Remembering our four centuries under Ottoman rule, Greeks should consider the cultural infiltration of America a new kind of societal subversion and defend our traditions accordingly.
Greece was once a colony of the Ottoman Empire. Across nearly 400 years, Greeks were second-class citizens in the land they inhabited for millennia. During this period of occupation and the many wars of reconquest that were fought to reclaim Hellenic territory, untold millions of Greeks were lost due to genocide, starvation, famine, war, and forced conversion and assimilation.
The Janissaries were the fighting force of the Ottoman Empire, and rather than recruiting from their own population, the Turks would take young Greek, Serbian, and Armenian men to force into military service. This indoctrination included forcing them to speak Turkish and abandon their native identity. Many millions of Greek boys and men were taken from their homes, castrated, and used to subjugate their own people at the commands of their Turkish superiors. The damage to the Greek people through this process is impossible to calculate and it has become the foundation of the death of millions of Greeks.
It would be easy for us to opine on the millions of Greeks lost to the Turkish sword and the policies of the Ottoman state, but the reality is that the dead are buried and Greece is faced with a new challenge: one much more deadly than that of the past. This new threat is none other than the complete destruction of the Hellenic culture, religion, and language. Unlike our previous colonization, this is not done at the barrel of a gun or the edge of a sword, but slowly and without fanfare or violence. Greece is being colonized from the inside, and its way of life and traditions are under attack by cultural imperialists from America and the West.
Today, it is no longer necessary to invade a country with tanks and guns – modern imperialist powers can get everything they want out of their new client states by slowly spreading their influence and undermining the local culture through covert means. Anyone who spends a day in Athens can see the sheer amount of destruction wreaked by America without a single bullet being fired. Traditional dress disappeared a long time ago; everything has been replaced by American styles and fast fashion; the young people of Greece eagerly await the next trend on TikTok to tell them how to dress, how to talk, and how to do their makeup. American slang has become increasingly popular, gracing the lips of every Greek under the age of 35. iPhones, Jeans, hamburgers, and rap music dominate modern Greek society while truly Greek traditions and cultural quirks fall by the wayside. There are a great number of changes to the Greek lifestyle, as evidenced by this departure from tradition and the mass adoption of globalism. These harmful developments are painfully blatant in every corner of popular culture and society.
Individually, things like American slang, jeans, hamburgers, and rap music are relatively harmless. However, they are all taking hold at the same precise moment, representing a severe departure from our traditional society and the adoption of various anti-Hellenic habits. In my experience, people in Greece idolize America and assume that what the people of America do is inherently better than Greek society. Consequently, they have a narrow impression of America based on television and media that they wish to emulate, without proper knowledge of the societal deterioration that has ensued in response. Not only is their vision of America a false construction of Hollywood and music videos, but the America that they wish to imitate is not something worthy of the noble and heroic Greek people who have been the epicenter of culture, music, theology, and language throughout history.
Anyone in Greece who is paying attention can see how there is a concerted effort by the powers that be to disrupt traditional Hellenic society and replace it with the global culture of consumerism and undisrupted capitalism. Without intervention from the Greek people, backed by faithfulness to their country and their God, Greece will fall in the way of Western European countries like the Netherlands, where Dutch culture and language are an endangered species in their own country. Some people believe that all societies reach a point where the old is replaced with the new, and things like traditions and culture are arbitrary constructions that don’t need to be protected, we disagree. It is the Greek culture and traditions that are solely responsible for the construction of the greatest civilization the earth has ever seen, from the Hoplites of Ancient Greece to the kings of the Byzantine Empire, to the revolutionaries who struggled for our independence; all of Greece has been guided by a strong respect and observance of our traditions. These traditions must be protected if Greece is to remain Greek and we must do everything in our power to ensure that it does.