PHOTO: Village of Machairas, Central Greece. Photo: EV

By Evaggelos Vallianatos

Threatening Greece

On April 15, 2025, the appointed president of Greece issued a decree that is bound to have serious, nay, potentially catastrophic consequences on the countryside of Greece. The executive order says that any village of less than 2,000 inhabitants must accommodate with houses and schools and Mosques at least 100 foreign immigrants, who are mostly Moslems from Turkey, as farm workers. This potential rural upheaval is playing out primarily because the country is not replacing itself with the births of sufficient new babies. Greece is suffering from dramatic / catastrophic demographic decline, which Elon Musk has aptly described as “The Death of Greece.” Musk went further. He warned America and Europe. Musk said that “Low birth rate is the number one threat to the West, followed closely by migration. There will be no West if this continues.”

In the case of Greece, the demographic fallout adds to the outrageous prospects of the Greek presidential decree of replacing the surviving Greek population with Moslems. Should this abominable policy survive the wrath of the local rural Greeks, all of Greece will become a Turkish colony in less than 20 years. Yet, this sensible thought did not enter the calculations of the few people running Greece – in 2025.

An Australian Greek newspaper put it bluntly as a population replacement. Its editorial warned:

“The Greek government is leading the nation toward an unprecedented disaster. This decree effectively legalises the mass settlement of 1.6 million illegal immigrants—misleadingly referred to as “refugees”—throughout rural Greece. Our homeland is being turned into an immense reception zone, while native Greeks are being pushed out of their villages in an alarming process of displacement and replacement….

“Greece is being turned into a human warehouse, with full complicity from a government implementing a programme that endangers our national integrity and existence. This is not merely a policy—it is a historic betrayal. This Presidential Decree represents an unfolding nightmare: a direct attack on Greek identity, heritage, and security. The replacement of our population is no longer a theoretical risk; it is a reality. To remain silent now is to become complicit in this national tragedy.”

Eugenia Sarigianni, a Greek psychologist with interest in the survival of rural culture and society in Greece, is equally upset by the scheduled dumping of foreigners / Turkish Moslems into Greek villages.

I suspect that foreign immigrants landing to Greece are primarily Turks because most of them come from the Asia Minor coast of Turkey sent to the Greek Aegean islands of Samos, Lesbos and Chios by Turkey.

Sarigianni says that the presidential executive order, demanding that villagers accept foreign migrants living in their neighborhood as farm workers, was the culmination of a series of national policies that thoroughly degraded the countryside and village farming in particular. She said:

“The governing class created the economic, political and social conditions that made life in the countryside miserable. As a result, government policies funded by the European Union emptied the villages of young people, forcing them to impoverishment and pushing them to the far away islands and to the top of mountains. Rural schools closed.… Then the government, through its European Union subsidies, destroyed the traditional and sustainable production of food. This means fishing boats were burned, the raising of food by peasants, their planting the land with traditional crops, was literally uprooted. The number of farm animals became smaller and smaller. The goats and sheep grazed only at moonlight, primarily because EU subsidies started going to gangsters, not to small farmers… In addition, politicians sowed the grazing land with solar panels and the top of the mountains with giant wind turbines. Tourism became the heavy industry of the countryside and of all Greece. The children of the farmers went to the universities and did not get their hands dirty but worked in the tourist industry. This attitude and behavior gave rise to the outrageous notion that “I am not a Pakistani to work the land” — Δεν είμαι Πακιστανός να πάω να δουλέψω στο χωράφι.”

This is alien and has nothing to do with Greek farming traditions. But the attitude, however ignorant and insulting, mirrors the influence of the European Union agricultural subsidies and foreign agribusiness in Greece.

These astonishing and almost criminal farm policies and delusions and corruptions from decades-long Greco-EU relations end up with the present sellout of Greece. Outsourcing the Greek countryside, the soul of sacred agrarian traditions and civilization, to foreign “farm workers” funded by madmen of the EU, not in exchange of “fat EU subsidies but for a miserly plate of lentils.”

Imagining extinction and Turkish occupation

If the Greek people allow this madness to take root, they will have the fate of Assyrians and other extinct people. The oligarchy in Athens, educated in the US and EU countries,  demonstrates its alienation and hatred of all things Greek. In ancient Greece these oligarchs — men and women — would be subject to ostracism.

The Athenian oligarchy in charge of Greece, did practically nothing in demanding that Germany repaid its murderous and WWII starvation debt to Greece, something like a trillion euros. With that kind of money invested in the villages, the Greek countryside would shine with plentiful wholesome food for the country — and large village families. When responsible governments take care of their people, demographic problems disappear. “In countries with consistently higher fertility, robust welfare systems, and targeted family- and child-support policies played a decisive role. In southern Europe—and particularly in Greece—the absence of such measures prevented generations after 1970 from having the number of children they desired.”

The experiment of replacing Greek villagers with largely illegal Moslem immigrants is bound to fail. Turkey keeps sending illegal Moslems to the Greek islands. Strangely, the Greek government accepts these immigrants. The reasons are potentially two. NATO and EU insist Greece take the migrants in order to keep Turkish Greek relations friendly. And second, probably because EU funds the costs of immigrants living in Greece. And since Greek debt repayments thoroughly exhausted and drained the country, the EU funds were seen above the risks of housing potential enemies.

What they conveniently forgot was medieval and modern Greek history. These eras of about 1,600 years embraced for centuries the fear and catastrophes of vicious crusades and Muslim-Christian antagonism, hatred and endless wars. Not only that, but no one can forget the Islamic Turkish occupation of Greece, 1453-1821. That period was dark ages and violence for Greece. And despite 200 years of freedom, modern Greeks are still threatened by Muslim Turks next door.

England and the US keep supporting the Turks because of their made-up fear of Russia, which essentially was responsible for Greek independence with its defeat of Turkey in the war of 1828. The Treaty of Adrianople of 1829 between Russia and Turkey confirmed Greek independence from Turkey. The British never wanted to see an independent Greece. They occupied the Ionian islands until 1864 and looted the Parthenon. They maintain their dislike of Greece to our days. They abandoned the Greeks in the 1920s in Asia Minor and, like Italy, France, the Soviet Union / Russia and the US, supported Kemal.  The Western allies witnessed the disgrace of Western civilization, observing fanatical Turks violating and killing Greeks on the harbor of Smyrna in 1923 and they, only meters away on their warships, did nothing.

The pogrom of 1955

In 1955, the British encouraged the Turks to go on with their horrific pogrom against the property of 85,000 Greeks living in Istanbul.

PHOTO: The Patriarch emerging from the ruined church of the holy virgin at the Belgrade Gate, Istanbul, Turkey, Pogrom, September 6-7, 1955. From Dimitrios Kaloumenos, The Crucifixion of Christianity, 48th edition, Athens, 2001. Courtesy Leonidas Chrysanthopoulos

A gigantic government organized mob of Turks ripped through all that was Greek: houses, stores, schools, hospitals, churches, even cemeteries. Turks unearthed dead people and stabbed them. The Greek government complained but the British and the US sided with the Turkish government that pretended it had nothing to do with the violence. And, in 1974, British and American supported the Turkish invasion and occupation of Northern Cyprus. In fact, British warplanes bombed Greek positions in Cyprus to help the invading Turks.

Most Greeks of our time remember this history, and they are not about to repeat it by filling their villages with Moslems.

However, aside from the hostility between Christianity and Islam, the very idea of planning to replace Greek population with foreigners is another criminal scheme of foreign occupation, equally repulsive to the Greeks.

Sacred and democratic farming

Demographic disruption is real in Greece, now, in 2025. Elementary school students are sharply declining – at least 19 percent since 2018. The debt crisis of 2009-2020 decimated the country so much that young people could not afford to have a family. Deaths outstripped births. “Between 2001 and 2021, the number of women aged 20–40 fell by 500,000, or 31%. Combined with a wave of skilled emigration during the financial crisis, the result has been a sharp reduction in the country’s reproductive population. Today, Greece’s fertility rate stands at just 1.35, with women having their first child at an average age above 32.”

The solution to demographic decline and the absence of young people from the villages is to reverse the trends by investing immediately in the Greek countryside. Make it prosperous with funding for couples to have large families, while raising traditional crops with agroecological methods, which produce healthy food and protect the natural world. Build farm schools all over the rural Greece.  If need be, Greece should abandon the EU, if the EU insists it must continue to fund the destruction of traditional farming for the benefit of agrochemicals and agribusiness.

Traditional Greek farming is a link with the ancient Greek gods. Zeus sent rains, Demeter represented the growing of wheat and the preservation of  traditional agriculture and civilization, Dionysos was grape vines and wine, Pan protected flocks of cattle, sheep, gods and other domesticated animals, Poseidon protected horses and Aristaios protected honeybees and wildlife.

PHOTO: Zeus, disguised as a shepherd, tempts Mnemosyne by Jacob de Wit (1727. Public Domain. Wikipedia Commons

Xenophon, a student of Socrates, Athenian general and historian, wrote a book, Oikonomikos, in which he argues that agriculture was a school for self-reliant food production, food security, bravery, cooperation, national defense and civilization. Besides, the gods made farming prosperous ( 5.6-14, 17-20).

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Evaggelos Vallianatos, Ph.D., is a historian and ecopolitical theorist. He studied zoology and history at the University of Illinois and Wisconsin. He did postdoctoral studies in the history of science at Harvard. He worked on Capitol Hill and the US EPA. He taught at several universities and authored hundreds of articles and 9 books, including the 2025 book Freedom: Clear Thinking and Inspiration from 6,000 Years of Greek History