EDITOR’S NOTE (Nick Stamatakis). Please watch the video below (one of several) from a Cyprus soccer field where fans of both sides are singing the national anthem in unison and demand that Greece does not punish the Navy Cadets who shouted “Cyprus Is Greek, F… Turkey” at last week’s parade in Athens. This has sparked a wave of patriotism across Greece and Cyprus, destroying decades of leftist/globalist efforts throughout the educational system to suppress the Greek identity, a truly spectacular development!
To me, this is very personal, and I will explain:
I spent an academic year in Cyprus in 1989-90 researching the relationship between “History, Language and National Rituals: The Construction Of Greek-Cypriot Identity” (title of my doctoral thesis – approved in 1994). As part of my research, I closely followed that year’s national holiday parades and numerous other national rituals newly formed in post-1974 Cyprus – such as protests for the “missing since 1974” and other demonstrations along the “green line.” I did this as I was attending history and language classes at the famous “Acropolis Lyceum” of Nicosia, a high school whose graduates include many of the historic Greek-Cypriot political figures and known at that time for its nationalist “traditions”.
In the morning of March 3rd, 1990, the Memorial Day for Gregoris Afxentiou, the biggest hero of the Cypriots’ anti-colonial struggle, many Acropolis Lyceum students joined thousands of other students in a protest at the “Green Line” near the “Ledra Palace Berricade”, the most famous of the few UN-guarded crossings to the occupied territory of Cyprus. It was a vibrant protest, with the students demanding the “Turks out of Cyprus,” among other slogans. To realize the setting and the passionate protest, you have to picture that many occupied villages (likely the birthplaces of some protesting students) were visible across the “green line” a few miles away…
As I started driving back after the end of the protest, I saw a student (I later learned he was Acropolis Lyceum student Petros Papaleontiou) hanging from a Turkish flagpole on the Venetian Walls of Nicosia around Pyli Pafou. He was trying to take down the Turkish Flag, as a Turkish soldier was shooting in the air to scare him!! I took a couple of photos, and they were published on the front page in most papers, becoming the talk of Cyprus for the next month… At least one more similar incident happened in the same year, and many more – with tragic results – a few years later.
I witnessed then and documented/analyzed/compared in my doctoral thesis later that parades and national holidays/rituals, in combination with language/history lessons, are essential in preserving our identity and can trigger sentiments and acts of resistance. They are crucial pedagogical elements in a situation like the occupied/divided Cyprus. If we are ever to achieve the liberation of Kerynia, we must ensure that a component of resistance is constantly present among (at least) the younger generations.
I am still connected to Petros Papaleontiou, and I offered to the Cypriot-American leaders to invite, honor, and present him as a symbol and a heroic prototype for our youth—to no avail.
The lesson of the above is simple: You cannot suppress a national identity forged with blood and tears in countless generations fighting for freedom. A simple incident such as the Navy Cadets shouting, “Cyprus Is Greek, F.. Turkey,” will instantly revive it. And it will instantly destroy decades of brainwashing and “ethno-nihilism.” But we shouldn’t expect luck or coincidence to do the work for us if we are the leaders of our community. We have to cultivate and encourage patriotism.
BELOW AGAIN THE FULL VIDEO OF THE NAVY CADETS
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Cyprus Supports the Greek Navy Cadets
A shiver of emotion in Cyprus for the lads of SMYN, the cadets of the Navy who shouted slogans at the parade on March 25. At the APOEL – Apollon match on Saturday, the fans sang the National Anthem together and were shocked.
On both sides they raised banners that read “Cyprus is Greek.” The fans in the stands carried several Greek flags .
So, somehow, soccer fans, known for their hooliganism and certainly no fans of discipline, are somehow patriots for approving indiscipline in a military parade. I guess you’re OK with the military being turned into a flock of hooligans. That’s not how you win wars, Nick.
You certainly don’t win wars by marching in gay pride parades… even more you don’t win wars by teaching schoolchildren for the past 20 years that the Ottoman Empire was beneficial for the Greeks and all Balkan people or that the Catastrophe of Smyrna happened because there were too many people crowded at the docks…
And how exactly does one win wars, Bob? By being a couch-bound “ψευτο-παλικαρο” or a loyal “political servant” at home, typing contrarian kafeneio style rhetoric on the internet all day? I’m sure the Turks are quite afraid such “war-winning” words…
Have you ever seen an aggressive Turk up close behaving in his natural cultural environment? In 1986 in Smyrni I saw a 17-year old and a 16-year old arguing loudly in a public setting…I didn’t understand what they were saying, but I certainly understood what I saw when one of them took a pick-axe (κασμας) and drove the pointed end down upon the other guy, fortunately only making a deep but non-life threatening hole between his radius and ulna after the latter lifted up his arm to protect his head, and before multiple others jumped into the fray to restrain the bloodthirsty aggressor. Not a very pretty scene buddy, but it’s no different from the scenes that occurred in 1922 at a large scale in that same city. This behavior is a more modern example of the surviving widespread, endemic, barbaric, cultural viciousness that history has taught us about our “neighbor”, and which CANNOT be countered by a woke military culture of “nursery rhyme” marches… Soldiers have to be soldiers, not feather-wielding boy scouts.
I already wrote about the reasons for marching to tunes like the ones that were heard in the parade on that other thread last week. Military and wokeness don’t mix. What you fail to understand here is that those “marching chants” are a perfectly sanctioned part of military training in Greece, and have been so for decades, whether the woke politicians & media nowadays like to hear them displayed during parades or not. Are you now suggesting that Sophia Vempo was also “undisciplined” when she sang her songs such as “Κοροιδο Μουσσολινι”, etc, because they were “demeaning” to the Italian invaders?