The Dust of Greece on My Shoes

Embedded in the seams of my black oxford walking shoes there can still be seen the light-coloured dust of Greece from a recent trip there.

I was almost going to write “the ancient dust,” since we traversed the Acropolis in Athens, prehistoric Corinth, Olympia and the original Olympic games site, Delphi, the monasteries of the high Meteora outcrops, and Thermopylae before we headed off to the tourist islands of Mykonos and Santorini.

But the dust in Vancouver, of course, is just as ancient, although it lacks the molecules, and the echoes, of far-distant human history and prehistory if not the gods themselves, that must float around in Greece still.

I swear that you could march off a couple of hundred yards or metres in any direction there, start excavating and before too long discover some sign of ancient civilization — that was how dense the presence of Greece’s history felt.

Up to the Acropolis

Our tour guide for the mainland part of the tour, which was really an archaeological one, was a young archaeologist between digging gigs who made ends meet by taking around, in this case, a bunch of Americans, Australians, and two Canadians — my wife and me.  Our guide was very serious about her job — so proud of her country and its heritage and eager to impart a detailed knowledge of the sites we visited.

Greece’s universities produce many archaeologists, given its many ruins and artifacts and the interest of many parts of the world in its rich history.  But probably too many, especially given its current economic troubles, of which we observed some signs.

That evidence included expensive half-built homes left undone in the dust and heat, and the shells of uncompleted businesses abandoned until times get better.  In the larger cities could be seen much graffiti on building walls which our guide said had cropped up most extensively in the last couple of years with all the troubles.  Mainly they were messages about politics and sports teams, she said.

But there were no riots in the streets, no bonfire-fueled protests or chanting demonstrations.  Both our guides during the trip expressed frustration with the way the media gets stuck on the most dramatic snapshot of events and then repeats that image well past where the reality has changed and moved on.  There is no question that there is hardship in the country: high unemployment, reduction in wages and access to money, political corruption, but most people cope as they struggle and make do amidst the uncertainty of their lives.

Meteora Monastery

Tourism is a huge economic engine for the country, and although there had been some cancellations due to the economic unrest and the migrant crisis in other parts of the country, there were still many coming to the ancient land.  Tourism and olive trees — everywhere.

Highlights of the trip:

♦ The hilltop plateau in Athens with the Acropolis and the hordes who accompanied us to the top. Making our way through the sweating crowds up the steep pathways to the top seemed like a secular pilgrimage of sorts.  The old temples and reminders of the old gods – Athena, Apollo, Poseidon, Zeus – although now just backdrops for thousands of digital snapshots and selfies, still have an essential dignity and grandeur.  This feeling of pilgrimage was strong in me and perhaps also, if unconscious, in many of the multitudes standing on the doorstep of the beginnings of Western Civilization.  These gods and the Athenians who worshipped them somehow engendered the idea of democracy.

Oh, Athenian democracy was limited.  You had to be a citizen of the city-state, to have completed your military training and to be male to qualify.  Athens became an imperial power, often cruel in the way of empires.  And as somebody once said, like Christianity, democracy has yet to be thoroughly practiced — even or especially by the Athenians.  Yet, in that era of authoritarian and tyrannical gods and rulers, somehow the Athenians were the very first to find their way for a time to the idea that direct participation in politics, in their own governing, was both possible and necessary.  Theirs was not a “representative” democracy, where one periodically is allowed to vote for those made available by the elites, but direct, where one had to be in attendance, both figuratively and literally.

♦ Seeing the Antikythera Mechanism in the flesh, so to speak (or in the metal) at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.  In my enthusiasm I’ve written about that unique and mysterious machine or computer in a couple of posts here over the years (The Antikythera Mechanism: Ancient Computer and The Antikythera Mechanism Revisited).  I’m still amazed at its existence: it gives you new respect for the minds at the dim edges of the history we are able to know.

♦ The Eastern or Greek Orthodox Church monasteries perched atop the rocky crags of Meteora.  In a landscape of surreal rocky crags, the six perched monasteries look over the valley below.  Two of them are for nuns. One we were told was inhabited by only three monks, two in their nineties.  The Eastern Church, as its brother Catholic Church, is not the attractive vocation of young people as it was once.  But we did find there tourists and buses from all over Europe, especially places such as Romania and Serbia.  Many who came were of the faith, there to pay their respects.  After climbing up the steep stone stairs, one can only marvel at the efforts it took to build these places, mostly in the 1500s.

♦ Once we left the mainland, it was on to the more leisurely islands of Mykonos and Santorini.  The Aegean is as blue as the tourist brochures show, and the white and pastel buildings glow in the sun.

Santorini Church Bell

There were many other places of course: the sonically impressive theatre at Epidaurus, the ruins at Delphi, and the original Olympic grounds near Olympia.  I even ran back and forth over the race track in what remains of the stadium.  I hope that allows me to say I’m an Olympic athlete….

I came away from Greece with a new appreciation for the Greek people, subjugated and over-run by various empires for centuries, now going through the current crises — they are enormously resilient to have kept their culture and sense of identity.  They have a justifiable pride in their country and their history.  In the wet fall of the Pacific Northwest, I like to look at the faint line of white dust in the seams of my shoes.

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Note:  More photos from Greece in addition to the above will eventually be on my photo website, The Suspended Moment….

The Migrant Crisis and An Old Apocalyptic Novel

“Raspail may have written the most politically incorrect book in France in the second half of the twentieth century.”
— Matthew Connelly and Paul Kennedy, The Atlantic, Dec. 1994 in a review of The Camp of the Saints, by Jean Raspail, 1973.
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My wife and I recently visited Greece on vacation for a couple of weeks, part archaeological tour and part chasing photographs on a couple of the tourist islands.

At night, with BBC World Service usually about the only English channel available on TV, we heard and saw all the drama and tragedy of the ongoing migrant crisis, which continues to deepen.  Although we didn’t come into contact with it, Greece on top of its economic troubles is also dealing with an influx of the refugees piling into Europe and headed north.

It reminded me a lot of an old science-fiction novel, I guess you could call it, I read back in the 1970s.  Returning from our trip, I tried to track down the name and more details of the book.  It turns out to have been the 1973 apocalyptic novel The Camp of the Saints by Frenchman Jean Raspail, which was translated into English in 1975 and I must have read shortly thereafter.

It’s about the starving, the wretched and the disenfranchised pouring out of India in a flotilla a million strong and arriving on the beaches of France.  Although France is the focus, the rest of Europe and the Western world in the novel eventually suffer the same fate as hordes of migrants continue to come ashore.  As Raspail himself put it:

“I literally saw them, saw the major problem they presented, a problem absolutely insoluble by our present moral standards. To let them in would destroy us. To reject them would destroy them.”

On their way to France, the enormous flotilla wants to approach Egypt (to gain access to the Suez Canal) and South Africa, but the military of both countries threaten to sink the boats and drown the occupants if they should approach.  So, in Raspail’s world, the horde of migrants make their way to France.  Raspail is more interested really in the reaction of the French establishment and the rest of Europe in the face of such an onslaught, and depicts it as decadent and weak in the face of this threat to the Western way of life.  He casts the coming migrants in a poor light as mangy and prone to violence and sexual assaults in their long journey to anywhere that will be better than what they left.

A review of the book by T. Williamson describes it in a way that is thought-provoking about current events:

“The actions of the main characters in the book mirror what we see every day in the media and especially on the Internet: There are the government spokesmen telling us not to panic, the media talking heads telling us what our duty is or should be, the leaders of church and society instructing us in what is the “proper” way to feel about everything that’s happening to us. And front and center is the ordinary citizen, caught like a child under a steamroller as events roll over them at their terrible slow speed.”

The Fate of Western Civilization

The point of Raspail’s book seems to be that Western civilization is psychologically incapable of defending itself.  The French in the end order their miltary to shoot or sink the approaching menacing armada, but the soldiers and navy refuse and flee.  Eventually, at the end of the novel, as examples of the overrunning by the third world, the mayor of New York is made to share Gracie Mansion with three families from Harlem, the Queen of England must marry her son to a Pakistani and other huge armadas are ready to head for Australia, New Zealand, and Europe.

Raspail has been accused of writing a racist tract, but that is too simple.  As an example, one main spokesman for European civilization in the novel is non-white but has embraced what he sees as the best of Western civilization.

As another reviewer, Dominique M. Sanchez, puts it:

“I did not see it as a racist book but as a book written by an elitist who is strongly attached to his way of life and fearful of seeing it vanish. All cultures are protective and proud of their own ways and that includes Asian, African, Middle Eastern, Latin populations. The issue here is poverty and exploitation, not necessarily race.”

Over the years, as migrant and refugee crises have cropped up here and there, those from both sides of the political spectrum have referred to this book from the mid-1970s.

The National Review, a prestigious conservative publication, in 2014 had a short essay by Mackubin Thomas Owens about The Camp of the Saints after the sudden influx of migrant children into the United States.  He asserted the deficiencies of multiculturalism and the loss of self-confidence of Western liberal society:

“Instead, multiculturalism has spawned a balkanized society of resentful members of various groups that seek favors for themselves, often at the expense of other groups — identity politics at its worst.”

The Atlantic, a literary and cultural magazine that would likely be considered too liberal by the National Review, examined The Camp of the Saints 20 years prior to that, trying to place the fictional events of Raspail’s novel in the context of exploitation of the third world.

The authors, Matthew Connelly and Paul Kennedy, wrote in 1994 that:

“Perhaps the global problem of the early twenty-first century is basically this: that across our planet a number of what might be termed demographic-technological fault lines are emerging, between fast-growing, adolescent, resource-poor, undercapitalized, and undereducated populations on one side and technologically inventive, demographically moribund, and increasingly nervous rich societies on the other.”

The Fault Line of War

It seems to me that the main fault line is simpler than that, and it’s called war.  The current migrant and refugee numbers are a direct result of civil, guerilla and national wars.  Right now, on the continent of Africa alone, there are something like 20 nations with major conflicts with a half-million or more of their citizens on the move, struggling to survive.  That’s not even on the horizon of most Western minds.  Never mind all the displacement from the Middle East conflicts that is front and centre in the media now.

My modest proposal is that those nations who profit most from the billions of dollars they are making in the arms trade, who export the weapons of war, should import the most refugees.

By that measure, the United States, Russia, Germany, China and France should be taking in the most.  Great Britain (no. 6) and Canada (no. 15) should also be stepping up.  (And remember the hypocrisy when representatives of those nations prattle about the evils of war.)

Connelly and Kennedy put it well at the end of their Atlantic article:

“However the debate unfolds, it is, alas, likely that a large part of it–on issues of population, migration, rich versus poor, race against race–will have advanced little beyond the considerations and themes that are at the heart of one of the most disturbing novels of the late twentieth century, Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints. It will take more than talk to prove the prophet wrong.”

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