Guest Post: Migrants Must Eat Cats and Dogs

[This shocking tale comes from Nikos Rapti’s weblog at Zdnet. It sounds more like the plot of a horror film but alas it’s real life in 2011.]

As mentioned in some of my ZNet Commentaries, during the 1941-1944 Nazi occupation in Greece there was a famine in Athens, in 1941, that claimed the lives from starvation of about 200,000 Greeks. At that time there was a rumor [?] that the Italian occupiers were eating the cats of Athens as a … delicacy. I do not think that Greeks, in general, ate cats or dogs, even while dying of starvation. I did not and I survived.
 
One of the journalistically most honest papers in Greece is the satirical weekly “To Pontiki” [The Mouse]. It was started in 1979 by Kostas Papaioannou as an almost one-person endeavor and it evolved into the most authoritative paper of Greece. Three of the ZNet people have already met Kostas on the island of Aegina where he now lives in retirement. I had been writing for “To Pontiki” during its first two decades of publication. The paper was taken over by other people after Kostas’ retirement.
 
Today, January 6, 2011, seventy years after the Nazi instigated famine, I went to the kiosk in my neighborhood and bought ”To Pontiki” of this week. On page 3 the title reads: ”SHOCK: They grab and eat dogs”. 
 
The article describes the unbelievable situation in a neighborhood of Athens where the immigrants who have flooded the area having reached the lowest point of misery and hunger grab and eat the cats and the dogs in the neighborhood; the stray or the pets of the Greek residents. The Greek residents became aware of this gradually, as they noticed that the stray cats and dogs were disappearing.

It so happens that the house of my maternal grandfather is situated in this area. The house is an old one built around the turn of the 20th century and it was uninhabited. All these years during my rare visits to the abandoned house I used to notice that on the sidewalk some tender-hearted ladies in the neighborhood were placing plates full of cat food for the cats that had proliferated after finding refuge in the abandoned house.
 
After reading the article, it struck me, for the first time, that during my visits of the past year there were no plates for the cats on the sidewalk. There were no cats anymore.
 
The article goes on to describe the same, if not a worst, situation with starving immigrants eating cats and dogs in the Greek countryside. Also, in the villages immigrants break into houses and all they steal is food!
 
In Patras, the Greek port just opposite Italy, there are hundreds of Afghans, Iraqis, Pakistanis, etc fighting one an other trying to reach Italy by sneaking on the trucks that are ferried to Italy.
 
[Note: To fathom the immorality spread on this planet by the pious and God-fearing US and Israeli elites be informed that the US-controlled Greek police (the usual pigs) on the I.D. papers of some Afghans, Iraqis, etc, they print that their nationality is Palestinian, so when they are fighting one an other in Patras to reach Italy, one can blame it on the Palestinians. Many years ago a neighbor of my father’s, a high-ranking Greek policeman, boasted cynically to me that he was smart enough to choose the right side; the US side.] 
 
I have been living in this country for 80 years. My fellow Greeks and I could have never [repeat: never] imagined that in the year 2011 thousands of people from Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, etc, could walk the streets of Athens and eat the cats and the dogs of the city. We cannot not imagine that somehow there are still Nazis, or epigones of the Nazis walking on this earth. 
 
Most Greeks, not only of my generation but of the succeeding ones, knew of Afghanistan, Iraq, etc, only as geographical entities. How come they came to Athens to eat the cats and the dogs?
 
What follows is addressed to the ordinary Americans that have still retained their human dignity:
 
Ignoring what the US elites have been doing to the peoples of the world since the end of World War II in the name of the American people, let us dwell a bit on what the Clinton family and the Bush family have done. Bush (father) attacked Iraq killing hundreds of thousands. Clinton had been bombing Iraq for years killing thousands and exterminating half a million infants through his embargo (which according to Madeleine Albright, his Secretary of State, ”was worth it”). Bush (son) destroyed Afghanistan and Iraq killing hundreds of thousands of people (mostly civilians) and has destabilized Pakistan to a very dangerous point. Obama, the black US President, is continuing the benevolent deeds of his predecessors through high-tech drones, thus protecting the lives of young US military personnel.
 
As expected some of the young people of Afghanistan, of Iraq, and of Pakistan, probably the most courageous ones, to survive the US attack ended up on the streets of Athens and of the Greek villages and now to survive they eat the cats and the dogs of the country.
 
As Americans, you have never experienced how a human feels when expecting to be bombed by airplanes flying thousands of feet in the sky above his home. Millions of humans on this earth have experienced that feeling, because the above individuals, Clinton, the Bushes, et al, were striving to protect the interests of the ordinary Americans. All the above immigrants know this feeling. I did, also, although the Nazis never bombed or threatened to bomb Athens during World War II, as they admired the classical Greek civilization and not the humans in Athens.  It seems that the above US Presidents, etc, being more practical, did not hesitate, for sentimental reasons, to bomb Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilization.
 
It seems, also, that things have gone too far. And it is not only Afghans, Iraqis, and Pakistanis eating cats and dogs on the streets of Athens. There is worse, much worse, going on. Something has to be done to stop the murderous behavior of the world elites. The only power that can do that are the ordinary Americans who still retain their human dignity.
 
To do that they have to search and find the details of what is going on in the world and to search and find the individuals who perpetrate this misery. They have to ask themselves:
 

• Why, Heinz Alfred Kissinger, the mass-murderer known as Henry Kissinger, is mocking humanity by advising the US elites and others how the world should operate? 
• Why, people like Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, as members of the US Supreme Court, decide the fates not only of ordinary Americans but of people all over the world?
• Why, Dick Cheney, an unbelievably cruel person and guilty of committing one of the worst crimes, torture, is enjoying his life. As if, such a person has feelings to ever enjoy anything?
• Why, the young Americans, men and women, that torture other humans not only in Guantanamo but all over the world, will someday return to their hometowns, as if nothing had happened, and be respectable citizens?
• Why, John Bolton, of the UN etc, is free to be part of the society of ordinary Americans?
•  Why, John Negroponte, a Greek American [!], one of the worst criminals, with thousands of murdered in Central America and all over the world on his conscience, is part of almost all US Administrations and a respected individual?
• Why, the “throw-the-bums-out” members of the US Congress have a good time in Washington while they spit in the face not only of ordinary Americans, but of people in Athens, Rome, Dublin, Madrid, Baghdad,…?
• Why, is there a possibility that Jeb Bush will have the audacity to be a candidate for the US Presidency?
• Why, are the ordinary Americans not stopping the Israelis in their genocidal project of eliminating the people of Gaza?

 
No need to go on. Many of the above the ordinary Americans are vaguely aware of. A good start for doing something about them will be to start talking about them with their neighbors.