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IS THERE A RIFT BETWEEN GREECE AND THE FORMER YUGOSLAV REPUBLIC OF "MACEDONIA" ON ALEXANDER?
American Chronicle
http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/11 2014
July 28 2009
Miltiades Elia Bolaris July 28, 2009 On a Washington Post article,
("Another Rift Between Greece, Macedonia, Both Lay Claim to Alexander
the Great", July 28, 2009) Craig Whitlock is intend on sending us
scrambling back to our History books. Should we be talking about
Alexandros o Megas or Aleksandar Veliki? Was he Greek or was he
Slavic? I will let the reader do their own reading and research. Any
encyclopaedia, in any language, anywhere in the world, except for
the ones published in the former Yugoslav republic will be fine.
Mr. Whitlock is correctly pointing out that Alexander's "cult of
personality is just starting to grip this tiny Balkan country",
speaking of FYROM, informing us that among other childish actions that
the government in Skopje is doing to annoy the Greeks is the erection
of "a 72-foot-tall marble colossus of Alexander astride his favorite
warhorse, Bucephalus, which will dominate the skyline of the capital,
Skopje". Our information is that it is actually a bronze statue, not
marble, but the rest is correct: Greeks are understandably annoyed
by the ethno-religious cult that has hijacked the political debate of
their neighbor. Why did I say "childish"? Because only little children
do things to annoy others...not governments, not nations. Someone
who getting "annoyed" will become hardened and less willing to
give in. This is something that FYROM's "diplomats in training"
have yet to grasp. When they try to "annoy" the Greek government,
what they essentially end up achieving is is aggravate the Greek
electorate, especially the Greek Macedonian (of Historic Macedonia,
in Nothern Greece, not FYROM) into demanding a tougher stance from
Athens against the "Skopianoi". The article is correctly pointing
out that "this glorification of Alexander and other ancient heroes"
is derided by critics in Skopje as "antiquization." I have also heard
the term Bukefalism (Bucephalism), a more sarcastic term by rightfully
embarrassed intellectuals in FYROM.
The issue, as presented in Mr. Whitlock's article, is stated as
follows: Does a country have the right to be call itself what it
wants? A second issue, but more important is this issue's "potential
to destabilize a region still trying to recover from the Balkan wars
of the 1990s".
Let us start with the name issue itself. If the reader goes to any
encyclopaedia, he or she will quickly find out who Alexander was,
who the Macedonians were and what language the ancient Macedonians
spoke. For the reader who would want to read further on this,
then another article would be more appropriate: "The alleged
differences between the Macedonians and the other ancient Greeks",
(http://www.americanchronicle.com/ar ticles/view/101463).
The name Macedonia itself is Greek, meaning the "high lands", and
Makednoi or Makedones are the highlanders. "Hesiod first mentioned
'Makedon', the eponym of the people and the country, as a son of Zeus,
a grandson of Deukalion, and so a first cousin of Aeolus, Dorus,
and Xuthus; in other words he considered the 'Makedones' to be an
outlying branch of the Greek-speaking tribes, with a distinctive
dialect of their own, 'Macedonian', is what we read in the "Oxford
Classical Dictionary", 3rd ed. (1996), pp.904,905.
There are about a half a million marble inscriptions that have
been found in Macedonia, all written in Greek, with the occasional
Latin one, after the Roman conquest, but then still in the small
minority. None has been found in any other language.
Finally, we have the strongest indication on the ethnicity of the
Ancient Macedonians, in their Greek language: This is precisely
the language that Alexander and his victorious Macedonians spread
throughout the Asian lands they took over, including the dominion of
Egypt in Africa. The Slavs whose descendants now claim exclusivity over
the use of the name Macedonia, appeared in the Balkan peninsula more
than a thousand years AFTER Alexander. Hence the irritation of the
Greeks when others try to claim their ancient history. When someone
claims your history, what they also claim is your land. If someone
claims the title to your house, he is not simply claiming a piece of
paper to hang on a wall as a souvenir: he is actually claiming your
house, land, walls and roof.
Craig Whitlock seems to be siding with "Macedonian officials" who
"said they cannot understand why Greece sees their country's name
as a threat or thinks they have a secret plan to annex northern
Greece. "It's laughable," said Foreign Minister Antonio Milososki,
noting that the Macedonian military consists of 8,000 troops and a
fleet of eight helicopters.
I would beg to differ with Mr. Whitlock's seeming naivete, for I
cannot imagine that he has not read the 20th century history of the
land that is Macedonia, before he wrote what he wrote. I am very
certain that he knows that two Balkan wars have been fought over the
control of Macedonia, the land. Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria, and later
Yugoslavia, along with numerous other players, including Austrians,
Germans, Italians and Albanians fought in two world wars in their
attempt to become masters of Macedonia. Yugoslavia and Greece almost
came to a clash right after WWII, when Tito made a thinly veiled
attempt to carve parts of Macedonia from Greece and incorporate them
into Yugoslavia, but actively joining one side in the Greek civil
war of the 1940's. His reasons were far from ideological, it was
purely a land grab. You may read some of the background in another,
related article: "A brief overview of the Macedonian name issue"
(http://www.americanchronicle.com/arti cles/view/109817).
As for Anton Milososki, FYROM's foreign minister, he may try to
appear laughing at the suggestion of the threat his country is
posing to Greece, but his boss's trips to Ankara and the rousing
welcome the Turkish Political-Military establishment prepared for
Nikola Gruevski there, did not go unnoticed in Athens. As for FYROM's
eight helicopters, lined up against Greece's formidable air force,
we know that Greece is not arming itself against FYROM, it is an
attack from Turkey that it is always prepared to confront. In such a
confrontation, FYROM can easily become the straw that will break the
camel's back. Alternatively, we need to remember that only a few years
ago, the Kosovar Albanians "defeated" the all powerful Serbian army,
without firing a winning shot: others, Americans and Western Europeans,
even Turks did the fighting for them. In history, you cannot pretend
to play naive. You can always expect the worse case scenario. When
Bulgaria entered the second Balkan war, all it had against it was the
Greek and the Serbian armies, and the Bulgarian army was larger than
the other two combined. It expected a quick victory in two weeks'
time, long enough for the Great powers to intervene. Things did not
go as planned, the Greeks and Serbs started winning, and then hell
broke loose: Turks and Romanians joined the war against Bulgaria,
and Bulgaria from formidable attacker ended up the defender, fighting
for its existence. Moral of the story: If someone has land claims on
your home, you do not simply shrug your shoulders and walk away. You
confront the issue, until there is a resolution.
The former Yugoslav republic, under the 1995 agreement agreed to change
its flag (which hitherto had used a Greek Macedonian Symbol). It
also agreed "to rewrite its constitution to include a promise
never to violate Greek territory or interfere in Greece's internal
affairs". This basically means that the original constitution had
made explicit references to a United Makedonija Obedineta Makedonija,
the old Bulgarian and later Yugoslav slogan which was a war cry for
land grab of historic Macedonia, from Northern Greece. Obviously
they had to change it. They felt humiliated in the process, that is
probably true. On the other hand, any little boy that senselessly
tries to bully a stronger classmate in school and ends up getting
slapped around, feels rightfully humiliated. The 30 year old amateur
diplomats who have been running the little country's foreign policy
for the last eighteen years are good at creating peaks of crises
with bravado and hullabaloo, only to smash their heads on the wall,
bringing unnecessary disappointment to their own people. This is
precisely what they did in last year's NATO conference in Romania,
when, with G.W.Bush's full support they tried to slip into NATO,
bypassing the name issue, with champagne bottles ready to pop. When
disaster struck, they did not know what to do and they were crying
in front of the TV cameras, talking of a national catastrophe.
Mr. Whitlock's tells his readers that "Leaders in Macedonia, a poor,
landlocked country about the size of New Hampshire, warned they may
have trouble holding the nation together if Greece does not relent
soon. Internal unrest, they said, could easily spread to other fragile
nations in the Balkans...". let us take this argument and consider
its opposite side: Greeks have been warning FYROM's politicians that
may have trouble holding their nation together if the governing clique
in Skopje does not relent soon and stop playing with Balkan fire.
Why is this line of arguments more correct? For several reasons. First
of all, it was not Greece that started this whole mess, it was the
Ultra-nationalist hotheads in Skopje. they are the ones who started
and they are the ones who can instantly stop it. They adopted for
themselves the name Macedonian, as if this name was existing in vacuum
as a "freeware". Not so, since a province of Macedonia exists since
1913 in Greece.
While the name Macedonia was Greek in antiquity, by the early
20th century a multiple of people were considered geographically
"Macedonians", for being inhabitants of Macedonia, in the same way
people who lived in Bosnia Herzegovina were all Bosnians Herzegovinans
but others were catholic, others Orthodox yet others Muslim. Macedonia
was even more complex: people of a multiple linguistic, ethnic and
religious affiliations made up its multiethnic mix. Everyone was a
Macedonian, BUT NONE was an ethnic "Macedonian". This had to wait
until 1943, when the Communist Party of Yugoslavia established a
Communist Party of "Makedonija" and became determined to turn its
Serbian, Bulgarian and other (Slavic and not only) inhabitants into
full-bloodied "Makedonci".
Since the 2.6 million Greeks of Macedonia have a cultural Macedonian
identity, they cannot forgo their own identity just because half as
many Slavs north of their land decided to usurp the name Macedonian
and try to make it an "ethnic" name. This needs to be understood. I
will repeat it. When there is a shared name, a shared geographic
identity, you cannot have one of them claim that THEY are the ones,
the REAL ones, the TRUE ones and that the others now have to change
into something else. Nothing aggravated a Macedonian Greek more than
someone telling him "...so are you a Greek or a Macedonian?".
To a Greek this sounds like..."are you an American or a
Californian?". If Baja California at some point in its future decides
to become an independent state, cutting itself off from Mexico and
calls itself California, will this give the Bajan Californians the
right to be called the "ethnic" Californians subsequently refusing
persons from San Francisco or Los Angeles their right to have a
"Californian" identity?
Now, let's see again how it sounds: "Oh, you are from Los
Angeles?...So, are you an American or a Californian? Do you speak
Californian (which is of course perfectly Spanish, just the Mexican
dialect of Baja California Spanish, now renamed "Californian") or you
speak American"? It will not sound too convincing to many Californians,
will it? Well, this is precisely what the Greeks have to deal with,
for the last eighteen years. The Bulgarian and Serbian speaking
Slavic population decides to change the name of their land and call
it Makedonija. Then they decide to rename their Bulgarian dialect
"Makedonski" and now they demand that the Greeks of Macedonia forgo
their cultural and geographic identity as Macedonians. This is not
going to happen, no matter how much the governments in Athens decide to
"cooperate" and give in to seem cooperative.
But, "The problem is threatening the fabric of our society," Gjorge
Ivanov, the president of Macedonia, said in an interview. "The pressure
that Greece is making is destabilizing the whole region." is that
so? And who told you to base your ethnic identity on a BIG LIE? If you
have been lying to your own people for two generations about their
true identity, is this now OUR problem? the Greeks of Macedonia can
counter. And who is destabilizing "the whole region"? Who has been
screaming about "United Makedonija!", who is polluting the internet
with screams of "Solun" (the capital of Greek Macedonia, the one
million strong city of Thessaloniki) "is the capital of United
Makedonija!", who is being 19th century style irredentist?
Who is refusing to see reality in the eyes and tries to dig up ancient
Greek Kings and adopt them as their own, refuting the true Slavic
identity of their own people? Who is publishing State-sanctioned
History books (the latest one came out a month ago), declaring that
the Makedonci are not a Slavic nation! Is it the Greeks? The Serbs, The
Bulgarians? No, it is people like this very same President Mr. Ivanov,
and his boss, Nikola Gruevski.
Lincoln said it very eloquently that you cannot lie to ALL the
people ALL the time. The BIG LIE will eventually catch up with you,
at some point or another! It surely caught about with more than a
hundred thousand Skopjan citizens to date who, fed up with the 35%
unemployment, and unable to cash Alexander the Great's 72ft tall
bronze statue for food stamps, have opted to go to the Bulgarian
embassy in Skopje and declare themselves "ethnic Bulgarians". How
many of them in reality feel Bulgarian is difficult to say, and at
the end of the day it will not make any difference. For sure, every
single one of them greatly appreciates the brand new red EU passport
that allows them to find a job anywhere in Europe! The Slavs leave,
the Albanians stay...the future Kosovo-style crises is beginning to
brew...and whose fault it this?
This, Mr. Ivanov should be told, is the dynamite under the foundations
of your multi-ethnic country: while you are busy creating and defending
THE BIG LIE, you seem to have forgotten the big lessons of the collapse
of Yugoslavia: "It's the Economy, Stupid!" Once people start going
hungry, no lies will stand in front of their children's future and
their family's survival!
In the same article we see mention of the Albanian minority and some
of its concerns, which led in 1991 to an armed uprising. I would
dare suggest that maybe the anti-Albanian riots in Monastir/Bitola
and extreme pseudo-Makedonism is what led the Albanians to feel
as second rate citizens in a "Macedonian state". Maybe I am wrong,
but I will need to see some strong proof, because arguments like that
"the assumption that Macedonia would join NATO" was going to act as a
"guarantee of internal stability", sounds to me like empty talk. "It
would give us medicine for our hot heads," said Menduh Tachi, leader
of the opposition Democratic Party of Albanians." we read in the
article. That is a remote possibility, I suppose, but we need to
distinguish between what the leader of a political Party says, and
what his constituents in the street say. The Albanian in the street
needs a job, he needs a police that is not engaged in ethnic brutality
and he needs a future, for him, for his family. People do not simply
get to the guns and start a revolt unless they feel desperate that
their future is taken from them. What does NATO have to do with the
INTERNAL stability of FYROM and the Albanian issue? An argument can be
convincingly be made for the EXTERNAL stability, but not the internal.
In Mr. Whitlock's article we are told that "Macedonians say the name
of the country is crucial to developing their still wobbly national
identity." This is interesting. Greeks do not have a "wobbly" national
identity, Serbs or Albanians do not either. They know who they are. Is
it maybe because the so called "Macedonian" have been given a fake
identity, for the last sixty-odd years, a make-believe identity that
has not stuck well with them? And why is it so important to sweep all
the half baked inventions of Yugolavia's Titoism under a NATO woven
rug of convenience, and have the neighbors deal with the INEVITABLY
ugly aftermath, whenever (not if...) that comes? No...while FYROM's
Titoist rebaptized nomenclatura may be just jolly and fine with the
perpetuation of pseudo-Makedonism's BIG LIE; a BIG LIE from which they
can keep their stranglehold on this poor country and its resources,
and the future EU funds, ready for VMRO corruption and plunder, the
people of the area deserve a better future than that: THEY DEMAND A
FINAL RESOLUTION OF THIS BAD JOKE OF AN ISSUE!
Craig Whitlock informs us that "Ethnic Albanians say they would revolt
if the Slavic Republic of Macedonia was the new name because they are
not Slavs". I honestly wonder, whom is he trying to convince? Where is
the logic in his argument? First of all Greeks never said they want a
Slavic Republic of "Macedonia", they suggested Slavomacedonia, which
includes the word Macedonia in a "syn-thetic" name. If the "Makedonci"
claim to be "ethnic Macedonians", and they want to call their name
"Macedonia", their supposed name, then where do the Albanians fit
into this? By the "Ethnic Macedonian" formula, the Albanians are NOT
considered Macedonians, so, then, if it is called Slavomacedonia, what
difference will it make to the Albanians? Call it Japanese Macedonia,
Chinese Macedonia if you like, it still does not make any difference
to the Albanians. If anything, the so called "Albanian" argument
against Slavomacedonia, inevitably leads to a PURELY GEOGRAPHIC,
purely non-ethnic, neutral name, that excludes nobody! Yes or no? If
we try to be logical, we need to start making sense after some point,
and not simply regurgitate arguments thrown arround by others with
greater interests and bigger knifes to grind.
Towards the end we are given the argument of a hard liner
Slavmacedonian big hat, a certain "Todor Petrov, president of the
World Macedonian Congress" obviously some ultra-nationalist emigre',
who "said the country should stop kowtowing to Greece and just call
itself the Republic of Macedonia, regardless of how badly it wants
to join NATO or the European Union." Perfect...and why should this
gentleman give a hoot about whether "his" country joins the European
Union and sees untold amounts of investment flow in that will create
jobs for his "co-patriots"? Simply because, technically, I assume,
he is not even THEIR compatriot. he does not live their misery and
poverty. He is probably sitting in his office somewhere in Toronto,
Sydney or Indianapolis, and he makes a comfortable living away from
them. All he cares about is HIS identity as an emigre, which is light
years away from the identity of the person on the ground in FYROM,
the average unemployed SlavoMacedonian man who sells his family's
"Makedonskata" identity for a EU passport that says EUROPEAN UNION
outside in golden letter over red.
Then, and here the article becomes suspect of being more like a
paid lobbyists stroke of genius rather than genuine journalism, we
are quoted the same gentleman, Todor Petrov who "In an interview,
he accused Greece of "practicing ethnic cleansing and genocide on
the Macedonian nation" for the past 100 years. "They're denying our
nationality and culture and church and history and our borders," he
said." Really, now? I have seen photographs of Jews in crematoria and
piles of corpses in Nazi concentration camps. I have seen pictures of
beheaded Armenians, men women and children, in Turkey, during WWI, but
I have still to see a photo of Greek Genocide against the "Macedonian"
"nation".
Journa lism, I would expect, demands fairness and balance. How can
the rumblings of an ultra-nationalist emigre be given space to defame
the Greeks through an imaginary BIG LIE, (which by the way is a very
recent invention, they have come up witht hsi "genocide theory" post
2000) without allowing the reader the chance to hear so much as even
a question mark on this? But lest I forget, did anyone notice what
this Titoist nationalist just say at the end of his sentence? Let us
revisit his uttering:
"They're denying our nationality and culture and church and history
and our borders," he said." Your borders? Which borders? The United
Macedonia borders? Where do your borders start and where do they
end? Is the so called "Aegean Macedonia" (they will never be caught
alive saying Greek Macedonia, so they invented the misnomer :"Aegean
Macedonia") part of the borders you feel the Greeks are denying you?
Then the juicy fruits start coming one by one: "It is not just
Macedonia's national identity that is at stake. The Greek government
does not recognize ethnic minorities within its own borders, including
Macedonian-speaking residents of northern Greece."
We are even offered the distinguished opinion of a very important
gentleman: "Pavle Voskopoulos, a Greek citizen who leads the Rainbow
Party, a group of ethnic Macedonians in northern Greece, said
the country subscribes to a myth of a "pure" Greek people who are
directly descended from Alexander and others from his era. "This is
all about modern Greek identity," he said. "If there is a Macedonia
as an independent state, this is a great threat against Greek policy
and Greek ideology."
I grew up in Greece and went through most of my formative years
there and that included even the years under the ludicrous colonels'
Junta. I do not recall anyone teaching me about a "pure" Greek nation,
yet I see our friends from Skopje repeatedly accusing Greeks of this
very same myth. Greeks since antiquity know that it is not blood
lines that make a nation, but common living, commonality in culture
and common interests. though it sounds like a puzzle to others from
outside, Americans do constitute a nation, and so do Australians and
Canadians. There are subgroups that is for sure, but there is unity
in diversity. Greek are the same.
Ancient Greeks were a dynamic mix of local Pelasgians, and other local
tribes, Indo-European speaking Greeks, who arrived in Greece around
2000 BC, and as time went by they mixed with slaves, and others who
came as a result of Alexander's expeditions in Asia, and later with
Romans, Thracians, etc. Greek culture has been evolving the last 4000
years and it is the language that more than anything (religion too,
to a smaller of greater degree, depending on the historic frame)
that makes their nation. Who ever talked about racial purity? Only
Dog breeders and Nazis are thinking in these terms. As for Pavlos
Voskopoulos, the leader of the Party of the Ethnic Macedonians of
Greece, I will ask the readers permission to copy here what I recently
wrote in another recent article on this issue, about the political
Party Mr Voskopoulos leads:
"When Ouranio Toxo - Vinozhito (Raibow) a political Party representing
the "ethnic Macedonians" slated candidates under the banners of the
European Free Alliance (Eyropaiki Eleytheri Symmachia - Ouranio Toxo)
for the in June 2009 Europarliament, the total votes tally they were
able to receive in the districts of Macedonia were two thousand five
hundred ninety four votes (2594), out of a population of 2.5 million
Greek Macedonians
( http://ekloges-prev.singularlogic.eu/e2009/pages/i ndex.html?lang=en
).
This is hardly making a case for allowing one third of Greece,
Macedonia, to be split and given as a land grant to the FYROM
ultra-nationalists in Skopje.
By comparison, the Komma Ellinon Kynigon (Fysi - Kynigi - Psarema
- Paradosi)/Party of Greek Hunters (Nature -Hunting - Fishing -
Tradition), the quintessential joke of a party in Greece, in the
very same districts (Districts of Drama, Kavala, A' Thessalonikis,
B' Thessalonikis, Serres, Chalkidiki, Kilkis, Pella, Imathia, Pieria,
Florina, Kozani, Kastoria and Grevena) received 5900 votes, twice as
many as Eyropaiki Eleytheri Symmachia - Ouranio Toxo / Vinozhito.
( http://ekloges-prev.singularlogic.eu/e2009/pages/i ndex.html?lang=en
).
We are given here the opinion of the leader of a Party that was able
to gather less than one vote per thousand people in Greek Macedonia
supporting their cause, although they had tv time, and freedom to say
whatever they wanted, yet they managed to gather half the votes of
the hunter's party! What minority are we talking about then? the best
statistics may be talking of some fifty thousand bilingual people
who speak Slavic ALSO, besides Greek. And that is true especially
of the older generations, but that again makes no difference:
it is identity that counts, not language not blood, not anything
else. Several, though not all, Muslim Slavs in Greece (Pomaks) consider
themselves to be Turkish though they speak no word in Turkish. And
Many Jews worldwide think of themselves as Jews though they speak
no Hebrew. These are instances where one part of the identity, the
religious one, overcomes language and other aspects of culture. I
have met not a few Americans who are Greek Orthodox in religion and
Greek in culture and identity, though they speak no word in Greek, and
they revel in their double identity as both Americans and Greeks. It
is self identity that counts. It is who and what you want to be. A
huge part of identity, sometimes even primary, is of course language,
but not the only one. A bilingual person can always chose the identity
he prefers. Many families in pre-war Macedonia were split in half when
one brother would decide to "became" a Bulgarian ("ethnic Macedonians"
had not been invented yet) and another to "became" a Greek. A bilingual
of Macedonia who speaks both Greek and Slavic, but considers himself
to be a Greek and derogatorily calls the people across the frontiers
"Yugoslavs", cannot be counted as one of Mr. Voskopoulos's voters or
"ethnic minority" supporters. A Cuban-American in Miami, is typically a
fully bilingual Spanish and English speaking, and while he has a strong
Spanich/Cuban identity is also at the same time very much an American.
The Washington Post article continues by informing us that FYROM
"has renamed its national stadium for King Philip II, Alexander's
father, and organized dozens of archaeological digs." It is not
what you dig out that matters to Greeks, but the language found
written in the artifacts, and the culture that created these
artifacts. Claiming for example prehistoric stone-age artifacts as
"proof" of an age-long continuum of (Slavo)"Macedonian" culture
is as ludicrous as naming Greek funerary, religious and political
Greek inscriptions "ancient-Macedonian" epigraphy. The Zenith of
"Fyromian-antiquization" kitsch is displayed in the governing Palace
in Skopje, where a series of priceless ancient Greek statues have
been arranged with total disregard to their care, on the sidewalk,
as proof of "ancient Macedonian" art. Similarly, a huge Greek
inscription which mentions the Makedonarchs (leaders of Macedonia)
has been hauled from the Archaeological site and taken to decorate
the entry to Mr. Gruevski's Gubernatorial building.
"Officials", we are reminded, "also like to needle Greeks that the
philosopher Aristotle, who tutored the teenage Alexander, was from
the kingdom of Macedonia, not Athens". This is a true statement:
Athens was not Greece, Athens was IN Greece. Macedonia was in Greece
too. The fact that someone was from Macedonia, like Aristotle, does
not make him any less a Greek than someone from Athens as someone
from Sparta or Hellenistic Egypt or Syracuse in southern Italy. the
fact that Eratosthenes was from Egypt does not make him an Arab,
since Arabs came into Egypt seven Hundred years after him. He was
Greek. The fact that Archimedes was from Syracuse, does not make
him a Roman, he was a Greek who was in fact killed by a Roman during
the capture of his country, his city state by the Romans. And after
all, Aristotle is not known for simply being Alexander's tutor...he
is the man that established the scientific method and one of the
two pillars, along with Plato, of ancient Greek Philosophy. And
there is no question as to what language he wrote in. If he was a
"Slavo-Makedonski" Macedonian, why did he not write in Slavic? The
Romans were brutes and uneducated in the beginning yet when they
started writing they wrote in their own language, Latin. Where is
that elusive language of the Macedonians, the ancient conquerors of
the known world, the language of Alexander, Philip II and Aristotle,
if it was not the Greek they left us in their incriptions?
The fact that there are plenty of pseudo-scientists in FYROM, like the
Archaeologist "Pasko Kuzman, the government's director of cultural
heritage" who prostitute their allegiance to science for the sake
of pseudo-scientific political ends, is not surprising. Hitler found
doctors who killed their fellow humans in order to execute SS-ordered
human "experiments". I would never call Pasko Kuzman an SS officer,
far from it (though I have no problem describing some of his political
bosses in VMRO as such). No, his description "as a cross between
Indiana Jones and Santa Claus" goes along way to create a good picture
of him, but I would definitely add a bit of Goebbels into the mix:
it is the BIG LIE "thing"...with which he has been raised, in Tito's
Yugoslavia and from which, like a second skin, he cannot get out of.
Someone could easily claim that Greeks are too emotionally involved
to be credible, when speaking of ancient Macedonia. I can say that
this might be correct with some. On the other hand, the facts are
facts and nobody can escape from them, not even FYROM government's own
"director of cultural heritage". Then, who would be the best to expose
the falacy and fakeness of pseudoMacedonist theories? None other than
the ex prime minister of the country, i suppoze, Ljupco Georgievski,
who abandoned Pseudomakedonism and went to maika Bulgaria and got
a Bulgarian passport, remembering that his grandparents were all
Bulgarian, after all. This is how the ex-Prime Minister countered
Pasko Kuzman's nebulous theories, logically and point to point:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HvKPiLYZCI &NR=1
But in Craig Whitlock's interview, the professor had other things
to say:
"The Greeks are sorry that they are called Greece and not Macedonia,"
he said. "What else can I tell you?"
Don't say anything professor...polla eipas and, as Aristotle, that
timeless Macedonian philosopher said: "ouk en to pollo to eu!...I do
not need to translate what he said, you are eis Makedon Macedonian,
as you claim; I am sure you can read Aristotle in the original...
Then, after you finish Aristotle, please go and read what 350 Classics
professors world wide are saying, on the Macedonia issue, in their
Open Letter to President Obama:
http://macedonia-evidence.org/obama-letter .html
What was Pasko Kuzman's reply to that letter?
It is right here, on national tv:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tCgTJsRuW8
American Chronicle
http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/11 2014
July 28 2009
Miltiades Elia Bolaris July 28, 2009 On a Washington Post article,
("Another Rift Between Greece, Macedonia, Both Lay Claim to Alexander
the Great", July 28, 2009) Craig Whitlock is intend on sending us
scrambling back to our History books. Should we be talking about
Alexandros o Megas or Aleksandar Veliki? Was he Greek or was he
Slavic? I will let the reader do their own reading and research. Any
encyclopaedia, in any language, anywhere in the world, except for
the ones published in the former Yugoslav republic will be fine.
Mr. Whitlock is correctly pointing out that Alexander's "cult of
personality is just starting to grip this tiny Balkan country",
speaking of FYROM, informing us that among other childish actions that
the government in Skopje is doing to annoy the Greeks is the erection
of "a 72-foot-tall marble colossus of Alexander astride his favorite
warhorse, Bucephalus, which will dominate the skyline of the capital,
Skopje". Our information is that it is actually a bronze statue, not
marble, but the rest is correct: Greeks are understandably annoyed
by the ethno-religious cult that has hijacked the political debate of
their neighbor. Why did I say "childish"? Because only little children
do things to annoy others...not governments, not nations. Someone
who getting "annoyed" will become hardened and less willing to
give in. This is something that FYROM's "diplomats in training"
have yet to grasp. When they try to "annoy" the Greek government,
what they essentially end up achieving is is aggravate the Greek
electorate, especially the Greek Macedonian (of Historic Macedonia,
in Nothern Greece, not FYROM) into demanding a tougher stance from
Athens against the "Skopianoi". The article is correctly pointing
out that "this glorification of Alexander and other ancient heroes"
is derided by critics in Skopje as "antiquization." I have also heard
the term Bukefalism (Bucephalism), a more sarcastic term by rightfully
embarrassed intellectuals in FYROM.
The issue, as presented in Mr. Whitlock's article, is stated as
follows: Does a country have the right to be call itself what it
wants? A second issue, but more important is this issue's "potential
to destabilize a region still trying to recover from the Balkan wars
of the 1990s".
Let us start with the name issue itself. If the reader goes to any
encyclopaedia, he or she will quickly find out who Alexander was,
who the Macedonians were and what language the ancient Macedonians
spoke. For the reader who would want to read further on this,
then another article would be more appropriate: "The alleged
differences between the Macedonians and the other ancient Greeks",
(http://www.americanchronicle.com/ar ticles/view/101463).
The name Macedonia itself is Greek, meaning the "high lands", and
Makednoi or Makedones are the highlanders. "Hesiod first mentioned
'Makedon', the eponym of the people and the country, as a son of Zeus,
a grandson of Deukalion, and so a first cousin of Aeolus, Dorus,
and Xuthus; in other words he considered the 'Makedones' to be an
outlying branch of the Greek-speaking tribes, with a distinctive
dialect of their own, 'Macedonian', is what we read in the "Oxford
Classical Dictionary", 3rd ed. (1996), pp.904,905.
There are about a half a million marble inscriptions that have
been found in Macedonia, all written in Greek, with the occasional
Latin one, after the Roman conquest, but then still in the small
minority. None has been found in any other language.
Finally, we have the strongest indication on the ethnicity of the
Ancient Macedonians, in their Greek language: This is precisely
the language that Alexander and his victorious Macedonians spread
throughout the Asian lands they took over, including the dominion of
Egypt in Africa. The Slavs whose descendants now claim exclusivity over
the use of the name Macedonia, appeared in the Balkan peninsula more
than a thousand years AFTER Alexander. Hence the irritation of the
Greeks when others try to claim their ancient history. When someone
claims your history, what they also claim is your land. If someone
claims the title to your house, he is not simply claiming a piece of
paper to hang on a wall as a souvenir: he is actually claiming your
house, land, walls and roof.
Craig Whitlock seems to be siding with "Macedonian officials" who
"said they cannot understand why Greece sees their country's name
as a threat or thinks they have a secret plan to annex northern
Greece. "It's laughable," said Foreign Minister Antonio Milososki,
noting that the Macedonian military consists of 8,000 troops and a
fleet of eight helicopters.
I would beg to differ with Mr. Whitlock's seeming naivete, for I
cannot imagine that he has not read the 20th century history of the
land that is Macedonia, before he wrote what he wrote. I am very
certain that he knows that two Balkan wars have been fought over the
control of Macedonia, the land. Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria, and later
Yugoslavia, along with numerous other players, including Austrians,
Germans, Italians and Albanians fought in two world wars in their
attempt to become masters of Macedonia. Yugoslavia and Greece almost
came to a clash right after WWII, when Tito made a thinly veiled
attempt to carve parts of Macedonia from Greece and incorporate them
into Yugoslavia, but actively joining one side in the Greek civil
war of the 1940's. His reasons were far from ideological, it was
purely a land grab. You may read some of the background in another,
related article: "A brief overview of the Macedonian name issue"
(http://www.americanchronicle.com/arti cles/view/109817).
As for Anton Milososki, FYROM's foreign minister, he may try to
appear laughing at the suggestion of the threat his country is
posing to Greece, but his boss's trips to Ankara and the rousing
welcome the Turkish Political-Military establishment prepared for
Nikola Gruevski there, did not go unnoticed in Athens. As for FYROM's
eight helicopters, lined up against Greece's formidable air force,
we know that Greece is not arming itself against FYROM, it is an
attack from Turkey that it is always prepared to confront. In such a
confrontation, FYROM can easily become the straw that will break the
camel's back. Alternatively, we need to remember that only a few years
ago, the Kosovar Albanians "defeated" the all powerful Serbian army,
without firing a winning shot: others, Americans and Western Europeans,
even Turks did the fighting for them. In history, you cannot pretend
to play naive. You can always expect the worse case scenario. When
Bulgaria entered the second Balkan war, all it had against it was the
Greek and the Serbian armies, and the Bulgarian army was larger than
the other two combined. It expected a quick victory in two weeks'
time, long enough for the Great powers to intervene. Things did not
go as planned, the Greeks and Serbs started winning, and then hell
broke loose: Turks and Romanians joined the war against Bulgaria,
and Bulgaria from formidable attacker ended up the defender, fighting
for its existence. Moral of the story: If someone has land claims on
your home, you do not simply shrug your shoulders and walk away. You
confront the issue, until there is a resolution.
The former Yugoslav republic, under the 1995 agreement agreed to change
its flag (which hitherto had used a Greek Macedonian Symbol). It
also agreed "to rewrite its constitution to include a promise
never to violate Greek territory or interfere in Greece's internal
affairs". This basically means that the original constitution had
made explicit references to a United Makedonija Obedineta Makedonija,
the old Bulgarian and later Yugoslav slogan which was a war cry for
land grab of historic Macedonia, from Northern Greece. Obviously
they had to change it. They felt humiliated in the process, that is
probably true. On the other hand, any little boy that senselessly
tries to bully a stronger classmate in school and ends up getting
slapped around, feels rightfully humiliated. The 30 year old amateur
diplomats who have been running the little country's foreign policy
for the last eighteen years are good at creating peaks of crises
with bravado and hullabaloo, only to smash their heads on the wall,
bringing unnecessary disappointment to their own people. This is
precisely what they did in last year's NATO conference in Romania,
when, with G.W.Bush's full support they tried to slip into NATO,
bypassing the name issue, with champagne bottles ready to pop. When
disaster struck, they did not know what to do and they were crying
in front of the TV cameras, talking of a national catastrophe.
Mr. Whitlock's tells his readers that "Leaders in Macedonia, a poor,
landlocked country about the size of New Hampshire, warned they may
have trouble holding the nation together if Greece does not relent
soon. Internal unrest, they said, could easily spread to other fragile
nations in the Balkans...". let us take this argument and consider
its opposite side: Greeks have been warning FYROM's politicians that
may have trouble holding their nation together if the governing clique
in Skopje does not relent soon and stop playing with Balkan fire.
Why is this line of arguments more correct? For several reasons. First
of all, it was not Greece that started this whole mess, it was the
Ultra-nationalist hotheads in Skopje. they are the ones who started
and they are the ones who can instantly stop it. They adopted for
themselves the name Macedonian, as if this name was existing in vacuum
as a "freeware". Not so, since a province of Macedonia exists since
1913 in Greece.
While the name Macedonia was Greek in antiquity, by the early
20th century a multiple of people were considered geographically
"Macedonians", for being inhabitants of Macedonia, in the same way
people who lived in Bosnia Herzegovina were all Bosnians Herzegovinans
but others were catholic, others Orthodox yet others Muslim. Macedonia
was even more complex: people of a multiple linguistic, ethnic and
religious affiliations made up its multiethnic mix. Everyone was a
Macedonian, BUT NONE was an ethnic "Macedonian". This had to wait
until 1943, when the Communist Party of Yugoslavia established a
Communist Party of "Makedonija" and became determined to turn its
Serbian, Bulgarian and other (Slavic and not only) inhabitants into
full-bloodied "Makedonci".
Since the 2.6 million Greeks of Macedonia have a cultural Macedonian
identity, they cannot forgo their own identity just because half as
many Slavs north of their land decided to usurp the name Macedonian
and try to make it an "ethnic" name. This needs to be understood. I
will repeat it. When there is a shared name, a shared geographic
identity, you cannot have one of them claim that THEY are the ones,
the REAL ones, the TRUE ones and that the others now have to change
into something else. Nothing aggravated a Macedonian Greek more than
someone telling him "...so are you a Greek or a Macedonian?".
To a Greek this sounds like..."are you an American or a
Californian?". If Baja California at some point in its future decides
to become an independent state, cutting itself off from Mexico and
calls itself California, will this give the Bajan Californians the
right to be called the "ethnic" Californians subsequently refusing
persons from San Francisco or Los Angeles their right to have a
"Californian" identity?
Now, let's see again how it sounds: "Oh, you are from Los
Angeles?...So, are you an American or a Californian? Do you speak
Californian (which is of course perfectly Spanish, just the Mexican
dialect of Baja California Spanish, now renamed "Californian") or you
speak American"? It will not sound too convincing to many Californians,
will it? Well, this is precisely what the Greeks have to deal with,
for the last eighteen years. The Bulgarian and Serbian speaking
Slavic population decides to change the name of their land and call
it Makedonija. Then they decide to rename their Bulgarian dialect
"Makedonski" and now they demand that the Greeks of Macedonia forgo
their cultural and geographic identity as Macedonians. This is not
going to happen, no matter how much the governments in Athens decide to
"cooperate" and give in to seem cooperative.
But, "The problem is threatening the fabric of our society," Gjorge
Ivanov, the president of Macedonia, said in an interview. "The pressure
that Greece is making is destabilizing the whole region." is that
so? And who told you to base your ethnic identity on a BIG LIE? If you
have been lying to your own people for two generations about their
true identity, is this now OUR problem? the Greeks of Macedonia can
counter. And who is destabilizing "the whole region"? Who has been
screaming about "United Makedonija!", who is polluting the internet
with screams of "Solun" (the capital of Greek Macedonia, the one
million strong city of Thessaloniki) "is the capital of United
Makedonija!", who is being 19th century style irredentist?
Who is refusing to see reality in the eyes and tries to dig up ancient
Greek Kings and adopt them as their own, refuting the true Slavic
identity of their own people? Who is publishing State-sanctioned
History books (the latest one came out a month ago), declaring that
the Makedonci are not a Slavic nation! Is it the Greeks? The Serbs, The
Bulgarians? No, it is people like this very same President Mr. Ivanov,
and his boss, Nikola Gruevski.
Lincoln said it very eloquently that you cannot lie to ALL the
people ALL the time. The BIG LIE will eventually catch up with you,
at some point or another! It surely caught about with more than a
hundred thousand Skopjan citizens to date who, fed up with the 35%
unemployment, and unable to cash Alexander the Great's 72ft tall
bronze statue for food stamps, have opted to go to the Bulgarian
embassy in Skopje and declare themselves "ethnic Bulgarians". How
many of them in reality feel Bulgarian is difficult to say, and at
the end of the day it will not make any difference. For sure, every
single one of them greatly appreciates the brand new red EU passport
that allows them to find a job anywhere in Europe! The Slavs leave,
the Albanians stay...the future Kosovo-style crises is beginning to
brew...and whose fault it this?
This, Mr. Ivanov should be told, is the dynamite under the foundations
of your multi-ethnic country: while you are busy creating and defending
THE BIG LIE, you seem to have forgotten the big lessons of the collapse
of Yugoslavia: "It's the Economy, Stupid!" Once people start going
hungry, no lies will stand in front of their children's future and
their family's survival!
In the same article we see mention of the Albanian minority and some
of its concerns, which led in 1991 to an armed uprising. I would
dare suggest that maybe the anti-Albanian riots in Monastir/Bitola
and extreme pseudo-Makedonism is what led the Albanians to feel
as second rate citizens in a "Macedonian state". Maybe I am wrong,
but I will need to see some strong proof, because arguments like that
"the assumption that Macedonia would join NATO" was going to act as a
"guarantee of internal stability", sounds to me like empty talk. "It
would give us medicine for our hot heads," said Menduh Tachi, leader
of the opposition Democratic Party of Albanians." we read in the
article. That is a remote possibility, I suppose, but we need to
distinguish between what the leader of a political Party says, and
what his constituents in the street say. The Albanian in the street
needs a job, he needs a police that is not engaged in ethnic brutality
and he needs a future, for him, for his family. People do not simply
get to the guns and start a revolt unless they feel desperate that
their future is taken from them. What does NATO have to do with the
INTERNAL stability of FYROM and the Albanian issue? An argument can be
convincingly be made for the EXTERNAL stability, but not the internal.
In Mr. Whitlock's article we are told that "Macedonians say the name
of the country is crucial to developing their still wobbly national
identity." This is interesting. Greeks do not have a "wobbly" national
identity, Serbs or Albanians do not either. They know who they are. Is
it maybe because the so called "Macedonian" have been given a fake
identity, for the last sixty-odd years, a make-believe identity that
has not stuck well with them? And why is it so important to sweep all
the half baked inventions of Yugolavia's Titoism under a NATO woven
rug of convenience, and have the neighbors deal with the INEVITABLY
ugly aftermath, whenever (not if...) that comes? No...while FYROM's
Titoist rebaptized nomenclatura may be just jolly and fine with the
perpetuation of pseudo-Makedonism's BIG LIE; a BIG LIE from which they
can keep their stranglehold on this poor country and its resources,
and the future EU funds, ready for VMRO corruption and plunder, the
people of the area deserve a better future than that: THEY DEMAND A
FINAL RESOLUTION OF THIS BAD JOKE OF AN ISSUE!
Craig Whitlock informs us that "Ethnic Albanians say they would revolt
if the Slavic Republic of Macedonia was the new name because they are
not Slavs". I honestly wonder, whom is he trying to convince? Where is
the logic in his argument? First of all Greeks never said they want a
Slavic Republic of "Macedonia", they suggested Slavomacedonia, which
includes the word Macedonia in a "syn-thetic" name. If the "Makedonci"
claim to be "ethnic Macedonians", and they want to call their name
"Macedonia", their supposed name, then where do the Albanians fit
into this? By the "Ethnic Macedonian" formula, the Albanians are NOT
considered Macedonians, so, then, if it is called Slavomacedonia, what
difference will it make to the Albanians? Call it Japanese Macedonia,
Chinese Macedonia if you like, it still does not make any difference
to the Albanians. If anything, the so called "Albanian" argument
against Slavomacedonia, inevitably leads to a PURELY GEOGRAPHIC,
purely non-ethnic, neutral name, that excludes nobody! Yes or no? If
we try to be logical, we need to start making sense after some point,
and not simply regurgitate arguments thrown arround by others with
greater interests and bigger knifes to grind.
Towards the end we are given the argument of a hard liner
Slavmacedonian big hat, a certain "Todor Petrov, president of the
World Macedonian Congress" obviously some ultra-nationalist emigre',
who "said the country should stop kowtowing to Greece and just call
itself the Republic of Macedonia, regardless of how badly it wants
to join NATO or the European Union." Perfect...and why should this
gentleman give a hoot about whether "his" country joins the European
Union and sees untold amounts of investment flow in that will create
jobs for his "co-patriots"? Simply because, technically, I assume,
he is not even THEIR compatriot. he does not live their misery and
poverty. He is probably sitting in his office somewhere in Toronto,
Sydney or Indianapolis, and he makes a comfortable living away from
them. All he cares about is HIS identity as an emigre, which is light
years away from the identity of the person on the ground in FYROM,
the average unemployed SlavoMacedonian man who sells his family's
"Makedonskata" identity for a EU passport that says EUROPEAN UNION
outside in golden letter over red.
Then, and here the article becomes suspect of being more like a
paid lobbyists stroke of genius rather than genuine journalism, we
are quoted the same gentleman, Todor Petrov who "In an interview,
he accused Greece of "practicing ethnic cleansing and genocide on
the Macedonian nation" for the past 100 years. "They're denying our
nationality and culture and church and history and our borders," he
said." Really, now? I have seen photographs of Jews in crematoria and
piles of corpses in Nazi concentration camps. I have seen pictures of
beheaded Armenians, men women and children, in Turkey, during WWI, but
I have still to see a photo of Greek Genocide against the "Macedonian"
"nation".
Journa lism, I would expect, demands fairness and balance. How can
the rumblings of an ultra-nationalist emigre be given space to defame
the Greeks through an imaginary BIG LIE, (which by the way is a very
recent invention, they have come up witht hsi "genocide theory" post
2000) without allowing the reader the chance to hear so much as even
a question mark on this? But lest I forget, did anyone notice what
this Titoist nationalist just say at the end of his sentence? Let us
revisit his uttering:
"They're denying our nationality and culture and church and history
and our borders," he said." Your borders? Which borders? The United
Macedonia borders? Where do your borders start and where do they
end? Is the so called "Aegean Macedonia" (they will never be caught
alive saying Greek Macedonia, so they invented the misnomer :"Aegean
Macedonia") part of the borders you feel the Greeks are denying you?
Then the juicy fruits start coming one by one: "It is not just
Macedonia's national identity that is at stake. The Greek government
does not recognize ethnic minorities within its own borders, including
Macedonian-speaking residents of northern Greece."
We are even offered the distinguished opinion of a very important
gentleman: "Pavle Voskopoulos, a Greek citizen who leads the Rainbow
Party, a group of ethnic Macedonians in northern Greece, said
the country subscribes to a myth of a "pure" Greek people who are
directly descended from Alexander and others from his era. "This is
all about modern Greek identity," he said. "If there is a Macedonia
as an independent state, this is a great threat against Greek policy
and Greek ideology."
I grew up in Greece and went through most of my formative years
there and that included even the years under the ludicrous colonels'
Junta. I do not recall anyone teaching me about a "pure" Greek nation,
yet I see our friends from Skopje repeatedly accusing Greeks of this
very same myth. Greeks since antiquity know that it is not blood
lines that make a nation, but common living, commonality in culture
and common interests. though it sounds like a puzzle to others from
outside, Americans do constitute a nation, and so do Australians and
Canadians. There are subgroups that is for sure, but there is unity
in diversity. Greek are the same.
Ancient Greeks were a dynamic mix of local Pelasgians, and other local
tribes, Indo-European speaking Greeks, who arrived in Greece around
2000 BC, and as time went by they mixed with slaves, and others who
came as a result of Alexander's expeditions in Asia, and later with
Romans, Thracians, etc. Greek culture has been evolving the last 4000
years and it is the language that more than anything (religion too,
to a smaller of greater degree, depending on the historic frame)
that makes their nation. Who ever talked about racial purity? Only
Dog breeders and Nazis are thinking in these terms. As for Pavlos
Voskopoulos, the leader of the Party of the Ethnic Macedonians of
Greece, I will ask the readers permission to copy here what I recently
wrote in another recent article on this issue, about the political
Party Mr Voskopoulos leads:
"When Ouranio Toxo - Vinozhito (Raibow) a political Party representing
the "ethnic Macedonians" slated candidates under the banners of the
European Free Alliance (Eyropaiki Eleytheri Symmachia - Ouranio Toxo)
for the in June 2009 Europarliament, the total votes tally they were
able to receive in the districts of Macedonia were two thousand five
hundred ninety four votes (2594), out of a population of 2.5 million
Greek Macedonians
( http://ekloges-prev.singularlogic.eu/e2009/pages/i ndex.html?lang=en
).
This is hardly making a case for allowing one third of Greece,
Macedonia, to be split and given as a land grant to the FYROM
ultra-nationalists in Skopje.
By comparison, the Komma Ellinon Kynigon (Fysi - Kynigi - Psarema
- Paradosi)/Party of Greek Hunters (Nature -Hunting - Fishing -
Tradition), the quintessential joke of a party in Greece, in the
very same districts (Districts of Drama, Kavala, A' Thessalonikis,
B' Thessalonikis, Serres, Chalkidiki, Kilkis, Pella, Imathia, Pieria,
Florina, Kozani, Kastoria and Grevena) received 5900 votes, twice as
many as Eyropaiki Eleytheri Symmachia - Ouranio Toxo / Vinozhito.
( http://ekloges-prev.singularlogic.eu/e2009/pages/i ndex.html?lang=en
).
We are given here the opinion of the leader of a Party that was able
to gather less than one vote per thousand people in Greek Macedonia
supporting their cause, although they had tv time, and freedom to say
whatever they wanted, yet they managed to gather half the votes of
the hunter's party! What minority are we talking about then? the best
statistics may be talking of some fifty thousand bilingual people
who speak Slavic ALSO, besides Greek. And that is true especially
of the older generations, but that again makes no difference:
it is identity that counts, not language not blood, not anything
else. Several, though not all, Muslim Slavs in Greece (Pomaks) consider
themselves to be Turkish though they speak no word in Turkish. And
Many Jews worldwide think of themselves as Jews though they speak
no Hebrew. These are instances where one part of the identity, the
religious one, overcomes language and other aspects of culture. I
have met not a few Americans who are Greek Orthodox in religion and
Greek in culture and identity, though they speak no word in Greek, and
they revel in their double identity as both Americans and Greeks. It
is self identity that counts. It is who and what you want to be. A
huge part of identity, sometimes even primary, is of course language,
but not the only one. A bilingual person can always chose the identity
he prefers. Many families in pre-war Macedonia were split in half when
one brother would decide to "became" a Bulgarian ("ethnic Macedonians"
had not been invented yet) and another to "became" a Greek. A bilingual
of Macedonia who speaks both Greek and Slavic, but considers himself
to be a Greek and derogatorily calls the people across the frontiers
"Yugoslavs", cannot be counted as one of Mr. Voskopoulos's voters or
"ethnic minority" supporters. A Cuban-American in Miami, is typically a
fully bilingual Spanish and English speaking, and while he has a strong
Spanich/Cuban identity is also at the same time very much an American.
The Washington Post article continues by informing us that FYROM
"has renamed its national stadium for King Philip II, Alexander's
father, and organized dozens of archaeological digs." It is not
what you dig out that matters to Greeks, but the language found
written in the artifacts, and the culture that created these
artifacts. Claiming for example prehistoric stone-age artifacts as
"proof" of an age-long continuum of (Slavo)"Macedonian" culture
is as ludicrous as naming Greek funerary, religious and political
Greek inscriptions "ancient-Macedonian" epigraphy. The Zenith of
"Fyromian-antiquization" kitsch is displayed in the governing Palace
in Skopje, where a series of priceless ancient Greek statues have
been arranged with total disregard to their care, on the sidewalk,
as proof of "ancient Macedonian" art. Similarly, a huge Greek
inscription which mentions the Makedonarchs (leaders of Macedonia)
has been hauled from the Archaeological site and taken to decorate
the entry to Mr. Gruevski's Gubernatorial building.
"Officials", we are reminded, "also like to needle Greeks that the
philosopher Aristotle, who tutored the teenage Alexander, was from
the kingdom of Macedonia, not Athens". This is a true statement:
Athens was not Greece, Athens was IN Greece. Macedonia was in Greece
too. The fact that someone was from Macedonia, like Aristotle, does
not make him any less a Greek than someone from Athens as someone
from Sparta or Hellenistic Egypt or Syracuse in southern Italy. the
fact that Eratosthenes was from Egypt does not make him an Arab,
since Arabs came into Egypt seven Hundred years after him. He was
Greek. The fact that Archimedes was from Syracuse, does not make
him a Roman, he was a Greek who was in fact killed by a Roman during
the capture of his country, his city state by the Romans. And after
all, Aristotle is not known for simply being Alexander's tutor...he
is the man that established the scientific method and one of the
two pillars, along with Plato, of ancient Greek Philosophy. And
there is no question as to what language he wrote in. If he was a
"Slavo-Makedonski" Macedonian, why did he not write in Slavic? The
Romans were brutes and uneducated in the beginning yet when they
started writing they wrote in their own language, Latin. Where is
that elusive language of the Macedonians, the ancient conquerors of
the known world, the language of Alexander, Philip II and Aristotle,
if it was not the Greek they left us in their incriptions?
The fact that there are plenty of pseudo-scientists in FYROM, like the
Archaeologist "Pasko Kuzman, the government's director of cultural
heritage" who prostitute their allegiance to science for the sake
of pseudo-scientific political ends, is not surprising. Hitler found
doctors who killed their fellow humans in order to execute SS-ordered
human "experiments". I would never call Pasko Kuzman an SS officer,
far from it (though I have no problem describing some of his political
bosses in VMRO as such). No, his description "as a cross between
Indiana Jones and Santa Claus" goes along way to create a good picture
of him, but I would definitely add a bit of Goebbels into the mix:
it is the BIG LIE "thing"...with which he has been raised, in Tito's
Yugoslavia and from which, like a second skin, he cannot get out of.
Someone could easily claim that Greeks are too emotionally involved
to be credible, when speaking of ancient Macedonia. I can say that
this might be correct with some. On the other hand, the facts are
facts and nobody can escape from them, not even FYROM government's own
"director of cultural heritage". Then, who would be the best to expose
the falacy and fakeness of pseudoMacedonist theories? None other than
the ex prime minister of the country, i suppoze, Ljupco Georgievski,
who abandoned Pseudomakedonism and went to maika Bulgaria and got
a Bulgarian passport, remembering that his grandparents were all
Bulgarian, after all. This is how the ex-Prime Minister countered
Pasko Kuzman's nebulous theories, logically and point to point:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HvKPiLYZCI &NR=1
But in Craig Whitlock's interview, the professor had other things
to say:
"The Greeks are sorry that they are called Greece and not Macedonia,"
he said. "What else can I tell you?"
Don't say anything professor...polla eipas and, as Aristotle, that
timeless Macedonian philosopher said: "ouk en to pollo to eu!...I do
not need to translate what he said, you are eis Makedon Macedonian,
as you claim; I am sure you can read Aristotle in the original...
Then, after you finish Aristotle, please go and read what 350 Classics
professors world wide are saying, on the Macedonia issue, in their
Open Letter to President Obama:
http://macedonia-evidence.org/obama-letter .html
What was Pasko Kuzman's reply to that letter?
It is right here, on national tv:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tCgTJsRuW8