The Greeks don’t know anything about American domestic policy; nor do they care. But they do care about war and immigration.
Thinkers, Rhodes, Greece, 2006. (Riccardo Romano, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
By John Kiriakou
Special to Consortium News
I spent the past two weeks on my ancestral island of Rhodes, Greece, helping my cousin settle his late father’s estate. It’s no surprise that everybody — and I mean literally everybody — wanted to talk about this month’s U.S. presidential election.
Greece has long had an anti-American streak stemming from U.S. support for the 1967-1974 military dictatorship that killed, tortured, and imprisoned thousands of people just because of their political views. Indeed, the governing conservative New Democracy Party (ND) wins elections only because there are so many socialist and communist parties that they split the left-wing vote and allow the conservatives to govern.
But much to my surprise, every leftist I’ve spoken to, including just about everybody in my own family from the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) to the Socialist Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) has offered full-throated support to Donald Trump.
After hearing this over and over again, I decided to probe a little to get to the bottom of how lifelong socialists and communists can support a billionaire businessman who leads a capitalist and conservative political party. But the reasons for their admiration of Trump were quite simple. They saw Donald Trump as the anti-war candidate.
The Greeks don’t know anything about American domestic policy; nor do they care. They generally give you a blank stare when you mention abortion or health care or the environment. But they care about war.
They hate what is happening to the Palestinians and Lebanese, despite the fact that their government is unabashedly pro-Israel (as is Donald Trump.) They hate that the United States has armed one Orthodox Christian country, Ukraine, against another, Russia. And they hate that the United States has done nothing about the 50-year-long Turkish military occupation of Cyprus.
The Greeks genuinely believe that if anybody is going to end the Ukraine war or tell the Israelis to stop killing civilians in Palestine and Lebanon, it’s going to be Donald Trump. (I disagree strongly that Trump has any love whatsoever for the Palestinians. Indeed, he’s been Benjamin Netanyahu’s lapdog for years.)
But the Greeks argue that Democrats have only made the international situation worse, so why not give Trump another chance to make things better, like he did with North Korea, at least temporarily.
Immigration
Trump, in Yuma, Arizona, in June 2020, walking along the completed 200th mile of the border wall with Mexico. (White House/Shealah Craighead)
There’s another issue that the Greeks agree with Trump on, too. That’s the issue of immigration. The Greeks are well known for their hospitality. There’s even a word for it: Filoxenia, which means “love of the stranger.”
When Afghanistan and Iraq began falling apart, private Greek citizens actually stood on the beaches to welcome them as they washed ashore in rafts and to give them food and clothes. That changed when the European Union gave Turkey billions of dollars to hold refugees in Turkey and the Turks instead began forcing them across the border into Greece and just pocketing the money.
The Greeks, in turn, built a wall along the land border with Turkey. That enraged the Turks, of course, but the wall actually worked. And when Trump started talking about building a wall along the southern border with Mexico, the Greeks were all in.
As a progressive American voter, and a truly independent one at that, I’m not optimistic about the next four years. Abortion is of primary importance to me. So are the environment, workers rights, health care and education. I support easier immigration and an easier and quicker path to citizenship. Donald Trump will likely destroy all of that.
With that said, I believe that there are two areas where Trump is right. One is his support for a less interventionist foreign policy. The other is criminal justice reform. Trump issued a lot of pardons when he was president. He issued a lot of commutations. And he worked to do something about the sentencing disparities between white people convicted of crimes compared to people of color. At least there was that.
Donald Trump already has served one term as president. Consequently, he’ll be a lame duck beginning the moment he takes the oath of office on Jan. 20 with nobody on Capitol Hill owing him anything. He’ll be permanently out of office in four years.
Is it possible that we could be pleasantly surprised, then, on some of these issues? I expect to be far more disappointed than anything else. But I don’t want to be a Debbie Downer. I’m going to try to convince myself that some good will come of this. I don’t know exactly what it’ll be.
John Kiriakou is a former C.I.A. counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act—a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration’s torture program.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
“Greece has long had an anti-American streak stemming from U.S. support for the 1967-1974 military dictatorship”
Well, yes. But I’m confident that some people, particularly in the KKE, remember the British and U.S. intervention in Greece’s civil war (around 1947) that kept the popular left-wing parties (which had done most of the fighting against Nazis) from coming to power.
The war issue is a U.S. domestic thing, too. My old blue collar co-workers may not know terms like neolib, neocon, externality. But they know the econ system is trickle up, benefitting only a 1%er and corporate few. They know trillions of $$$ for endless wars means nothing for infrastructure, better healthcare, or much of anything domestic. They also know we’ve been ignored by the Ivy D elite party for decades.
Eastern Orthodoxy was mentioned, and it does figure into neocon plans. One of the groups to be opposed is the entire Orthodox world, seen as Russian influenced or at the very least as harboring inferior religion. Which has been the vociferous, arrogant, and self-righteous belief of the Atlanticist West for centuries.
Look at Samuel Huntington’s influential 2011 book titled //The Clash of Civilizations.// The Wiki entry shows his map defining these “civilizations;” more accurately described as west Euro and anglophone countries with all else as lesser to little, if any, degrees of civilization. Indigenous peoples don’t count whatsoever, but then they’re the very definition of uncivilized. The lessers, including the Orthodox and especially the Islamic nations, tend toward dictatorship, don’t understand free markets, and too often become military dangers to the West. Thus it’s a realistic strategy to take them out before they attack. In the name of self defense of course.
Trump might bring US involvement in Ukraine to a close. The neocons beat him last time. Israel? He’ll likely make things worse, if somehow they could be.
If Greeks wanted to help, they could work with the Chinese to keep ships with armaments for the IDF out of their ports.
“Easier immigration and pathway to citizenship” wouldn’t be so bad if we knew who all the migrants were. When Biden opened the border, it was rational for other countries to just empty their prisons and send their criminals, in the mass of others, our way. Lowering costs for them, increasing costs for us. I recently saw an interview with a migrant from Turkey who said he’d paid the cartels $10K to be trafficked. If that’s an average (some paying more some paying less), then multiply that by 10 million and that’s $100 BILLION to the cartels. It’s no wonder they advertise all over the world that the US is a land of milk & honey where everyone is wealthy and there are no problems. What I would say is we just need to follow the law. In the law, the qualifications for asylum are described. Sadly just being poor doesn’t qualify. Asylum is for specific persecution. I would also say — and I don’t know why more media doesn’t discuss this — why do we continue to send “aid” to countries their citizens want to flee from? How about creating incentives? Like, what if we only give you aid if you improve the lives of your citizens such that they want to stay home?
The war of the orthodoxies Roman, Greek/Russian, and Viking starting with stealing monotheism for defamation of character is what western culture wars are still attempting to brew world culture as our witches brews afraid of Asia without weaponized monotheism to manipulate in wars. What we need to world environmental planetism.
I really wish when people talked about Trump and immigration, they would have some nuance and make the distinction between orderly, controlled, legal immigration and illegal border jumping.
Trump and his supporters have no problem whatsoever with legal immigration. He might quibble about the methodology used to determine which applications get moved to the top of the pile (they prefer Canadian-style skills-preference over lotteries or family-chain immigration), but as he said, he want’s a ‘big beautiful door’ in his wall for those people who go through the legal immigration process.
What they do have a problem with is uncontrolled immigration run by criminal cartels, where nobody gets vetted and people aren’t the only thing crossing the border. Just getting to the border is a humanitarian nightmare, with something like 80% of the women who make the trek being sexually assaulted along the way, and hundreds of thousands of kids getting sent over and lost in the system who most likely wind up as human trafficking victims. For every one that make it across and achieve the American dream, there are dozens who only get the cartel’s nightmare version of America. The most humanitarian thing you can do for most people considering making the trip is to discourage them in the strongest terms possible. That is what Trump illegal immigration policies are designed to do.
What an absolute crock. Yes, Trump and his followers, whose frothing-at-the-mouth xenophobia has been very carefully stoked by his campaign really just want to help folks from countries Yank-centric imperialism has utterly wrecked and that’s why they want to empower the sociopaths at ICE and CBP. Sure. Apparently “nuance” for contemporary rightists like yourself is ignoring what Trump himself and his surrogates say about his policy proposals-when not actively insisting “that isn’t what he actually means”-then cooking up the most benign (and frankly utterly implausible) interpretations of those policy proposals and pretending that’s what they’re actually all about.
Over here in reality, the US has had a brutal anti-immigrant, anti-asylum policy for some time now mainly because blaming everything wrong in this country on immigrants (a fucking joke on its face) is solid red meat to throw to the plebes and, most importantly, it costs the oligarchs (like Biden & Trump) who run this country nothing at all.
John with much respect, rather than comment in purely negative terms I will commit to making no comment on your take here.
I will however remind you of Maya Angolou’s quite sensible quote, “When someone tells you who they are believe them the first time.”
Thank you, John. Any idea how Trump came to support criminal justice reform and non-interventionist policies?
They have the same picture in every “Capitalist” country in Europe, the true Left opposing the elites part of the criminal NATO alliance and brotherhood of evil with the US Empire. Despite its imperial past, Europe still is the center of western civilization, as opposed to the Five Eyes entente insistence in being called the heart of “Democracy” in the world.
Oh, man, are you ever in an optimistic mood. Too much retsina?