Greeks in 20th centry Britain +20th cntry Australia versus Greeks in Germany + the US

[mayfly13]

Fascinating article.
For my American friends too, I bet they weren't aware of these issues.

The article also adds to my impression that, while Americans do have their own racial problems, they've been unfairly demonized by the World.
And that the real underbelly of White supremacy lies NOT with America but with Britain, Australia and NZ. (add an underbelly of anti-intellectualism to the latter two).



Aren't you sick of being called a WOG?
By Ilias
https://greekreporter.com/2013/02/04/arent-you-sick-of-being-called-a-wog/


"I am sick and tired of a certain group of Anglo-Australians 'kidding' “You’re a dirty wog”. It’s ugly, underhanded racism.
Anything that we or our Greek parents brought to this country which was different was immediately judged as inferior and as “wog-this” or “wog-that.”

What is most sad about this, is that we as Greek-Australians grow up hearing this over and over again and internalize its inference – that we are beneath them, that we are inferior, and that there is something somehow wrong with us.

It was not until I visited Greek-Americans and Greek-Germans that I realized that shame didn’t seem to even occur to them.There was no such thing as the word “wog” or equivalent in either of these countries (the U.S. Democratic party even nominated Greek-American Michael Dukakis to run for President in 1988.)

When I told an Anglo-American friend of mine about the racial slur and the pressure to change our names, he looked at me as if we were some un-evolved white-trash redneck nation stuck in a time-warp of the 1950’s!
He told me that far from being judged in that way, having a Greek background in the US means you are associated with ancient Greek history and the island of Santorini.

I discussed this with a friend of mine who is a therapist and has had clients from all over the world including Greek-Australians, Greek-Americans, and Greek-Germans. She says that by far, the Greek-Australians seem to be the ones who are most rejecting and ashamed of their Greek heritage. Is this a coincidence?

 

[mayfly13]

"wog-this wog-that".
So funny, gotta love the Greeks!

 

[Biggs_Darklighter]

The greeks haven't mattered in 2000 years. The only thing they got now is being used as a euphamism for assfucking.

 

[oggbashan]

The oncologist keeping me alive is a Greek. I am very grateful she has chosen to live and work in the UK.

 

[Champakian]

I know exactly one Greek. She owes a gyro shop...



:shrug:

 

[mayfly13]

The greeks haven't mattered in 2000 years. The only thing they got now is being used as a euphamism for assfucking.

or the Turks.

Which reminds me:
I was listening to this Iranian guy the other day, who was referring to the inmutable self-perceived superiority of the West.

In the 19th century, Turks (seen as representing Muslims) were considered to be uncivilized/barbaric because they were seen to have have tendency towards homosexuality. The West were pretty homophobic at the time.
Fast forward in century 21, and Muslims are now considered to be uncivilized because They are anti-homosexuals.

The same goes re women.
In the 19th century, Muslims were considered to be uncivilized because their women used to wear more revealing clothes than AngloSaxs at the time. Now it's the reverse.

So values change over time, but the view that the West has the moral superiority, is a constant.

 

[Sean]

Greeks aren't called wogs in Britain. In fact, the word went out of fashion in the seventies. Back then it meant "black".

 

[LukSkyFokker]

I know exactly one Greek. She owes a gyro shop...

:shrug:

Who does she owe it to?

 

[rockcasbah]

luk likes a little greek every so often.

 

[butters]

Greeks aren't called wogs in Britain. In fact, the word went out of fashion in the seventies. Back then it meant "black".

indeed

trust hashy to get it all wrong

the word was horrible then and quickly lost traction amongst the younger gens, though i'm sure the older racist bastards still cherished its 50s-60s vibe

 

[rockcasbah]

Greeks aren't called wogs in Britain. In fact, the word went out of fashion in the seventies. Back then it meant "black".

Oxford Dictionary says in Britain wog means not white.

In Australia it means southern european, southeast european or middle eastern.

But no matter where you go, Butters means “ lying cunt”.

 

[oggbashan]

Greeks aren't called wogs in Britain. In fact, the word went out of fashion in the seventies. Back then it meant "black".

Italians and Greeks were called wogs in the 1950s because there were thousands of immigrants from those countries who took time to assimilate. Brits can still be called Poms because although they claim to speak the same language some of them affect a non-existent superiority over Australian-born people which causes resentment.

Ten-Pound Poms is an even worse insult - referring to those who paid ten pounds a head to emigrate to Australia. Many of them did that because they were failures in the UK and proceeded to fail in Australia as well.

 

[mayfly13]

indeed

trust hashy to get it all wrong

the word was horrible then and quickly lost traction amongst the younger gens, though i'm sure the older racist bastards still cherished its 50s-60s vibe

Good, but it's still too close.

There still are quite a few clips on youtube by Indians or East Europeans in their early 40's, who describe how they used to be beaten up (on top of verbal abuse) at school because of their ethnicity.

Weirdly enough, the prejudice doesn't seem to extend to African immigs. or Black Brits., who often describe better experiences in the UK. Germans tend to be described as far more vicious and demeaning towards Africans than towards other ethnicities, tho.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LM1cSdCqNE8

Two Black people born in Germany, who studied in the UK describe how they felt far more accepted in the UK, and are thus switching countries. Despite the fact that the cost of living is far cheaper in Germany.
Can't find the vids, but they were fascinating.

 

[mayfly13]

Not that natives from colonies are angels either.
I knew this Scotish guy who emigrated to NZ in his teens and then to Au. Growing up in a Maori-White mixed school was rough, he said, and he learned to speak with a local accent asap because Maoris used to be beat him up because of his accent.
UKers are still called 'poms' over here.

 

[mayfly13]

Brits can still be called Poms because although they claim to speak the same language some of them affect a non-existent superiority over Australian-born people which causes resentment.

Ten-Pound Poms is an even worse insult - referring to those who paid ten pounds a head to emigrate to Australia. Many of them did that because they were failures in the UK and proceeded to fail in Australia as well.

It's interesting, most British immigrants that I met over here were SO nice.
They treat other immigrants (regardless of skin color) with genuine respect, but they often can't stand locals, they consider them small-minded and backward.

But few of them spoke with a posh accent, they were from regions that they said, are considered lower class by the posh E. regions.


I can't figure out if their superior attitude towards locals came first, or it was a reaction to being discriminated against & called 'poms'.

 

[Champakian]

Italians and Greeks were called wogs in the 1950s because there were thousands of immigrants from those countries who took time to assimilate. ...

We called them WOPs... (WithOut Papers).


How does an Italian helicopter sound?

The big blade goes wop, wop, wop and the little blade goes diego diego diego...

It was not an age of sensitivity and political correctness.

 

[colddiesel]

Where does Mayfly come from? As a Gaelic speaking Scot living on the edge of the desert in Oz, I need to know, so that I can apply the correct terms of abuse.

 

[oggbashan]

It's interesting, most British immigrants that I met over here were SO nice.
They treat other immigrants (regardless of skin color) with genuine respect, but they often can't stand locals, they consider them small-minded and backward.

But few of them spoke with a posh accent, they were from regions that they said, are considered lower class by the posh E. regions.


I can't figure out if their superior attitude towards locals came first, or it was a reaction to being discriminated against & called 'poms'.

When I went to Australia in 1960 (I was there from August 1960 to March 1962) I was NEVER called a Pom. I think there were three main reasons. 1. On the month-long voyage my most frequent companion was a 12-year-old Australian girl. I helped her with her set schoolwork; she helped me with Australian. 2. I was NOt an immigrant. I was staying for less than two years. and 3. I was very large and anyone insulting me might have regretted it.


I went to school for the last few weeks of term before the holidays. I and an American from Boston were the only newbies. He was a typical nerd - horn-rimmed glasses, weedy, pale-faced and spoke very quietly. He was taken for the Pom because I spoke Aussie.


After then I spent three months with some of my Australian relations near Palm Beach, North Sydney and trained to be a surf lifesaver. When I went back to school I spoke fluent Aussie, had a blond crewcut and a tan.


Looking down on Aussie culture? I didn't understand the then attitude in Australia. In Melbourne, there was one radio station that broadcast classical music for three hours on a Sunday afternoon and that was it. The music was light classical - Strauss, Lehar, some Tchaikovsky. It was the peak of the Okker culture when anything 'highbrow' was discouraged.

But in the 19th Century mining towns like Ballarat, Bendigo and Broken Hill had Opera Houses with touring European companies presenting Opera and the latest stage plays. Dame Nellie Melba was of that era.

By the l; late 1970s and certainly the 1980s onwards that attitude changed and classical music, opera, and drama proliferated. But when Sydney Opera House was suggested there were people who said 'What do we need an opera house for? We Aussies don't do Opera.'

Australia is no longer a cultural desert but the home of many world-class companies.

 

[mayfly13]

When I went to Australia in 1960 (I was there from August 1960 to March 1962) I was NEVER called a Pom. I think there were three main reasons. 1. On the month-long voyage my most frequent companion was a 12-year-old Australian girl. I helped her with her set schoolwork; she helped me with Australian. 2. I was NOt an immigrant. I was staying for less than two years. and 3. I was very large and anyone insulting me might have regretted it.

I went to school for the last few weeks of term before the holidays. I and an American from Boston were the only newbies. He was a typical nerd - horn-rimmed glasses, weedy, pale-faced and spoke very quietly. He was taken for the Pom because I spoke Aussie.

After then I spent three months with some of my Australian relations near Palm Beach, North Sydney and trained to be a surf lifesaver. When I went back to school I spoke fluent Aussie, had a blond crewcut and a tan.

Looking down on Aussie culture? I didn't understand the then attitude in Australia. In Melbourne, there was one radio station that broadcast classical music for three hours on a Sunday afternoon and that was it. The music was light classical - Strauss, Lehar, some Tchaikovsky. It was the peak of the Okker culture when anything 'highbrow' was discouraged.

But in the 19th Century mining towns like Ballarat, Bendigo and Broken Hill had Opera Houses with touring European companies presenting Opera and the latest stage plays. Dame Nellie Melba was of that era.

By the l; late 1970s and certainly the 1980s onwards that attitude changed and classical music, opera, and drama proliferated. But when Sydney Opera House was suggested there were people who said 'What do we need an opera house for? We Aussies don't do Opera.'

Australia is no longer a cultural desert but the home of many world-class companies.

Interesting post.
Sydney House Opera? I didn't know about THAT, but I'm not surprised.
How embarassing for Australia .....

Also:
Anti-intellectualism is far more prevalent in Australia and NZ than in other countries.
You see it the more you move towards rural places, together with the frontier-type stoic-blokey-iish/ keep a stiff upper lip/cut-throat mentality.
I liked their city folks - you meet some assholes or racists like everywhere, but you also meet many nice and sophisticated people.
But ever since I travelled or moved more rural - grrrr...

It's very strange:
In other countries, rural folks are often uneducated because they had to put all their time and effort into working their land. And some of them are just as anti-intellectual and stoic. . But most of them RESPECT more intellectual pursuits and those who pursue them, be they political discussions like in this forum or arts, music or philosophy.

I think it's Australia's frontier-type past in unhospitable places isolated from the rest of the world. They had to become pragmatic/practical in order to survive, and that has morphed into a cherished national trait.

You know whose rural folks I think are a bit like Australians?
The French. As many classical French writers described them.

Australia is no longer a cultural desert but the home of many world-class companies.

Yes, which makes the contrast between their high-end intellectual class (as in arts, humanities) and the anti-intellectualism among many aussies, even more striking.

 

[butters]

According to the Macquarie Australian dictionary, the word "wog" originated in the 1920s as British nautical slang for Indians.Oct 12, 2005

Origin
The origin of the term is unclear. It was first noted by lexicographer F.C. Bowen in 1929, in his Sea Slang: a dictionary of the old-timers’ expressions and epithets, where he defines wogs as "lower class Babu shipping clerks on the Indian coast."[3] Many dictionaries[4][5][6][7] say "wog" probably derives from the golliwog, a blackface minstrel doll character from a children's book, The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and a Golliwogg by Florence Kate Upton, published in 1895; or from pollywog, a dialect term for tadpole that is used in maritime circles to indicate someone who has not crossed the equator.[8]

Use in British English
"Wog", in its modern usage in the UK, is a derogatory and racially offensive slang word referring to a dark skinned person, including people from the Middle East, North Africa or the Indian subcontinent, other parts of Asia such as the East Indies, but usually not those from the Mediterranean area or Southern Europe. Historically, the term also encompassed Southern Europeans and other such people with slightly darker skin tone than ethnically British people.[citation needed] A similar term, wop, has historically been used to refer to Italians.

Use in American English
Duane Clarridge, a former CIA officer, explained that the term "wog factor" was used by the CIA "to acknowledge that the motivations that shape decision-making in North Africa, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent are very different from our own."[18]

wiki

i lived in the uk for 57 years and only ever heard one person, ONE person, use the term: he was an elderly white guy (office head but a subordinate to other, better men a couple of doors along) who spoke 'received queen's english' and reeked of old army, the days of the raj, and whose huge horse teeth were so yellow it was shocking. he also fancied our sole, young, black secretary and even as he coveted her, he absolutely believed no black man (or darkie, as he generally referred to them) had ever contributed to science, the arts, or the benefit of society at all and that they were more like unruly children needing the firm hand of the superior white man. ANd that was 40 years ago!

 

[rockcasbah]

Let’s not lose focus on what we all agree on:

Butters is a lying cunt.

 

[oggbashan]

My rural Australian relations in Northern NSW and the Northern Territory were hunting, shooting, fishing and sports fans. But they also enjoyed culture. In NSW they had a large wind-up gramophone and a massive collection of complete operas on 78s which the older generation enjoyed. My father arranged for them to get a modern stereo record player and about fifty classical LPs as repayment for putting us up for a month. After that, the younger ones started buying US Pop records as well.

One of their daughters caused local consternation. She was the first woman ever in the extended community to bleach her hair blonde, using a proprietary product that wasn't very good. My mother had to buy her something better to make it look more natural. But we were touring from their farm. Their nearest shop was fifty miles away, and that was it - the shop, post office, gas station, police station all in one building and no other business except the pub.

The nearest town with any pretensions to a shopping centre was seventy-five miles away. But sometimes they would visit their closest relations in Surfers' Paradise. Those relations owned a beachfront hotel (Later sold to Japanese investors who turned it from a single-storey thirty room motel-style building into a thousand-bed high rise because the beach frontage was about five hundred yards.)

What impressed me about Australians was their attitude to sport. Almost everyone I met. of any age, played or participated in a sport of some kind even into old age. My school had an emphasis on sport. Five of the staff had won gold medals at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. Five more, including the headmaster, had played cricket for Australia. But they had a strong academic status as well. There were twenty-five Commonwealth Scholarships available for the whole state of Victoria. In previous years, and in my year, the school had never won less than five of the twenty-five.

But one thing sticks in my mind forever. In my year we were studying Macbeth. The Australian National Shakespeare Company put on a special set of productions for schools. But they didn't know their lines, and almost everyone in the audience, having been studying it in-depth, did. Whenever they fluffed their lines, the front row prompted. It was a disaster for the company and led to some serious reviews of what they could and should do. But I remember it as being the worst travesty of a Shakespeare production I had ever seen, including some amateur ones in which I was part of the cast.

 

[mayfly13]

I'm aware that I'm piling on Aussies &kiwis and denigrating them. I, too am starting to sound like a classist cunt: calling their small-towners anti-intellectuals, oakies and so on.

But what shocked me & blew me off was their wog-this wog-that superior, smug attitude towards Italians and Greeks. Out of all nationalities.

Honestly. How fucking insightless must one be, to think that they are superior to people who, regardless of social status, have thinking about 'larger-than them' issues and philosophy in their blood?
Whereas many Australians, even those who went to College, just don't do these things. For them culture is like a trade: you learn the trade to get a high-paying job, then you watch sports and talk about what you did over the weekend. Even the way they approach religion is like a club or trade.

 

[oggbashan]

I think Australia has changed since then - or many Australians have. Or perhaps my relations and friends who visit me in the UK aren't typical.

Yes, Australia still has a laddish culture, but many appreciate more cultural things as well as drinking stubbies and tossing another prawn on the barbie...

https://youtu.be/g_H2YqKOFW8?list=RDCMUCqm4v0BLEyKnbY874F1h7fA

 

[mayfly13]

I just don't think that Xers and boomers have changed to such a drastic degree.

Yes, racism and intolerance are markedly lower than generations ago, people Show empathy and kindness towards minorities & foreigners, but the unconscious colonial bias of a master race is still widespread.

I think that many White millenials think drastically different.
They grew up corresponding online with kids from all sorts of countries who have the same preoccupations and knowledge that they have.