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.
Indulge in a little petty anti-Americanism that would make Ramsey Clarke proud (not "name-calling"...oh no no no..FAR more sophisticated and nuanced than that), get caught making a sloppy historical reference by the "snotty sophomores" on Free Republic, and then call for "civility" as you slink away with your tail between your legs.
Beautiful.
And why do you suppose that was? C'mon - dazzle us with your understanding of history and human nature.
That's asinine.
By that logic, my parents hated me when they corrected my faults and and when they punished me for my wrongs. By that logic, telling a drunk he shouldn't get in a car means that you hate him.
No doubt you've heard the expression, "Our country, right or wrong." This has often been used as justification for anything the country does.
The full quote is, "Our country, right or wrong. When right, to be kept right; when wrong, to be put right." It's the last part that is the important part. It is our duty to speak up.
Disagreeing with a policy does not make one an anti-American. Now, I may be wrong, and you may disagree, but that doesn't make either one of us anti-American.
So grow up.
Oh, this article does indeed bring back long-suppressed memories of the worst vacation I ever had in my entire life! You wanna talk about anti-American sentiment? Here goes!
Back in the '80s, I had been a very frequent guest at various Club Meds in the Caribbean and eventually earned a free vacation at any Club Med in the world. My boss at the time had a Greek wife and they owned a vacation home on the island of Corfu, so he suggested that I take the free stay at the Club Med resort there and look in on his house during my stay.
I had lots of young Greek-American friends in New Jersey who traveled to Greece very often (their parents were trying to marry them off to Greek spouses to no avail), and it sounded like fun. I also knew people from England who visited Greece just as casually and frequently as the Americans who goes to Florida. I envisioned beautiful blue and white scenery just like the travel posters. WRONG!
Pan Am was experimenting with new service between the US and Greece, so I got a cheap fare to Athens connecting through Frankfurt. From there, I was supposed to connect to a shuttle flight to Corfu.
I had a horrible feeling from the moment I touched down at the Athens airport. For one thing, I noticed how open and unsecure everything was, and how vulnerable this place would be to a hijacking. Next, they had a scam going that if you had to connect from international to domestic flights on any other airline than Olympic, you had to take an expensive cab ride to the other side of the airport.
So I stood in the checkin line for the Olympic shuttle with my luggage and prepaid paper ticket for Corfu. The connection was tight, but I still could have made it. However, two Olympic employees stood and chatted in front of the counter, deliberately ignoring me for such a long period of time that I missed the cutoff time to board the shuttle. On top of this, they refused to confirm me on the next flight or even check my luggage in, insisting that I would have to keep my suitcases with me until a vacant seat came up on a later flight. I demanded that they produce a supervisor or manager, but that man just sneered at me and said, "Hey, it's not our fault you didn't fly in on Olympic!" and refused to help.
My suitcases were too heavy to drag around, and there was no remote possibility of getting a flight until almost midnight. I looked at my itinerary and it said I had a reservation on the return trip at the 5-star Ledra Marriott in Athens, so I decided to go there for help.
It was a good thing that I'd seen a picture of the place, because the cab driver tried to rip me off by driving past the hotel. I was so tired, sweaty and bedraggled-looking at this point that the doorman didn't even want to help me out of the cab. "Are you SURE you're in the right place?" he said.
I was furious. I thought, "Well, if they're going to treat me like an 'ugly American,' then I guess it's time to play the part." I marched up to the Front Desk, whipped out my American Express Gold Card and hotel confirmation letter, slapped it down on the counter and bellowed, "I have a reservation here, and I want to see the manager NOW!!!" He came and I told him what had happened to me since I'd arrived in "his" country. I think they really just wanted to get me the hell out of the lobby, so they were very calm and helpful. They found me a quiet lounge area to relax and had a concierge make phone calls to Corfu for me, only to be unable to get anyone at the Club Med switchboard to answer the phone. "Maybe you'd rather just stay here instead?" the operator suggested (but that part of the nightmare didn't come until later). Finally someone made some headway with Olympic and when the time came, they called a cab and sent me back to the airport.
When I returned, they still refused to take my luggage because they had me on standby. In fact, they didn't call my name until the plane was on the runway about to take off, and I had to run onto the field with the damned suitcases. Fortunately, there was a nice guy from Belgium also on standby, and he helped me carry them.
At Corfu, the Belgian guy said he was also going to Club Med, but there was also a campground in addition to the resort I was going to. He told the cab driver he wanted to pay my fare when he got out at the Club Med campground and I thanked him. Unfortunately, between the campground and the resort, the cab driver started hitting on me and when I didn't make a date with him for the next evening, he demanded payment for the fare between the two places.
So now I've been traveling for 25 hours straight with no sleep, and there's no one to check me in because it's after midnight. Finally I was able to raise someone, and it turned out that I'd been assigned a roommate from France. She had the door barricaded and was sound asleep inside te room and it took a lot to wake her up. There was a bed next to the open window, so I popped onto it and fell asleep.
The next morning, the roommate left early for the beach, and it was a while before I sensed something was wrong. A ribbon of ants had been marching through the window in formation and across my body like something out of a Hitchcock movie. I screamed and ran into the bathroom, where I remembered that the shower had a detachable hose, and rinsed them off.
Now it was daylight and the Front Desk was staffed. Nobody spoke English, just French and German (there were some local Greek kitchen employees, but oddly enough, the duties were assigned in reverse with the Greek cooks making the French food and so on). It was a good thing I'd brought a dictionary along, because as soon as people determined that I was American, they instantly ignored me until I started looking it up and yelling "Beaucoup de fourmi en ma chambre!!" and then they finally serviced the room and got me some insect stuff.
What an effort this turned out to be for the next two weeks. As it turned out, there were about 20 American guests at this resort, and everyone felt quite betrayed because Club Med should never have promoted this location in their US catalog. So we decided to travel in packs, each led by someone who spoke enough French or German to communicate. I went on all the local excursions, only to discover that Corfu was absolutely NOTHING resembling the blue-and-white travel posters of my dreams. In fact, I ended up buying a t-shirt which bore the logo "Corfu: The GREEN Island" -- I could have gone to any lake in New York State if had I wanted to see greenery, not the other side of the world. Geez!
The anti-American sentiment was in full force because of upcoming elections, so the foreigners I met always advised me never to speak in public. An Australian family gave me a kangaroo stickpin to wear and coached me on their accent. One night, we were taken to a local taverna and a bunch of motorcyclists roared past us. They had angry expressions on their faces and I asked what was going on -- it was an anti-American demonstration. It was getting pretty scary.
There was one experience I had that really stuck out on my mind during all of this. A group of us went on an excursion to a place directly across the water from the border between Greece and Albania. It was a shocking study in contrasts. As darkness fell on the mainland, everything to the south was busy. I could see highways lit up with truck traffic. However, to the north, everything was pitch blackness, NO activity at all. This, I realized, was the difference between the two governments. Freedom to the south in Greece, tyranny and repression to the north in Albania. I was so sorry that I didn't have a traveling companion to share this astounding experience with. You really had to be there, because words alone really couldn't do it justice.
Anyway, when the two weeks ended, the guests were transported from Club Med to the Corfu airport for another Olympic shuttle flight back to Athens. However, there was no Olympic flight on the runway. Instead, we were directed to board an aircraft painted with the Air Lebanon logo, a big cedar tree. I really did not like the looks of this, to say the least. I was convinced we were going to be hijacked. I kept asking in Greek if the plane was really flying to Athens, and I didn't believe it until we actually touched down in that same nasty airport.
My French roommate ordered the cab at the airport, warning, "You shut mouth -- you American!" She got out at her hotel and, just like the first time, the cab driver tried to cheat me by zooming past the familiar yellow umbrellas of the Ledra Marriott. This time, the staff remembered my previous visit and greeted me warmly, and I checked into a lovely room (I don't remember exactly, but it cost over $200 per night). I thought everything was finally going to turn out OK. WRONG!
I had a friend from New Jersey who was dating a Greek actor she met on vacation. He was supposed to come to the Ledra and take me on a tour of the city that night. He never arrived, and it turned out that there was a huge anti-American demonstration in Syntagma Square that night blocking traffic in all directions, so he wasn't able to get across to meet me. By this point, nothing surprised me.
So I dined alone in the hotel restaurant that night. At first I thought it was an excellent meal and a pleasant end to what had been such a rotten trip. Everything was great until I got back to my room and spent the night throwing up with food poisoning -- right before my return trip to New York!!
It was so embarrassing, because the bellhops were carrying my luggage out to the taxi while I was making an unholy mess in the bathroom. Then I got to the airport, and watched how verbally abusive the Greek employees behind the Pan Am counter were being to the American tourists in line ahead of me. I decided to take a different tack.
I smiled warmly and politely asked if I could have a seat closer to the lavatory on the plane. I was wearing a flowing dress, and patted my stomach so they would think I was pregnant. I thought the woman-to-woman approach might work. Wrong again! The ticket agent snarled, "If you knew you were traveling in that condition, you should have made advance arrangements." At this point, I completely snapped. I slammed my hand across her computer monitor and said, "God damn it, I asked you nicely. If you don't give me what I want -- right now -- I'm going to make a mess out of both your keyboard AND your pretty aircraft -- and I'm going to enjoy it, too. Do you hear me?"
There were other American guests from the Corfu Club Med standing in line behind me, and they were puzzled. They'd seen me drinking and dancing for two weeks, and suddenly here I was claiming to be pregnant. Some of the men actually took a step back in surprise. The ticket agent glared at me and gave me a new seat assignment, so that I had three seats across all to myself. There wasn't any reason why she couldn't have done it in the first place -- the plane was half-empty!
When I got to the airport in Frankfurt, I felt much better. On the connecting flight to New York, I noticed that large number of American soldiers were on board. I was so happy to see them that I wished I could have run up and down the aisles hugging them. But I was too worn-out from my ordeal. I think I actually kissed the ground when I got to Kennedy Airport.
I don't know, in all fairness, if my trip would have been quite as miserable if I'd gone to my friends' hot spots like Mykonos, Ios or Santorini. Still, I'll never forget the bitter sting of the anti-American sentiment I witnessed in Greece -- and they'll never get one of my tourist dollars again.
PS: Almost forgot to mention that, shortly after I came home from Greece, there was indeed a hijacking that somehow involved the Athens airport. Eeek!!
My point is, if you're going to run your foreign policy by what the population of a 3rd (non-involved) country feels about your policy, then you're headed for a total failure, because, you can't please all the people all the time. And outsiders certainly do not have the best interests of the US in mind.
At the end of WWI the United States left Europe. We had to go back 20 years letter and stop another war. We stayed after WWII, and here it is 50+ years later and we have not had another World War.
Do you mean that kind of intervention?
That's what I remember (somewhat fuzzily) about Greece!
As much as we beat ourselves up for not knowing about other countries, it is phenomenal the extent to which goofy conspiracy theories & misperceptions exist in the rest of the world about America. Europeans that cannot tell you about the Marshall Plan will cite mythical chapter and verse about war for oil in Iraq, contracts for natural gas pipelines in Afghanistan, CIA hits to put Pinochet in power, and why we should FREE MUMIA! Often what they are against is a caricature of America. Not sure how to solve this problem, but when Jerry Springer, Hollywood, Noam Chomsky, CNN International, the International Herald Tribune, and Michael Moore are the main sources of information about the USA then we start out behind the 8 ball.
I think it's been pretty negligible, yes.
And that resentment of our actions-for example, from those affected by collateral damage, or from a nation who suffers under a dictator we supported-has a stronger negative effect on our self-interest?
If you are referring to the Saudi royal family whom we've supported and who are responsible for the Islamic terrorism, that's hardly a grass roots reaction against the Saudi royal family, that's a specifically engineered action driven and guided BY the royal family. But considering that we have supported them because the alternative was Pan-Arab socialism that will undoubtely look just like Iraq and Syria... whom we have NOT supported but who have STILL also contributed to the attacks... it doesn't look like it matters what we do. They hate us for who we are, not what we do.
Think about all the countries who hate Israel. Is it because Israel bombs other countries? Supports dictators? Causes collateral damage? Nope. Israel hasn't done squat to France, Germany, Saudi, Libya, Cuba, etc etc.... but they are hated roundly, supposedly because of the "poor Palestinians." Of course, Jordan murdered 10,000 of them, Lebanon treats them worse than Israel. Are THEY hated? No. The hatred against Israel is the same as the hatred against the US.
Visiting the islands, I remember one incident when our little cruise ship passed an American battleship on the seas. The crowds on the boat starting booing the ship and the USA. Everybody around me on deck, except the few American students, was booing. It made me uncomfortable.
But I found the shopkeepers very friendly. They all spoke German, moreso than English, because there were so many German tourists. I remember several of us students sat on a step and talked for an hour with a housewife as she knitted lace. It was a nice time.
I wonder if everything changed after the Achille Lauro terrorist incident.
Thanks for the rant! I have stood on the "electricity-free" Albanian coast near Sarande and looked at the lights in Corfu and thought "That sure looks like a good time!" Now I know I didn't miss that much. And for all of Albania's faults, there is probably no place in Europe more pro-American. As for the electricity, they're still working on it! Excerpt below:
Albania to look after its tourists by providing uninterrupted electricity supply Tirana, 12 June: Albanian Power Corporation (KESH) said on Thursday [12 June] that all tourist areas will be supplied with energy during the whole summer season. According to the above mentioned sources, Shkoder area up to Saranda has experienced important investments which guarantee supply with energy for the tourists who rest in the Albanian coast. KESH confirmed that it has invested over 152m lek for the electric networks along the tourists spots in our coast. Along with investment with its funds, at the tourist spots KESH keeps on rehabilitating electric networks, mainly distribution systems and that thanks to foreign donors amounting to over 9m euro. Source: ATA news agency, Tirana, in English 1512 gmt 12 Jun 03
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