About two decades ago I met a civil engineering colleague of mine, a politically conservative person, in a suburb of Athens. We started a conversation about current events. It so happened that the most important event, at the time, was the usual threat of a war between the Turks and the Greeks. I said to him that a war between Greece and Turkey is ‘impossible’, because the Greeks number 10 million and the Turks 80 million. His answer: “Yes, but the Greeks have psyche!” That is, the Greeks are courageous.
As a child I was taught that when a person dies, out of his mouth comes something called ‘psyche’ (spirit, soul). As an adult, I usually ask my fellow-humans: Is the psyche material or nonmaterial. The answer always is that it is nonmaterial. So, I am obliged to spoil the conversation by asking: how come that a glass of wine (a material substance) delights our psyche (a nonmaterial entity)?
Here is, in Greek, the ‘face’ of the psyche: ΨΥΧΗ.
There are more than 50 words in the English language with the word psyche as a compound, starting with the word psychasthenia and ending with the expression psych-out.
However, there is a substance in nature that not only exists but also is the reason for the existence of something called life in the universe. The substance: Blood!
Here is: the ‘sound’ of the word blood in Greek: ΑΙΜΑ.
The first two letters AI, constitute a diphthong which in Greek is pronounced “e”, as the letter “e“ in the English word ‘end’. Thus, in Greek the sound of the word ‘blood’ is ema, which we adopt as the noun for ‘blood’ in this article. For a not so strange reason in English the Greek word ‘Aima’ was rendered as ‘hema”. That is, instead of simply ema a (rather unnecessary) “h” was added ahead of the ‘e’..There are about 47 words in the English language with the word hema as a compound, starting with the word ‘hema’ and ending with the word ‘hemostatic’
[Note; That “h” was added by a Dutch gentleman who ‘baptized’ himself adopting the name ‘Erasmus’ (1466/1469 – 1536). See my ZNet Commentary of October 17, 2007, titled “Ethics of Stone”, about the American General David. H. Petraeus.]
Finally, there is one more interesting Greek word, the word ‘vora’ (accent on ‘a’) ,which means food for carnivorous beasts (according to the.Liddell and Scott dictionary) and originates from the classical Greek verb vivrosko, which means to eat.
Here, again, is from time immemorial, the Greek ‘face’ of this precious word for ‘food’: ΒΟΡΑ (Β = V , P = R!). In English the word vora was used to build the word voracious.
[Sad Note: It is this proliferation of Greek words borrowed by other languages that makes the Greek Nazis and other Greek ‘patriots’ so proud and enthusiastic in carrying out their Greek Orthodox Christian contribution to humanity.]
The Greeks combining the word ema (blood) and vora (food) created a strange and powerful word: emovoros (‘e’ as in end, accent on the middle ‘o’) which means that a person is cruel and sadistic and malicious, etc, etc
Then, to make the word more powerful, the Greeks eliminated the initial ‘e’ and the word that was formed was: movoros (again, accent on the middle ‘o‘). It is not strange that the human language is so strong that even the elimination of one letter can affect the person accusing another human as ‘movoro’, given that the face, the eyes, even the body of the accuser participate in the expression of the contempt and the anger against the accused. In this article we use the word ‘movoros’ both for singular and plural.
To start the anatomy of the ‘movoros’ in History beginning with Alexander the Great and reaching Hitler is redundant. We, more or less, know their evilness.It is more important to seek the ‘movoros’ of our time. Presenting examples of the acts of such persons is extremely sad but more than extremely necessary..
” ‘This old man came out of a hiding hole, his hands held up,’recalled Ryu Jin-seong, a former marine with the [South Korean] unit who was 22 then. He kept begging for life …’ In a fit of rage a sergeant sore and emptied his clip on the man, Mr. Ryu said’ ” The time: February 12, 1968. The place: Central Vietnam. [The NewYork Times International, Edition, August 23, 2021, p. 3.]
It is not an exaggeration to say this is a typical reaction of a movoros Even if he does not carry a gun. There are two points here that one has to analyze. 1. The rage of the movoros and 2. Our reaction to the act of the sergeant.
1. The Rage
As all humans, so and I, since about the age of six, I have been, instinctively, observing and paying attention to the expression on the face and to the acts of my fellow-apes.. My conclusion: the movoros, when angry, present a face unnaturally red and a facial expression full of extreme hate. This we, usually, call a tantrum. The Americans, through the Merriam, define a tantrum as “a fit of bad temper”. The British at Cambridge define a tantrum as “a sudden period of uncontrolled childish anger” [Emphasis added.]. The word extremely is too weak to describe the expression of the movoros. Also there is nothing ‘childish’ about an extremely red-hot face. So, I have accepted this ‘uncontrolled tantrum’ as a basic ‘tool’ which can reveal if a person is a movoros. This is the conclusion of a layman. I do not know if the experts have identified such a connection between a tantrum and a movoros. Or, even, if science has classified a person with the attributes of a movoros as a separate category of evil humans. Also, is a movoros, born or ‘made’ by the social environment?
Of course these questions will be answered by science, as it is our only hope for survival on this planet. However, the existence of the movoros and the extreme harm he can inflict on his fellow-humans is here. A Trump or a Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court, both movoros par excellence, can inflict harm on millions of humans. It is more realistic to try to identify the persons who, as movoros, have done or are doing extreme harm to humanity this very minute.
In the September 15, 2021 issue of the ‘New York Times International, Edition’, there is a small photo (3 by 4 inches) that accompanies an article by Maureen Dowd. This photo, taken by Jason Reed of Reuter’s, could easily be the most important photo taken, at least, during the last five or seven decades. In the photo there are four very important persons (followed by two aides in the background) dressed in casual attire walking towards a place pointed by the most important person of the four.
The persons, from left to right, in the photo: Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice, and George W..Bush (son), the President of the USA. All four have historically gained the title. of ‘movoros’. Jason Reed should be proud of having so much history in a simple photo.
Here are also the names of some persons who have earned the title of ‘movoros” in recent times: Mitch McConnell, Bolsonaro, Erdogan, the one of Hungary (I forget his name), Putin, and so on.
Staying at the level of important people, let us try to understand the movoros among them. Let us begin with the most obvious case: the offspring of the elite. Here is an interesting case, Hercules, who is a muscular and tall human male. Hercules was the son of a top Leader called Zeus who was keen to sleep with a married lady called Alcmene, which he did. The offspring, Hercules, was a muscular and tall male. Hercules married Megara. “But he killed her and their children in a fit of madness… (the Britannica)”. As is usual with persons born in rich and powerful families Hercules went on with his life killing lions, with his bare hands, etc.
Unfortunately, the Hercules mentality bred an industry of comics and movies with Herculean Supermen as the main heroes, who save humanity through violence. Fortunately,at some point there was ‘Pogo’.of Walt Kelly, with an ordinary ‘person’ as its main hero who was kind and rational. However, generations of children have, ‘printed’ in their mind the ‘beauty’ of violence.
Of course one does not have to be tall and muscular to be a movoros. In our societies of ‘ordinary’ persons there are many.
2. Our Reaction
First, can we ‘detect’ if a child has the tendency or is already born to be a movoros? I think we can. Instinctively even from kindergarten, to elementary school, to high school, to college, to the Army, to our job, or in our neighborhood we can spot the movoros. However, there is a person that definitely knows if a child or an adult is a movoros; our mother.
Second, suppose that our society comes to the conclusion that Heinz Alfred Kissinger (a.k.a Henry Kissinger) is a movoros who, after graduating from Harvard, can be a potential murderer of thousands of women, men, and children. What can we do to stop Kissinger, or Trump, or Clarence Thomas? At present there is nothing we can do. Yet, we are told that we have three potent tools to stop the monsters:The
[Important Note: The Greek word ‘eu’ (pronounced: ef , ‘e’ as in end ), is a very important (and strange) word. It means: good, kind , joyous, morally right, happy, fortunate, competent …,). We see it as an adverb, an adjective, a combining word, and even a noun. For example, there is a famous classical Greek maxim which advises us that:
ook en to pollo’ to eu (the ‘o’ in ‘to’ pronounced as the ‘o’ of ‘so’)
not in the many the eu (good) [many= several, great quantity. great number, abundant]
Of course, the Greeks did not apply this maxim in war, concerning the dead of the enemy. Also, they did not agree that in politics the more honesty there is, the better and so on. Once more the Greeks were… wrong. As they were wrong in their maxim “know thyself’, an impossibility. However, there is a really important word in the maxim; the word ‘pollo’, of which the plural is ‘oi polloi’ = the many, the masses, ‘we the people’, who were considered by Plato and Socates as Trumpean “shit’ and that the “intellectually” powerful, the Trumps of the world should be the leaders of the unwashed masses. This philosophy was intensively taught in 1947 and in 1948 in my Greek high school, under the orders of the benevolent US State Department. Finally, when ‘eu” is followed by a vowel the pronunciation ‘ef” is changed to ‘ev’, hence the American: ‘Ev-angelicals’. End of Note]
A few weeks ago we read in the N.Y.Times International Edition:of November 26: “Arbery was jogging through a South Georgia neighborhood. The {white} men formed a pose…They stoked Arbery…. then one of the men – Trevis Mc Michael – blasted him three times with a shotgun…. It was caught on video, ironically by one of the {three} men convicted of the murder.”
The South Korean sergeant of 1968 and Trevis Mc Michael of 2021 out of a team of men were the single person who with inexplicable rage killed their fellow-men. As expected the movoros in any group of males is a minority, most of the time a single human. The single teenager that kills his peers and others in the schools of America can be spotted and stopped. The solution starts with his mother and all of us.
As for the Rumsfelds and the Kissingers of the world, of the last century, we, all of us, should be ashamed for allowing them to do what they did. .All of us? Yes, all of us! Also, we should be ashamed for allowing them to bring us to this point where the ice is melting not only at the Poles but now melting in Greenland. A 123 Fahrenheit summer is closing on us!.
For example, we, the US–satellites of the Empire, which was “made great again” by Donald Trump, the epitome of a movoros, we have our share of responsibility. The ordinary citizens of Greece, of Germany, of France, of Italy, of Ghana …, all of us let Rumsfeld to bring Merkel to America, for a couple of weeks and after catehizing her, put the ring of leadership in her finger and sent her back to Germany to terrorize Helmut Kohl and the rest of the German politicians and become the leader of Europe for two decades, together with that ruthless human being, Wolfang Scueuble.
To close this ZNet Commentary, it is right to try to answer the question of whether it is possible for a ‘movoros’ to change from a monster to a normal human. I cannot answer. It is something that science should answer. Of course, there is the easy answer, which we can find in Antonio Vivaldi’s opera ‘Ercole’ (‘Hercules”) in which Hercules simply throws down his overcoat, the entire skin of a lion, and changes into a good guy. However there is a case of a real and ferocious movoros whose contribution to our world during World War II was paramount. I hope to be able to write a ZNet Commentary about him, in the near future.
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