What is in essence a WASP [White Anglo-Saxon Protestant]? Whether it is a “P” for Protestant, or “C” for Catholic, or “B” Buddhist, etc. is irrelevant. Irrationality has no geographical or national roots. The important letters are “W’” for white and “AS” for Anglo-Saxon.
Does the geography of our planet play a role in affecting our “acquired” behavior? Take a man or woman born in Greece, in a sunny and benign climate and a German or a Finn born in a cold and harsh climate. Does the benign climate give birth to a culture different to that of a harsh climate? My opinion is that a rational individual surpasses these “differences,” due to the terrestrial climate, if they exist.
Here are some examples of this, possible, difference, based on our recent history as a species.
The Greeks and the Battle of Karootes
For various reasons Delphi, in Greece, is one of the most visited tourist destinations in the world. Thousands of years ago for the ancient Greeks Delphi was in the oracle-racket of the type: “If you do not get killed in the war you will be alive.” Prophesy was (and is for some U.S. Christians) one field of the various “business enterprises” of all religious entities on our planet for millennia.
Also, I think that since 1930, when the Greek poet Sikelianos and his wife, Eva Palmer, an upper-class girl from New York, made Delphi known to ordinary people, between 40 to 60 million people have visited Delphi, mostly Americans and Germans. All these people have enjoyed the view of the gorge at the edge of Delphi. I wonder if their guides ever mentioned to them the unfortunate relationship between Aesop and the priests at the ancient Delphi.
Aesop, who lived 600 years before the birth of Christ, is considered as the “universal” myth-creator. Aesop traveled all over the then known world and at some time he visited the “sacred” place of Delphi.
At Delphi, where Aesop arrived to deliver money from king Croesus to the priests there, he took a look at the priests and not only he did not give them the money, but angrily derided them for not only being worthless but also for not working and demanding to be fed by the offerings of the faithful. As expected, the priests reacted, as priests usually do [for example, against doctors who perform abortions] by planting the “sacred golden flask” of the God Apollo in his baggage. Then, they triumphantly, “discovered” the flask and killed Aesop, for sacrilege, by throwing him alive over the fearsome rocky precipice at the edge of Delphi. That was the end of Aesop.
[Note: My reference, above, to priests in general, excludes the honest “liberation theology” priests of Central America, massacred by the CIA.]
Here is what some of the tens of thousands of men and women who will visit Delphi in 2015 could do. They can follow the main road of Delphi, parallel to the gorge, up to the western edge of the city. There they will see beneath them a quite big flat plain completely covered with a carpet-like deep green surface of olive trees, which gradually merges to the light blue sea on their left, to the South. Then, still standing there, they will see on their right hand, to the North-West, a mountain. The mountain of “Giona.”
Giona mount (pronounced “Geeona, accent on “o”) is one of the highest mountains of Greece, reaching a height of 2, 510 meters [8,235 feet]. In ancient Greece Giona was named the “Moonless Mountain” as the Goddess “Selene” [the “Moon” Goddess] wife of Zeus, the top-God, turned off her light over the earth, when she went to Giona at night to meet her lover, a shepherd. A story which is much more impressive than the usual Hollywood stuff.
Giona mount is an important part of the history of the 20th century and particularly of the Second World War [WWII]. It was there on August 5, 1944 that “The Battle of Karootes” took place.
In essence wars are the result of rivalry among the “aristocrats” [a Greek word meaning: “the power of the best”] , also known as the “elites” of the world; a handful of rather problematic individuals. These “aristocrats” are represented by a much smaller group, less than half a dozen, who are known as the “leaders” of each competing fraction, also known as nations or groups of nations. For a strange, rather biological reason, the millions of ordinary humans, agree to die for the benefit of that handful of “aristocrats,” in the name of patriotism, the nation, and other inexplicable reasons. For example, in our time during the WWII the “aristocrats” were the Rockefellers, The Krupps, the Du Ponts, the I.G. Farben, etc. The leaders were, Churchill, Hitler, Roosevelt and Stalin.
The Second World War started in 1939. Hitler invaded Russia in June 1941. By the middle of 1943 it was obvious that the Nazis had lost the war. Finally, on June 6, 1944 the Allies landed in Normandy in France. By that time the allies had almost ten thousand airplanes and the Nazis less than one thousand. Did the ordinary German soldiers know what was going on? Not only they knew, they knew much more than the rest of us. As a matter of fact, in Greece the Nazi occupiers were starting to prepare their “escape” not their retreat from Greece.
So, in the wider Delphi area the Germans were starting a program of “search and destroy” against the Greek Resistance fighters, so that their “escape” could be safe. The commanding post of the Germans was at Amfissa, a small town at the northern-most edge of the plain of olives. On August 5, 1944 a battalion of the SS – Polizei Gebirgjaeger [SS – Police Mountain Riflemen (Hunters!)] had occupied the Village of Karootes which was deserted from its inhabitants. Karootes [accent on “oo”], a small village, is situated almost halfway to the top of Giona mount. The Germans, 208 soldiers and 3 officers, were armed as a regular army and they even had a piece of artillery, of 75 millimeters. The Germans were encircled by a force of about 400 Greek Resistance fighters, who were poorly armed with weapons they had acquired from the Nazi and Italian occupiers in previous battles; six Fiat [!} machineguns and a single German mortar of 81 millimeters. On August 5 the heat of the Greek summer hits around 42 Degrees Celsius [107 Degrees Fahrenheit]. The Greeks attacked around 2:30 p.m. The battle lasted bout five hours, and was carried not only from house to house, but even from room to room. Finally the Germans surrendered.
There were 97 dead Nazis, 105 prisoners and nine managed to escape. Among the dead was the German Commander, Captain Haker, and second Lieutenant Bruka. Alive was only the second in command, First Lieutenant Otto Webers. There were 30 dead Greek Resistance fighters. [In some testimonies Haker committed suicide.]
Forty years later, in 1984, a commemoration gathering was held at Karootes. Present were surviving Greeks that took part in the battle. However, the most important event was the reading of a letter by a German, translated in Greek. The German: Otto Webers the Second in Command of the Germans during the battle at Karootes. Here is his letter:
“It is a happy occasion that the anniversary for the 40 years since the battle of Karootes finds our two peoples working together on a par, for the future of Europe. This fact imposes on me the very gratifying duty to participate through this message in the commemoration of the battle. As a soldier who fought and was defeated I recognize my victors! As a commanding-officer of the German battalion I honor that guerilla army which won the battle and respected its opponents by respecting its word of honor that was given to them. I recognize that during the time we were held as prisoners the guerillas themselves did not have anything else to give us. I kneel in front of the humble monument for the fallen Greek fighters, and I mentally place flowers on this soil that covers also the remains of the German soldiers who fell while performing the duty of a soldier.” [Emphasis added.]
Otto Webers
The Greeks did not kill the German prisoners at the battle of Karootes. A first cousin of mine, a second generation American, took part in the “Battle of the Ardennes” during the Second World War. In a moment of frankness, he told me that his unit had captured an entire company of German soldiers and then the Americans executed all of them, even though the Germans were prisoners of war. Herr Schaeuble can check that in the German archives which the diligent Germans always maintain.
The Nazi Saxons, as good Protestants or whatever, naturally took revenge against the Greeks for the defeat. They burned to the ground five villages neighboring to Karootes. Among them was the village of “Skaloula,” the birthplace of my father. After the war to replace the five villages, they “created” a single village that they named the “Penta-polis” under the U.S. “Penta-gon” program of “urbanization,” supervised by the brave General James van Fleet of the U.S. Army, as a test for the “urbanization” in Vietnam.
Otto Webers was handed by the Greek Resistance to the British who sent him to a POW [Prisoners Of War] Camp in Egypt. He finally was released in 1947 and returned to Germany.
During the Battle of Karootes there were two WASPs observing the battle: an American and a Briton, who were operating as spies for the Allies, after they were parachuted to Karootes two years before the battle. The Nazis “escaped” from Greece, a few weeks after the battle, in October 1944. About sixty days later, on December 3, 1944, these WASPs and their handlers Winston Churchill and F.D. Roosevelt unleashed the Greek collaborators of the Nazis in an orgy of executions, torture, incarceration, and terror against the very Greek Resistance fighters who were the victors at the Battle of Karootes. That lasted for almost two decades. Even Stalin was an accomplice in this crime by the WASPs against the Greek Resistance fighters. [For the December 3, 1944 events (“Dekemvriana” in Greek) see my article “’Eleni’: The Work of a ‘Professional Liar’,” Covert Action, Number 25, Winter 1986.]
During that December 1944 and later the English arrested out on the streets of Athens 15,000 people, mostly Resistance fighters and every one else that they considered not dignified enough; gypsies, laborers, etc. and sent them to “POW Camp 381” in Egypt, at a place in the desert called El Daba, about 180 kilometers west of Alexandria. There were two neighboring POW Camps; 382 and 383 for Nazi German soldiers and officers.
So, the Anglo-WASPs used the Greeks to defeat their Saxon-WASP rivals and then put both of them in a concentration camp. I wonder if Webers, if alive today, in his nineties, is aware that a few yards away from his POW Camp there were the Greeks that fought him at Karootes.
Of course, the Saxons are not all bad. When Handel visited Italy as a young man and absorbed the music of the non-WASP Italians he was called by them: the “Carro Sassone” [the “dear Saxon”]. But, that was the 18th century.
Personally, what affects me most in the Battle of Karootes is the crookedness of some individuals. There were a number of Nazi soldiers that pretended they were surrendering and when the Greek fighter approached to take his rifle he killed him.
As for the U.S. WASPs, here is the latest on this crookedness of individuals:
The following U.S. Republican Congressmen, Duncan Hunter of California, Matt Salmon of Arizona and Ryan Zinke of Montana, are striving to pardon First Lt. Clint Lorance who is serving a 19-year sentence for crimes committed in Afghanistan. Lorance advised his soldiers to “go in Gestapo-style in night raids …” In one incident, Lorance ordered Private David Shilo to shoot. Shilo refused to “shoot a 12-year-old boy.”
To close this: Any generalizations to the tune that “war is cruel, barbaric, etc. what should one expect?” are not only dishonest but a tacit acceptance of that cruelty and barbarism. I feel that we should be wary of the persons that react this way.
The message from sunny Greece is: No more “Karootes” and no more “barbarism” by the IMF, the EU and the US, the “instruments’’” of the WASPs.
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