Bazaar of Athens

BAZAAR OF ATHENS

The year is drawing to a close and Greece is imploding.

After almost five years of extreme economic rigor which crushed the low and middle classes that fell outside the protective umbrella of the ruling kleptocracy, complete and final bankruptcy is once again looming ahead.

Our laughably incompetent government switched into militant anti-European mode back in May. They began trumpeting the exit from the EU-IMF program, peddling the lie that they had fulfilled all its requirements. In fact they had carried out none of the structural reforms they had signed on to. The public sector is as corrupt as ever and the economy is still in the hands of the scandalously privileged unions and various private business mafias that have the political personnel in their pay.

The only thing the government have managed is to balance the budget by a) not paying the state's debt to private individuals and b) by taxing to death small businesses and the average wage-earner. So, when they tried to once again draw financing from the international markets they received a drubbing, and the rates of return on Greek government bonds skyrocketed back in October. Ever since they have been "negotiating" with the EU-IMF about not fulfilling commitments they agreed to and wrote into law back in 2012. No wonder that the talks ground to a screeching halt.

Meanwhile, the inability to elect a new President of the republic in the present parliament makes an early election highly probable by next spring. So, come the new year the country is threatened with the perfect storm: no international financial protection program, hence no liquidity to the Greek banks from Frankfurt, no legitimate head of state, a government at the end of its tether and the general chaos that ordinarily ensues during election time and which nearly drove the country out of the EU in 2012.

Except that this time the consequences of a Greek exit are much more manageable for Europe. We are rapidly sliding back to our age-old Balkan malaise, if not straight into a fourth-world vegetative state.

In all this the "radical left" opposition is touting its own magic potion: if they gain power they will demand of the EU to forgive most of the country's colossal debt (primarily owed at this point to governments, i.e. to the European tax-payer) and if they refuse Greece will default on its obligations. What they will do if the international community slams the door in their face they don't say. Also, they will provide thousands of new public sector jobs, and increase drastically the minimum wage as well as public works spending. All this out of non-existent financial resources.

When they presented this farcical concoction to international lenders in London a couple of weeks ago, they were laughed out of the room. If they mean all this balderdash (and it seems that they do), Greece is out of the Euro overnight and, given that the country imports everything it needs, shortages and monster inflation will result. They are then going to be chased down the streets by stone-throwing crowds, the very same ones that are now cheering them on convinced by them that it rains pennies from heaven.

So all in all, both government and opposition are locked in embrace as they lead the country dancing down the cliff. They keep hurling obscenities at each other, to be sure, as they are wrestling for power. But to have power for themselves alone is their only aim -and their only difference. Apart from that they are in profound agreement that the mafia-ridden system of nationalist-Stalinist statism that ruined the country was just about perfect and that it was the "evil foreigners" that swooped down on us uninvited to disturb our bliss. This is the mentality that also grips the people at large, beaten into their brains by the mass media, themselves prime beneficiaries of the rotten system. As long as these conditions prevail there is no salvation, however you finesse the economic figures here and there.

The ship of fools

It's the oldest truth about politics, but still as valid as ever. And from time to time one is given the chance to test its validity for oneself. Through a strange twist of fate I was also given the opportunity to do just that. My decision to enter the political arena was thrust upon me. It was entirely unpremeditated, actually the thing furthest from my mind about three months ago. But then I was convinced by trusted friends that there was a possibility for a new beginning and that I owed it to myself to pitch in.

It's such a truism by now that the Greek political system is in a state of putrescence -I have been writing about this monotonously for the past four years or so. But then two different conclusions follow from this premise: either you sit still and bear the consequences helplessly, or you try to do something about it. Something like packing up and leaving this place (thousands, especially young people, are actually doing so), or joining some political initiative with an outside chance to help stem the rot. I wagered the latter. A new political group was formed with the express aim of fighting the attitudes and practices that bankrupted the country. It scored respectably (6.6%) in the recent elections for the European Parliament. I was not elected of course, but that's neither here nor there. The depressing point, as I see it, is rather that these elections did not signal even a faint awareness in the people at large that there ought to be a radical re-assessment of policies and a renewal of personnel, if the direction of the ship (or rather the pitiful raft that is left of it) is to be reversed. Even in the midst of generalized despair and outrage the public still favored, both in the government and opposition camps, the easy and empty slogans and the failed personalities that only promised to continue the blithe and blind course to further ruin.

The chief cause for this is the stranglehold over public life exercised by the media. The campaign was fought on the television screens -nothing remarkable about that, you might say, it's the same in all democratic countries. Except that the media here do not possess even the modicum of impartiality and independence that might justify their role as chief arbiters in the political debate. They are fully in cahoots with the corrupt politicos -the media actually put them in power in the first place in order subsequently to to claim unbelievable rewards that make a mockery of the rule of law and basic equality. The relative integrity of constitutional provisions that elsewhere provide some redress for abuses of power and privilege are absent here. Laws and institutions are mere tools in the hands of private interests for the purpose of bilking the commonweal.

And the most dispiriting thing of all is that the majority of the people consider this a normal state of affairs and are incapable of visualizing -and therefore wanting- an alternative. Each and every one is pining for "his own" to grab the helm, in order to exploit the public wealth for the benefit of the followers of this or that political party. The sound and fury of television panels debating the issues signified precisely nothing. Ignorant and/or plainly self-interested figures engaged in shrill altercations, in which the rudest and most shameless usually "won". "The worst are full of passionate intensity": God, how many times need we to be reminded of Yeats' great insight! It is no surprise that the individuals that collected  the most votes in all parties were those that excelled in this theater of ostentatious nothingness -TV personalities, footballers, actors and sundry demagogues spooning out the cant of the "wronged nation".

This was a "European" election in which Europe was absent. Or it was mentioned only to be bashed as the source of all evils that have befallen this most perfect of all lands. A general desire was abroad for a return to the "blessed" condition before the fall (of 2010), in which Europe would continue to ladle out the billions to be spent for the obscene enrichment of privileged castes, with some crumbs falling off the table for the rest of us. This is a vicious circle that I hate to say cannot be broken in the foreseeable future.

So what was the ancient truth that was thus re-learned? That democracy is not viable without a demos that is informed, cultured and of independent judgement, and hence capable of making a sharp distinction between cheap rhetoric and rational discourse aiming at the common good. But this presupposes an educational system cultivating critical thinking, rather that ideological indoctrination -something which is missing here, because it was deliberately destroyed by those wishing to put the television evangelism of hatred and obfuscation in its place. A people whose mind is shaped in this way is none other that the ἄγριον θρέμμα described by Plato, ready to pounce upon those counseling for the common interest (such as poor Nicias) as enemies of the nation. This is a people perverted by its very enemies to regard anyone truly equipped to guide it to a better condition as "μετεωροσκόπον τε καὶ ἀδολέσχην καὶ ἄχρηστον" (Rep. 488e).

But at least in Plato's Ship of Fools those who through impudence and violence have seized the helm of government still somehow keep the vessel floating albeit in random and aimless course: "τοὺς μὲν άλλους ἢ ἀποκτιννύντας ἢ ἐκβάλλοντας ἐκ τῆς νεώς, τὸν δὲ γενναῖον ναύκληρον μανδραγόρᾳ ἢ μέθῃ ἢ τινι ἄλλῳ ξυμποδίσαντας τῆς νεὼς ἄρχειν χρωμένους τοῖς ἐνοῦσι, καὶ πίνοντάς τε καὶ εὐωχουμένους πλεῖν ὡς τὸ εἰκὸς τοὺς τοιούτους..." The same in Hieronymus Bosch's great painting: the debauched occupants of the vessel are still gorging themselves, and puking into the sea, while their boat is heading to nowhere with a roast chicken strapped to its mast. Of course the rocks are visible in the distance, but the hour of reckoning has not yet arrived.

This hour has come and gone for the modern Greek ship of fools. There is no roast chicken to be seen anywhere anymore, and just a few broken planks remain. And yet most cling to them fantasizing that the feast is about to resume, trusting the same vile priests and dunces that brought them to this ruin.

The new as old as it gets

The whole of Europe is laughing: Greece is at the helm of the EU. The country is at a terminal stage of decomposition and yet its leaders talk pompously about setting goals for "more Europe" and such trash. They have to find approximately 10-15 billion euros for 2014 to plug the holes of their management and still they declare success in leading the country out of the crisis.

It's clear that our strangulation has still further to go. For the budget surplus that they are declaring, to the extend that it is real, has been achieved only through the vicious extortion of their last remaining penny of those who have no way to dodge the tax office, namely the small people with some meager savings amassed by perfectly legitimate means. Their procedures have been so ruthless, that all constitutional protections have been swept away. Revolutions have broken out in the past for much milder oppression that that. Meanwhile, the fat cats who have been robbing us blind for a generation are still partying.

Since 2010 the only thing that successive governments have done in order to convince the European overseers that they are complying with the obligations undertaken in return for the loans that kept the country afloat is tax to death the small portion of the population that could not hide its income at the same time that they slashed their salaries and pensions. What a triumph. Everything else that they promised they failed to carry out, above all the closing of countless government bodies performing no work at all and existing only for providing fat recompense for the party hacks running them. There are, for instance, four different state-run institutes for doing the same thing, namely study international legal relations, all funded out of our pockets. And that's just a minor example. Oh, and there is another ingenious trick: it's called "amalgamation." A number of these bodies are terminated on paper, but instead of being dissolved they actually continue to exist as before under the roof of a new single public entity. The latter acquires an independent bureaucracy of its own, superimposed upon the previous ones. So out of the seeming termination of, say, three preexisting boards or institutes or what have you you end up having four! This is what is called here reducing the size of the state sector.

In one of my very first posts I predicted what has come to pass, namely that all the solemn commitments made after endless debates in parliament (and not least the repeated burning of Athens by crazed "revolutionary" gangs) were going to be violated by the authorities. It took no particular wisdom to do that, just having endured the vileness of the local governing class. The hydrocephalic monster that crony government has created over the past generations has at this point just about consumed the flesh of society at large and it is beginning to devour its own.

This is the last stage before the implosion, in which a final explosion of generalized greed masquerading as militant socialism will reduce everything to ashes. And it is only in mythology that new life spontaneously springs out of such desolation. The European elections in May will strip the sitting government of all legitimacy, and deservedly so. For they came to power promising a liberal administration that would clean out the Augean stables of statist corruption, and instead they delivered an intensification of Soviet-style control by minorities entrenched in the public sector ruthlessly defending their private interest at the expense of the commonweal -and all that under the flaming red banner of leftism.

The most charitable thing that can be said about our current rulers is that they were not in a position to subdue the hydra that they themselves brought into being. Nor did they wish to, however, for after all it was flesh of their flesh.

One last reminder. Well-meaning people abroad should not be deceived by the legal prosecution of the neo-nazis that has dominated the headlines over the past few months. For one thing, it was carried out in violation of key constitutional provisions: you cannot fight fascism by fascist means. But maybe this is the least of ills, for the constitution in modern Greece has since her very inception been just a facade to bamboozle credulous foreigners thinking that they were dealing with a civilized country -and an heir to the glories of Hellas no less. Fat chance. The more relevant, and damning, consideration is that despite the aforementioned legal show the ideology and the methodology of the extreme right is still triumphant, penetrating all political factions and coloring the thinking and the emotions of the average person at large. The nationalistic hatred of sundry "foreigners,"the glorification of the "chosen race" under attack by international Jewry, usually called "capital," the readiness to use violence to silence liberal thought and to shake off the "yoke" of the west -all these are the staple of public discourse and are hysterically propagated by the media (the chief perpetrators of public corruption over the decades). A recent offer by the Soros foundation to heat all schools in a northern district during the winter was vehemently rejected by the local education council. They did not deign to stoop before the nefarious designs of such an evil agent of Jewish imperialism. They preferred to have their children freezing between four stone walls.

Happy new year.