Greece Independence day

[The Wizard]

What exactly is so celebratory about an event that inaugurated twelve years of bloodshed for the population of that part of the Balkan peninsula; killed the prospect of a liberal republican Greece in favor of an authoritarian, patriarchal, monarchic regime in which we find the roots of Greece's 20th century predicaments; produced 100 years of wars, hatred, enmity and ethnic cleansing on both sides of the Aegean; and birthed a distorted relation with the past and Greece's great eastern Other that persists to this day?

I am charging the issue, of course, but given the shrill nationalistic tone and its unidimensional approach to history seen in this thread, it's warranted. I don't begrudge Greece its independence, but I do begrudge anyone their sentimental, nationalistic triumphalism about it (or any other violently begotten independence).