In return the US was allowed to house the 6th fleet in Greece and built dozens of american bases for radars and rockets. In short the actions of the US government has caused a lot of pain, and most people are old enough to have been directly affected by that aggression.
Take for instance Latin America. Have a look at how the US has stoped communism spreading all over the world. Vietnam, Korea, Cambodia. Not to mention of course the blatant support for Israel. You say that it was american citizens that were killed in the twin towers and not government officials. The same goes for the countries that you claim hate you for no reason. But this example is important, not least of all because it comes from Greece, a country where anti-Americanism is handed down from generation to generation like heirloom china.
First, the interpretation provided above glosses over much, including the U. As Greek writer Takis Michas pointed out in The National Interest in , one survey of secondary school students in Greece conducted in the late s ranked Americans below Gypsies as being among the most despised peoples in the world.
Greek extremists have occasionally even taken American blood as retribution for perceived wrongs — from the murder of four Americans, three diplomats and a Harvard-educated CIA officer named Richard Welch, in to the rocket attack on the U.
Since , in fact, there have been more than terrorist attacks against Americans or American interests in Greece. And, as the report of the U. And Greece has its own. They include Greek paramilitary units fighting alongside Bosnian Serbs under the command of wanted war criminal Gen. Ratko Mladic. In the nature of things, America matters a great deal more to the Greeks than Greece matters to America, and their respective perceptions and obsessions differ accordingly.
The military and economic assistance provided to Greece in the post WWII years is not forgotten, but neither does the fact that such assistance corresponded to US strategic interests. The resulting dependence was bound to produce a degree of resentment — and in the case of the vanquished of the civil war outright enmity. Many small acts of highhandedness contributed to creating bitterness. American considerations of anti-Soviet and anti-Communist containment often were translated into support for a political role of Greek extra-parliamentary institutions such as the monarchy and the armed forces.
It is manifest, and not only to Greek opinion, that the United States acquiesced to, if it did not inspire and actively embrace, the military dictatorship , in the name of the maintenance of military bases and facilities deemed "essential" by the Pentagon during the Junta years, but only "significant" thereafter.
When the folly of the Greek Colonels in the summer of , an attempted coup against President Makarios, triggered the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, the United States adopted a position of "equidistance", amounting to a pronounced pro-Turkish tilt in the troubled Greek-Turkish relationship. The American position of alleged neutrality was all the more apparent given that the Junta, by then an international pariah, had no patron other than official Washington.
Finally, the present American stance with respect to Cyprus also strikes most Greeks as partial and dictated by military considerations favoring Turkey in the strategic scheme of things rather than the merits of the case. After the restoration of democracy in , following the unceremonious collapse of the Junta, the Greeks were often lectured by the United States about their supposedly lax response to a small but deadly band of domestic terrorists, called "November Also, in the early s, the populist anti-American sloganeering of Andreas Papandreou did not exactly help Greek-American relations.
His tier-mondist rhetoric no doubt strengthened negative stereotypes. Yet, despite a perilous course, Papandreou managed to defang the traditional revolutionary left and channel its forces into a center-left party that could alternate with the center-right in an orderly democratic pattern.
Papandreou's policies, having given verbal vent to the worst popular frustrations, have contributed, paradoxically, to improving Greek American relations in the longer run. The new Greece that has emerged as a mature democracy and advanced economy, anchored safely in the European Union, can afford to overcome old grudges.
It may take some time before Greeks fully internalize their newfound objective dignity, so aptly demonstrated by the flawless handling of the Olympic Games in Athens. If this dignity is matched by the respect it rightly deserves, the future of Greek-American relations will be better for all concerned. It does this through scholars-in-residence, seminars, policy study groups, media commentary, international conferences and publications.
The program investigates European approaches to policy issues of importance to the United States, including globalization, digital transformation, climate, migration, global governance, and relations with Russia and Eurasia, China and the Indo-Pacific, the Middle East and Africa.
Read more. Close Search Search. Show Streaming. Explore More. Is this really hatred? The reason that she is us born is that her left-wing father fled persecution in greece to live in america. While here he raised a family, had a career that he retired from and waited out the right-wing dominance of greece.
Now that he is retired, he has returned to his home island where he enjoys his us retirement and acts as the mayor. Just my observation here, but I think that most of this hatred of america stands as an emotional front that could easily be bypassed on a personal level.
If you are considering a trip, then surely you will enjoy yourself without even having to act canadian. I was there just a few months ago, and it was wonderful. Stay at Hotel Kapodistrias. Watching the Acropolis as dusk arrives and the floodlights turn on is otherworldly. Especially over an excellent meal. Make a reservation. I polled my Greek buddies 6. Joe Grossberg: I stand by my statement.
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