The irreverence of birds

Good things are still happening. This is the end of a dismal year, with all sorts of further calamities presaged for the incoming one. But we should not dwell endlessly on the disasters -there will be plenty of opportunity for that. Rather it is fitting to celebrate a unique event, one which has been buried under the senseless sound and fury of the ongoing political and economic ructions.

The temple of Athena Nike on the Acropolis has been finally re-erected on its original site and it is now once again shining in its unique splendor despite the ravages of so many centuries. Its latest disappearance dates from about a decade ago when it was completely dismantled in order to repair not only structural damages from the erosion of its foundations (it was tilting about five centimeters on its south side) but also the mistakes of previous restorations back in the thirties of the previous century. It has now been fitted with new architectural elements made of Pentelic marble that are clearly visible since they have not yet acquired a patina. Before this, its previous demolition dates from 1687 when the Ottomans tore down the classical temple still standing in its place, for the purpose of building a higher battlement on that vulnerable side of the Acropolis fortress. The Venetians of Morosini were besieging the Hill after having retaken the entire Peloponnese -the warrior Doge having been awarded for this feat the honorary appellation Peloponnesiacus by the Council of the Serenissima. It was during that siege that the Parthenon itself was hit by a shell that caused frightful damage to its south side. Now this jewel of Callicrates is once again projecting its stupendous beauty into the Attic sky, wonderfully counterbalancing the massive presence of the predominantly Doric Propylaia with its intricate Ionic grace. We might spoil this extraordinary story by noting that the erection of this temple is symbolically associated with the ambitions of Athens to exercise political control over Egypt during the peak of its imperial reach, but as I said in times like this it is well worth celebrating the positive dimensions of the historical process. We are heirs to supreme artistic glory long after the power schemes of politicians (even world-historical figures like Pericles) have irrevocably perished.

When I visited the Hill a couple of weeks ago the sky was cloudy with the sun occasionally breaking through. The temple glistened with well-deserved self-satisfaction. All kinds of dark prophesies circulating at the time of its disappearance, to the effect that it had been spirited away by faceless enemies to be sold to foreign museums, had been proven false.

As I was taking pictures a pigeon came in to land on the roof. I am sure it had no inkling of the sacredness of its intended perch. I hope it did not leave any permanent mess behind.

Notes from the underground

The Greek parliament ought to be an elevated place, but in recent years it has been striving hard to come level with the gutter. This is certainly true with respect to the basic political (as well as other) intelligence of the average member. As for elementary integrity, the issue should be better avoided. This is terrible news for the notion as well as the practice of democracy in this country, which in recent years has disintegrated into an unprincipled free-for-all for the satisfaction of private interest and/or sectarian ideological delusion at the expense of the commonweal. This as a rule involves the deliberate wrecking of public institutions, space and property in the name of sundry ideological obfuscations of bogus "social" coloring, such as nationalism, Stalinism or (quite often) an odious combination of the two.

This is a shattering disappointment for many of us, who a generation or so ago fought the colonels' regime with the vain (as it is clear now) hope that we might put a free and decent society in its place. We paid a terrible price for this delusion, not necessarily in terms of personal suffering -although in quite a few cases this was also involved. I am talking rather in terms of the misguided life goals that we set ourselves in the light of the betrayed ideals of those years, such as the determination to abandon prospects of academic and personal advancement abroad in order to participate in the effort, as we saw it, to build that society. It was all so utterly futile. When Papadopoulos died in prison a few years ago, I wrote in my personal journal that he should rest easy because the behavior of his ostensible enemies actually vindicated him ideologically. His silly doctrine of "Greco-Christian" messianism was soon after his overthrow triumphant, penetrating all components of the political spectrum. As for the spectacular venality of the "democratic" power holders, of all ideological persuasions and on all levels of government, it worked as a retrospective confirmation of his dismissal of the entire political class as corrupt. One of the saddest things in the past couple of years especially has been hearing ordinary people of impeccable democratic and leftist credentials openly express a longing for his dictatorship as a last ditch cure for the moral, social and economic breakdown that our pithecanthropic political and intellectual leaders have plunged us into.

These are of course counsels of desperation. And, all told, it is still the sullen and cowed mass of the people that offers the long-term hope that this problematic historical experiment called modern Greece will still emerge as a viable social and cultural concern after the present shipwreck. And the reason is simple. It is they, the anonymous masses, that silently bear the brunt of the present catastrophe. They are its only witnesses in a basic existential sense. And, to utilize a valuable insight of the great Hegel, it is through this "fear and labor" inflicted upon them by those that falsely claim to speak for them that they will find the inner strength to endure and to build a new life upon today's ruins. They have done it in the past, and therefore it is reasonable to assume that the feat will be repeated. For there is true seriousness in their silence. They, and only they, have instinctively understood the depth and significance of the present disintegration, for it affects their existence immediately and painfully without the mediation of junk ideologies and political slogans. They know, for they have always known, that it is only through work, serious, concentrated work personal and social, that their society and nation will pull through. Work has reappeared as a value in the present despond. It had well nigh evaporated in the great debauch of the past generation, where getting something for nothing, blackmailing the community for personal gain, sucking the marrow out of the bones of the commonweal was the watchword of "democratic" advancement. In this sense there is a return to the essentials of, yes, Marxism (as well as of the classical social and political theory of modernity) -of a genuine Marxism, though, as opposed to the tattered and lying caricatures thereof with which the Greek people had been hoodwinked and oppressed. It is in this undertow that long-term hope may be detected -not foolishly I hope.

As opposed to this, there are no signs that, even in the midst of the terminal crisis we are going through, our rotten elites can offer even a morsel of inspiration to counteract the gloom. Instead, they are still engaged in their selfish games of jockeying for power, even as the whole edifice is crumbling around them. Their incorrigibility is the cause of the fact that among broad segments of the population, and especially the rudderless and fearful youth, the very democratic ideal, which they quite naturally identify with its vile usurpers, has been discredited. The feeling in the air is sometimes akin to the twilight of the Weimar republic. A kind of defensive fascism is rampant, blindly nihilistic and reflexively violent, no matter what the ideological pretensions it dons. This knee-jerk reactionary paroxysm, often taking the form of real flames devouring the center of Athens, can cause incalculable devastation. But, as I argued above, it is not preordained that it will prevail.

These sad thoughts (and only this kind seems to be possible nowadays) were occasioned by the antics of our self-admiring parliamentarians yesterday. The director of the IMF was in town and he agreed to appear before the economic affairs committee in order to answer questions about the rescue program etc. The antediluvian left boycotted the proceedings claiming that he had no right to be in the country (!!!!!) at all. The deputies present then proceeded to basically insult him. The attack was orchestrated by a prominent individual of the ruling party (!!!!), a person who was a chief contributor to the unspeakable kleptokratic mess from the consequences of which those foreign agencies currently reviled in the media and in parliament consented to save us, provided we decided to mend our ways. The sight of the very protagonists of the calamity that threatens our existence as a country abusing one of the agents of our possible salvation would be utterly laughable -if it weren't so tragic. The perversity of all this is so extreme that it ends up provoking a certain admiration. The political sense of our elected leaders is so abysmal for so many reasons that one's head just spins. To begin with, the IMF, for all its real and imaginary faults, is an official agency of the United Nations. Greece is a certified member of it, paying its dues regularly since WW2. Many prominent Greeks have been and are still among its ranks. So much for its "right" to be present in the country. All this is of course arcane science for our Neanderthal revolutionaries whose great vision for the country has all the hallmarks of North Korea. But one might think that a basic sense of self-preservation would deter at least the members of the ruling party that had to go a-begging to the IMF's door from their egregious rudeness. It so happens that at the present moment among our rescuers it is precisely the IMF that supports Greece's request for a prolongation of the period of repayment of the loans, in the face of opposition from Germany. Among all their accumulated misdeeds, it is this suicidal stupidity of our representatives which is so frightening. We are at God's mercy.......

Leaks and Reactions

As things stand right now, it seems to me that America is more likely to be hurt by her own reaction to the publication of the Wikileaks documents rather than by the documents themselves. When the Attorney General darkly intones that an investigation of a criminal nature is afoot targeting Assange for the unveiling of diplomatic secrets, not only is he on dubious legal ground, but -much worse- he is being stampeded by Palin and her ilk. This bodes ill for the administration and of course the world in the coming years.

If Assange broke US law with his leaks, then so did the NY Times. Assange did not steal the secrets himself, he just received the proceeds from an admittedly illegal act under US law (Manning is already in custody for the criminal side of this issue). He then acted as any other bona fide journalist would do and did, namely he decided that it was in the public interest to publish. He also deserves credit for waiting for the established news media to publish selected redacted documents, with information jeopardizing the safety of individuals excised, and then posting the same documents on his website. All these wild cries about putting a CIA hit squad on him etc. is just right wing extremism at its most odious. If this type of response prevails, then America will play into the hands of its worst enemies. Such hysteria would contradict and obscure America's glorious tradition of press freedom, which brought down a president after all back in the seventies. America ought to protest certainly; but in the name of the principle of diplomatic confidentiality which is of the essence in conducting international relations, a principle that all nations are interested in seeing upheld. For the rest, let the State Department put its own discombobulated house in order so that such a breach may not occur again.

That the Obama administration seems to be so easily cowed by the screeching and howling of the most reactionary right in a century is a symptom of a deep-going malaise. When Jimmy Carter in a misguided attempt to appear "tough" began his demagogic campaign against the presence of a "Russian brigade" on Cuba (a force that had been there since the early sixties and everyone knew about), this was a sure sign that his presidency had run out of steam and that he was throwing in the towel in the bout with Reagan. Could it be that Obama is mesmerized by the perverse charisma of that empty and stunted person, Palin, even though he says that he does not waste time thinking about her? Why are American liberals so complex-ridden in the face of that uncouth and hypocritical crowd of Tea Party Republicans, whose previous incarnation as the Bush neocons ran the American and the world economy to the ground and offered Iraq on a platter to Iran and Al Qaeda (forgetting for the moment the numerous human lives destroyed by that truly criminal enterprise)? And are the American people as a whole so uneducated and misinformed that they cannot perceive these facts? I believe that this is false. I believe that a serious political effort from the pulpit of the White House to broadcast the disaster that weirdo Republicanism has inflicted upon American society, and the texture of lies that is their present "policy", would easily overrun the defenses of that Neanderthal crowd. If Helmut Schmid can call the Budesbank and Angela Merkel a bunch of reactionaries, surely Obama can summon up some more fire from his political belly to underline the true cause of the American people's current economic suffering. In attacking the editorial and opinion pages of the NY Times as out of touch with ordinary people he is shooting himself in the foot. It just happens that Paul Krugman, for instance, is right on target precisely from an "ordinary people" perspective and Obama's advisors would do themselves a favor to heed some of his warnings.

With respect to the actual content of the published dispatches I do not think that America has anything to be ashamed of so far - with the exception of those stupid CIA instructions to America's UN diplomats to spy on their colleagues there. (Of course it is not to be doubted that their Russian and Chinese etc. counterparts returned the favor). As Neal Acherson cogently explained in the Guardian the other day, America's diplomats by and large emerge from Assange's disrobing as a crowd of sensible and well-meaning individuals, on the whole performing commendably the task allotted to them, namely to report the truth about local conditions and personalities and to manage the myriad crises thrown up in today's fragmented world with a view to maintaining peace and stability. Obama's handling of relations with Russia, what with the scrapping of Bush's missile shield in Poland so that Putin can be won over for sanctions against Iran, is a case in point.To be sure, this activity is conducted from a perspective of safeguarding America's predominant position internationally -but there is nothing new or astonishing in that. However, what does clearly emerge from the exchanges is the weakened imperial posture of the last superpower in the midst of numerous crosscurrents and shifts of power.

Whether one likes it or not, America's power is still the ultimate foundation of whatever coherence remains in the international system with reference to some residual legality and mutual recognition of legitimate interests. The way this power is wielded is, thus, of vital importance to all of us. And the classified cables clearly show that there is a world of difference between the Bush procedure of riding roughshod over the international landscape in the name of various half-baked ideologies of America's metaphysical mission and Obama's efforts to mediate in the name of a reasonable mutuality. That is why his possible overthrow by the crazed Palin crowd is such a nightmare.

Lastly a note of local interest. Among the Wikileaks documents there are about 1300 dispatches from the Athens embassy and the Thessalonica consulate. These have not yet been published. I desperately hope that nothing is contained in them that might fan the anti-American, anti-Western psychosis of the political and journalistic classes here. So far, the Wikileaks revelations have been greeted with the expected glee on account of the US embarrassment, as well as inane declarations, from certain numbskulls of the main opposition party no less, that Assange ought to be declared a "hero of humanity". Of course, if Greece had been the target of similar diplomatic exposure you would have seen a general hue and cry about an "imperialist attack" against the nations sacred rights. If, for instance, in the Greek dispatches there is as much as a veiled hint of a hint that Greece ought to compromise on Macedonia's name, you can safely expect an anti-American explosion, with ample invoking of the case of Purifoy and such instances from sixty years ago.

The fact that the Obama administration has been from the very start firmly on the side of Greece in its present travails, urging the Europeans to bail her out, declaring its willingness to contribute to this rescue through the IMF, opposing the bloody-minded deflationary and monetarist diktat of the Germans in the EU and generally following a neo-Keynesian economic course at home which if followed here would offer an escape for Europe from its present vicious spiral, has not registered on the defunct minds of our political and intellectuals leaders. Let's hope that Assange's, otherwise well-meaning, initiatives do not drag us deeper into this suicidal swamp.