Silence is Surrender
“The Sin of Silence casts the Longest Shadow”. The Other Genocide the World forgot to remember...
“The Sin of Silence casts the Longest Shadow”...
“They have the longest memories in Greek Macedonia. The one-time rulers of the “Known World”, as far as the Indus before “India” was India, under Alexander the Great and his father “Philip The Macedon”. Greek Macedonians remember, as if it were yesterday, the Apostle St. Paul writing to “The Thessalonians”. And typically, as yet, to receive a reply.
Injustices, however dusty with Time, cast the longest shadows. Each wrong, a pebble rippling through time. Something the Greek Macedonian, the Father of Philosophy, Aristotle, taught Plato. As Plato taught us and we forget daily.
“The Greek Genocide” by the occupying Sunni Ottoman Turks 1915-1918- and before and after- has been air-brushed by other Holocausts. By louder voices with access to the “Lights and Action” of Hollywood. Despite the Province of “Drama” that lies in the North of Greek Macedonia.
My great grandparents, among the million massacred or forcibly expelled (escaping to the USA in 1916), after having their lands above “Salonika” (Thessaloniki) and business in Constantinople sequestered. Still awaiting compensation. Justice- with interest at 10%.
It is something the English, un-invaded (until recently self-invaded by migration), will never understand, quite. Though they unilaterally and disastrously ceded their hard-fought for Independence (by young Americans), to the embryonic EU in 1973.
In Muslim-occupied Greece, the British stood by until 1918 when the massacres were all but over, and the Winter rains had washed the sticky blood from the harbour and into the ever-forgiving Aegean.
An uncle and brother (Demetrius, a University Doctor and his brother, a Lawyer in training), were tied to chairs at the back of the family farmhouse. Shot with the Luger pistol of a German captain in Gravena; the sound of death and of injustice, echoing round the mountainous valleys of pine nut tress and olive groves.
Here, in Greek mythology the River Styx divides the “World of the Living” from the Hades of The Dead. Its’ silver-grey waters run under the local stone bridge…
Unlike us, the brothers did not have far to travel. Paid The Ferryman with their few coins in young blood and stolen hopes. Vowing that one day, as the hollow shots rang out, that occupied “Istanbul” would return to a new, “Greek Byzantium”. I believe them.
There is a saying, untranslatable from Greek, that what you “Cannot Forget- you cannot Forgive”. Even if you wanted to.
Machiavelli, who had perhaps heard the saying second-hand, conjured up “Revenge is a dish best served cold”.
Others, ghosts condemned to roam the olive grove- still in the family. The hills, where the early snow and limestone are hard to tell apart, would answer.
“Those who do not believe that, have simply never had it cold enough”.
FROM AUTOBIOGRAPHY 1- JAMES CHANEL- AMAZON KDP