The Guardian taken down the garden path

The London Guardian is one of the worthiest left-leaning newspapers around, but in the matter of the present Greek crisis it is patently ill-informed and ill-advised. It is fed information and analysis by people (including apparently certain "radical" circles in the LSE) whose ideas and practices do not offer a way out, but are rather the chief cause of the country's present predicament.

Its editorial today is partially right in stressing the tremendous burden imposed upon the average citizen by the latest slew of austerity measures. But it is entirely wrong in attributing this to a certain rigid mindset of international institutions, a kind of sledge-hammer conspiracy meant to bleed the people dry. In fact, these measures, and the ones first adopted in May 2010, were a (hasty and improvised) response to a situation due entirely to the outright criminal behavior of the local elites, who also managed to bamboozle the people into a hallucinatory state of "socialist" euphoria financed by the sweat of the German and French taxpayer.

And if this repulsive regime did indeed possess any actual features of legal and social equality, one might be able to defend it on some ideological grounds. But in fact it possessed none at all. It was simply a racket involving a tiny minority of party politicos, civil service unionists and owners of the main mass media here, whose purpose was to despoil the commonweal and suck out of it mythical riches for themselves and their henchmen. In this system the people were systematically fed ideological clap-trap, including a tremendous dose of anti-western and specifically anti-European venom, that exploited and reignited the political traumas of two generations ago, for the purpose of legitimizing their organized loot of state coffers.

This loot left all essential services in shambles: education was trashed, the health service degenerated into a major threat to anyone's health (biological, psychological and financial) who was unfortunate enough to become enmeshed in its coils, and all other public functions (tax collecting, building permits etc. etc.) mutated into gangs of blood-thirsty extortionists. European structural funds and mindless public borrowing at, then, cheap rates were used to fund the conspicuous consumption of the upper layers of civil servants and the functionaries of fictitious agricultural co-operatives, while everybody else was taxed to death in order to close the yawning budget gaps of state administration. In this manner Greece became the chief export market for the Porsche brand....

Under this ferocious assault of private interest against the common good (masquerading under hard-line leftism!) the natural environment, among other things, was terminally spoiled. Greece became a thoroughly ugly urban space with its entire cultural history effaced. This was an unprecedented act of cultural vandalism that went perfectly well together with the new mentality instilled in the average person, to the effect that "correct" ideological posturing and the right connections offered the best chance to participate in the thieving orgy.

It is this horrific system of rapacious hooliganism that collapsed with a sound heard around the globe. It is impossible for a well-meaning foreigner trying to make sense of the Greek situation from the outside and with the use of the the tools of rational political theory (of any hue) to conceptualize the devilish welter of corruption and the utter denial of any normal human value that was the "Greek system" over the past generation. It is still, I suppose, unbelievable to any sane civilized person that such things occurred. But to those of us who actually lived through this generalized psychopathology of feral grabbing it has been an unbearable everyday experience.

Hence the Greek case, although it affects Europe vitally, has absolutely nothing to do with the dysfunctions of global capitalism that caused the turbulence in the rest of the peripheral countries. Greece did not belong in Europe to begin with, not simply because of its defective economy (a kind of Brezhnevism under a pseudo-democratic facade), but also because of the mentality of its ruling elites, which saw the European project simply a a source of cheap money in their pockets and also as a tool for asserting their stupid nationalistic claims in their immediate neighborhood.

And this mentality, needless to repeat, was systematically inculcated in the mass mind, through the lying propaganda of paid agents of the corrupt system posing as journalists. Greece will be eventually ejected from Europe, because it has never wanted to be in Europe in the first place.

Given all this, it is easy to see how tendentious is another article in today's Guardian by a Greek journalist serving as the newspaper's current correspondent in Athens. Describing yesterday's odious scenes in Syntagma square she emotes about the beginnings of "revolution" in an "advanced democracy". This is just laughable.

Greek democracy has been a Potemkin village during the past generation. It was just a profusion of lying cant to cover up the plunder of the mafias in control of the state apparatus. Law and the institutions of legality have long ceased to have any practical meaning here, and everybody -high or low- is contemptuous of them.

This has been so since the beginning of the modern Greek state, but the past thirty years have brought this situation to its predictable conclusion, viz. the breakdown of the elementary preconditions for common life. We are currently going through the last, violent phase of this terminal anomie. This amounts to no "revolution" in any meaningful, rational sense. This society is slowly reverting to a Hobbesian state of nature. It is feeding off its own entrails, it is imbued with an irrational death wish, a fantasy of general conflagration out of which the raging mobs tearing up the center of Athens imagine that some nebulous "salvation" will emerge.

This is the ideology of certain apocalyptic sects that we know from past history. It is a bid for a full plunge back into the darkness of medieval fanaticism. The peoples of Europe have nothing whatsoever to learn or to hope from the current ructions in a place ironically called Greece. In organizing their worthy fight against the excesses of capitalism gone mad they ought to capitalize upon their valuable traditions of rational discourse,collective action and compromise for the general good which have long ceased to have any purchase in the political life of this country.

It ought to be stressed that a significant minority here is in full cognizance of the facts and the situations that I describe above. It would serve the Guardian well to seek them out for their insight.

Silence and shame

A couple of hours ago we barely avoided a headlong dash for the cliff -for the time being. But the lemmings are known to be stubborn little devils, and this society contains a sizable portion of them, a group moreover that is fired up by extraordinary destructive energy, so much so that they do provide whatever vitality is left in the dead limbs of its body politic. This is of course a negative vivaciousness, an urge for death, a brutal impatience for disintegration. To that extent it is a typical expression of the spirit of theological mysticism, which scorns the concreteness of the present, disdains the task of knowing it and reforming it, and instead delivers itself to a dark fantasy of otherworldly salvation presupposing the conflagration of the real, a colossal auto da fe.

This inflamed delusional state of consciousness is the bitter fruit of the cultural, political and economic regime imposed (in the name of radical democracy) by a small coterie of charlatans, dupes and demagogues, all of them in thrall to a mafia of brutal exploiters who proceeded to suck the very marrow out of the commoweal. It is these groups that are out in the streets protesting against the harsh measures needed in order to save the country from the consequences of their lying, looting and plundering.

There is no doubt that these measures are going to hit the hardest precisely those that had the least participation in the blood-sucking orgy of the privileged minorities. And the reason for this is that the representatives of the old order, inside and outside the government, fought tooth and nail in the past year in order precisely to frustrate the implementation of any structural reform.

Still, the masses of the people (crushed indeed by the one-sided attempt to rein in financial debauchery without touching the outrageous privileges of the mafias nurtured by statist collectivism) are silently watching the spectacle of self-immolation unfolding on the world's screens with the heartfelt wish for the defeat of these vipers currently parading under the pretense of "direct democracy". This is a sociopolitical fact that I trust will assert itself in the medium run given a modicum of sanity by all those in positions of power (however undeserved these positions). But of course there is also the possibility that precisely this modicum is lacking.

There are three distinct methods of approach to "truth" in physical and sociohistorical matters (each with a number of internal differentiations to be sure). The first is empiricism: one attempts to garner as inclusive a body of empirical facts and observations, concerning the matter at hand, as humanly possible. One then extrapolates from these evidences to the most likely generalization that can be erected on their basis. The second one is rationalism: one begins with certain rationally self-evident assumptions and then proceeds to deduce by means of correct logical procedure whatever other propositions follow from the initial posits. Both of these methods are ignored, violated, scorned and rejected by the vast majority of public players in the current Greek situation (not to speak of the populace subjected to their nefarious influence).

With respect to factual evidence, all opinion leaders here are complete ignoramuses in the fields that they are arrogantly pontificating about. They know nothing about cultural and political history, including the history of Greece itself, and they do not give a damn about it either. Engels said back in 1890 that historical materialism was simply an excuse for the "Marxists" of the time not to study history. This is absolutely true of this country today: the various ideologies that are passionately broadcast by the roaming bands of political vandals are simply covers for the most apalling ignorance of reality, an ignorance moreover that has been exalted to a positive virtue. The Marxists of all hues are devoid of knowledge of history, social structure and development, political ideas and methods -not to speak of economics. And the nationalists are equally heedless concerning nations, the Greek nation and their historical conditions and itineraries.

Rational argumentationa and logical coherence is also egregiously lacking on all sides. Let us assume that the prime concern at this juncture is to protect the people from utter impoverishment (as the representatives of the public sector mafias and their tools in the press claim). Then, how does this aim square with their demand that we should simply defy our creditors (who have been paying for their bloated bellies for so long), refuse to pay them back in any way, or adopt any measures of restructuring, with the result of being ejected from Europe and the euro? In what way would the people's welfare be secured with Greece tumbling to the level of, say, Zimbabwe? With a return to the drachma (touted by many, including Marxist "economists" as a patriotic goal) we would not be able to heat our homes come December.

Their "ideal" is, thus, a reversion to a subsistence economy of exchange in kind, a primitive communism of general destitution (one of Marx's worst nightmares). That real, living individuals would be thus forced to endure an actual hell with no foreseeable escape is, to these enthusiasts, neither here or there. For their real committment is not to people, but to their ridiculous "visions", the flights of their diseased imaginations.

And this brings us to the third way to "truth" alluded to above, which is the preferred one by these raving maenads of "revolution". And this is simply the "method" of mystical intuition, the revelation of higher, absolute truth by the supreme being that controls the unfolding of history, a divine authority that somehow speaks through their stunted and crude minds. What they believe is true a priori, even though it violates both the principles of logic and experience, simply by virtue of their claim that it derives from a secret source unavailable to common mortals.

This is the good old mentality of religious fanaticism, which (as I have explained before) has thoroughly corrupted the modern Greek collective consciousness since late medieval times (since the triumph of the Hesychastic heresy in the Orthodox church). This mental abomination continues to poison it, even though the content nowdays of religious belief is party politics rather than bona fide theism. And the cause for this iron grip of irrationalism is of course the fact that this society never went through the cathartic experience of the Renaissance or the Enlightenment.

In base Byzantinism all social and political questions were reduced to theological ones and the uneducated masses were brought out into the streets spurred by the eschatological ravings of uncouth monks: ζῆλος λήψεται λαὸν ἀπαίδευτον καὶ νῦν πῦρ τοὺς ὑπεναντίους ἕδεται as the church still boasts even today. Not a single day has passed, it seems, since those calamitous times, in which even the destruction of the Greek Byzantine state was preferrable for these lunatics to an alliance with the "heretical" west.

We are living through the same public dementia today. Europe will eventually eject this fake "Greece", not least because she yearns to be so ejected. The public mind here has drastically veered off any European, or even civilized, consensus as to basic values. The great crime of the regime that has so pitifully collapsed is precisely that it managed to excise any awareness of public duty from the mind of the average person. And all this, oh shame of shames, in the name of a hard core leftism!

"The best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity": Yeats' immortal lines are constantly on my mind these days. With an amendment: it is not so much that the best lack convictions, but rather that they are totally demoralized as to the possibility of these convictions making the slightest dent in this torrent of mystical lunacy that seems to impell a whole society towards its own doom. The only thing left is to look on in silence and shame.