Friday, February 11, 2011

Jedi slime

General Grievous
A good way to cope with stress at work (which is more of an issue than some people might think) is to find little things in the day that you find amusing. I thought I would share one of them with my reader(s). Yesterday whilst doing some cataloguing I came across this tome, The Memoirs of General Grivas (London, Longmans, 1964). Who was this General Grivas? After a bit of digging, thanks to the good people at homework website Factmonster (a division of Pearson Education) I discovered that he was George Grivas (1897-1974). My home city of Melbourne has one of the world's largest Greek communities outside of Athens, but I have never studied Greek history, so I had no idea who he was. One thing is clear, however. Grivas is not to be confused with General Grievous, who was the commander of the Separatist droid army during the Clone Wars in Star Wars.

George Grivas (1897-1984)
Grivas on the other hand was a Greek and Cypriot general. Some people regard him as a national hero. He may not have killed scores of Jedi knights and kept their lightsabres as trophies, have four arms, speak in a raspy voice, or own a personal star ship named the Invisible Hand, but from what I have read about Grivas, he sounds like he was just as ruthless as his fictional counterpart.

Factmonster states as follows:

"He joined the Greek army and early became an advocate of enosis (the union of Cyprus with Greece). After the Second World War, he played a sinister role in the anti-leftist repression that helped bring about the Greek Civil War. In 1954 he returned to Cyprus to head a guerrilla army (EOKA), which conducted struggle against the British in Cyprus from 1955 to 1959. He opposed the 1959 agreements establishing the independent republic of Cyprus. In August, 1964, after fighting broke out between Greek and Turkish Cypriots, he commanded the Cypriot national guard and headed Greek forces on the island. Grivas was forced to leave Cyprus, however, in November 1967, after a number of Turkish Cypriots were killed in a battle with Grivas's national guard. In 1971, he returned secretly to the island, launching a terrorist campaign against the government of President Makarios. Shortly after his death, his movement succeeded in temporarily overthrowing Makarios, thus opening the way for a Turkish seizure of the northern third of the island (July, 1974) and its defacto partition."

"http://www.factmonster.com/ce6/.html." The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia.

© 1994, 2000-2006, on Fact Monster.

© 2000–2007 Pearson Education, publishing as Fact Monster.

13 Feb. 2011

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