Posted on 08/30/2014 7:31:59 AM PDT by marshmallow
As for Greece being a Turkish province without Western help, Greece and Serbia crushed the Ottomans just before WWI and liberated virtually all of “European Turkey” despite the attempts by the Western Christian powers to prop up the “Dead Man of Europe”. After WWI, the Western powers saw to it that Constantinople was returned to the Mohammedan Turks. By 1922 the Turks were on a genocidal rampage and at Smyrna they massacred over 100,000 Greeks and Armenians while Western, including American, warships sat in the harbor and did nothing.
The last American administration to do anything for Greece was Harry Truman's!
We are a “Christian” nation when it suits us. This always been the case.
We tend not to pick sides based on religion, but on profit. If the two are in synch, that’s great. If not, we wave the first amendment into battle.
The US wasn’t a part of the creation of Greece in the 19th century; whine to the ancestors of those countries.
“After WWI, the Western powers saw to it that Constantinople was returned to the Mohammedan Turks.”
Returned? They hadn’t lost it in the war.
“The last American administration to do anything for Greece was Harry Truman’s!”
And the last time Greece did anything for America? I believe there was some distance between the US and Greece precipitated by their flirtation with communism; they are still a left-wing country (even in comparison to Obama’s America). Do you thank the Brits for helping suppress the communists after WWII? Probably not...
We don’t even bother pretending anymore; we aren’t remotely “Christian”. Iraqi and Syrian Christians can attest to that; we are a post-Christian secular country along the lines of Republican France after the French Revolution.
“Returned? They hadn’t lost it in the war.”
Constantinople was occupied by Western forces from November 12, 1918 until September 1923, during which time the Ottoman Empire was partitioned off. The Western Powers were terrified that Russia would have ready access to the pashaliks the West had established along the Mediterranean littoral in former Ottoman territories virtually all the way to the Atlantic. They made a pact with the Mohammedan Turkish devils. The fact that hundreds of thousands of Greeks and Armenians died was neither here nor there.
As for communism, the Greeks, with help from the Truman administration, crushed the communists in the 1940s and again in the 1970s. Greece has had a center right government for some years now. They also have a political party called Golden Dawn which many Freepers might find attractive.
OK; so what has Greece done for America?
Unlike Germany and Austria-Hungary, Turkey was in a position to continue fighting (regardless of how hopeless it may have been). Russia’s surrender had left plenty of troops for Turkey to use elsewhere; the Allies’ treatment of Turkey after WWI probably saved them from having to fight Turkey again in WWII. We didn’t take Hamburg or Munich from Germany; no reason to take Istanbul from Turkey. Who would they have awarded it to? Greece, who fought at the very end of the war? Over the centuries it had become part of Turkey; there was no way to undo that.
Greece gave America both democracy and Christianity. You want more than that? As the Greeks say, “what do you want, a son-in-law with two eyes?”
Our Christianity was from Jewish apostles of Jesus.
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