Ελληνικά Θέματα Hellenic Issues Греческая дела Affaires Helléniques: Which Macedonia Plays Up Past Glory?

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
a 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!