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.
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Very well said, sir. The Guardian has been consistently, in a series of column pieces and editorials, misrepresenting the root causes of our conundrum as some sort of neoliberal raid and the situation on the ground in Greece as a response to this. But then again, the rest of the British media (e.g. BBC editors) are no more clued in as to what really is going on here and what precisely were the salient formative traits of Greek state and society in the post-dictatorship era.
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