Σάββατο 25 Ιουνίου 2011

Which Macedonia Plays Up Past Glory?

June 26, 3011
Miltiades Elia Bolaris 

In his "Macedonia Plays Up Past Glory" (New York Times, June 23, 2011), 
Mathhew Brunwasser has disappointed the better informed among his 
readership by chopping up the truth to the point of no recognition. (1)

To begin with, the title itself is misleading. It implies that there is a 
Macedonia that has a glorious past, which is obviously true but then 
blunders by identifying historic Macedonia (of Northern Greece and 
of the glorious past) with the wrong geographic entity, a former Yugoslav 
Republic of the assumed name.

"Bulgarians see its people as Bulgarians with accents", is how the article begins. 
This is the first half truth we encounter. A more precise statement would be 
that a large percentage (probably more than 60%) of the citizens of FYROM 
are seen by the Bulgarians as their linguistic brethren. FYROM is a multi-ethnic 
entity where Slavs and Albanians, Turks and Gypsies, Serbs and Greeks live 
under one umbrella with a forced assumed name: Makedonci; a name 
that was imposed on them by Yugoslavia's resistance hero turned dictator Tito, 
after he took power in 1944.

The Bulgarians do have a point on linguistics, on the majority of the Slavonic 
part of the population. The so called Macedonian language is as distinct from 
Standard Bulgarian as Australian English is from the English spoken, say, in Texas. 
If you want to call this "Texan" and the other "Australian", in a linguistic sense, 
who is there to stop you? If ever the Australian parliament decides to call its 
dialect of English the "Australian language", linguists the world over will 
congregate and find the distinct linguistic patterns that make Australian a 
"distinct" language. Bosnian, has been proclaimed a separate language, 
after all, though it differs not an iota from standard Serbocroatian...
pardon my sin, standard Serbian and/or standard Croatian, I meant to say. 
Language often takes the back seat in modern Balkan identities, after all.

"Serbia", the article continues "used to consider the land Southern Serbia and 
refuses to recognize its church". The writer of the article could have also 
informed the reader that the area in question was indeed Southern Serbia 
in several eras of its history, starting from the 13th-14th century and as recently 
as post-1912, when the Serbian army pushed the ottoman conquerors out of it. 
It was Southern Serbia until Marshall Tito cut it off from Serbia and renamed 
it "Makedonija", post WWII. As for "Serbia's...refusal to recognize its church", 
it is not Serbia, but the Orthodox Church world wide that refuses to recognize 
the non-canonical splinter. Hile I can wake up next Monday morning and go register 
on my name the Church of the American Chronicle, for lack of a better name, 
I cannot simply call it a catholic church and hope that the vatican will accept 
my creation as a legitimate part of the body of the Catholic Church. Likewise, 
the Patriarchs of the Orthodox Church do not have to accept the random ruling 
of the Communist Party of Yugoslavija's central Plenum when it decided to split 
off Skopje from the Patriarchate of Serbia and call it the Makedonska 
Pravoslavna Crkva, the "Macedonian orthodox Church". For good or for bad, 
the patriarchates of Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem, Alexandria, 
Moscow, Romania, Bulgaria and Serbia, among other Orthodox Churches, 
have refused to go along with that POLITICALLY motivated decision of the 
Union of Yugoslav Communists.

"Greece accuses the country of nothing less than stealing its name, history 
and national symbols", continues Mathhew Brunwasser, yet he fails to quantify 
that "nothing less". Truth be told, any quick internet search, will convince even 
the best intentioned and most impartial researcher that this is indeed what 
is happening. On May 18th, 2009, two hundred Classics and History professors 
from academic institutions around the world sent a "Letter to President 
Barack Obama" (the number of the signatories has now grown to 371) protesting 
the unleashing of "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." (2)
Balkan nationalistic silliness gone too far: clownish parade of impostors
pretending to be some sort of "Macedonians"

So, then, if scholars from Berkeley and Stanford, Yale, Harvard, Sorbonne, 
Moscow and Berlin "believe that this silliness has gone too far", why is then 
Greece not fully justified to "accuse the country of nothing less than stealing its 
name, history and national symbols"?

"Macedonia wants to advance the thesis that it is a cornerstone of 
Western civilization." is what a New York based Greek anthropologist 
being interviewed by Mathhew Brunwasser said. She was very timid indeed. Had 
she known what God himself said, in that state - sponsored propaganda video, 
aired on state TV in Skopje (sacrilegiously mis-named "Makedonska Molitva - Macedonian Prayer"), she would have heard the following divine truths which 
their state wants its citizens to absorb:

"Divine blessing for you, my Macedonians. I have waited for thousands of years 
to be called by you. From always with you, from eternity I am coming, I am 
already among you because here neither time nor space exists. Here, at my 
place, (He means: Heaven) the time is still. But at your place (i.e. Skopje), the 
time is now, for me to explain. Your mother Earth I have inhabited with 
three races: the White-Macedonoids, the Yellow-Mongoloids and the 
Black-Negroids. The rest-all are mulattoes (...if "God" and the Skopje State TV 
said it, it must be true! I wonder what Obama would think of all this...). 
From you, Macedonians, the descendants of Macedon, I have impregnated 
the White race and everything began from you, to the Sea of Japan (a subtle 
reference to the "Makedonoid" Russians, obviously). All White people are 
your brothers because they carry Macedonian gene. And all the migrations 
started from your place towards the north...wherever you dig you shall find 
the truth who you are, why you are and from where are you. Evil diabolic 
souls (i.e. Classical Scholars, Greeks, Bulgarians, etc) obscured the truth for thousands of years and lied to the world." 


Joseph Goebbels would have been pleasantly impressed by such faithful adherents to state sanctioned white power Skopjan "Makedonoid" Naziism (3)
"If it can´t have riches, Macedonia, a country of two million with 31 
percent unemployment, wants recognition. Playing up ties to an ancient 
global celebrity  resonates with people who feel they have been marginalized 
for centuries."
The impostor Christopher Gerharts Reiter as "Clark Rockefeller" 
imposing as fake Roman Mars
Enter Clark Rockefeller, the man pictured above, a German national who was 
born the humble son of a painter in Bavaria as Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter but 
made a career as an impostor (supposedly of aristocratic roots) in the US, 
assuming such names as Christopher Gerharts Reiter and Chris Kenneth Gerhart. 
He also convinced people he was an English aristocrat under the names of 
Christopher Chichester and better yet Christopher Chichester, XIII Bt, 
(i.e. Baronet) and Christopher Crowe.
He became most infamous by assuming the "Clark Rockefeller" persona, supposedly
a super-wealthy scion of the famous Rockefeller family. He is now serving time in 
California prison but until he abducted his own child and committed murder, 
he had convinced half the New York high society, plus Hollywood, that he 
was indeed the real thing. This is what impostors are good at.

Indeed, if Skopje "can´t have riches"..."it wants (an outright fake!) recognition". Why? Simply because "Playing up ties to an ancient global celebrity resonates 

with people...": Give people the opium they deserve, in other words! Hence the 
"30-ton statue of Alexander the Great in Skopje"!

The delirium goes on:
"We are proud of Alexander," said Petko Bozhinovski, 48..."Finally, our Alexander has come back to his homeland" he said.

His homeland? A brief browsing through ancient Greek history will inform even 
the most Geography and History - ignoramus that Skopoi-Scupi-Skopje was 
in Dardania, which was home (along with what is now modern Kosovo) of Bardylis, 
an Illyrian warlord and nemesis of Macedonia, whom Philip II, the father of 
Alexander eventually crushed into submission. Alexander's homeland was Pella, 
the capital of ancient Macedonia, only a few kilometers from Thessaloniki, 
the second largest city in Greece. Cassandos, the king of Macedonia after 
Alexander, founded Thessaloniki (meaning "Thessalian victory", in Greek) and 
gave her the name of his wife, who was Alexander the Great's sister.

Far from being Alexander's "homeland" (Alexander spoke Northwest-Aeolian and 
Attic Greek, after all, not a Serbo-Bulgarian dialect), the area around Skopje 
was visited by Alexander but once, when he was coming back from his 
Balkan expedition, and had to kick the Tribalians (among other Thracian and 
Illyrian tribesmen) into submission. He littered the place with barbarian corpses 
and now a statue is being erected in that very place on his honor! Who wouldn´t 
say that life has its ironic turns and switches...the Greeks spent lifetimes 
iscussing about just that.

"The project", we are told, "is controversial — it cost €9.4 million, or $13 million. 
But some things, say statue fans, are priceless. "If you lose your identity, you 
are a nobody," said Alexandar Ristevski, 32, an ethnographer.

An ethnographer must be quite desperate indeed about the future of his ethnos, 
if he trully believes that a $13 million (it started originally as a $4 million project, 
but add the under the table corruption and political commissions for the 
governing VMRO heads and the PM Nikola Gruevski, and now the sky is the limit: 
"The government estimated the bill for renovation at €80 million in 2009, but 
the opposition says costs have already risen to €200 million. No official figures 
are available") statue and the fake ethnic identity it represents is what will help 
glue this multi-ethnic Balkan conglomerate, this mini Yugoslavia, together...

"Meanwhile, Macedonia has filed suit with the International Court of Justice in 
The Hague against Greece..."

It reminds me of the thief who sues the owner for refusing to let him peddle 
the stolen goods in the market...

"This attempt to rebuild the Macedonian nation is definitely destroying the 
chances for compromise" with Greece, said Vladimir Milcin, executive director of 
the Open Society Foundation Macedonia. Mr. Milcin noted that the European 
Union´s enlargement commissioner, Stefan Füle, called the statue a "provocation" 
and suggested for the first time that Macedonia´s move toward Europe was 
going backward.

But neither Mr. Milcin nor a Western diplomat who insisted on anonymity thought 
this would deter the prime minister. "It´s just adding fuel to his power and 
image that he is the final and only defender of Macedonian name, identity 
and culture," Mr. Milcin said.

Macedonia´s identity politics are further complicated by the restive 25 percent of 
its population who are ethnic Albanians. In 2000, the ethnic Albanian 
National Liberation Army fought a six-month war against the majority.

Rafis Aliti, a former fighter with the Albanian rebels, and now deputy speaker 
of parliament, said the name dispute worried Albanians because "there will be 
no prospects for the future, no security and foreign investment."

This, in simple Balkanese, means that what PM Nikola Gruevski is doing is:

A. Antagonizing ALL of the small country's neighbors with irredentist talk of 
"United Macedonia" (meaning "uniting" FYROM with the supposedly "still to 
be liberated parts of Makedonija" in Greece, Serbia, Albania and Bulgaria that 
the Skopje ultra-nationalists envision and claim as part of their own).

B. Ignoring and irritating the restive Muslim minorities of the Torbeshi (Muslim Slavs)
Turks and especially the numerous Albanians of FYROM, by keeping their 
communities captive to his party's "Antiquitist" (this is the actual political term 
being tossed around in Skopje) illusions.

C. Undermining the very survival of FYROM by making a compromise with 
EVERYONE else (including NATO and the EU) impossible, therefore 
effectively shutting all avenues to economic development and long term stability 
of the country he was elected to govern.

That withstanding, "The lure of Macedonian lore has grown in recent years. 
Alexander has helped buttress the nation against the trauma of the free 
market, political strife and independence, said Pasko Kuzman, an archaeologist 
with the Ministry of Culture". I can not possibly see how "independence" can qualify 
as "trauma" for a nation, but Pasko Kuzman, the chief paid state propagandist 
of Pseudo-Makedonism and a notorious pseudo-scholarly history falsifier, 
probably knows something I don't.history falsifier.
"Alexander conquered the world," he added. "Would you ever give up something 
like that? I don´t think so."

As a Greek Macedonian, from historic Macedonia, in northern Greece, the 
homeland of the real Macedonians, the land of Philip II, Aristotle and Alexander 
the Great, not Yugoslav Dardania, the land of Illyrians, Triballi and Dardanians, I 
can't help but somehow and wholeheartedly agree with him.

I would 'nt EVER "give up something like that" whatever it takes, whatever the 
Greek government in Athens decides, I, along with two and a half million other 
Greek Macedonians - no matter how many statues to our ancestors Skopje erects 
(we don't give a bronze horse's ass for that) - we will not give up our 
own Macedonian identity to fake impostors in need of one!

Skopje: The stuff pseudomacedonian ethnic identity is being created from.

REFERENCES:
1. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/24/world/europe/24iht-macedonia24.html
2. http://macedonia-evidence.org/obama-letter.html
3. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBRoocbMSEE  
The video is in Slavomacedonian, so, please read the translation attached to 
the You Tube video.

http://macedonianissues.blogspot.com/2011/06/which-macedonia-plays-up-past-glory.html
http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/240220

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