Ένoσις - 'so perilous an experiment'

I'd been told by a British friend, some years ago, in one of those generalisations filed under 'conjecture - revisit', that Corfiots were fiercely proud to be Greek but sustained a certain sense of superiority over other Greeks. Our dear young Hellene friend Nancy, from Patras, did mention, when we were happily debating politics at table this January, that some Corfiots (and presumably some inhabitants of the rest of the Septinsular) felt that in abandoning the Protectorate in 1864, the British had delivered what could have been an independent Ionian Republic into the hands of the Greek Monarchy, embroiling them in the machinations of Athens.

I suspect that it will necessary first to understand the machinations of Britain and her agents. I expect this to bring uncomfortable revelations about what went on in the Ionian Islands under our 'amical protection' - notwithstanding roads, education, cricket and sin tsin birra (echoes of Life of Brian on "what have the Romans ever done for us?"). Original sources offer direct insight but, subliminally, they draw a student through time, so that one finds oneself wandering in another dimension. A reader invents the voices of fiction in their head. Film-makers pre-empt such imagining. I've travelled thus before when pursuing research. As ever it depends who writes the history and what interpretations most credibly explain the motives and actions of individuals.

From Warlike England as seen by herself (1915) by Ferdinand Tönnies - insight into British foreign rule from a great sociologist

I will ever revert to Anglo-Hellenic relations because my necessarily sober study of texts is driven by inchoate emotions. At times what I thought was Greece turns out to be my reflection in a foxed mirror. I'm neither detached nor disinterested. I'm mindful of Kevin Andrew's passion for Greece, in whose seas his life ended, undimmed by a rare fury at 'uncritical, unquestioning adherence to the revolting shame of lesser people’s stupidity, cynicism and cheapness' and Byron, his heart buried in the Hiera Polis, writing, in a burst of vexation, that 'there never was such an incapacity for veracity shown since Eve lived in Paradise.'

In the National Archives reading room at Kew: British Colonial Office records for the Protectorate of the Ionian Islands

On only my second visit to the National Archives, last Thursday, I focused on the months between November 1858 and late Spring 1859, getting the hang of ordering documents on-line, remembering to put pens in my bag in the downstairs locker chained by my folded bicycle, requesting a desk, swiping my reader's card at security, collecting documents - one file at a time - from the glass-doored locker with the same number as my computer allocated desk space, collecting the polystyrene forms to support thick heavy volumes, donning white cotton gloves to turn pages...

Sir Thomas Wyse, author of Impressions of Greece, was British Minister (or ambassador) to Greece, sending reports on local affairs back from Athens to the Foreign Office in London since his posting in 1849. On 2 December 1858, in a dispatch to the Earl of Malmesbury, Foreign Secretary in the government of Lord Derby, Wyse describes how, on the evening of 24 November, he'd just left a party given by Ozeroff, the Russian Minister to Greece, when a young employee from the Hellenic Foreign Office called Typaldos arrived with the news 'that the Ionian Islands had been ceded to Greece'.

..the dance ceased…groups were to be seen in every direction congratulating each other, especially amongst the younger portion of the company on so unexpected and auspicious an event.

This news may have come attached to reports of William Gladstone's extraordinary mission to the islands (journeying from England by train through Dresden, Prague and Vienna to Trieste where he took the paddle steamer HMS Terrible down the Adriatic, arriving in Corfu on 24 November [see p.367 in this ref] reporting the magnificent Albanian landfall we've several times enjoyed - the Karaburan Peninsular then called the Acroceraunian mountains). The day after news broke of unification, people in Athens had started ...

... to hesitate as to the advantages of the change. The more sedate and experienced did not see that either party could gain much by the proposed union. Others went so far as to express apprehension of immediate danger to the monarchy and dynasty, from annexing their turbulent neighbour little used to the restrictions of genuine Hellenic liberty...(The Ionians) couple with the hope of such annexation, the means of establishing by their audacity or preponderance, a new state of things in Greece, involving in some of the theories, a radical alteration, not in the constitution only, but in the dynasty and Monarchy of the State...The time is not yet ripe, it is added, for so perilous an experiment. It would be not so much an annexation of the Ionian Islands to Greece, as of Greece to the Ionian Islands...(FO32/263 ~ p.165)

Letter from Sir Thomas Wyse to the Earl of Malmesbury ~ 2 Dec 1858

Background: The news that broke at Ozeroff's party was of course a rumour, since union with Greece did not actually occur for another five and a half years on 21 May 1864. Gladstone, over three months in late '58, early 59 had sought to convey to Ionians - in ways and for motives I'm trying to understand - that union with Greece was, for the time being, unrealistic. Inclined towards self-rule, he became convinced that a catalogue of complaints against the Protectorate could be attributed, in part, to the style of the previous Commissioner Sir John Young who had recommended an Ionian partition converting Corfu and Paxos to British colonies, ceding the remaining islands to Greece, in part to inbuilt flaws in the Maitland Constitution of 1817 that corrupted prospects of evolution towards self-government, making the Ionian Protectorate, a Colony in all but name, and unready for the 'home-rule' he perhaps hoped to seed (echoes of Gladstone's later preoccupation with Ireland) or union with Greece which he came to doubt was really what local people or the Greek government really desired. Having ensured the departure of Sir John Young, Gladstone sailed away from the islands on HMS Terrible, leaving a reform package for approval by the Ionian Senators that would strengthen Ionian conservatives, weakening radical pressure for enosis. But his successor Sir Henry Storks was left to face almost immediate rejection by the Ionian Assembly of Gladstone's proposals as well as continued demands and petitions for union with Greece. Thus we enter the last five years of the Protectorate.

Gladstone, during his twelve week Ionian mission had visited Athens to sound the Greek government and court on the idea of union. On 13 December 1858 he wrote to Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Secretary of State for the Colonies under Lord Derby, noting ‘divided sentiment’ about union in the Greek Kingdom - something ‘feared as well as desired’. It is exciting to see the signature and writing of Gladstone dotted about the records, but although it’s referred to in Holland and Markides as being in CO136/165 I couldn’t find it. That file starts in January 1859 where I did find a letter marked 'most secret' from Sir Henry Storks to Bulwer-Lytton, a few months after Gladstone's departure for England on 19 February. Sir Henry matched Gladstone and Wyse in conveying Athenian ambivalence about extending the Hellenic Kingdom to the Ionian Islands:

Sir Henry Storks at the Palace, Corfu, to Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Downing Street, London ~ 9 April 1859

'No doubt the King of Greece would find the inhabitants of these islands very difficult to rule, and in many respects superior in attainments, and less docile than his own subjects, but still territorial aggrandizement, and the commanding strategical and maritime position of these islands, are objects of ambition which the Court of Athens is not likely to underrate...'

...adding a full measure of jaundice towards King Otto, Queen Amalia and their court.

'It is my duty to acquaint you that I have heard from sources in which I have confidence that little reliance is to be placed in anything the King or Queen of Greece, or the Ministers may say on the subject of the annexation of these States to the Kingdom of Greece. I believe there is an undercurrent of intrigue fanning the flame here, and that the chief movers are Greek agents. (CO136/165 ~ p.645-646)

***

Dropping in on the Scrutiny offices at Southwark Council in mid-afternoon I mentioned my visit to the National Archives. As I left, Rachel one of Shelley's colleagues, explained how security at the NA had, through its focus on preventing documents being stolen, overlooked the possibility of them being introduced. Some rogue had sneaked in fake correspondence to prove that Himmler, rather than committing suicide, had been murdered by British agents. The fake letters intended as evidence (scroll down this URL to see) were printed on a 'high resolution laser printer', written by someone risibly incapable of imitating official circumspection, a bit like those ridiculous, but at least technically clever, Meegeren imitations of Vermeer. But then Trevor-Roper was initially deceived by The Hitler Diaries, to which Richard, knowing his le Carré, adds "unless it was double bluff."

* * *
  Email from Ayios Markos:

I forgot to comment on your learning Greek. It can be hard, or it can be fun, depending on the teacher and the teaching methods. I found it more fun and learned more when I taught myself. There are some advantages to having the teacher though, such as pronunciation and grammar. When I took classes I found it too frustrating. There were a couple of times I had to grab the teacher by the throat. She kept me sitting across the table so I wouldn't grab her. Ha! She is my very dear Greek friend here.

There was a rather comical incident up here in Agios Markos. They are working on the road, cutting a trench for water pipes. This, of course creates more problems for the already narrow street. Consequently, there was major frustration by the bus driver who was having a problem getting through. He called and complained to the mayor, who then called the police and they came up and wrote tickets on 30 cars! Each costing €80. Everyone was up in arms. They have been parking there for nearly 20 years without ever being told it wasn't legal. They all embarked on the police department in a rage. The mayor was red faced and admitted he might have made a mistake. Last I heard they were told not to worry about it, and today I noticed they were all, once again, back in their old parking places. Don't you love Corfu? The Greeks are as much fun as the italians. Love, X

* * *
Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) meeting in Corfu under the auspices of Dora Bakoyannis near Gouvia.

Forwarded email: I see there’s a big summity event at the end of the month in Corfu. Everyone get ready to be hustled off the road by large cars with flags, and off the sidewalk by burly gentlemen with ear pieces. Here comes the cavalry...

Reply from H: Yes. I heard from the neighbor. Hillary Clinton is coming! [she cancelled] Actually, as much as I would love to see her, I would rather not be around with all the police lining the streets. I've experienced it before when a dignitary came to town. We've been amused at the things they've been doing to the main roads. You would not believe all the painted white lines! You will laugh when you see them. And also cats eyes, which are already popping off. Ha!

And a call via Indymedia to protest at the implication of Fortress Europe
 * * *
Back to the future ~ 16 June 2009 re the Iranian Election result: I think I and many others may, at last, take Twitter seriously seeing its use along with mobile phone photos to evade attempts to silence those challenging the poll. See this witty lass on YouTube where she speaks of things in Iran and of Twitter ' the so-called "death of attention span" medium (2.26).

See also Iran: Nation of Bloggers plus accompanying comments. It reminds me of the way the mobile phone circumvented attempts by leaders of the 1991 August Putsch in Russia to control the media and the telephone network.

Back to the immediate future - 23 June 09: I was informed on Facebook across the globe by my student Takanori Ogasawara in Aomori Prefecture: 'The movie of the moment of Neda's (ندا آقا سلطان) death are so shocked. We receive the full benefit of peace here in Japan. On the other hand, on the another side of the Earth, a lot of people are dying.' The face of a woman, Neda Agha-Soltan, a philosophy student shot by a Basij militia sniper, on 20 November, dying in the street, was sent by an attending doctor's mobile to a contact in the Netherlands who put it on

the web from where it was picked up and relayed on live-blogs, flickr, facebook, mainstream media, wikipedia to be printed on placards in Iran. I'm just hearing a BBC R4 report in our kitchen at 13.26 23 June 09.

...and one of the most informed of commentators Iason Athanasiadis who spends a lot of time in Iran in The Spectator on 17 June 09 - cautious.

...and from Eric Margolis a sage warning about the higher-politics: 'In viewing the Muslim world, Westerners keep listening to those who tell them what they want to hear, rather than the facts. We are at it again in Iran...President Obama sincerely wants to enter into talks with Iran over its nuclear program and try to convince Tehran to give up enrichment. But hardliners in his cabinet and Congress are urging Obama to seize the opportunity to further destabilize Iran. Bad idea. A stable Iran is essential to a stable Mideast....US and British efforts to subvert Iran’s government could yet blow up in our faces.

...this on internet interception and this from Greek bloggers
[Back to the future -  22 June 2011: A More 4 programme For Neda]
[Back to the future - 14 November 2012: BBC News magazine 'Neda Soltani: 'The media mix-up that ruined my life'

'...the graceful ease of a monkey in the jungle canopy!'

"What was that sudden silence?" said the girl next to me in the Apple Shop in the Bullring. I was awaiting an 11.00 am tutorial from Isaac, on using the latest version of iMovie. Having struggled with the first lesson I made progress, finding I could now edit compressed film, instead of doing that before compression. Now I can more easily create a medley of extracts from the archive. I felt someone tugging on my bicycle saddle as I wheeled it out of the shopping centre, and saw a uniform in the corner of my eye. An instant of anxiety, then I realised it was my daughter. I switched from startled, to the churn of joy I get when my children surprise me. She was on her lunch break. We looked in the Christmassy shops; strolled down to Steelhouse Lane. Always a walker, she's getting a professional saunter; not my flâneur stroll. More authoritative. We gaze over the street in different ways. With her earphone looping her into a commentary linked to the cameras swiveling over the city centre, Amy's gaze is more kestrel than conceptual, while I'm thinking panopticon - Foucault's view that what Bentham had designed inside, is outside ["...in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen. But - 14/10/08 - noting Danica, what would Foucault who wrote Discipline & Punish in 1995 have made of twittering? Is there a word for reverse panopticon; the watcher watched? Tom Stonier said this in one of his talks on campus in the early 90s. Instead of one way watch as in 1984, Brazil or coplink, watching works both ways, but it's not the image alone; it's the collating and processing capacity. Crude oil needed refineries. How do the information refineries balance out between agencies and individuals? The wisdom of crowds?...] I suppose Amy is becoming one of this world's 'experts in normality'. She has to make decisions about things that happen on the street. I get away with watching - unless I'm at work. Foucault would argue I'm still part of the process, as Marx argued - my role and actions reproduce the processes of production. I wrote Internal Polity feeling round the walls of such cells, pondering my involvement in what I try to change.

‘Depravity in the oppressed is no apology for the oppressor; but rather an additional stigma to him, as being in large degree, the effect, and not the cause and justification of oppression’ Herman Melville, Chapter 14 White Jacket

On surveillance ~ I note the map of hits on 'Democracy Street'. "Na." says Lin "Don't delude yourself. Come on! "Democracy"? "Street"? You're just coming up on searches " Oh well. I still cherish that flattery about swinging through cyberspace 'with the graceful ease of a monkey in the jungle canopy!' I love that image. Thanks Freya. I could have responded with a reflection on my delight at her skill in reading and the pleasure she takes in following hypertexted prose. I love and will never abandon books - where the equivalent of hypertexting has long been done between hard copy and the far reaches of imagination (how ever brilliant the films, nothing on screen could match the world I entered on reading Lord of the Rings in 1956) I've no wish, nor need, to drill holes through pages, but to have that opportunity in cyberspace....oh wow, www. My first encounter - back 13 years...

William Gibson, confessing ignorance of computers, but struck by the concentrated attention of boys playing arcade video games, wrote a story about a place as much a mixture of fantasy and reality as the Americas of the Elizabethans....Gibson named it and, though he would refute the idea, has claimed it for many who experience the thrill of a newly imagined universe. Imagination - from cave painting to sky-writing on the Net has always worked with virtual realities. For Shakespeare’s Lorenzo in the finale of the “The Merchant of Venice”, a moonlit night suffused with music bespoke sweet harmony made inaudible and invisible by “the muddy vesture of decay”. Gibson’s neuromancer, Case, clinically maimed by those he had hustled can only see the sky above Chiba -“the color of television tuned to a dead channel”. The moment when the music swells, as in Robert Bolt’s and Maurice Jarre’s spectacular cinema sequence of Lawrence of Arabia returning to the desert, is when Case, his nervous system restored, settles “the black terry sweatband across his forehead, careful not to disturb the flat sendai dermatrodes” and launches himself into cyberspace:

...fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chess-board extending to infinity. Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond his reach. ... Somewhere he was laughing, in a white painted loft, distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face (Gibson 1984:69).

As I am more exposed to the world by communication technologies so I may shrink in relation to complexity “that cut the eye” (Gibson 1984:304 refers to a horrid image in Bunuel's film). Contact with even the fringes of the data wealth of the Internet has thrown me into superficiality - paddling not surfing. What is currently available on the World Wide Web is only a taster for what is presaged, with increased bandwidth, the multiplication of servers and information providers. It realises, even more than with newspapers and radio, Eliot’s condition of being “too conscious and conscious of too much”. I wander around a labyrinth as enchanting, in its own way, as the British Museum Library, before its move to St.Pancras , or the great Library at Trinity College, Dublin, with the dust-specked beams of sunlight just missing the carefully protected Book of Kells in its glass case, or the bookshops of Charing Cross Road or Hay-on-Wye on a chilly rainy autumn afternoon. I download and unzip material. Layer upon layer of reference tempts me onwards, diving through texts and icons through servers to other servers and home by different routes. I retrace my trail and find side exits that become the main trail. I follow trails laid out by others. I hit dead-ends and retracing my steps discover exits into new branching tunnels. It’s intoxicating and yet recalls alarm I felt as a child watching the Sorcerer’s Apprentice in Disney’s Fantasia. Back and forth I roam into the early hours downloading buckets from the Pierian spring. I exhort myself to define my objectives, while another part of me pleads respect for the interactive conventions of new paradigm research... Every time I decide what I really want to know I read something that tempts me to type in another search word, another Boolean term to extend my enquiry back and forth via addresses at Stanford, Tokyo, Oslo, Towson State, Florence, Durban, Harvard, Ann Arbor, Tel-Aviv, Edinburgh, Princeton, New York, Göteborg, Melbourne, Mexico City, Cambridge, Colorado, Kobe, Geneva, Rio, London, Massachusetts, Marseilles - to and fro and on and on, half-hoping the magician will return, and after stern reproof, tidy everything up. This connectionist ramble will not submit to two-dimensional mind-maps. The trees bifurcate and bifurcate and form new nodes from which further branches expand and divide. I envy infinite memory, then recall Borges’ Funes the Memorius who, having perfect memory, took as long recalling as he did perceiving. At the foot of the screen I see hours have slipped by... [S. Baddeley (1997) Governmentality in Brian Loader (ed.) (1997) The Governance of Cyberspace (London: Routledge) (5) 64-96]

Remember 28 December 1994 - my first entry into cyberspace, with help from the children and my university - in our study upstairs:

The machine is switched on, red lights blink on the front of the modem which amplifies the sound of the serial phone connections. Babble of static and staccato beeps of electronic space. Bumps and scrapes - “host error”, “host refused access”, “cache overload”, “host timed out try again later”, “call disconnected do you wish to reconnect” - and then as Richard enters a forum for people interested in tarantulas there appears at the top left hand of the screen the word “Hi”. For a moment we misinterpret this as an unfamiliar screen command. R. types back “hello” and identifies a girl in a suburb of Philadelphia playing on her parent’s computer. He begins a conversation with people in South Padre Island, Texas and in Philadelphia and Sunny Valley, Idaho - Mary and her son-in-law, Charlie, from Phoenix, Arizona - and Vicki from Dallas. They chat in text, each phrase appearing a few seconds after the other. The conversations go on for two hours as me and Amy watch intrigued, offering our own suggested questions. The light of the screen plays on our entranced faces deep into the night.

* * * On Saturday night with pouring rain outside there was a power failure. Lin lit candles. As it went on I dug from the garage Isobel's power-failure kit - two propane gas lights and lots of gas cans - probably last used at Raven's Cottage in 1990. They gave us warmth and light. Richard took one upstairs to continue working. Power came back. Lin's been working on my tax, having already saved me more than my accountant because she's got time I needn't pay for to factor in loads of small transactions. Furthermore she files my paperwork as it arrives. * * * I got up early Monday morning in the chilly house to go to New Street Station. Oscar, as always, comes down with me and presses to go in the garden. Do teeth. Have a cup of tea, then upstairs and shower and down again and dress. Leaving Lin sleeping and the house dark I cycle up the empty road and into gathering main road traffic heading into town. Through the Jewellery Quarter and down to the Parade then under the library into New Street by the Council House, past the Post Office, down through the New Street car park and into the station concourse, where, after buying my ticket to Peterborough I got into conversation with another cyclist called Alex. Didn't I think Obama had raised politics to - a sort of - higher level. Yes I did. Yes. But what a job he's got. That's when you need great leaders. No-one has to wear their pants hung low. I might even learn how to clap on the back-beat. * * * In Peterborough it was still raining. I cycled to M & S in the High Street to get some smarter trousers. How M & S has pulled its socks up in the last few years under Stuart Rose. They even had a scuffed Chesterfield in the men's changing room. Good service, reasonable prices and trousers 40' by 33' from a wide selection. It's good to see them back especially with the Fairtrade and green policies. The half day course I ran with Charlie went well, with a mix of politicians and managers. We talked about London and Liverpool on the train to Birmingham from where she was to catch another train north west and I, home. * * * A stranger e-mailed me earlier in the evening to ask if I thought travelling across the city by train late at night was safe. I replied saying why I thought there was absolutely nothing to worry about. Later I got another email:

Hi Simon. Thanks very much for your prompt and reassuring reply. I have just got back and my fears were totally unfounded. I enjoyed the experience so much I hope to do it again, often. On the way a cyclist got off as I got on and 2 more bikes joined my carriage at New Street. On the return there were no stops after Wylde Green until New Street. I got off 2 stops early at University and cycled through campus and cut through the back of Cannon Hill Park. It was great to stop on the bridge over the Rea and look at the river and the stars in the clear sky. Thanks again, I really must get off to bed

* * *

'Many Americans have already bought their last car...'

'...the car industry. The Big Three, all functionally bankrupt, are now lined up for bail-outs from the treasury's bottomless checking account. Personally, I believe the age of Happy Motoring is over. Many Americans have already bought their last car - they just don't know it yet. The current low-ish price of oil is a total fake-out, having to do much more with asset-dumping in the paper markets than the true resource supply-demand equation. Most of the world (the media for sure) has ignored preliminary leaks from the International Energy Agency's (IEA) forthcoming report which forecasts global oil depletion to be 9.1 percent in 2009. This is a staggering figure, very likely to offset whatever slack we see in global demand from the worldwide economic crisis. In fact, the global oil markets are poised for the most severe dislocations ever seen, meaning it's a toss-up what happens first in the USA: a major leg back up in oil prices, or shortages, hoarding, and rationing.' James Kunstler 10 Nov 2008

[Back to the future: 13 November 2008: Bank of England Inflation Report press conference ~ Mervyn King, Governor]