Romilly Jenkins: Truth and ‘Ethnic’ Truth

In the name of Apollo Smintheus, I demand that Guessedworker remove that Bodychelly picture from the left-hand corner of this blog and replace it with a picture of a dirty shovel, which will symbolify our anti-intellectualism and the dastardly disrespect of culture we promote, as well as the secret ritualistic dirt-eating ceremony, rumored to be practiced by the blog’s inner circle!

We are not worthy of Europe, we have not paid enough reverence to our cultural forebears. As a symbol of protest, I post these excerpts from chapter six of The Dilessi Murders

by Romilly Jenkins.  May we never forget our indebtedness to Thalo and Socraxander, Herodicurus, Epistophanes and peerless Gnomer! Thanks to the cultural pimps and pushers, the dumb unworldly schoolteachers, and everyone who covers themselves in cultural robes like a niveau riche woman decked out with diamond jewelry. The man underneath is lost in an ever-accumulating crescendo of unlimited brilliance, which truly dazzles the eye, truly.

….henceforth comments in italics, quoted excerpts in plaintext…

:

The Greek of the nineteenth century was a man who, like his Byzantine ancestor, lived simultaneously on two levels of consciousness.

There was the level of factual, observed truth, on which he had to conduct his everyday life. And there was the upper level of ideal truth, on which he claimed to appear in the eyes of the outside world. These levels of truth seldom approached one another, and were often sharply divergent: and this led to a dichotomy in the Greek mind which contemporary, secularized Europe could not understand at all, and attributed, rather unfairly, to an inherent deceitfulness of character.
The factual, observed truth about Greek politics in the third quarter of the nineteenth century was somewhat as follows. The Greek kingdom occupied a small territory in the south of the Balkan Peninsula, much of which was mountainous and infertile. Its independence from Turkey hung on the guarantee of three powerful nations, Britain, France and Russia, who were known as the Protecting or Benefactory Powers. Its inhabitants numbered less than two millions. They were thrifty and intelligent, with a love of learning and culture unparalleled among their neighbours. Yet their whole system of government was radically vicious. Their state was, constitutionally, democratic; but, owing to its political immaturity, its democracy was stultified by the organized tyranny of political parties. The Constitution of 1864 had curtailed the powers of the Crown and abolished the Upper Chamber; and the whole country was held fast in a system of corruption and intimidation manipulated by four or five powerful party managers.

In a state of affairs in which everything was decided solely on grounds of party advantage by powerful cliques in Athens, the economic and social interests of the countryside naturally came a very poor second best. The principle occupation of Greece was agriculture. It was in crying need of modern agricultural equipment, of roads, of internal security, and of an equitable taxation. But the money required for these improvements was never forthcoming: it was needed for the party purposes of buying supporters and of creating more and more ‘places’ and sinecures—in the ministries, in civil life, in the armed forces—which these supporters could retain so long as their party remained in power, and might hope to resume when that power was regained.
The aim of every party was power alone: simply to be in office and in control of the machine. No differences in programmes or policies divided them. The single purpose in the political field was the Great Idea, that is to say, the territorial expansion of Greece at the expense of the Othoman Empire; and in this purpose all parties were at one. The Great Idea held an unbounded sway over the mind of every Greek, and its vigorous prosecution, however untimely and inept, was enough to secure a measure of popularity for the most corrupt and self-seeking politician. No party had the smallest interest in any internal reform or development, and all regarded with the keenest suspicion and jealousy any foreign enterprise which seemed to promise a successful exploitation of the country’s resources. The dislike of foreigners was in fact universal: they were unpleasant necessities, to be spied upon, flattered or defamed as occasion offered.

The party struggle was carried was carried on from day to day with a violence and rancor, an unscrupulousness and irresponsibility, unexampled elsewhere in ninetheenth-century Europe. When one party obtained office, the rest instantly united, in defiance of all consistency and principle, to dislodge it. The press, which boasted seventy-seven separate newspapers, was free. Each party controlled a group of these newspapers, which devoted most of their space to vilifying and calumniating its political opponents very much in the style of the Eatanswill Gazette and the Eatanswill Independent. [PF to self: Huh?]
The wildest accusations were bandied about from side to side, without regard to truth or decency. The party chiefs were often honourable and stainless in their private lives, yet capable of devising or sanctioning any means, not excluding murder, to achieve their political ends. ‘Their basic principle,’ as their contemporary Alexander Vyzantios very truly said of them, ‘is that the notions of honour and decency prevailing in private life have no relevance to politics.’

To reign as king over this unhappy state had been chosen, seven years previously, a young fellow of eighteen, a foreigner, wholly western in manners and upbringing. He was, naturally enough, all at sea. The party leaders exploited and overreached him by turns, and his helplessness was the jest of the very outlaws who ravaged his kingdom.

PF: Reference is of course to King Otto of Bavaria! Leader of the so-called Bavariocracy of civil servants in the capital. Referring to the party chiefs in Athens, it was written:

It was not surprising that such men should have made full use of brigandage as a political weapon.

The army itself was in a deplorable state of inefficiency.

Excerpt:

This then, or something very like this, was the factual truth about Greek political life in 1870. But it would of course be misleading to judge it by the standards of the twentieth century…
It would have been nothing short of miraculous if Greece, after a bare half-century of independence and a bare six year s of a constitution the most democratic in Europe, should already have emancipated herself from the abuses to which such constitutional liberty is at first inevitably exposed. And if responsible Greeks had frankly admitted the prevalence of such abuses, and asked for the help of the Powers to prevent and end them, such help would readily have been supplied.

Get ready for it, because here it comes…

But this was the one admission which no Greek who wished to prosper, or even to live, in any Greek community could afford to make.

For the myth, the upper level of truth, reflected a different order. It was informed by the transcendent and mystical concept of the Nation, the ‘ethnos’, a term which comprehended everybody inside or outside the little kingdom who was of, or wanted to claim, Hellenic descent. According to the ‘ethnic’ truth, the modern Greek was at once the spiritual heir of all the splendid intellectual endowments of the classical age, and the political heir of all the vast pretensions, both religious and imperial, of Byzantium. From the first of these he derived his genius and culture, from the second his natural right and fitness to resume the Empire over all the nations of the eastern Mediterranean; and from both his evident superiority, in intellect and capacity, over the members of any other race.

It followed from these premises that his conduct was above reproach, and his country a paragon of order and enlightenment. He was acutely conscious of the importance of persuading the outside world of these truths, deeply grateful to any observer who proclaimed them, and fiercely resentful of any kind of criticism which seemed to belie them. The inescapable paradox of his position lay in the fact that his own politicians and newspapers were daily heaping on one another abuse far more damaging than any which could have been devised by an outsider. But the internal dimensions of his country were, he felt, a matter for himself, and of no concern to anybody else. The torrent might run confused and polluted below, but the business of the world in general was to fix its gaze on and adore the insubstantial halo. Anybody who directed the world’s attention downwards to the material but muddy cataract was, if he were a Greek, a traitor and blasphemer, and if he were a foreigner, a ‘mis-hellene’.

The term ‘mis-hellene’ or Greek-hater, with its correlative ‘phil-hellene’ or Greek-lover, demands a word of explanation. The best account of it was written, shortly after this time, by the ingenious Angelos Vlachos, who declared it to be a unique phenomenon in contemporary thought. By the Greek of his times, Vlachos tells us, the whole of humanity was divided into two groups, the Greek-lovers and the Greek-haters. The latter group was, unfortunately, by far the larger, since it included not only adverse critics of Greece but also that considerable portion of the human family which knew nothing about her or had never heard of her: and this ignorance or indifference was itself a crime against the Hellenic ‘ethnos’. The adverse critics who qualified as ‘mis-hellenes’ were not only such confirmed and malicious calumniators as Edmond About and George Finlay, but also those who had expressed dissatisfaction or skepticism of any kind at all; and the majority of these would have been surprised, Vlachos said, to learn that they had been baptized haters of Greece by that country. The contemporary Greek-lovers, on the other hand, were those who, however ignorantly, accepted the ‘ethnos’ at its own valuation and published their views abroad. These were, without exception, men of the highest intelligence, discernment and integrity.

This rigid segregation of humanity into sheep and goats was in origin religious: for the concept of Hellenism was inextricably fused, in Greece as in Byzantium, with that of Orthodox Christianity.

PF: How many changes can Hellenism tolerate and still make sense?

In the Byzantine mind there was, on earth as in heaven, one empire and one faith. The emperor of the day was the temporal image and vice-gerent of Jesus Christ. ….Those who owed allegiance to spiritual or temporal powers outside it were either pagans or heretics, and fell under the general head of barbarians or ‘gentiles’. …

PF: blah blah f**ing blah, f**ing blah f**ing f***ing blah

The ‘ethnic’ myth constituted a canon of infallible truth: and this canon was constantly growing. Once the ‘ethnos’ had ruled on any event, its pronouncement became an article of faith which none but the most obstinate and bad-hearted would question. …The overwhelming mass of the population subscribed unquestioningly to the canon: and those who aspired to success in public life did so of necessity.

This brief account of the double standard of truth prevailing in Greece at the time may help us to understand how it came about that things which everybody knew to have happened, and to be happening daily, could at the same time never have happened at all. Those unfamiliar with the historical factors which gave rise to the ‘ethnic’ standard may find the account strange, and be tempted to think it exaggerated. Yet it is far from being so.

More to come in future posts!

Posted by Potential Frolic on Tuesday, August 7, 2007 at 04:44 AM in
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