kolovratsk:

kokkinisto-kounoopi:

:

Awful but not totally destructive shit:

-Stole our most valuable artifacts

-Pretended to be the heirs of ancient Greece to justify their  white supremacist colonialist actions/thinking while making up theories that current Greeks weren’t descendants of ancient Greeks and that we’d ruined our pure lineage by mixing with Middle Easterners

More destructive shit:

-Helped liberate Greece from the Ottoman Empire so they could put it under the control of the Great Powers, giving Greece a horrible German king for ages. For that moment, Greeks got to be Christian Europeans so that the British public could be convinced to support the huge effort of the liberation of Greece. Basically making sure Greece was under the control of the Great Powers

-They arranged the massacre that preceded/helped trigger the Greek Civil War

-During the Greek Civil War, they armed nationalists to keep Greece from joining the Soviet Union and keep Greece under their/western sphere of influence. This eventually resulted in them creating and arming ultra-nationalists that would evolve into Golden Dawn, Greece’s extremely violent fascist party. So they basically created a terrorist group within our borders for their own geopolitical interests. The Greek Civil War was also the first proxy war of the Cold War

-Other geopolitical fuckery

-More generally about Greeks overall, they also colonized Cyprus, stirred up ethnic tensions which resulted in the deaths of countless people, planned the partition of Cyprus which resulted in thousands of Greek-Cypriots dead and displaced, and arrested and tortured thousands of Greek-Cypriots including civilians. 

@kolovratsk

On the subject of Cyprus, the British government also used it to goad Greece into abandoning neutrality during World War I, despite having been the ones to establish a Danish-German monarchy, which automatically meant Greece would have great difficulty supporting the UK. They promised to withdraw from Cyprus and stop standing in the way of enosis but quickly withdrew that promise once the war had been won and Greece had been left in ruins.

Another interesting point I recently discovered was in the 19th century, Greece was controlled by the Great Powers Britain, France and Russia, which all created their own political parties in an attempt to fully colonize the country. The UK used Greece’s English Party (which they had set up) to promote one of their supporters – Charilaos Trikoupis and make him Prime Minister. Incidentally, once that happened, Greece went bankrupt within less than a decade, and the British started privatizing important parts of the country, all while pretending to save it from the other two powers. This influence has, unfortunately, not yet faded. E.g. we still do not own our country.

British intervention in Crete was also criticized strongly, especially in the late 1940s because the aim was to keep Greeks fighting and dying against the Italians and Germans, while the British government had instructed its army to protect Turkey (from Greece, ironically) so it would gain access to the Middle East.

Not going to talk about the Parthenon Marbles because that’s old news, @kokkinisto-kounoopi said it already. But I am going to mention that the Civil War was one of the most brutal conflicts in Greece, with 190000 natives dead, and a million people displaced. The British Army essentially entered the country, killed members of the resistance force that actively helped them just years before and helped win WWII by stalling the Germans long enough to postpone the Invasion of Russia, and disarmed them with the promise that they wouldn’t attack. The rebels laid down their weapons, and the next thing that happened was British bombs raining down on them. This bloodbath, known as the Dekemvriana, lasted a month and resulted in the death of 20000 civilians.