Homer in the Iliad He presents the Trojans with the same sympathy as the Hellenes. In this way, the Greeks of that time, or the current readers of the work, feel the pain of the “enemies”, of the defeated, as much or more than that of the victorious Greeks, or the laments for the death of the Trojan prince Hector. They hurt us as much as Achilles’ cries for Patroclus. In this, it has always been pointed out, the Iliad It differs from the epics of other peoples, much less even-handed with the enemy.
What happened after Hector’s death, the fall of Troygave way to the complete destruction of this city. Homer no longer tells this, but in other poems and, above all, in some tragedies, such as Trojans of Euripidesthe hateful behavior of the Greeks after their victory is recounted. The entire city is burned, the men are executed and the women are raffled off as loot. In the midst of that great desolation there is a scene in Trojans especially terrible: the Greeks decide to kill Hector’s son, a boy named Astyanax. His grandfather is the old Priam, king of Troy; This boy, after his father died, was the hope of the city. The Greek soldiers tear him from his mother’s arms, Andromacheand they take him away while she screams in horror: Alas, Greeks, inventors of barbaric evils! Why do you kill this child, who is not guilty of anything? Later, near the end of the piece, it is his grandmother, Hecuba, in charge of burying him, who laments the cowardice of the victors, who kill him, she thinks, fearing that one day he might avenge his country. The interesting thing about the episode of the death of Astyanax in Trojans is that we find a Greek author (Euripides) putting the accusation of barbarism in the mouth of a Trojan woman, that is, a “barbarian” (Andromache).
In the documentary Dachau (2020), when one of the Nazi soldiers tried in Nuremberg Why did they kill even Jewish children? Their answer is the same as what Hecuba imagined: for fear that one day they would take revenge. The Jews have left abundant evidence of the horrors of the Holocaust: films, documentaries, series, diaries, essays… Of the Holocaust that the Zionists are perpetrating in Gaza now, will they themselves, the executors themselves, leave evidence? I am not referring to a graphic memory of their evil, something they do with joy and shamelessness, but rather a testimony of the barbarism recognized as such, of the genocide assumed for what it is, in all its criminal dimension.
The Israeli army is responsible for untold “barbaric evils”
The relationship of the ancient Greeks with the episodes of the taking of Troy was always conflictive, of a certain discomfort. In some ceramic images, the elderly Priam is represented with his grandson Astyanax, already dead and bloody, on his lap. This symbolized the absolute destruction of the city, once Hector, the first son and father of the second, had already died. Current images of Gaza, with entire families massacred, corpses of murdered mothers with their children in their arms, of devastated little children hugging brothers, older and younger, also dead, are everyday images. We see them day after day because we are faced with crimes committed with impunity and shamelessness. The Israeli army is responsible for untold “barbaric evils.” After all, the Greeks returned the body of her grandson to Hecuba so that she could bury him with dignity; The soldiers of the Zionist army, on the other hand, abandon unburied corpses at the mercy of dogs, or run over them with bulldozers, or throw them by kicking them from rooftops…
Of Trojans there is a film version by the Greek director Michael Cacoyannisfrom 1971. The role of Andromache was played by an impressive Vanessa Redgrave. This same actress, now almost ninety years old, continues to denounce today, as she has done all her life, the horror suffered by the Palestinian people. His support for Palestine, massacred for decades (it did not start on October 7), has always cost him threats, despite having also always faced anti-Semitism and fascism. When he received the Oscar for his role in Julia (a 1977 film in which he shared the scene with Jane Fonda and which denounced Nazism) made a famous speech in which he showed his commitment and courage without allowing himself to be intimidated by groups of “Zionist thugs, whose behavior is an insult to the true stature of Jews around the world.”. In that same speech he again pledged his support for the fight against anti-Semitism and oppression.
Here we are, decades after this speech, facing a new holocaust, and it is still difficult to denounce the genocide in Gaza without receiving accusations of anti-Semitism from zionist thugs. It doesn’t matter that Nazi barbarism is also denounced. It does not matter whether Hamas terrorism is denounced. The Zionists believe they are untouchable, but there is no choice but to continue talking day after day about Gaza, about the barbaric and more than barbaric evils of the Israeli army, its absolute inhumanity, its infinite misery, its absolutely unbearable crimes.
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