Dear Professor,
I
am John Smith, a lawyer from WAKDJUHLK. This is the
first time I write to you and I swear to Beelzebub not to do it again. I do not wish to
discuss economics, numbers and graphs; I lack the preparation. I just want to
share what happened to me last night in a pizzeria.
I am at a table
with friends of my girl friend, whom I do not know well. A fellow sitting next
to me tells me that he lives in Athens and works for the European Commission.
His working group is helping the Greek government apply the agenda of the
Troika (don’t worry prof, I am not going to recount the economic “reasons” that
I had to hear, you know them better than I).
I was dismayed
to learn that the operation is much more sophisticated and ideologically
complex than the political-economic version. By the way, I have bonds with
Greece and consider it my second home. I know it quite well, and whenever I
can, I return to see various friends. At home I grew up on epos and Hellenism
and I did classical studies.
To return to my
story: the substance of what I heard was that the Greeks do not have the right
to complain. To the contrary, they should thank the west (a concept I hate, but
that I report) for its very existence. Greece, the Greek nation, is in fact a
geopolitical invention, artfully created in 1800 by France and England to
favour implosion of the Ottoman empire. “Greece was the Israel of the 19th
century” [cit.]. My zealous neighbour did not say that France and England were
content just to sustain the Greek revolts against the Turks, but claimed that
the Greek people do not exist. The Greeks are only Orthodox Turks! Modern Greek
was forged ad hoc to give them a
sense of community. Greece was created as a buffer state to arrest Muslim
expansion. A military outpost full of people who just happened to have the same
religion: “exactly like the state of Israel” (addendum: for brevity and
coherence I shall not go into what the state of Israel is or is not).
I tried to bring
my stubborn dining companion back to earth, starting with linear B of the
Mycenaean period, the Persian wars, Hellenism and the Byzantine empire, down to
the war between Greece and Turkey and the mass deportations of Greeks from Anatolia in the early 1900s. To no effect.
For him my
arguments were sophisms because the history of the Mediterranean and the
mobility of the populations that lived and sailed it for thousands of years
make it impossible to identify the starting points in history of peoples and
nations.
On the basis of
“The Baltic Origins of Homer's Epic Tales” (a wonderful book by Felice
Vinci), I conceded that the
“blond Achaeans” of the Iliad could indeed have originated from Scandinavian
populations that descended the Vistola and Danube in ancient times (a
hypothesis to take with a grain of salt), but that from that moment the Greeks
had always been there. Nothing. The Greeks do not exist, they are an artifice.
In the end,
disconsolate and exhausted by the effort to remain polite, I gave up.
But I learned
something.
The narrative of
power is attempting a noteworthy qualitative leap. It is no long denigrating
the nation state with the story of lazy, unproductive, corrupt and wasteful
Greeks. It is trying to cancel three thousand years of history with the
rhetoric of the ipse dixit of “experts”. The subjects in
question (and their zealous young recruits like my dining companion) are not
just sharks and mystifiers, but much worse: manipulators of history, geography,
anthropology, philology and the like.
Denying the origins of a people,
its history, traditions and ethnic-linguistic homogeneity (ignoring dialects)
means denying the existence of that people. And where there is no people, where
there is no dèmos, there cannot be
democracy, but only despotism and barbarity.
In conclusion, if it is possible to manipulate Greek history, one of
the oldest in Europe, with such facile impunity, then it is even easier to
manipulate the history of much younger and more heterogeneous nations like
Italy.
We should watch out for this
because as you say, we are next.
I trust I have not abused your
patience. Thank you for your attention and your time.
All the best for your work.
P.S. If you decide to publish
this, please do not disclose my name.
John Smith
