- Volume 23, Number 2, October 2005, pp. 217-234:
“Nationalism acts as a bulwark against death, fate, and contingency. It replaces religion, claiming qualities for the state that clearly are not true. Indeed, today Greece nationalism is an Invented Fiction. In this, Greece does not differ from other European nations in which nationalism developed in the void left by the breakdown of the Christian world-view. The Neohellenic 18-century Enlightenment invented a glorious past for Greece as well as a glorious future. But the distortions were so gross that they could not continue without revision during the nineteenth century. Then nationalism was reinvented still again in the twentieth century.What we need to realize in the 21- century is that the world has had quite enough of these inventions. Let us redevelop an all-embracing system of value that goes beyond the nation-state”The Ancient Greece was essentially evoked and an invention of Western PhilHellenes. Even Katharevousa ("the purified one" was a form of the Greek language set in motion during the early 19th century by pseudo-Greek nationalist leader Adamantios Korais (1748–1833), although ostensibly meant to 'refine' those who spoke and wrote it, trying to make them more “greek” (although not necessarily peaceful) by eliminating from their vocabulary the Turkish words that kept them chained to their degeneracy - even Katharevousa was produced not just for the Ottomanized Greeks, but also for Western philhellenes.For over a century and a half Greek State institutions, organizations and pseudo-intelectuals have been making unproven and unfounded theories that the modern Greeks are direct descendents of the ancients inhabitants of the region . To this day they have shown no evidence to prove their claims. There is ample evidence that proves that this particular modern pseudo-Greek claim suffers from a deep amnesia and is an absurd pseudo-Greek lie.It was a double distortion and a double big lie: a distortion of Ancient Greek reality, and a distortion as well of Modern Greek reality! Invented nationalism is expert not only at distorting but also at forgetting - indeed, forgetting is probably the prime mechanism for distorting. In a word, nationalism requires Amnesia. And one of the major areas of amnesia in Greece concerns the role of the Orthodox Church in the period leading up to the Revolution - specifically the role of Patriarch Gregory V.
'We now come to the third division of the Albanian language, which consists of unknown roots, or at least of such as have not hitherto been explained; we might at first have been apt to leave the examination of the subject to orientalists, and to suppose that these words were exclusively of Asiatic origin, because they are apparently foreign to every known European language. But as we have ocassionaly been able to account for some of these roots, and to connect them, in spite of their irregularity, with the Hellenic and other European dialects, we were led to conclusion that the primitives of a pure and indigenous language like the Albanian, must have been at one time common to the Thracian, Illyrian, Phrygian and Lydian, and that the uknown roots are not the least valuable part of each or all these languages. The Albanian .. might become as useful, in an historical point of view, as the language of the Orpheus or Deucalion, and might enable us to explain the meaning attached to the names of many ancient people and places '
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812-1819), which Byron had begun writing while in Albania, Scanderbeg and his warrior nation are described in the following terms:
Canto II, LXV.George Castriot, surnamed Scanderbeg, King of Albania
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