Binding: Hardcover EAN: 9780192151940 ISBN: 0192151940 Label: Oxford University Press Manufacturer: Oxford University Press Number Of Pages: 422 Publication Date: 1972-06-01 Publisher: Oxford University Press Studio: Oxford University Press
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Customer Rating: Summary: The relevance of the Greek War of Independence today Comment: 1821 and the war to liberate Greece from its Turkish overlords is well worth considering today and for several good reasons. On the surface the cause was clear and just. The Greeks were fighting to emancipate the Hellenic spirit that spawned our own highly vaunted political and ideological traditions. The Ottoman Empire was gasping its last breath as it enforced its strangle hold on our noble race of founding fathers. At any rate, this was the rhetoric that inspired the Philhellenic movement in Western Europe that saw the most idealistic intellectuals of the early 19th century, most notably Lord Byron himself, go to Greece and fight the good fight against the Turks.What they found when they got there was a Balkan War that makes the recent war in the former Yugoslavia seem tame, with atrocities being committed with equal fury on both sides. At the same time we see the absurd levels that the gentlemen, many of them veterans of the Napoleonic Wars, went to, to assert their ridiculous notions of heroic honor. As the Greeks and Turks fought a ruthless war, many of the European volunteers strutted about as if they were involved in a ritual theater devised strictly to reveal the nobility of their spirits. Thus we get the great clash of Greeks versus Turks and the various visions of war at odds with each other. A great cynicism was the result of the Philhellenic movement and this book tells the story with thorough research and fairness. St. Clair's writing, always historical in tone, at times, soars to poetry. This book should be in print. It's a great and important history.
