The thing about cancer and the smoke being bad for his health, would have been true if he was inhaling smoke every night. Once every three years, not so much. And flares are not so dangerous as people make them to be. Might be to someone with a specific medical condition, like asthma, but hey mate if you are asthmatic just avoid the arena in a Maiden concert in Greece.
I'm one of the people who weren't there, so yeah, I don't really know what the situation was. I'm going off two things here: One, that I do see a lot of smoke in the video of the incident in the vicinity of the stage, and two, that I don't think Bruce would get so worked up about nothing. The latter is an assumption, true, but the smoke that you see is only part of the smoke that's actually there. Bruce may have inhaled a minimal amount of smoke that however alerted him to the fact that it's there and that more might be coming in. He's supposed to run around and sing on the stage all night, and if there's smoke coming in all this time, he can't do that job. So better alert people from the beginning on that he's not going to have any of it. There are plenty of well-recorded incidences of him having a go at someone in the crowd for interfering with the band's performance.
That fact that Bruce is an elitist, who has delusions of grandeur about the British empire and a right winger is not a secret. You can hide your face in the sand as much as you want and you can defend him as much as you want. This does not change a thing. Besides he is British. There is no left in Britain. Only right and less right.
I assume this is supposed to give those people telling Greeks to chill out a taste of their own medicine. Fair enough, but there's a difference: Bruce didn't make any assumptions about Greeks, he merely said "Greek cunt". Exactly why he used the extension "Greek" is anyone's guess, but he made no statement about the nation as a whole, their political leanings or anything else. He called one guy a "Greek cunt" because he was a being cunt and Bruce assumed he was Greek.
You know what they say about opinions, you have one, I have one, we all have one and yes, we are entitled to it. This runt is mine and I do not give a flying fuck what people think of it.
Fair enough.
The thing about some people not being offended and some being. Well I know people who are NOT offended by calling someone nigger, this does not make it right.
Correct, but "Greek" isn't a slur. Normally, people don't get offended when you call them Greek.
For me, by including the word Greek he made it like he was characterizing an entire nation and I am not even a fucking nationalist. I am the exact opposite of it.
You see, I do get this. I don't have an explanation for why Bruce called him a "Greek cunt" rather than just a "cunt" (And I'm sorry, this is still funny when I type it). From what I can see in the video, and that really is all the evidence I have, he was mad and this slipped out. He didn't have himself under control at this point. Does this mean that he generally thinks less of Greek people and normally just hides it, or does it mean something else? For example, he may have had on his mind that the person he's targeting probably won't speak English because he's Greek, that part somehow got stuck and came out. Bruce didn't have terribly much time to mince his words there because he was singing lyrics that he was trying to concentrate on but couldn't. A lack of concentration in a high-adrenaline environment can lead to a lot of things being said that come out differently than they were intended. At the very least, I would give Bruce the benefit of the doubt there unless I had other reasons to assume that he has an anti-Greek sentiment. And quite frankly, I have no reasons to assume this.
Now sure, one can demand an apology from him, but how much good would this do? One half of the crowd would not believe it's genuine anyway (as you later go on to say) and the other half would be disappointed in him that he gave in to public pressure.
Did he kill the mood? You fucking bet he did. And the rest of the gig he just delivered the vocals with zero effort, Let;s get it over with and go home. I mean the British are cunts as well, but they are his cunts.
I'll take your word for this, although there are two things I can't reconcile this with: First, that a Greek friend of mine told me the gig was great from start to finish, and second, that the crowd seems quite dead when the intro to NOTB starts, which is pretty unusual if you ask me. Was there something else going on at the gig?
Now. Before I go, I will admit one thing, and if you want to think it undermines my point you are free to do so. In 2006, I saw Maiden three times, in Paris, Dortmund and London. The Dortmund crowd was pretty much a hellhole with a large amount of moshpits and circle pits. It seemed inappropriate at the time, and Bruce at one point called out to the crowd for the pits to be closed. In London, there were also several pits, and Bruce did look at them critically a few times, but said nothing. Was this because he behaves differently in Britain? Maybe, maybe not. Other things may play a role: This wasn't just Britain, but London, their home turf. The gig was three days before Christmas and at the very end of the tour, so the atmosphere was far more relaxed than it had been in Dortmund. I thought back then that these factors had much more to do with his lack of comment towards the pits than, say, him hating Dortmund. But I don't know.
Just my two cents. A personal opinion. Oh and before you get offended by it, remember that you were slamming the Greeks who got offended all day long.
It takes far more to offend me than a well-argued opinion even if I partially disagree with it.
Question just is: Now what? Are we going to cancel Bruce? Are we going to boycott Maiden? Are we going to continue being fans despite being openly disappointed in him for this one moment? Are we going to have forgotten about it all in a month's time?
