Politics
Numerous Greek American political and social organizations have existed since the 1880s. Turkish American involvement in American politics did not begin until the Tukish Invasion of Cyprus in 1974 mobilized individuals seeking to counter U.S. government support for the Greeks. In the 1990s, Cypriot American organizations for both Greek and Turk ethnic groups lobbyied for political advantage.
Greek Cypriot immigrants are loyal to both the United States and Cyprus, as well as having a strong cultural and ethnic loyalty to Greece. During both world wars, Greek Cypriot Americans served in the United States armed forces and participated in assorted war fund drives. Cypriots were staunch supporters of the Allied cause in World War II. This was particularly true after the 1940 German invasion of Greece. The draft was not imposed on the island, but 6,000 Greek-Cypriot volunteers fought under British command during the Greek campaign, due to British promises that Cyprus would be ceded to Greece after the war. Before the war ended, more than 30,000 had served in the British forces.
Read more about this topic: Cypriot American
Famous quotes containing the word politics:
“The history of American politics is littered with bodies of people who took so pure a position that they had no clout at all.”
—Ben C. Bradlee (b. 1921)
“There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto—God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger.... A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.”
—Dorothy Allison (b. 1949)
“The rage for road building is beneficent for America, where vast distance is so main a consideration in our domestic politics and trade, inasmuch as the great political promise of the invention is to hold the Union staunch, whose days already seem numbered by the mere inconvenience of transporting representatives, judges and officers across such tedious distances of land and water.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)