History is a great teacher and a sign from the heavens to draw humankind towards divine presence. Unfortunately, nations have turned it into a compendium of self-serving myths, dividing themselves, and erecting borders of hate. The passions that erupt in the flames of war arise in the hearts of men and women. It is here, in the deep recesses of the human breast, that love and hate wage their battle and manifest themselves on the stage of history. The fuel that propels them is the perception of history, often self-serving, subjective and tailored to keep those passions alive.

Professor Nazeer Ahmed

There are many such borders of hate in the modern world: Bosnia-Serbia, Greece-Turkey, Chechnya-Russia, India-Pakistan, Ethiopia-Eritrea, Israel-Palestine, Israel-Lebanon. And the list keeps growing by the day. Often, these borders are trans-national. At other times, they exist within the same geographical entity.

That hatred is now institutionalized with governments feeding their nationals as well as the visitors to their borders with doses of prejudice about their perceived enemies. Hatred has now become embedded into tourism. Travel brochures deliver carefully crafted misinformation. Travel guides transmit it, sometimes in subtle tones and at other times brazenly.

I had the occasion to travel across one such border recently, that between the Greek and the Turkish worlds, where neighbors who live within a stone’s throw are separated by emotional chasms a thousand miles wide.

I have visited Turkey many times, enjoyed the hospitality of its beautiful people, savored its sumptuous foods and have marveled at the magnificence of its monuments. I have stood in reverence at the tombs of Mevlana Rumi and Ayup Sultan, Companion of the Prophet. The Bosphorus is where Asia and Europe meet. It is where the axes of three great world religions, Islam, Catholic Christianity and Orthodox Christianity intersect. If you disregard the hassles at the Istanbul airport, Turkey is a land one must visit at least once in a lifetime.

The following day we took a taxi from Athens to Mykenia, a distance of about sixty miles. The Mykenian civilization (circa 1200 BC) was a forerunner of the Hellenistic civilization (circa 750 BC to 100 BC). The Mykenians were master builders, skilled craftsmen in the bronze age, advanced in the art of administration and used a numerical system based on alphabets. An understanding of the Mykenians is a must for anyone studying the classical Greek civilization.

“We were slaves of the Turks for four hundred years”, began the taxi driver’s version of history. “When they occupied Greece”, he continued, “many churches were destroyed and our culture was ruined”. The historical fact is that under the Milli system, the Ottomans gave complete autonomy to the Greeks (and other Christian Orthodox people in Eastern Europe). The Greek Churches were protected by Christian waqfs and administered by the Patriarch of Istanbul. This patronage enabled the Greeks living in the hills and those in the plains develop a kindred sense of belonging to a common heritage. Indeed, a sociologist may develop a plausible thesis that it was the Ottoman patronage under the milli system that ignited the consciousness of a unitary Greek nation among peoples of Greek heritage living in isolated islands and different parts of the mainland.

We proceeded on to Nafplion, the first capital of modern Greece. It was here in 1829 that the Greek rebels, incited and abetted by the British, declared their independence from the Ottoman Empire. The old city plaza is still there and the Turkish flavor endures. The jami masjid of Nafplion is now a museum, a fate better than those of other masjids in Greece that were converted outright to churches. But the Greeks have their eyes closed to the excesses that they committed. They have no recollection of their invasion of Turkey (1921-24) in which they killed, burned and destroyed much of Western Anatolia. It is an asymmetrical memory, which stores only what the Turks did to them.

 

"Occupied Cyprus"! Never in history has any government owned Cyprus, and Greek Cyprus is calling the legally-intervened north "occupied."

I am much in appreciation of Dr. Ahmed's humanistic sensibilities.

There was one omission in this wonderful article; Dr. Ahmed wrote, "The Greeks and the Turks hate each other." He didn't provide a single example of Turkish hatred.

I think he is well aware that generally speaking, Turks are not raised with hatred, and most Turks actually maintain a brotherly feeling toward those who make an industry of hating Turks (Greeks and Armenians, principally). Dr. Ahmed was probably attempting diplomacy with that statement, not wishing to shoulder the entire blame on the Greeks. (Yet if that is the case, I wonder if such statements should be made for the sake of diplomacy.)

Such was not his aim, but Dr. Ahmed was inadvertently continuing a great tradition of "Turkish defense"; it was because of the Indians and what would soon become the Pakistanis that WWI Britain's bigoted Lloyd George was persuaded to try the apprehended Ottoman officials (accused of committing an Armenian "genocide") fairly. (Because the English were fearful of riling up their Indian subjects.) I believe if the Indian delegation did not speak justly, the British would have had it in for the Turks, and most every detainee would have been found guilty. (This was the episode of the "Malta Tribunal," 1919-21; every single Turk could not even be charged, for lack of evidence, and they were all released.)

As brave Greek-Cypriot Antonis Angastiniotis has written, "Selective memory is necessary to maintain current policies, sadly the problem is that this attitude does not lead to reconciliation."

I have recently received a nice letter from a Greek in Greece, just one of the indications not every Greek operates from a knee-jerk anti-Turkish hostility. Yet, too many are indoctrinated by hatred... like the Armenians. (Or as Angastiniotis put it, "Since our childhood we were taught that the Turks were barbaric dogs.")

But another dimension to this hatred is that too many Greeks and Armenians who have moved to other nations take and cultivate these hatreds with them.  We can see this level of irrational hatred in Internet forums, where Americans of Greek and Armenian ancestry, far removed from their "ancient homelands," whole-heartedly carry the banner of vicious hatred... all in the duty of what they think of as  "patriotism."

An Armenian, Rafael Ishkhanian, (from "The Law of Excluding the Third Force," cited in Gerard Libaridian's Armenia at the Crossroads; Democracy and Nationhood in the Post-Soviet Era, 1991, p. 10) said it best, speaking also for too many Greeks:

"[T]o curse at Muslims and especially at Turks, to talk much about the Armenian Genocide, and to remind others constantly of the brutality of the Turks are all regarded as expressions of patriotism. Among the leaders of the past we consider those who curse Turks and killed Turks to be the most patriotic. Our most recent heroes are those who assassinated Turkish diplomats in European cities... [this] is the dominant mentality."

They then carry over this irrational hatred in the western nations they have settled in, use the positions of wealth and influence some have attained, and poison the minds of their non-Greek & Armenian countrymen. They stop anything that may come across as "positive" about Turkey. And their fanaticism can be so great, some of their countrymen of different heritage can get hit by the crossfire, winding up shell-shocked. (Most westerners, however, simply and mindlessly nod their heads in agreement and say, uh-huh, sure. Everyone knows the Turks are Terrible. This prejudice is what has made Armenian and Greek propaganda so easy to administer, along with the knowledge that the already politically-weak Turks are indifferent and let these matters go.)