16/07/15

Limbaugh,
Having returned from Greece last week, it is more than abundantly clear that Greeks do not sit around all day relaxing. I visit Greece annually
and it is abundantly clear that most Greeks are in fact Church going and hard working people that you know nothing about. Greece makes the papers and so suddenly you are an excerpt on Greek affairs.

The people that have been hit by the economic crisis are people who have paid taxes throughout their lives and now have to endure losing much of their pensions and benefits. You seem to think that one hundred percent of the Greek population is lazy because of a few media reports. You are blaming an entire group of people for the mistakes of their political leadership over the years. As an Orthodox theologian with an extensive knowledge of Byzantine, Ottoman, and modern Greek history the relations between Greece and Germany-Europe are far more complex than you seem to think.

The Greeks can be demonized collectively over some mistakes and this is going to be held over their heads by their critics for many years. The Germans on the other hand who slaughtered fifty million people and who took the Polish town of Oswiecim and made it notorious as Auschwitz will forever curry favor as a “western” nation no matter how barbaric their recent past has been. Keep in mind that the hard working Germans were forgiven their debt in 1952 by Greece. And this from a Greece whose population suffered horrific massacres and famine as a result of occupation and brutality by the
Master Race.

All Greece is asking for is the opportunity to rebuild and to avoid the harsh austerity measures that have inflicted pain on the ordinary Greek. It is also a fact that Germany has never properly compensated Greece for the horrors of the Nazi occupation, as well as for stealing Greek Gold during that era.

The Germans have the opportunity both to correct a historical wrong and to show the same sort of leniency that Greece extended to the Germans in 1952. Greeks have a sense of national honor who will fiercely guard their independence and sovereignty, and have no intention of ending up under German occupation over again.

Theodore G. Karakostas
Boston