Where have all the Americans gone? (Greece) (Victor Davis Hanson alert)

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.

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.

If no Americans want to go to Greece, how come all the flights leaving the U.S. are booked up to Novemeber?(I did a search on travelocity)

You are correct to point out that the facts don't necessarily support Hanson's contention that the number of American tourists in Greece is down compared to rest of Europe. We know that the numbers of Americans traveling abroad has been down since 9/11. I am confident that Americans will be visiting Greece in droves to see the Olympics. They will be welcomed warmly. I am always skeptical when I have to depend on the personal perceptions of the author to buy his premise.

indeed secular governments of China and Iraq were siding with Serbs in their fight against Albanian Muslim extremists.

Then since we were in a cold war with Iraq at the time, an American 'national interest' existed in defeating Serbia.

You have reversed the cause and effect. First NATO sided with Muslim extremists againts Serbs and only then China and Iraq started to help Serbs. BTW, both China and Baathist Iraq had an interest in supressing Islamists.

The USA stopped selling raw materials to Japan. We were very unhappy with thier invasion of China and the ruthless conduct of same. Japan faced a dificult choice. War with USA or give up dreams of dominating the Pacfic Rim and East Asia. The decsion had very little to do with liking us. However downed American pilots and solders were protected by locals. Seems being a liked Aerican was (unluike today) a big help in person to person relations.

I for one would love to tour Greece, but will not do so for sometime to come because of its anti-American attitudes and actions. I was shocked by the soccer stadium incident into realizing that what Greeks really wanted was for the Americans to get a stick right in the eye. They really wanted to see Americans in pain. More they wanted Serbs to murder with abandon and impunity. They wanted the communists to have their day in the sun, though the sun had long since set. Once I cared about our friendship with the Greeks, but that day has passed into night.

"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"

My wife and I spent 10 days in Greece last September. Everything this article states is TRUE about the a**holes in Athens.

However, the Greek people in the Peloponeses and the Islands are just the opposite. Super friendly, incredibly clean facilities, public transportation (bus, ferry) that is on-time and cheap, I could go on and on about what a wonderful time we had in the Islands etc.

Many, many Europeans vacation in Greece because of cheap airfare, cheap hotels, cheap (and incredible) food and drink along with great beaches and entertainment.

This bad rep BELONGS to Athens and the Greek Government, not the people or nation in general.

Last September (including 9/11/2002) our flights to
and from Athens were completely full.

Everyone was doing the same type of trip, head to Athens,
then connect on another flight (or the ferry docks at Pereus) to the Islands.

Athens is a dirty, polluted armpit full of American haters.

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.

I believe he meant wrongly as in "not in accordance with fact," not wrongly as in "immorally."

Athens is changing - more slowly than surely.. Much of the change is evident in the more distant suburbs, however, and of little relevance to the tourist experience. Unfortunately, the only way to swiftly reverse much of the ugliness inherited from years of socialist mismanagement would be for a major earthquake to take out those parts of the city....

When the Greeks do revision or redevelop parts of the city these days, though, they seem to do a rather nice job of it..

The decsion had very little to do with liking us....Japan faced a dificult choice. War with USA or give up dreams of dominating the Pacfic Rim and East Asia.

Exactly. We stand in the way of ambitions of all sorts. That is why it hardly matters if the populace love us, if the government has a policy that we are an impediment to by our very existence. If you think it's worth it to have Pearl Harbors and September 11ths all over the place -- just so long as a lot of the locals like us -- then you and I are so far from being on the same page there probably isn't any point in discussing this any further.

Point is, the USA shouldn't subjugate its foreign policy to the whims, desires and expectations of a bunch of greasy faggots,

"Curses, foiled again!"

Athens is a dirty, polluted armpit full of American haters.

I'll agree with the dirty, polluted part as would most Athenians who head to the islands and elsewhere every chance they get. I have experienced firsthand the traffic jams and the pollution. The new subway and airport plus other improvements made in preparation for the Olympics should make Athens a better place to live. For all its faults, the Acropolis including the Parthenon and other antiquities and the Plaka make it a glorious place to live. Athens is not/not filled with American haters anymore than the US is filled with Greek haters.

The fallout with the French certainly has more to do with French jealousy than with any resentment over our overseas actions.

Well, that's my point! That we should not alter our policy to try to avoid hatred nor to incur gratitude. Because we have very little control over how people react to our actions. We have all seen it before: someone we help turns on us, someone we've never bothered hates us anyway... all I'm saying is that other people's emotions shouldn't have squat to do with our foreign policy, I want neither isolationism nor philanthropy. I want us to act in our own self-interest, period.

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.

Too bad the Greeks didn't learn from the Germans, the French and a whole roll-call
of weasels.

They thought their American aid/subsidy program was a never-ending entitlement.

Now, even the Greeks are learning a lesson about democracy (actually
representative republicanism)...
defecate long enough and often enough on a long-suffering friend and they will eventually leave.
And will gather up as many of their "marbles" as possible and go find
newer, truer friends.

Like the Poles.

Greece is hosting the Olympics next year. I wonder if the Americans will attend that?

Attend?
They'll be lucky if a fair number of Americans even watch the turgid coverage
of the Olympics that NBC has perfected.

NBC Olympics coverage lost this long-suffering viewer after their opening
of the Salt Lake Winter Olympics...subjecting a noble, but aging figure like
Jim McKay to a team-up with Katie Kouric in a live broadcast...
that was the absolute end for me.

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