“This is an act of terrorism,” Police Chief Asimakis Golfis said. “There was a shell that exploded in the toilets of the building.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/12/AR2007011200051.html?nav=hcmodule
I’ve dropped more than a shell in toilets before.
rimshot
Who dropped a whole truckload of fizzies into the swim meet? Who delivered the medical school cadavers to the alumni dinner? Every Halloween, the trees are filled with underwear. Every spring, the toilets explode.
Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbour? Hell no. And it ain’t over now.
Who’s always writing on the wall? Who’s always goofing in the hall? Who’s always throwing spit balls?
Apparently the Greeks have hated the US since World War Two, and aren’t just jumping on the Bush is Satan bandwagon, I never realised that.
Someone should’ve told the Greeks these are not Stingers:
It’s not hard to see how the Byzantine Empire fell seeing as the Greeks, when they’re not arguing with literally every one of their neighbors, can’t help but decend into fratricidal arguments among themselves every chance they get. Literally the first thing the Greeks did after winning the Balkan war was set upon themselves.
Most Greek intelligencia are strongly socialist and anti-American in the Franz Fanon anti-colonialism sort of way.
Yeah, that’s pretty much how they lost their empire. Fighting for the throne after Manzikert lost them Asia Minor and squabbling for the throne prior to the 4th Crusade lost them Constantinople.
I don’t understand this:
The march is also an opportunity for Greece’s grandparents to vent their anger over US interference in their domestic politics. After Stalin, Truman and Churchill divided Europe at the Yalta summit, Greece slid into civil war, fought between communists and nationalists. During the five-year conflict, America supported the nationalists, because they were desperate to make sure that the Soviet bloc did not have an outlet to the Mediterranean.
Do they really think they’d be better off behind the Iron Curtain for 40 years?
In hindsight, it looks unbelievably retarded. Lots of well-meaning people were in the communist party in those days, though, who either didn’t know about or convinced themselves to ignore that world socialism as such was really a police state.
Yeah, but we’re not talking about 40 years ago now. The article says that present day Greeks resent what happened. You’d think they’d appreciate that they didn’t have to grow up in a Stalinist state. But no, it’s easier to be mad at the US I guess.
Greece is just another one of those cultures where the children are sat on their grandparents knee and entertained with stories on how evil the protagonists are. Whether it’s the Americans, Israelis, British, Protestants, Catholics, whatever.
My ex was a Catholic, and it was common in their family to hear stories about Catholic oppression. Each generation passes on their own greviances onto the youngest generation. My ex still had issues over Protestant massacres of Catholics back in the 1600s. They hated Cromwell as if he was still walking around.
Huh? It was the Bulgarians who turned against their former allies (Greeks and Serbs) and launched the Second Balkan War, with disastrous results for themselves.
As for the Byzantines, they lasted what 900 years? Do you want to compare them to their original contemporaries; the Frankish Empire, Saxon England, the Visigoths and the Sassinid Persian Empire? Laugh.
As for present day resentment against America, it has little to do with anything in the immediate aftermath of WWII, and a great deal to do with open US support for the universally despised 67-74 Junta, belief that the US gave its blessing to the Junta’s overthrow of Makarios (as well as the assassination attempts against him) and was thus ultimately responsible for the Turkish invasion there while doing nothing to prevent it.
Edit-Sp
Gotta love when things turn out to be slightly more complicated than “they hate us because they are weird.”
As somebody with plenty of Greek blood in him… Greeks are arrogant know-it-alls who can’t stand other know-it-alls. As such, they all can’t stand each other. The fact that Greece is a poor country with little wealth to go around means more often then not their squabling over more then pride.
Yea, but the reason Greece exists at all is because of romantic, Byronic notions of phil-hellenism that swept up Europe around the start of the 19th century, that compelled the Great Powers to impose upon the Ottomans a settlement that allowed the Greeks a great deal of independence far in excess to their capacity or natural inclination. And this despite Greeks being the “second citizens” of the Ottoman Empire for much of it’s history. After their successful rebellion the Orthodox Patriarchate, and the reign of the Pharianotes, was completely irradicated or reduced to a near symbolic shell, and eventually led to the liquidation of the Greek heritage on Anatolia.
I have to wonder whether it wouldn’t have been better for everyone in the Middle East if Greek Independence, and the subsequent fracture of the Ottoman Empire along ethnic and religious lines, hadn’t happened. If somehow, the Ottoman Empire, a multi-ethnic, multi-religious society, survived and was dragged into the Modern Era with all it’s nations and religions intact, whether modern liberal principles wouldn’t have compelled it into a great liberal experiment in tolerance, sort of a Lebanon on a larger scale. And I wonder if everyone wouldn’t have been better off it it had.
You forget that Lebanon is tiny and has everyone living in close proximity. The Ottoman Empire was huge and had its religions and ethnicities neatly separated into large territories. At best they’d be bitching at each other like Flemings and Walloons in Belgium, or Québecois and the rest of the country in Canada. At worst they’d break apart anyway, with or without violence, like Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia or the USSR.
The whole idea that locking different peoples into a single state somehow engenders brotherly love and tolerance was always baseless and has been quite thoroughly refuted by the breakdown of the Soviet empire, I should think.