Re: ...the French saved their fellow Europeans from a fate worse than death by killing a document that would forever bind sovereign national armies to NATO, placing them under the control of neo-fascist Washington and its Satanic, Zionist puppet masters in London.
Well, as I said, History merely repeats itself...
Useful matches to bear in mind while reading the excerpt below:
Latin = American
Greek = European
1204 = 1945
1261 = 2002
Christendom = Democracy (as the West's ideological mythology)
myriobiblos.gr
Excerpt:
It was only after 1204, when a Latin army under the guise of a holy crusade sacked Constantinople itself, carved up the Byzantine Empire, and forcibly imposed 'Roman Catholicism' on the Greek people, that the growing animosity of the Greeks for the Latins was transformed into a mass revulsion, a permanent hostility that permeated every level of society and was to poison all subsequent relations between the two peoples. It is at this point, when the ecclesiastical schism became ethnic and political as well as religious in scope, that the break between the two churches may be said to have been truly consummated.
Even after the Greek recovery of Constantinople in 1261 the Byzantines, on the defensive in the face of continuing Latin aggressiveness and fearing a repetition of the notorious Fourth Crusade, came increasingly to view the Latins as predatory, semi ignorant 'barbarians', and out-and-out heretics.
The Latins were hardly less antagonistic toward the Greeks. Accusing the latter of treachery in the crusades and irritated by the Greek rejection of the religious union pronounced at Lyons in 1274, the Westerners became more and more contemptuous of what their chroniclers termed the 'perfidious, cowardly, schismatic Greeks'. Ambitious Latin statesmen and covetous Italian merchants refused to give up the idea of a restoration of Latin domination in the Greek East. Indeed some western propagandists of the fourteenth century, in order to achieve their aim of a united Christendom to combat the Muslims, openly advocated another crusade against Constantinople in the aim of reducing the Greek East to obedience to the pope. A prime factor in this process, according to one leading theoretician, was to be the Latinization of key members of each 'schismatic' Greek family so that as a result Orthodoxy would be completely stamped out.
But not all Greeks or Latins of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries shared these inimical sentiments. There were a few men of good will, of an ecumenical spirit so to say. And here and there a rare idealist, such as Pope Gregory X, the French theorist Humbert of Romans, the Greek monk John Parastron, or the famous Greco-Italian scholar Barlaam, as of the enlightened view that through a greater understanding of the customs and religious beliefs and practices of their estranged brethren what a modern authority would perhaps term the 'psychology' of each people- a peaceful solution to the problem of mutual antagonism could be achieved, to the benefit of Christendom as a whole.
Most Greeks, however, recalling their bitter experience as a dominated people during the Latin occupation, and especially the forced conversion of the Greek clergy and people to Catholicism with the installation of a Latin patriarch in Constantinople, remained fanatically anti-Latin. But with the advance of the Ottoman Turks in the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a small but increasingly articulate minority of Greek politiques and intellectuals, including, as we shall see important refugee scholars to the West, became less intolerant of the Latins. For in the face of the Turkish threat to the very existence of Byzantium, they began to look to the West as the sole source of military aid and, as a result of expediency or conviction, even to favor ecclesiastical reunion with Rome as a means of salvation for the state.
On the Latin side some evidence can be found of sympathy for the plight of the Byzantines, especially on the part of Italian humanists, a few of whom went to Constantinople itself to study Greek. But on the whole, the Latin world, despite its growing passion for the ancient Greek classics, retained virtually undiminished its traditional animosity toward the medieval Greeks. Even the great fourteenth century Italian humanist Petrarch, whose love for ancient Greek literature is well known, could make an unfavourable comparison between 'the enemy Turks and the schismatic Greeks who are worse than enemies and hate and fear us with all their souls'. The result was that in the fifteenth century most western statesmen, disturbed over the abortive religious union pronounced at Florence in 1439 or engrossed in the Hundred Years' War and internecine Italian politics, seemed almost indifferent to the fate of the Byzantine world, when, in 1453, Constantinople finally succumbed to the Turks.
The brief sketch provided above is intended of course only to mark some of the more important points in the complex, centuries long development of East-West estrangement -those events which seem most to have inflamed Greco-Latin antipathy. We must be wary of making generalizations about the emotional or mental attitudes of entire blocs of peoples, since, as noted, exceptions on the part of certain groups or individuals can almost always be cited, and the intensity of feeling engendered was not always parallel on each side. Keeping these qualifications in mind, however, it may be said that the process of alienation between East and West seems to have been cumulative, reaching its peak of intensity in the thirteenth and perhaps early fourteenth century, after which, through force of circumstance, a certain slackening of tension may be observed with regard to some of the upper classes -a few intellectuals, politicians, or an occasional high-minded cleric. Nevertheless, for the great mass of the population, the average Greek more than the Latin, mutual almost unreasoning hostility toward the other people continued to remain deeply rooted in its psychology. And the medieval image projected on either side of the 'perfidious schismatic Greek' and the 'aggressive heretical Catholic', though of course mitigated and blurred by the passing of time, has persisted to the present day in the substratum of each people's mentality as an unhappy legacy of the medieval world.
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