America the despised

National Interest, The, Spring, 2002 by Takis Michas

For some, the incorporation of nationalism into communist doctrine has a deeper ideological significance. Common to both systems is the absence of any concept of individual freedom. As former U.S. Ambassador to Yugoslavia Warren Zimmermann pointed out, the shift from communism to nationalism, such as that which took place under Milosevic, could be characterized as the transition from one collectivist ideology to another. (1) More importantly, both nationalism and communism are ideological means to mobilize the masses for the fight against a supposedly ever-present enemy in whose name individual rights and freedoms may be ruthlessly suppressed.

The intellectual sources of Greece's new conservative "anti-Americanism" also include a nationalist element, but they are more rich and varied than that. They reflect in part the xenophobic anti-Western attitude that characterizes the rhetoric of the Greek Orthodox Church. This connection points to the fact that it is not simply U.S. foreign policy that offends the nationalist Right. Instead, it is the entire narrative of American history and the values that define the United States, for these contradict the basic premises of nationalist conservatism in Greece: Multiculturalism and multi-ethnic narratives challenge the very essence of the linguistic, cultural and ethnic homogeneity that has always constituted the plinth of modern Greek nationalism. Indeed, one of the main fears among conservative nationalists in Greece during the recent Balkan wars was that the United States was trying to export its model of societal pluralism in the region. American support for Bosnia and Macedonia has been interpreted by Gr eek conservatives as an attempt to export multi-ethnic models to Greece's doorstep. If it is the case that the United States supported an independent Bosnia because of its once and potentially future multi-ethnic character, exactly the opposite was the case with Greece, whose government maintained from the outset that Bosnia was doomed precisely because of its multiethnic make-up.

Thus, conservative Greek newspapers now denounce the United States with the same vehemence as the Communist Party paper Rizospastis. Anti-Americanism is not restricted to diatribes in the press but is increasingly forming part of the public pronouncements of conservative politicians, which, of course, influence the views of the average conservative voter. A poll taken shortly after the September 11 terrorist attack revealed that over 50 percent of conservative voters define themselves as anti-American.

The third source of the new anti-Americanism in Greece is the Orthodox Church itself. Its enmity toward the United States draws its intellectual inspiration partly from the generally militant, anti-Western legacy of Eastern Orthodoxy. In attacking the United States during the war in Kosovo, the Church drew upon traditional Biblical sources to cast the United States in demonic terms. Its president was labeled a "Satan." New York became the new seat of the "Whore of Babylon." The Church, however, also drew upon its own historical legacy. Traditionally, the Greek Orthodox populations of the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires had always perceived the West as being inhabited by "barbarian Franks", "schismatics" and "heretics" from the True Faith. The religious bond of Orthodoxy that held together the Greek population through centuries of occupation has always carried a strong and-Western strain. Nobody understood this better than Karl Marx, who wrote: "There exists no polemical schism between the Musulmans [the Ottoman Turks] and their Greek subjects; but the religious animosity against the Latins may be said to form the only common bond among the different races inhabiting Turkey and professing the Greek creed." (2)