Without Greece there is no Western civilisation

The West has always been perplexed by Greece. Yes, the Greeks made us who we are, Western thinkers admit, but can we tolerate their gifts of reason, science and democracy? And these modern Greeks, are they really Greek? The Romans started the peculiar relationship of the West with Greece. They borrowed a lot from the Greeks. They even adopted Greek war machines, which they used to conquer Greece. Roman generals plundered Greece and dismembered Macedonia. In late third century BCE, the Roman state assassinated Archimedes, the greatest Greek mathematician and engineer. Yet despite this violence against the Greeks, the first century BCE Roman poet Horace admitted, “Captive Greece took its Roman captor captive.”

When the Roman Empire fell to the barbarians in the fifth century, the Greek-speaking half of the empire survived for another millennium. The barbarians barbarised the West, plunging it into near darkness. Despite the hostility of Christianity for Greek thought, the East had the texts of the ancient Greeks. The Christian West forgot Greek and, by 1054, anathematised the Christian East.

In 1204, crusading Italian and French armies attacked Constantinople, the capital of the Greek empire. The crusaders captured Constantinople and dismembered Greece. The violence of the crusaders left a lasting legacy of mistrust between Greece and the West, cementing the theological hatred of 1054. The Western occupation of Constantinople prepared the ground for the Turkish conquest of 1453.

The Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries healed, but not completely, the enmity between East and West, though Greece, in the Turkish concentration camp, did not have a Renaissance. Greek texts triggered the scientific revolution of the West, hence the making of our modern world.

The mathematical physics of Archimedes is our mathematical physics. Archimedes originated calculus for the measuring of curves; his discovery of combinatorics is behind our theory of probability and, with calculus, imaging science. Archimedes also initiated the world’s first computer, dubbed the Antikythera Mechanism.

We are all Greeks

“We are all Greeks.” This was the proud declaration, in 1821, of the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley who was witnessing the heroic struggle of the Greeks to throw the Turks off their land. He was one of several philhellenes who fought with the Greeks to regain their freedom. When the Europeans were fighting each other in the Crimean War in the 1850s, “The Manchester Guardian” connected the Greek achievement to the Greeks’ drawing “the sword at Marathon.”

In 1872, Jacob Burckhardt, the Swiss cultural historian, proposed that the Europeans see with the eyes of the Greeks and to abandon them would be to accept their decline.

Writing in 1907, the British classical scholar Gilbert Murray admitted “the seeds of Western civilization are mostly to be found in Greece and not elsewhere.”

Still another European scholar from England, W. R. Inge, wrote in 1921, “Without what we call our debt to Greece we should have neither our religion nor our philosophy nor our science nor our literature nor our education nor our politics. We should be mere barbarians. Our civilisation is a tree which has its roots in Greece…[our civilisation] is a river…but its head waters are Greek.”

In 1948, the British poet W. H. Auden suggested the Greeks taught us to think about our thinking, that is, to ask questions. Without the Greeks, he said, “we would never have become fully conscious, which is to say that we would never have become, for better or worse, fully human.”

In the late 1950s, E. J. Dijksterhuis, Dutch historian of mathematics and natural sciences, said that the origins of present-day knowledge, especially in mathematics and natural sciences, go straight to ancient Greece. And in 1999, Charles Freeman, a classical scholar, argued that the Greeks “provided the chromosomes of Western civilisation.”

German racism

In the midst of this philhellenism, there are those who dislike the Greeks. In the nineteenth century, the German traveler Jacob Philipp Fallmerayer slandered modern Greeks with his racist theory that no Greek blood flowed in the veins of modern Greeks.

World War II and the Greek defeat of fascist Italy and fierce resistance to German, Italian and Bulgarian occupation revived the Greeks in Western imagination, but only temporarily. Impoverished post-WWII Greece became captive to America. Unlike the Roman experience, captive Greece in the American Empire had no civilising effect on her captor.

In 2011, bad Wall Street financial practices out of the book of colonialism and a handful of Western-educated Greek politicians willfully undermined Greece, bringing the country to its knees. This tragedy has sparked not philhellenism but anti-Greek sentiment in both Europe and America.

The Germans are leading the Western attack on Greece at their own peril. As Nazis occupying Greece between 1941 and 1944, they were model barbarians. They nearly annihilated the country. They killed and starved thousands of Greeks, plundered Greek art, and smashed Greek infrastructure. When the Germans abandoned Greece in 1944, the country looked like a nuclear bomb had blasted it. And yet, thanks to American “strategic” interests, Germany paid no compensation to Greece.

In 2011, the Germans are savaging Greece for the second time. They demand getting back the money their banks lent to the Greek government, usually to buy German weapons.

Western policies toward Greece show the decline in the civilisation we inherited from the Greeks. The best thinkers of the West are convinced we are all Greeks or, at least, we continue to some degree on the democracy and science path of the Greeks. But now, in 2011, we seem to be deviating from the humanism of the Greeks. A tiny global plutocracy of corporate managers, bankers, academics and government officials, no different than the barons and kings of the Middle Ages, is blindly gambling all we inherited from the Greeks for their selfish interests. Humiliating and punishing Greece by the West is matricide.

Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner and President Barack Obama threatened to wreck the economy of Europe if Europeans failed to wreck the economy of Greece. We know this from Michael Hudson the President of the Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends. On November 3, 2011, Hudson explained this shameful and unprecedented Americans attack on Greece as a result of the influence of Wall Street. American money market funds insured Greek debt. Thus any European concession to Greece in the repayment of its debt would translate into losses for American banks.

All this is not to suggest modern Greeks have nothing to do with the plight of their country. They do. They have yet to have a Renaissance, so they never translated their fabulous ancient traditions to making their lives better, just like the Europeans did. Their political class has always been a subsidiary to foreign powers. Greece violates the Aristotelian axiom of “autarkeia” or self-reliance. It produces practically nothing for export and imports almost everything, including food. Greek politicians are as corrupt as those of America, where they often receive their education. Greece remains captive to America and the European Union. The ugly debt is damaging all that it has accomplished in its recent history.

The West ought to think twice about its treatment of Greece. Greek culture lifted the West out of barbarism. And that culture has had the power to enlighten and to bring people together for a more humane, rational, just, democratic and sacred world.