One hopes that yesterday's compromise solution to the Greek conundrum will calm things down a bit, so that the real work of domestic restructuring, both in the economy and much more importantly in the collective mind here, may begin in earnest.
For it is obvious that this is not the end of things, but rather the beginning of a very tortuous and painful beginning.

There was a general sigh of relief that Europe finally decided to spell out in concrete terms how a Greek insolvency will be avoided. But I am afraid that the motivation for this was not at all innocent. The great danger lurking in the rescue now hypothetically achieved is that the local criminal elites that wrecked the ship of state to begin with will interpret the new situation as simply a license to continue with their nefarious activities.

Stringent measures have been indeed adopted and signed into law, but laws in Greece are usually not worth the paper they are written on. Some people, notably the prime minister and his finance minister, may sincerely intend to carry out a thorough overhaul of public finances and the wider economic system, but unfortunately they do not dispose of an efficient apparatus to put into effect the necessary surgical operation.

The civil service at all levels is so thoroughly rotten that they can very easily sabotage any or all of the decisions taken at the highest level. The greater part of the government itself is dead set against the measures adopted under pressure from the EU. They may pay lip service to the need for a drastic change of course with respect to the hydrocephaly of the public sector, but under their breath they pray for the opposite.

There have been in recent days some very disturbing signs of this attitude, notably outrageous decisions concerning defense outlays to the tune of 1.5 billion euros (!!!) even in the midst of the budget meltdown. The vile scoundrels of the so called "press" have been raising a mighty fuss about the activities of the Turkish navy in the Aegean at the same time as they have been stoking their sick propaganda war against Germany.

It is impossible to see how the operations of the ministry of defense comply with general economic policy at this critical juncture, unless one -in conspiracy theory mode- assumes that the purchase of German submarines and frigates for the above-mentioned stupendous sum was nothing short of a bribe to our mighty ally to unlock their consent to a financial bail out even under their stringent terms. In addition, the heightened tensions in the Aegean may also have their causes in internal Turkish politics and the current tug of war between the generals and the Islamist governnment. In this mighty tangle it is very difficult to find straight, or even tolerably convoluted, causal associations.

But, to narrow our scope to yesterday's events in Brussels, the sad fact one may bank on is that the personnel in charge of the Greek state will do their utmost to frustrate any change in how this rickety and oppressive contraption operates. This apparatus is so putrescent in all respects (in terms of administrative and even basic mental competence, not to speak of elementary moral disposition) that one can be sure that they will fight tooth and nail to preserve their anti-social privileges, all the while brandishing the standard of "anti-imperialism" as is their time hallowed wont.

The mildly encouraging difference now is that they have been found out on the wider European plane, and that as a consequence Europe may not any longer tolerate their devouring of European funds to build their palatial residences (of excruciatingly bad taste) and to buy their Porsches. But even on that score one cannot be overly optimistic, for the flabby Eurocrats of the Barroso type were clearly aware of the orgy of thievery going on for decades and chose to turn a blind eye.

These objective circumstances alone are enough to justify Germany's intransigent opposition to a concessionary line of credit to salvage the abominable Greek elites from their own foulness, as well as their insistence upon involving the IMF in a rescue of last resort under the most stringent possible controls. Merkel is right that this outcome, if assessed coolly and rationally, is the best for Greece itself first of all, and secondly for Europe and Germany. It is to be devoutly wished that it douses speculation so that the country does not have to pay punitive interest rates in the open markets, as a precondition for getting along with the extremely difficult task of internal restructuring. The prime minister has hailed it in this spirit. One can only hope that he comes back home after his hectic travels of the past few months in order to do battle not against the "evil" Germans, but against the degenerate apparatchiks in his own government, party and in the wider state administration who are plotting his demise -as well as that of the country.

The key point is this: the nation is an ideological and political construction, but it is not a construction ex nihilo. It was not conjured out of thin air and then foisted through manipulation and violence upon gullible and/or recalcitrant masses, for these types of artificial structures stand no chance to function historically for any significant duration. And God knows that for the past two centuries the nation-state, first as an idea and then as a reality on the ground, has actually served as the basic framework for world civilization -for better or worse.

As PMK notes, the reason why this construct proved so long lasting and functional was that it was anchored in underlying historical actualities, providing novel interpretations and justifications for experiential facts uniting significant populations around common practices, beliefs and symbols. Primary among these were language and to a certain extent religion. Without these vehicles of communication and shared feelings that national idea would not have inculcated itself in the popular mind. This inculcation undoubtedly came from above, on the initiative of literary elites later aligned with newfangled political authority. But they found a ground to cultivate.

This project bore remarkable fruit, revolutionized the institutional makeup and concomitantly the collective consciousness of European societies to begin with, subsequently extending overseas, and provided ever since the obligatory frame of reference for all attempts either to conserve or to further refashion in a more or less radical sense the standing institutions of society. In the words of John Dunn, himself not at all a blind champion of nationalism, as heirs today to the aforementioned systemic transformations "we are all nationalists". This, I repeat, does not imply some abject subjection to whatever version of the national concept is dominant at a given time a place. It, rather, underlines the inevitably national jumping off point of our various political discourses.

This is still true despite the fact that as of late the absoluteness of national sovereignty has been breached and mitigated through the emergence of a universalist discourse of rights transcending the closed framework of local national power. This is a hugely welcome development, but one which has not yet solidified into some functional supra-national authority whose jurisdiction is impartially and globally enforced. But even if we assume the eventual evolution in that direction it is not possible to visualize an end-state where the national dimension of life has become extinct in favor of a homogeneous and unitary world-culture in which particular identities no longer exist. We will not all some day, as it were, speak Esperanto. This is neither possible nor desirable. We all will and should speak a universal lingua franca (this being English under present conditions) at the same time as we continue to stand under the obligation to cultivate to ever greater literary depth and refinement our particular native and historical tongues (a truth sadly lost in today's Greece).

Even the chief utopian of world oneness, the noble Kant, never enunciated as a postulate of reason the suppression of unique national character, but only the erection of a world federation in which the continuing vibrancy of distinct cultural identities is dialectically subsumed under universal ethical rules. That is why the chief project today of transcending national separatism and antagonism, i.e. the European Union, has also enshrined the principle of subsidiarity, namely the active cultivation of minority cultures and languages, as the necessary counterpart to the drive for political integration.

In the light of this, the present struggle in Greece surrounding the immigration law is not in truth a confrontation between nationalism tout court and some kind of vague universalism that has allegedly shed all national traits. If this is how the main participants see it, then the only thing we can say is "a plague on both your houses". It should be perceived instead as an attempt to define and affirm alternative, even antagonistic, versions of the national idea: one, roughly, committed to antiquated notions of national exclusiveness and shot through with racialist prejudices vs. an opposed understanding of the national community as togetherness around a core of procedural concepts of justice and rights permitting the free cultivation of a stimulating variety of ethical and cultural orientations.

Liberal openness to a variety of metaphysical and ethical outlooks vs. totalitarian rejection of all cultural stances diverging from an official "orthodox" standard enforced by illiberal law: this is is the true choice. And the liberal political model, if realized, does deserve our patriotic devotion, enthusiasm and respect without this in the least implying hostility to other national ideals or racist denigration of the ethnic and cultural identity of those minority groups housed under our own.

Hence not all reference to the nation and its ideals is suspect as code for xenophobic racism, as the anti-national party in the debate assumes and declares. It all hangs on what concept of the nation one attaches his or her allegiance to. And this is a matter for concrete and detailed theoretical understanding of the varieties of the national concept together with its historical mutations and vicissitudes.

Throughout the nineteenth century the demand for the liberation of the various captive nations from their imperial prisons was seen as simply another way of putting the demand for the liberation of humankind as such. For J.S. Mill, the prime liberal thinker of the period, national self-determination was on a par with individual autonomy and self-definition within the individual state. This was not as obvious as it sounded, as Lord Acton pointed out. The nation is a collectivity, and the passion for freedom that drives its struggle to overthrow an imperial yoke easily mutates into a zeal to subject its various human ingredients to one canonic, and hence "sacred", system of beliefs once that struggle is brought to a successful conclusion. In fact the very blood shed to secure national independence seems to justify the subsequent totalitarian drive for absolute ethical and cultural uniformity in its own midst.

Acton demanded that one should be alive to this inevitable degeneration of the national cause to begin with and not succumb to the sirens of a fake freedom. But this is easier said from the lofty perch of the synoptic and necessarily retrospective view of the disengaged historian, rather than done in the heat of immediate action and choice. Mill's more existential approach to the predicament of living actors seems better to capture the urgency of that concrete dilemma, and in that sense better represents the liberal impulse firing the national revolutions of the early 19th century, with the Greek one a prime case in point.

That particular national insurrection was imbued with a democratic spirit of justice and equality derived from the great example of the French Revolution. This French root was especially fortunate because it brought into play the determining legacy of ancient Greece, whose invocation endowed with axiomatic legitimacy the modern Greek quest for freedom in the eyes of educated Europeans and especially the anti-establishment portion of the restless intelligentsia of the period. This becomes clear once one delves in the writings of the ideological leaders of the Greek revolution, in whose mind the nation is just the Rousseauian community of self-governing citizens, the historical re-emergence and reinstatement in other words of the classical Hellenic demos.

The Greek revolution was certainly more than that. It was also real events on the ground such as the abominable massacres of Tripolitza and Vrachori, as well as the vicious civil wars among the Greek revolutionaries themselves. These cannot be swept under the carpet in any true historical understanding of the event, just like the French terror cannot be evaded in the assessment of the French case. But one chooses the elements that ought to be emphasized and validated as opposed to those that ought to be condemned without reservations of the "my country right or wrong" type. It was in the face of the same dilemma that the French in 1989 decided to highlight the universal declaration of human rights as the focal point of their bicentenary. In this there lay a choice of which national paradigm to honor and to promote and which to reject.

There is, hence, nothing untoward in celebrating even today that ideological dimension of the revolt of 1821, and there is nothing more historically blind and culturally obtuse than confounding the classicist admiration for the democratic experiment of classical Hellas with unreconstructed conservatism and a barren cult of our "glorious ancestors". That the classicist strain degenerated eventually into such a deadening imitation of ancient Greek prototypes no longer studied properly or even understood at all makes it all the more imperative to return to the productive and progressive mentality of truly universal spirits such as Koraes, who advised a creative and critical methexis with the political thought of the ancients as the theoretic foundation of modern Greek freedom.

The recovery of the democratic and progressive element of the national movement of the nineteenth century would effectively serve the goal of promoting today an open and truly European nation recognizing and honoring its own internal diversity. There is no more effective antidote to the inhuman vision of the closed racial community despising its neighbors and its own self. Instead of this the soi-disant "progressives" of the anti-national party systematically brandish a blanket condemnation of all reference to a national tradition as equivalent with fascism, and reject as a corollary any study of classical Greek thought and language as intellectual oppression.

In this of course they betray their utter ignorance, besides proffering a precious gift to the extreme right who come forward as the defenders of Hellenism in the only way they know, i.e. in the form of a sick and hollow rhetoric of the "chosen race". The sad thing is that it was precisely this "progressive" ignorance that ruled and governed the sphere of education and culture during the last generation, with the inevitable Herostratean result of the death and decay of both. And PMK is absolutely right in condemning this unfortunately irreversible vandalism.

I will sum up the discussion with the following thought: in any free country the act of burning the flag cannot be criminalized. But the act in itself is not commendable. It is an unconscionable and despicable act of symbolic violence, which is usually a visual announcement that the perpetrator is quite willing to proceed to physical violence as well, as the shock troops of our local "anti nationalists" have repeatedly demonstrated. For this reason alone it ought to be morally and politically condemned.

The flag, furthermore, is a multivalent sign: it has all sorts of meanings to all sorts of people. It condenses an infinitely complicated historical experience with good and bad sides. Destroying it is no proof that the perpetrator is self-evidently good. He may just as well be a pure beast. For better or worse the national flag, just as the crosses or the stars of David or the crescents on various religious buildings, enjoys the love and allegiance of the great majority of the people -for all sorts of reasons. One may consider this allegiance as misguided etc., but this -even if true- does not proffer a right to attack, efface or expunge some other person's expression of the meaning of their own lives.

One may argue against these commitments, try to get people to change their minds about them. But this is the limit of his legitimate actions. To proceed to the "cleansing" of the public space from the images that go against his or her own belief of what is right and proper is just intolerable fascist violence, an egomania of omnipotence and omniscience, a tyrannical deed whatever the ideological cap it may wear. The kernel of the current Greek tragedy is not its economic dimension. It is rather the fact that the aforementioned fascism has imposed itself as an accepted form of "revolutionary" political action.

The law granting Greek citizenship to a significant number of foreign immigrants and their children was recently passed and this is a very positive thing. As was to be expected the project stirred up a lot of discussion marked as usual by intense ideological partis pris. In itself this is not something to be lamented, except that it ought to be accompanied by a second order of discourse steeped in judicious discrimination and deep historical awareness. But, it was precisely this latter tier that was lacking. The debate quickly gelled into two opposed extremes, one permeated by xenophobic bigotry and antediluvian nationalism, the other by a dogmatic aversion to the idea of the nation in itself and all historical and cultural experiences associated with it. True to a tradition that goes back to degenerate Byzantinism and its penchant for comprehending all issues in theological terms, the field was taken over by two rival mujaheddin brigades with simplistic world views.

In the midst of this an article by P.M. Kitromilides, the foremost historian of modern Greek ideas, stirred controversy, precisely in its attempt to approach the subject in a reasoned and cool-headed way. PMK has for a generation now been the chief critic of the fake verities of local nationalist cant. He has been instrumental in introducing the theoretical problematic of E. Kedourie and B. Anderson in the analysis of the modern Greek national consciousness, in itself a radical interpretive reorientation that shook the foundations of the hitherto dominant paradigm of the "eternal nation".

But his recent intervention drew fire precisely from those that had misunderstood him as the theoretical exponent of their own blanket anti-national agenda -a misinterpretation based on the political expediencies they were serving and their failure to delve in his work and its sources. He was now accused of fudging, or even betraying, his previous views by pursuing an unspoken opposition to the proposed law. This is clearly unfair, for the effective integration of the immigrant population is unequivocally declared in the article to be an urgent and desirable task. But apart from this, he continues, the issue must not be handled in a haphazard fashion under the pressure of current party-political exigencies. The proper cultural and educational framework must be set up in order to accommodate the newly enfranchised groups with the aim of assuring both the cultural self-expression of the immigrants as well as the shaping of a coherent collective consciousness around certain core values and historical references.

This is indeed a plea for a pluralistic public space, and not at all a demand for the homogenization of the public mind in a way that expunges cultural and ethnic difference. It is simply a matter of erecting barriers against the deleterious slippery slope of "identity politics", i.e. against the fashionable "post modernist" agenda that quite deliberately aims at breaking up the social whole into a multitude of incompatible, and even mutually hostile, world and life perspectives, each with absolute beliefs and ethical stances contemptuous of all others. Such a development would most certainly constitute a threat to institutional liberty and social civility, because it would brutally undermine the core requirement for mutual recognition and respect even in the presence of radically diverging interpretations of existence which is the precondition for a free order of life.

An immigrant community coming to live in the midst of a long established historical nation does certainly have the right to demand that the cultural majority recognize its distinct personality and grant it the political freedom to exercise its unique mode of existence (cultivate its language, religion, customs etc.). But the reverse is also of the essence: the minority community that properly enjoys the aforesaid rights and freedoms also owes to the preponderant national group sincere recognition and respect of the latter's self-definition and self-understanding.

The requirement for coexistence under freedom can only be that the late comers find their own distinct place within the historical culture that preceded them in the geographical area in question as well as within the institutional framework there erected through the long historical labor of the dominant community.

It is indeed a very perverse notion of equality that demands the deletion of pre-existent historical experiences and the commencement from point zero of a radically new enterprise of nation building. It would also be another notch up in the scale of perversity to demand a right for the minority immigrant community to hate and/or destroy the culture and the history of the host nation. If there is indeed such hatred, why did they bother to move to the new destination in the first place? It is precisely this unnatural and inhuman demand which incites the xenophobic racism of the extreme right.

All this does not mean that the dominant culture is somehow sacrosanct. It is not. It is subject to historical change, and the accommodation within the frame of its national life and thought of the distinct identity of the minority communities is a huge transformation in itself, especially as regards such an insular collective consciousness as the modern Greek one. Progressive re-ordering of the national system is indeed the order of the day -and the new law is proof that it is indeed taking place.

But this in no way implies either the erasure of the traditions and historical memories of the dominant group (laden with myths and prejudices though they be) or the maintenance of some "pure" and absolutely self-referential identity on the part of the minority communities (replete with female genital mutilations and other oppressions of the female sex for instance). This would be to understand the problem of human coexistence as a zero-sum game in the form of the vaunted "clash of civilizations", and it is particularly disheartening to see the left adopting this kind of language and mode of thinking disguised under "anti-imperialist" claptrap. This is not a vision of acceptance of the Other as the pieties of postmodernism would have it. It is a war cry for the Other's destruction on the pretext of the real or alleged injustices suffered by the various minorities claiming for themselves this absurd and murderous "right to destroy".

Foolery doth shine around the orb like the sun, if we take Shakespeare's word for it -and he was known to be partial to some fools at least, such as Yorick or Lear's attendant. That there are many types of folly, some of them praiseworthy with Christianity chief among them, was adequately explained also by Erasmus, although neither he nor his English epigone clarified the issue as to the ratio of worthy fools to the worthless kind.

Experience, however, can be said to have established that the average fool is also an unmitigated scoundrel. This is the type who lives by the motto "fiat stultitia mea, pereat mundus", unable of course to comprehend that if the world goes under then all of its contents also tumble down into destruction including the fool's own likes and dislikes.

The most succinct definition of such self-defeating foolery is the preference for one's material desire of the moment, the gratification of which will clearly lead to the frustration of the sum total of them in the medium term. The portion of the Greek populace currently incited onto the streets by a corrupt union leadership, whose activities in collaboration with the criminal political elite led to the present economic break down in the first place, vie unfortunately for the distinction of being the prime example of such suicidal ignorance.

They are frothing at the mouth at the prospect of giving up ten percent of their current income as the price to secure the rest ninety per cent in the future. Their declared preference is to keep one hundred percent now, even though this will lead to the complete forfeiture of everything first thing tomorrow morning.

They are egged on to rage against the very institution (the EU) whose generous outlays made possible the extravagant mode of living of an aristocracy of public employees, in complete and scandalous disharmony with any productive labor performed by the said privileged cliques. It is these despicable drones that have brought the life of the capital to a standstill in the past few days, occupying the government budget office and preventing traffic in the main thoroughfare of Athens with the authorities just looking on. It is these thugs, a few dozen former Olympic airways employees violently claiming the outrageous grants and pensions promised to them by the previous government of idiots, liars and quacks, that have unfurled the flag or revolution (!!!!) and national honor all in one. And to defend these kinds of anti-social privilege a few thousands of professional protesters (whose mental operation has been usurped by a reflex of screaming systematically bred in them by abominable party hacks) are periodically trotted out by political leaderships whose victory in the current arm wrestling would condemn these same unfortunate fools to perpetual misery.

No wonder, then, that the game is by no means over, despite the relative calm of the past few days. The prime minister managed, through a round of skilled and dignified diplomacy from Berlin to Washington, to pose the Greek problem in terms that elicited a sympathetic response abroad. But behind this political screen the core wound is still festering. For his enemy is within. And if he loses his nerve in tackling the elements in his own party responsible for (and still defending) the cancerous growth of our anti-social public sector, then the ruin will not be finally averted.

This is not to suggest that the sweeping measures he announced before he embarked on his foreign peregrinations are just. On the razor's edge of destruction they could not possibly be. Masses of people are going to pay for the misdeeds of feudal elites that pampered them with false vistas of social largesse while feeding the insatiable rapacity of parasitic minorities. Still, big electoral majorities did support these mendacious peddlers of a fake paradise. Besides, the stolen billions cannot be gotten back. The only hope is that through a shock revamping that will introduce a modicum of honesty in the administration of the state a new beginning will be made for the sake of the next generation.

Beyond that what is needed here is a true cultural revolution -pardon the expression for its odious historical associations. This, as I have written before, would amount to the restoration of social labor as the leading value and claim in society, after a generation in which socialism came to mean to defraud and shake down and despoil the common weal for the sake of private interest, the most successful looters and parasites posing as the chief "revolutionary" example to follow. It is not in an ironic vein that I suggest that this is tantamount to a return to authentic Marxist values.

One last sad thought. The most deleterious consequence of the current financial breakdown is that it has distracted us from the real task, which is the cultivation of a new collective consciousness. The enterprise of knowledge and culture has been waylaid by the need to deal with the abominable machinations of our worthless social and political leaders. It has been to a great extent inevitable that to dissent from the malefactions of our rulers one would have to roll in the gutter along with them. Just to witness the moral and mental putrefaction of our public space ipso facto soiled and spoiled and contaminated one's own conscience and thought. One found oneself hating and despising, even though it went against one's own best instincts. But hatred and contempt is never a constructive moral or social sentiment, even if its object is the truly hateful and contemptible. The good can never win by evil means. But unfortunately the extremity of the general predicament forced even the best to become in some sense the same as the targets of their aversion. So we all got sucked up in a mighty vortex of ill-feeling, malediction and vindictiveness. This descent into a welter of turpitude, aggressiveness and intolerance is not yet ended. But maybe we are approaching rock bottom.

So, finally the Greek prime minister bit the bullet. He did it after five months of prevarication trying to appease the old-school "socialists" of his own party, the ones that laid the foundations for the present disaster, the ones that were responsible for loading the pre-election manifesto of the governing party with all kinds of mendacious promises flying in the face of reality.

No matter the delay and its heavy cost: he still has to be lauded for the radical decisions that he took, admittedly with the watchdogs of the EU breathing fiercely over his shoulder.

The measures are not just, for they will hit hard not the party-affiliated caste that stole the European billions and secreted them away in Swiss bank accounts in order to finance a disgustingly lavish lifestyle, but the millions of ordinary citizens who have been bled white over the years in order to support a lying and cheating government in cahoots with the aforementioned kleptocrats.

But, at this extreme point where survival is at stake retroactive justice is simply not possible.

If, despite this, the decades-long orgy of debauchery and exploitation of our "socialist" feudal classes is finally ended and the pseudo-welfare state that they erected is dismantled, the price is worth paying for the sake of our children.

But this is the beginning of a hesitant beginning that may be easily derailed if the traditional inertia of blatantly egoistic interests posing as the defenders of social values is allowed to reassert itself. For this not to happen Europe must not avert its gaze. It must keep pressing for the completion of the institutional dimension of the process of reform, i.e. the elimination of absurd bureaucratic regulation and control in all fields whose purpose was precisely to stifle all creative initiative from below, whether in the economy or in education, that would truly benefit the commonweal.

This is not, by any stretch of the imagination, an argument against the welfare state as such, or against government intervention in the economic field, in a general theoretical sense -in the same way that being against Stalinism or Brezhnevism is not at all tantamount to being an opponent of socialism, Marxist or otherwise.

It is the Greek state apparatus of the past thirty years, its particular mode of control of the society, its rotten national-socialist ideology and the attitudes of parasitic passivity that it inculcated in the population at large that ought to be the target of uncompromising hatred and loathing.

It is the Greek political elites of all ideological hues that usurped the honorable and praiseworthy demand for a political authority that cares for its citizens, and especially those on the bottom rungs of the social ladder, and used it as a lying pretext for the most shameless regime of catering to insatiable minorities at the expense of society as a whole.

The aforementioned demand represented a genuine longing of the masses which in previous generations had been subjected to multiform deprivation and suffering. But the upstart political leaderships that emerged after the fall of the dictatorship just proved to be morally worthless and intellectually empty in the management of this legitimate political aspiration. They hijacked it, thus hoodwinking the people that they were custodians of their interests. But in fact, precisely at the moment when the accession to Europe provided the material means to erect a decent system of mutuality and effective social services, they proceeded to distort this ideology into a cover for the most ruthless rapacity of strategically situated cliques.

This tyrannical exploitation was underpinned and furthered by a deliberate cultural practice of deconstructing traditional values and verities, such as politeness, respect for one's fellow human beings, recognition for diverging points of view, tolerance for alternative modes of existence etc.

Aggressive dogmatism, inhuman bullying and slander of those thinking differently from the self-appointed prophets of mock-revolutionary truth, hatred of all sorts and plain rudeness gradually prevailed as the mark of "progressivism". Sartre's famous dictum that hell is the other came to be realized in the streets and other public spaces of this country.

The very idea of morality, i.e. the recognition of the other as an equal in terms of his/her rational essence and autonomy, was ironically debunked as the lie of "bourgeois society". Thus, schools and universities, especially after the bogus reform of 1982 that turned them over to uncouth party apparatchiks, began producing illiterate individuals despising the whole set of ideas and values that comprise human civilization, as well as the basic stances that define humanity per se.

This does not mean that right thinking, humane and intelligent people just disappeared -quite the contrary. But they had to retreat into obscure niches, the only place where they could retain integrity and exercise their right to think for themselves. The public sphere was taken over by the wild-eyed inquisitors of national and "socialist" orthodoxy -the two merging into a foul mixture in due time.

Unless this contamination of the public mind is somehow healed any economic reform, however radical, is bound to remain ineffective. Unless people grasp the elementary thought that socialism is not your right to benefit yourself at the expense of others, but rather conscious and self-denying labor in service of the common good, i.e. the supreme manifestation of morality; unless the goose-stepping detachments of various pseudo-revolutionary groups understand that occupying the Acropolis or the ministry of finance or burning the city down is fascist barbarism; unless high-living "trade unionists" grasp that defending, often through violence, the outrageous privileges of civil service aristocracies that suck the life-blood of the great masses of ordinary workers is reactionary oppression, there is no real way out of the crisis.

Meanwhile, the prime minister ought to be commended for making a bold start -even though his choices are going to hurt people that are not to blame for this debacle.