‘for

yBy RUPERT
LOCKWOOD

j/AT CYPRIOTS stayed mili-
gently Greek, is one of
jry’s miracles — and a
gaument to the fierce cour-
of a virtually defenseless
rs le,

he Encyclopaedia Britanni-
Says Aegean influences
dominated in the Bronze
ge Which for Cyprus “began
Bably before 3,000 B.C. and
a about 1,200 B. CY; that
gus then had “a larger
julation, and distinct art
Eeculture”; that Cypriots to-
‘regard Greece as “their
ther country.”

hich is not surprising, con-
iting “that they've been
, €ks since before Sir Anth-
gf Eden’s ancestors learned
ot their faces with blue

wYPTUs, coveted for copper,
westos, foodstuffs and the
gests that built fleets for
AYPtians, Persians and
Xander the Great, was sel-
xm left in peace to develop
pore culture,

pesSytla, Egypt, Persia, the
giites, Phoenccians, Saracens,
aMks, Genoese, Venetians,
Welans, Turks and British —

have j
Blea ntruded and de-

fonqueror

ey

) YPtiots were treated as
aves and bartered for dogs
® Plgs. They often walked
Ked, lived in caves, reaped
; id not eat, gathered grapes
did not drink.

®t even their ancient stones
fe sacred, Foreign muse-
PS Were filled with them.

|
@

When the British wanted to
Hld Port Saiq wharves after
© Suez Canal opening, they
No stone quarries handy.
2 ancient and remarkable
mple at Soli, Cyprus, dedi-
eo Jointly to the Egyptians’
4 Bae the Greeks’ Aphrodite,
4 Tankish and Venetian
a €drals solved the problem.
; he Muslim Turks, too in-
rent to build mosques, stole
evan churches.
= Selim the Second’s
:.. €neral Mustafa landed
b.. With 60,000 killers.
lcosia held out for 45 days;

Na
le Turk. s
ford. S put 20,000 to the

followed con-

pellant Famagusta held for
; Its governor accepted
Sac of honorable sur-
Bre treacherous Turk gen-
. seasled his eyes on Fama-
Be S s0vernor being flayed
he the streets. Then
: ate had his skin stuffed
a Ata hung fromthe yard
¥ ae galley and par-

“f0re coastal vill
 ‘SPite these fats

and more

‘Cyprus fights

reecem

APE
KORMAKITE

> CAPE
ARNAUTI

=, AU LIMASSQL 7 CYPRUS

‘A Akrotie Bos

ed

grisley warnings, Cypriots
rose in revolt—seriously in
1784, 1804 and 1821. Turks
massacred the Cypriot bishops
and many others for support
of the Greek Revolution.

In 1878 Britain claimed
there was a “Russian Menace”
to the Suez Canal; and so
occupied Cyprus. :

Queen Victoria made a dirty
deal with Sultan Hamid I.

The British held the island,
retained Turkish policemen,
judges and tax-gatherers, but
the Sultan remained official
ruler and the Turks collected
from Cypriots at the point of
British bayonets, the yearly
“Turkish tribute” of 92,800
pounds—to subsidize the Sul-
ten’s eunuchs, harems and
torture chambers.

When Britain made Cyprus
its colony in 1914, on Turkish
entry into the war on Ger-
many’s side, the unfortunate
Cypriots were forced to con-
tinue paying the “Turkish trib-
ute.”

The excuse was that the
Turks owed money to British
bondholders; it ‘couldn’t be
collected from the enemy: so
the impoverished Cypriots
could help foot the interest bill.

The British on arrival in
1878, were met by Cypriot
Orthodox bishops who petition-
ed that Cyprus “be united
with Mother Greece, with
which it is naturally con-
nected.”

The British promised Enosis

(union with Greece) often
enough. a
In 1897, Prime~ Minister

William Gladstone spoke of
“the satisfaction I should feel
were it granted me before the
close of my long life to see
the, population of that Hellenic
island ~placed «by friendly
arrangement in organic union
with their brethren of the
Kingdom of Greece.”

Sir Compton Mackenzie, head
of Aegean Intelligence Ser-
vice in the First’ World War,
recalled again this year that
Britain had offered Cyprus

~

CAPE
ANDREA

Rizckarpaso

Mediterrerees Seo ’

—— own

}
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to Greece in 1915, as a bribe
for Greece’s entry to the war
against Germany.

In 1931, Cypriots rose for
union with Greece, burned
Government House and were
savagely suppressed.

Cyprus is only 60 miles by
141 at its broadest and long-
est, with 400,000 Greeks held
down by huge British forces,

Archbishop Makarios, Cypriot prelate exiled by the British

government, sits outside his bungalow in lonely Seychel-
les, British island colony in the Indian Ocean.

Turkish policemen and Turkish
judges — one of whom has
just refused D. N. Pritt, noted
British lawyer, a habeas cor-
pus writ for Cypriot union
leaders jailed without trial.

The Cypriots could neve:
metch the military might of
great empires.

But they have a moral might
that makes contemptible pig-
mies of, those who decree them

the hangman’s rope, curfew
and collective punishment.

This battle for Enosis that

the: passing of centuries, mas- .

sacre, torment, hunger and
vandalism has inflamed in
their hearts is not the affair
ct Cypriots alone.

Let all democrats demand
that Greeks may be Greeks—
ard not the subjects of alien
terrorists.

Shaw: sage for socialism

(Continued from Page 10)

the common. street, and into
the common Trafalgar Square,
where, on the smallest hint
on their part that communism
is to be tolerated for an in-
stant. in a civilized country,
they will be handily bludgeon-
ed by the common policeman
and hauled off to the common
jail.

“But the proletarian soil
was neither virgin nor except-
ionally kindly. The masses
are not in the least like tramps
and they have no romantic
illusions about one another,
whatever illusions each of
them may cherish about her-
self.”

(“Herself” instead of “him-
self” because the passage is
from The Intelligent Woman’s
Guide to Socialism, one of the
most challenging and cogent
political- handbooks in the
English language, for all that
it was addressed to just the
sort of middle-class lady whom
Shaw was cutting *down to
size.)

Bernard Shaw had a great
deal of respect for women as
political beings, and proposed
not only female suffrage, but
a device he called the ‘‘Coupl-
ed Vote’—by which a man
and a woman, paired, were to
stand for every office to make
democracy more “authorita-
tive and efficient.”

“When Ibsen said the hope
of the world lay in the women
and the workers, he was nei-
ther a sentimentalist nor a

demagogue,” Shaw wrote in
the Intelligent Woman’s Guide.
“Wormen are not angels. They
are as foolish as men in many
ways, but they have had to
devote themselves to life
whilst men have had to devote
themselves to death...

“The heroism of a woman
is to nurse and protect life; and
of a man to destroy it and
court death. But the homicid-
al heroes are often abject cow-
ards in the face of new ideas
and veritable Weary Willies
when they are asked to think.

“. .. knowing instinctively
that if they thought about

what they do they might find ~

themselves unable to do it,
they are afraid to think. That
is why the heroine has to
think for them, even to the
extent. of often having no time
left for herself.”

*

And- in that passage we
come to the final basic ingred-
ient of Shavian humor — the
one he recognized and public-
ized himself. For a man con-
siderably in advance of his
contemporaries — “a ghost of
the future,” as he put it — to
say precisely what he thinks
is often to achieve the effect
of hilarious comedy. Especial-
ly when it is combined with
deliberate overstatement and
mis-statement. The naive or
reactionary reader laughs. be-
fore he thinks — and then
wonders — and thus comes to
think for himself!

This is what Shaw was do-

ing when he welcomed Stalin’s
triumph over Trotzky as the
“Fabianizing of Bolshevism”—
for had he not always said
that socialism could be built
only in each country by and
for itself?

That is what he was doing
when he warned the Fabian
friends ‘after the First World.
War that they were changing
from ‘“intransigent revolution-
ists into intriguers for cabinet
rank as yesmen and bunk
merchants in the service of
the governing class” — and it
was no longer “possible for
the ocean of spcialism to be
poured into the pint pot of
nineteenth century parliament-
arianism” — and having taken
sides with the Russian experi-
ment, persisted in his loyalty
to it thyough all its ups and
downs.

One cannot help wishing he
had not finally given up the
ghost at 94 and retired into
the future he foresaw. It
would be good, these days, to
have someone around to re-
mind us among other things
that: :

“Revolutionary movements
attract those who are not good
enough for established insti-
tutions as well as those who
are too good for them,” and
that “Society must put up with
a certain burden of individual
error. The man who has never
made a mistake will never
make anything; and the man
who has ‘never done any harm
will never do any good.”

August 3, 1956 —PACIFIC TRIBUNE — PAGE 11