Akritas Macedonian blog: Victoria University conducts offensive survey ‘in partnership’ with nationalist lobby group, the ‘United Macedonian Diaspora’

Saturday, September 11, 2010

Victoria University conducts offensive survey ‘in partnership’ with nationalist lobby group, the ‘United Macedonian Diaspora’

PRESS RELEASE
8 September 2010

AMAC was disappointed to discover the content of a survey conducted by the Centre for Strategic Economic Studies, a research centre of Victoria University, for people of Slav-Macedonian background: http://www.cfses.com/survey-macedonia-2010.htm. According to this link, the survey was conducted “in partnership with the Macedonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the United Macedonian Diaspora”.

The UMD is a nationalist, US-based lobby group with its head office in Washington DC. The UMD is well-known for their supporting territorial claims by the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia against Greece and Bulgaria.

Question 1 asks for the respondent’s country of birth and gives the option “Aegean Macedonia (in Greece)”. This sort of terminology is highly inappropriate. The term “Aegean Macedonia” is a term coined by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia in order to legitimise its claims on the Greek province of Macedonia and, in particular, the port of Thessaloniki.

Question 15 then asks.....
the respondent to what extent it agrees with the 'Roadmap for Advancing Australia-Macedonia Relations'. The ‘Roadmap’ is a 14 point plan a lobbyist construction of the UMD which it announced earlier this year. One of the Roadmap’s points which the survey asks the respondent to state the extent to which they agree is “Australia should recognise Macedonia's constitutional name without delay”.

AMAC fails to see how the nationalistic formulations of a lobby group such as the UMD and offensive, racist terminology could form part of an anthropological research project which purports to examine“how people maintain links with a homeland which represents an important part of their family background, identity or cultural heritage.”

AMAC has written to Victoria University and those conducting the survey and awaits a response to our concerns.

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Regarding the Greek debt Crisis....

Greece, a peripheral european state was encouraged to join a badly designed single currency by the rich elite of countries that dominated it. Those countries, having set up borrowing rules for the currency union, were the first to break them and did so with impunity.

Through complacency and inept financial regulation, and lacking good investment opportunities in their own stuttering economies, they then encouraged their banks to lend recklessly to the country on the periphery.

When those investments went sour, the elite governments -influence from Germany- with theirs globalizing neoliberal leadeships, rushed to bail out their banks first by loading up the debtor government with yet more loans to pay them back and then by imposing a foreign overlord to extract repayments through legal force.

We need History Lectures based on FACTS not political motives!

In November 5-8 2009 at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City took place the so-called "7th Macedonian-North American Conference on Macedonian Studies".
Although a number of presenters strictly deal with subjects of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, there are politically motivated lectures that attack and disparage the people of Greece, the Greek Cultural identity and as they twist historical facts through their disturbing presentation.
These motivated lectures are influence under the umbrella of the Slavmacedonism [5], a post-modern ultra nationalist ideology.

Read more here.

Modern Macedonian question - What is it all about?

Ancient Macedonia was a Greek kingdom situated in the north end of Greece. It became the most powerful Greek state during the 4th century bc after the decline of Athina (Athens) and Sparta. Under the leadership of King Philippos II and his son Alexandros III (Alexander the Great) the Macedonian army conquered most of the world and created the world's largest empire ever, including South-East Europe, most of Asia and North Africa.
After the death of Alexandros, Macedonia followed the fate of the rest of Greece. It became a Roman province, later a Byzantine province, it was occupied by the Ottoman empire and finally it became part of the indepented Greek state in 1912.
Today a Slavic nation attempts to adopt the history and culture of Macedonia as their own and present themselves to the world as "ethnic Macedonians" and "descedants of ancient Macedonians"
This is a blatant attack against Greece and its world wide respected history.
The FYROM Slavs who claim to be "Macedonians" have no historical, cultural or linguistic relation with ancient Macedonia. They descended into the region not before the 6th cent. A.D. long after ancient Macedonia was homogenized with the rest of Greece. Their 'Republic of Macedonia' occupies less than 10% of ancient Macedonia.
Therefore their claim on ancient Macedonia's name, history, culture and symbols can not be justified.

Aegean Macedonia.........

is a FYROMacedonian Slav nationalist term used to refer to the region of Macedonia in Greece, in the context of a United Macedonia.
The origins of the term seem to be rooted in the 1940s but its modern usage is widely considered ambiguous and irredentist.
The term has occasionally appeared on maps circulated in the FYROM, which envisioned Greek Macedonia (referred to as "Aegean Macedonia") as part of a "Greater Macedonia", and is regarded as a challenge of of the legitimacy of Greek sovereignity over the area.

Akritas Macedonian blog

Saturday, September 11, 2010

Victoria University conducts offensive survey ‘in partnership’ with nationalist lobby group, the ‘United Macedonian Diaspora’

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