I. op-eds and short opinion pieces on hellenism
olympics must return to greece
Online Opinion (http://www.onlineopinion.com.au) July 2, 2008
excerpt:
“The Olympics does not belong to
“The Burning of Greece,” Chicago Tribune, August 31, 2007
“Greece: A wounded country and civilization,” Hellenic News of America, June 2005.
excerpt- Greece is always hurting me. It’s a country full of tragedy. Its fantastic
ancient civilization, which gave light to the West, stands alone because
Greece remains outside the cultural borders of the West. Having never had a
Renaissance, Greece is behaving more like an Oriental religious despotism,
allowing its clergy a license for power and corruption reminiscent of the
dark ages. The result of having a Christian theocracy in Greece is that the
country is paying little attention to its Greek history and cultural treasures.
Everything is made from a foreign model — and in a hurry. Its Christian
population has yet to understand its pre-Christian Hellenic achievement.
Rather, it strives to emulate its European neighbors and the United States,
barely tolerating its antiquities.
“Greece betrays the Olympic spirit,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, March 17, 2004.
excerpt- Athens is hosting the 2004 Games, but it (too willingly) is paying a terrible
price in cultural defilement. What Greece has done to Greece for the sake of
the games is a good measurement of how far the original ideal of the
Olympics has fallen.
“The Enduring Legend of the Golden Fleece,” The National Herald, August 11, 2007
excerpt- Apollonios Rhodios wrote “Argonautika” in the Alexandrian Library in the
third century BCE, about a millennium after the events of the Golden Fleece
epic. Apollonios was a scholar and a librarian at the Greeks’ greatest library.
He used earlier versions of the story for his narrative, which is a breathtaking
masterpiece of adventure, daring, manliness, skills and a united
Hellas. Read as a myth, in the Christian meaning of myth as fiction, it is
spectacular, filled with superhuman achievements. But read as myth in its
Greek meaning of very early Greek history, which is how ancient Greeks
read it for more than a thousand years, the Golden Fleece is a mirror of their
very beginnings as a country.
“Greece prepares for Olympics by ravaging a historic area,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, August 13, 2002
excerpt- Despite the seminal importance of Marathon, the site itself, where the Greeks
defeated the Persians, is being annihilated. The Greek government is converting it into a
rowing and canoeing playground for the 2004 Olympics. This means, above all,
destroying Schinias, Marathon’s forest and coastal wetland, and building two artificial
lakes of some 2,500 meters in length, including grandstands for 10,000 spectators.
Such massive human intervention, wiping out the great marsh and wood where
the battle between Greeks and Persians took place, is an act of barbarism. In addition,
Schinias is a rare ecological site in Greece with numerous threatened and endangered
species of birds, reptiles, amphibians, insects, and plants. It is a botanical garden with
more than 750 species of flora; many of them found nowhere else.
“Spreading Hellenic Culture in the United States,” The National Herald, October 19-20, 2002, p. 11.
excerpt- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) was probably the greatest political architect of
America’s independence, democracy, and the separation of church and state. Jefferson
was steeped in Greek culture. He donated his books, some of which were Greek classical
texts, to the American people and, in that exemplary manner, those books became the
seed for the Library of Congress. Jefferson was a philhellene who met Adamantios Koraes (1748-1833) in Paris, the
revolutionary home of the protagonist of Greek freedom. During the Greek Revolution of
1820s Jefferson sent Koraes a letter on how to organize the emerging Greek republic.
Koraes, like Jefferson, was in love with Hellenic culture, seeking moral, political and
practical guidance from the ancient Greeks for the freedom and happiness of their
struggling descendants.
spreading-hellenic-culture-in-the-united-states.pdf
“Platon University: A Gift of the Greek-American Community to the World?” The National Herald, March 7, 2004.
excerpt- There are dozens of private universities in the United States educating Americans
and foreigners alike to high standards of excellence in the sciences and the humanities.
Harvard and Yale started as Christian seminaries, and evolved into the best universities of
the country. Protestant, Catholic and Jewish Americans had the foresight and wisdom
founding universities to serve both the country and their own interests.
It’s about time the Greek-American community think of its own long-term
survival by giving birth to Platon University as a concrete expression of its affinity to
both its Hellenic heritage and commitment to the secular and democratic ideals of
America.
“The Curved-Horn Oxen of Helios,” The National Herald, July 7, 2007.
excerpt- This past April 19, I went to northern Greece where I traveled back in time
when the Greeks herded Greek cattle and ate Greek food. Once in the
neighborhood of Meteora, the suspended in mid air stone towers, in
Thessaly, I met Demetrios Petarakis, a veterinarian of the Greek Department
of Agriculture, who led me to a world unknown even to agricultural experts.
This was the farm of Demetrios Demos in the countryside around Meteora.
For about 22 years, Demos, an economist and a family farmer, has been
doing what the Greek state ought to be doing: protecting from extinction the
country’s agricultural patrimony, especially its autochthonous farm animals.
In the case of Demos, these animals include goats, pigs, cattle and horses;
the cattle are those curved-horn oxen that Homeros and Hesiodos, Greece’s
greatest epic poets, praised 2,800 years ago; and the horses are the military
horses that led Alexander the Great to his world conquest.
“Training Body and Mind for Arete,” Review of Stephen G. Miller, Ancient Greek Athletics (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2004) 288pp, The National Herald, June 19-20, 2004.
excerpt- With the Olympics returning to Athens after more than a century of making
the rounds among a few Western and technologically advanced non-Western
cities, it is necessary to go to the roots. Greece gave birth to the Olympics,
but where did this global athletic competition come from? What was the
original purpose of competing in running, throwing the discus and the
javelin? Does the modern Olympics, embedded as it is in the multi-billion
dollar industry of television, commerce, and the commodity of the athletes
themselves, have any virtue, which one can trace to its ancient Greek
origins?
training-body-and-mind-for-the-practice-of-arete.pdf
“Why Greece has no Greek foreign policy,” Hellenic News of America, June 21, 2006.
excerpt- From Persia in the early fifth century BCE, to the Romans 400 years later, to
the Turks, 1,600 years later, foreign invaders have had a dramatic impact on
the Greeks.
why-greece-has-no-greek-foreign-policy.pdf
“The Danger of the Slavs’ Claims to be Macedonians,” The Hellenic News of America, May 6, 2006.
excerpt- I reminded Dimitrov that the ancient Macedonians were Greek; they
worshipped the Greek gods, spoke Greek, and participated in the Olympics.
In addition, I said to Dimitrov his Slavic ancestors appeared in Northern
Europe a millennium after Alexander the Great, and that it was the
communist tyrant Tito in the early 1940s who named one of the Yugoslav
provinces Macedonia. I also asked him, Why was he not proud for being
Slav? He ignored my questions, repeating the refrain that history was of no
importance in settling issues of security in 2006.
why-do-slavs-want-the-world-to-call-them-macedonians.pdf
“The Turkey Effect,” Hellenic News of America, September 2006.
excerpt- The main reason for the bad feelings between the NATO “allies” and Greece
is the Turkey effect, the insulting decision of the United States to including
Turkey, Greece’s most bitter enemy, in NATO. The United States, working
under the poisonous climate of the cold war, and not little self-interest,
dismissed its cultural and political debt to the Greeks for the illusion of
drawing Turkey against Russia. But Turkey only follows its own rules,
pretending to be on the same fence with the West while remaining an
Islamic country with deep historical hatred for the West.
II. op-eds and opinion pieces on agriculture and the environment
Sowing Feudalism
Online opinion (Australia), August 11, 2008
excerpt-
“Atomic science gave birth to weapons civilized people wish never existed. Now agricultural genetic engineering is on the verge of bringing into being another monster future generations will face with the same perplexity and anguish we feel about our nuclear bombs.”
“The Agrarian Dream of Kephalonia: Organic Farming is the Answer” The National Herald, February 25, 2006.
excerpt- So each time I visit Greece, and especially Kephalonia, my heart breaks seeing the near collapse of the country’s ancient food and agriculture. No one bakes bread in Valsamata anymore; a man with a truck sells the peasants white bread. I still remember my mother’s round heavy dark loafs of bread, the smell and taste being divine. Now some strips of land in Valsamata still produce wine and olive oil, but nothing else. Like other Greeks, the peasants of Valsamata, and they are not many left, have abandoned their ancient umbilical cord with the agrarian civilization of their ancestors, opting for urban employment. This means, among other things, eating imported food that is drenched with chemical poisons. I find it strange accompanying my niece in Athens to buy food at farmers’ markets and hearing farmers telling me they consider toxic sprays, which they refer to as “medicines,” absolutely essential in the production of their fruits and vegetables. In fact, some of them laugh at me when I speak to them about the thriving trade of organic food (or, as the Europeans call it, food grown in biological farming) in both Western Europe and the United States.
agrarian-dream-of-kephalonia-pdf.pdf
“Agriculture Spreads Disease,” The Progressive Populist, Feb. 1, 2006
excerpt- Mad cow disease was a symptom of industrialized agriculture, especially animal farms. These animal farms, however, are factories designed for domesticated animals (primarily cattle, chicken and pigs) where scientists, engineers and businessmen have been striving to convert animals into industrial products. The results of such hubris have been catastrophic. The animal farm technicians and businessmen assumed, wrongly, that living beings like animals could adapt to perpetual darkness and absolute confinement, artificiality administered by science-based violence. The owners of these farms knew their animal factories would stink, so unless they found powerless communities like the black people of rural North Carolina where they built several animal farms in their midst, they chose isolated places in the countryside for them. The less that urban people knew about these factories, the better.
agribusiness-spreads-disease-pdf.pdf
“Agribusiness takes on organic food, farming,” The Progressive Populist, November 15, 2006
excerpt- Agribusinesses are also in charge of US agricultural policy, becoming the beneficiaries of government-funded research and lucrative subsidies with the result that they have driven most family farmers out of farming and rural America while, for all practical purposes, they enslave those who become “contract workers,” managing their animal farms. In this political context, organic farming emerged in the shadow of feudal agribusiness, becoming merely a boutique niche for food “certified” clean of toxins, genetic engineering and sludge. Americans became tempted by this version of clean food so organic food began to grow since 1990 by about 25% per year, earning its practitioners some $13 billion in 2005.
“Black farmers down to a precious few,” SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER, Tuesday, February 22, 2005
excerpt- According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, there were 740,670 “Negro” farmers in the United States in 1900. In 1920, black farmers increased to 922,914, and then started on a catastrophic decline. In 1969, there were 90,141 black farmers and, by 1992, the number had been reduced to 18,816. In other words, black farmers declined by about 98 percent between 1920 and 1992. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which black farmers call the “last plantation,” speeded up the exodus of black people from the land. Pearlie Reed, a senior black official at the USDA, admitted in 1997 that the USDA discriminated against black farmers, cheating them of their dignity and loans that could keep them in operation.
“Blood on their hands,” The Progressive Populist, December 15, 2002.
excerpt- The Greeks had a wonderful polytheistic religion that rarely if ever incited them against other people just because these non-Greeks worshipped different gods than they did. This global religious peace was shattered forever with the victory of Christianity in the fourth century and Islam in the sixth century. These one-god faiths, daughters of Judaism, spread their doctrines by the sword. The Christians, in particular, were responsible for the unforgettable evil of “extirpating” the Greeks, my ancestors, and their culture. That crime was so horrendous that sunk the Western world into a millennium of darkness.
“Sowing Africa with African Seeds,” San Francisco Bayview, May 23, 2007
excerpt- Africa is still unhappy from her European and American encounter — a largely muted displeasure, coloring all relations of most Africans with each other and their former colonial masters. After all, in 2007, Africans are producing, more or less, the cash crops they used to produce under colonialism — cocoa, coffee, sugar, peanuts, cotton, rubber, tea, palm oil, timber, and tobacco. The violence of the old system has not vanished: Cash crops for export take more and more of the best land from local food production, forcing peasants to bring additional marginal land under cultivation. The social and environmental results of such policies are devastating.
“America’s farm workers still toil in fields of danger,” The Baltimore Sun, Feb. 22, 2007
excerpt- In 1979, I was a new Environmental Protection Agency employee attending a government-funded seminar about the plight of farm workers. Expert after expert described conditions of horror. The threat came from farm sprays — the farm workers’ worst enemy. Many farm workers didn’t understand the instructions on the pesticide can or the advice of the farmers on when to enter sprayed fields. Sometimes workers were sprayed while harvesting crops, but most often the workers harvested crops with the toxin still on the leaves and fruit. More than 25 years later, little has changed.
“Family Farming for a Sustainable Rural America,” The Progressive Populist, January 1-15, 2003.
excerpt- Small rural towns in the United States are falling apart because agribusiness is sucking the life out of them. Forty-nine of America’s fifty poorest counties are rural. Agribusiness is using this vast impoverished rural estate – empty largely of people — in producing wealth with its factories of wheat, corn, soybeans, cattle, poultry, and hogs, while it is colonizing and obliterating small family farmers and their communities. California was the first victim of that aggressive policy. The grapes of wrath did away with small family farmers in imperial California. Agribusiness then turned to the rest of the country. It made the Great Plains of the Midwest (home of Minnesota, Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, Kansas, and Nebraska) the nation’s poorest region. Nebraska has six of the poorest twenty counties in the United States. Two of those six, Loop and McPherson Counties, are the poorest in the country with a per capita income of $ 4,896 to $ 6,940.
farming-for-sustainable-rural-america.pdf
“Calling for food sovereignty for Africa,” Chicago Tribune, June 18, 2003.
excerpt- Bringing back to life Africa’s food plants would heal the ecological wounds of the continent. Africa’s cereals are tolerant of heat, cold, drought, and waterlogging and infertile land. A dose of agrarian reform could help heal some of the continent’s political wounds. In addition, the study said that Africa’s “lost” plants may benefit more than Africa because “they represent an exceptional cluster of cereal biodiversity with particular promise for solving some of the food production problems that will arise in the twenty-first century.”
