GREECE, THE CRADLE OF EASTERN CIVILIZATION (OR IS IT THE WEST?)

Sean Matthews is a Greek American journalist based in Athens. On the occasion of his book, "The New Byzantines" he talked to Unapologetic host Ashfaaq Carim about the question if Greeks belong to the West or to the East. But a few words of caution are in order. Matthews may be half Greek, but obviously he's a fairly recent arrival. Only in the final part of the interview it becomes clear that his political sympathies live on the Left side of the aisle, carrying a shipload of chips on his shoulder that come with the territory. As such, he is not a neutral observer of history. But in the first two parts of the interview he gets away with it. It's so fascinating, because this is a story of empire that is not understood at all in the era of the secular, national state and arrested imagination. 

July 26, 2026 Unapologetic: Do Greeks have more in common with Arabs and Turks than Europeans | Sean Mathews.

Matthews is painting a fairly accurate picture of the last 250 years in Greece and the Levant, if you are willing to gloss over Turkish atrocities and other indignities that minorities had to endure over centuries. 

We are dealing here with another effort to whitewash Muslim rule in the Ottoman Empire. Recently Tucker Carlson hosted a similar person with a slant just like it, promoting the idea how great it was for Christians to live under Islam.

Matthews mentions at length the unique role of the island Chios, but fails to mention the Chios massacre of 1822 (link). He tells how the sons of conquered Roman aristocrats were appointed as administrators and officials. But he fails to attest to the cruel Janissary system, an elite infantry force that was only disbanded in 1826.

Janissaries were recruited through a levy on Christian families, where boys between 8 and 20 years of age were taken, forcibly converted to Islam, circumcised, and trained for military and administrative service. I recently read somewhere that the siege of Malta in 1565 was conducted by the Ottoman Empire, with the Janissaries serving as the elite core of the invading force.

Matthews's anecdotal evidence of common culture is all pretty superficial and completely ignores the deeper roots in metaphysical and ethical beliefs that separate Muslims from Christians. But yes, the entire region loves the same sort of food and music based on ancient Hellenic and Eastern Roman roots (link). 

Nevertheless, Matthew highlights something important. Bible scholar Father Stephen de Young often remarks that Greece, rather than being the cradle of Western civilization, is actually the last Near Eastern culture. And he is right. If anything, the East was born of Greek Hellenism. Alexander the Great did not conquer the West.

The West has grown out of the Germanic tribal conquests of Western Rome. The first major Greek text reached the West only during the Renaissance. The first Greek book read by a Westerner was Plato's Republic, translated into Latin by the Eastern Roman scholar Manuel Chrysoloras around 1400. 

No one even knew Greek until that time. In the early days of Christianity Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430) could send Western Christianity into an entirely different direction, because he knew very little Greek and had no idea about theological debates and doctrines being worked out in the East, which was the center of gravity at the time.

As a consequence East and West have entirely different sets of philosophical fundamentals. We hope to put the final touches on the e-book on this subject, by early September.

The West eventually rebelled against Papal power during and after the Reformation, a struggle that has given birth to the secular national states that currently make up most of the Western world, including modern Greece, Turkey and all of the other post colonial national constructs in the Middle East. 

The national state not only birthed secularism, but also a host of other ideologies like Liberalism, Communism, Socialism, Nationalism, National Socialism, and so on and so forth. These ideologies were not indigenous to the Near and Middle East, but were exported there from Europe to the detriment of the people in the East. The rest is history. 

This is why it is so ludicrous for democrats to project secularism on countries in the Near and Middle East that have had nothing to do with the religious wars on the European continent between Catholics and Protestants.

Matthews is right to warn about Greece's strategic alliance with Israel known as the "3+1 Framework". It  is quite dangerous since Israel as an arms supplier has a vested interest in aggravating and exploiting the enmity between Greeks and Turks to their own national advantage.

If you want to know more, follow Dr Zac Porcu's series of lectures on Secularism (playlist), the Secular State (playlist) and Epistemology (playlist). 

How Greek Orthodoxy helped fight Islam.

Let me take you for a tour…

This is a Greek Orthodox Secret School. Called Κρυφτό Σχολείο in Greek.

What is it?

This is where monks and priests hid & taught kids about Christianity and how Greek Orthodoxy remained and prevailed over… pic.twitter.com/7gq3PM0i8e

— Peter B (@realpeteyb123) August 2, 2026

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