European and American economic and military-NATO pressures forced the Greek government in gifting of the name Macedonia to a former Yugoslav province. This foolish act is weaponizing and destabilizing Southeastern Europe
How Euro-American vultures have been looting Greece
In 2019, Greece is in chaos. Since the American-triggered global financial meltdown of 2008, the country has been drained of wealth, sovereignty and, above all, self-respect.
The agents of this rapid decline and fall are the usual suspects: irresponsible American-educated Greek politicians who borrowed money from German, French, and American banks, and the international debt collectors determined to get back the borrowed money from Greece at any cost.
The American reporter Greg Palast is right calling the debt collection agencies vultures and poisoners. I call them dark-age landlords and servants of the billionaire class. In the case of Greece, they include the European Union Central Bank, the European Commission, and the American International Monetary Fund.
For some ten years these vultures used the proven methods of propaganda, threats, humiliation, and bribery to force Greece to the abyss of self-doubt and defeat.
Not only Greece has been paying back huge sums but was forced in selling its assets to foreigners. Germany now operates Greek airports and telecommunication; China is in charge of the country’s largest harbor in the city of Piraeus, next to Athens; Italy is managing the railroads.
The EU-IMF conglomerate, like seasoned and rapacious dark-age feudal lords, kept the appearances of “helping” Greece by raiding the funds Greece has had for modest retirement of working people, and support of medical care, schools, environmental protection, infrastructure, national defense, and archaeological research and protection.
The result of this extorsion is a country in deep trouble.
Millions of tourists keep Greece afloat: the country is busy for several months a year. On the surface, you rarely see real impoverishment.
But then winter comes, the streets and museums are with few if any tourists, and the real crisis comes to the surface: Huge unemployment; no heating of apartment buildings and most homes; hospitals are barely functioning, lacking the basics; the best educated Greeks are working in Western Europe and North America; all proceeds from museum tourism go to Germany.
Meanwhile, America’s wars in the Middle East triggered rivers of refugees towards Turkey and Europe. Turkey struck back at its Greek enemy by diverting thousands upon thousands of desperate Moslem refugees to the Aegean islands. No doubt, some of those refugees are Turkish agents or jihadists.
NATO and Macedonia
As if these calamities were not enough, NATO kept pressuring Greece to negotiate with its northern Skopje neighbor, a former Yugoslav province peopled by Albanians and Bulgarians. These guys, now in charge of an independent nation, loved the name Macedonia the Yugoslav communist boss, Tito, gave their province during the Cold War. The name included both the glorious Greek Macedonian history and culture and Greek Macedonia all the way to the Aegean.
Greek governments resisted Skopje and NATO propaganda – until in 2018 the communist and hopelessly anti-Greek government of Alexis Tsipras gave in to the NATO-European Union threats and gifted the name Macedonia to the unprincipled small Albanian-Bulgarian conglomerate in the northern border of Greece.
The 2018 giveaway started in 2004 with the second administration of George W. Bush who had no problem recognizing Skopje as “the Republic of Macedonia.”
On May 18, 2009, about 200 Classical scholars from America, Europe and elsewhere wrote a letter to president Barack Obama saying only Greeks can be Macedonians. Albanians and Bulgarians arrived in southeastern Europe about a millennium after Alexander the Great. They urged Obama to “intervene to clean up some of the historical debris left in southeast Europe by the previous U.S. administration.
“On November 4, 2004, two days after the re-election of President George W. Bush, his administration unilaterally recognized the ‘Republic of Macedonia.’
“This action not only abrogated geographic and historic fact, but it also has unleashed a dangerous epidemic of historical revisionism, of which the most obvious symptom is the misappropriation by the government in Skopje of the most famous of Macedonians, Alexander the Great.
“We believe that this silliness has gone too far, and that the U.S.A. has no business in supporting the subversion of history.”
About a month later, on June 22, 2009, the same Classical scholars sent a brief update to Obama. This time their letter had 332 signatures from all over the world. The situation was urgent.
However, Obama had other things in mind. The subversion of history was not one of them. He ignored the letter. He was busy showing the white establishment how tough he was in fighting “terrorism.”
European governments did not lose any sleep over the falsification of Macedonian-Greek history. They, too, honored the Albanians and Bulgarians of Skopje as Macedonians. Suddenly, the subversion of history became routine.
For a temporary gain of encircling Russia even more, American and European political elites started lying and supporting the fake Macedonian news of Skopje. Historical integrity did not matter anymore. Skopje had to join NATO.
America had boosted the fake aspirations of the Skopje and UN elites on why Skopje was Macedonia. America’s man behind the propaganda was Matthew Nimetz, an old hand in corporate law, business, diplomacy and government policy.
Nimetz directed the Greek-Turkish affairs at the State Department for several years. This was a time of American hegemony in Vietnam and around the world.
President Lyndon Johnson, faithful to Cold War hysteria, demanded that Greece and Turkey slice Cyprus in two. Turkey could then have half of the island. When Alexander Matsos, Greek ambassador in Washington, refused to agree to that hostile proposal, Lyndon Johnson was brutal. He turned to the ambassador and hurled at him a threatening and thunderous insult:
“Fuck your Parliament and your constitution. America is an elephant. Cyprus is a flea. Greece is a flea. If those two fleas continue itching the elephant, they may just get whacked… We pay a lot of good American dollars to the Greeks, Mr. Ambassador. If your prime minister gives me talk about democracy, parliaments, and constitutions, he, his parliament, and his constitution may not last very long… Don’t forget to tell old papa-what’s his name [prime minister George Papandreou] what I told you.”
Nimetz came out of that hubris — as large as Johnson’s elephant. The American president’s word was international law.
In 1995, president Bill Clinton sent Nimetz as a special envoy for the Skopje regime and Greece. He had to find a suitable name for the Albanian-Bulgarian state that also did not offend Greece: an impossible task. He had made up his mind, however. He saw his role the facilitation of the NATO solution. He suggested the first temporary name of Skopje: Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. And, in 2018, he insisted that Skopje deserved the name Northern Macedonia.
So, the join EU-IMF debt collectors-NATO pushers for Skopje used the trauma of debt to crush Greek resistance. The Prespes Agreementof June 17, 2018 codified the Nimetz proposal.
Soon thereafter, Zoran Zaev, prime minister of Skopje, said something to the effect the Greeks in Greece need to learn Macedonian, a fake language found legitimacy in the Prespes Agreement. The result of such irredentist rhetoric was a firestorm in Greece against Skopje.
Nevertheless, the Greek elite, hoping against hope, is supporting the Prespes Agreement as a magic formula for a “pro-Western orientation of Skopje and minimizing Russian influence” in Skopje and Southeastern Europe.
But the outcome of this forced negotiation humiliated the vast number of Greeks as much as if they had lost a war. Their government had just handed over to Skopje a tremendous victory: in a sense, it was like giving them the keys to the history and civilization of Macedonia and Greece, which, Greeks thought belonged to them alone.
This was an intolerable insult. Greeks are talking in the open that Alexis Tsipras, his SYRIZA party parliament deputies, and the president of the Hellenic Republic, Prokopis Pavlopoulos, are guilty of treason.
This bodes ill for Greek political life. The country is deeply divided. Most Greeks feel contempt for Tsipras and his party.
Athanasios Karantzikos, a retired general, denounced the political leadership of Greece and that of the allies, including NATO and the UN, for their support of the Prespes Agreement, which ignores Greek history and the sacrifices of the Greek Macedonians for the freedom of their country.
“I feel shame, humiliation, and uneasiness for the future of Greece,” he said. He resented the diplomatic defeat of Greece at the hands of a country openly looting the history and culture of Greek Macedonia. In addition, seeing NATO officers greet the illegal leaders of Skopje was utterly humiliating: it was proof NATO leadership has no respect for Greece, democracy, and international law and order.
Mythology-history
There’s little doubt Greeks are very angry. They know their mythology connects them and the Greeks of Macedonia to Zeus. Hellen, who gave his name to the Greeks as Hellenes, was the son of Deucalion who was the son of Prometheus. Another tradition makes Hellen son of Zeus.
We also have the same roots for Macedon who gave his name to the Macedonians. He was son of Zeus. The eighth-century BCE poet Hesiod makes those connections.
Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, the 10thcentury medieval Greek emperor, was a man of letters. In his book, De thematibus, he cites Hesiod to the effect Macedon was the son of Zeus.
Then we have the history of Alexander the Great who in late 4th century BCE defeated the world’s largest empire, Persia, and founded a vast empire and spread Greek civilization all over the world. The Alexandrian Age, with its pioneering Mouseion (Institute for Advanced Studies-University) and the world’s greatest Library in Alexandria, Egypt, spawned an unprecedented scientific and technological revolution that, during the Renaissance, sowed seeds that made our world.
This is the legacy engulfing the minds of all Greeks. They see the international community that sided with Skopje as untrustworthy. Allowing Skopje to call itself Macedonia, which also has a “Macedonian language” and “Macedonian ethnicity,” is threatening the Greeks no less than the Turks do.
The threats now are psychological. On January 29, 2019, Skopje’s propaganda agency, Rainbow, urged Greece to apologize for is crimes against Macedonians. Imagine the hubris of this organization, which is located in the Greek Macedonian town of Florina. And, of course, imagine the outrage of the Greeks.
General Karantzikos sees Skopje, powered by the name Macedonia, NATO and EU, opening the leather bag of Aeolus, and releasing the winds of strategic instability and danger.
Southeastern Europe is entering another age of tension verging on war.