25-7-94
My cousin Virginia has had a very strong voice since she was young. Piercing. Which she activated every time she felt wronged. Which means every day. "You lose your right by your manner," her mother used to tell her. Something that I had realized early on and counted on to tilt the scales of justice of the elders in my favor during our childhood squabbles.
Lately, I have come to the conclusion that my cousin's temperament coincides with the characteristics of the average Greek mentality. That is, with intense childish sentimentality, with a permanent background of bitterness and betrayal with a sense of violated justice, with explosive reactions, with hasty actions, and with a lack of rational judgment and self-criticism.
What else do the national-hysterical reactions regarding our threatened language show, while ignoring our own faults towards it and the identical fate of other small countries, albeit with a less glorious past? How else can we explain the most self-destructive, blind, and stubborn foreign policy, and in what way will we accept our cultural isolation through the picturesque and naive emphasis on our supposedly pure national-religious past?
All these demonstrate a possibly endearing, but certainly fruitless, childish sentimentality, which because it starts from a usually sincere and oppressed sense of justice, explodes indiscriminately in every direction with little chance of rectification, even of the existing injustice.
This seems to be the general psychograph of the average citizen of our country, and this very cunningly, and not very intelligently, is cultivated by most of the politicians and most of the journalists.
However, there was one step my cousin never took, and I am grateful to her for that. She never responded to the feeling of oppressed justice by reversing the terms. She did not become an agent of injustice, an oppressor, a revenger. Her childishness remained pure and did not succumb to the cunning of the so-called mature realism.
However, I cannot attribute the same commendation to our national mentality. And it is not helpful to argue about who is first or more to blame, the average Greek or the politicians and the media. The anonymous journalist who wrote months ago in a reputable morning newspaper that if Turkey were wiped off the map, the harm would be small, since it has contributed nothing to the history of civilization, is also an average Greek. As is the 70% of the Greek people who fanatically supported the unjust and fruitless exclusion of Macedonia, or the vindictive expulsion of thousands of unfortunate Albanians. Greek spiritual leaders are those who proclaim that we are better than all, that we have the best religion and the most glorious past, perhaps also the best basketball team. Average Greeks are those who adopt an attitude of a chosen race towards their co-inhabitants in this country, whom in the worst case they do not consider Greeks and in the best case they call minorities.
I feel emotion and tenderness to belong to a people with evident childish elements of spontaneity, even when it makes them lose their right. However, I feel painful isolation, when I realize that childish innocence is so easily, so quickly, and so widely converted into injustice and intolerance. The road from naivety to folly and from just defense to unjust counterattack is not long. Let's try not to cross it all."
Plato Rivellis