Dr. Michael Seraphinoff Ph.D

July 12, 2002

To the President of the Senate of Illinois, Senator James Philip,

I was both shocked and appalled to learn that the State Senate of "the land of Lincoln" and the party of Abraham Lincoln had fallen so low as to recently pass a resolution, SR0446, that proclaims the eternal Greekness, both past and present, of the Macedonian region of northern Greece.

I was shocked because this is something that most scholars, whether they be political scientists, geographers, historians, archaeologists, ethnologists or others, would never say. There is too much contradictory evidence to draw such a simplistic conclusion. I was appalled because the Senate Resolution runs so counter to the spirit of justice and fair play that one would normally expect of a legislative body that is the direct heir in state government of "honest Abe Lincoln".

The honorable Senators of Illinois apparently have no idea how many hundreds of thousands of people who were not Greek, but who called themselves and whose fathers, grandfathers and their grandfathers for a thousand years before them all called themselves Macedonians, were killed, imprisoned or driven into exile from northern Greece after the Balkan Wars of 1911 and 1912 and after World War One and again after the Greek Civil War of 1948.

What if we were talking about a Pan-German Aryan historical issue instead? What if we were talking about a state that had killed or driven out millions of Jews during World War Two, and about a neo- Nazi lobbying group, under some title such as the Aryan Nation Pan- Germanic Association? What if they asked for a Senate Resolution that read as follows, and that group made some generous contribution to many of the State Senators of Illinois, would they have passed the following resolution:

SENATE RESOLUTION

2 WHEREAS, Philip of Macedonia, his son, Alexander the
3 Great, and his tutor, the philosopher Aristotle, were born
4 and raised in the Ancient Southern Province of Germany ; and

5 WHEREAS, The language and culture of the ancient
6 Southern Germans, the ancestors of the inhabitants of northern
7 Greece of today, were Germanic; and

8 WHEREAS, The Southern Germans, like the rest of the Hellenes
9 in Antiquity, believed in the 12 Gods of Olympus and
10 participated with their fellow Hellenes in the Olympic Games;
11 and

12 WHEREAS, Pella, the palace where Alexander the Great was
13 born, and Vergina, the burial site of the Macedonian kings,
14 are all located in what was once Southern Germany; therefore,
be it
15 RESOLVED, BY THE SENATE OF THE NINETY-SECOND GENERAL
16 ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF ILLINOIS, that for all of the above
17 reasons, we proclaim that the ancient Southern Germans are
18 Hellenes and that the inhabitants of the southern province of
19 Germany, are their Hellenic Descendants; and be it
20 further

21 RESOLVED, That the history of Ancient northern Greece has been
22 Germanic for 3,000 years and continues to be today; and be it
23 further

24 RESOLVED, That a suitable copy of this resolution be
25 presented to George Lincoln Rockwell Jr., the Mid-Western
26 District Governor of the Aryan Pan-German Association, Inc

Now if the honorable Senate of the state of Illinois would not pass such a resolution, I believe that it should withdraw SR0466, because it is scientifically unsound, and it does an injustice to a people of southeastern Europe who suffered terrible persecution because they lived on land that became part of modern Greece in 1913. That people call themselves Macedonians after the land of their forefathers for over a thousand years.

The fact that the modern Greeks conquered and annexed part of their Macedonia at the beginning of the 20th century and evicted most of those inhabitants who called themselves Macedonians and who spoke a Slavic language instead of Greek, does not give them or their friends the right to deny that ethnic group its history or its ethnic identity.

Ethnic cleansing is one of the most serious crimes of our era, whether it was practiced by Germans upon Jews in their midst, by Turks upon Armenians or Kurds in their midst, by Chinese upon Tibetans in their midst, by Indonesians upon East Timorese in their midst, or by Greeks upon Macedonians in their midst.

Please do not bring shame upon the good name of the land of Lincoln by an odd show of support for the claims of a lobbying group that seeks through a racist version of Balkan history to bestow respectability upon ethnic cleansing.

Sincerely,

Dr. Michael Seraphinoff Ph.D. Slavic Languages and Literature

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