The German newspaper Die Welt published an article which rekindles memories of Nazi racism, directly attacking Greece and warning that the Mediterranean country “destroyed European order in the past as well”.

Conservative Die Welt, based on an outrageous proposition of DNA-based participation in the EU, insinuates that besides the “fake Greeks”, Slavs, Turks, Albanians and all sorts of “non-Europeans” may not have a right to be in the purest of European families…

This is extremely worrying, if one considers that this newspaper is representative and shares many views with the majority of Angela Merkel’s constituency.

Speaking on the matter of the Navarino naval battle in 1827, during which the Great Powers of Europe destroyed the Ottoman armada, thus helping with the Greek revolutionaries’ victory against the Sublime Porte, the article writer underlined that the motives behind such a move were pure and romantic, and not geopolitical, the latter being what is today considered justifiable by political science.

“The three powers acted against their beliefs (that people should not rise against their ruler), affected by pure romanticism, since Europeans, based on classical knowledge could not bear the thought that the descendants of Homer, Socrates, Pericles should live under Turkish rule”.

The writer then proceeds to explain to the conservative German readers that these reasons were the wrong ones. The reason? According to the article writer, “these Greeks were not real Greeks”, which directly raises a question on “race purity”.

The racist dribble is as follows: “The idea that the modern Greeks were descendants of Pericles and Socrates and not a race of slavic, Byzantine and Albanian genes created through Turkish hegemony, was popular among educated Europeans. But not even the architects of the European Union were able to forego this conclusion and misunderstanding. Based on this logic, they brought Greece aboard the EU ship in 1980 with the now well known consequences we ‘admire’ daily”.

This idea that Greeks are not… real Greeks is not new nor does it belong to the hateful and racist article writer. The idea and theory was first described by Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer, a journalist, political and discredited historian of the 19th century.