In this day and age of the INTERNET revolution, the web sites have been swarming the computer screens. They are everywhere. It's almost impossible to ignore them. Most of these web-sites are designed to fulfil a necessary and beneficial function. Others are truly the epitome of the expression 'junk mail,' or the paradigm of the word 'trash'. Yet they proliferate uncontrollably. Some of them are very conspicuous, to say the least. At times their graphics are bleeding with discordant colours, almost always with gaudy hues. They seem to scream at the browsers, daring them to disregard the challenging messages cleverly hidden within the bowels of their enticing, but deceptive verbiage.
One such web-site caught my attention recently. The following message was displayed in large letters on the screen:
"HELLENES
The struggle for the liberation of the last
enslaved Greek lands:
North Epirus-(Albania),
North Macedonia,
East Thrace-(Turkish Trakya),
Asia Minor-(Anatolia),
North Cyprus-(TRNC) has started.
The brilliant progress of our Greek
ancestors has to continue in the same manner.
A historical responsibility has passed on upon
us. OUR GOAL IS GREAT HELLAS.
OUR CENTER IS CONSTANTINOPLE."
Following these outrageous statements, a Greek Military Evzone-like cartoon character appears and walks towards the Turkish flag, which is spread out on the ground, and begins to urinate on it. This disgusting event repeats itself continuously, on a loop, every three or four seconds, until one decides to change the web site, or turn off the computer.
There have been other similar cases: In their typical fashion, even the official members of the Greek government cannot help but use the most pejorative words to describe their fellow diplomats, the Turks. It is quite ironic that right after Turkiye was admitted to the European customs union, the Greek government's official spokesman Telemahos Hytiris used the friendliest words he could muster and said the following: "The Hellenic government 'dropped' the veto without securing any compromise by the Turkish government. At the same time, Hellas was opening the door of civilised Europe for the BARBARIC MONGOLOIDS, the Turks."
Here's another gem of a statement I was able to glean recently. It said, "...many web sites were created by Turkish "students" throughout the world. And in their amateurish ways, they try to present liberated Thrace in Hellas as a place where Turks are oppressed. But what can we expect from a MURDEROUS BUNCH, who have even 'converted' the genocide of 2.5 million poor Armenians, into a massacre of Muslims and Jews."
Turks were also victorious in a fairly recent war in 1919-1922, a Greek invasion instigated by the then British Prime Minister Lloyd George, and the First Lord of the British Admiralty Winston Churchill. This senseless intrusion onto Turkish soil in Anatolia, and their humiliating defeat at the hands of their former rulers, the Turks, could be counted as the prime source of their frustration. This, of course, led to the Greeks' unbearable inferiority complex.
There was a period of relaxation of tensions on both sides. A rapprochement of sorts was initiated by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk during the early Thirties. This lull lasted until the end of the Second World War. I remember during those feverish days of the war Turkish government-owned cargo ships smuggled tons of wheat cut from their meagre supplies of food stuffs, manoeuvring through the hazardous, mine-infested waters of the Aegean Sea to reach Greece, so that their neighbours would not starve. In the process Turks lost scores of their own citizens and vessels.
This feeling of closeness and empathy toward one another slowly dissipated. Through the demise of Ataturk, then of the elderly leader of Greece, Eleftherios Venizelos, the short-lived detente between the two nations was no more. Taking its place was now the Greek experiment with international Communism, which ended in 1946 with the inauguration of the Marshall Plan, and by the full Nato membership of Greece and Turkiye in 1952.
The Tri-partite treaty of 1959-60 among Great Britain, Greece, and Turkiye, granting the Turkish and Greek Cypriots an independent status, followed by massacres, the Greek Army Colonels' coup, then the Turkish military intervention to save the Turkish nationals, the 24 year-old stalemate continuing on the island of Cyprus have all contributed to the present day state of affairs between the two neighbours.
As long as the Greek-American lobby, the Greek Orthodox Church, and the ethno-centric Greek organisations operating as propaganda machines are around us, there will be no chance for the cessation of hostilities emanating from their side, targeting continuously the interest of Turkish people everywhere.
The website mentioned earlier, is but one of dozens of similar sites spewing venom, Greek style, against anything Turkish, 24 hours a day. Never mind the fact that Turkiye is four times the size of Greece and six times more populated than their country, the arrogance displayed by the likes of Theodoros Pangalos in Greece and Glafkos Klerides in southern Cyprus is incomprehensible at best.
A further striking example of unbelievable audacity is witnessed in the case of Greeks' insistence in calling the city of Istanbul by its previous name of CONSTANTINOPLE, though its name was changed 537 years ago when the city was conquered by the Turks. Today no one in his right mind dares to call New York by its old Dutch name of New Amsterdam; Leningrad in Russia is now called St. Petersburg; the name of Stalingrad is replaced by Volgagrad; In China the old Peking became Beijing; the Dominican Republic's Ciudad Trujillo adopted the name of Santo Domingo: Zimbabwe's old name was Rhodesia, and its capital, the former Salisbury, proudly calls itself Harare. These changes have all been accepted officially by everyone in the world. However, Greeks are determined to give Istanbul the name of Constantinople.
Just to add a little colour to this writing, let me give you a few incomplete lines of a popular American song which dominated the HIT PARADE TV programs for several weeks during the Fifties:
"...Take me back to Constantinople,
No, you can't go back to Constantinople,
Now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople.
Why did Constantinople get the works?
That's nobody's business but the Turks'!"
As if the above intransigence wasn't enough, the Greeks now seem to have started a different agenda comprised of bold-face lies, and savage attacks against a legendary leader whom every Turk considers being inviolable.
Not so long ago, very laudatory words were spoken on the pages of Miami's prominent Spanish daily, EL NUEVO HERALD. The article was entitled: ATATURK, TURKIYE'S GREAT HERO, written by a Cuban born writer and dramatist, Rolando Francisco Bravo. Mr. Bravo was criticising the Greeks and Armenians who had intimidated a film actor who had promised to portray Ataturk in a movie. Mostly-Greek-Americans, who constantly claim to be the originators of democracy, human rights, and of fair play, alongside with their ideological partners, the Armenian-Americans, unfairly flooded the actor's office and his home with thousands of letters, telegrams, e-mail messages and threatening phone calls. What made the author mad was their use of very pejorative ugly language describing Ataturk. They were calling him a mass murderer and the sodomiser of children. Mr. Bravo urged the British movie producer Tarquin Olivier, the son of the famous actor Sir Lawrence Olivier to find an actor worthy of his project and not to buckle under the pressure of those 'radical immigrants.'
A few days later, a nasty reply entitled THE CRIMES OF ATATURK appeared on the pages of the same newspaper where the Bravo article was published earlier. The letter penned by the Director of the AMERICAN HELLENIC MEDIA PROJECT (AHMP), a lawyer of Greek origin "residing" in south Florida. Our inquiries found him with no local address or phone, and no local registration with Florida's Bar.
His letter was replete with every kind of stereotypical falsehoods, slanders and out and out ridiculous statistics imaginable. Among the most unbelievable claims he had was the statement that the Turkish troops upon "invading" Izmir (their own city), and burning it to a crisp, had managed to "butcher 200,000 Armenians and Greeks."
Given the fact that this alleged monstrous massacre took place in only a single day boggles the mind. The Turkish troops recaptured the city on September 9, 1922. Since we are told that all remaining foreigners left the port of Izmir during the next 24 hours, his outrageous figure of 200,000 could have made the Turks the world's greatest military logistic performers. What the Turks had accomplished would have been a super human miracle of sorts.
I happen to have an American-educated nephew who works at the NATO headquarters in Izmir. I asked him to do some research for me on the population of Izmir at the time of the great fire, and the massacres blamed on Turks. Cuneyt expeditiously sent me the following e-mail pertaining to the breakdown of different ethnic groups living in Izmir (census circa 1915. The 1922 records were not available, they had perished during the fire.)
Greeks ... 55,000
Jews ... 21,000
Armenians ... 10,000
Osmanli (Turks) ... 114,000
British, French, German, Italian ... 50,000
As one can see, the sum total is only 250,000 people. Since the number of Greeks and Armenians did not go beyond 65,000 souls, in order for the Turkish military to be able to massacre 200,000 people of their ethnicity, they had to transport into the city of Izmir an additional 135,000 from other parts of Turkiye so that they could comply with the quota shown in the letter and 'butcher' them there. It is a mystery how they accomplished this Houdiniesque legerdemain and how the Turkish Army accomplished this feat in such a short time and then magically disposed of the bodies of those unfortunate victims of theirs. Oh! I almost forgot, the Turkish armed force units are also accused, in that letter, of snatching the Greek Orthodox Archbishop of Izmir, the Metropolitan Christosomos out of his Cathedral while he was saying Mass and killed him and dismembered his body in the street. The perplexing question is: Why was he singled out? Wasn't he and the others in the church part of the 200,000 to be 'butchered?
Though all of this doesn't make sense to us, it is logical to the Greeks and Armenians who have lied so many times that they believe their own fabrications. It's that simple.
Daydreams, or call them hallucinations, are unproductive. They tend to make their perpetrators the laughing stock of true historians. As fiendish, diabolical and contemptible as they may be, they are nevertheless as transparently deceitful. And as long as we allow them to pull the wool over the eyes of those who do not bother to search for the truth, the unsuspecting bystanders will be watching and approving, inadvertently, their dishonest political charades.