America the despised

National Interest, The, Spring, 2002 by Takis Michas

The appearance of a group of influential "neo-Orthodox" thinkers has been one of the most important elements fueling the Church's strong anti-Western posture of the last several years. Writers such as Christos Giannaras, a professor at the Panteion University at Athens, have revived and focused the antagonism that existed between the Orthodox East and the Latin West during the Middle Ages. Giannaras and others have recast those traditional religious antagonisms (familiar to every Greek, whether religious or not) in the contemporary idiom of world politics, and used them as a basis for advocating foreign policy positions whose ultimate aim is the total separation of Greece from the West. (5)

According to these thinkers the West continues to perpetuate the legacy of hatred for the Orthodox Church that started with the Great Schism of 1054 and culminated with the sacking of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204. The West is hostile, and its values alien to the Greek experience. Thus, all the misfortunes that have befallen Greeks during their recent history--from the Asia Minor catastrophe in 1922 to the invasion of Cyprus by the Turks in 1974--are due to Greece's failed attempt to imitate the West. The continuing decline of Greece cannot be reversed until Greeks realize their cultural and spiritual superiority to the West as members of the Orthodox Church. The rot will stop only when the Greeks substitute the "servility" that characterizes their relation with the West with the spirit of resistance against the latter's "immoral barbarism." Herein lies Greece's path to salvation and its moral and cultural rejuvenation. Thus, to the Left's anger at America's sabotage of the Communist dream, and the conservatives' distaste for America's multicultural legacy, the Church contributes a spiritual justification for anti-Americanism.

More recently, in his regular column in Kathimerini, the newspaper of record for Greek conservatives, Giannaras went so far as to condone the terrorist attacks against Washington and New York, comparing them to acts committed by the Greek fighters of the War of Independence in 1821. It is also of interest to note that, in some instances, relations between the Communist Party and Orthodoxy are not restricted to ideology but extend to politics. Thus one prominent member of the neo-Orthodox movement, Kostas Zouraris, was included in the list of parliamentary candidates that the Greek Communist Party filed in the last elections.

The intellectual props for anti-Americanism in Greece also happen to blend well with the mix of conspiracy theories that dominate the folk worldview of the masses. In the popular mindset, argues Alexis Herakleidis, professor at the Panteion University at Athens, the universe is divided into two categories: the [phi][iota][lambda][epsilon][lambda][lambda][eta][nu][epsilon][zeta] (popularly rendered in the Western media as "Philhellenes"), the "friends of the Greeks", and their opposite, the [micro][iota][sigma][epsilon][lambda][lambda][eta][nu][epsilon][zeta] or [alpha][nu][theta][epsilon][lambda][lambda][eta][nu][epsilon][zeta] ("those who hate Greece"). Greece, according to this view, is an [alpha][nu][alpha][delta][epsilon][lambda][phi][omicron] [epsilon][theta][nu][omicron][zeta] ("a nation alone in the world"). It always lives on the "edge of a crisis." It is always surrounded by enemies. Greeks are always at the center of [sigma][KAPPA][OMICRON][TAU][epsilon][iota][nu][epsilon][zeta] [sigma][upsilon][nu] [omicron][micro][omega][sigma][iota][epsilon][zeta] ("dark conspiracies") that emanate from [zeta][epsilon][nu][alpha] [kappa][epsilon][nu][TAU][rho][alpha] ("foreign centers"). These conspiracies emanate from the "Ankara-Skopje-Tirana axis", from Bonn, from London, from NATO. But above all the conspiracies emanate from Washington or, according to more "sophisticated" versions of these theories, from "the Jewish lobby" in the United States. All have, as their ultimate goal, the subjugation of the Greeks.