Tweet
Racism from Greece and Greeks
The Mail Nazi: 'No Mail For You!'; Greece's handling of Ethnic Macedonian political mail
June 28, 2009
Alexandra Aleksovska
There is an adage that you can tell a lot about a country by the way it treats women. I would add to that that you can also tell a lot about a country by the way its postal service works. The postage system might sound drab and boring, but think about it, entire economies depend on invoices and contracts being sent. Given that the postal service often has relatively low wages, employs a lot of people from all over each particular country and has more contact with a person's physical residence than any other organization, it tends to reflect national culture a lot better than say, a country's international airline. For that reason I believe the postal service always seems to be a good reflection of the character of a nation.
In the US the postal system is seen as being efficient, trusted, upholding values, doing whatever it takes to get the mail through and every now and then one of its employees 'goes postal' and guns down a few people; one may see a resemblance to the way the United States behaves internationally. In Japan, the postal system is reliable, works hard and due to the cheap capital provided by its banking business was one of the reasons why Japan was able to expand explosively from the 1950s until the 1980s. Bangladesh for example, has a postal system that reflects it's government – corrupt. I sent a friend in Bangladesh a new, sealed, Kenny G CD via airmail. It arrived at her door three months later. According to her it had been at the post office in Dhaka for two and a half months. The CD had slight scratching and the booklet showed signs of heavy usage. Based on that experience, I'd conclude that the post office in Bangladesh is corrupt; or at the least have a communal view of property, and are also Kenny G fans.
Here in Australia, our postal system also reflects our culture. If it is delivered by Australia Post, the service is good and as efficient as any in the world. However, when it comes to the outsourced contract workers, you get a feel for the way we Australians can sometimes act when we are unsupervised. I used to live in a rural area where the postman was a contractor. Raining? No mail. Good surf? No mail. High petrol prices? Mail every second day. I did have face to face contact with the contract postman a few times; one time was particularly memorable. I had a university friend send me a DVD from her ANU dorm in Canberra. As the postman handed the small standard DVD-sized parcel to me, he gave me a knowing look and a sly smile. It turns out that Canberra is the adult DVD capital of Australia – the only place where X-rated videos can be legally obtained. I'd imagine 90%+ of DVDs coming from Canberra have titles like Magnificent Melons 4, Mickey does Mykonos or Cathy the Raging Coprophile Part 5. I assure you, if you are reading this, you lazy postal contractor, it was a home-made DVD of my cousin's wedding, OK?
But what about dear old Greece? Well their postal system got some publicity last year when a 1996 book on it entitled 'Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers' was awarded the 'Diagram of Diagrams' award for having the strangest book title of all time (my own personal favorite however remains 1978's 'Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice'). Greek rural postmen may seem like a innocent bunch of people. You could imagine them riding bicycles through old villages, delivering the morning mail, before sitting down with their colleagues and having a nice 5 Euro coffee for the entire afternoon while they complain about Western imperialism and other conspiracies. Innocent? Not in the least.
It turns out that these quaint rural postmen have been involved in a type of scam that is rarely seen in the western world. During the recent election campaign in Greece, the party that campaigns mostly on the theme of Macedonian minority rights, Vinozito, decided to use a direct-mail mail-out to reach potential voters. No media station would allow anything as 'treasonous' as an ad campaign aimed at a minority that doesn't officially exist, so this was one of the only alternatives available.
The EU parliamentary elections were held on the first weekend of June. The mail was sent from the Vinozito offices early in May. On June 23rd, almost 3 weeks after the elections, the Vinozito party was informed that a package was waiting for them at the local post office. The package consisted of those pre-election letters that the post office refused to deliver. Why would the post office refuse to deliver mail?
Well if it were a one-off event, we might wonder, maybe Greek postmen are just unreliable? The problem is that there has been a decades long established pattern of persecution by the Greek government, through its various organizations, against the Macedonian minority and anybody who represents them. For example, in 2005 the TV station NET banned a travel program on Greek Macedonia because the Ethnic Macedonians in it were speaking Macedonian. Greece has been convicted at the ECJ (European Court of Justice) for not allowing a Macedonian organization to incorporate. Reporters have been arrested, news articles have been omitted, film has been stolen - and that is just the last decade. Given that history, I doubt it is an isolated accident. It appears that the Greek rural postman, as immortalized Derek Willen's 1996 book, is less like some quaint idyllic pillar of the rural community and is actually more like a 'Mail Nazi' – the postal version of Seinfeld's famous 'Soup Nazi'. One can imagine him sorting letters shouting 'Minority party? No mail for you!' - as there is no other rational explanation as to why every letter sent by the Vinozito party was not forwarded on to the addressee. It really appears that the postal service has been used as a political tool by the Greek government against a minority party. This is in Greece – a supposedly European country.
A few months ago, a leaked Greek Secret Service document from the early 1980s became public. It suggested using all government organizations against the Macedonian minority. The behavior of the Greek government indicates that they may have been following that script. All the while, the Greek government has been announcing that there are no Macedonians in Greece, despite the fact that the United Nations, the US State Department, the Council of Europe, the European Council on Racism, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have all stated that a Macedonian minority exists and is being persecuted in Greece. Really Greece, if there are no minorities in Greece, why are you scared that they will get political material. If Macedonians are like unicorns and don't exist, why steal their mail?
What is awful about this behavior is that it is occurring in an EU member, a NATO member, a country that people often associate with the Enlightened West. What do you think would happen if an incumbent US political party decided to block the advertising of the opposing party? What do you think would happen if the incumbent party abused the USPS by stopping the mail of its opponents prior to an election? What if the previous administration had banned Obama from using mail to connect with voters or threatened media outlets so they wouldn't carry Obama's advertisements? There would be an outcry and whoever ordered it would be sacked from their position and charged. Sadly, in Greece this will probably not happen – the state controlled media will not report on it and it will be ignored by the Greek government, as in all likelihood it was the government that ordered the abuse of the mail system. Using the postal system against opponents is not something that happens in the western world. This is like Mugabe's Zimbabwe or Putin's Russia or Saddam's Iraq.
That type of behavior reminds me of Takis Michas post 9/11 article on Greece entitled 'Is Greece a Western Nation'? A poll was taken after 9/11 that showed that Greeks felt the attacks on the US were justified and were pleased that it happened. As Michas reported:
Takis Kafetzis, the political analyst who supervised the poll, claims that in reality over 40% of the respondents felt pleasure with what happened. "The fact that they did not say so was simply due to the fact that they felt that they had to somehow control their responses." Greece, he says, simply does not share Western values and perceptions.
That is what it boils down to. In Greece there is no problem if the government denies an ethnicity and interferes with the postal system against minority parties. The reason why this is acceptable in Greece is exactly the same reason that Greece tries to justify interfering with Macedonia joining NATO and the EU - even after signing an international agreement that they wouldn't. Simply, Greece does not share our western values of human rights. We should stop treating Greece as if it is one of us; it isn't.
June 28, 2009
Alexandra Aleksovska
There is an adage that you can tell a lot about a country by the way it treats women. I would add to that that you can also tell a lot about a country by the way its postal service works. The postage system might sound drab and boring, but think about it, entire economies depend on invoices and contracts being sent. Given that the postal service often has relatively low wages, employs a lot of people from all over each particular country and has more contact with a person's physical residence than any other organization, it tends to reflect national culture a lot better than say, a country's international airline. For that reason I believe the postal service always seems to be a good reflection of the character of a nation.
In the US the postal system is seen as being efficient, trusted, upholding values, doing whatever it takes to get the mail through and every now and then one of its employees 'goes postal' and guns down a few people; one may see a resemblance to the way the United States behaves internationally. In Japan, the postal system is reliable, works hard and due to the cheap capital provided by its banking business was one of the reasons why Japan was able to expand explosively from the 1950s until the 1980s. Bangladesh for example, has a postal system that reflects it's government – corrupt. I sent a friend in Bangladesh a new, sealed, Kenny G CD via airmail. It arrived at her door three months later. According to her it had been at the post office in Dhaka for two and a half months. The CD had slight scratching and the booklet showed signs of heavy usage. Based on that experience, I'd conclude that the post office in Bangladesh is corrupt; or at the least have a communal view of property, and are also Kenny G fans.
Here in Australia, our postal system also reflects our culture. If it is delivered by Australia Post, the service is good and as efficient as any in the world. However, when it comes to the outsourced contract workers, you get a feel for the way we Australians can sometimes act when we are unsupervised. I used to live in a rural area where the postman was a contractor. Raining? No mail. Good surf? No mail. High petrol prices? Mail every second day. I did have face to face contact with the contract postman a few times; one time was particularly memorable. I had a university friend send me a DVD from her ANU dorm in Canberra. As the postman handed the small standard DVD-sized parcel to me, he gave me a knowing look and a sly smile. It turns out that Canberra is the adult DVD capital of Australia – the only place where X-rated videos can be legally obtained. I'd imagine 90%+ of DVDs coming from Canberra have titles like Magnificent Melons 4, Mickey does Mykonos or Cathy the Raging Coprophile Part 5. I assure you, if you are reading this, you lazy postal contractor, it was a home-made DVD of my cousin's wedding, OK?
But what about dear old Greece? Well their postal system got some publicity last year when a 1996 book on it entitled 'Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers' was awarded the 'Diagram of Diagrams' award for having the strangest book title of all time (my own personal favorite however remains 1978's 'Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice'). Greek rural postmen may seem like a innocent bunch of people. You could imagine them riding bicycles through old villages, delivering the morning mail, before sitting down with their colleagues and having a nice 5 Euro coffee for the entire afternoon while they complain about Western imperialism and other conspiracies. Innocent? Not in the least.
It turns out that these quaint rural postmen have been involved in a type of scam that is rarely seen in the western world. During the recent election campaign in Greece, the party that campaigns mostly on the theme of Macedonian minority rights, Vinozito, decided to use a direct-mail mail-out to reach potential voters. No media station would allow anything as 'treasonous' as an ad campaign aimed at a minority that doesn't officially exist, so this was one of the only alternatives available.
The EU parliamentary elections were held on the first weekend of June. The mail was sent from the Vinozito offices early in May. On June 23rd, almost 3 weeks after the elections, the Vinozito party was informed that a package was waiting for them at the local post office. The package consisted of those pre-election letters that the post office refused to deliver. Why would the post office refuse to deliver mail?
Well if it were a one-off event, we might wonder, maybe Greek postmen are just unreliable? The problem is that there has been a decades long established pattern of persecution by the Greek government, through its various organizations, against the Macedonian minority and anybody who represents them. For example, in 2005 the TV station NET banned a travel program on Greek Macedonia because the Ethnic Macedonians in it were speaking Macedonian. Greece has been convicted at the ECJ (European Court of Justice) for not allowing a Macedonian organization to incorporate. Reporters have been arrested, news articles have been omitted, film has been stolen - and that is just the last decade. Given that history, I doubt it is an isolated accident. It appears that the Greek rural postman, as immortalized Derek Willen's 1996 book, is less like some quaint idyllic pillar of the rural community and is actually more like a 'Mail Nazi' – the postal version of Seinfeld's famous 'Soup Nazi'. One can imagine him sorting letters shouting 'Minority party? No mail for you!' - as there is no other rational explanation as to why every letter sent by the Vinozito party was not forwarded on to the addressee. It really appears that the postal service has been used as a political tool by the Greek government against a minority party. This is in Greece – a supposedly European country.
A few months ago, a leaked Greek Secret Service document from the early 1980s became public. It suggested using all government organizations against the Macedonian minority. The behavior of the Greek government indicates that they may have been following that script. All the while, the Greek government has been announcing that there are no Macedonians in Greece, despite the fact that the United Nations, the US State Department, the Council of Europe, the European Council on Racism, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have all stated that a Macedonian minority exists and is being persecuted in Greece. Really Greece, if there are no minorities in Greece, why are you scared that they will get political material. If Macedonians are like unicorns and don't exist, why steal their mail?
What is awful about this behavior is that it is occurring in an EU member, a NATO member, a country that people often associate with the Enlightened West. What do you think would happen if an incumbent US political party decided to block the advertising of the opposing party? What do you think would happen if the incumbent party abused the USPS by stopping the mail of its opponents prior to an election? What if the previous administration had banned Obama from using mail to connect with voters or threatened media outlets so they wouldn't carry Obama's advertisements? There would be an outcry and whoever ordered it would be sacked from their position and charged. Sadly, in Greece this will probably not happen – the state controlled media will not report on it and it will be ignored by the Greek government, as in all likelihood it was the government that ordered the abuse of the mail system. Using the postal system against opponents is not something that happens in the western world. This is like Mugabe's Zimbabwe or Putin's Russia or Saddam's Iraq.
That type of behavior reminds me of Takis Michas post 9/11 article on Greece entitled 'Is Greece a Western Nation'? A poll was taken after 9/11 that showed that Greeks felt the attacks on the US were justified and were pleased that it happened. As Michas reported:
Takis Kafetzis, the political analyst who supervised the poll, claims that in reality over 40% of the respondents felt pleasure with what happened. "The fact that they did not say so was simply due to the fact that they felt that they had to somehow control their responses." Greece, he says, simply does not share Western values and perceptions.
That is what it boils down to. In Greece there is no problem if the government denies an ethnicity and interferes with the postal system against minority parties. The reason why this is acceptable in Greece is exactly the same reason that Greece tries to justify interfering with Macedonia joining NATO and the EU - even after signing an international agreement that they wouldn't. Simply, Greece does not share our western values of human rights. We should stop treating Greece as if it is one of us; it isn't.
Comment