As many of you know I have been traveling in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. I plan to write an article on what I saw in general, but one thing has come through loud and clear, over and over and over. That is this:
The Ottoman Empire ravaged these nations and peoples in every possible respect: physically, economically, culturally, socially, you name it. Entire cities were razed to the ground with their inhabitants obliterated. The Ottomans bragged about enslaving Eastern European women, dragging them back to Turkey and forcing them to submit to Islam. I have heard at least ten times on this trip about how that is why there are blue-eyed Turks.
The Ottoman Empire only fell in 1922. That means that for many older Eastern Europeans this savagery was in the living memory of their grandparents.
We don’t learn about this history in the West, but it is an omnipresent specter for these nations I have visited.
So when leftist Americans or Western Europeans complain about Eastern Europe’s unwillingness to take in Muslim migrants, they must realize what Eastern Europe has endured historically and why they believe they have excellent reasons for keeping those barriers up.
I spent two years in Turkey and then a year in Greece. Those two peoples absolutely hate each other.
The Greeks still call Istanbul Constantinople. It’s occupied territory. They’ve spent 1500 years fighting to hold back, then endure, then roll back the forces of Islam.
The giant exchange of populations after they almost retook control of western Anatolia but ultimately lost in 1921-22 is a fresh wound.
They only got the last piece of modern Greece back in 1946. They nearly got a piece back (Cyprus) in 1968.
None of it is history. It’s current events.
If your grandma is from Castilla or Galicia, northern Spanish coast, you grow up knowing “los Moros” are to be fought until death if we see “Moros en la costa”, because that means rapes & enslavement.
And yet most of Spain seems to have forgotten.
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