The courage in blood of this American republic

by Dimitri C. Michalakis

When I lived in Greece as a boy I lived on Chios and all around me were the remnants of the Turkokratia that had subjugated the island for centuries: the horse trough with Turkish letters, the old mosque in the old Genoese castle, the way my grandmother called her neighbor Mustapha, for some reason, the Turkish music playing on the radio from the stations in Cesme and the groan of its amanedes, the old buttons from old uniforms (supposedly Ottoman) we found in the dry riverbed, the curved saber with the ornamental hilt we also found and surmised about, the trek one time to Anavatos, the haunted and abandoned village that had been depopulated by the Turks and all its inhabitants massacred.

I remember being shown the kotetsi where the Turks had kept their captives before slaughtering them, many in the church, where on the stone floor you could still see the imprint of toes: supposedly the toes of the Turks butchering the Greeks in their own blood.

It’s hard to imagine how fearless people were to start a revolution against their overlords after centuries of subjugation. The Greeks did it, perhaps with the inspiration of the American Revolution only fifty years before, which, in turn, was inspired by the democratic ideals of ancient Greece. The American founding fathers were landed gentlemen, but in their soul they worshipped the ideals of freedom the ancient Greeks had once practiced, and the brave example of the little polis’ that defied the mighty Persian Empire dared them to think they could defy the mighty British Empire.

“Yes, we must, indeed, all hang together,” said John Hancock, “or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

It was not a given that America would win, as we comfortably think now: it was a given that the American colonies were foolish and Britain would crash them with her arsenal of redcoats and warships like a forest in her harbors. And George Washington and his men barely escaped with their lives over their many skirmishes with the British. “I am worried almost to death with the retrograde motion of things,” he said during the disastrous rout of his army during its New York campaign.

But he persisted, as the Greeks persisted in believing they could meet the hordes of the Persian army at Marathon and Salamis, and the Greeks against the Ottomans in the battles at Tripolitsa and Valtetsi and the naval battle of Chios where Kanaris, in a fireboat, blew up the Turkish flagship.

It takes blind courage to start a revolution, and dogged courage to create the miraculous model of democracy America became: a beacon to the world by a nation made up of immigrants from all over the world, who came here with nothing many of them, and formed the bedrock of this country and are a roll call of some of her most distinguished citizens.

Somebody said to Benjami Franklin at the Continental Convention that created our nation, “Well, doctor, what have we got—a republic or a monarchy?” And Franklin replied, “A republic—if you can keep it.”

The amazing republic of America will hopefully live on, if we can keep it.