Gene,

I’ve seen this quote a couple of other times and always on the internet. As much as I’ve had my differences with Kissinger, something tells me that it’s not authentic. For one thing, the paper in question reported on it twenty years after the fact. Does anybody know of a contemporaneous reporting of this event? Something like a video/audio or a newspaper/magazine account from 1974?

For those of us who really know the Greeks (btw – I’m 100% Greek), their joining the EU was a mistake waiting to happen from the get-go. How the (northern) Europeans could have been so stupid is beyond me.

My father-in-law used to tell the story of the first traffic light installed in Athens. In other parts of the world, people simply respected the color of the light…red/yellow/green.

In Athens, the Greeks looked up at the contraption, pointed to it, and started laughing…”THAT is going to tell ME when to go? Ha-ha-ha-ha.”

2500 years ago – Xenophon told the Persian king, in the Anabasis, something to the effect of, “With your [Persian] troops, kill the general and they flee. With the Greeks, kill me, and you will have 10,000 generals on your hands.”

Nothing has really changed.

There’s a genetic reason those city-states never coalesced into one nation…today we describe it as, “three Greeks, five opinions.”

Best Regards,
Dean

PS and don’t worry about Greece…they will do just fine!

It speaks strongly to the futility of trusting in governments and the chiliastic vision so many offer.

Where is our faith? To whom to we look in hope? If it is in politics, economics, even theoloy we are deluded.

Deficit as a % of GDP
Iceland
15.7
Greece
12.7
Britain
12.6
Ireland
12.2
United States
11.2
Spain
9.6
France
8.2
Japan
7.4
Portugal
6.7
Canada
4.8
Australia
4
Germany
3.2

* Figures from OCED forecast in November 2009.

By my figuring, the Greeks are an entire 1.5% (of GDP) higher than we are. Keep in mind that Iceland, with 15.7% of GDP, recently suffered a currency meltdown, in which interest rates were jacked up to 18% in order to stem the currency outflows. The government ultimately resigned.

Nah…that couldn’t happen here…our “Chicagoans” are much too adroit and capable… 🙂

What the Greeks and Constantinople are going to do with a loss of Greek sovereignty should be the least of our concerns.

Best Regards
Dean

This is more than just the incumbent President, there is a a culture of indolence that has brought us to this point. As someone one said, “there are two kinds of people, those who work for a living and those who vote for a living.” Hopefully, the collapse of the liberal mindset as manifested by the failures of the Administration will dispirit those who voted for a living and the unnatural but temporary marjority that won in 2008 will dissipate.

As reported in the popular Greek magazine, Oikonomikos Tachydromos on 14 Aug. l997, Henry Kissinger, while addressing a group of Washington, D.C. businessmen in Sept.1974, said:

“The Greek people are anarchic and difficult to tame. For this reason we must strike deep into their cultural roots: Perhaps then we can force them to conform. I mean, of course, to strike at their language, their religion, their cultural and historical reserves, so that we can neutralize their ability to develop, to distinguish themselves, or to prevail; thereby removing them as an obstacle to our strategically vital plans in the Balkans, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East.”

35 years later, the money powers seem to be achieving their goal. Greece has been infiltrated by powers set to destroy them. Remember the World hates us.

How will this play into the Greco triumphalism? Hard to say. The Patriarch, in playing the global warming card, revealed a too-cozy alliance with the Euro-statists — the same people now threatening Greece with the loss of its sovereignty. If Greco triumphalism is still high on the agenda, then the Greek economic collapse will force Constantinople to turn on the people it was trying to cultivate. If that happens, Constantinople will retrench and we will see an increase in authoritarian dictates and a ramping up of the PR machine, but no new ideas will be offered and no moral leadership of the kind you see with Pope Benedict and Patriarch Kirill will be developed.

We might be witnessing a slow-motion collapse. Climategate reveals that the Green Patriarch campaign was morally hollow, little more than a public relations gambit. The insolvency of the Greek economy also brings into the focus Constantinople’s silence on the moral issues that contributed to it. Things don’t look that good overall.

Of course this could change overnight if we saw some moral leadership emerge from Constantinople instead of these constant blunders. But they seem to be masters of the misstep; too preoccupied with things that leaders of their stature should leave to others. I used to believe Constantinople understood this. Now I’m not so sure.

I guess non-Greeks will come to food festivals to acquaint themselves with a quaint, almost-extinct culture of an obscure mountain people. Get to know their folkways, dances, cuisine, and tribal religion. Lord have mercy.

On the other hand, Nicole Gelinas wrote a piece on RealClearPolitics two days ago showing how the Greeks can voluntarily get off the Euro, get back on the Drachma (incidentally, the oldest-used currency in the world), start privatizing social welfare plans, restrict their borders and get back to being a nation. It’s possible, but I don’t believe their globalist elites want this. Thought experiment: I wonder if any of this would have happened if the king was still reigning? England and Denmark both refused to go on the Euro, both of them have strong monarchies. I tend to think not. Thoughts anyone?