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Greece Was Never “Western” (And Still Isn’t) (ladamedazur.medium.com)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/comradeship@lemmygrad.ml
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Little thing I wrote on Medium. I'd appreciate some feedback.

Wasn't sure where to post this so I put it here.

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[–] 11 points 3 months ago (1 child)

I never thought about it that way, but it makes a lot of sense. I know almost nothing about modern Greece and yet I have at least passing familiarity with various elements of ancient Greek philosophy or mythology (through a westernized lens of them anyway). It seems like a very colonizer thing to do. Pick out the parts you want to keep, warp them to your ideology, and erase/ignore/exploit the actually existing society.

It reminds me of the psychology of quoting figures from the past more generally. I don't understand the why very well, but I'm sure there is something to the idea that, at least in the white western context, people will tend to take words more seriously if you frame them as something said in the past by a famous figure (hell, sometimes even a fictional character).

Like if I were to say, "The fall of the US will be marked by the rise of a false populism. With popular will so starkly and continuously buried beneath a facade, the anger at being ignored will rise like never before." I'd probably say I'm being dramatic and trying to sound profound when I'm not. But if I went: "The fall of democracy will be marked by the rise of a false populism. With popular will so starkly and continuously buried beneath a facade, the anger at being ignored will rise like never before." - Socrates

There'd probably be people who would be like, wow, so deep. Socrates got it, even back then.

And it brings me back to the idea that the "white" west is fundamentally stuck in the past. Which is ironic because as you point out, it doesn't have a legacy to be proud of in the first place. So it's stuck in the past yet also stuck pining for a civilization that never was, a profundity of understanding it never had, and a capability it only ever got through things like mass racialized slavery. It has little to actually be proud of, so it steals bits and pieces from others and claims them as its own. And it has plenty to be deeply ashamed of, which it washes away at the altar of "humanity is flawed and broken and fundamentally can't be fixed but you can do some penance and then go do more war crimes."

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  • [–] [S] 12 points 3 months ago*

    Yeah, if I'm being totally honest I didn't use to think about it all that much either. It was only over the past few years I started really noticing Greece's place in "Western Civilization" and the history & culture of the West that I started realizing it doesn't occupy nearly the same place of importance as Rome, whom it's often paired together with. We follow Ancient Greece right up until Rome poofs into existence and then forget all about Greece thereafter but continue following Rome's influence even after Rome itself falls. Even the Byzantine Empire barely gets mentioned outside of the Crusades and maybe the Great Schism. The absence of Byzantium from history was actually what got me interested in that civilization and the more I learned the more I realized how it was almost completely missing from the cultural mind of the West, despite essentially being a synthesis of both Rome & Greece - the alleged mutual forebears of "Western Civilization" - and began to wonder exactly why that was. It was kicked off a much broader trend of me looking at other civilizations that often get little mention or discussion by Western pop history, such as Scythia, Abyssinia, Persia, Armenia, Assyria, etc.

    But what really got the gears in my head turning was when I realized there was a very common Orientalist treatment of Greek music and how often Westerners hear it and think it's from Arabia or Iran or whatever. That's when I really started forming all these ideas before, finally, Nolan's The Odyssey and the controversy it spawned made everything click, watching the Far Right speak so authoritatively on a work they didn't understand from a culture they know nothing about while claiming to believe in authenticity and how they tried to link their moral outrage to a diverse movie cast to the state of the modern West when many of these chuds have a hard-on for Rome, not Greece.

    By the time I started typing it all up everything just fell perfectly into place.

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