The coming to office of the new Greek government has inspired a new rhetoric of democracy and Philhellenism intriguingly similar to the Philhellenism that accompanied the establishment of the modern Greek state in the 1820s, in an international environment of post-Napoleonic reaction analogous in a number of ways to today’s reactionary environment of post-Soviet-collapse. To take a characteristic example of this rhetoric, let us quote Paul Craig Roberts, dissident former assistant secretary of the Treasury under the Reagan administration in the US: “The Greeks, who were once to be contended with, who were able with 300 Spartans, supplemented with a few thousand Corinthians, Thebans, and other warriors, to stop a one hundred thousand man Persian army at Thermopylae, with the final outcome being the defeat of the Persian fleet in the Battle of Salamis and the defeat of the Persian army in the Battle of Plataea, are no more. The Greeks of history have become a people of legend. Not even the Romans were able to conquer Persia, but little more than a handful of Greeks stopped the attempted Persian conquest of Greece. But the Greeks, despite their glorious history, could not stop their conquest by the EU and a … Continue reading →