Palaestra, school for the mind and body, Olympia, Greece. Photo: Evaggelos Vallianatos
Prologue: The ambiguous dream of Western civilization
The idea of Western civilization has always been an ambiguous dream among rulers and thinkers in Europe and North America. It sounds good, yet industrialization, the two world wars of the twentieth century, and American planetary hegemony, all but transformed the idea of Western civilization into a dream. There’s also the Greek factor. The origins and ties of Western civilization are Greek. But the modern vision of Western civilization nearly excludes the living Greeks. No wonder 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, sculpture, architecture and the arts, theater, the Olympics, science and democracy – from the ancient Greeks. They document such claims with museums packed with stolen beautiful Greek art, statues, architecture, codes of law, imitation of the Greek tragic poets and the presentation of their plays in theaters, and the teaching of ancient Greek as well as the history of science from samples of Greek 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.
A 2004 NASA image of Greece. Turkey is east of the Greek Aegean islands, right. Greek Ionia is now Turkey in Asia Minor.
Turkey occupies Ionia, the heartland of ancient Hellenic culture. Europeans for several centuries, and Americans since the nineteenth century, have embraced the Moslem Turks who have been the greatest nemesis and 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.
Islamic Turks and Christian European crusaders defeat and dismember Greece
By late eleventh century, the Turks captured most of Asia Minor from the Greeks. This turned out to be a catastrophe that changed Greek and Western civilization. Medieval Greeks received no military aid from the West against the Mongol Turks. The Turks forcibly converted to Islam the Greeks of Asia Minor. Neither the surviving Greeks in their diminished empire nor the Christians of Western Europe understood the existential threat coming from the Mongol Turks of Asia Minor. Religious hatred made them blind. By mid-eleventh century, Christian Greeks and Christian Western Europeans had excommunicated each other. Christianity had become a weapon.
In 1204, Western Christian crusaders inflicted another lethal blow against the Greeks. Instead of going to Jerusalem to fight the Moslems, armies of Germans, Venetians and French attacked and conquered medieval Greece. They looted. slaughtered, and burned libraries. They dismembered the country. The damage of the Western attack and occupation were so deep and 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 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 of Greek books started the Europeans on the path of science and the construction of our world. For example, the mathematical physics of Archimedes, the third century BCE mathematical genius, inspired and guided Galileo and Newton. The astronomical works of Aristarchos of Samos who invented the Heliocentric Theory of the Cosmos emboldened Nicolaus Copernicus to spread heliocentrism in the West.
Occupied Greece
However, the Western Europeans made no effort to free Greece from Turkish occupation. 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-Egyptian naval forces attacking Peloponnesos. That victory of the great European powers was a culmination of the victories of the Greeks against the Turks. In 1828, the Great Powers sent Ioannes Kapodistrias to Independent Greece. Kapodistrias was a great Greek diplomat that had served as the Secretary of State of Russia. He tried to make Greece a real independent state based on the rule of law and Hellenic traditions. However, the British and the French did not appreciate an independent Greece. They probably funded his assassination on September 27, 1831. After Kapodistrias, Greece barely survived.
However, the Europeans, who started talking about Western civilization, did not abolish the Turkish (Ottoman) empire. World War I did. 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 after 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 has been allowing Turkey to continue its own cold war against Greece: for decades, sending its warplanes over Greek islands in the Aegean, in fact claiming half of the Aegean as their “blue homeland.” And despite meaningless diplomatic efforts of Ankara and Athens for better neighborhood, Turkey is threatening the very survival of the Aegean islands and, indirectly, Greece.
Strangely, America and NATO, which America created to face the Soviet Union- Russia, remain silent on the dangerous policies of Turkey against Greece. Or they side with Turkey. They tolerate Turkish atrocities and violence against the Kurds in Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. They ignore that Turkey has been cleansing the Greek communities of northern Cyprus for 50 years. And America does not have the ethical courage to admit it made a terrible mistake to orchestrate the Turkish conquest of northern Cyprus in 1974. Turkey takes advantage of this grave error of America and continues its aggression in both Cyprus and Greece. Turkey even weaponized its foreign ministry. The apathy of the West (Europe and America) towards a growing aggressive Islamic country member of NATO does not reflect the character of people who claim to be the defenders of Western civilization. It shames Europe and the United States.
Thinking of Europe one immediately comes up with a galaxy of Greeks: Homer, Hesiod, Thales, Anaximander, Pythagoras, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Socrates, Plato, Hippocrates, Aristotle, Aristarchos, Archimedes, Alexander the Great, Plutarch, Galen, Ptolemaios; and another galaxy of non-Greek Europeans: Dante, Desiderius Erasmus, Philip Melanchthon, Galileo Galilei, Nicholas Copernicus, Isaac Newton, Beethoven, Voltaire, Friedrich Nietzsche, Emile Zola, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, and Leo Tolstoy. But thinking of Turkey no name comes to mind, except the violent legacy of a state that terrorized and slaughtered and enslaved the people of Southeastern Europe for several centuries.
School of Athens by Raphael, 1511. Plato (in red clothes) and Aristotle (in blue) in the Platonic Academy. Plato and Aristotle are surrounded by philosophers. Public Domain
The Turks are still celebrating their capture, in 1453, of Constantinople, the capital of the Greek medieval empire. Turkey is the country that George Horton, the American consul general in the Ottoman Empire during World War I, described as “the blight of Asia.” The Ottoman Empire became Turkey while Horton observed its genocidal policies against its non-Moslem minorities. In early twentieth century, in fact, the Turks sealed the doors between them and Europeans. In a presentation on November 7, 2009, in Chicago, — “From Lausanne (1923) to Cyprus (2009) — Van Coufoudakis, professor of political science at the University of Indiana, added details confirming the broad denunciation of Turkey by Horton. He spoke about Turkey-sponsored terror and genocide in Eastern Thrace and the Aegean coastline against non-Moslems, especially Armenians and Greeks and Jews. After WWII, Turkish terrorist groups came under the protection of NATO, supposedly in order to fight invading Soviet troops. By 1962, these violent Turkish organizations became the “Directorate of Special Operations.” Turkey mobilized these terrorists to destroy the properties of the Greeks in Istanbul in the pogrom of 1955. Coufoudakis expressed his anger that NATO cared less about the activities of the groups it organized, possibly funded, and armed in Turkey. The result of this ruthless policy was to encourage the Turks to continue terrorizing and killing Greeks in Turkey and northern Cyprus.
The Lausanne Treaty of 1923, the Nuremberg and Tokyo Tribunals of 1945, the 1949 Geneva Convention, UN Resolutions, and decisions of the European Court of Human Rights made cleansing, violations of human rights, and genocide war crimes. These international conventions made no difference to Turkey. Coufoudakis confirmed that Turkey cleansed the Greek population of occupied Cyprus without fear of any international sanctions. Turkish authorities expelled about 170,000 Greek Cypriots from their ancestral homes. This was the equivalent in 1974 of nearly 70 percent of the population of northern Cyprus occupied by Turkey.
NATO Turkey against NATO Greece
I don’t know how American generals run NATO. I do know that the Turks care less about American leadership of NATO. I already said that, at the height of the Cold War, in 1955, the Turks smashed the Greek community in Constantinople / Istanbul. That barbaric pogrom did not exactly unnerve America or change American and NATO policy toward Turkey. Indeed, England was very pleased with the outcome. England urged Turkey to terrorize the Greeks of Istanbul, that way it revenged the Greeks for the resistance of the Cypriot Greeks against its misrule of Cyprus and for its duplicitous role in nullifying the union of Cyprus with Greece.
In 1974, America ordered Greece to do nothing while Turkey invaded Cyprus. Turkey invaded the Greek island of Cyprus and grabbed nearly half. The Turks killed thousands of Greek Cypriots, forcing close to 170,000 to become refugees in their own country.
The Turks also plundered Cypriot antiquities, converting churches to stables and mosques, while vilifying Cyprus’ 12-millennia-old culture and history. The United Nations issued several resolutions condemning the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, urging Turkey to get out of Cyprus, but Turkey, knowing that America and England shared its strategic interests, has been ignoring the United Nations.
Turkey also keeps provoking Greece with hostile rhetoric, threats, and intimidating military exercises. On May 23, 2006, such unfriendly behavior turned lethal. Greek and Turkish F-16 fighter jets “collided” over the Greek island of Karpathos in the Aegean, killing the Greek pilot.
Greece in the 21st century
Meanwhile, Greece, governed largely by American-educated politicians, is frozen into impotence. America has a large naval base in Crete and one in Alexandroupolis in northern Greece for arming Ukraine with weapons against Russia. These military bases, however, do nothing to safeguard Greek interests against the aggression of Turkey. On the contrary, the American war against Russia through Ukraine must be sending Greece the unmistakable message it must please / submit to Turkey because America wants to keep Turkey in NATO. This assumption at least explains the enforced timidity of Greece towards its fanatical enemy.
In addition, the Obama administration allowed America’s International Monetary Fund to impoverish Greece. The IMF, in concert with the European Union and the European Central Bank, has been taking advantage of the vulnerable debt straits of Greece. Instead of encouraging countries to invest in the country in order to enable it to pay back its unwise loans from European and American banks, the IMF-EU-ECB have been acting like a scrooge, slave drivers undermining Greek economy and bringing the country to its knees. The main beneficiary of such aggression against Greece is Turkey.
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.
Western civilization and Greece
How does one explain this hostile behavior of the countries of the Western civilization towards the very country that sparked their civilization? 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. In the 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 had to be capitalist and Christian (Catholic and Protestant) and obedient members of NATO and the EU.
In contrast to these ideals, Greece was Orthodox (right ideology) Christian that, in cultural terms, leaned 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 (for some time) 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 misguided 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 Turkish hatred for America and Western civilization.
Roots of war
War makes sense to me primarily to defend one’s freedom, exactly like the Greeks did in fighting the invading Persians in early fifth century BCE. Otherwise, war (civil and conquest) is failure of politics. Humans butcher each other in one to one combat with swords and spears or with pistols, guns, machine guns, and missiles. In either case, they prefer aggression, death, and destruction to reason, dialogue, understanding and justice. Of course, as I tried to sketch the Greco-Turkish conflict, we noticed that the origins and infrastructure of war are dark, complex, ideological, religious, political and economic. Many people die but a few benefit from war. And from the case of Greek and Turkish antagonisms, Greece, like it or not, must do her best to be ready for war. The alternative, losing her freedom, is revolting and unacceptable. So, preparations for war are ceaseless.
No wonder, the Greek philosopher Herakleitos, 540-480 BCE, praised war as the father and king of all: making gods and among humans, some made slaves and others free. The Greeks had Ares, a full-time god of war and Athena, goddess of freedom and civilization, had also a mission of protecting Athens, war being one of her assets. So, war, horrific as it is, it had a place in Greek culture.
Thucydides, the great Athenian historian of the Peloponnesian War, 431-404 BCE, tried to find the roots of war. He said that the fear of Sparta for the rising power of Athens caused that pernicious civil conflict among the Greeks. Fear is uncertainty for the intentions of others, especially if those others are thought to be the enemies of those who, like Americans, think their country is the world’s sole superpower. But being superpower, like the Supreme Court, is beyond the rule of law, and, therefore, untenable, monarchical, and imperial. Yet, WWII and the atomic bomb convinced the US it was a superpower, which explains most reasons for the rise of Turkey and the punishment of Greece, by no other than the US superpower in order to satisfy its wrong strategy and unjust fear and antagonism of the Soviet Union / Russia. The sacrificial lamb to the gods of war is Greece, the very country that created what became Western civilization and, therefore, made the US a superpower. Professor Huntington’s insult that Greece was not part of the Western civilization was simply an expression of super hubris, the petroleum of superpower.
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: the use of science-based decisions, democracy, the protection of the natural world, and good life. Western civilization should not be peddled for global hegemony – by anyone. It should be a spark for the revival of Hellenic civilization as it came out of Homer, Hesiod, Pythagoras, Hippocrates, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Euclid, Archimedes, Hipparchos, Ptolemaios, and Galen.
America needs to heal its blindness and stop funding mayhem in Ukraine and Israel. At the same time, the United States must expel Turkey from NATO, while reforming NATO into a machine to fight climate chaos, in Europe, America and the rest of the planet. The anthropogenic climate chaos is the real enemy. Therefore, we must defeat the fossil fuel industry and explore the limitless energy of the Sun, who was a great god to the Greeks for millennia.
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.
NOTES
1. Πόλεμος πάντων μεν πατήρ εστί, πάντων δε βασιλεύς, και τούς μεν θεούς έδειξε, τούς δέ ανθρώπους, τούς με δούλους εποίησε τους δε ελευθέρους. Fragment 53, Hippolytus. ↑
