Modern Macedonian History

Greece’s PSI is Dead on Arrival: An error in search of a rationale but also a failure that may prove a harbinger for the Modest Proposal

2012-01-15T08:41:00.000+02:00

by Pr. Yannis Varoufakis
http://yanisvaroufakis.eu

A brief history of Greece’s PSI

In the beginning there was Wholesale Denial. Then the Denial began to subside under the weight of circumstances. It did so slowly, agonizingly so, with the result that, in the process, Greece lost any capacity it might have had to rebound. It also caused the Crisis to spread like a bushfire throughout the eurozone, turning liquidity problems into unyielding insolvencies first in Ireland, then in Portugal. Still, to this day, Denial is in the air. But it cannot remain intact, without the whole eurosystem crashing and burning. The Greek PSI may be the harbinger of denial’s end. If not, it is hard to see what will stop the juggernaut of the Crisis from destroying the few chances the euro has of survival.

Taking things from the top, the Wholesale Denial began life two years ago when imploding Greece was issued a triple ‘Nein’:...

No bailout, no interest rate relief, no haircut.[1] A few months later, with a second credit crunch looming, one of these Neins was revoked. The calendar read May 2010 when a massive bailout was agreed. But, still, no interest rate relief to mention and, of course, no haircuts. A few short months later, when it became abundantly clear that the disease had spread to the Emerald Isle, and it was on its way to the Iberian peninsula, Germany decided that another of the three Neins ought to be revoked: There would be haircuts, but not until the creation of the permanent ESM in 2013. It took another eight months of so (early summer of 2011) before the Greek haircut was given a snazzy new acronym, PSI they called it[2] (making it sound as if it was the bright idea of the… private sector).

The idea was not without appeal: Why should the taxpayers of the surplus countries fork out untold zillions to shore up silly bankers, who knew quite well why they were receiving interest rate premia by lending to basketcases like Greece, without having the bankers themselves take a haircut too? How else would banks be given an incentive to think twice before lending to profligate states? Such talk sounded good in the Federal Parliament, in Berlin, but also in Athens, in Paris, wherever the politicians used these ‘lines’ to feign ‘toughness’ in front of an audience aching for the bankers’ blood.

Alas, in the era of, what I call, Bankruptocracy,[3] even a haircut imposed upon bankers can be a blessing in disguise for the most sinister operators of the runaway banking sector. After the Greek PSI was announced in July 2011, shadow banking (hedge funds, special vehicles et al) lived its finest hour. They bought en masse Greek government bonds, at basement prices, with a view to swapping them for fresh bonds of much greater value. Why? Because PSI Mk1 specified no face value loss but a drop of expected net present value (estimated at around 20%) due to a swap with new bonds of much longer maturity. So, hedge funds bought old Greek government bonds (GGBs) for 30% to 35% of their face value in order to exchange them with bonds whose value was estimated at 80% of the old ones’ net present value. A nice little earner. This was one of the reasons why PSI Mk 1 bombed out, leading to PSI Mk2 in October 2011. (The other was, of course, the fact that this pitiful diminution in Greece’s debt burden was neither here nor there given the viciousness of the Greek recession.)

Back to the drawing board, our European leaders came up with a deeper haircut in October 2011. They called it PSI Mk2 and even had the foolish Greek PM fall on his sword, to be replaced by a hitherto loyal ECB functionary, so as to ensure that PSI Mk 2 would become Greece’s new light on the hill; a beacon of the last glimmer of hope for a desperate nation. PSI Mk 2 envisaged an impressive sounding 50% reduction in the GGBs’ face value which, in present value terms, would result in a haircut no less than 60% (since the interest rates charged on the new bonds, that would be swapped with the old ones, could not exceed the interest rates charged by the ECB and the EU for the original bailout funds). In other words, holders of GGBs would be hair-cut in two ways: a 50% reduction in face value and an interest rate less than 5% which would cut further into the present value of the old GGBs.

Alas, there is never a dearth of silver linings for the shadowy universe of our modern financial sector. Even when facing such a substantial haircut, many financiers will find something to smile about. In the case of PSI Mk 2, their smiles can be traced to two reasons: First, many of them bought GGBs for something around 30%. If PSI Mk2 implies an overall (present value) haircut of less than 70%, they are home and dry. Secondly, hedge fund managers have had more playful thoughts: Given the EU’s zeal to keep the semblance of a voluntary haircut (a ‘private sector initiative’) alive, what is there to stop them from pursuing a legal battle against any compulsory expropriation of even a cent of the GGBs they hold? Already a major hedge fund has opted out of the negotiations with the Greek government over the terms of PSI Mk2, clearly preparing for a legal challenge or, more precisely, for extracting a nice little out of court settlement once the all-singing-all-dancing PSI Mk2 ‘concordat’ is announced by the Greek government and the EU.

In short, and so as not to overlabour the point, PSI Mk2 is dead in the water. The shenanigans of the shadow banking sector (which, lest we forget, includes not only the hedge funds but also, remarkably, the ‘proper’ banks shady Special Vehicles) plus the predictable deterioration of the Greek economy have put paid to it. The negotiations may go on for a little while longer, the announcement of a brilliant agreement may be made but, in truth, the idea that the Greek haircut will put Greece’s debt-to-GDP ratio back on a course towards 120% has sunk without trace. And if you need hard evidence for this, the European Summit of 9th December provided it even before 2011 was seen off: Officially, Europe’s great and good announced the end of PSI as a policy of the new ESM; Europe’s future central, permanent bailout fund. It had all been a mistake, they seemed to confess.

And now what?

This year’s first significant statement came from Athanasios Orphanides, the Central Bank of Cyprus’ Head and his country’s representative on the ECB’s Council. In a letter to the Financial Times, published on 5th January 2012,, Mr Orphanides wrote: “Government debt markets are about trust”, blaming the Crisis’ inexorable progress within the eurozone on “…[a] collective failure of euro-zone decision-makers.” So far so excellent. As for the PSI, Orphanides repeated that which many have said before him: It signalled to investors, especially non-Europeans, that “euro-zone sovereign debt should no longer be considered a safe asset with the implicit promise that it would be repaid in full.” Like I have been writing ad nauseum in this blog since PSI Mk1 was announced, back in July 2011, Orphanides agrees that the Greek PSI, rather than being the bankers’ scourge, has proven a bonanza for shadow bankers and mainstream banks’ Special Vehicles. [He mentions the example of funds that purchased GGBs 35 cents or 40 cents on the euro who now insist on an agreement that allows them to profit from the swap.]

Now, some will say, with considerable justification, that the Head of Cyprus’ Central Bank is saying all this because Cypriot banks are sinking in a mire of their own making, having bought oodles of GGBs. Still, the fact that Mr Orphanides has an ulterior motive in calling for an end of Greece’s PSI is not the reason why his argument is lacking. The reason is that he is making precisely the same mistake as that Mrs Merkel, Mr Sarkozy and, indeed, the Greek government have been making for almost two years now: They keep thinking of the Greek public debt crisis in isolation to (a) the deep malaise of Northern Europe’s banks and (b) the public debt difficulties of most eurozone states. The fact is that the Greek crisis cannot and will not be dealt with unless the ‘solution’ is part of a systemic redesign that deals with (a) and (b) as well as containing a program for stemming the tide of recession that is currently engulfing our continent.

As evidence of Mr Orphanides’ narrow focus, which detracts from his case against Greece’s PSI, I offer the alternative that he is proposing: Greece should be issued, in lieu of the failed PSI, thirty year loans at 3% interest rates. Similar suggestions come from different quarters (see here an article by George Zestos) canvassing the idea that, instead of the PSI, the ECB ought to guarantee GGBs (with the Greek government paying the ECB a small premium in return for these guarantees). The problem with such proposals is that they fail to incorporate their solutions to the Greek Problem within a broader plan for Europe. Mr Orhpanides cannot possibly believe (and I do not think he does believe) that 3% thirty year loans can be extended to Greece but not to Ireland, Portugal, Italy, Spain, Belgium even. And he cannot believe that the banks will be left with ECB loans but not be forced to recapitalise ‘big time’. But where will the trillions involved come from? He does not answer the question, leaving it to us to imply that he is in favour of eurobonds. But then the question becomes: What sort of eurobonds?

The continuing appeal of the Modest Proposal

So, we have returned to the question that this blog has been built upon over the past year and a half. We certainly need eurobonds. But we neither need nor want eurobonds jointly and severally issued and backed by member-states (for reasons that Mrs Merkel can explain better than anyone; namely that such bonds will sell at interest rates that are too high for Germany and not low enough for the periphery). And since we cannot have a Federal Treasury do this on Europe’s behalf (as opposed to member-states), it is imperative that it is the ECB that issues and backs such bonds so as to convert the Maastricht compliant part of the eurozone’s aggregate public debt into Union/Eurozone debt; a common pool of debt that is, however, to be serviced pro rata by member-states at interest rates reflecting not their individual credit ratings but those of the ECB that organises this debt conversion on the Union’s behalf. (For more see our Modest Proposal.)

Interestingly, George Zestos’ recent proposal (mentioned above) points in the Modest Proposal’s direction. Zestos’ idea that the ECB should guarantee new issues of GGBs is, in fact, more radical than our proposal for ECB bonds issued on behalf of each member-state and to be serviced in the long run by the member-state. While Zestos is asking of the ECB effectively to take on its books the new issues of Greek, Italian and Spanish bonds, the Modest Proposal, much more… modestly, suggests that the ECB issues debt on behalf of these member-states but then charges them for their servicing on the basis of some super-seniority baring loan agreement. In fact, the two ideas are close in spirit except that the Modest Proposal (i) gives more guarantees to the ECB that it will not have to print to service member-states’ debts and (ii) gives international investors more ground for confidence (since they would be much happier buying bonds issued by the ECB than bonds issued by Greece or Italy under a complicated insurance scheme backed by the ECB).

To recap, the Greek PSI was always an error in search of a rationale. It gave shadow banking a great new opportunity to profiteer at the expense of Greece and of Europe and escalated the latter’s Crisis rather than help tame it. The question is: What is the alternative? After two years of studying carefully all alternatives, I still believe that our Modest Proposal is the natural candidate. More recently, I had the dubious honour of talking to a hyper-smart Goldman Sachs apparatchik. He more or less agreed with the Modest Proposal’s basic thrust, albeit in a manner not at odds with the usual cynicism associated with his firm. This is how he put it: “Well, in the end your proposal will be adopted by default. Once the ECB has accumulated so many rubbish bonds, they will have to start borrowing to service them. Once they make it official, they will see the merits in charging the member-states for the cost of servicing what will effectively be ECB-bonds.” As they say, the Devil has the best of tunes.

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[1] A fourth Nein was not even verbalised: A Nein to an exit from the eurozone.

[2] Private Sector Initiative/Participation
[3] The New Regime that emerged from the ashes of 2008 in which the greatest power to extract rents from the rest of the social economy was granted to the banks with the largest black holes in their assets’ books. See my Global Minotaur for more.

The Greek Character of Macedonia through the Ages

2011-11-21T10:34:00.002+02:00

by Christos Karatzios MD

«ΕΣΤΙΝ ΟΥΝ ΕΛΛΑΣ ΚΑΙ Η ΜΑΚΕΔΟΝΙΑ»
(Estin oun Ellas ke i Makedonia) “Macedonia, is of course a part of Greece”
Strabo, Geography, book 7, Fragment 9 (circa 7 BC – 23 AD)

With this quote, Strabo, the famous ancient Greek historian and geographer described the relation of Macedonia to the rest of Greece when he was describing the known ancient world. The rest of his geographical encyclopedia describes the Macedonians and their lands and is a testament to the Hellenism of Macedonia through the perspective of the ancients [1].

There is overwhelming evidence that the ancient Macedonians, their civilization, their culture, and their history were Greek ever since they settled the lands north of Mt. Olympus about 2,000 BC, and most modern classical scholars and archaeologists agree on these points [2]. As it stands, even historians like Eugene Borza who have not totally supported the fact that the ancient Macedonians were Greek, do state that by the time of Philip II and Alexander the Great, they had been absorbed and assimilated by the Greeks [3]. However, since Borza, more....
evidence has emerged about the ancient Macedonian civilization and language being undoubtedly Greek. This is not considered theory any more and even those historians who had disagreed did so based on the information they had about this civilization at the time they were writing their dissertations or theses. The late Nicholas Geoffrey Lemprière Hammond, long considered to be the world’s expert on Ancient Macedonia was the first to suggest that a town in Macedonia, Greece known as Vergina was likely the place of the first Macedonian capital, Aegae [4]. Sure enough, in 1977, one of the most important discoveries in Greece was made near Vergina where archaeologist Manolis Andronikos found the probable tombs of Philip II and various other members of the most famous Macedonian royal house. All tombstones or steles discovered in the vicinity had Greek inscriptions, and the pan-Hellenic symbol known as the “Sun of Vergina” adorned many ornaments and armour belonging to the royal family. The Macedonian royal house traced its origins to Argos in the Peloponnese, and Alexander the Great believed he was a descendant of the demi-God Hercules. The Macedonians participated in Pan-Hellenic summits, and participated in the Olympic Games – sporting events reserved solely for Greeks.

There abound many theories and pseudohistorical claims originating in Greece’s northern neighbour, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), that it was only the upper classes that spoke and acted Greek whereas the common people had a non-Greek Macedonian nature. Furthermore, revisionist historians from the FYROM also claim that the only reason why the Macedonians spoke Greek was because Greek was the lingua franca of the ancient Eurasian world somewhat like today’s worldwide English. These claims have no basis in reality and can be in fact, nullified. In 1986 a curse written on a tablet by a common Macedonian woman and dating back to the 4th century BC was discovered near the town of Pella (and the birthplace of Alexander the Great) in Macedonia, Greece. Known as the Katadesmos of Pella, it proves that the language the woman known as Dagina (or Dapina) used in order to curse the future wife of a man she loved was indeed a dialect of Northwestern Doric Greek [5-7]. Moreover, Greek was not the lingua franca of the ancient world before Alexander the Great spread the koine (or common) dialect of Greek throughout his Empire from Europe to India and to the steppes of Asia. Why would a non-Greek conqueror spread a language and a culture/customs that were alien to him? Many revisionists have used the infamous quote by the Athenian statesman Demosthenes; about Philip essentially coming from a land of barbarians, as proof that the Ancient Greeks regarded the Macedonians as non-Greek. This has been proven to be a falsehood since the term “barbarian” (barbaros) was also a slur used by Greeks towards other Greeks who they considered to be political adversaries [2]. In addition, the name Macedonia derives from the ancient Greek word μακεδνός (makednos; similar to macro- or large) meaning “tall one” or “highlander” and likely described the people living in the area [8]. Historian Robin Lane Fox from Oxford University recently stated during the opening of the “Heracles to Alexander the Great” exhibit at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, United Kingdom:

There is a message that is historical but still politically has to be said: Macedon is a Greek-speaking kingdom in northern Greece, populated by people using Greek names, Greek months of the year, worshipping Greek gods. Those who live in Skopje and say that that is Macedon and Alexander’s homeland are as ignorant and outrageous as if someone would to say that Oxford University was in Belarus, and Oxford was Minsk. [9]

The capital city of Skopje was never part of any historical Macedonia. Ancient Macedon spanned the area roughly corresponding to the modern administrative unit of Macedonia in Greece. It did contain a small part of the modern country of the FYROM known as Pelagonia. North of this however, the area was known as Paeonia in antiquity, and further north was the land of Dardania with Skopje (Scupi) as its capital [2, 10]. When the Romans defeated the Greek king Andriscus, Macedonia passed on to the Roman Empire in 146 AD and became a province known as Macedonia Prima [11] while southern Greece was known as Achaea. The Dardanian town of Scupi was not part of this either. When the Roman Empire in the east became the Byzantine Empire, northern Greece was separated into various themes or administrative units. The theme of Macedonia was then further East in what is known as Thrace today [12]. Later, during the Ottoman Empire, Macedonia ceased to exist as an official designated name. Instead, the Empire was divided into administrative units called vilayets. While most of what was ancient Macedon was part of the vilayets of Manastir and Selanik, Skopje (called Uskub at the time) was further north in the vilayet of Kosovo [13]. It should be added here that later during the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th centuries, the Slavs of the city of Uskub self identified (and were also identified by others) as Bulgarians who spoke a dialect of Bulgarian [14]. What is also interesting is that Skoplje (Skopje) was the first capital of medieval Serbia and of the Kingdom of Serbia in the early 20th Century.

The idea that there is a geographical region named Macedonia that includes parts of Greece, Bulgaria, and all of the FYROM is a political one and originated with the expansionist dreams of Bulgaria in the late 1800’s. It was however, solely used as a geographic term to describe where the Bulgarians of the Balkans lived and was not an ethnic designation There was never any country named Macedonia or a Macedonian nationality. In fact, when the pro-Bulgarian Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, William E. Gladstone coined the phrase “Macedonia for the Macedonians” in 1897 he was thoroughly criticized by William Miller, a Balkan traveler and historian, as being out of touch with the reality of the region if he implied that there was a true Macedonian ethnicity [15]. Many historians of the time pointed to the Ottoman statistics for the Balkan vilayets that failed to mention any Macedonian ethnicity [16].

The Greek element and struggle in historic Macedonia remained intact throughout the Ottoman occupation and persisted during the Slav and Bulgarian invasions of the Middle Ages. While southern Greece attained its freedom from the Ottomans in 1821, northern Greece was freed in 1912. There were, however, many Greek revolutions in Macedonia that were suppressed by massive numbers of Ottoman Turks (Greek leaders were Emmanuel Pappas in 1821 in Eastern Macedonia, Anastasios Karatasos in 1821-3 in Western Macedonia, and Evangelos Korovangos in 1878 around Mount Olympus). The thirst for freedom did not end there and when Imperial Russia (wanting a Slav satellite in the Balkans with access to the Aegean Sea) started supporting the creation of a Greater Bulgaria in 1870, innumerable Greek peasants in the Macedonian hinterland resisted the encroaching Bulgarian militias known as the komitadjis – committeemen of the Bulgarian Committee or VMRO (Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization) – the first recognized terrorist group in modern history [17, 18]. The current ruling nationalist political party in the FYROM is called VMRO-DNMPE and is the continuation of the original Bulgarian committee. As a result, there was never any “Greater” or “United” Macedonia that was taken over by Greece, and Bulgaria after 1912 as is officially believed in the FYROM.

Greece was the first modern country in the region to use the term “Macedonia” as an official political unit in 1914 after northern Greece was freed from the Ottomans a year earlier, and continues to do so [19]. There are about 2.5 million Greeks living there who have been calling themselves Macedonians for thousands of years and who believe they have a cultural continuity with the ancient Macedonians. International Law does state that there exists legal entitlement to the use of a name/term based on historic title (essentially who used the term first and for the longest period of time) [19].

There is a rumour among revisionists in the FYROM that there was never any area in Greece known as “Macedonia” prior to 1988. It is stated that Greece, aware of the fact that the People’s Republic of Macedonia was to secede from Yugoslavia, renamed Northern Greece to Macedonia. This unfortunate lie was started by no other than the former Minister of Foreign Affairs of the FYROM, Antonio Milososki, around 2003 [20]. The reality of the matter is that the Ministry of Northern Greece was named “The Ministry of Macedonia and Thrace” in 1988 after a government shuffle but the province’s name never changed.

The People’s Republic of Macedonia was created in 1944 out of the area that used to be Old/South Serbia and Vardarksa Banovina. What was originally The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes eventually became Yugoslavia and it was only then that the Yugoslav dictator Josip Broz Tito decided to add another Slav ethnicity to his communist federation [19]. The ultimate plan was to support a communist uprising in northern Greece and to eventually annex Greek Macedonia into a larger “United Macedonia”. The alarm was raised by the US State Department in 1944 and the US Secretary of State, Edward Stettinius, sent a circular airgram warning American diplomatic missions worldwide that Yugoslav talk of a Macedonian nation was a “cloak for aggression against Greece” [21].

Tito’s right hand man, Edvard Kardelj [13], together with the help of the Minister of Public Education of the Yugoslav People's Republic of Macedonia, Mitra Mitrovic-Djilas, and Greek communist collaborators devised a plot to transfer as many Greek children as possible from the border areas of Greece through the Iron Curtain for indoctrination and to use as fighters. Mimicking the old Ottoman act of devshirme (essentially kidnapping), about 28,000 children were removed from their families and displaced throughout Communist countries from 1947 until 1949. After many pleas from the US, the UN and from the International Red Cross, less than 2,000 of these children were returned to their homes [13, 22-26]. The majority of the non-repatriated children (now adults) firmly believe that they are “(non Greek) Macedonians” who were expelled from Greece in an act of genocide. They form the backbone of the nationalist movement in the FYROM and its diaspora [27-29]. They dream of a fictitious and euphoric “United Macedonia” that will occur by force in the not too distant future and the official government in Skopje is complacent with such ultranationalist rhetoric [30, 31].

Expressions of hatred against Greeks both at official and unofficial levels of the FYROM government have spread throughout the internet and have even made their way into the FYROM mainstream media [32]. A tribal obsession with blood purity and genetic continuity by the modern Slavs of the FYROM with the ancient Macedonians can be seen through the use of pseudoscientific and racial theories in the national rhetoric [33-35]. Suddenly, Greeks can’t be descendants of the ancient Macedonians because they are descendants of Ethiopian tribes while the FYROM Slavs are descendant from an older and inherently whiter European substratum (ancient Macedonians). While these theories have been disproved by the scientific community [36], they continue to permeate the FYROM society.

This is the reality that the world faces when dealing with Macedonism – a form of propaganda aimed at appropriating the name “Macedonia/Macedonian” by the FYROM: An aim at antiquization and nation-building that relies on historical revisionism and on a past that was never there. The truth is that Macedonia has been an indispensable part of the Greek psyche, history, culture, and identity for over 3,000 years. Let’s not forget this. We owe this to our children and to future generations.
1) Strabo; H.L. Jones (Editor) (1924). "The Geography of Strabo". The Perseus Digital Library. Tufts University, pp. Books 6 14. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?lookup=Strab.+toc. Last accessed 2011/10/13; in English.
2) See active letter to US President Barack Obama cosigned by 371 world renowned classicists. http://macedonia-evidence.org/documentation.html. Last accessed 2011/10/13.
3) E.N.Borza, “In the Shadows of Olympus” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pages 84, 92-3.
4) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N._G._L._Hammond. Last accessed 2011/10/13.
5) Dubois, Laurent (1995). "Une Tablette de Malédiction de Pella: S’Agit-il du Premier Texte Macédonien". Revue des Études Grecques 108: 190–197.
6) Masson, Olivier; Dubois, Laurent (2000). Onomastica Graeca Selecta. Librairie Droz. ISBN 2600004351. http://books.google.com/books?id=DE6o-uTvdj0C. Last accessed 2011/10/13.
7) Masson, Olivier (1996). Oxford Classical Dictionary. Oxford University Press.
8) Johann Baptist Hofmann (1950). Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Griechischen. R. Oldenbourg.
9) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIRe5tnqRKM&feature=player_embedded. Last accessed 2011/10/13.
10) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macedonia_(ancient_kingdom). Last accessed 2011/10/13.
11) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macedonia_(Roman_province). Last accessed 2011/10/13.
12) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macedonia_(theme). Last accessed 2011/10/13.
13) Templar, Marcus A. Thesis. A Challenge to the Macedonism of the Slavs (2008). http://history-of-macedonia.com/wordpress/2009/02/19/the-former-yugoslav-republic-of-macedonia-a-challenge-to-the-macedonism-of-the-slavs-bibliography/. Last accessed 2011/10/14.
14) Blakeslee, George Hubbard. “The Journal of International Relations” (1920).
15) Miller, William. Travels and Politics in the Near East (1898).
16) Dakin, Douglas. The Greek Struggle in Macedonia 1897-1913 (1966): page 20. ISBN 960-8303-2-6.
17) Dakin, Douglas. The Greek Struggle in Macedonia 1897-1913 (1966). ISBN 960-8303-2-6.
18) Douflias, Konstantinos. Macedonia, Macedonian Struggle, Greece-Macedonia 4000 Years, 1992, Aegean Publications, Pages 81, 84, 116, and 117
19) Bantekas, I. The Authority of States to Use Names in International Law and the Macedonian Affair: Unilateral Entitlements, Historic Title, and Trademark Analogies. Leiden Journal of International Law (2009) 22:563-82.
20) http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2008/03/25/what-s-in-a-name.html. Last accessed 2011/10/14.
21) www1.mfa.gr/images/docs/fyrom/dilosi_stettinius_dec_1944.pdf, or: U.S State Department, Foreign Relations Vol. VIII, Circular Airgram, Washington D.C. (868.014/26 Dec. 1944).
22) UN Resolutions: 382 (V Section C), 1950; 618 (VII), 1952; 517 (VI), 1952.
23) “Innocent’s Day,” Time, January 09, 1950. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,811653,00.html. Last accessed 2011/10/14.
24) US President Harry S. Truman, Letter to the Speaker of the House of Representatives on the Plight of Greek Children Abducted by Communist Guerrilla Forces, 1950. http://trumanlibrary.org/publicpapers/viewpapers.php?pid=713. Last accessed 2011/10/14.
25) Bougas, Ioannis. Η Φωνή της Ειρήνης (Thessaloniki: Erodios, 2006).
26) Studies in the History of the Greek Civil War, 1945-1949, eds. Lars Baerentzen, John O. Iatrides, Ole L. Smith (Museum Tusculanum Press, 1987).
27) Danforth, Loring M. (1997). The Macedonian Conflict. Princeton University Press. pp. 54. ISBN 0691043566.
28) http://www.makedonija.info/aegean3.html. Last accessed 2011/10/14.
29) Human Rights Violations Against Ethnic Macedonians-Report 1996, Macedonian Human Rights Movement of Canada, Toronto, 1996; p.111-112
30) In the following video, a giant flag of the Greek “Vergina Sun” over a map of "United Macedonia" encompassing the lands of Greece and Bulgaria, is displayed at the official 20th Anniversary festivities in Skopje on September 8, 2011. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfTVO4Gg0JgPearl (see after 2:15 minutes, last accessed 2011/09/09)
31) Toronto businessman and community leader John Bitove Sr. being interviewed by Skopje’s “United Macedonian Diaspora” lobby-group president in Toronto (2010). He stated to a cheering crowd that he wished for a "United Macedonia". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3UAV0kj_l0&feature=related (see especially from 3 minutes on; last accessed 2011/06/01).
32) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1583685/Macedonia-row-overshadows-NATO-summit.html. Last accessed 2011/10/14.
33) Arnaiz-Villena A., Dimitroski K., Pacho A., et al. (2001a). HLA genes in Macedonians and the Sub-Saharan origin of the Greeks. Tissue Antigens 57: 118-127.
34) http://www.maknews.com/html/articles/pan_mac_resolutions/koloski_pan_mac_1.html. Last accessed 2011/10/14.
35) The “Macedonian” prayer written and produced by Niche Dimovski, vice-president of the World Macedonian Congress, was shown on national TV (i.e. MTV) of the FYROM had God telling the “Macedonians,” “[f]rom you, Macedonians, descendants of Macedon I conceived the white race. All that stretches over to the Japanese sea is conceived from you [sic] gene.” Furthermore, in the prayer God said to his flock calling all the white men on the planet Macedonoids (Last accessed February 16, 2010). Templar, Marcus A.: http://www.rieas.gr/research-areas/global-issues/balkan-studies/1183-skopjs-award-for-its-racist-behavior-and-the-treaty-of-st-germain-en-laye-of-1919-eu-application-of-double-standards-on-the-name-issue-.html
36) http://greek-dna-sub-saharan-myth.org/. Last accessed 2011/10/14.

Some Christian Evidences on the Invented Macedonian Question

2011-11-12T08:58:00.000+02:00

by Pr. Ioannis N. Kallianiotis

October 2011

http://www.antibaro.gr/node/3467#_ftnref43

Abstract

The purpose of this small paper is to provide some Christian evidences (during the Christianization of Greek-Macedonians in year 50 A.D.) and a scientifically true analysis on the Hellenic (Greek) history and to examine what this information regarding Macedonia means to us and to the uninformed world as a whole. We will offer some thoughts and unshaken Christian events that may help to answer questions concerning today’s conditions in south-eastern Europe, the borders of the “Christendom” (currently, the under decomposition European Union). It is imperative that all scholars, politicians, decision makers, students, and intellectual human beings have this information regarding an artificial state, Skopje, created recently between Greece and Serbia, because we, as educators, are responsible for all young people of this planet and we must tell them the plain truth in simple words, away from any expediency, propaganda, and anti-scientific delusion. This new Albano-Slavic state has unlawfully chosen the Greek name “Macedonia” for its nation and Greece is opposing their aggressiveness and will resist their expansionism. It is historically wrong for them to use Greek names and symbols because they have nothing in common with Ancient Greeks since they came from Dardania and appeared in the region in the 7th century A.D.; their old name was Vardarska. How can they found their new establishing state on an incredible lie? They must know that there is social justice and it will, soon or late, prevail!

I. Preface

Hellenic history, Orthodoxy, and culture have contributed a great deal to the European and the entire western civilization that we find their seal everywhere, today.[1] The democracy of ancient Greece,[2] the accomplishments of her people,[3] the great ideas of her moral philosophers,[4] scientists and artists,[5] and finally, the dramatic events, which have unfolded in the glorious history of the Greek nation because of its geographical position and its persistence in Christian truth have always been a source of creative inspiration to all nations.[6] Even though that Greece has truly improved mankind, the West was and is against Greeks and their achievements.[7] The comparative advantage of Greece is her civilization. And of course, Greece has the copyright of this unique and oldest civilization, which is viewed stolen in the museums around the “civilized” world

Further, history, scientific truth, divine justice, morality, human respect, liberty, rights, sovereignty, and International Law are social necessities and they require satisfaction. Otherwise, this world cannot proceed towards its objectives, and Orthodox nations towards their perfection. Each man enjoys existence according to his labor and his values and virtues and by himself he determines his future, his heritage, his nation and thus, affects the world. Mutual solidarity, joint responsibility, and real love are essential not only for the life of families, but also for the history of nations and the coexistence of this Cosmos (order, ornament). Moral, ethical, independent, and uncorrupted leadership is necessary to promote patriotism and indigenous value system of a sovereign nation. Nations, also, need to pass their time in peace, in respect, in justice, and by supporting their citizens (their well-being) and the other independent nations without any intervention or else they will face the Divine Justice.

Today, the Hellenes (Greeks), even though that they are members of NATO and European Union (EU), remain ever-vigilant against the expansionistic plans of their neighbors (the barbarian Turks since the 11th century A.D.)[8] and lately, since the fall of the communism, the desperate Skopjeans have begun to make claims against northern Greece because they need to create a national history, after abandoning their Slavic ancestry, on which they will found their pseudo-state. They have spread far and wide propaganda that Macedonians are not Greeks and they style themselves as the true Macedonians (sic). They have spread lies and disinformation everywhere in all the “controlled” nations,[9] the United States, Canada, Australia, and Europe. But the question remains, how can these newcomers Slavs be Macedonians without being Greeks? And, how dared some nations to turn a blind eye to the historic and scientific truth and recognize this pseudo-state as “Macedonia”? This fallen world has lost completely its values and purpose!

II. A Summary of the Longest Historic March

During the ancient times, the entire area of Greece was divided into independent city-states, but they had the same blood, language, religion, culture, and civilization. They encouraged cooperation among city-states and cultivation of the intellect and the fine arts. As they were growing, they were starting to establish colonies along the costal regions of the Mediterranean. These cities were united for times against common foreign enemies; i.e., during the Persian wars, which lasted from the battle of Marathon in 490 B.C. to the battle of Thermopylae (480 B.C.) to the naval battle of Salamis (479 B.C.), and the battle of Plataea in 479 B.C. Alexander the Great, the King of the Greek city-state of Pella, united all Greeks and went against these Asian invaders.

From 450 B.C. to 300 B.C., it was the intellectual period, where Socrates taught about the soul and spoke of the Unknown God[10] hoping that He would reveal Himself. Plato and Aristotle made significant contributions to human thought with their moral philosophy and their foundations on almost every science (except Probability Theory), while sculptors such as Pheidias, Scopas, Praxiteles, and others experimented with new forms of artistic expression by putting the standard for the future and beautified Athens. Xenophon was also the father of the new moral discipline of Economics.[11]

At the same time, a new Greek city-state Pella, more powerful politically began to emerge in region of Macedonia (the Northern part of Greece).[12] In the four decades before the Hellenistic Period (323-146 B.C.), the Macedonians under King Philip II (359 B.C.) forcefully united most of the Greek city-states after defeating Athens and Thebes in battle at Chaeronea, and built a powerful Hellenic confederacy.[13] The illustrious Alexander the Great, the son of King Philip, schooled by Aristotle, embarked on a historic expedition in 336 B.C. to conquer the vast empire of the Persians (punish them for their past invasions of Greece). In only eleven years he subdued this mighty foe and extended Hellenic influence, language, civilization, and paideia far into Africa and Asia, as far as India.[14] Alexander’s achievement marked the height of Hellenic military power.[15]

Following Alexander’s death (323 B.C.), violent and frequent warfare among rival Greek (Hellenic) leagues tore apart the Empire. These conflicts rendered the Greek city-states vulnerable to invasion. Finally, in 146 B.C., after fifty years of war, Roman legions conquered Greece. Although conquered, the Greek culture “subjugated” the Roman culture. During and after the Hellenistic Period, the classical Greek culture and Greek language were dominant throughout the Orient.[16] This was God’s Providence! In A.D. 50, the Apostle Paul preached Christianity in Greece, and from the time when he spoke to the Athenians about their “Unknown God”, for whom they already had a temple, a common religion, the Hellenic Orthodoxy united them and made them an inseparable group, the Greek-Orthodox people.[17] Many people believed to Jesus Christ and two Athenians became disciples of St. Paul from the first day, a man named Dionyssios (a Judge in the Supreme Court in Athens) and a woman, Damaris.[18] Also, the use of the Greek language in writing the Gospel and by the Eastern Church and her fathers gave a new dimension to Hellenic culture and created the spiritual Medieval Hellenic (Byzantine) culture. No Slavo-Macedonian language anywhere in the region because Slavs came seven centuries later in the area from the north-central Europe.[19]

The Byzantine (Medieval Greek) Empire was the continuation of the Alexander’s the Great Empire and of the Eastern Roman Empire.[20] It was their evolution and transformation in the East. The transposition of the center of gravity of the Ancient Greece and the Roman nation from West to East (3rd century A.D.), the transfer of the capital from Rome not in Athens, but to an area predominance of the Greek spirit and language and at the same time not the pagan gods of the past, but the intense effect of Orthodoxy; all these combined, created the starting point of one autonomous historic march of the eastern sphere of the Empire. Byzantium was a new political form, where Hellenism and Orthodoxy created a new culture.[21]

The Byzantine Orthodox hymns[22] emphasize that the people of Byzantium are the “people of the Lord”. The same can be seen in other historic texts and it is clear that the perception of the Empire’s role as a divinely guided entity prevailed throughout the world of Byzantium.[23] The citizens of the Byzantium are understood to be the “chosen” people of God, the genuine Christian people of the “God guarded” Christian-Orthodox nation, compared with the heterodox of the west; of course, no comparison can be made with the allodox or pagans of today. During its whole journey in history, Byzantium had the same strong perception that among the fundamental goals of the nation was the protection of the Christian faith, its propagation, and its perpetuation until the Second Coming. Surrounded most of the time by nations of other religions, the Christian people were obliged to defend their faith, because in this way, they saved their national identity.[24] They had a strong involvement in religious strifes, an exceptional sensitivity towards heresies, and dogmatic opposition. Also, they Christianized their northern neighboring Slavic (like, Skopjeans) and Russian nations.

Uprising against the Turk conquerors occurred sporadically throughout the Middle Ages, but it was not until the early nineteenth century that the modern Greek Nation evolved (confined by her allies only on the European side of the Byzantine Empire), commensurate with the decline of the Ottoman Empire. On March 25, 1821, Greeks resumed their march through history again. A revolutionary army composed of patriots from Peloponnesos, Sterea Ellada, and the Aegean Islands began to battle the Turkish armies. Although both sides scored success, the conflict soon reached a stalemate. At the request of the Sultan, the Egyptians under Ibrahim Pasha invaded Greece, thus allowing for intervention by the three great European powers (France, England, and Russia) on the side of the Greek insurgents.

In 1939, World War II broke out in Europe and by 1940 most countries of Europe had surrendered and Hitler had the Continent of Europe in his grip. On October 28, 1940 Mussolini decided to take over Greece with an easy victory based on his numbers and mechanized forces. He attacked Greece from Albania. The Greeks with their Prime Minister Ioannis Metaxas stood up and said “Ochi” (OXI = No, you shall not pass) and these heroic forefathers of today’s Greeks fought with a will, hurling back the aggressors. The Duce’s divisions were soon pushed back into Albania and for six months were fighting to maintain a hold on the sea-cost, desperately calling for help.[25] When Germany entered the war against Greece with the most powerful army in Europe, the Greeks continued to fight both of these big empires although reason must have told them that their position was hopeless. Beside their British comrades, they continued to resist stubbornly on the Island of Crete.

Finally, Greece fell, but it cost Hitler thousands of his finest youth, and delayed for two months his attack against Russia. German troops ran into the dreadful Russian winter and the Russians imposed such appalling losses that it contributed to the ultimate defeat of Germany.[26] The occupation, great famine, resistance and subsequent liberation of Greece followed, and then came the “December Movement”, in which Greek communists fought their brother Greeks. This civil war ended in August 29, 1949 with the defeat of communists. England helped Greece first and later, the United States helped with the Marshall plan, which lent Greece to a new era and made her one of the most important allies of the West; but, her ignorant politicians threw the country, without a referendum, to the nails of the anti-Greek European Union. Then, it came the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the creation of pseudo-“Macedonia”. Until 1991, the Ancient Macedonians were unknown to Skopje. In 1991, they issue a banknote of 20 statirs (“Statir” was the currency of Ancient Macedonians during the period of Philip II, which brought the inscription in Greek language: FILIPPOY and the currency during the Alexander the Great period brings his name: ALEXANDROY).[27] This new bill was printed, but it did not approve as the national currency. Nikola Gruevski blew up the minds of ignorant Skopjeans with false dreams that they had the Ancient Macedonians their ancestors. Liubco Georgiefski aimed Skopje to join Bulgaria. Branko Crvenkovski is financed by G. Soros, who is working for a multinational and multicultural “Macedonia” and Kiro Gligorof was saved from an assassination attempt because he dared to say the truth, “We are Slavs!” The Albanian parties in Skopje are pleased with the support of Turkey. All these facts show the big crisis that exists in Skopje and give to us a feeling about its future.[28]

III. Christian Evidences

Looking at sources outside Greece, in the Acts of the Apostles, the Apostle Paul writes of his travels in Macedonia. He refers to Greek cities (Neapolis, Philippi, Thessalonica, Verea, etc.) and men and women with Greek names. One gets an impression of a Greek environment, attitude, and culture being present in Macedonia. Here, it must be noted that Macedonia was the main gate of the entrance of Christianity in the European Continent. Let us bear in mind the vision of the Apostle Paul that night in Troy, which determined the following Christianization of Europe. “So, passing by Mysia,[29] they went down to Troas. During the night Paul had a vision: there stood a man of Macedonia pleading with him and saying. ‘Come over to Macedonia and help us.’ When he had seen the vision, we immediately tried to cross over to Macedonia, being convinced that God had called us to proclaim the good news to them.”[30] It is characteristic that the Apostle of the Nations, addressing himself to the Macedonians, was preaching the Word of God and writing his letters in the Greek language. There is no Macedonian language or non-Greek Macedonians anywhere. These people, who were Christianized by St. Paul (in year 50 A.D.) were Greek-Macedonians. The Slav-pseudo-Macedonians were Christianized by the Greek brothers, Methodios and Kyrillos much later (9th century A.D.)[31] because they were not Greeks and they were living far away in the north of Greece, in Dardania.

The vision of the “Macedonian man” in the book of “The Acts of the Apostles”, the letters of the Apostle Paul, “To the Philippians” and “To the Thessalonians A and B” and all the other references in the Old and New Testaments concerning Macedonia constitute unassailable and infallible testimony of her Greekness. Not only these, but the continuous and uninterrupted line of bishops and saints; the great number of churches and monasteries found throughout the Macedonian regions (even within the borders of the Democracy of Skopje) as well as the Monastic Community of the Holy Mountain with its sovereign Greek characteristics and its spiritual light shining upon Orthodox Nations near and far, give holy evidences that Macedonia is Greek.

Saint Timothy accompanied Saint Paul to Macedonia, to Philippi, to Thessalonica, and to Verea (or Berea). “Many of them [in Berea] therefore believed, including Greek women and men of high standing.”[32] When the apostle Paul left Verea, Timothy and Silas remained there to confirm the converts. Then, when St. Paul went to Athens (in 51 A.D.), he asked Timothy to come to him and later, Timothy was sent back to Thessalonica because he had an account of the churches of Macedonia. After some time Timothy went with Silas to Corinth to meet St. Paul. Saints Timothy and Silas are mentioning at the beginning of the two Epistles of St. Paul to Thessalonians.[33] This entire region was Greek, with the same language and culture, made up by different cities under the Roman occupation. With the exception of some Latin tribal settlements, the basic population of Macedonia was Greek.

Concerning ancient Macedonia, it is needful only to speak of the stones and the archaeological treasures of Vergina, Dion,[34] and other areas to silence the forgers of history. Of Christian Macedonia, the unceasing chorus of the Holy Scriptures, the Churches, the Monasteries, the Saints (i.e., Methodios and Kyrillos), the Byzantine Hymns, and frescos (well-paintings) shout the truth. Above all the icon of Saint Demetrios, who on horseback guards vigilantly the Walls of Thessaloniki and strikes with his spear the vanquished invader prone upon the ground, speaks of the Greekness of Macedonia. And all invaders from that time to the present, whether ancient barbarians or the would-be conquerors of present day Skopje, have all dreamed to go down to Thessaloniki and to the Aegean Sea with no hope of success! The Greek defenders will prevail because the right, the truth, and the justice are on their side.

Skopjeans went beyond any limit from their confusion and the difficulties that they have to persuade themselves and the anti-Greek West. They try with any mean to prove that they are the legitimate off-springs of Alexander the Great and they put statues of Alexander and of other Ancient Greeks to their squares and public buildings. Also, they give these Ancient Greek names to their roads and other places. But, the most outrageous delusion, in which they fell, was that they declared as saint of their self-proclaimed “Macedonian orthodox church”, Alexander the Great, who lived 350 years before the coming of Jesus Christ. Thus, they made the Greek Alexander the Great as “Saint Alexander the Macedonian”.[35] Also, Skopjeans celebrated the 20th birthday of their pseudo-state, which has not been recognized with its “constitutional name” by the U.N.; under a 22 meters statue of the Greek Alexander the Great. These Skopjeans love the Greek Alexander more than Greeks! Amazing hypocrisy from this circus, who wants to usurp the historic inheritance of the Ancient Greek Macedonia.[36]

IV. Some Concluding Considerations

The role of Hellenism is historic and humanistic (and as time passes the vast majority of learned people will realize it) because it was able many times in the past to re-orientate humanity. Hellenism is a global movement of ancient moral philosophy combined with the revealed truth of Christianity, the Holy Orthodoxy. Its advantage exists in the adoption of the moderation, the spiritual, the eternal, and the truthful, and at the same time in the rejection of the exaggeration, the materialistic, the transitory, the fake, and above all the bold lie. How many today understand this unique culture, which is called the Hellenic Orthodox Culture? The race, which possesses this culture, has the unique ability to reach the highest accomplishments and surpass the pathless degeneration of the human civilization left behind in every historic period. Christian evidences confirm the Greekness of Macedonia and the choice by God of the Greek Alexander the Great to spread the Greek language, and the Greek moral wisdom to the entire known world. The universal ideas of Hellenism constitute an inexhaustible source of alternating everlasting values. The principles of Hellenism that have changed the intellectual trends of humanity throughout history, have been born to this small geographical region, which for seven thousand years, obstinately resists the undermining efforts of the “civilized” (but ignorant) world and the hordes of barbarians (that God allows them to dominate for some time, due to our sins). One representative of this Hellenic race is Alexander the Great, the Macedonian Greek commander of the army, who civilized the world and refined and united Hellenism.[37]

The name “Macedonia” was given by Tito and was used for this South Yugoslav region only since 1945,[38] but it was identified for tens of centuries with Greek civilization and Greek history. Their neighboring Greeks are reasonably disturbed when the name of Macedonia becomes subject to abuse by a region, which ethnologically is not Greek, but Albanian, Vlach, Serb, Gypsy, Turkish, Slavic, and Bulgarian. It is characteristic and suspicious that the two first countries, which recognized this new government was Bulgaria and Turkey. The stability of the region would be better served by the denial of recognition or by saying to these people and the entire world the historic truth. Finally, if Skopjeans feel that they are Macedonians, let them open their borders and unite with Greece, then, they will become Greeks by culture and paideia, not by blood, and at the end, they will be Macedonians (as Greeks living in Macedonia).

It is clear when, objectively examined, that the “Macedonian Question” for Greece cannot exist and the “Macedonian Problem” is a non-issue.[39] The legal status quo of the northern borders of Greece are determined with international treaties, like the Treaty of Bucharest (1913), which ended the second Balkan War, and the Peace Treaties at the end of the two World Wars, of Neigy (1919) and of Paris (1947). Also, Macedonia is a geographic concept and not an ethnic notion. In fact, only one country can identify herself, for historical reasons, with Macedonia. That country is Greece, which has been inextricably linked with Macedonia for more than 4,000 years. Even the former president of Skopje, Kiro Gligorov, stated in June 1992 that they are Slavs, who came in the area in the 6th century A.D. Then, there is no connection between Ancient Macedonians and the Slavs of Skopje, which usurp the Greek history, names, symbols, and heritage.[40]

For these reasons, Greece is opposing the recognition of an independent nation on her northern border, which will bear the Hellenic name “Macedonia” (or any composite name having as one component the word “Macedonia”). Of course, this does not mean that Greece is against the Skopjeans right to establish their own independent nation and have their own language, history, and traditions. All people have the right to self-determination of their future; of course, this choice is confined within the limits of International Law (or legality). Greece, however cannot accept the use of the Macedonian name by any nation, which is in all other respects Slavic. The terms “Macedonia-Macedonians” and names of similar relevance belong to Hellas and Hellenes (Greece and Greeks). They constitute Greece’s national and cultural inheritance and as such have been recorded in history for many centuries before the appearance of Slavs in the area of Balkans and especially in the area of Macedonia. Greeks will never cease, as the Greek race to claim their lost national lands. It is their national duty to state matters concerning Greek Macedonia, both inside and outside of Greece, exactly as they are to restore the historical truth that expediency, misguided, and calculating interest continue to counterfeit and distort.

Finally, the fact, that the ancient Macedonians belong to the world of Greeks, is very difficult to dispute any longer. The new archeological treasures in connection with linguistic analyses and the findings of a great number of new inscriptions (all Greek) with rich samples of Greek names prove that there is no discontinuation of either cultural or linguistic of the unity of the Macedonians with the rest of the Greeks.[41] Also, the numerous Christian evidences, the spreading of the Greek language, the Greek moral philosophy, the Greek civilization, and the Greek culture to the entire known world from the Greek Macedonians of the Alexander the Great constitutes the most categorical confirmation of this event. This event is confirmed every year by the new archeological findings that are coming to light either at the large excavations of Pella, Vergina, Dion, and Sindos, or in dozens less known, like in areas of Voion, Aeani, Kozani, Kastoria, Florina, Edessa, Aridaea, Kilkis, Kavala, and of course, Thessaloniki and Chalki-diki[42] with Petralona, Sithonia, Tironi, and others. Even the minister of the U.S. Foreign Affairs, Edward Stettinius, had sent on December 26, 1944 to all the diplomatic offices of the U.S.A. an elucidative and attributive encyclical, in which he says that the “Macedonian Issue” is an unjustifiable demagogy coming mainly from Bulgaria and does not represent a reality.[43] The historic truth must prevail among all humans of the 21st century, if we want to see a social prosperity in our small world.

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[1] The English language has borrowed 40,000 Greek words, See, Schizas.com, September 10, 2011.

[2] See, Jones (1997).

[3] See, Kebric (1997) and Kitto (1987).

[4] See, Marchant and Todd (1997)

[5] See, Pedley (1998).

[6] But, at the same time, Hellas faces a lot of opposition from heretics (heterodoxs) and other religions (allodoxs) because of her traditional Orthodoxy and her Hellenic paideia.

[7] See, Christian Vivliografia, August 31, 2011. http://christianvivliografia.wordpress.com/2011/08/31/%ce%b3%ce%b9%ce%b1%cf%84%ce%af-%cf%86%ce%b8%ce%bf%ce%bd%ce%bf%e1%bf%a6%ce%bd-%cf%84%ce%bf%e1%bd%ba%cf%82-%e1%bc%95%ce%bb%ce%bb%ce%b7%ce%bd%ce%b5%cf%82/

[8] This was the Battle of Manzikert. See, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Manzikert . With Bulgaria in 1905-1907, with Italy in 1940, and with Albania (Tsamides) in 1941-1944, who collaborated with Italians the Germans against Greeks. The buccaneer of the Mediterranean (Turkey) threatens war clash against Greece and Cyprus because Cyprus wants to utilize its natural resources. Greece must do the same right away, which will support the country economically and improve the current debt crisis.

[9] Mahathir Mohamad, former leader of Malaysia, said that “Jewish groups secretly control the World’s great powers”. See, The Wall Street Journal, October 9-10, 2010, p. A1 and A11.

[10] After 350 years, Saint Paul went to Athens, in A.D. 51, to preach this Unknown God (the True God). (Acts 17: 22-23).

[11] For Socrates, human flourishing (eudaimonia) was the goal, rather than great accumulation of material goods. Xenophon accepts private property and the division of labor within certain ethical limits. In his work, the development of the ethical approach to household management (oikonomia or oikonomikē), or microeconomics, within the context of the Greek city (polis) can be seen. Friendship (philia) and gentlemanship (kalokagathia) are discussed together with oikonomia as a united package. There is a strong linkage between ethics and economics in Socrates and Xenophon. See, James E. Alvey, http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?issn=03068293&volume=38&issue=8&articleid=1938121&show=html&PHPSESSID=bp02n332v1d875m2qqo2n772k5&&nolog=142950 .

[12] We can see their coins, too; all the inscriptions and names on them are in Greek. For more information see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_II_of_Macedon

[13] Because as Hellenes, all these city-states had the same blood, the same language, and the same religion, according to Herodotus, 5th century B.C. and many other similarities as Kallianiotis (2007, p. 179) refers them.

[14] There are many tribes in Asia today that they claim of being descendants of Greeks, since that time of Alexander, like the Kallas in northern Iran.

[15] From 404 to 338 B.C. hegemonies of Sparta, Thebes, and Macedonia (area of Northern Greece) appeared. From 359-336 B.C., the reign of Philip of Macedonia took place. From 338-323 B.C. Alexander the Great conquered the entire Asia; he went to India and Africa, too. The Old Persian Empire, which had invaded Greece many times in the past, was overrun by the Greek-Macedonians. In 322 B.C., Greek-Macedonians took over Athens and overturned the Athenian democracy. From 323 to 272 B.C., Alexander’s successors sought domination and the Hellenistic Kingdoms were created in Greece and the rest of the Empire – of Macedonia (with Antigonus), of Egypt (with Ptolemy), [The tomb of Alexander the Great was discovered by the Greek archeologist Liana Souvaltzi. See, Souvaltzi (2002).] and of Syria, Mesopotamia, and Iran (with Seleucus). “Under the sponsorship of Alexander’s Empire and the Hellenistic Kingdoms that succeeded it, Greek culture spread over the whole Mediterranean world, and in the first century B.C. achieved a thorough intellectual conquest of the imperial Roman republic, its military conqueror.” [Blum, Cameron, and Barns (1970, p. 10)].

[16] Even the Gospels were written in Greek language and with this language the New Religion was spread to the entire known world of that time. This was the language of the Greek King Alexander the Great and his descendants. The non-Greek speaking nations were “barbarians” outside the Hellenic culture and paideia (paideiva). This is the historic truth and not what some pseudo-states anxiously try to distort the science of history.

[17] The proportion of Greeks that are Orthodox is 98% of the population. Someone that is not Orthodox could not be considered Greek, too. This is the homogeneity and uniqueness of these people.

[18] See, Acts 17: 34.

[19] In the 7th century A.D., various Slavic tribes (Dragouvitae, Strymonitae, Sagouditae, etc.) began settling in the Macedonian region. With the permission of Byzantine (Greek) authorities these tribes set up small Slavic enclaves known to the Byzantines as “Sclaviniae”. Throughout the 7th century, the Slavs continually fought against the Byzantine authorities and repeatedly attacked (without success) the city of Thessaloniki. See, Kallianiotis (1992), p. 33).

[20] See, Vasiliev (1980).

[21] The contribution of the three hierarchs (Sts. Vassilios, Grigorios, and Ioannis) is unique in the connection of the ancient Greek moral paideia with the Christian revealed values.

[22] See, a Hymn chanting on the day of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. (Today, it is September 14th, the feast day of the Gross).

[23] The same beliefs continue to hold even today in the Greek Orthodox nation and the Greeks of Diaspora, who are more than 100 million people of Greek origin spread around the world. This unique culture is inconceivable by any other sub-culture.

[24] The problem that Greece is facing today is the dilution of her identity, due to millions of Muslims illegal immigrants that Turkey is smuggling into the Greek nation. This is a new Turkish invasion to Greece after the previous one in 1974 in Northern Cyprus.

[25] This victory of Greeks was a miracle from Panagia for their fair and just defense of their country.

[26] Germany has not yet paid the indemnities for the war damages that it inflicted to Greece and her citizens.

[27] See, Kallianiotis (1992, p. 39).

[28] See, MacedoniaHellenicLand.eu, Septemebr 16, 2011.

[29] Mysia (Greek: Μυσία) was a region in the northwest of ancient Asia Minor. It was located on the south coast of the Sea of Marmara. It was bounded by Bithynia on the east, Phrygia on the southeast, Lydia on the south, Aeolis on the southwest, Troad on the west and by the Propontis on the north. In ancient times it was inhabited by the Mysians, Phrygians, Aeolian Greeks, and other groups. As we see from the names of the cities, all are Greek names.

[30] See, Acts 16: 8-15.

[31] See, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saints_Cyril_and_Methodius

[32] Acts 17: 12.

[33] See, St. Timothy, Paul’s Associate, Christianity.com.

[34] <> the city of Dias (Zeus).

[35] See, dailynews24.gr, August 22, 2011.

[36] See, MacedoniaHellenicLand.eu, September 11, 2011. http://www.macedoniahellenicland.eu/content/view/2162/1/lang,el/

[37] See, Aristotle, Meteorologika A 14.

[38] In 1948, Cominform, the first official forum of the international communist movement since the dissolution of the Comintern, put into action a plan to take hostage to communist countries children from Greece during the Greek civil war. The aim was to re-educate the children as well as blackmail the populace and the Greek government towards reaching a settlement leading to a partition of Greece and the subsequent creation of an internationalist "Macedonian" Republic. This move has favoured by the Yugoslav dictator Josip Broz Tito and had been a Comitern policy aimed at destroying the national states of the Balkans through the creation of internationalist republics.

[39] Professor Stephen G. Miller of Berkley University sent a letter to the Archaeology Magazine, where he proves that the region where Skopje is today was Paeonia and Skopjeans have no right to call their nation “Macedonia” and themselves “Macedonians”. See, Christianiki Bibliographia, Issue 42, Year 38, January-March 2009, pp. 21-23.

[40] See, “Kiro Gligorov: We are Slavs (archive video)”, MacedoniaHellenicLand.eu, September 19, 2010.

[41] There is a series of articles by the author examining the Macedonian question from these perspectives, as they can be seen in the references, at the end of the paper.

[42] Chalkidiki was a colony of Ancient Chalcis of Euboea. See, http://www.macedoniahellenicland.eu/content/view/2143/65/lang,el/ . The Ancient Tironi was established by Chalcideans in the 8th century B.C. and it was one of the most significant cities in Chalkidiki. It had its own currency and was a member of the Athenian Alliance. In 348 B.C., the city came under Philip II. See, MacedoniaHellenicLand.eu, September 6, 2011.

[43] [U.S. State Department, Foreign Relations, Vol. viii, Washington, D.C., Circular Air gram (868.014/26 Dec. 1944)]. See, Voanerges, Issue 54, March-April 2011, p. 87.

The Keynes-Hayek Rematch (in the cases of Greece and Eurozone crisis)

2011-11-01T10:15:00.001+02:00

LONDON – The Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek, who died in 1992 at the age of 93, once remarked that to have the last word requires only outliving your opponents. His great good fortune was to outlive Keynes by almost 50 years, and thus to claim a posthumous victory over a rival who had savaged him intellectually while he was alive.
Hayek’s apotheosis came in the 1980’s, when British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher took to quoting from The Road to Serfdom (1944), his classic attack on central planning. But in economics there are never any final verdicts. While Hayek’s defense of the market system against the gross inefficiency of central planning won increasing assent, Keynes’s view that market systems require continuous stabilization lingered on in finance ministries and central banks.
Both traditions, though, were eclipsed by the Chicago school of “rational expectations,” which has dominated mainstream economics for the last twenty-five years. With economic agents supposedly possessing perfect information about all possible contingencies, systemic crises could never happen except as...

a result of accidents and surprises beyond the reach of economic theory.
The global economic collapse of 2007-2008 discredited “rational expectations” economics (though its high priests have yet to recognize this) and brought both Keynes and Hayek back into posthumous contention. The issues have not changed much since their argument began in the Great Depression of the 1930’s.
What causes market economies to collapse?
What is the right response to a collapse?
What is the best way to prevent future collapses?

For Hayek in the early 1930’s, and for Hayek’s followers today, the “crisis” results from over-investment relative to the supply of savings, made possible by excessive credit expansion. Banks lend at lower interest rates than genuine savers would have demanded, making all kinds of investment projects temporarily profitable.
But, because these investments do not reflect the real preferences of agents for future over current consumption, the savings necessary to complete them are not available. They can be kept going for a time by monetary injections from the central bank. But market participants eventually realize that there are not enough savings to complete all the investment projects. At that point, boom turns to bust.
Every artificial boom thus carries the seeds of its own destruction. Recovery consists of liquidating the misallocations, reducing consumption, and increasing saving.
Keynes (and Keynesians today) would think of the crisis as resulting from the opposite cause: under-investment relative to the supply of saving – that is, too little consumption or aggregate demand to maintain a full-employment level of investment – which is bound to lead to a collapse of profit expectations.
Again, the situation can be kept going for a time by resorting to consumer-debt finance, but eventually consumers become over-leveraged and curtail their purchases. Indeed, the Keynesian and Hayekian explanations of the origins of the crisis are actually not very different, with over-indebtedness playing the key role in both accounts. But the conclusions to which the two theories point are very different.
Whereas for Hayek recovery requires the liquidation of excessive investments and an increase in consumer saving, for Keynes it consists in reducing the propensity to save and increasing consumption in order to sustain companies’ profit expectations. Hayek demands more austerity, Keynes more spending.
We have here a clue as to why Hayek lost his great battle with Keynes in the 1930’s. It was not just that the policy of liquidating excesses was politically catastrophic: in Germany, it brought Hitler to power. As Keynes pointed out, if everyone – households, firms, and governments – all started trying to increase their saving simultaneously, there would be no way to stop the economy from running down until people became too poor to save.
It was this flaw in Hayek’s reasoning that caused most economists to desert the Hayekian camp and embrace Keynesian “stimulus” policies. As the economist Lionel Robbins recalled: “Confronted with the freezing deflation of those days, the idea that the prime essential was the writing down of mistaken investments and…fostering the disposition to save was…as unsuitable as denying blankets and stimulus to a drunk who has fallen into an icy pond, on the ground that his original trouble was overheating.”(this is the cases of Greece and Eurozone crisis)
Except to Hayekian fanatics, it seems obvious that the coordinated global stimulus of 2009 stopped the slide into another Great Depression. To be sure, the cost to many governments of rescuing their banks and keeping their economies afloat in the face of business collapse damaged or destroyed their creditworthiness. But it is increasingly recognized that public-sector austerity at a time of weak private-sector spending guarantees years of stagnation, if not further collapse.(this is the cases of Greece and Eurozone crisis)
So policy will have to change. Little can be hoped for in Europe; the real question is whether President Barack Obama has it in him to don the mantle of President Franklin Roosevelt.
To prevent further crises of equal severity in the future, Keynesians would argue for strengthening the tools of macroeconomic management. Hayekians have nothing sensible to contribute. It is far too late for one of their favorite remedies – abolition of central banks, supposedly the source of excessive credit creation. Even an economy without central banks will be subject to errors of optimism and pessimism. And an attitude of indifference to the fallout of these mistakes is bad politics and bad morals.
So, for all his distinction as a philosopher of freedom, Hayek deserved to lose his battle with Keynes in the 1930’s. He deserves to lose today’s rematch as well.

from Robert Skidelsky, a member of the British House of Lords, is Professor Emeritus of Political Economy at Warwick University.

The Wicked Game

2011-10-15T01:14:00.001+03:00

How Greece is being beaten into a pulp to force Europe’s banks to accept capital while keeping Italy et al in awe.

Reliable sources tell me that the troika has drawn a surprising line on the sand: Either the Greek government agrees to force upon the private sector trades unions an immediate reduction in minimum wages with immediate effect (plus the dismantling of all awards regarding dismissal compensation and limitations), or the next instalment (or tranche) of EU-IMF-ECB loans to Greece will be withheld. Noting that even Mrs Thatcher took years before she could impose her iron will on the trades unions, it is clear that the troika is asking the Greek government to commit to a change that it may be both unwilling and unable to effect. If this is true, two questions arise:

QUESTION 1: Why do the representatives of the Greek state’s creditors gamble the progress of their loan agreement with the government of the day on an immediate diminution of wages and awards that concern the private sector? While the IMF has had a long held fixation with low-er wages (and has never left an opportunity to dismantle collective bargaining agreements unexploited), it is curious that the troika seems prepared to risk derailing an already hugely expensive Greek bail-out for the sake of such an ideological project. Granted that that the troika may think of the present moment as its golden opportunity to beat a demoralised Greek government into total submission (especially given that no Greek state bonds will mature until well into December), a question remains about the troika’s choice of target: Why aim at the already pitifully low private sector wages when there are so many larger fish to fry elsewhere within the Greek state (e.g. public procurements, pharmaceutical bills, fee-free Universities etc.)?

QUESTION 2: The second question concerns the troika’s very thinking: Can they really believe that a wage reduction for the lowest paid European workers (who are vying for this ‘honour’ with their Portuguese counterparts) will, in the midst of a rampant recession, help boost private sector economic activity? Do they seriously think that entrepreneurs will seize upon such a wage reduction to invest in the Greek economy handsomely enough to generate a modicum of growth? As I am loathe to impute inanity on other parties, I shall assume that they cannot possibly believe this. I shall, therefore, give the troika the benefit of the doubt and presume that they, too, understand that a further reduction in private sector minimum wages will (at a time of falling public sector wages and employment) lead to a further, reduction in aggregate demand which will, undoubtedly, maintain (if not accelerate) the current rate at which Greek national income shrinks and, naturally, generate lower future taxes, thus giving the remorseless wheel of recession another twirl.

If my assumptions above are correct, what on earth is the troika doing? Here is a scenario that I think captures nicely, in all its horror that is, much of what is going on at the moment. Three are the main protagonists in my scenario: (1) European bankers (mainly French and German), (2) the German government, and (3) the NYF member-states, where NYF stands for ‘not yet fallen’ (which includes mainly Italy but also Spain and perhaps Belgium). Having established who the players are, it is important to define their objectives and constraints.

BANKERS: The bankers know well that their banks are bankrupt. They have known it for some time but have been hoping that the European Central Bank, together with their national governments (made up of politicians who truly value their cosy relation with the bankers), would keep their banks afloat and themselves in control of their banks. Unlike most businessmen/women who labour under the fear of bankruptcy, bankers face a different nightmare (since bankruptcy in fact increases their command of the surpluses produced by others, courtesy of the politicians’ infinite generosity with the taxpayers’ and the ECB’s money): Forced recapitalisation, is their worst-case scenario – of the sort that the American government introduced in conjunction with TARP (the trouble assets relief program). They fear a Euro-Tarp (of the type that we proposed in our Modest Proposal a year ago – see Policy 2) for the simple reason that recapitalisation of ‘their’ banks means that the bankers will lose the part of equity which has hitherto delivered to them control over the banks.

NYF member-states: Waiting on the sidelines, unable to utter a world (in case loose talk brings them greater disasters than their current situation), they are holding their breath hoping against hope for some decision from Berlin that might get them off the hook. With the bond markets treating them like the new pariahs, Italy, Spain and Belgium find themselves in a tight corner. They are damned if their do not adopt swinging cuts (since ‘inaction’ will be perceived as fresh evidence that their spreads will rise) and they are damned if they do (since austerity will further erode their nations’ anaemic growth; a development which will also push up interest rates). Deep down, their remaining hope revolves around some scheme that will see their sovereign debt come down in size, if not via a haircut then at least by means of a reduction of the interest payments due in the coming decade.

GERMAN GOVERNMENT: Berlin’s main concern is how to manage this crisis by means of minimal European integration. It disdains the idea of any type of continental consolidation which threatens the Principle of Perfectly Separable Debts (PPSDs, as I call it). After a long eighteen months during which Germany’s political elite struggled to remain in denial of the systemic nature of this Crisis, Mrs Merkel now seems resigned to the idea that the banking sector of Northern Europe (including of course Germany’s) is in tatters and in urgent need to capital infusions. German politicians seem to have grasped the importance of the fact that the liabilities of the eurozone’s banks is more than 300% the eurozone’s aggregate GDP (Nb. the relevant ratio in the United States, in 2008, was ‘only’ 200%). After a lot of huffing and puffing, Mrs Merkel and Mr Schaeuble have accepted the inevitable: About one trillion notional euros must be set aside for the banks. While they have not swallowed, as yet, that this must be done at the central EU level (as opposed to a government by government level), they are getting there, kicking and screaming of course. Two are sticking points for Germany: It does not want to refloat the banks (for the second time in three years) and have to pay Greece the money that Greece owes to the banks. In short, a Greek default is a political prerequisite for what is becoming a serial bailout of the Franco-German banks. The second sticking point is Italy and, more generally, the NFY member-states: Germany fears that if the NFY member-states see that Greece is allowed to diminish its debt mountain through a default that still allows it to remain within the eurozone, they may get ideas that a similar solution may be in the offing for them.

THE EMERGING STRATEGY: Germany knows that the banks will resist recapitalisation as long as Greece is being kept afloat by the troika. To gain leverage over the recalcitrant bankers, Berlin must push them over the edge with a Greek default. But, at the same time, to stop Italy and the remaining NFY member-states from getting dangerous ideas in their head, Mrs Merkel is determined to make an example of the one member-state that is allowed to default: Greece. It is for his purpose, and for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with Greece itself (its economy, its much needed structural change etc.) that the troika has embarked on a mission to make Greece so wretched, so poor and so unattractive that its default will give Berlin the bargaining power it needs with Northern European bankers while, at the same time, making it abundantly clear to the NFY member-states that they really do not want to even think of default as a way out of their debt crisis.

THE CATCH: This strategy might have worked if the Crisis were additive, quasi-linear and static; if it were possible, in simpler words, to use plain arithmetic to add Greece’s debts with other bad assets inside the banks’ books, then to juxtapose this sum against the (possibly leveraged) funds that the EFSF can throw at the banks, and so on… until this most peculiar Crisis Accounting yielded Germany’s optimal strategy. Unfortunately for all of us, no capital ‘c’ Crisis is additive and quasi-linear. It is, rather, highly non-linear and violently dynamic. The attempt to ring-fence Greece will fail as surely as it did last year. Last year, in May 2010, the very creation of the EFSF was meant to ring-fence Greece on the basis of a linear, static logic. Unremarkably, it failed. Now, the great idea that Mrs Merkel seems to have accepted is to try again by turbo-charging the toxic EFSF (e.g. by using ECB leverage to turn its €440 billion into more than €1 trillion). What this stratagem is ignoring is that the problem with the EFSF type of approach (based as it is on the assumption that each country’s woes ought to be dealt with separately/sequentially – as opposed to at once, systemically) is not the size of the EFSF but its structure and logic. That byturbo-charging a toxic creation you get a monster.

In short, the plan seems to be to let Greece default in a big way, so as to scare the bankers into accepting new capital, while, at once, grinding the Greek social economy into a pulp to keep Italy and the rest of the NFY member-states in awe and keen to do as they are told. Our collective tragedy is that this plan, like all the others before it, will not work. Why? Because, like all the previous plans, it does not address the eurozone’s systemic Crisis systematically. Because, once again, the powers that be choose to ignore the interconnections between: (a) the banking sector’s insolvencies, (b) the lack of fiscal shock absorbers in case there is a run on the bonds of one or more member-states, and (c) the absence of a decent surplus recycling mechanism that directs surplus into deficit regions in the form of productive investments. As long as this form of European denial remains, Greece’s reduction to a pile of ashes will only lead Mrs Merkel to a Pyrrhic victory over the banks.

Source:http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2011/10/11/the-wicked-game/#more-1167

Pan Macedonian Canada Letter to Liberal leader Bob Rae

2011-09-30T00:12:00.000+03:00

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Dear Sir,

On behalf of the members of the PanMacedonian Association of Canada, the largest organization of Canadians of Greek origin from the region of Macedonia in Greece, we are writing to you to express our concern regarding your congratulatory statement to our fellow Canadians from the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (the FYROM) on September 8, 2011 [1]. This date marked the 20^th anniversary since Skopje declared its independence from Belgrade in 1991. Just like you do, we share the same conviction that liberty and freedom should be celebrated, promoted, and congratulated, and we extend our congratulations to our northern neighbours and their diaspora communities. However, in your letter you addressed our fellow Canadians from the FYROM as “Macedonian-Canadians”, and you lauded their contribution to a “harmonious” Canada. The PanMacedonian Associations all around the world have been at the forefront of protecting the Hellenism of Macedonia ever since that...

famous US State Department circular Airgram in 1944 to all US diplomatic missions stated that talk of a “Macedonian nation” was “demagoguery” aimed at “aggressive intentions” against Greece [2, 3].

The Liberal Party of Canada has always been a party that Canadians of Greek descent have had a great working relationship with. When Prime Minister Harper’s Conservative government – following US President Bush’s lead – recognized the FYROM as “Republic of Macedonia” in 2007, this was seen as an affront to the sensitivities of all Greeks worldwide even though the action was of course made naively and without any malicious intent. As Macedonians, we too were alienated and continue to be so. Thankfully, we were relieved to see that the Liberal Party opposed this action by Canada’s Tory government.

Greece and its northern neighbour have been at the UN negotiating table since 1995 when both parties agreed to an Interim Accord and an interim name (the FYROM) until a new name could be mutually agreed upon under the auspices of the UN. The fact that Skopje has promoted itself as “Republic of Macedonia” – against the wishes of the UN – at the bilateral level is irrelevant. However, it is important to state that the promotion of this mistake by third countries such as Canada has only hardened Skopje’s stance and has thwarted all attempts of a solution to this imbroglio. There are many examples of irredentism at the expense of Greece (and Canadians of Greek descent) by official Skopje and its diaspora. At the anniversary celebrations, ruling government officials presided over events that promoted the violent break-up of Greece’s north with annexation to their country [4]. Skopje’s diaspora lobby group – the “United Macedonian Diaspora (UMD)” – promoted the partition of Greece in 2010 in Toronto. All this was in front of cheering crowds of “Macedonian-Canadians” [5].

This is disturbing and is anachronistic for our times. It is also against the vision of Canada and what we hold dear for the future of the world. We trust Mr. Rae, that the Liberal Party of Canada and you can see our concern in these developments. As a result, our representatives look forward to, and welcome, a planned meeting with you along with other Greek-Canadian organizations in the very near future.

Sincerely,

Haralambos Moutousides

President

PanMacedonian Association of Canada

1) http://www.liberal.ca/newsroom/news-release/statement-liberal-leader-bob-rae-independence-day-republic-macedonia/

2) The Department [of State] has noted with considerable apprehension increasing propaganda rumors and semi-official statements in favor of an autonomous Macedonia, emanating principally from Bulgaria, but also from Yugoslav Partisan and other sources, with the implication that Greek territory would be included in the projected state. This government considers talk of Macedonian "nation", Macedonian "Fatherland", or Macedonian "national consciousness" to be unjustified demagoguery representing no ethnic nor political reality, and sees in its present revival a possible cloak for aggressive intentions against Greece.

From: http://www1.mfa.gr/images/docs/fyrom/dilosi_stettinius_dec_1944.pdf

3) And, http://www.panmacedonian.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=336:stettinius-circular-airgram-us-state-department&catid=1:latest-news&Itemid=50

4) In the following video, the FYROM’s Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski and his government officials (including President Gjorge Ivanov) are seen enjoying a performance of the song “Biser Balkanski” (Pearl of the Balkans) and it has the following lyrics:

“Hey, Macedonia, Pearl of the Balkans, Aegean [region of Macedonia in Greece] and Pirin [region in Bulgaria]: join with the clear waters of the Vardar. Leave conquerors...enemies!”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpNYBQom79A (last accessed September 9, 2011).

5) Toronto businessman and community leader John Bitove Sr. being interviewed by UMD president Metodija Koloski in Toronto (2010). He stated to a cheering crowd that he wished for a "United Macedonia". (see especially from 3 minutes on; last accessed June 1, 2011): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3UAV0kj_l0&feature=related

Pau Gasol receives Death Threats in his FB page by Ultra-Nationalists from FYROM

2011-09-18T10:09:00.000+03:00

Pau Gasol, the famous Spanish Basketball player receives death threats by FYROM’s Ultra-Nationalists in his Facebook Page.
Its surely the most pathetic News Story related to the Eurobasket 2011 of Lithuania. Pau Gasol, the ace of the Spanish National Team and LA Lakers, is receiving numerous abuses and even Death threats by Slavic Ultra-Nationalists of FYROM after commiting the… “crime” to call their country FYROM. In other words, the name that FYROM’s governments have agreed to use in ALL the International Organizations.

The Spanish player published in his FB page last Thursday, the following:

This friday we’ll play against FYROM to get a spot in the final and the straight qualification for the Olympics. It won’t be an easy game though, as they managed to knock out Lithuania with a whole arena roaring against them. We will have to be very focus and prepared on performing our game. Thanks a lot for your support!

Immediately a large number of FYROM’s fans, full of Hysteria, showed their true racist colours by signing to his page and starting to abuse him. Some of them went further by even writing Death Threats against him!!

Greece and FYROM have been tangled in a ongoing international dispute regarding the latter’s name, after FYROM’s Slavs absurdly keep claiming the Name, history and heritage of ancient Macedonia, an ancient Greek kingdom in Macedonia, Greece.

Source:history-of-macedonia.com

Slavmacedonians call the Greeks “Freaks of Nature” & “Deranged Bastardly Monsters” and the Australian Court dismiss the racial vilification complaint!!!

2011-09-08T22:12:00.001+03:00

AMAC’s racial vilification complaint dismissed

Australian Macedonian Advisory Council (AMAC)
Press Release
8 Sept 2011

The Australian Macedonian Advisory Council (AMAC) would like to express its disappointment at the decision of VCAT Member Noreen Megay to dismiss AMAC’s racial vilification complaint against the ‘Australian Macedonian (sic) Weekly’ (AMW).

Last week Ms. Megay handed down her judgment on the matter which was heard at VCAT on the 3rd and 4th of August 2011. The AMW’s article which was the subject of the AMAC’s complaint was published in May 2009, and Ms. Megay found that the article did not meet the high threshold imposed by Section 7 of the Racial and Religious Tolerance Act 2001 (Vic) for a finding of racial vilification. Section 7 requires that the conduct “incite hatred, serious contempt for, or revulsion or severe ridicule of” a class of persons on the ground of the race of that class of persons.

AMAC’s legal advice was that the disgraceful language used in AMW’s article would likely have fallen foul of Section 7. The article in question was titled ‘Who in this Celestial World (sic) gave the Greeks the right to take away the Macedonian language?’ and AMAC’s complaint was based mainly on the following parts of the article:

The complaint was not based on history or on any historical errors contained in the article. The complaint purely concerned the racist, abusive and gratuitously insulting nature of the article. Ms. Megay acknowledged that the historical accuracy or inaccuracy of the AMW article had no bearing on the decision.

In his witness statement, the AMW’s editor, Ljubcho Stankovski, admitted the language in the article was “extravagant”. Ms. Megay stated that she considered this to be an understatement and that, in her opinion, the article was a “hyperbolic rant”1, but nonetheless did not consider the article breached Section 7.

Ms. Megay came to this conclusion despite the fact that, during cross-examination, Mr. Stankovski admitted that, had the article been written about Slav-Macedonians, it would have had the effect of inciting hatred or serious contempt or revulsion against Slav-Macedonians.

AMAC considers Ms. Megay should have placed more weight on the fact the respondent (Mr. Stankovski is the editor and sole proprietor of the AMW) basically conceded – to the surprise of everyone present at the hearing – that he considered the article contravened Section 7.

To-date there has been no successful racial vilification complaint made under Victorian law. AMAC finds it difficult to foresee what type of conduct or language could possibly be used to invoke a sanction under Section 7, given that the said article did not (in the opinion of Ms Megay) cross the line. AMAC considers that Section 7 is a poorly drafted and toothless provision and that it should be repealed so as not to give false hope to people who have legitimate grievances and have been racially vilified. The wording of the Section 7 makes the assessment of whether particular conduct breaches the Section highly subjective and too dependent on the personal taste of the Tribunal member hearing the matter.

The danger of the Tribunal finding that the AMW article was not unlawful is that the Courts and Tribunals can be seen to be condoning the kind of racist, insidious language used in the article. Ms. Megay saw it necessary to state that, despite her finding there was no breach of Section 7, she “would not wish to be taken as approving the tenor of the article”2. Despite Ms. Megay’s comment, AMAC believes the danger that the Tribunal be seen as condoning the AMW’s conduct is a real one. A further danger is that the Victorian community may perceive that there are double standards attached to racial vilification laws, in that some ethnic groups are more likely to be successful in making a complaint than others.

There have been various academic criticisms of the particular legislation and similar legislation in other states. AMAC believes that amendments are necessary to ensure the proper protection of Victorians from vilification and the maintenance of multiculturalism in Victoria. AMAC has the option of appealing against the decision to the Supreme Court of Victoria.

AMAC’s legal advice is that Ms. Megay’s judgment contained numerous errors of law upon which an appeal can be based. However, in considering whether to appeal the decision, AMAC will have to take into account the significant expenses entailed with an appeal and the considerable risk of costs being awarded against it, should the appeal be unsuccessful. AMAC notes that there has been criticism of the decision in the mainstream media and provides the following links for the information of our members:

1.http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/if_i_were_macedonian_id_feel_safer
2. http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/more-news/macedonian-newspaper-did-not-incite-racehate-says-vcat/story-fn7x8me2-1226131670914
The article in question is attached to this press release. Ms. Megay’s judgment can be found at the following link: http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/vic/VCAT/2011/1647.html

i) Referrence to Greece as a “thieving nation”
ii) Reference to Greeks as: “deranged bastardly monsters”, “freaks of nature”
iii) Reference to the Greek language as “their ugly language”
iv) the author asks Greeks what “evil alien abstractions possessed your dark soul?”, what “barbaric wickedness obliterated your senses?” and “What evil spirits possessed your moronic conscience to be so cruel and predisposed to such ghastly monstrosity?”

Anti-Turkish Movements in Macedonia before the 1821 Greek Revolution

2011-07-30T11:35:00.003+03:00

by Ioannis Hasiotis

Modern and Contemporary Macedonia

Volume 1, pages 436-457

macedonian-heritage.gr

Most of what has been written about anti-Turkish movements in Macedonia during the long period between the consolidation of Ottoman rule in the first half of the 15th century and the outbreak of the 1821 Revolution is largely characterized by oversimplification. The enthusiasm with which idealist and even Marxist historians have projected revolutionary activities in the area has not been based on sufficient evidence. What is more, anachronisms have not always been avoided. Confusion further increases as a result of the geographical identification of present-day Macedonia -both Greek and 'Greater Macedonia', which stretches over parts of three neighbouring countries- with an area which, albeit known under the same name, had an entirely different geographical content during the period of Ottoman domination.

These phenomena should not be ascribed solely to political or ideological expediency influencing the writings of Greeks and foreigners on modern Macedonia....

Open publication - Free publishing - More greece

FYROM lobby irked by Bill introduced by U.S House Committee on Foreign Affairs

2011-07-26T17:55:00.002+03:00

July 26, 2011
The FYROM (Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia) lobby in the US been irked by the content of a Bill which was introduced to the U.S House of Representatives by the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.

The Foreign Relations Authorization Act, Fiscal Year 2012 (H.R. 2583) has proposed a limitation on U.S foreign aid to the FYROM. Further irritating the FYROM lobby, the Bill referred to the FYROM under that name, rather than under the name 'Republic of Macedonia´, as official documents have done since the Bush Administration unilaterally recognised the FYROM as the ´Republic of Macedonia´ name in 2004. The relevant sections of the Bill are as follows:

SEC. 807. LIMITATION ON ASSISTANCE TO THE FORMER YUGOSLAV REPUBLIC OF MACEDONIA.

(a) FINDINGS.—Congress finds the following:

(1) Greece has demonstrated an enormous good will gesture in agreeing that Macedonia´´ may be included in the future name of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) as long as that term is combined with a geographic qualifier that makes it clear that there are no territorial ambitions on the part of the FYROM with regard to the historical boundaries of the Greek province of Macedonia.

(2) The FYROM continues to utilize materials that violate provisions of the United Nations-brokered Interim Agreement between the FYROM and Greece regarding incendiary rallies, rhetoric, or propaganda, and United Nations-led negotiations between the FYROM and Greece have so far failed to achieve the longstanding goals of the United States and the United Nations to find a mutually acceptable, new official name for the FYROM.

(b) SENSE OF CONGRESS.—It is the sense of Congress that all United States assistance to the FYROM should be conditioned on the FYROM´s willingness to engage in meaningful discussions with Greece in accordance with United Nations Security Council Resolution 817.

(c) LIMITATION.—The Secretary of State may not use funds authorized to be appropriated under this Act for programs and activities that directly or indirectly promote incendiary rallies, rhetoric, or propaganda by state-controlled agencies of the FYROM or encourage acts by private entities likely to incite violence, hatred, or hostility, including support for printing and publishing of textbooks, maps, and teaching aids that may include inaccurate information on the histories and geographies of Greece and FYROM.

The official text of this resolution can be found here:http://hcfa.house.gov/112/ROSLEH_078.pdf.

This is seen as yet another setback for Skopje, after Hillary Clinton during her visit to Athens stated sternly that FYROM must work to reach a compromise with Greece if they are to be allowed to accede to the European Union and NATO.

The Australian Macedonian Advisory Council welcomes the Bill introduced to the U.S House and would like to see further actions taken by the U.S Government to discourage the provocative and unproductive attitude of the Government of the FYROM.

www.macedonian.com.au

FYROM Statues: From ethno-cultural nationalism to National Chauvinism

2011-07-11T20:24:00.005+03:00

With the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the ruling ideology of Marxism-Leninism was replaced by different ideological forces. One of them was nationalism. In FYROM, gradually and with the "withdrawal" of the Socialists in the various state power positions, the far right through the VMRO began to take their places. So we have from the late 90's a gradual transformation of rampant ethno-cultural nationalism, into an explosion of national chauvinism (see Andrew Heynwood, political ideologies, 2007).

The extreme nationalist hysteria that exists on these days between the Slavmacedonians, because of the erection of two statues (one is giant) at the center of Skopje is a typical example. The far-right Prime Minister Gruevski, continuing the "antiquisation policy" of the Slavic population, made the next step and the Slavmacedonism enfold the "national chauvinism".

National chauvinism breeds from a feeling of intense, even hysterical nationalist enthusiasm. The individual as a separate, rational being is swept away on a tide of patriotic emotion, expressed in the desire for aggression, expansion and war. The right-wing French nationalist Charles Maurras (1868-1952) called such intense patriotism “integral nationalism”: individuals and independent groups lose their identity within an all-powerful 'nation', which has an existence and meaning beyond the life of any single individual. (Heynwood:165) Such militant nationalism is often accompanied by...
militarism. Military glory and conquest are the ultimate evidence of national greatness and have been capable of generating intense feelings of nationalist commitment.

So therefore, with the “statues project”, Gruevski regime is trying to admonish the Slavic population, by the martial values of absolute loyalty, complete dedication and willing self-sacrifice. When the honour or integrity of the nation is in question, the life of ordinary citizens become unimportant is one of the main points of the national chauvinism. (Heynwood:165)

National chauvinism has a particularly strong appeal for the isolated and powerless, for which nationalism offers the prospect of security, self-respect and pride. Militant or integral nationalism requires a heightened sense of belonging to a distinct national group. Such intense nationalist feeling is often stimulated by 'negative integration', the portrayal of another nation or race as a threat or an enemy.(Heynwood:165

In the face of the enemy, the nation draws together and experiences an intensified sense of its own identity and importance. Slavmacedonian national chauvinism arise with a clear distinction between "them" (Bulgarians and Greeks) and "Us”. National chauvinism therefore breeds from a clear distinction between 'them' and 'us'. There has to be a 'them' to deride or hate in order to forge a sense of 'us'. In politics, national chauvinism has commonly been reflected in racialist ideologies, which divide the world into an 'in group' and an 'out group', in which the 'out group' becomes a scapegoat for all the misfortunes and frustrations suffered by the 'in group'. It is therefore no coincidence that chauvinistic political creeds are a breeding ground for racialist ideas. (Heynwood:166) Far right-wing VMRO party of Gruevski builds on this national chauvinism. For the Slavmacedonians, are the Greeks who steal theirs “ancient” history and the Bulgarians theirs language.

All forms of nationalism address the issue of identity. Whatever political causes nationalism may be associated with, it advances these on the basis of a sense of collective identity, usually understood as patriotism. For the political nationalist, 'objective' considerations such as territory, religion and language are no more important than 'subjective' ones such as will, memory and patriotic loyalty. Nationalism, therefore, not only advances political causes but also tells people who they are: it gives people a history, forges social bonds and a collective spirit, and creates a sense of destiny larger than individual existence. (Heynwood:154)

Certain forms of nationalism, however, are less closely related to overtly political demands than others. This particularly applies in the case of Slavmacedonian ethno-cultural nationalism. Cultural nationalism is a form of nationalism that emphasises the strengthening or defence of cultural identity over overt political demands. Slavmacedonian ethno-cultural nationalists view the state as a peripheral if not an alien entity. So the statue of the Great Alexander in the center of capital, in an direct way, it provides attractive elements to propagate, shamelessly, their territorial fantasies over the Greek northern regions. Also it aims at expanding the boundaries of the historical “taktovina” (fatherland) of the “Makedonci” to include wide regions of Greece and Bulgaria. It is well known, that for decades the classrooms and school textbooks of history in FYROM have been adorned with maps portraying Macedonia’s “geographic and ethnic”, i.e. Slavic boundaries extending all the way to Mount Olympus and Chalkidiki, in Greek Macedonia as well as to the Pirin district of Bulgaria. ( see : Macedonianism, FYROM'S Expansionist Designs against Greece, 1944-2006, Society for Macedonian Studies, 2007 ) Now, by claiming the patrimony of the Ancient Macedonians via the statue of a Greek historical person,, the boundaries of “Greater Macedonia” assume a much wider historical and cultural dimension in time.

Unfortunately, Slavmacedonian national chauvinism is obvious that it is a road without return. Wherever you look in history, where he was a national chauvinism, we have explosions similar movements such as Pan-Slavism, anti-Semitism and Pan-Germanism. It is therefore obvious, that the FYROM Slavmacedonism from an ethno-cultural nationalism has transform to the dangerous of the regional peace, national chauvinism.

Greek austerity measures could violate human rights, UN expert says

2011-07-05T09:09:00.002+03:00

30 June 2011
un.org

– The United Nations independent expert on foreign debt and human rights warned today that the austerity measures and structural reforms proposed to solve Greece’s debt crisis may result in violations of the basic human rights of the country’s people, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) reported.

“The implementation of the second package of austerity measures and structural reforms, which includes a wholesale privatization of state-owned enterprises and assets, is likely to have a serious impact on basic social services and therefore the enjoyment of human rights by the Greek people, particularly the most vulnerable sectors of the population such as the poor, elderly, unemployed and persons with disabilities,” said Cephas Lumina, who reports to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.

“The rights to food, water, adequate housing and work under fair and equitable conditions should not be compromised by the implementation of austerity measures,” he said, urging the Government to “strike a careful balance between austerity and the realization of human rights, taking into account the primacy of States’ human rights obligations.”

Mr. Lumina also called...
upon the authorities to maintain some fiscal leeway to meet its people’s basic human rights, particularly economic, social and cultural rights.

“Tax rises, public expenditure cuts and privatization measures have to be implemented in such a way that they do not result in unbearable suffering of the people,” he said.

“Debts can only be paid out of income,” Mr. Lumina said. “A shrinking economy cannot generate any revenue and contributes to a reduced capacity to repay the debt. More time should have been allowed for the restructuring measures already in place to work.”

The independent expert also called on the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European Union (EU) and the European Central Bank (ECB) to remain aware of the human rights impact of the policies they design in attempting to resolve the sovereign debt crises in Greece and other countries.

“There will be no lasting solution to the sovereign debt problem if the human rights of the people are not taken into account,” said Mr. Lumina, who serves in an unpaid capacity.

Democracy’s Cradle, Rocking the World

2011-07-01T09:27:00.003+03:00

By MARK MAZOWER
Published: June 29, 2011
nytimes.com

YESTERDAY, the whole world was watching Greece as its Parliament voted to pass a divisive package of austerity measures that could have critical ramifications for the global financial system. It may come as a surprise that this tiny tip of the Balkan Peninsula could command such attention. We usually think of Greece as the home of Plato and Pericles, its real importance lying deep in antiquity. But this is hardly the first time that to understand Europe’s future, you need to turn away from the big powers at the center of the continent and look closely at what is happening in Athens. For the past 200 years, Greece has been at the forefront of Europe’s evolution.

In the 1820s, as it waged a war of independence against the Ottoman Empire, Greece became an early symbol of escape from the prison house of empire. For philhellenes, its resurrection represented the...

noblest of causes. “In the great morning of the world,” Shelley wrote in “Hellas,” his poem about the country’s struggle for independence, “Freedom’s splendor burst and shone!” Victory would mean liberty’s triumph not only over the Turks but also over all those dynasts who had kept so many Europeans enslaved. Germans, Italians, Poles and Americans flocked to fight under the Greek blue and white for the sake of democracy. And within a decade, the country won its freedom.

Over the next century, the radically new combination of constitutional democracy and ethnic nationalism that Greece embodied spread across the continent, culminating in “the peace to end all peace” at the end of the First World War, when the Ottoman, Hapsburg and Russian empires disintegrated and were replaced by nation-states.

In the aftermath of the First World War, Greece again paved the way for Europe’s future. Only now it was democracy’s dark side that came to the fore. In a world of nation-states, ethnic minorities like Greece’s Muslim population and the Orthodox Christians of Asia Minor were a recipe for international instability. In the early 1920s, Greek and Turkish leaders decided to swap their minority populations, expelling some two million Christians and Muslims in the interest of national homogeneity. The Greco-Turkish population exchange was the largest such organized refugee movement in history to that point and a model that the Nazis and others would point to later for displacing peoples in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and India.

It is ironic, then, that Greece was in the vanguard of resistance to the Nazis, too. In the winter of 1940-41, it was the first country to fight back effectively against the Axis powers, humiliating Mussolini in the Greco-Italian war while the rest of Europe cheered. And many cheered again a few months later when a young left-wing resistance fighter named Manolis Glezos climbed the Acropolis one night with a friend and pulled down a swastika flag that the Germans had recently unfurled. (Almost 70 years later, Mr. Glezos would be tear-gassed by the Greek police while protesting the austerity program.) Ultimately, however, Greece succumbed to German occupation. Nazi rule brought with it political disintegration, mass starvation and, after liberation, the descent of the country into outright civil war between Communist and anti-Communist forces.

Only a few years after Hitler’s defeat, Greece found itself in the center of history again, as a front line in the cold war. In 1947, President Harry S. Truman used the intensifying civil war there to galvanize Congress behind the Truman Doctrine and his sweeping peacetime commitment of American resources to fight Communism and rebuild Europe. Suddenly elevated into a trans-Atlantic cause, Greece now stood for a very different Europe — one that had crippled itself by tearing itself apart, whose only path out of the destitution of the mid-1940s was as a junior partner with Washington. As the dollars poured in, American advisers sat in Athens telling Greek policy makers what to do and American napalm scorched the Greek mountains as the Communists were put to flight.

European political and economic integration was supposed to end the weakness and dependency of the divided continent, and here, too, Greece was an emblem of a new phase in its history. The fall of its military dictatorship in 1974 not only brought the country full membership in what would become the European Union; it also (along with the transitions in Spain and Portugal at the same time) prefigured the global democratization wave of the 1980s and ’90s, first in South America and Southeast Asia and then in Eastern Europe. And it gave the European Union the taste for enlargement and the ambition to turn itself from a small club of wealthy Western European states into a voice for the newly democratic continent as a whole, extending far to the south and east.

And now today, after the euphoria of the ’90s has faded and a new modesty sets in among the Europeans, it falls again to Greece to challenge the mandarins of the European Union and to ask what lies ahead for the continent. The European Union was supposed to shore up a fragmented Europe, to consolidate its democratic potential and to transform the continent into a force capable of competing on the global stage. It is perhaps fitting that one of Europe’s oldest and most democratic nation-states should be on the new front line, throwing all these achievements into question. For we are all small powers now, and once again Greece is in the forefront of the fight for the future.

Mark Mazower is a professor of history at Columbia University.

Letter from All Pan-Macedonian Association to UN and EU regarding the Statue of Alexander the Great in Skopje

2011-06-22T22:33:00.000+03:00

To: UN Country Members

Europarliamentarians

We are vehemently opposing the erection of Alexander the Great’s statue in the Skopje Square, in the capital of the FYROM. This act does not only show the usurpation of the Greek history by that country’s Slavs in the strongest terms, but it also portrays their true irredentist ideas such as land expansion. We are not fooled by the name "Warrior on a Horse", as Skopje's ultranationalist government is now clearly breaking the Interim Accord signed by the two countries in 1995.

Under no circumstances should the international community and the international legal system allow this theft of Greece’s most famous persona, Alexander the Great to take place. We, the Macedonians are proud of our Macedonian cultural identity for...

millennia and historic figures such as Alexander the Great are an integral part of Greek history. With respect to FYROM’s historical revisionism as a means to establish an identity in the modern world, please see: macedonia-evidence.org http://macedonia-evidence.org/obama-letter.html

Therefore we call upon the international community to intervene and put a stop to this crime that is taking place in Greece’s neighboring country.

Pan-Macedonian Association USA- Kostas Hatzistefanidis

Pan-Macedonian Association of Australia – Dimitris Minas - President

Pan-Macedonian Association of Canada-Haralmpos Moutousidis- President

Pan-Macedonian Association of Europe-Archimandrite Dr. Panteleimon Tsormpatzoglou-President

Macedonian Chapters of Africa-Amyntas Papathanasiou-President

cc: Parliament of the Hellenic Republic

cc: Media

The Macedonian Identity in 19th century

2011-06-05T12:56:00.000+03:00

By Dr Evangelos Kofos

Historian and Balkan expert

With the establishment of the modern Greek state in 1830, Greek national ideology developed on the basis of national continuity. It stressed classical Greek roots but also traced, from Byzantium, through Turkokratia, to Independence, the survival of the Greek nation, the Greek language, Greek customs and, of course, the Greek Orthodox religion.7 In Macedonia, however, emphasis was focused on two important, specific points. The first centred on the grandeur of ancient Macedonia and the saga of Alexander the Great. The magnetism of the great king, his achievements and the name of the Macedonians had been stimulants of Greek national ideology in Macedonia even before the Greek War of Independence;8 during the period of the Enlightenment, Greeks of Macedonia, both locally and in the diaspora, carried the Macedonian name as an additional testimony of their Greekness.9 As yet there was no challenge to the view that the ancient Macedonians were Greeks, and that the Greek inhabitants of Ottoman-held Macedonia were the only bona fide ethnic group entitled to bear the Macedonian name. These modern Makedones took pride in claiming descent from kings Philip and Alexander, just as eighteenth-century Athenian villagers traced their ’imagined’ lineage from Themistocles and Pericles.

The extraordinary revival of Hellenic names, particularly those of ancient Macedonian origin, which were given to children, to cultural clubs and even to towns (Edessa in lieu of Vodena, Monastir in lieu of Bitola) indicates...

how strongly the heritage of the past conditioned nationalist manifestations. 10 Interest in archaeological research in Macedonia was not limited to trained archaeologists or historians, but caught the imagination of local teachers, priests and professional people. In 1896 the monumental work by M. Dimitsas, an Ohrid philologist, appeared under the appropriate title I Makedonia en Lithois Fthengomenois kai Mnimeiois Sozomenois [Macedonia in Speaking Stones and Surviving Monuments].11 The product of years of laborious library and field work from one end of Macedonia to the other, this book stimulated among Greeks interest and pride in their national roots, as well as a sense of legal ownership of the land with the hidden testimonies of its Greekness. It is no wonder that nationalist literature of the period made repeated references to ancient ruins and Greek inscriptions to prove the Hellenic origins of Macedonians 12.

As education spread further into non-Greek-speaking communities, the Alexander saga captivated their imagination too. Seeking to identify themselves with the glory of the ancient Macedonians, they associated themselves with classical Hellas. It is not surprising that in the latter part of the nineteenth century, when, mainly in the central zone of Macedonia, Greek and Bulgarian ideologies competed for the loyalties of Slav-speaking communities, Greek educators and propagandists published and circulated the popular story of Alexander’s life in the local Slav dialect, but in Greek script. 13

Historical geography was similarly employed to determine ethnological boundaries as perceived by the competing national ideologies. Macedonia, a land of ill-defined and rather arbitrary geographical delimitation, was easy prey to manipulation by geographers, historians and politicians. Until the 1870s it was customary among Greeks to claim, on historical grounds, the entire geographical region of Macedonia as far north as the Shar mountains. Subsequently, the emergence of the Bulgarian national movement - and to a lesser extent Serbian activities -made necessary a more realistic approach. Indeed, Macedonian ethnography differed remarkably from region to region. Excluding the Muslims, three zones could be roughly identified. The northern zone, bordering on Serbia and the Bulgarian principality, extended over one third of the entire geographical area of Macedonia and was inhabited by Slav-speaking populations of either Bulgarian or Serbian orientation. The southern zone, bordering on Thessaly (annexed to the Greek kingdom after 1881), had a distinct Greek-speaking population. The central zone, however, was an ethnically mixed region of Greek, Slav and, to a lesser extent, Vlach-speaking Christians. Their national orientation varied from one locality to another. In terms of national identity, Slav speakers could invariably be split into Greek, Bulgarian or Serb factions, even within the same village community. 14 Such political realities curtailed earlier, excessive Greek claims to the northern zone. Greek historians came forward with more plausible theories concerning the historical boundaries of ancient Macedonia. Conveniently, these boundaries followed a west-east line from Lake Ohrid - Prilep - north of Monastir - Strumnitsa - Nevrokop - Nestos (Mesta) River. By coincidence or design, these northern limits corresponded almost perfectly with the northern boundary of the central zone. 15 The Greeks could thus argue that the political and cultural heritage of Macedonia, the historical geography of the region, and the Macedonian name all justified their aspirations to both the southern and the central zone.

The second pillar of Greek national ideology was the legacy of the Byzantine Empire. Quite apart from the traditional view of the advocates of the ’Great Idea’ that the modern Greek state was destined to act as a nucleus for a resurrected Byzantium, in Macedonia the medieval multi-ethnic, multilingual empire had a particular attraction. Prior to the appearance of Bulgarian, Serb and even Romanian national ideologies in Macedonia, the Byzantine tradition of multi-ethnic societies and empires had been popular among Balkan Greeks. It had found its expression in Rigas Ferraios’s dream of a Balkan federation. It was no coincidence that a significant number of Rigas’s disciples were Macedonian Greeks of the central European diaspora. Understandably, the Greeks expected to play the leading role in their visionary federation or empire. Much as Alexander’s campaigns had resulted in the multinational Hellenistic states of the diadochoi, spreading Greek culture and language over most of the Balkans and the NearEast, and much as the Eastern Roman empire had evolved into a Greek Byzantine society, so their visionary state was able to embrace other ethnic groups who were willing to share Greek language and culture. These romantic visions of the late eighteenth century and the early decades of the nineteenth gave way to more practical considerations as national states emerged in the Balkans. Nevertheless, in Macedonia Greek national ideology continued to be preoccupied with such considerations down to the early years of the twentieth century. The fact that a significant number of Slav speakers in the central zone of Macedonia, most of the Vlach-speaking communities, and the scattered Christian Albanian villages had opted for the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate and Greek education was an encouraging sign to the Greeks that Greek national ideology stood a good chance of being adopted by the majority of the Christian population of central and southern Macedonia. 16

A third historical weapon in the arsenal of Greek ideology emerged after the Bulgarian ecclesiastical schism. It related exclusively to Macedonia and, to a lesser extent, southern Thrace. For almost a quarter of a century since 1870, the contest between Greeks and Bulgarians in Macedonia over the Slav-speaking inhabitants had developed on the basis of ecclesiastical loyalties. Opting for the Bulgarian Exarchate, particularly in the absence of physical coercion by armed bands, was sufficient evidence of Bulgarian national identity. Greek nationalists, fearing that the neutral, ecumenical and non-racist approach of the Ecumenical Patriarchate could not serve their needs for national polarization, sought to Hellenize the institution of the Church. To them it was not enough that the language of the liturgy was Greek and the clergy Greek speakers. The Orthodox faith - the only ’true’ faith - and the Church - with all its saints - must acquire a distinct and convincing Greek identity. The peasants of Macedonia, by remaining loyal to the Patriarchate, would accordingly continue to be listed as ’true’ believers, while simultaneously being ushered into the ’cherished’ world of Greek national ideology. 17

Thus the legacies of Hellenic - and Hellenistic - Macedonia, of the medieval Byzantine Empire and the traditions of the Greek Orthodox Church, all contributed to rendering Greek national ideology adaptable to the unique requirements of nineteenth-century Macedonia. In order to spread this ideology and at the same time cope with the Bulgarian challenge (and to a lesser extent with that of Serbian and Romanian ideologies), the Greeks employed all traditional means at their disposal: schools, cultural associations, the press, and distinguished personalities. In doing so, however, they were exposed to contradictory signals emanating from the two centres of Hellenism: the irredentist, revolutionary nationalism of the capital of the independent Greek state, and the conservative, evolutionary ecumenicism of the Constantinople-based hierarchy of the subject Greeks. This strain was clearly manifested in the uneasy, and at times polemical, relations between Greek consuls and bishops in the dioceses of Macedonia. Consular dispatches to the Athens government and bishops’ reports to the Constantinople Patriarchate provide ample evidence of the two different approaches. It was only at the turn of the century, when the ecclesiastico-educational contest between Greeks and Bulgarians developed into armed struggle between opposing bands, that the Church’s evolutionary approach was subjected to the requirements of militant national ideology.18

* The above text is an excerpt from the article by Evangelos Kofos titled “National Heritage and National Identity in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Macedonia”, published in the “European History Quarterly, 1989, Vol 19”» The title of the thread as the bolding parts are my own and not of the author. The references located in the paper.

The Odd Couple; The Stefov – Gandeto connection

2011-05-28T13:59:00.000+03:00

by Nick Michael Hodges

In his article “The little Dictionary had no chance”, which was published in the American Chronicle on April 17, 2011, Risto Stefov says that he is wondering why the Greeks are behaving the way they do and he has obviously found somebody by the name J.S.G. Gandeto who has written a book called “The Theft of a King who Stole Alexander” and he uses that book as his, I may say, Gospel to explain the “Greek behavior” as it is presented or described in that book by a man who I think he may be as qualified to do that about the Greeks as Judas might had been asked to do the same thing about Jesus Christ.

I do not know for sure but I would like to think that there are books out there that explain or describe the Greek behavior but J.S.G. Gandeto is writing things about the Greeks and their behavior that Risto Stefov wanted to hear and thus present in his article whatever claptrap he was able to find in J.S.G. Gandeto´s book that was written to allow himself and his fellow South Slavonians Slavs to vent out their passion, hate and malice against ...
the Greeks because they are not willing to give them what they want although nothing ever was theirs or belonged to them at any time in history.

Before I go on with the R. Stefov and J.S.G. Gandeto collaborative effort to explain, as they say, the Greek behavior which they seem to be so much concerned with nowadays, I would like to make a reference to the two criminal acts of FRAUD and FORGERY for which the South Slavonian Slavic people as well as the above mentioned two individuals have not so far come forward and express any remorse for the pain, suffering and sorrow that they have caused to the Greek people whose behavior they are trying to explain although they ought to look at their own behavior which can be explained by insanity, paranoia and schizophrenia for not admitting that they have committed fraud and forgery against the Macedonian Greek identity theft and, also, for not being willing to reach a compromise regarding the Macedonian name issue or accept the fact that it needs to be returned to the Macedonian Greek people, who are the rightful owners of it and need it back as soon as possible.

So I say to them that If the Greeks like to think that they have a national homogeneity and racial purity, they are not in any way committing any crime against their neighbors. They are not calling their country, their people or their language by using names that they have stolen from their neighbors. However, the Greeks have every right in the world to protest, contest and defeat any attempt made by the South Slavonian Slavic people who obviously think that they can steal or usurp their precious and glorious Macedonian Greek heritage.

What kind of people would we be if we did not care to protect our country against those who think they can steal our national or Macedonian heritage? We do what any normal people would do to protect and defend what we have inherited from our ancestors and has been ours for more than two or so millennia . Is this bad behavior? Obviously not so for those of us who care about who they and what they are and want to continue to be proud descendants of their great ancestors.

Bad or criminal behavior is the one displayed by the South Slavonian Slavs who do not respect the property or ownership rights of their neighbors but they think that what they cannot make or have for themselves, they will take or usurp from their neighbors and, then, claim it as their own by fraud and forgery and they never, ever, have apologized or have expressed any regrets for the fraudulent act of the theft of the Macedonian identity , the fraudulent usurpation of the Macedonian Greek name and the wicked and criminal attempt to assign a Slavic identity to Macedonia by using again the fraudulent name of the name Macedonia for a country that has never been Macedonia at any time in history and it has been inhabited by non-Macedonian South Slavonian Slavic people. So, I ask my readers what kind of behavior is that on the part of the South Slavonian Slavs, if not, the behavior of criminals who specialize in FRAUD and FORGERY with no apology or justification for it and no acknowledgement for any sort of wrong doing or any expression of remorse for the pain and suffering they have created to the Greeks.

So, R. Stefov goes on with the help of his equally Greek-hater friend J.S.G. Gandeto to explain the Greek behavior by telling us that , if problems with Greece´s neighbors do not exist, then they must be created whether it may be with Turkey, Bulgaria or with the state that is falsely called “Macedonia”. The truth is that Greece never created any problems with its neighbors but, on the contrary, the problems that Greece is facing with its neighbors are real and they accredited to its hostile neighbors who are constantly are trying to provoke, intimidate and threaten the Greek people in order to undermine the territorial integrity of their country. Bulgaria and Turkey have used force to usurp Greek land but the South Slavonian Slavs of former Yugoslavia are trying to do just that but in a rather subtle and sinister way since they had failed to do it militarily when they were Bulgarians in the years 1912 and 1913 and later on again when they were Yugoslavians in the years 1947-1949. I personally challenge Risto and Gandeto to prove me wrong.

Why would the South Slavonian Slavs try so hard to blame the Greeks for creating problems with their neighbors when all the facts point at them because they are the ones who have devised and used the “Macedonization” scam to defraud the Greek people of their Macedonian Greek identity and, therefore, use it in order to create a fraudulent “Macedonian” identity for themselves , their country and their language while at the same time, creating and causing identity confusion, identity crisis and identity deprivation among the Greek people of the Macedonian province of northern Greece.

I believe that Risto and his equally Greek-hater friend Gandeto in their effort to explain the Greek behavior did exactly the opposite and, so, unwillingly and unintentionally they have revealed and exposed their own evil minded, hateful, despicable and heinous behavior as well as their personal hostility and animosity towards the Greeks who have never done anything so far to harm or hurt them in any way possible.

Unfortunately, as the Greeks try to become more reasonable and rational in their approach towards negotiating a fair and just solution regarding the Macedonian name issue, the South Slavonian Slavs, on the other hand, appear to be more incorrigible and impudent as they constantly attempt to create more and more problems with the people of the Macedonian province of northern Greece by asking them t or trying to impose upon them the approval of the recently published and so-called Greek-”Macedonian” dictionary which is another aspect of the continuation of the crimes of FRAUD and FORGERY against the same poor Greek people who have already suffered so much from the South Slavonian Slavs in the last fifty or so years and did not had enough time yet to recover from that suffering.

First of all the Macedonian people of northern Greece have always been Greek and have always spoken the Greek language and, therefore, the so-called Greek-”Macedonian” dictionary was not, obviously, intended for them but obviously for the Slavic speaking people who only speak a somewhat similar language but have nothing else in common with the South Slavonian Slavs who like to refer to them by using the fraudulent “Macedonian” name for the sole and fraudulent purpose to falsely identify these Slavic speaking Greek people with themselves who also falsely and fraudulently call themselves by the same pseudo-”Macedonian” name.

I would like to ask my readers how corrupt, dishonest and deceitful can the South Slavonian Slavic people be and what right or authority do they have to publish and, then, try to get the approval of the so-called Greek-”Macedonian” dictionary in the sovereign country of Greece where only the official Government has the right and the authority to negotiate the use of such a dictionary for the Slav speaking people as long it is done legally and is not used by outsiders to impose a false and fraudulent identity upon them and use them to promote the fraud and forgery of the Macedonian Greek identity for pseudo-Macedonian purposes.

The main reason that the South Slavonian Slavs wanted to get the approval of that dictionary was obviously to show themselves that the Macedonian name does not represent Greek people but Slavic people and, above all, that the name Macedonia does not represent a Hellenic land but a Slavic one and, therefore, the Macedonian history and heritage do not belong to the Greeks but to the South Slavonian Slavs just because they like to call themselves by that same name as we do. Furthermore, the South Slavonian Slavs were trying so hard to have that dictionary approved because they wanted to mislead, confuse and deceive the people of the world that the Slavic idiom spoken by the Slav speaking people of Hellenic Macedonia is not a Bulgarian peasant dialect but a so-called “Macedonian” language when even Risto Stefov in one of his articles was stating that the Macedonian people of antiquity were speaking the Greek koine which he was referring to as the Alexander´s koine language.

Another piece of evidence for the Greeks to prove to the world that the South Slavonian Slavs would do whatever is possible to assign a Slavic identity on anything and everything of Macedonian ancestry whether it is history, heritage, language, people or land so that the crimes of Fraud and Forgery are totally and entirely completed as planned without any judicial, legal or political consequences for the South Slavonian criminals of the “Macedonization” crime scam against the Greek people who did not get much cooperation and support from either the European Union or the United States who were perfectly aware of the crime, the motive and the perpetrators.

I think that I have presented enough information for my readers to realize that it is not the Greek people who create and cause problems for their neighbors but it is Greece´s neighbors and mainly the South Slavonian Slavs of former Yugoslavia as well as the Albanians and the Turks but I like to deal with one of them at a time.

The crimes of fraud and forgery do not stop here and I would deal with more of the same or worse as I go on. I know that the disapproval of the so-called Greek-”Macedonian” dictionary was a great defeat or disappointment for R. Stefov and J.S.G. Gandeto who were very bitter, hateful and hostile because they did not accomplish whatever evil and wicked intentions they had in their convoluted minds. So, they found another excuse to attack the Greek people and accuse them of attempting to culturally assimilate and ethnically erase the Slav speaking population by denying them the right to identify themselves as ethnic “Macedonians “when most of those Slav speaking people are ethnically or nationally Greek while some of them who many years ago may have been Bulgarian- minded because they may have been of Bulgarian descent since not all of the Bulgarian speaking people went back to Bulgaria after the exchange of population.

So, then there are no such thing as ethnically “Macedonian” people in Greece as there is no “Macedonian” ethnicity or even nationality among the South Slavonian Slavs because even the fraudulent “Macedonian” name they use for themselves is not and cannot be an ethnic name because it is stated in their constitution that it is a “constitutional” name and no constitutional name designates ethnicity. Moreover, the Macedonian name that they usurped from us was never used in antiquity to designate ethnicity or nationality and the ethnicity or nationality of the Macedonian people was Hellenic. The South Slavonian Slavs as soon as the “Macedonized” themselves and tried to “Macedonize” other Slav speaking people, they went ahead and fraudulently ethnisized or nationalized their “Macedonization” so that they can use it as a fraudulent “Macedonian” national identity in order, as I said earlier, to assign a Slavic identity to Hellenic Macedonia and, therefore, incriminate the Hellenic identity of Macedonia and, if possible, undermine the sovereignty of Hellenic Macedonia.

Mr. Gandeto does not hesitate to tell us in his book that the Greeks have confiscated land that belongs to the Slav speaking people and, obviously, the Greeks have confiscated lands that belong to the South Slavonian Slavs because, since, we are Macedonian Greek people and they call themselves, but fraudulently, “Macedonians”, then the pseudo-Macedonians become the owners of lands they never owned before in history or ever belonged to them. In other words, the criminal South Slavonian Slavs think or believe that the usurpation of the Macedonian Greek identity from the Macedonian Greeks and the fraudulent use of it for themselves would enable them, but fraudulently, of course to the ownership of our Hellenic Macedonian land.

In other words, they did not just steal and use for themselves our Macedonian Greek identity, our history and heritage but they dare lay claim on our Macedonian Hellenic land. I really believe that these people must be insane, paranoid and schizophrenic to make such accusations about a fantasized confiscation of lands by the Greeks when they know or ought to know that the Macedonian lands we are talking about, except for the Pellagonian territory never got to be inhabited by the South Slavonian Slavs whose country consists mainly of ancient Paeonia and Dardania and even those were Serbian territories that were handed over to them about twenty years ago with the help of the United States.

I , also, would like to say that the Macedonian land that is under Greek control was not confiscated or stolen from the South Slavonian Slavs as it was always ours and Hellenic but it was liberated from the Ottoman Turks during the first Balkan war in the year 1912. However, in the year 1913, while the Greeks were busy fighting the Bulgarians to prevent them from taking over Macedonian land, the Serbians came down to Pellagonia and made it a Serbian territory by the use of military force. Let it be known that the Greeks were defending their Macedonian land against two Slavic nations and they could only deal with one of them at a time. So, then in an uneven war they had no other choice but lose Pellagonia to the Serbians in order to save the rest of the Macedonian territory from the Bulgarians. Once again I would like to inform my readers that the fraud and the forgery never comes to an end and the criminals, never stop accusing the victims of a crime when the evidence is overwhelmingly against them. It sounds like the criminal is shouting about theft in order to chase the owner out of his house.

I, also, like to respond to another accusation made by Mr. Gandeto against the Greeks in which he says that they are guilty of imposing their Greek culture and language on other people while as I mentioned earlier it was the South Slavonian Slavs who have tried, although unsuccessfully, to impose the so-called Greek-”Macedonian” dictionary to the Slav speaking Greek people for the purpose of promoting their South Slavonian Slav culture, identity and language which they call fraudulently “Macedonian” while they and all of us know that their language is a Serbo-Bulgarian language and their identity has nothing to do with that of the Macedonians who were always Greeks and spoke their own Greek dialect.

There is, at least, one more accusation against the Greeks that I do not want to let it go unanswered because it presents the Greeks as the most proficient thieves and fabricators of history in the Balkans. Mr. Gandeto does not take the time to get specific about it and tell us which nation´s history in the Balkans have the Greeks so proficiently stolen or fabricated and, above all, which nation in the Balkans has that much history or it is famous for its great history and the Greeks have tried to steal from it or have tried to fabricate history for any reason unknown to me.

I would like to make a wild guess and dare say that he is referring to his country which is the only one the Balkans without an identity and history and has every reason in the world to try to steal history from the Greeks and fabricate a pseudo-Macedonian identity for their country, themselves and their language. It is obviously another case where a criminal accuses the victim for a crime that is being committed by his own criminal people.

Well, it is also possible that Mr. Gandeto is trying to tell us that the Greeks may have stolen the ancient Macedonian history and heritage and, therefore, they have fabricated the Macedonian Greek identity, something that all the other South Slavonian comrades seem to be so much willing to accept and believe because it incriminates the Greeks but it justifies the South Slavonian fraud and forgery.

The Greeks do not steal anybody´s history, but they just make history and they do it by working together with Greek people from different parts of the Hellenic world. The Greeks fought often against each other for dominance, control or territorial expansion but they also fought together and won against the Persians who threatened to destroy their country. The ancient Macedonians and the other Greeks fought against each other for control or dominance of the Greek land but the Macedonian Greeks prevailed and established the Macedonian hegemony which brought about a force-imposed Greek unity that helped again to unite the Macedonians and the other Greeks for a campaign against the Persians.

What I am trying to show to my readers is that the Greeks did not steal the ancient Macedonian history but, on the contrary, the Macedonians and the other Greeks made their history together and for the good of the whole country and not for either one of them in particular. Therefore, the Macedonian history was made by Greeks and for the Greeks and no one else has any right whatsoever to lay hands on it. The Macedonian history has always been Greek and it will remain Greek because the ancient Macedonians were also Hellenic people and not Hellenized as some people think of them but they never, ever, try to tell us or explain to us how, when , why and by whom were they Hellenized if they were not originally Hellenic people.

Why would the ancient Macedonians have chosen to become, say, Hellenized and accept a Hellenic identity, culture and language from, say again, the Greeks when at that time they were the masters of most of the Hellenic world and much of the Balkans? If there are any people who for some reason propose such a theory, I would like for them to come forward and explain to me and all the others how, when, why and by which particular Greek group did the so-called Hellenization of the ancient Macedonians take place and, therefore how was it possible for the Macedonians to learn, for example, a “foreign” Greek language and , then, use it throughout their campaigns and make it become the equivalent of the English language of today.

In conclusion, the Greeks did not in any way try to steal, as Mr. Gandeto claims the Macedonian history, nor did they fabricate the Macedonian Greek identity. On the contrary, the Macedonian history is an integral part of the Hellenic history while the Macedonian identity was always Hellenic because the ancient Macedonians were people of Hellenic stock and, therefore, the Greeks never, ever had to use FRAUD and FORGERY to justify the Greekness of the Macedonian history, identity or language.

I ask again who are the thieves, the fraudsters and the forgers of the Macedonian Greek identity, history and heritage? The answer is who else but the infamous South Slavonian Slavs of former Yugoslavia.

Finally, I would like to comment on Mr. Gandeto´s reference to Eugene Borza and Ernest Badian whom he describes as being attacked by the Greeks for writing books and articles against them. I personally think that both of these Professors know the truth about Macedonia and the Macedonian people but they must have their reasons to lie about them. I do not believe that every Professor has the required intellectual honesty and integrity of character. Historians know the truth but they must stay away from politics and other means of corruption. I have known that both Borza and Badian have cast doubt about the Hellenism of Macedonia or the Macedonians, but I would like to believe they did not do it for historical reasons.

However, although these Professors deny in some way the Hellenism of Hellenic Macedonia, they really fail to provide any documentary evidence or proof to justify their claims as they just present simple and convenient speculation while they overlook or disregard many important historical facts. Again why do they refer only to those two Professors while there are so many others who may be telling the truth but the South Slavonian Slavs do not want to hear about them. Not everybody has a reason to lie and not tell the truth and I know that there over two hundred of them or more who have signed a letter written to President Obama and they all want the President to discredit the fraud and the forgery.

In conclusion, I say to my readers that the crime has been exposed, the motive for the crime was explained and the criminals were identified as well as the victim. I hope we all work together and do something soon to put the perpetrators away, where they belong. Justice must and will prevail and the crime should be punished in order for us, Greek Macedonian people to be vindicated.

http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/234749

The Origins of Greece's Policy with Regards to the Current "Macedonian Issue"

2011-05-17T17:27:00.001+03:00

by Evangelos Kofos

abstract from the essay “Documenting the Greek-Macedonian Name Controversy”

Sudosteuropa, 58, January 2010, pages 413-435

The original "Macedonian question" emerged in the last decades of the 19^thcentury and covered the two first decades of the 20^th. Simply stated, it was a contest between three young Balkan states, vying with each other to inherit the possessions of the crumbling Ottoman Empire. The vaguely defined "Macedonian" lands were both the prize and the apple of discord for Bulgarians, Greeks, and Serbs. For the European powers, the treaties of the Balkan Wars (Bucharest 1913) and the First World War (Neuilly 1919 and Lausanne 1923), terminated the armed conflicts in Southeast Europe, rendering the "Macedonian Question" a challenging subject for historians rather than politicians.^{^[1]} Not so for the locals.

Perceptions of an endured "historical injustice", lost homelands for hundreds of thousands of uprooted natives, various types of population exchanges, all followed by suppressive measures for the induction of varied ethnic groups into new unified political environments, kept the issue alive. Out of the peace settlements, Greece had emerged as a status quo country, Bulgaria as an irredentist one. Former Serbia, subsequently Yugoslavia, had turned introvert seeking to put its multi-ethnic state entity in order.

Soon, new international actors emerged in the region, intent on plying the murky Macedonian terrain for their own benefit. The first....

to challenge the recently established status quo was the Communist International (Comintern) which was quick to introduce a novel blueprint for a future Balkan Communist Federation. A Macedonian state, to be composed of the Macedonian provinces of Greece, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria was expected to be one of its constituent members. The initial reference to a "Macedonian people" included all inhabitants of the Macedonian regions, irrespective of their ethnic background. Gradually, however, the Comintern's documents began to attach an ethnic identity to the name, compelling all Balkan communists to adhere, nolens-volens, to Moscow's constructions.^{^[2]}

The second intervention was Nazi Germany's occupation of the Balkans in the Second World War and its apportionment of Greek and Yugoslav Macedonian lands to its allies, Italy and Bulgaria. For Greece, the four year occupation of its Macedonian provinces (1941-1944) and the subsequent Civil War (1946-1949) opened traumatic wounds on issues of security and identity. For decades, those wounds were still visible in Greek state policies as well as in public perceptions of the country's security. They certainly influenced and shaped Greek politicalthinking vis-a-vis the former Socialist Republic of Macedonia's declaration of independence and various related identity issues.^{^[3]}

Nevertheless, the reactions of Greek political leaders and the masses in 1991-93, particularly in the region of Macedonia, were not an instinctive, backward jump into the vicissitudes of the 1940s. On the contrary, in December 1991 Greece merely stressed, perhaps with a dose of hyperbole, what had been a traditional policy, shared by all parliamentary parties.

Particularly enlightening in this respect is an August 1983 circular letter addressed to Greek missions abroad by the first PASOK Foreign Minister in Andreas Papandreou's government, Yannis Haralambopoulos.^{^[4]} The text reflected the policy of all post-Civil War Greek governments on the issue of the "Macedonian nation" and the identity of the Slavs of the wider Macedonian region.

DOCUMENT A

Foreign Minister Yannis Haralambopoulos on 13 August 1983, in a letter to diplomatic and press missions abroad.^{^[5]}

"The Greek policy on the Macedonian issue consistently pursues the same line since 1950 [the end of the Greek Civil War]. Greece raises no territorial or minority claims to the Macedonian lands of Yugoslavia or Bulgaria, but [for its part] does not accept the existence of a "Macedonian" minority on its territory.

More specifically, Greece pursues the following line vis-a-vis the Yugoslav position on the 'Macedonian nation':

- It does not recognize the existence of a 'Macedonian' nation, language etc. This negative position refers to the appropriation of a geographical term - which also is in use in Greece - by a nationality which was constructed in Yugoslavia for political reasons, after the Second World War. If another name is adopted, Greece would have no problem to accept it.^{^[6]}

- It insists on the use of the term 'Macedonia' solely as a geographical concept. Not wishing to interfere in the internal affairs of a foreign country, it does not raise the issue of the name of the southern Yugoslav republic, 'Socialist Republic of Macedonia', as this is an issue of internal [Yugoslav] law.

- If Yugoslavia abandoned the tactics of monopolizing the term 'Macedonian' to adopt, for example, a name such as 'Slavomacedonian' or 'Macedonoslav', exclusively for the Slav inhabitants of Yugoslav Macedonia and persons sharing their ideas, there would be no negative response on the Greek side.

- Referring to the novel interpretations of Yugoslav historiography for the 'Macedonian nation', Greece rejects them. On this issue, it is only natural that Greek and Bulgarian positions coincide, although they are not harmonized on purpose [...].^{^[7]}

About the Macedonian nation

- It is not possible to recognize the existence of a 13-century old 'Macedonian nation', as claimed by Skopje, because no historical sources exist which justify the existence of a Macedonian nation, either in Byzantine or Ottoman times [...].

Turning now to post-war developments in Yugoslavia, it is possible to accept that in the span of four decades, in the well-known social and political conditions, a new ethnicity was constructed in southern Yugoslavia, although erroneously named, 'Macedonian'. The formulation of a nationality is an internal issue and concerns the national-political state structure of a neighbouring country. Nevertheless, the appropriation by a Slav nation of an ancient Greek name which, moreover, is in use today in Greece as a geographical appellation, has no scientific basis. Moreover, it is politically unacceptable because, through a process of adoption of a geographical name, it has attempted to appropriate a significant part of the Hellenic political and cultural heritage associated with the region of Macedonia. If, however, Yugoslavia adopted the names, 'Yugoslav Macedonians' or 'Slavomacedonians', for the inhabitants of the Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, there would be no reason for objections, as the former component would indicate the national identity, while the latter, the regional provenance of each inhabitant of Macedonia, at large. [...]

The geographical meaning of Macedonia

Another important point to keep in mind when dealing with Macedonia, is the indisputable historic fact that the geographical region of present Yugoslav Macedonia has not been part of ancient Macedonia - apart from a narrow belt of a few tens of kilometers north of the Greek frontier. Consequently, it has no historical title to appropriate the term 'Macedonia' [...]. Nevertheless, Yugoslav authors have a tendency to present the entire geographical region of Macedonia as an ethnical, historical and geographical entity. Moreover, they refer to the 'three parts' [i. e. the Macedonian regions in the three neighbouring countries, Yugoslavia, Greece and Bulgaria] as 'Vardarska del [part] na Makedonija', 'Egeiski del na Makedonija' and 'Pirinski del na Makedonija'. Such denominations, however, are inadmissible because they reveal tendencies for territorial claims. Since the three regions have been finally and legally passed under the jurisdiction of three neighbouring states, the correct appellations should be 'Greek Macedonia', 'Bulgarian Macedonia' and 'Yugoslav Macedonia'."

The importance of this document is that it was issued by Andreas Papandreou's first PASOK Minister of Foreign Affairs, just eight years prior to the dissolution of the Yugoslav federation. Later, however, Andreas Papandreou both as the opposition leader (1992-1993) and as Prime Minister (late 1993 to the end of 1995) rode the popular bandwagon and emerged as a staunch supporter of the Greek position to firmly oppose the Macedonian name or any of its derivatives for the newly independent neighbouring country.

Yet, Haralambopoulos' circular of 1983 reveals that in fact the Greeks adopted a policy on the name issue as early as the termination of their Civil War, and that there is a continuity to be drawn to their stance towards the emergence, in late 1991, of an independent Macedonian state in their neighbourhood.

Compared to post-1991 polemics, certain points of the 1983 circular, referring to Greek objections to Yugoslav claims, appear milder in tone and open to constructive dialogue. For example, Athens appeared ready to acknowledge that a new ethnicity had been constructed in the SFR of Yugoslavia. At the same time, serious objections to the use of the Macedonian name for the Republic and its inhabitants within the federated state already existed then. Nevertheless, the Greek side appeared willing to accept a number of hyphenated or compound names, including the adjective Macedonian, for the different Macedonian geographical regions and their respective inhabitants.

On the other hand, these aspects do reveal, in a succinct way, the key Greek concerns as they pertain to security and identity issues. Over the course of four decades, the security elements of the Macedonian issue for Greece, so pronounced during the 1940s, faded away. Still, Athens was seriously annoyed by the Yugoslav practice of referring to Greek (and Bulgarian) Macedonian provinces as parts of a united region, a practice that, according to the Greeks, could contribute to eventually reviving irredentist claims to Greek regions. Secondly, the Greeks objected to attempts to monopolize the Macedonian name as the ethnic appellation of a Slavic people; a monopolization that, according to them, could eventually lead to wider encroachments into the Macedonian Greek patrimony, with reference to all historical eras. However irritating such tactics were to the Greeks, and more so to the Greek Macedonians [the Makedones], on an international scale their political significance was rather minimal. After all, these tactics originated from a provincial - federated - republic of the Yugoslav state. At least until Tito's death in 1980, Athens could expect Belgrade to somehow contain nationalist excesses in Skopje, should they occur. It is such considerations that were dealt a serious blow, when on 17 September 1991 the parliament in Skopje declared the independence of the "Republika Makedonija".

^{^[1]} For an up to date Greek and international bibliography on the subject consult the recently published book by Vasilis Gounaris, I Istoriografia tou Maked onikou Zitimatos, 19os to 21os aiones [The Historiography of the Macedonian Question, 19^th to 21* centuries]. Athens 2010.

^{^[2]} That was a time when Stalin's Soviet Union was engaged in creating or recognizing new ethnicities for its own political ends ("Belorussians", "Moldovans"etc). Much later, on 7 June, 1946, in a meeting with Yugoslav and Bulgarian leaders in the Kremlin, Stalin reprimanded Georgi Dimitrov for his reservations to assigning a "Macedonian" ethnic identity to the inhabitants of Bulgarian Pirin Macedonia which would be opening another Pandora's box for the Macedonian Question: "You do not want to grant autonomy to Pirin Macedonia. The fact that the population has yet to develop a Macedonian consciousness is of no account. No such consciousness existed either in Belarus when we proclaimed it a Soviet republic. However, later it was shown that a Belorussian people did in fact exist." Minutes from the Archives of the Communist Party of Bulgaria, published in Otecestven Vestnik, 19 June 1990.

^{^[3]} For English language books on the Macedonian problem during the decade 1940-1950 consult Evangelos Kofos, Nationalism and Communism in Macedonia: Civil Conflict, Politics of Mutation, National Identity. New York 1993 (First edition: Thessaloniki 1964); John S. Koliopoulos, Plundered Loyalties: Axis Occupation and Civil Strife in Greek Western Macedonia, 1941-1949. London 1999; Dimitris Livanios, The Macedonian Question: Britain and the Southern Balkans, 1939-1949. Oxford 2008. For more recent developments on the Macedonian issue cf. James Pettifer (ed.), The New Macedonian Question. London 1999.

^{^[4]} The text was published in Thodoros Skylakakis, Sto Onoma tis Makedonias [In the Name of Macedonia]. Athens 1995,24-28, from a copy submitted to the Greek Parliament in the early 1990s by the then Prime Minister Constantine Mitsotakis.

^{^[5]} Excerpts follow in an unofficial English translation.

^{^[6]} The emphases in bold characters in all documents were added by the author.

^{^[7]} A rather lengthy paragraph follows, refuting historical tenets of Yugoslav historiography on Macedonia, from medieval times to the establishment of the SFR of Yugoslavia.

The social and historical parameters of the Greek abducted children (Greek civil war)

2011-05-08T23:33:00.000+03:00

By Yannis Tsalouhidis,

Macedonia and the Historical Guilt,

Thessaloniki 1994, p. 76-79

An internationally unprecedented historical crime. The issue of the Greek children who were taken to Yugoslavia and the Eastern Bloc in 1948-1949 is still obscure as an insoluble incident of the Civil War in Greece. The parties involved stopped working on the issue, which is today exploited by the blatant Slavo- "Macedonian " nationalists in Skopje and abroad.

The varied and opposed terms given to the issue are indicative of the contrary opinions that the two sides have: "kidnapped" or "refugees", "Greeks" or "Macedonians", "mass kidnapping " or "exodus ", "genocide " or "rescue ". In order to clarify the issue, it is necessary to find more evidence, since we cannot gain access to the archives of the CP. of Greece, Yugoslavia, Skopje and Bulgaria, neither can we get the protagonists to talk and clear up many obscure parts. Those who brought about the tragic kidnapping ought to talk eventually.

The Greek Government brought the issue of the these children to the U.N. for the first time in March 1948, as soon as it was made known that the Greek Communist guerillas removed great numbers of children, between the ages of...

two and fourteen years old, from regions that were under their control in Thrace, East, Central, West Macedonia and Epirus to the "kind" northern neighbors of Greece. The guerillas of the "Temporary Democratic Government" in particular, conducted a census for the children who had to be moved and came to an agreement with the countries of the Eastern Bloc (including Yugoslavia) that would take these children in. So they paved the way for a quick transfer operation that resulted in the movement of 14,000 children out of Greece (they were taken to Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Romania. Albania was the transit area. No children were sent to the U.S.S.R. while a small number were sent to Germany).

In May 1949 the number of these children reached 24-25,000 and in 1950, the International Red Cross estimated a total of28,296 kidnapped children. The issue of the "repatriation of the Greek children " was on the agenda of the U.N. until 1952.

The Communists claimed that the removal of these children from their mothers was a humanitarian act and a counterweight to the government's policy to house the children in the "Queens Homes ", which, of course, were launched after the kidnapping. It was also known that you could take your child back if you wanted.

The issue was examined by the U.N., in the context of the Special Committee on the Balkans (SCOB), which did not include members from the Soviet Bloc, since they had refused participation in it. In 27 November 1948, the U.N. General Assembly unanimously issued the decree 193(III)C about the return of those children to Greece. Besides, the children themselves or their parents and their closest relatives wanted to return. About 8,000 children from Yugoslavia and a smaller number of those who were taken to the Eastern Bloc in October 1950 by the C.P.G, namely 2,347 children, were there with at least one parent who had taken part in the Civil War.

In October 1951, 12,172 repatriaton applications were submitted by parents and relatives in Greece and the U.N. decree was assigned to the International Red Cross in order to negotiate. The Eastern Bloc did not accept the decree, while on the other hand, Yugoslavia, despite being renounced by the U.S.S.R., was urged by the theory of the "Macedonian Nationality" and the 11,0000 children it had in August 1949 to claim that there was no Greek child on Yugoslav grounds out of the 5,060 that were written on the list it was given. When the International Red Cross's mandate was carried out in late 1952, the Eastern bloc gave no children back to Greece, while Yugoslavia gave only 538 children! V. Bartziokas, a leading member of the C.P.G., asserted that 8,385 children returned to Greece during the period 1952-1982.

The rest of the children were educated as "good Macedonians ", confirming what the British ambassador in Belgrade had said: "When they go back to Greece, they will promote the doctrine that Greek Macedonia is a part of the "Greater Macedonia ", whose heart is the autonomous Republic in Yugoslavia ".

The Communist ideology paved the way for the nationalist philosophy, whose insubstantial claims that there was a "Macedonian " minority, turned against the Greek stand. It is time the historians intervened to delve into every aspect of this grim affair, whose repercussions are still evident today.

We should bear in mind that the "mass kidnapping" of the 28,296 Greek children was only one facet of Tito's atrocious actions and of Gligorov, who executed Tito's will.

Tito’s and Skopje’s commissioners converted the consciousness and the citizenship of a great part of these children and with these new "Macedonians ", they revived the janissaries of the Ottoman period.

The "Union of Refugees of the Aegean" was organized in Monastiri, where every year the International Conference of the "Children of the Aegean " takes place. In 1988 the first conference was held, together with a symbolic march toward the Greek borders... "

SOURCE: Michael S. Chrysanthopoulos, The Macedonian File, The Greek minority in the FYROM under Bondage, 2010, pages 93-94

The Myth of Modern Macedonia - inventing an identity

2011-05-02T12:10:00.004+03:00

By Professor John Melville-Jones

Last year I learned that a statue of Alexander the Great was to be erected in Skopje. I knew enough about modern history to be sure that the choice of this subject was not simply, as in some places (for example in Edinburgh), the result of a desire to commemorate a heroic figure of the past. I realised that it was part of an attempt that has been made during the last few generations to create an identity for the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia which can stretch back to distant antiquity. So what we have here is a myth in the making.

A myth is a story which can be told, retold, and modified. It survives because it gives pleasure, or satisfies a human need. It may be based on a fact, but it is not a historical account of something that happened, because even if an event took place that led to the birth of the myth, the story has been so changed for artistic or other reasons that it takes a form that is different from the form that it had when it was born. So a raid that might have been made on a city in Asia Minor by men who sailed from Greece in the second millennium B.C. turns into the story of the abduction of Helen and the Trojan War.

To take another example, among....

the early Christians in Asia Minor a story was told of Nicholas of Myra (an ancient city near Demre in southern Turkey), who became a saint. It was said that when Nicholas learned that a local family was in such severe distress that they might be forced to sell their three daughters into prostitution, he crept past their home one night and dropped three bags containing gold coins through an open window, thus enabling them to survive (if I have not told the story in exactly the same way as it has been told elsewhere, that is how myths grow; they can always be reworked). He was also known for making other gifts to the poor, and in particular for leaving coins in their empty shoes.

From the original story of St Nicholas we have nowadays arrived at the story of a white-bearded old man, who wears red garments and drives a sleigh drawn by reindeer and delivers presents to children in Christian countries on the night of December 24/25 each year (and sometimes not only in Christian countries; it is said that there is a department store in Bangkok which displays figures of Santa Claus and the Seven Dwarfs in December). The history of the development of this myth is a long one, and irrelevant to what I am writing now, but the Santa Claus story is a good example of the way in which a tale can grow of its own accord, if it is found emotionally satisfying in some way.

It is in this manner that the legend that is the cultural foundation on which the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia is forming itself has grown (this title, although approved as a temporary measure by the United Nations, is too cumbersome for my liking, and although it, and the abbreviated form of FYROM, are technically correct, I will use my preferred names of Northern or New Macedonia from now onwards, and explain why each of them is a satisfactory description of this country).

Let us examine the history of the development of the legend, starting at the beginning. At some time between 1000 B.C. and 800 B.C. a tribe or group of people who were called the Makedónes established themselves in an area north and east of Mount Olympus. Its borders cannot be precisely established, but it seems to have been approximately the same as the area called Pieria, which was named after another tribe that had established itself there (it should be remembered that many movements of people have taken place around the Mediterranean, both at this time and later, the latest example in this area being the movement of the Albanians in a north-easterly direction). It has been suggested that the Makedónes came from Phrygia in Asia Minor, but this cannot be proved, and if they did, they may well have originated even further away.

Over the centuries that followed, these Makedónes expanded their territory until they reached the sea, and by about 500 B.C. they were the leading group in that area. They became even more powerful in the middle of the fourth century B.C., as a result of the activities of two of their kings. The first of these, Philip II, was attacked at the beginning of his reign by two neighbouring groups, the Illyrians to the west and the Paeonians to the north. The latter group occupied approximately the same territory as the land that Northern/New Macedonia now occupies, although the most northerly part of it, including the area in which Skopje now stands, may have been under the control of another tribe called the Dardani. Philip not only drove them back, but at the same time developed a highly trained army, using new tactics and weaponry, that enabled Macedonia to gain control of much of the southern part of Greece. His son, Alexander, built upon his father´s successes, and conquered much of Asia as well.

During this period the Paeonians seem to have been independent. Their kings began issuing coins bearing their own names written in Greek letters, like Macedonian coins, after they had been defeated by Philip, and continued to do so until the Roman conquest of Greece in the 2nd century B.C. (the king who ruled Paeonia at the time when Alexander III was ruling Macedonia was called Patraus). The last issue from their mint describes itself as being ´of the Paeonians´, which suggests that the monarchy had been abolished, but that they were still independent. They supplied a small number of cavalry to Alexander the Great´s army. Historians therefore describe them as being a ´client kingdom´ or ´semi-autonomous´. At a later time they sent offerings to Delphi and Olympia, which were set up with accompanying inscriptions written in Greek, but this in itself does not tell us whether they considered themselves to be Greeks, and so little of their language survives that it is impossible to classify it with any confidence.

Although the evidence is so sparse, we may guess that after Philip II had defeated this neighbouring tribe, he treated them with respect and formed an alliance with them, perhaps agreeing to assist them if they were attacked by their neighbours. This was a wise move, which might have provided a model for treating the modern successors of the Paeonians.

There is also very little evidence, apart from their coinage and the occasional mention of their provision of troops to assist the Macedonians, which might show clearly what the relationship of the Paeonians and the Macedonians was, but after the Romans had defeated the last king of Macedonia, Perseus, in 168 B.C., they decided to incorporate Paeonia into an enlarged administrative district of Macedonia that was formed at that time, because it had been ´under King Perseus´, rejecting the claim of the neighbouring Dardanians that this land should be given to them because they had recently defeated the Paeonians. This is why modern historians describe Paeonia as a client state.

The suggestion that when from the sixth century of the Christian era onwards invading Slavic groups moved into Macedonia, this can be represented as a ´return of the Paeonians´ is fanciful, almost as fanciful as the more recent suggestion that the section of text that appears in the middle of the Rosetta stone is a specimen of the ancient Macedonian language, some words of which bear a resemblance to the modern ´Macedonian´ language.

Macedonia and Paeonia were divided immediately after the Roman conquest into four regions (Macedonia Prôtê, Deutera and so on), with Paeonia divided between the second and third regions. All of these regions except the third issued coins in their own names, so they must have been to some extent independent. This creation of separate administrative divisions may have had the aim of discouraging attempts to revive the Macedonian kingship which had been so powerful. If this was the intention of the Romans, it failed, because a pretender called Andriscus who claimed to be a son of King Perseus attempted to seize power in that area some twenty years later. The revolt was suppressed, but after this the four regions were rolled into one again, and an even larger administrative district, still called Macedonia, which stretched across to the coast of the Adriatic and included southern Greece, was formed by the Romans under the guidance of its governor Quintus Caecilius Metellus (who used the extra name ´Macedonicus´ thereafter, although, he did not claim to be a Macedonian). This arrangement lasted for a while. Then the size of this administrative district was reduced, and the southern part of it was called Achaea.

By this time the name ´Macedonia´ had begun to lose its ethnic significance, because it was now the name of a larger administrative area. In later centuries this situation continued, with occasional revisions of borders (one of which transferred the northern part of the former Paeonia, now a part of the enlarged province of Macedonia, into a more recently constituted province of Moesia Superior), followed by the turning of the Roman empire into what we call the Byzantine empire, in which Macedonia continued to be an administrative district or thema. This was then succeeded by the Ottoman occupation of much of Europe. The name ´Macedonian´ now no longer referred to a member of an ethnic group, but to someone who came from this geographically enlarged area (for example, the Byzantine emperor Basil I was known as ´the Macedonian´, but this was because he had emerged from this administrative thema to become emperor; he seems actually to have had his origin in Armenia).

This situation continued during most of the Ottoman period. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, few people claimed any longer to be ´Macedonian´ in the ethnic sense, although the word was used regularly by outsiders to denote people who came from Macedonia, whether they were of Slav, Greek or Turkish origin.

In 1821 and 1822 two attempts to wrest southern Macedonia from the Turks, started by the Greek-speaking population of the area known as Chalkidike, were unsuccessful. I have not been able to ascertain with any certainty whether the participants in this uprising thought of themselves primarily as Greeks or as Macedonians, although they certainly had the support of Greeks to the south of them.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, however (I have noted a claim that it began at the end of the previous century, but have been unable to verify this), another movement had begun in the area that is at present occupied by Northern Macedonia and the Greek province of Macedonia. This was again aimed at seeking independence from the Ottoman Turks. It was formed by Bulgarians, who had devised the idea of creating a separate Macedonian administrative area with a government controlled by Bulgaria, a sort of province of that country. I do not have a good understanding of the various groups that developed, or faded away, at this time, but I have the impression that they had only a limited amount of support, because the non-Turkish population of that area had enough to worry about without dreaming of independence. But their activities subsequently led to the Ilinden and Preobrazhenie anti-Ottoman uprisings of 1903.

This concept of a separate and autonomous Macedonia was also not displeasing to some thoughtful Serbian politicians, who saw it as a useful buffer between themselves and an aggressive Bulgaria (a wise point of view, valid even today).

There were indeed some pure ´Macedonists´ who touted the idea of a completely separate Macedonia, in the fullest post-Roman sense, from the middle of the 19th century onwards (the best known of these being Georgi Pulevski and Krste Misirkov), but they were few in number, and their views cannot be said to represent the thinking of the majority of the inhabitants of the area, whose connections in the northern part of it would have been with Serbia or Bulgaria, and in Thessaloniki and the more southerly areas with the Greeks. And of course the large Jewish populations of Bitola, Skopje and Thessaloniki at that time would have had no reason for seeking a separate state.

Then in 1912 the First Balkan War erupted. In the years that followed, war was waged against the Ottoman administration in this area by Serbia, Greece and Bulgaria, with the Montenegrins also taking part. After the defeat of the Ottomans, a division of territory was briefly achieved by the Treaty of London, but in the following year fighting broke out again because the Bulgarians were dissatisfied with the arrangements that had been made, which favoured Serbia and Greece, and this time the Romanians were also involved. The treaty of Bucharest followed, which defined the territory that was placed under Bulgarian control more or less as it exists today (parts of eastern Macedonia and western Thrace were assigned to Bulgaria during the Second World War, as a reward for their support of Germany, but were returned in 1947).

The reasons for fixing these boundaries were partly based on ethnic divisions, but were to a much greater extent the result of giving each group the land that it had won by fighting, following the principle of ´effective possession´.

At this time, Greeks were in a minority in the overall area of Macedonia, except in Chalcidice. The further north one looks, the more the proportion of Greeks decreases, which is not surprising. Some surveys of population were undertaken, but these are unsatisfactory for two reasons. In the first place, much depends on the outlook of the persons who conducted each survey, and because of this, some surveys referred to ´Slavo-Macedonians´, and others to ´Serbians´. It is also easy to imagine that many people might have given different answers to different surveys, depending on what they thought safer or more satisfactory to the interviewer.

It was during this period, as it is now claimed, that ´Macedonians´ began to fight in earnest for an independent ´Macedonia´. I have tried to verify this by looking at books printed in English, French and German during the first quarter of the twentieth century which provide information on the history of Europe at this time, but I have not found any indication that any except a few groups of activists might have believed that they were fighting to establish a free ´Macedonia´ (although there was a ´Macedonian´ colony in St Petersburg which was active and, to judge from the proclamation that they made, eager to be considered as separate from Serbians or Bulgarians). In Macedonia itself there was certainly no such thing as a ´Macedonian´ army (although there were one or two small armed groups which used the name ´Macedonian´, whatever their actual focus and links were). The majority of the combatants were conscripted, willingly or unwillingly, to serve in the armed forces according to the areas in which they lived, so that men whose common language at this time might have been Turkish, but whose ethnic language was a Slavic one might find themselves fighting for the Greeks, and vice-versa. To most of them, ´Macedonia´ would have meant the territory that was the bone of contention, not a separate racial label. So the reality was different from the myth that has now been created.

After the end of the First World War the treaty of Sèvres (1920) was superseded by the treaty of Lausanne (1923). The latter, confirmed by the Balkan Pact of 1934, led to the defining of boundaries which have been for the most part maintained since that time (except for a few years during the Second World War, as mentioned above). This defining of boundaries was followed by an exchange of populations between Turkey and Greece, as a response to the enmity that had been generated by the failure of the unwise attempt by the Greeks to establish a firm hold on territory that had been assigned to them on the Aegean coast of Turkey (the Smyrna campaign). The exchange was conducted on the basis of religious affiliation, and the result was that except for the population of Constantinople, as that city was still known at that time, those who were Orthodox Christians (all or nearly all of them of Greek background) were taken from Turkey and relocated in different parts of Greece, some of them near Athens, but most of them as additions to the existing Orthodox population of northern Greece, from which the Muslims had been removed. The number of Orthodox persons transported from Turkey to Greece was considerably greater than the number of Muslims who were deported.

During this period relations between the Greeks and the Slavs who remained in Greek territory were bad, and have continued to be bad. Some people were removed from their homes, the use of the ´Macedonian´ language was banned, and exclusive rights were established for the Orthodox Church of Greece. I do not know whether this was primarily caused by an urge by the Greeks to establish a Greek identity for the area, or whether there was any provocation. At all events, Slavs in Greek Macedonia received a treatment not totally dissimilar to the treatment of Albanians in Northern Macedonia.

The reverse movement of families from Greece to Turkey led to some families of Greek or Slavic background being deported from Europe. Some of these families were not of Turkish origin, but had converted to Islam, perhaps to pay lower taxes. The exchange was organised on the basis of the religious affiliations of the population of each country, so they had to go, even if their ancestors had lived in Europe for a thousand years or more. This is why in the middle of Turkey today you will sometimes see fair-haired fair-skinned Turks; their ancestors may have been Slavs who had converted to the Islamic religion.

It was at this time that the Great Powers established the mixed nation of Yugoslavia, the land of the ´South Slavs´, which endured, sometimes uneasily, as a political unit until it broke up into its separate components in 1990-1991.

During the first part of this period the activists in southern Yugoslavia who were agitating for a restored ´Macedonia´ can have had little support in the general population of what was then classified under many names at different times: for example, South Serbia, Old Serbia, Serbian Macedonia, the Vardar Province. Also, in Belgrade a tripartite description was developed for the parts of Macedonia (in the sense of the enlarged area created by the Romans): Vardar Macedonia (the present Northern or New Macedonia), Pirin Macedonia (lying within the borders of Bulgaria) and Aegean Macedonia (in Greek territory, now divided into Southern, Western and Eastern Macedonia). There was a sense of dissatisfaction in the Vardar area with the treatment that they were receiving, or might expect, from Belgrade, but it did not lead to concerted action.

In the later stages of the Second World War, however, the situation changed, because it suited the ambitions of the president of Yugoslavia, Marshal Tito, to accept the view of history that had been created by the activists. He saw the establishment of a separate province of ´Macedonia´ within Yugoslavia as a springboard for acquiring the northern part of Greece, and, being a Croat, he found no difficulty in detaching a part of Serbian territory for this purpose. So the new ´Macedonia´ was formed from Vardar Macedonia. But this idea of an independent state was not universally accepted; even the most prominent ´Macedonist´ at this time, Ivan Mihailov, was advocating a Macedonia that would be separated from Serbia, but would be principally Bulgarian in its ethnicity.

This alarmed the Greeks, and led to a renaming of what had since the years after the First World War been called ´Northern Greece´, to emphasise the fact that it was Greek territory. The name ´Macedonia´ was now reinstated as the name of this area. It was divided into three administrative districts, Western Macedonia, Eastern Macedonia and Central Macedonia, and these names are still used. For this reason, it can be argued that ´Northern Macedonia´ is the most suitable name for the clumsily named Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, because it represents exactly the situation that has existed since the second century B.C., even if ´New Macedonia´ is even more in accordance with the spirit of its creation.

Because the Romans brought into existence this new enlarged Macedonia, the use of a qualified form of the name for its northern area at the present time cannot reasonably be challenged. But what can be challenged is the attempt that has been made in recent years, to give the new republic a more respectable ancestry. It is embarrassing, as Oscar Wilde showed in his play The Importance of Being Earnest, to know that one is a foundling with no apparent ancestor except the Gladstone bag in which one has been mislaid.

A more ancient ancestry needed to be provided, and this process has been vigorously pursued. After the Second World War, although the population of the newly constituted Macedonia had nothing in common with the ancient Macedonians, their sharing of the name was used as an excuse for them to begin to appropriate the history of their southern neighbours, and to imply that they were the rightful heirs to the great achievements of Philip II and Alexander III. The new Macedonia began to lay claim to the old Macedonia, placing a picture of the mediaeval White Tower of Thessaloniki on its commemorative banknotes, and at a later date appropriating the golden sun of Vergina as its national symbol, naming a major highway after Alexander´s father Philip and building a soccer stadium decorated with an appropriately imaginative image (based on a Roman medallion of the 3rd century AD) of that ruler, rebadging airports with the names of Philip II and Alexander the Great and commissioning an equestrian statue of the great conqueror, inspired by the work of the ancient Greek sculptor Lysippus, to be erected in the centre of the same city.

School books began to be produced which indoctrinated the young with the idea of a Macedonia that had a continuous ethnic identity from ancient times, with a territory covering the enlarged Macedonia that was created by the Romans. An autonomous Macedonian Orthodox Church was established at the end of the 1950s, and declared itself autocephalous in 1967, thus breaking away from the Serbian Orthodox Church, which had previously controlled most of the area (with some competition from the Bulgarian Orthodox Church). The language of the new republic (more Serbian in the west, more Bulgarian in the east) was reformulated in order to create a ´Macedonian´ language which, it was claimed, had always existed. A specifically ´Macedonian´ mythical history was created, borrowing where necessary (for instance, the Bulgarian Czar Samuel was made a Macedonian).

Such actions, and the publication of maps showing the new Macedonia and the Greek province of Macedonia as a single unit, have inspired in their southern neighbours the fear that an attempt might be made to seize some of the land for which they had fought so hard, and is partly responsible for the aggressive way in which in areas under Greek control the use of the modern Macedonian language has been harshly discouraged, and the ethnicity of those who claimed to be ´Macedonian´ has been denied, with their Slavic names being changed against their will into Greek forms. This reaction was unwise, even if it was understandable, because some of the troubles that have plagued this area since the treaty of Lausanne was put into force might have been avoided if the slavophones who found themselves on the wrong side of the border had been able to continue using their traditional forms of speech (with the proviso that their children must all learn Greek as well, since official business would be conducted in that language), and if they had been encouraged to stay under the protection of Greece and use their farming skills. As it is said, it is easier to catch flies with honey than with vinegar. But in an attitude of mutual mistrust, particularly after the savage battles that took place in that area at the end of the Second World War, and the fear that Communism inspired, it is hard to see how that could have been achieved.

The new republic began to ´antiquitize´ itself. The pre-Roman Macedonians were claimed as the forebears of its inhabitants, by the use of a simple but false syllogism: ´Alexander the Great was a Macedonian; we are Macedonians; therefore we are the successors of Alexander the Great´ (the error lies in the assumption that ´Macedonian´ in the first sentence has the same meaning as ´Macedonians´ in the second). Using the same false logic, it would be possible to prove that Santa Claus was a Turk.

We are left with a difficult situation. The myth of a Macedonian identity stretching back into the centuries before Christ has taken hold, after two generations have been brought up to believe it, just as the myths surrounding our beloved Santa Claus have taken hold of the popular imagination. It has also been comfortably accepted by many people in other countries, who have no direct connection with Northern/New Macedonia, are not well informed about the facts, have no interest in examining the complicated history of this area, and find it easier to say ´Macedonia´ and ´Macedonian´, without considering what they mean by these words. The ´principle of effective possession´ is again being applied.

There can be no doubt that it is useful to have a separate independent country in this location, a buffer state between Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece, and because Northern/New Macedonia has land which is productive of good food, and resources of minerals which can be mined, it can be economically independent, and it will fit well into the European Union, particularly after Bulgaria has completed the requirements for admission. Also, by now Northern Macedonia has been welded into a separate functioning community, even if there are problems with its Albanian minority. But when a country lays claim to an ancestry that it does not have, and aggressively makes claims that are based on an invented myth, this is bound to sour the potentially productive relationship that could be developed with its southern neighbour. If you are naked, it does not give you the right to steal someone else´s clothes.

To recapitulate and expand some of the points that have been made: At some time early in the first millennium B.C. a group of people who called themselves the Makedónes settled in an area to the north of Mount Olympus. During the next few centuries they expanded the area under their control to such an extent that it began to be named after them. In the fourth century B.C. their king Philip II defeated the Paeonians who dwelt to the north of Macedonia, and also brought a great deal of Greece under his control. Paeonia then remained subject in some way to Macedonia until the second century B.C., when the Romans became masters of Greece. The Romans created a new administrative area, which was called ´Macedonia´. This included more land than the original Macedonia, in particular the territory of the Paeonians (which was approximately equivalent to the area that is now occupied by the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia).

During the Roman and Byzantine periods this enlarged Macedonia remained as an administrative unit (although the northernmost area, which included the city which is now called Skopje, was for a while included in the province of Moesia). It also remained as an administrative and geographical unit during the time when it was under the control of the Ottoman Turks. Its population was altered at different times, by the arrival of Slav invaders from the sixth century onwards, of Turks from the second half of the fifteenth century, and of Jews in its cities from about the same time onwards.

In the middle of the nineteenth century (or perhaps a little earlier) a movement seems to have begun among the Slav-speaking part of the population. This group (or perhaps there were several groups) developed the idea of a revived ´Macedonia´ which had an ethnic as well as a geographical meaning. It was claimed that there was a specifically Macedonian language and culture. When, just before the First World War, this area became the scene of protracted warfare as Greeks, Serbians, Bulgarians and Montenegrins battled for possession of this land, there may have been some who believed (or later claimed) that they were fighting for an independent Macedonia, but there was no formal Macedonian army.

When Yugoslavia was created by the Great Powers after the First World War ended, the enlarged Macedonia that had been created by the Romans was partitioned between Serbia, Greece and Bulgaria. That might still be the situation today if Marshal Tito had not decided to support the proponents of a separate Macedonian province in the part of this area that was under his control. Then, when Yugoslavia was separated into its constituent parts in 1990 and 1990, this province became a separate independent country, with an uncertain identity, which its leaders tried to embellish by claiming to have inherited the legacy of the ancient Macedonians, even though they did not own more than a sliver of the land that had been called Macedonia before the Roman conquest of Greece.

It will be difficult, if not impossible, to eradicate the myth, since it is a matter of faith, not reason, and faith can rarely be altered. In addition, if the inhabitants of North Macedonia cannot hang on to this invented association with the Macedonians of antiquity, what sort of identity is left for them? They will be naked indeed. The title of the autobiography of their former President, Kiro Gligorov, ´Macedonia is all that we have´, is very true.

So we may have to wait a long time for a reasonably negotiated settlement of the naming dispute, particularly because the erection of a statue of Alexander the Great in Skopje, which was not a part of Macedonia in his time, is provocative, being based on a false claim. Or should we perhaps view it not as an attempt to steal a cultural identity, but as an act of homage (like the statue of William the Conqueror that stands by Westminster Abbey in London), a compliment to the man whose father whipped their predecessors in this land so long ago, and made them his subjects?

Professor John Melville-Jones is a Winthrop Professor in Classics & Ancient History at the University of Western Australia.

http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/233089

Facts of the Slavmacedonian(FYROM) pseudoscience

2011-04-21T12:26:00.000+03:00

The very act of the foundation of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), together with all its subsequent actions as a political entity from 1944 to the present day, show that "Slavmacedonism" is the basic totalitarian ideological tenet of that state. With this tenet the state and the Slavic component in a population of several different ethnic groups have constructed their existence as a nation and their ‘historical’ mission. Right at the very start, "Slavmacedonism" was proclaimed as a sacred dogma, allowing of no discussion, let alone questioning based in Pseudoscience. It is therefore useful to consider some of the earmarks of Slavmacedonian(FYROM) pseudoscience. The substitution of fantasy and nonsense for fact leaves behind many different clues and signs that almost anyone can readily detect. Below are listed some of the most common characteristics of Slavmacedonian(FYROM) pseudoscience....

Slavmacedonian(FYROM) pseudoscience displays a remarkable and characteristic indifference to fact. Writers tend simply to make up bogus “factoids” where needed, instead of going to the trouble of consulting reliable reference works, much less investigating directly. Yet these fictitious facts are often central to the pseudoscientist’s argument and conclusions! This can also be seen in the fact that pseudoscientists never revise. The first edition of any pseudoscience book is almost always the last, even though the book may go through innumerable new printings, over decades or centuries. Even a book with obvious mistakes, errors, and misprints on every page is just reprinted as it is, over and over. Compare to college science textbooks, which usually see a new edition every few years because of the rapid accumulation of new facts, ideas, discoveries, experiments and insights in science.

Slavmacedonian(FYROM) pseudoscience “research” is almost invariably exegesis. That is, the pseudoscientist clips new or old newspaper reports, collects hearsay and questionable memories, reads other pseudoscience books, or thumbs through ancient religious or mythological works. The pseudoscientist never or rarely ever makes an independent investigation to check his sources. They are taken at face value, or even better interpreted as “symbolic,” so that the pseudoscientist can use them as a kind of Rorshach inkblot— reading into the myths and old texts anything he wants to find in them. Some areas of pseudoscience are generated by very simplistic “literalism”— the use of inherited “sacred texts” as if they were contemporary science textbooks, a practice that leads to the flat earth, the earth at the center of the universe, Creationism, Intelligent Design and a number of other completely foolish but resolutely traditional claims about man and nature.

Slavmacedonian(FYROM) pseudoscience shows a total indifference to criteria of valid evidence. The emphasis is not on meaningful, controlled, repeatable scientific experiments— instead, it is on unverifiable eyewitness testimony, stories, faked footprints, blurry photos, and tall tales, hearsay, rumor, and dubious anecdotes. Genuine modern scientific literature is not cited. Real research is never done. Generally Slavmacedonian(FYROM) pseudoscientists never present any valid evidence of any kind whatsoever for their claims. One of the most bizarre recent tactics of Slavmacedonian(FYROM) pseudoscientists is to publish a novel, a work of fiction in which essentially everything is made up by the author— as usual in works of fiction!— but then to turn directly around and treat the completely made-up material as if it were actual, factual and researched.

Slavmacedonian(FYROM) pseudoscience begins with a hypothesis— usually one which is appealing emotionally, and spectacularly implausible— and then looks only for items which appear to support it. Conflicting evidence is ignored.

Slavmacedonian(FYROM) pseudoscience lways avoids putting its claims to a meaningful test. Slavmacedonian(FYROM) Pseudoscientists never carry out careful, methodical, convincing experiments themselves— and they also generally ignore results of such experiments that are carried out by scientists. Pseudoscientists also never follow up.

Slavmacedonian(FYROM) pseudoscience often contradicts itself, even in its own terms. Such logical contradictions are simply ignored or rationalized away. In a meaningful description of the physical world we live in, mathematical or factual or logical contradictions simply could not exist. In pseudoscience, they are par for the course!

Slavmacedonian(FYROM) pseudoscience persuades using misinformation, appeals to widespread belief, rhetoric, propaganda, and misrepresentation, rather than presenting valid evidence (which presumably does not exist). Pseudoscience books offer examples of almost every kind of fallacy of logic and reason known to scholars, and have invented some new ones of their own. A favorite device is the non sequitur.

Slavmacedonian(FYROM) pseudoscience argues from ignorance, an elementary fallacy. That is, pseudoscientists base their claims on incompleteness of information about nature, rather than on what is known at present. But no claim can possibly be supported by lack of information.

Slavmacedonian(FYROM) pseudoscience often pretends to be one side of a legitimate scientifc controversy. That is, pseudoscientists like to pretend that “the jury is still out,” and that “further research” is needed to clarify the validity of their beliefs. This is essentially never the case.

Slavmacedonian(FYROM) pseudoscience makes heavy use of an invented vocabulary in which the new terms introduced do not have precise or unambiguous definitions, and most have no definitions at all. The listener is forced to interpret the statements according to his or her own preconceptions.

The presence of any one or more of these symptoms in any material in question marks it conclusively as pseudoscience.

SCIENCE: The literature is written for scientists. There is peer review, and there are rigorous standards for honesty and accuracy.

Slavmacedonian(FYROM) pseudoscience : The literature is aimed at the general public. There is no review, no standards, no pre-publication verification, no demand for accuracy and precision.

SCIENCE: Reproducible, reliable results are demanded; experiments must be precisely described so that they can be duplicated exactly or improved upon in sensitivity and volume of cases or events.

Slavmacedonian(FYROM) pseudoscience : Results cannot be reproduced or verified. Studies, if any, are always so vaguely described that one can't figure out just what was actually done or how it was done.

SUMMARY

Ongoing Ethnogenesis in 21st Century Balkans: FYROM and the ethnic Slav majority

2011-04-14T01:09:00.001+03:00

April 04, 2011, John James Smith

The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) is one of the world´s newest nations established towards the end of the 20th century. In September, 1991 the mixed population of ethnic Slavs (majority ca. 64%), Albanians (largest minority ca. 27%), Vlachs, Roma, Turks, and Greeks of this former Yugoslav state voted for independence in a referendum. From the outset, however, the constitutional name (e.g. Republic of Macedonia) and ethnic identity (Makedonski) of this young fledgling state have been at the centre of an intra-regional dispute spanning nearly two decades.

On the one hand, Greece, FYROM´s southern neighbour disputes any reference to the name Macedonia without a geographic qualifier. According to Greek arguments, FYROM´s constitutional name has...

irredentist designs on a Greek province of the same name. In addition, the Greeks consider the ethnonym Macedonian to be associated with their ancient heritage and in particular to those ancient Greek speaking tribes that lived on the lands corresponding to the Modern Greek province of Macedonia. On the other hand, Bulgaria also disputes the ethnic identity of the Slavs of FYROM, claiming that they are in fact, Bulgarians. Their claim hinges on ethno-linguistic grounds and on the historical figures which constitute part of FYROM´s pantheon of founding fathers, e.g. Ivan Hadjinikolov, Gotse Delchev, Boris Sarafov, Dame Gruev, Krste Misirkov, and Nikola Karev.

Indeed, can a nation which has yet to celebrate its 20th birthday be loaded with so much ethno-historical baggage?

Apparently so, according to the government in Skopje, the Slavic speaking majority have ample evidence to rightfully press their ancient origins as far back as Alexander the Great. They even found a group of long lost relatives among the Hunza tribes of Pakistan, who were invited and flown to Skopje by Gruevski´s government with much pageantry and fanfare and which according to the local historians, are descendents of Alexander´s troops and hence distant relatives of the ethnic Slavs of FYROM. Interestingly, while no foreign media at Skopje was able to interview the (suspicious) State guests, back in Pakistan word had spread of the tale resulting in the production of a local comedy loosely translated ´Iskander and the new Yunana (Greeks).´ The play ridicules the ethnic Slavs of FYROM as too backward, vulgar, and incompetent to be the descendents of the famous ancient Greek warrior Iskander (Alexander) reducing FYROM´s fanciful assertions to local tribal jokes. More amusingly, however, was that FYROM unaware, had not picked up on it at the time.

Arguably, the Skopje government is so highly determined to foster an ancient ancestry that its decision to import such questionable and dubious credentials reveals the government´s somewhat naïve yet desperate attempt to implement historical veracity to its national identity. One cannot help but wonder what sources the historiographers of FYROM have drawn on to produce their national narrative. Pretentious designs, not to mention the waste of thousands of taxpayer´s dollars, on exaggerated narratives with a hollow past only serves to alienate the very people who have faithfully witnessed the active engineering of their modern identity.

The question is, however, have the ethnic Slavs of FYROM accepted this monstrous deception by their government? In a recent national spree of impulsive nationalism the Skopje government set about renaming everything from highways, bridges, airports, and stadiums to controversial historical figures which has drawn the ire of some of its neighbours. Furthermore, the capital city of Skopje has been in the midst of a grand developmental building project called, Skopje 2014 which is said to feature statues, colonnaded buildings, and even a Roman styled Arc´ de Triumph. Unsurprisingly, many of Skopje´s citizens who were polled consider the Skopje 2014 project nothing more than an expression of ultimate kitsch reflecting a government in desperate denial.

Surprised? No, why should we. FYROM needs a historical past quick smart if it has any chance in establishing the ethnogenesis of a new, polished, and somewhat malleable Balkan identity whereby the ethnic Slav majority of FYROM will constitute the main ingredient in the famous regional Macedonian salad of Bulgarians, Greeks, Albanians, Roma, Turks, and Vlachs.

Then, a couple of years ago there was also the so called ´Macedonian Prayer´ shown on national television, and according to the distributors (government sponsored?), emphasised the intricate significance and superiority of the so called ´Macedonoid race,´ presumably a race of people from whom, and unbeknown to the global scientific community, the white race was conceived. The video attempts to marry FYROM´s religious pulse with science by apparently having the voice of FYROM´s God dictate a Darwinian spread of the (white) human race from Skopje (not Africa) to the rest of the world. How can the scientific community interpret such flagrancy other than to simply shrug it off as just another case of pseudo-science whereby certain individuals in FYROM must feel both threatened and desperate subsequently establishing their own version of racial-evolution.

Again, the question is, were the ethnic Slavs of FYROM seduced by such unabashed discriminatory rubbish?

Regrettably, the expected response from FYROM´s Academy of Sciences and Arts (MANU) to such public racism did not eventuate and was unfortunately quite muted. Conversely, the global academic community who were first and foremost appalled by the highly racist material (reminiscent of Nazi Aryanism), refused to comment on it and dismissed it on what they perceived as nothing more than nationalistic propaganda to score political points for the government in power. There was, however, global bemusement and disappointment for all those venerated (apolitical) scholars who work at MANU, and who did not openly and concretely distance themselves (and the academy) from such racist propaganda.

As this paper intends to only look at the recent construction of identity in FYROM, it is important to keep in mind that this means only the identity of the ethnic Slav majority of FYROM. While some ethnic Slav citizens of FYROM and in particular the Diaspora contend to be descendents of and believe to have legitimate rights to the ancient Macedonians, it is significant to point out that in pre-WW II Yugoslavia the vast majority of their ancestors openly proclaimed a Bulgarian ethnicity. This can be traced back to the beginning of the 20th century when in a time when most of the Balkans were attempting to liberate themselves from the Ottoman yoke, a sense of collective identity was formulated on the grounds to unite the people to a common cause. The birth of a number of revolutionary organisations created by a group of Bulgarian intellectuals conceived the idea to free the region of Macedonia from Ottoman control, extract autonomy status with the support of the European powers, and finally unite the Bulgarian people of Macedonia with their Bulgarian motherland.

Many of these intellectuals (e.g. Hadjinikolov, Delchev, Gruev, Misirkov) perceived a Macedonian identity as nothing more than the regional appellation of the many ethnicities that straddled the land of Macedonia. This was most evident in the preamble of their revolutionary organisation BMARO – Bulgarian Macedonia Adrianople Revolutionary Organisation – which although a Bulgarian organisation, openly called to arms all the inhabitants of Macedonia regardless of ethnicity. Coincidently BMARO is the ancestor organisation of many contemporary political offspring organisations in both Bulgaria and FYROM under the acronym VMRO.

Here it must be stressed, that contra to the nationalistic rhetoric emanating from both Skopje and the Diaspora, the preamble was formulated and approved by its Bulgarian committee (e.g. Hadjinikolov, Delchev, Gruev, etc.) to mainly signify its Bulgarian roots and Bulgarian identity in the lands of multiethnic Macedonia and Thrace (hence Adrianople). Over the years we have put forward the same question to a number of nationalists in the Diaspora about the significance of the Bulgarian identity in the preamble whereby we mostly received a series of confused, mumbled, and contradictory replies. It must be said that most of the nationalistic propaganda stems from Diasporic groups that peddle nationalistic newsletters usually filled with a good dose of historical fiction and a few pages inflamed with current politics. Many of these Diasporic groups refer to themselves with geographic qualifiers, e.g. Egeski, a term relating to the Aegean Sea in Greece. These recently invented terms give the impression that they once resided along the Aegean littoral but in reality they all come from the mountainous border regions, e.g. Florina, and have no historical, cultural, culinary, or maritime tradition to the Aegean Sea. Some see the creation of these geographic terms as irredentist designs by FYROM and her Diaspora with intentions to usurp Greek territory.

It is no secret that there is a new wave of neo-nationalism in FYROM and the Diaspora, and a lot of it is hand fed by incumbent figures who have resigned to the use of the internet as a field of propaganda to further fabricate an imaginary historical past dotted with mythologizing figures and events. Obviously, the lack of sociological knowledge in arm-chair nationalism clearly reflects the monolithic premise behind the absolute ignorance (and chauvinistic arrogance) of how the social construct of ethnic identity has always been in a state of flux or in a constant realm of becoming. The unsophisticated assumption that a regional identity (e.g. as that proclaimed in FYROM and her Diaspora) is static, rigid, and distinct to one people shows how little such assessments understand the social and conscious parameters of human agency and endeavour.

Obviously, the problem pertaining to the Skopje authorities over the years has been how to reconcile what has been termed as their antiquisationist projects (e.g. the deliberate grafting of ancient historical figures, symbols, events, onto modern national narratives) with that of their most recent past which, according to the revolutionary figures (e.g. Sarafov, Sandanski, Delchev), were deemed to be of Bulgarian stock. Ironically, it is these same Bulgarian intellectuals such as Hadjinikolov, Delchev, and Gruev whose memoirs are left to posterity, effectively dismantle FYROM´s antiquisation fairy tale based on the fact that these men (and many others) recognised and traced their Bulgarian roots back through the historical Bulgarian struggles. They saw as their direct ancestors Bulgarian revolutionaries such as Hristo Botev, Georgi Benkov and the martyr Vasil Levski (also known as the Apostle of Freedom) whose struggle to free Bulgaria from the Ottoman yoke cost him his life. For example, Gotse Delchev considered Vasil Levski as his faithful ancestor, and was once restrained by his comrades from attempting to strangle to death a 16 year old youth for publicly slighting the ´Apostle.´ In addition, they drew on their Bulgarian identity to create BMARO (and later VMRO) which was a carbon copy reproduction of Levski´s revolutionary organisations. BMARO´s preamble, the slogan ´Freedom or Death,´ as well as the symbol of a crossed pistol and dagger all find their origin in Levski´s organisations in the Bulgarian struggle for freedom. Others who get mention as Bulgarian forerunners in the intellectual´s memoirs are medieval leaders such as Samuel, defeated by the Byzantine ruler Basil who not surprisingly was also known as the Bulgarslayer.
What is certain is that none of the BMARO revolutionaries had any qualms or confusion in openly declaring the Bulgarian identity of the people the preamble was meant to defend. One must not forget that the existence of BMARO was in effect just another link in a chain of revolutionary freedom movements going back to Levski as the only alternative left for freeing the Bulgarian people of Macedonia and Thrace from Ottoman rule. Hadjinikolov, Delchev, Gruev, and many others repeatedly declared their Bulgarian identity in their memoirs something that was never contradicted by their followers and the rest of the Bulgarian people of Macedonia and Thrace. In spite of all this evidence, some FYROM and Diasporic commentators unconvincingly argue that these intellectuals must have been, nevertheless, confused of their ethnic identity. This then should not come as a surprise that some of these same commentators who are obviously ´confused´ by their own immediate ancestry can naively turn and claim ethnic continuity reaching back into the Neolithic period (some even claim 70,000 years), long before the conceptual birth of ethnicity, culture, and identity. Sensibly, many international academics have reasonably dismissed this and many other similar quasi-science assertions.

Even pro-FYROM academics such as some anthropologists (e.g. Danforth) and historians (e.g. Borza) have openly disclosed the recent ethnic construction of the Slavic speaking people of FYROM and distanced themselves from any ancient hyperbole. Others have likened Skopje´s (and certain Diasporic elements) antiquisation insistence as the likely outgrowth of an ´Inferior Slav Syndrome´ perceived and embodied in the national identity and fearful of being equated as a new Balkan upstart. Essentially, the theory of creating/inventing/fabricating ancient roots to provide instant ethnic legitimacy is in effect the Gordion knot which unfortunately for FYROM has yet to find Alexander´s intuition.

What then, is it that makes a segment of FYROM society (and many in the diaspora) seek their identity in antiquity? We know from reading many of the Diasporic articles that there is no shame in misappropriating historical material for nationalistic consumption. For instance, we have seen how on certain web-pages Diasporic individuals have altered the original Carnegie report of the Balkan Wars in 1912-13 to deliberately change and substitute every ethnic Bulgarian village in Macedonia (and unwittingly Thrace) to a more digestible reading along nationalistic lines for their national narrative while attempting to completely erase every Bulgarian presence from pre-Yugoslav Macedonia. This has also been the case where the Bulgarian language has been concerned.

The present Slavic language of FYROM was first codified in 1944 to purposely cleanse it of what was considered by the authorities to be to close to Bulgarian (something FYROM has yet to properly address). The question that should be asked here is, does the reassembling of various Bulgarian dialects constitute a new language (and identity)? Much of the original Bulgarian alphabet that was taught throughout the region of Slavic speakers was substituted with Serbian attributes. While I myself learnt Bulgarian in America and after nearly 35 years of research in the Macedonian region of Greece, Bulgaria, Albania, and FYROM, I have still to meet a villager who I did not understand. Sure many of the Bulgarian dialects spoken could be a little challenging at first, but it was never problematic in conducting our interviews. To conduct research one needs a good command of language, knowledge of customs, and most importantly mutual respect. It became obvious last year, while on a field trip researching the dialects in the southern Balkans that the Bulgarian speakers in the region of Thrace (in Greece) could (as we could) understand with amusing ease the Slavonic (or Bulgarian?) spoken in FYROM, Albania, Greece (Macedonia), and Bulgaria. One should normally ask how is it possible that a number of Bulgarians from Komotini in Thrace (Greece) were able to clearly understand the Slavic spoken in Kastoria (Greece), Ohrid (FYROM), Korce (Albania), and Goce Delchev (Bulgaria) if it is a supposed distinct, separate language to Bulgarian as some linguists attempt to claim.

The Slavic language of FYROM was recognised as an international (non-Bulgarian) language only after the assistance of the linguist Horace Lunt. One begs the question, had the highly admired linguist (Lunt) not endorsed the newly codified language in Skopje would Tito (with Stalin´s assistance) have continued on his anti-Bulgarian ethnic construction in the newly born Yugoslav state. Stalin was, nevertheless quite clear, creating new ethno-linguistic national identities seemed to be normal practice in the Soviet Union, e.g. Belarusian. Yet, in the last 30 years many Slavic linguists have made it clear that the Slavic spoken in present day FYROM is as different to Bulgarian as Austrian is to German, American to English, Brazilian to Portuguese, or Mexican to Spanish. It is said that the difference between a language and a dialect is that unity brings about a dialect, and with separation a language. This model fits like a glove with FYROM´s past. Under Ottoman rule Bulgarian dialects were present from the Black Sea across to Lake Ohrid. With the recreation of Tito´s post-WW II Yugoslavia the regional Bulgarian dialects were subsequently stripped, raped, and reproduced as a new language complete with a new Yugoslav state border and identity. Unlike Slovenian and Serbo-Croation, which are not mutually intelligible to Bulgarian speakers, although a superficial understanding can take place (e.g. such as the Romance languages – Italians can make some superficial sense of French or Spanish), the Slavic speakers of FYROM have a linguistic bond to Bulgarian even after the fervent though flawed attempts in the post-WW II period to cleanse the dialect (come language) of its Bulgarian roots.

There are those Slavic linguists (e.g. Friedman) who adamantly espouse the distinctive quality of the language spoken in FYROM but one needs to take their assertions with a grain of salt. Just as one needs to also remember, that all academics (linguists included) need a thesis to validate their position. And as such, we come to a good example of mutual intelligibility that took place in 1995 when FYROM´s President Gligorov attempted to have interpreters present to translate the proceedings between himself and his Bulgarian counterpart. He was promptly denied on the grounds that both the Bulgarian diplomats and his (Gligorov´s) entourage (especially his interpreter) found the exercise ridiculous. Later, one diplomat commented that Gligorov thought, that by having an interpreter present he would help validate a distinct FYROM language separate from its Bulgarian origin. In other words, while everyone at the diplomatic meeting agreed that the language spoken by all parties was mutually intelligible, political maneuvering by Gligorov failed to vindicate his claim. For example, Gligorov´s (interpreter) attempt was nothing short of seeing, for instance, Barak Obama requesting the services of an interpreter to translate David Cameron´s British English.
In the end, it is noteworthy to mention that no matter how much linguistic engineering took place in 1944 (even with Lunt´s approval) the social construction of FYROM´s language was absolutely incapable if not outright inept of erasing its Bulgarian origins.

Elsewhere (and quite disappointingly), there has been the FYROM government´s constant refusal to assist local and foreign research on the subject of the country´s ethnogenesis. For example, for many years applications have failed to access post-WW II archives in Skopje to understand the mass and sometimes brutal enforcement of the erasure of Bulgarian surname suffixes (e.g. –ov/ev (masc.), -ova/eva (fem.), into –ovski/evski, -ovska/evska) in a period when Tito accepted (with Stalin´s blessing) both a newly constructed ethno-linguistic Yugoslav identity with a newly created Yugoslav state. Research revealed that every region of the newly created post-WW II Yugoslav state (FYROM´s predecessor) was forced by the Skopje authorities of the time (sometimes under pain of death) to change their Bulgarian surnames into their newly constructed identities. It has remained one of the most secretive periods of FYROM´s past and continues to assert much hate among the few surviving older generation who as children remember those terrible times. Many of the eye witness accounts retell the horrific events that led to the sufficient rebaptism of the general populace. For example, many who refused to change their Bulgarian family names were first beaten in front of their families, and then forced to watch the rape of their wives, daughters, and mothers before being led away, mostly never to be seen again. This period of enforced ethnogenesis has and still remains, one of the most tragic stains of selective amnesia on the country´s conscious. It has been argued that even if the Skopje authorities opened their post-WW II archives there would be no trace of any documents alluding to both the codification of the language and the brutal enforcement of a new Yugoslav surname to promote the new post-WW II ethnic identity of what has today become FYROM.

It has taken many years of interviews and field work to capture the essence of the ethnogenesis of a new former Yugoslav state in the late 20th early 21st century. But ultimately, apart from some elements in both FYROM and the Diaspora who are firmly entrenched in some half baked fantasy of being linked to antiquity, let alone to Alexander the Great, the vast majority of ethnic Slavs of FYROM are not easily persuaded by the kitsch of historical statues or by the nationalistic overtones of the Skopje 2014 project.

No instead, it is said among many ethnic Slavs in the villages of FYROM that if we have food on the table and constant work the authorities in Skopje can build, fabricate, and rename anything they want, but please don´t leave us – Unemployed. Incidentally, another area of concern was revealed recently when Transparency International (the anti-corruption body) indicated that over 70% of people in FYROM paid bribes to receive public services. If we were to use such findings to reflect and measure socio-economic success in FYROM society today, then it is possibly safe to assume that constructing a putative ancient ancestry in FYROM receives precedence over peoples´ livelihoods.

The continuing ethnogenesis in FYROM´s national narrative is, unlike other modern European nations, still in the process of (re-)inventing itself. Eventually, it will embrace a modern identity compiled, if not completely fabricated from the mosaic of regional ethnicities whose histories, languages, cultures, and historical figures will pave both its streets and its conscience. An upcoming article will continue to explore the road of modern ethnogenesis in FYROM and assess the hybrid nature of the people of FYROM as well as the recent emphasis (and invention) of a variety of regional traditions to highlight the ongoing process of becoming.

Joan Walker and Sally Monroe
Students of Ethnogenesis
http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/227817

Conclusions of the Greek public hearings at the International Court of Justice

2011-03-31T13:48:00.005+03:00

FYROM’s claim is beyond the Court’s jurisdiction as established by Article 21, paragraph 2, of the Interim Accord, whether it is interpreted, as the FYROM originally proposed, as precluding any case which concerns - “directly or indirectly” the name issue, or whether, as the FYROM alternatively proposes, it is read as precluding any case which would resolve the difference over the name. Greece has demonstrated that the FYROM’s claim, in requiring judgment of the lawfulness of actions by NATO and by its individual members collectively, is inadmissible. Greece has also demonstrated that the FYROM’s claim, in seeking a remedy which a judgment cannot provide, is beyond the inherent competence of the Court.

Greece has demonstrated that, properly read, the actions attributed to Greece by the FYROM did not constitute an objection. This is not because Greece was supposed to support the FYROM’s membership in NATO in 2008; for reasons stated at the time and in applying the well known NATO criteria and requirements for membership it was not. It is also because the admission process to NATO is a consensus one based on consultation, with neither vote nor veto. Greece notes....

that the word “consultation” did not pass counsels’ lips last week or on Monday, not once. The Bucharest decision was a collective one. Greece participated in the consultation process, and it expressed its views. But this is something different from objecting. In any case Greece was not obliged by the Interim Accord to support the application of the country in question to join NATO, but this appears not to be the point of dispute before the Court. Moreover, the onus is on the FYROM to establish a breach of treaty; the FYROM has not proved that Greece objected. Greece would stress in this regard the only official statement by NATO at Bucharest on 3 April 2008. That unchallenged statement, committing both the Alliance and its members collectively, is the text of its Summit Declaration which, in paragraph 20, provides clearly and unequivocally the terms and conditions for the FYROM’s future membership of the Alliance. This Declaration was repeated in all successive NATO Summit declarations and communiqués, word by word. That was the Bucharest decision and it was not, of course, dictated by Greece.

Even if Greece had objected, the FYROM’s constant strategy - acknowledged by President Crvenkovski in 2008 - of seeking to undermine the interim situation created by the Interim Accord, of failing to negotiate in the resolution of the name difference in good faith, as well as other breaches of the Interim Accord, would have entitled Greece to “object”, whether on the ground of:
(a) the safeguard clause of Article 11, paragraph 1; and
(b) the law of treaties; or
(c) the law of countermeasures;
which both reflect the exceptio principle.
Furthermore, even if Greece were found to have objected in contravention of Article 11 of the Interim Accord, it would have been entitled to do so under Article 22, in exercise of its rights and duties arising under the North Atlantic Treaty.

FYROM’s claim has put the Court in an awkward position. Both the Interim Accord and the Security Council has resolved that the difference over the name disturbs regional peace and should be resolved by negotiation under the auspices of the Secretary-General. FYROM, in bringing this case to the Court, is continuing its policy of seeking to subvert the procedure required by the Interim Accord and to secure a de facto resolution of the difference over the name. The Court should, accordingly, reject the FYROM’s claim both as to jurisdiction and the merits.

In 1995 Greece had a strategic choice to make; it made it and has honoured it since. Greece committed itself to the negotiated resolution of the name issue pursuant to Security Council resolutions 817 and 845 (1993). Since then, Greece has made many efforts and concessions, even to accepting in 2007 a composite name, as a basis for a compromise solution, that would include the term “Macedonia” with a geographical qualifier. That solution was rejected by the FYROM. In these last years, FYROM has brought these negotiations to a dead end, by insisting, as the Court itself witnessed in the Agent’s statement, on the use of its contested name. He said, summarily, that “it was not a choice”. But it is a choice, a choice to violate its international legal commitments and to try to use the Court as a means for violating the Interim Accord. This is not only inconsistent with Article 5 of the Interim Accord, it also endangers regional security and the maintenance of good neighbourly relations between the two countries and the region as a whole. For these reasons Greece hope that Court wisdom will conduce to and not stand in the way of such a resolution, and will assist the Parties to help themselves in ways quite other than those proposed by the FYROM’s legal team last Monday.