[Ed- background: The Pan-Macedonian association is a deliberately misnamed Greek racist group whose raison d'�tre is to deny the existence of a distinct Macedonian identity. Their use of the word "Macedonian" is strictly geographic and excludes any ethnic or national connotation.
Members of this group are generally pliable, nationally ambiguous populations transplanted into Aegean Macedonia after the Greek ethnic cleansing campaigns of the 1920s. They are mainly Turkish prosfigi, madjiri, Ponti (former residents of the Black Sea region), etc., who were awarded the properties of those whom Greece had cleansed -- very often ethnic Macedonians. Under the Lausanne Treaty they are officially "Christian populations" but nowadays like to refer to themselves as "Greeks" or more pretentiously as "Hellenes."
In addition, this group has members who are ethnically Macedonian, Vlach or Albanian but who have bought into the self-loathing idea that their own nationalities are inferior to Greek.
While most Pan-Macedonians derive from families who have only recently been transplanted into Aegean Macedonia they nevertheless promote the delusion that they are the descendants of Alexander the Great -- an ancient Macedonian king from the 4th century BC.
As a rule Pan-Macedonian supporters are idealogical extremists who strive to be more Greek than the indigenous Greek population -- perhaps to overcome an inferiority complex.
The Greek government uses the Pan-Macedonian groups in the Diaspora to extend its persecution of ethnic Macedonians abroad and to monitor and report on the activities of ethnic Macedonians who have emigrated from Greece.
If an emigrant Macedonian from Greece should stray too far from the official line -- that Macedonians are Greeks -- then the Greek government can silence them by putting pressure on and/or punishing their family members back home.]
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