Talk:Eastern Party

Problematic article

I sharply object to the below comments and the negative views about Prof. Kitsikis. The Greeks have been divided between East and West factions for centuries. Recent events over in Greece between the Western oriented pro-EU Creditors party and the rest of the population illustrate this divide. No one can deny or denigrate the Byzantine heritage and the Orthodox religion in Greece. Demosthenos Danielides pointed these matters out in his seminal work "Νεοελληνική Κοινωνία και Οικονομία" written in the 1930's, which clearly outlines how Greece differs from Western Europe. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 46.177.71.227 (talk) 11:08, 30 June 2015 (UTC)

OK, this article is highly problematic. First of all, it reads more like an essay than an encyclopedic article, it uses exclusively the rather fringe theory of "Hellenoturkism" to make sweeping claims and over-generalizations such as equating the Byzantines who converted to Islam with an "Eastern, pro-Turkish party", or indeed claiming that the fall of Byzantium to the Ottoman Empire marked the victory of that party... This is a very simplicistic view of the issue to say the least. The article then jumps to today by way of China, without explaining how or why Chinese thinkers had anything to do with Greece except in the birth of the notion of an "Eastern Party", which again is odd since the claim is made that exactly such a party existed in Byzantium since the 13th century... In more recent times, Dragoumis, Souliotis and others are mentioned, but only as names to be rattled off to lend support to the claims this article makes, without any elaboration on their theories or indeed any indication that their views were at the fringes of mainstream Greek thought & opinion at the time as well as now. The only modern scholar mentioned is Kitsikis, without any effort to mention how his views are received, criticized or accepted by fellow scholars and the Greeks at large. Indeed, the way the article is written, it reads as if all of the preceding facts serve to emphasize Kitsikis' view. There is a need to present the Greek culture's ambivalent and often hostile attitude to the West, beginning well before 1204, but this article makes a horrible, jumbled mess out of it by reducing it to a listing off of mutually often unrelated, or at least unconnected, statements. Constantine ✍ 20:24, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Please don't remove the tags just like that, until the article is fully restructured to either remove WP:FRINGE claims or at the very least counter-balance them with critical views. Especially the historical sections, reducing the fall of Byzantium and Ming China to a mere contest between Eastern and Western parties, is ridiculous. Constantine ✍ 16:12, 24 July 2013 (UTC)