EDITORIAL

Tassos Symeonides
(Academic Advisor)

Copyright: Research Institute for European and American Studies (www.rieas.gr) Publication date: 28 August 2016

Note: The article reflects the opinion of the author and not necessarily the views of the Research Institute for European and American Studies (RIEAS)

In earlier times, anyone would have been hard pressed to use philanthropy and totalitarianism in the same breath. But in our uncertain and unpromising present, pregnant with lethal crises of conscience, politics, and “social justice,” big time “non-state” philanthropy has become a weapon of insidious undermining of independence and sovereignty aimed at the “guilty” West....Read more

Tassos Symeonides
(RIEAS Academic Advisor)

Copyright: Research Institute for European and American Studies (www.rieas.gr)
Publication date: 20 August 2016

Note: The article reflects the opinion of the author and not necessarily the views of the Research Institute for European and American Studies (RIEAS)

In an era dominated by the fluttering fame of the online jungle, the feeding frenzy of media clamoring for ratings, pathetic politicians, international divas, designer NGOs, and a collective attention span measured in seconds, a country’s slow death weighs little. Instant mayhem, death and destruction immortalized on YouTube, barbaric propaganda images of neo-Neanderthals severing the heads of innocents, and the occasional blurb by a controversial, and almost always incompetent, “public figure” shape out perceptions of “reality.”...Read more

Tassos Symeonides
(RIEAS Academic Advisor)

Copyright: Research Institute for European and American Studies (www.rieas.gr)
Publication date: August 2, 2016

Note: The article reflects the opinion of the author and not necessarily the views of the Research Institute for European and American Studies (RIEAS)

In 1901 Lenin, then the budding Marxist agitator preparing for the revolution asked what was to be done because of “burning questions of our movement.” One hundred and fifteen years later we can ask burning questions about what to do with a disintegrating “EUtopia,” with the Islamist war surge in Europe, with both “indigenous” and “refugee” Moslems going rampant with axes, hatchets, and bombs, but, above all, with political and social elites ignorant on how to defeat the attack and how to protect and strengthen what we still (reluctantly) continue to recognize as Western civilization and its values...Read more

Tassos Symeonides
(Academic Advisor)

Copyright: Research Institute for European and American Studies (www.rieas.gr) Publication date: 23 July 2016

Note: The article reflects the opinion of the author and not necessarily the views of the Research Institute for European and American Studies (RIEAS)

Strange things are happening in the land of Tayyip Erdogan, the relentless rising Padishah of “secular” Turkey. During a few tense hours over the weekend of July 15-16 an alleged military putsch tried to overthrow the government, a fuming Erdogan proclaimed over social media (which his regime hates with a passion and has repeatedly blocked lest ‘un-Islamic’ influences hurt Turkey’s virtues.) In the deadly confusion that followed, tanks rolled, fighter planes roared overhead, soldiers fired at police, police fired at soldiers, attack helicopters launched missiles at the National Assembly building--and then, suddenly, the whole “putsch” collapsed like a house of cards....Read more

Nickolaos Mavromates
(Security Analyst-Historian)

Copyright: Research Institute for European and American Studies (www.rieas.gr) Publication date: 17 July 2016

Note: The article reflects the opinion of the author and not necessarily the views of the Research Institute for European and American Studies (RIEAS).

“Nations have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests.” Lord Palmerstone (1784-1865)

President Tayyip Erdoğan's success in putting down the Turkish military Putsch aimed at him and his administration with the help of Dr Hakan Fidan automatically elevates him in the foreseeable future as the new premier of Turkey. Without the support of Chief of the Turkish Intelligence Dr. Hakan Fidan any resistance by Erdoğan to the Coup mutineers actions would had been futile.....Read more

Tassos Symeonides
(RIEAS Academic Advisor)

Copyright: Research Institute for European and American Studies (www.rieas.gr) Publication date: 15 July 2016

One apocryphal story claims that when Louis XVI was awakened by his courtiers with the news that Bastille had fallen to a revolutionary mob he chastened the news bearers because they had disturbed his sleep.

In similar fashion, Europe is still very much asleep despite horrors like the latest carnage in Nice perpetrated by the ‘French’-Tunisian Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, who had several earlier encounters with the law. Media reports said the murderer was a ‘loner’ who had become ‘depressed’ because his wife had left him—avoiding almost obsessively to suggest that the motive for the attack was Islam...Read more