying to defend oneself or ones country from an
enemy. Whether that enemy is real or perceived, it is up to the conditions
to determine that. I was not there, you were not there, Mr. Mutlu/Argic
was not there. How can we judge them with todays' standards? 

100 years from now historians will have a very easy time deciding the 
Gulf War. There's videos of each and every bomb dropped, and each and
every action taken. The Greek liberation war of 1821-1830 did not have
the benefit of CNN or Walter Cronkite. Historical sources are scarce, and
inevitably unbalanced depending on their origin. 

You assume 90% of the people are **** 99% of the time, and that of course
includes ALL people, Greeks, Turks, Russians, etc. All three groups
have gone thru tremendous amount of pain and suffering over the centuries.
They have been invaded, gone to war, suffered staggering losses, and 
yet have managed to keep their identity. They, for one, all know what it
means to be invaded for sure. Whether it was the Turks invading the
Greeks, the Greeks invading the Turks, the Germans invading the Russians,
etc, it has helped forge the nations' determination. 

So, Mark, these countries, and today's products of these countries, have
seen suffering first hand. To summarily dismiss the nature of people to
be free thru any means possible as ***** is not proper. It is a
disservice to classify them as anything but people fighting for their
liberation.  Does it justify killing civilians to win ones' freedom?
Were the bombings of Dresden in WW2 justified? Were the V2's against
London justified? War is War...

Unless, of course, you subscribe to the "The Greeks were better off under
the Ottomans" ((c) Yoakim Martillo) theory, in which case we should 
pretty much apologise to the Ottoman Empire (tm) for being rude as to
endeavor a liberation war for 10 years or so.

> I think that the reason the Turkish issues have generated more heat and
> smoke than Spiros's are many, but the ones that seem clearest to me
> are:

> The Turks had been in the Balkans for quite a while.  Sure, Poland
> maintained its national identity and language under Tsarist Russia and
> Prussia for a hundred years, and Lithuania for a bit longer yet.  But
> the Turks had been around a long time.  Not only could no one alive
> remember a time when the Turks had not been around, no one alive had
> ever met anyone who was alive when the Turks had not been around, and
> probably on for another couple of iterations.

Irrelevant. A country/ethnic identity that can not survive with its
memories under an oppressor does not deserve to be around... A nation
survives because of the memories, culture, tradition, songs, literature,
art, religion, and SPIRIT. 

> In the local culture, it is "common knowledge" that the Turks are
> "horrible people" who "massacred" untold numbers of Armenians, Greeks,
> and other peoples.  The Greeks, of course, are the "fathers of
> civilization" and it is "common knowledge" that Greeks and Armenians
> are such gentle folk they would never even insult a Turk, let alone
> harm one.

As I am sure to the Turks the Greeks are equally horrible people who
massacred untold numbers of Turks, Jews, Kurds, etc.  We still see
examples of that in the collected literary works of  Mr. Argic/Mutlu &
Company. 

Yet the fact that with the exception of a few airheads we, the children
of Turkiye and Greece, are having constructive dialogs and are in
general overgrowing our past differences. The discussions I've had over
the last 10 years on the net with Turks are hardly an example of such
stereotyping, however.

The statements about Greeks being the "fathers of civilization" and
"gentle folk" are of course attempts to point out that  somehow Greeks
consider themselves superior... Well, in some aspects maybe. It does
feel good to know that some folks from the same soil and speaking the
same language invented various useful concepts, just like it feels good
when the US basketball team won the gold. 

But I'll be hard pressed to find anyone trying to explain away 
the effort put by the Greek resistance in WW2 (in which both my parents
participated) or the liberation war against the Ottoman Empire (tm) from
1821 to 1830 as "examples of Greek superiority". 

> In the local culture, it is "common knowledge" that "Islam was
> spread by the sword" and that the crusaders were noble,
> self-sacrificing heros who only wanted to "liberate" the Holy Land.

[what is local culture? sounds like you assume all non-Moslems or 
all Greeks to be Moslem-haters... not a very healty assumption ]

The Greeks defended themselves quite well against the Christian Germans
and Christian Italians, thank you. I do not feel very proud of the actions
of the "crusaders" as much as modern Americans are now beginning to feel
uncomfortable with Columbus. While religion and the church played a key
role in the liberation of Greece from the Ottoman Empire (tm), I would be
hard pressed to accept religion as the main reason for the revolution.

When one is oppressed for 400 years, one becomes desperate. It is, as I
repeatedly pointed out, human nature, and not the result of people 
behaving like ***** 99% of the time. And, the bottom line is, and you
can quote me on that, I don't think we should apologise to the Ottomans
(tm) for our actions. The Germans did much more damage to Greece in
four short years and all we got was the Athens Trolley system and a
couple of formal apologies. (BFD IMHO). 

> Umm, there are probably other examples too, but the one-sidedness of
> the usual local perceptions make all discussion of such topics rather
> likely to ignite into insults.  

The purpose of the discussions we're having is not to put one or the
other system on trial. It is not to blame each other for what happened
in the past. It is to get the two sides to have some dialog, try to
understand a little bit about the other side, and see if we can come
to understand why the other side feels the way it does.

Having been on the net for 10 years, I only feel happy that the events
happened a long time in the past and that both sides have had time to
realize what can happen if we have war for real. Greece's (dumb) 
invasion of Anatolia in 1922 and its subsequent catastrophic defeat 
by the Turks would be a hell of a lot different if it happened a few
decades later, just like WW2 would have been a lot more destructive
if it had happened a few decades later.

In closing (yea!), I believe nations whose passion for freedom is much 
less than Greece's exist. Every once in a while during a conflict 
you'll see hundrends of thousands of refugees, or, a huge nation 
giving up and surrendering to the enemy. I'm happy to see that Greece
is a bit more determined than that. 

Regards,

Spiros Triantafyllopoulos

Newsgroups: soc.culture.greek