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Posted on 07/13/2003 5:07:05 AM PDT by Elkiejg
Driving across the central Peloponnese recently I was struck how vastly different Greece has become since my first visit exactly thirty years ago. If in the early 1970s paved roads, phone cables, and power wires were just reaching these most remote villages, today even kids in the most isolated hamlets on Mt. Taigetos or along the Alpheios Gorge log-on to the Internet and imitate James Dean on motorcycles. Globalization and subsidies from the EU-and the free embrace of almost every American pop idol-for all the ensuing social and cultural resentment, have transformed Greece into a modern-looking European nation.
But if American popular culture has overwhelmed the country's masses, its professionals-particularly those in the ruling socialist PASOK party-have for years promulgated a particularly virulent form of anti-Americanism. It is a creed nursed on Byzantine theories surrounding the 1967 coup and the aftershocks of the 1974 Cyprus disaster, coupled with past Cold War triangulation with the Soviet Union and Euro-style resentment of the global American presence.
After hearing too many conspiracy theories from wild intellectuals or long diatribes about America's unfair treatment of Milosevic, I think the country's establishment needs to get a life and move on from old hurts, real and imagined, since it is all beginning to sound so tired and shrill. Recent shake-ups in PASOK's leadership suggest that the old anti-Americanism is wearing thin even among that party's elite. But is that realization too little and too late?
Indeed, this summer I suddenly sensed something I had not noticed in my prior annual visits: There seems to be few Americans anywhere. Germans? French? Dutch? They are ubiquitous. But there is hardly an American to be seen. America-Stop signs, reruns of "Married with Children," and MTV schlock-is everywhere; but Americans themselves are almost nowhere.
Maybe we are staying home because of the general fear of terrorism in the post 9-11 climate. Maybe it is our recession-or the steep price hikes brought on by the strong Euro. Yet I think there is also something else special to Greece going on that might explain why Americans would forgo such a safe and beautiful country, replete with a history unrivaled elsewhere. My gut feeling is that after years of splashy anti-Americanism, most Americans-quite wrongly I think-finally concluded it was a hostile place better left alone.
During the latest Iraqi war, tens of thousands of demonstrators poured into Syntagma Square to damn the United States. It is a national secret that soccer fans in the Athens stadium booed when asked for a moment of silence to honor the September 11 American dead shortly after their murder. Our relationship with Israel is openly mocked-sometimes embarrassingly so given the history of the Hellenic Jewish community during World War II. What all this reflects, I think, is that a long hallowed association-based on Cold War pragmatics, Marshall Plan money, thousands of expatriate Greeks in the United States, millions of affluent American tourists who used to flock to the islands, and singular scholarly ties and affinities-is slowly ending as we once knew it.
The American bases are all gone, except for one left on Crete-itself rumored to be reduced or even eliminated. I tried to tell some exasperated Greeks, who depend on the tourist industry and love popular American culture, that their decades of anti-American rhetoric have finally sunk in, and most folks in the heartland of the United States, to the extent they ponder Greece, think it somewhere far to the left of France.
Americans, I added, are funny folk. They don't go in much for heated conversations, fist shaking, and political graffiti sprayed on freeway overpasses. Instead, they just shrug and stay home, and ever so slowly make it known that they'd prefer their troops do the same.
What all this means I don't quite know. The Eastern Mediterranean can still be a very touchy place, the old front line of NATO's southeastern flank. Terrorists seek to use Greek waters to ship their arsenals. Turkey habitually allows its jets to fly provocatively over Greek airspace and could do far more to help resolve the Cyprus dispute. Greece is not a bellicose or aggressive nation, but it is the first real European country at the edge of a volatile Middle East-and its history with the Islamic world, whether in 1460 or 1922, is not encouraging. Its Orthodoxy also makes it a strange bedfellow with like-minded Christians in Serbia, Russia, and Armenia-not exactly stable, reliable, or popular places these days. Germans are here everywhere now and often permanently, and I wonder to what extent anyone remembers their similar intrusive presence in 1941-44-and whether an increasingly undemocratic EU controlled from Berlin is really going to continue to be so avuncular after all.
In short, if I were a Greek, remembering World War II, billions of dollars in past American aid, salvation from the Warsaw Pact, and relative peace with Turkey, I wouldn't have so easily abandoned the old special American friendship.
So as I flew out this beloved country last month, I feared that this noble people with its tragic history at last may have achieved what its elites so often and so vocally wanted for the last thirty years-a country empty of Americans.
Always beware of what you wish for.
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FreeRepublic , LLC PO BOX 9771 FRESNO, CA 93794
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It is in the breaking news sidebar! |
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I hadn't heard of that, that says more than enough.
Atlas Shrugged
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