Beware! Bravo!
Sir: 'Gallant little Greece,' said the British officer as, with profound emotion, tears in his eyes, he gazed at the Acropolis on a flight out of Athens in April, 1947.
'I fear the Greeks . . . the other bully in the Balkans,' captioned The Spectator (`The new bully of the Balkans', 15 August), with a blasphemous depiction of the Parthenon, atop which have been placed hideous coils of barbed wire and ferociously armed guard posts, suggestive of all that is nasty in a brutish world.
You failed, however, to replace the columns with the Coca-Cola bottles that recently appeared in an equally tasteless depiction in advertisements in Italy. Have you become squeamish? Did your youthful studies of history leave you with some feel- ing for that ancient symbol of your civilisa- tion, or was basket-weaving the preferred option at the time? How sad to find you among the barbarians at the gates, 0 Spec- tator, my hitherto admired periodical.
Your Noel Malcolm is a fine writer and, in other places, at other times, has been impressive, with an outstanding ability to ferret out whatever truth can be found in difficult situations. Why, however, in sup- port of his slightly hysterical anti-Greek
'And whose idea was it to take television station?' over the.
stance, has he rearranged chapters of his- tory so that it becomes a fiction? Why has he resorted to working desperately to cre- ate an impression that there are unusual minority problems in Greece which are addressed by the Greek government more harshly than civilised behaviour would war- rant; that the Vlachs of the Pindus are unhappy (because he says so); and on and on?
He has gone through three pages of slanted material to pound out the message he obviously wishes to leave with us in his final paragraph — get Greece out of the EEC.
I should be loath to conclude that the whole exercise is in the service of some spe- cial interests inimical to the Greeks, but one must be excused in thinking that such a crude trampling upon the Greek soul, dressed up as a clinical analysis of an entire nation of neurotics, goes beyond what is fair and just to the Greek people of past and present generations, and therefore sus- pect.
The EEC will, unfortunately but inevitably, as history unfolds, shortly become a spent force, with all that that entails. I must admire the Greeks for hop- ing otherwise and undertaking an unequal struggle in order to meet the standards so much more easily attained among those European nations with secure borders and larders filled with vitamins.
Take heed, 0 Spectator and Mr Malcolm, lest you grasp painful nettles the next time the European tribes march unto the fields of slaughter, which they will surely do, and do not attempt so flippantly to dismiss, nay destroy, your trustworthy and loyal friends, gallant little Greece.
A.P. MacKinnon-Andrew
65-67 Dimoharous Street, Athens 115 21, Greece
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