9 - Is the Eastern Party dead in Greece?

I see that Erdogan played his hand with Brunson pretty well.  I always thought that he was going to return Brunson eventually. just as he returned the lost Greek soldiers at the border in Evros.  Brunson was tried and convicted, but released because of his time in jail already spent…..  Standing up the US, Erdogan’s popularity surged.  US Turkish relations are currently a mess almost impossible to entangle.  The Turks have multiple issues with Syria, Kurds, F-35 deliveries, etc.

The Americans would make an issue over Brunson, a Protestant apostate, but if he were Christian Orthodox, they would likely let him rot in hell like they do all Orthodox Christians in their foreign policy in Eastern Europe and the Middle East…..  What business does a person like Brunson have in Turkey??? On that point, the Turks have a point that Brunson was probably a front for some kind of dirty work.

These thoughts this morning led me to think about how differently Russia, Greece and Turkey have gone separate paths in the space of Endiamese Perioche. 

·    Greece has given up anything to do with its Byzantine heritage and today has moved to become willingly a Balkan economic and political protectorate under the EU.  Greeks crave to be Westerners.  They are passing laws and pursuing policies that make Greece a multicultural society to absorb the flood of illegal migrants, restrict the Christian Orthodox faith and they are pushing their young and educated to emigrate.  The Greek diaspora and business communities that flourished in the Black Sea, Asia Minor and Middle East have withered and disappeared.

·         

    Turkey has become a regional power.  It has developed a serious industrial base and become a major exporter of both industrial goods, textiles and agricultural commodities.  Under Erdogan, Turkey has rediscovered its Ottoman roots and is asserting itself in the region geopolitically.

·         

    Russia survived 70 years of Bolshevik upheaval, the collapse of the Soviet Union and dissolution under Yeltsin.  Today under Putin, Russia has rediscovered its national identity and traditions. The Christian Orthodox faith is flourishing with new churches.  Despite the incursions of the EU/ US in the Ukraine, Russia is reasserting itself geopolitically in the Far East with China as well as the Middle East on Syria.

One major theme is how each country faced the Marxist ideology and Bolshevism, which was a major source of political upheaval in the 20^th Century. 

·        Bolshevism is a Western ideology.  It has German-Jewish roots from the 19^th century.  It evolved into Social Democracy and created the roots of Globalism.  For that reason, the political left embraced the European Union.  The propagators of Bolshevism in Russia and Greece were originally predominately Jewish.  Their aim from the start was to eradicate any trace of national identity, Byzantine heritage and Christian Orthodox faith.  They never accepted the Greek presence in Macedonia.

·         

      The Germans during WW1, imposed the Bolsheviks on Russia to destabilize the Czar, immobilize the Russian imperial army so they could free up the Eastern Front to face the British and French.  The Russian Imperial Army had successes with the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empire but a series of setbacks on the German front.  The German government spent the equivalent of one billion dollars in today’s money to finance the Bolsheviks.  The Bolsheviks initially used non-Russian forces like the Latvian guard to seize power.  Their regime committed numerous atrocities and essentially demolished Russia, which at the turn of the 20^th Century was an incredibly thriving culture.

·        

    Greeks like Plastiras and Pangalos who experienced Crimea, which was the last stand of the White Russian/ former Imperial Army forces, became deeply anti-Communist for what they saw.  Later on in the Greek-Turkish war, they lived the efforts of the SEKE to demoralize Greek troops and encourage them to desert.

·         

     The Greek Communists created havoc in Greece in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Essentially they poisoned Greek political life.  Metaxas was a brief parenthesis to cleanse Greece and reestablish a national identity, but that ended quickly with the German occupation and chaos of the Greek civil war. The Greek communists lost the Greek Civil war but have dominated Greek cultural and political life since 1974.  Of course, cultural Marxism generally remains in the West the predominate ideology both in the US and EU, particularly in the media and university systems.

·         

   Turkey escaped Bolshevism due to Kemal. Marxism never flourished as an ideology. Kemal westernized Turkey on his own terms sui generis, but as in the case of Russia, Turkey is now rediscovering its Ottoman heritage and moving away from the West.

So we have Russia and Turkey, who are rediscovering their history and national identity, but Greece abandoning national identity. We have Russia and Turkey as successors to the Byzantines, but Greece counter to Gennadios wanting to be an entirely ‘Western European’ country even on the basis of protectorate status.

I hardly see under the present circumstances, why Russia or Turkey would cede anything to Greece or consider Greece as an example to them.  Conversely, the Greeks could learn a lot by the Russian example post-Yeltsin to rid themselves of cultural Marxism and reaffirm their Byzantine and Christian Orthodox heritage, but there no sign that that is likely to happen.

Whatever there was of the Eastern Party in Greece is dead.

                               Diran  Majarian                               13 October 2018