According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, 'Philistine' has two meanings:
"O.T. people of coastal Palestine, who made war on the Israelites, mid-14c., from O.Fr. Philistin, from L.L. Philistinus, from Late Gk. Philistinoi, from Heb. P'lishtim, "people of P'lesheth" ("Philistia"); cf. Akkad. Palastu, Egyptian Palusata; the word probably is the people's name for itself."
In the case of the cafeteria in Ankara (above), this, of course, would be the reference.
The other meaning is as follows:
"person deficient in liberal culture," 1827, originally in Carlyle, popularized by him and Matthew Arnold, from Ger. Philister "enemy of God's word," lit. "Philistine," inhabitants of a Biblical land, neighbors (and enemies) of Israel (see Philistine). Popularized in Ger. student slang (supposedly first in Jena, late 17c.) as a contemptuous term for "townies," and hence, by extension, "any uncultured person." Philistine had been used in a humorous fig. sense of "the enemy" in Eng. from c.1600."
From the same source, the following meaning of 'barbarous' is explained:
"mid-14c. (adj.), from M.L. barbarinus (cf. O.Fr. barbarin "Berber, pagan, Saracen, barbarian"), from L. barbaria "foreign country," from Gk. barbaros "foreign, strange, ignorant," from PIE root *barbar- echoic of unintelligible speech of foreigners (cf. Skt. barbara- "stammering," also "non-Aryan"). Greek barbaroi (n.) meant "all that are not Greek," but especially the Medes and Persians. Originally not entirely pejorative, its sense darkened after the Persian wars. The Romans (technically themselves barbaroi) took up the word and applied it to tribes or nations which had no Greek or Roman accomplishments. The noun is from late 14c., "person speaking a language different from one's own," also (c.1400) "native of the Barbary coast;" meaning "rude, wild person" is from 1610s."
I was looking, in my previous post (http://anisyxia.blogspot.ch/2012/06/life-in-year.html) for an analogy to try and explain to myself the relationship between the 'voleurs de plantons' and certain things that have happened to me over the course of the past year, and things that have been happening in Greece, Spain, Syria, Egypt...
As soon as I saw the name of the cafe, I think I began to get a glimpse of what the connections might be. Now, of course, connections between such a disparate group of events are highly tenuous, but the purpose of analogies is often to highlight meaningful, or significant, points of connection, to shed light on certain things; the claim is not that X IS Y, but that X shares certain similarities with Y and, by looking at Y, we might be able to learn more about X. That is as far as it goes, of course, but it can be enormously enlightening.
Whatever the motives of the plant thieves, they certainly appear to have demonstrated that they are "deficient in liberal culture"; as I wrote before, the act was not exactly making tremble the foundations of corporate culture, but its negative effects on the attempt to do so were despicable. At the same time, it was also an act of barbary in the sense that it betrayed a lack of 'Greek or Roman accomplishments' in as much as it manifested a lack of respect, care, compassion, understanding of community and showed scant regard for the notion of 'natural law, for want of a better phrase, and by it I mean the fact that, as denizens of this planet, we cannot but live together socially and communally. In its own way, it was an exercise in 'capitalism, red in tooth and claw', an act of 'social Darwinism', and about as barbaric ("wild") as it gets. Perhaps there is a 'good' explanation ('good' meaning fully explicatory), but reasons are not excuses, justifications do not provide carte blanche.
Except, of course, they are all too often used that way. Cf, as the dictionary editors would write, the Greek elections....
