Greek Australian Advisory Council and the falsification of Ancient Macedonian history Part 11
Risto Stefov
November 21, 2008
This is a response to the Australian Macedonian Advisory Council (which in fact is Greek masquerading as Macedonian) in regards to the article entitled "Risto Stefov and the falsification of Ancient Macedonian history" published on October 29, 2008 at this link: http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/79306
My reply to you is "Two can play that game!" I too can provide you with just as many arguments that the Ancient Macedonians WERE NOT Greek. BUT!
It is irrelevant, at least to me, if Modern Greeks claim that the Ancient Macedonians were Greeks or not, what is relevant here is that the Modern Greeks are not related to the Ancient Greeks or to the Ancient Macedonians. They call themselves "Greeks" but have nothing to do with the ancient Greeks or Ancient Macedonians because underneath their modern artificial Greek veneer is nothing more than Albanians, Vlachs, Turks and Macedonians, the same variety of Balkanites that exists throughout the entire southern Balkans. But, if they insist on accusing me of falsifying Ancient Macedonian history, then here is my rebuttal:
SALONICA TERMINUS
Some passages taken from Fred E. Reed's recent book, 'Salonica Terminus'
(1) "Perhaps more intensely than anywhere else, Truth and History, in the Balkans, are national considerations. In Greece, they are generated and reproduced by what a scholar, who asked that I not reveal his name, termed the "archaeological Mafia," and by an academic establishment which maintains an incestuous relationship with the State." [p.xiii]
(2) "The effacement of the square [Liberty Square] that was once its heart, its window to the world during the turbulent years when Salonica was the metropolis of Ottoman-ruled Macedonia, is a function of an unavowed modern Greek selective memory syndrome - a condition which dictates that all that does not mesh with the founding myth must be obscured, buried, eliminated, caused to vanish from public historical consciousness." [p.6]
Eradication of anything from the past that suggests connection with the ethnic Macedonians was the order of the day for the Greek government. Not even churches and cemeteries are spared. To erase the Macedonian element from the newly obtained lands was the most urgent task of the Greek state. Newly arrived Christians from Asia, were now occupying the farms and the buildings of the expelled Macedonians.
(3) "Liberty Square is not a place to linger. Often I circumnavigate it, and always hastily, on my way to or from the west end of the town. Today, lined with bank headquarters, on one side, fast-food restaurants and travel agencies on the other, the square which lies hard by the elegant, despairingly silent maritime passenger terminal, owes its name not to some putative liberation of Greek Macedonia. The embarrassment, for Salonica's masters, is that the Greeks had very little to do with it, except as onlookers." [p.9]
(4) "In Athens, Sofia and Belgrade the carving knives were being sharpened. London, Paris, Moscow and Vienna watched with ill-concealed glee as their general staffs drew up mobilization plans. If Macedonia was to be the meal, Salonica would be the plat de resistance". [p.18]
(5) "The Greeks claim they liberated Salonica," snorts Petropoulos. "But whom did they liberate?" [p.22]
(6) "The 'natives' possess no written language - some say they have no language at all, only a debased patios - their traditions are oral, their history passed on furtively from the mouths of the elders, their songs and dances proscribed. For even well-intentioned, broad-minded men like Mr. Stalidis, they escape examination, cannot be understood, are not easily inserted into the complex analytical schemata which the Greek mind is capable of devising. They are people of the shadows, these Macedonians; phantoms. Their speech, fleeting whispers spirited away by the wind; their land, clods of anonymous earth wrapped in newly-printed title deeds; their existence, a pang of abstract conscience. And though invisible, yet they do not disappear." [p.181]
(7) "Here, in the building which housed the Greek Consulate during the tumultuous years preceding the capture of Ottoman Salonica in 1912, the Museum is dedicated to the proposition that the sole legitimate Macedonian identity is Greek." [p.181]
(8) This being so, runs the implicit argument,America Philological Association (APA)
DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE ANCIENT MACEDONIANS AND ANCIENT GREEKS. TAKEN FROM ARTICLES ON ANCIENT HISTORY PUBLISHED BY THE A.P.A.
The contributors are:
1. D.Brenden Nagle " Macedonian Appropriation of Greek Kulturgechichte"
2. Eugene Borza "Who were (and are) the Macedonians"
3. Edmund F. Bloedow "Diplomatic Negotiations between Darius and Alexander: Historical Implications of the First Phase at Marathus in Phoenicia 333/332 BC"
1) "...the appropriation of Greek Kulturgescichte, and the use by non-Greeks for political purposes against Greeks, is less common, and even less well documented. Here I offer an example of highly effective Macedonian use of Greek cultural history to advance the propaganda aims of Philip II which had the double aim of blunting Greek criticism of his state-building while at the same time cloaking his work in the legitimizing terminology devised by Greeks for their own, often violent, colonizing and city founding activities."
camouflage the fact that he was creating a wholly new type of state, a consolidation of ethne under a personal monarchy."
That it has continued to confuse interpreters is testament to the hegemonic power of Greek cultural history and the adroitness of the Macedonians in using this powerful tool of self-identification against its devisers."
2) "On the matter of language, and despite attempts to make Macedonian a dialect of Greek, one must accept the conclusion of linguist R.A.Crossland in the recent CAH, that an insufficient amount of Macedonian has survived to know what language it was."
Macedonian and Greek were mutually unintelligible in the court of Alexander the Great" - "no more proof that Macedonians were Greeks than, e.g., the existence of Greek inscriptions on Thracian vessels and coins. Is that proofs that the Thracians were Greeks?
What did others say about Macedonians? Here there is a relative abundance of information", writes Borza, "from Arrian, Plutarch (Alexander, Eumenes), Diodorus 17-20, Justin, Curtius Rufus, and Nepos (Eumenes), based upon Greek and Greek-derived Latin sources. It is clear that over a five-century span of writing in two languages representing a variety of historiographical and philosophical positions the ancient writers regarded the Greeks and the Macedonians as two separate and distinct peoples whose relationship was marked by considerable antipathy, if not outright hostility."
Yet there is much that is different, e.g., their political institutions, burial practices, and religious monuments, etc.
The designation of Macedonia as part of Greece has intrigued modern critics. This, according to Schachermeyr, is enough to 'take one's breath away'. He went so far as to suggest that, however brief, it encapsulates a whole and bold strategy: to counter the Great King's strategy of attempting to exploit the age-old distinction between Macedonians and Hellenes. The reason for including Macedonia as part of a larger Hellas was designed to justify Macedonian participation in the so-called war of revenge. Whatever the truth on this point, on the basis of what we know happened in Macedonia in 480, Alexander had no more grounds for carrying out a war of revenge on behalf of Macedonia than he had on behalf of Athens or Sparta. Of course, Macedonians never regarded their territory as forming part of Greece, and certainly the Greek poleis did not regard Macedonia as being another Greek polis. The reason why Alexander here includes Macedonia as being part of Greece may be an attempt to paper over the glaring anomaly between what Philip and he had just done to 'the rest of Greece' and what he is in the process of doing to the Persian empire. The Persians had never done anything significant against the Macedonians. It is noteworthy that Herodotus, although he provides considerable information on Xerxes' activities when he passed through Macedonia in 480, does not record any acts of destruction--- scarcely surprising if Xerxes was instrumental in Macedonia gaining control of Upper Macedonia."
What is more important is the that Chaeronea, Thebes, and Agis make a complete mockery of attempting in this context to suggest that the Greeks in Hellas regarded themselves as willing subjects under legitimate Macedonian kings (Philip and Alexander) or- that the inhabitants of the regions he had just conquered did so entirely of their own will".
Consider Isocrates' letter to Philip where he, Isocrates, makes clear that:
(a) "Philips's ancestors understood that Greeks cannot submit to the rule of a monarch, while non-Greeks actually cannot live without such a regime," and
(b) "people of non-kindred race"
Clearly highlighting the distinction between Macedonians and Greeks.
The epitaph composed by Demosthenes for the common grave of the fallen Hellenes at Chaeronea reads as follows:
Time whose o'erseeng eye records all human actions,
Bear word to mankind what fate was suffered,
how Striving to safeguard the holly soil of Hellas
Upon Boeotia's plain we died."
If all the peoples in the regions which Alexander had conquered were willing subjects under the new king, he presumably should not have left any military troops with the satraps he everywhere instated."
(What an arrogant bluff by Alexander, to refer to the conquered people [Greeks] as "willing subjects". What Alexander failed to disclose is the fact that he left "no less than one quarter of his forces behind under one of Philip's most tried generals when he set out for Asia!")
No matter how hard Modern Greeks try to prove otherwise, there is always more than one side to their story!
To be continued.
Many thanks to J.S.G. Gandeto for his contribution to this article.
You can contact the author at rstefov@hotmail.com
My reply to you is "Two can play that game!" I too can provide you with just as many arguments that the Ancient Macedonians WERE NOT Greek. BUT!
It is irrelevant, at least to me, if Modern Greeks claim that the Ancient Macedonians were Greeks or not, what is relevant here is that the Modern Greeks are not related to the Ancient Greeks or to the Ancient Macedonians. They call themselves "Greeks" but have nothing to do with the ancient Greeks or Ancient Macedonians because underneath their modern artificial Greek veneer is nothing more than Albanians, Vlachs, Turks and Macedonians, the same variety of Balkanites that exists throughout the entire southern Balkans. But, if they insist on accusing me of falsifying Ancient Macedonian history, then here is my rebuttal:
SALONICA TERMINUS
Some passages taken from Fred E. Reed's recent book, 'Salonica Terminus'
(1) "Perhaps more intensely than anywhere else, Truth and History, in the Balkans, are national considerations. In Greece, they are generated and reproduced by what a scholar, who asked that I not reveal his name, termed the "archaeological Mafia," and by an academic establishment which maintains an incestuous relationship with the State." [p.xiii]
(2) "The effacement of the square [Liberty Square] that was once its heart, its window to the world during the turbulent years when Salonica was the metropolis of Ottoman-ruled Macedonia, is a function of an unavowed modern Greek selective memory syndrome - a condition which dictates that all that does not mesh with the founding myth must be obscured, buried, eliminated, caused to vanish from public historical consciousness." [p.6]
Eradication of anything from the past that suggests connection with the ethnic Macedonians was the order of the day for the Greek government. Not even churches and cemeteries are spared. To erase the Macedonian element from the newly obtained lands was the most urgent task of the Greek state. Newly arrived Christians from Asia, were now occupying the farms and the buildings of the expelled Macedonians.
(3) "Liberty Square is not a place to linger. Often I circumnavigate it, and always hastily, on my way to or from the west end of the town. Today, lined with bank headquarters, on one side, fast-food restaurants and travel agencies on the other, the square which lies hard by the elegant, despairingly silent maritime passenger terminal, owes its name not to some putative liberation of Greek Macedonia. The embarrassment, for Salonica's masters, is that the Greeks had very little to do with it, except as onlookers." [p.9]
(4) "In Athens, Sofia and Belgrade the carving knives were being sharpened. London, Paris, Moscow and Vienna watched with ill-concealed glee as their general staffs drew up mobilization plans. If Macedonia was to be the meal, Salonica would be the plat de resistance". [p.18]
(5) "The Greeks claim they liberated Salonica," snorts Petropoulos. "But whom did they liberate?" [p.22]
(6) "The 'natives' possess no written language - some say they have no language at all, only a debased patios - their traditions are oral, their history passed on furtively from the mouths of the elders, their songs and dances proscribed. For even well-intentioned, broad-minded men like Mr. Stalidis, they escape examination, cannot be understood, are not easily inserted into the complex analytical schemata which the Greek mind is capable of devising. They are people of the shadows, these Macedonians; phantoms. Their speech, fleeting whispers spirited away by the wind; their land, clods of anonymous earth wrapped in newly-printed title deeds; their existence, a pang of abstract conscience. And though invisible, yet they do not disappear." [p.181]
(7) "Here, in the building which housed the Greek Consulate during the tumultuous years preceding the capture of Ottoman Salonica in 1912, the Museum is dedicated to the proposition that the sole legitimate Macedonian identity is Greek." [p.181]
(8) This being so, runs the implicit argument,America Philological Association (APA)
DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE ANCIENT MACEDONIANS AND ANCIENT GREEKS. TAKEN FROM ARTICLES ON ANCIENT HISTORY PUBLISHED BY THE A.P.A.
The contributors are:
1. D.Brenden Nagle " Macedonian Appropriation of Greek Kulturgechichte"
2. Eugene Borza "Who were (and are) the Macedonians"
3. Edmund F. Bloedow "Diplomatic Negotiations between Darius and Alexander: Historical Implications of the First Phase at Marathus in Phoenicia 333/332 BC"
1) "...the appropriation of Greek Kulturgescichte, and the use by non-Greeks for political purposes against Greeks, is less common, and even less well documented. Here I offer an example of highly effective Macedonian use of Greek cultural history to advance the propaganda aims of Philip II which had the double aim of blunting Greek criticism of his state-building while at the same time cloaking his work in the legitimizing terminology devised by Greeks for their own, often violent, colonizing and city founding activities."
camouflage the fact that he was creating a wholly new type of state, a consolidation of ethne under a personal monarchy."
That it has continued to confuse interpreters is testament to the hegemonic power of Greek cultural history and the adroitness of the Macedonians in using this powerful tool of self-identification against its devisers."
2) "On the matter of language, and despite attempts to make Macedonian a dialect of Greek, one must accept the conclusion of linguist R.A.Crossland in the recent CAH, that an insufficient amount of Macedonian has survived to know what language it was."
Macedonian and Greek were mutually unintelligible in the court of Alexander the Great" - "no more proof that Macedonians were Greeks than, e.g., the existence of Greek inscriptions on Thracian vessels and coins. Is that proofs that the Thracians were Greeks?
What did others say about Macedonians? Here there is a relative abundance of information", writes Borza, "from Arrian, Plutarch (Alexander, Eumenes), Diodorus 17-20, Justin, Curtius Rufus, and Nepos (Eumenes), based upon Greek and Greek-derived Latin sources. It is clear that over a five-century span of writing in two languages representing a variety of historiographical and philosophical positions the ancient writers regarded the Greeks and the Macedonians as two separate and distinct peoples whose relationship was marked by considerable antipathy, if not outright hostility."
Yet there is much that is different, e.g., their political institutions, burial practices, and religious monuments, etc.
The designation of Macedonia as part of Greece has intrigued modern critics. This, according to Schachermeyr, is enough to 'take one's breath away'. He went so far as to suggest that, however brief, it encapsulates a whole and bold strategy: to counter the Great King's strategy of attempting to exploit the age-old distinction between Macedonians and Hellenes. The reason for including Macedonia as part of a larger Hellas was designed to justify Macedonian participation in the so-called war of revenge. Whatever the truth on this point, on the basis of what we know happened in Macedonia in 480, Alexander had no more grounds for carrying out a war of revenge on behalf of Macedonia than he had on behalf of Athens or Sparta. Of course, Macedonians never regarded their territory as forming part of Greece, and certainly the Greek poleis did not regard Macedonia as being another Greek polis. The reason why Alexander here includes Macedonia as being part of Greece may be an attempt to paper over the glaring anomaly between what Philip and he had just done to 'the rest of Greece' and what he is in the process of doing to the Persian empire. The Persians had never done anything significant against the Macedonians. It is noteworthy that Herodotus, although he provides considerable information on Xerxes' activities when he passed through Macedonia in 480, does not record any acts of destruction--- scarcely surprising if Xerxes was instrumental in Macedonia gaining control of Upper Macedonia."
What is more important is the that Chaeronea, Thebes, and Agis make a complete mockery of attempting in this context to suggest that the Greeks in Hellas regarded themselves as willing subjects under legitimate Macedonian kings (Philip and Alexander) or- that the inhabitants of the regions he had just conquered did so entirely of their own will".
Consider Isocrates' letter to Philip where he, Isocrates, makes clear that:
(a) "Philips's ancestors understood that Greeks cannot submit to the rule of a monarch, while non-Greeks actually cannot live without such a regime," and
(b) "people of non-kindred race"
Clearly highlighting the distinction between Macedonians and Greeks.
The epitaph composed by Demosthenes for the common grave of the fallen Hellenes at Chaeronea reads as follows:
Time whose o'erseeng eye records all human actions,
Bear word to mankind what fate was suffered,
how Striving to safeguard the holly soil of Hellas
Upon Boeotia's plain we died."
If all the peoples in the regions which Alexander had conquered were willing subjects under the new king, he presumably should not have left any military troops with the satraps he everywhere instated."
(What an arrogant bluff by Alexander, to refer to the conquered people [Greeks] as "willing subjects". What Alexander failed to disclose is the fact that he left "no less than one quarter of his forces behind under one of Philip's most tried generals when he set out for Asia!")
No matter how hard Modern Greeks try to prove otherwise, there is always more than one side to their story!
To be continued.
Many thanks to J.S.G. Gandeto for his contribution to this article.
You can contact the author at rstefov@hotmail.com
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