Talisker wrote:These are interesting comments and again I'd ask you to elaborate viv a vis Greece and existential threat
I'll have a go at giving you an insight into the Greek psyche vis a vis foreigners and foreign power - and give you an idea of the permanent existential threat that has hung over the Greeks forever - via a comparison that might be meaningful to you. I'm going to guess from your two obvious cultural references (scotch whisky and Robert Burns) that you're a scot, and I'll start with the caveat that the pityful amount I know about Scotland comes from two short visits lasting not more than 4 days in total, a high school reading of Macbeth, that Mel Gibson movie, and trying for years to determine if there is any difference in the taste between the various colours of Johnny Walker, and if I ought to feel guilty about refilling empty bottles of the more expensive colours with scotch from new bottles of the cheaper colours (welcome to Greece!).
For a Greek, the idea of Scottish nationality is strange, almost undigestible. Of course any Greek who can read "knows" that Britain is made up of England, Wales, and Scotland...but for some reason the UK or Great Britain in Greek is almost always referred to as 'Anglia' (England) (aside: it's extremely rare to hear of Greeks speak of the "United Kingdom"; I'm pretty sure that most intuitively understand that Northern Ireland distinct from the Republic of Ireland is as much an abomination as is the "trnc", but this is an argument I most certainly do not want to get into; in conversation you will occasionally you will hear the Greek translation of "Britain", less so "Great Britain", but almost never "United Kingdom"). I remember discussing - in the months after it had occurred - the Dunblane massacre with an auntie of mine from a remote, backward village, and she mentioned how it had happened in 'Anglia'. Being the worldly traveller that I thought I was, I corrected her and told her that it had happened in 'Skotia' (Scotland). A confusing argument emerged as I tried to convince her that Skotia is a country distinct from Anglia, while she tried to convince me that there was a part of Anglia called Skotia, just like there is a part of Greece called Epirus...
On my first trip to Britain, I had it explained to me that the Romans progressively conquered Britain from south to north, but that they eventually stopped when they realised the diminishing returns available to them via continued conquest - the warlike tribes to the north were less willing to be conquered, and their lands were not as fertile or easy to farm anyway, so instead of further conquest the Romand built some defensive fortifications to keep those pesky face painters out. So we get the idea that there is something in these people that makes them hostile and unwilling to yield to what really was insurmountable foreign might.
Fast foward through century after century of history I know nothing about, and Mel Gibson informs me that (quite understandably) there is conflict between the English (Normans?) and the Scots. I'm a bit of a Jared Diamond fan, and so I sometimes imitate him and think of geographic reasons why societies emerge, evolve, are conquered, and die out. Like Greece, Scotland is vulnerable, probably more so. Compared that of to England, the geography of Scotland is less fertile, more mountainous, and possesses a harsher climate; this means that Scotland is able to support a comparatively smaller population through lower food production, and that greater labour power is required to produce a given quantity of food; when men are busy tilling fields and herding sheep, they're not in the army. Being surrounded by water on three sides, there was nowhere for the Scots to gradually migrate to if they were under pressure from a politically unified force to the south, and the lack of any other neighbours meant that they were unable to enter into alliances through which they might protect themselves. If they were challened by whoever controlled the lands to the south of Scotland, they were forced to fight or compromise. The Romans couldn't be bothered conquering Scotland, but the English could, and after a long struggle the inevitable happened, there were these Acts of "Union"...which to a Greek sounds a euphemism for "domination" or "subjugation".
It seems to me that in those 300 years since this "union", Scotland has been completely politically, culturally, linguistically, socially, spiritually, and economically integrated into England as a few additional northern counties, with just the imprint of the scottish flag (ironically enough, transmitted to Scotland after being preserved by 1,000 years of Greek iconography, and pertaining to a Saint with a Greek name, crucified in an ancient Greek city, and whose remains to this day are interred in that very same Greek city!) remaining in the background of the Union flag. Apart from a few token flags (I recall one being flown from the caravan that sells meat pies, opposite a nearly identical caravan a little to the south flying an English flag!) and monuments, travelling overland from England to Scotland has nothing of the extraordinary (for a Greek, anyway) "entering another world" feel that does say travelling overland from Greece to Turkey (I have done both).
The circumstances of Scotland's geographic vulnerability, and attempted and eventual domination by foreign power is repeated at least in principle in Greece, but for some reason the Greeks never took to being conquered by foreigners lying down, and when they were (repeatedly) conquered, they did not give up on being Greeks. It took 200 hundred years for the turks to conquer anatolia from east to west, and at the end of it, the Greeks were completely subjugated without the benefit of an Act of Union. However, somehow after 400 odd years of often brutal domination, and before the industrial revolution and hence without the technologies that would've aided communication and the transmission through the ages of Greek thought, the Greek state re-emerged from the 1820's showing few signs of political, cultural, social, linguistic, spiritual, and economic integration into the turkish empire: between Greece and Turkey there exist vastly different religions and languages, absolutely no political integration, virtually no economic integration (different currencies, very low trade volumes given geographic proximity), very different cultures (and certainly no cultural integration between the respective populations, as say there might be between german speakers of Austria, Germany, and Switzerland, or the English speakers of Scotland, England, and Wales), and a vastly different sociopolitical structure. How many of these things hold true for England and Scotland? Even those Greeks that had integrated into Ottoman (and later turkish) political and economic life stood out so promonently that as various historical milestones were reached, they were systematically exterminated or expelled. Apart from for the obvious political pandering, who would know that Gordon Brown is a Scot? How many Englishmen feel uncomfortable (or are prohibited from, or have been expelled from) living in Scotland, and vice versa?
So in a round-about way, this is one element of the Greek psyche that as a non-Greek, and a native of a long since subjugated land that you might find difficult to understand, and we haven't even got past the first decade of the modern Greek state.
) I'm not Greek so I don't know what it feels to be one, but as a Scot I feel internationalist and European at the same time. I don't think it's the be all and end all to worship one's nationality or mother country in a way that makes it almost sound better, braver, more civilised or whatever than any other person's homeland. That to me suggests insecurity and perhaps self-loathing - and its so 19th/20th Century.
