When ignorance becomes a death wish

Over the weekend of Oct. 28-30 last, just after the momentous decisions -now moot, I am afraid- in favor of Greece had been taken by the European Council in Brussels, I happened to be in Berlin. The German papers had headlines splashed over their front pages declaring that "Europe celebrates the debt cut for Greece". I felt relieved, obviously.

Over the next couple of days I spent glorious and ecstatic hours upon hours in the Museums on the Museumsinsel, including a three hour wait in line (from 7 to 10 in the morning!) to get tickets for the Gesichter der Renaissance exhibition in the Bode Museum. The Altes Museum has an unrivaled classical Greek collection, while in the Neues Museum the face of Nefertiti just takes your breath away.

Walking the streets of Berlin dotted with the Schinkel buildings, and other structures bearing a pronounced Hellenic mark, one cannot help meditating upon the profound influence left by the Greek spirit upon the Prussian capital. And this without even pondering the teaching emanating from the lecture halls of the Humboldt Universitaet or the content of the plays and operas performed upon the various theater stages. Only a person ignorant of the intellectual history of Europe, and Germany in particular, would ever conceive the foolish notion that they are in any way anti-Greek. And yet this has been the dominant conviction here for a long time, one reinforced during the current adversity -in which I ought to add the only reason that we are still alive as a state is the subventions coming our way from northern points of the compass.

As John Major wrote in a widely noted article on Oct. 30, the most effective argument in favor of the admittance of Greece into the Euro area a decade or so ago was the one put forward by the French, and seconded by the Germans, to the effect that "you cannot exclude the land of Plato from a united Europe". It is not as if the economic problems of such a step were not envisioned. But, they simply paled in significance besides the historical and cultural considerations. For the Europeans Greece was then, and still is despite everything, the present day extension of a mighty ideal upon which their own identity is founded. I just wish today's Greeks were equally aware, and cared about, that historical continuity, with all its problematic features, instead of doing everything in their power to erase it. Most of the time the most powerful arguments against the inclusion of today's Greece in the common European project are supplied by the Greeks themselves, especially those in official capacities. The political events of the past couple of weeks have unfortunately reinforced this pattern.

In any case, it has to be remembered, as former PM Constantine Simitis underlined in his recent article in Le Monde, that Greece did not falsify the statistics in order to get into the Euro. The Goldman-Sachs arrangement to minimize the national debt at the time was common practice in EU as well as perfectly legal, while the budget deficit had indeed diminished to slightly above 3% of GDP during the first Simitis administration (1996-2000). The situation deteriorated during the second Simitis administration (2000-2004), and it became outright disastrous during the Karamanlis period (2004-2009) when all semblance of prudence and integrity in public finances was swept away. It was during this time that the figures conveyed to Brussels were systematically falsified. During the same period European oversight over Greek public finances was extremely lax, although there were warnings (more or less hushed up though) that the country was heading for derailment. In a famous speech in Parliament in December 2008 during the discussion of the budget Simitis predicted that the country was headed for receivership under the IMF. But nobody deigned to take note.

It has to be said that during those years the policies of George Papandreou were despicable. He opposed any proposal of fiscal consolidation as basically fascist in alliance with the populist, nationalist and left-corporatist wing of his party. And in the process he threw out of PASOK the modernizing fraction around Simitis, in other words what was best in Greek political life. No wonder that when he became PM his reformist rhetoric rang hollow and was never put into effect anyway. His erstwhile allies meanwhile, as well as the unbelievable dunces that he appointed as government ministers, did their best to wreck the adjustment programs negotiated with the EU since 2010 while he looked away. The ineptness and blindness of the man had thus been clearly indicated, but we kept giving him the benefit of the doubt simply because all the alternatives were so much worse. And yet, nothing had prepared us for the stupidity, mindlessness, dishonesty and self-destructive recklessness of his policies after October 27. In an unguarded moment Sarkozy called him mentally unhinged, and I can vouch for the fact that this was exactly the diagnosis current in Athens as well, not least among circles previously well-disposed towards him. A sign of the unabating inanity of his thinking is the fact that he has been going around ever since defending his disastrous decision, the latest instance being last night in Kiel during the conference of the German Green party.

On the morning of our departure we took a long, invigorating walk in the Tiergarten, admiring the gleaming Haydn-Mozart-Beethoven monument in the early sun. We were under the delusion that we were slowly emerging from a two-year darkness. As our plane touched down in the early hours of the morning of Oct. 31 we felt tired, but relaxed and satisfied after our Berlin sojourn. The Barber of Seville at the Deutsche Oper a couple of nights before had been a triumph. But little did we know that a real-life buffoon in control of our destiny was poised in a few hours' time to take the criminal decision to submit to a plebiscite the agreements so arduously reached in Brussels a few days previously, thus throwing us back into the abyss of existential precariousness from which we thought we had escaped.

By doing that he obviously sealed his political fate -but this is no consolation. All the nefarious consequences of his folly are still with us. He managed to ruin the G20 summit conference in Cannes, to destroy the last shreds of Greek credibility in Europe, to legitimize the option of throwing Greece out of the Euro, to convince the markets of the untenability of the common currency and to well-nigh nullify the pacts of Oct. 27 all in one.

His successor as PM, Lucas Papademos, is a decent and competent individual, but he will be hobbled by the terrible mess he has inherited and the operetta-like government foisted upon him by the political parties who haggled among themselves for four unbearable days trying to avoid taking the only decision that would not immediately ruin the country -namely the very appointment of Papademos.

Meanwhile, the vile gang of "journalists" are whipping up another campaign of "resistance" against the "German occupation" of Europe, at the same time as they are demanding the immediate disbursement of the German billions (of which a significant sum will end up in their pockets).

A seminar with Malcolm Schofield

A breath of fresh air. One might expect that I would comment on the shenanigans of the Greek political class this fall, but they cannot be dignified even by a mere mention.

Last night we met with Prof. Schofield at the philosophical library of the Academy of Athens (it sounds much grander than it actually is) to discuss book II of the Laws of Plato. On the face of it a futile exercise, but in fact a veritable life-saving diversion (we will return to the question of futility later, because it cannot be exorcised that easily).

To begin with, here you had a person of immense knowledge and judgment combined with humility and a democratic dialectical ethos. Having spent a quarter of a century navigating the toxic waters of Greek academia, his presence brought back the idealist eagerness of my student days, when however the passion and the devotion was not accompanied either by intellectual depth or existential adequacy. In any case last night I had to stare in the face all these wasted years of wandering through the moral desert in which a misguided sense of duty had landed me so many years ago. Still, these mere two hours were enough to make me experience the inward soaring that genuine noetic groping and exploration do ignite. Here you had a teacher eager to lift you along the surging motion of conceptual discovery that his own guiding comments instigated, and possibly lift you to an even higher orbit of discourse.

I do envy his current students, one of whom, a thoughtful young Greek researcher, I also met last night. He was complaining that hie employment in England is much less secure than ours here. Poor soul! I tried most emphatically to discourage him from thinking in these terms. What he called our "security" is clearly more like hard labor for life in a dank and stinking pit.

And now for the philosophical crux of the matter. Every time one approaches Plato there is a huge, implacable question mark hanging over the proceedings. Can this person really be in earnest, can his interlocutors really be so timid and shallow, and what is the value for us parsing his lines and trying to tease out some sense that one might argue is profitless to contemplate in today's condition? What Plato takes for granted cannot be taken for granted, and if it were taken for granted then all sorts of distasteful consequences would follow. One cannot stand before Plato today dazed and awed -or before any other philosopher for that matter.

One word that kept coming up last night was "charm". Well, I refuse to be "charmed" any more by the "big thoughts" of some divinely inspired individual, simply because there are no divinely inspired individuals and also because on closer inspection their big thoughts are not as big as all that. They are, rather, simple (sometimes even simplistic) assertions, which however it took an immense amount of insight to enunciate.

I am more than eager to be charmed by the beauty of the language, the daring of the intuition, the harmonious wholeness of the alternative universe that Plato is constructing. But I refuse to be convinced of its truth. Truth is a word that drops very easily from Plato's lips every thirty seconds or so. But on account of that we should not for a moment be drugged or intimidated into assuming that he has "truth" or that he can even rationally explain what he is talking about. He is peddling a vision: a mighty, bright, highly adhesive vision surely, but just a vision nevertheless.

I will go out on a limb here. I wonder when we will finally gather the courage to come out and state that quite a lot (even most) of Plato's so-called argumentation is pure mumbo jumbo. And the point here is not, as with Popper, that he is the proponent of the "closed" society. The closed society can be gotten at from a multitude of rational or intuitive paths, so it is unfair to single Plato out in this regard. It could even be that this self-mutilating longing for closedness and finality is a constitutive trait of human nature itself, an indelible blot on its ontology. It would just be too easy to blame a single great thinker for infecting the human condition with it. The human condition would not be infected unless there were an inherent predisposition in it to fall for these grand speculations.

No, the issue is different. It concerns a much more underhanded, and hence dangerous, stratagem undertaken here, namely the effort to induce belief through the sheer power and polish of the combinations of words deployed against the hearer (no matter what the belief might be). Platonists and anti-Platonists are equally prone to this nefarious enterprise.

All this is not meant to detract from Plato's greatness. This is indeed to be admired. But greatness is not the sole, or the greatest, value in life. Smallness can equally be great.

So, all told does it pay today to engage with Plato? The answer is a definite yes, provided that we understand "pay" in a radical new way compared with the fawning meekness in which it was understood in centuries and decades past. Besides, of course, I can think of no better past-time in today's stunted and mangled Greece.

Impressions from a Hellenic summer

Syracuse: what a sparkling, spacious, airy Hellenic city! The Greek part of Sicily, from Selinus through Acragas and Syracuse to Tauromenium, exhibits an unadulterated historical magic that on pinions of pure feeling carries you back to that superb age of archaic finesse and cruelty which is the root of the European spirit. My visit was a baptism in lofty meditation that -temporarily- cleansed the soul of the muck of pettiness and foreboding that is its fate in the sorry place to which it has since returned.

The sun was sharp as, from the top of Archimedes' fortress, Eurylaeum, I surveyed the plain surrounding that natural wonder which is the port of Syracuse. In the play of hues and shadows in the distance it was as if that sublime confrontation, in which the sea pride of the foolish Athenians was reduced to so much floating timber, was being reenacted for my sake. Nobody else, though, saw what I saw.

When I eventually got to the port there was a big summer fire burning on the other side in the vicinity of the temple of Zeus. Nobody seemed to bother much -simply because, I think, it posed no threat to the landscape and its cultural identity. This is a fearless land, one in which through untold vicissitude and upheaval the brightness of its Hellenism has always managed to shine through. What was more impressive was how aware the locals were of these demons still inhabiting their portion of the earth and how they sought their company.

When she was informed that we came from Greece, our guide at Selinus had earlier simply said: "welcome home". This to me was like a potion of divine youthfulness running through the veins, a precious gift that I will always cherish.

Later on that day we climbed the heights of Neapolis and I spent the afternoon just gazing awestruck at the rungs of the ancient theater opening into the horizon like a giant fan of pure spirit. The white stone pulsated with religious and rational energy. It is merely the face of a cruel quarry, but no matter.

As we were getting there driving through the multiple quarries of Achradina, some gaping ominously in their underground darkness, I thought I caught a glimpse (it was probably self-suggestion) of that other theater that the wretched Athenian captives had hewn in those infernal depths, simply to while away some hours of their living death by the sweet and invincible sounds of Sophocles and Euripides.

Both the victors and the defeated, separated by absolute and pointless hatred, worshiped at the same altar. How odious is human vanity, all the more so as the vain souls are equally giants of taste and desire and capable of scaling the pinnacles of thought. The foolishness of the great deserves so much more contempt. The above-ground faces of the quarries of Achradina were scintillating in the pure sunshine reflected off the calmness of the Ionian sea.

There was one jarring note. Right across from the Paolo Orsi archaeological museum (a true gem) there stands this ugly modernistic catholic church with a pyramidal roof rising to a stupendous height and thus brutally effacing the low-voice beauty of the surroundings. This insolent cement spear can be seen from miles around, another attempt by the Christians to impress their unnatural, perverted sensibility upon a historical and physical plate that simply chokes in their violent embrace.

Medieval morbidness, either of the Western or the Eastern Christian type, has simply no place here, or anywhere else in the Hellenic universe for that matter. It makes a mockery of all that the spirit of the Hellenes strove for, namely the spirituality throbbing at the very core of physical existence and deep within the human body.

But truly there is no more egregious manifestation of this Christian violation of Hellenism than the one seen on the acropolis of Ortygia, the heart of Syracuse. There the temple of Athena, one of the three erected in Sicily to celebrated the Hellenic victory over the Carthaginians in the battle of Himera, has been usurped and defaced in order to serve as the catholic cathedral of the city.

You can see and feel the mighty Doric columns of the archaic edifice, entombed in the superimposed medieval structure, still fighting to break loose from this deadly embrace. This is a spiritual atrocity that makes one gasp (I was the only one gasping). I suppose that the original Byzantine enclosure of the ancient temple would have been insensitive enough. But what intensifies the ugliness of the rape is the addition of that execrable Baroque facade that was erected in the Bourbon 17th century. The empty pomposity of its catholic "saints" in their faux tortuousness simply makes one cringe.

It is fortunate that the temple of Apollo, a few hundred meters up the street, although itself once subjected to the same sad fate of forced Christianization, has managed to get rid of this burden, probably through earthquakes that shook off those sick prostheses. So now its two remaining columns stand proudly alone to proclaim eternally their message of freedom. Athena, however, has not yet been liberated.

The island of Ortygia is a charmed world. An attractive village of Italianate refinement that blends well with the Hellenic aura surrounding it. Its main thoroughfare opens up to the spring of Arethusa and the great port, still populated by the suffering shadows of those Athenians sacrificed in vain.

A predicted debacle

As anticipated the ingenious "political" strategy of Greece's new minister of economics blew up in his face. That his personal standing was thus shattered is a negligible loss -nobody is going to miss the ugly mannequins running the show here for the past forty years when they are finally kicked off the stage.

The more consequential thing is that his attempted blackmail (see the previous post) precisely galvanized all those forces in Europe convinced that the country's place in the EU is plainly untenable. This conviction is now an iron-clad consensus and the only thing remaining is to work out the technicalities of Greece's ejection in such a way as to minimize the horrific consequences for all involved. This may take some time -a couple of weeks at most I reckon.

What may still save us for a little longer (i.e. a couple of months) -as a thoughtful colleague remarked this morning- "is Aristotle" and the fear of uncontrollable chain reactions in case the Rauswurf is clumsily handled. This last possibility has even roused the somnolent Obama people, who are sending their treasury secretary to Poland to participate in the meeting of the European finance ministers at the end of the week.

As for "Aristotle" what the friend meant to evoke is the immense cultural and historical significance of Hellas as a concept in the collective European mind. For those that admitted Greece into the Union back in the 80's and for a still significant segment of current opinion makers in the old continent, Europe is not just an economic arrangement but a wager in civilizational paradigm change, in which a new collective identity is to be built around the values of democracy, social and trans-national solidarity and critical historical thinking. And of course in all this one discovers Hellenic roots and foundations. Europe without Greece, thus, still seems to a lot of Europeans a truncated concept, a "body without limbs" as J. Delors recently expressed it.

For all of educated Europe Greece is a crown of spirituality that adds an eternal glow to the European institutional edifice, despite its having become an economic crown of thorns recently. Hence the last lingering hesitations concerning the (inevitable) exit of this failed state from the consort of serious, civilized countries.

When I say "all of Europe" I must, with heavy heart, exclude from this company the country named "Greece" itself -or, to be precise, its ruling elites and the greatest part of its population in its current numb and brutalized state, for whom the European cultural project as well as the Hellenic idea meaning nothing at all.

It is only the small minority of European Hellenes cowering in their hiding places that perceive the horrendous events unfolding these days as a cultural and moral catastrophe of unparalleled dimensions.

For the rest this society resembles but a ship of fools going merrily to its doom.

An autumn of futility and despair

The weather is still hot and sunny, but the summer with its deliberate forgetfulness is definitely over. More about the remarkable experiences of this summer in future posts, but for now it suffices to note that we are back on the track of collective destruction. Our abject leaders, whom we had gleefully erased from our mental screens for the duration of a few weeks, are back with a vengeance and still bent upon their same old pursuits of dismantling the little that has been left of this place -and this applies to all of them.

The government is paralyzed. After the stressful days of June, when they passed in Parliament the tough measures demanded by the EU in order to continue to keep the country artificially alive, they reverted to their time-honored game of doing absolutely nothing in order to put these measures into effect. The idea is to give to the Europeans what they want on paper, and then to proceed to violate all these verbal commitments in practice.

No wonder that the latest round of negotiations concerning the progress of the (fictional) reforms supposedly implemented by the government collapsed in acrimony. The Europeans departed last Friday in disgust at the tricks of the Greek ministers and bureaucrats trying to evade their legal obligations. The fact is that no one in government, with the exception of one or two individuals, supports the goal of trimming the monstrous public sector, for this means going against their very electoral base.

The strategy of the new economics minister is "political". This amounts to a blackmail of the Europeans, to the effect that they should accept that no structural reforms (opening up the closed-shop professions etc.) will be carried through and that they should be satisfied with the savage reductions of the salaries and pensions of the weakest groups that have been imposed so far. So they should shut up and continue funding the obscene absurdity that is the Greek state sector, for if they refuse the bankruptcy of the country will sweep the whole Euro area away.

This gamble is certainly desperate, but it has to be admitted that it has its own implacable logic. As I have remarked in the past in a very real sense Europe is Greece's captive under the present circumstances. But of course if matters are taken to that extreme, then the "political" -again- reactions of the European political classes and electorates become highly unpredictable. In this climate the attitude may very well prevail that it is preferable to let Greece go to the devil (given that its ruling elites ardently desire it), with Europe then going through a sharp but manageable crisis with highly beneficial consequences for its healthy core in the medium term. Europe will thus be rid of a stone around its neck.

This kind of thinking seems to be gradually winning the day in Germany, despite the protestations of the likes of Helmut Schmidt, Helmut Kohl and Gerhard Schroeder. What also weighs in its favor is the fact that the other countries of the European periphery are following a course of genuine reform quite the opposite of the sham "corrections" effected here.

It could well be argued that that contagion is a real and present danger as long as an unreconstructed Greece of rotten and stubborn Sovietism remains inside the Euro system. Whereas if this abscess is lanced immediately by letting the country go bankrupt and kicking it out of the European institutions altogether, the healthy core of the European project will soon recover: this would be the Befreiungsschlag as the Germans call it.

I personally dread such an eventuality, for it would forthwith destroy this place as a viable economic and cultural concern. This society would immediately descend into the savagery of a Hobbesian state of nature, a civil carnage much more barbaric than the one we went through back in the 1940's -and then Europe would have another kind of problem in its hands. And yet this is the outcome that our present leaders are blindly steering towards. This seems incredible to the average rational individual observing events from the outside. But for those of us who have lived through the moral and political beastliness of the Greek system of the past few decades it remains, unfortunately, a probable denouement.

Back to the precipice

Back in January 2010 the sum that would have sufficed to bail out Greece amounted to around 28 billion euros, and a rescue plan of that magnitude was being readied as Le Monde reported. Germany torpedoed it. Today the cost, only for Greece, is roughly 200 billion and counting -not to speak of the dizzying sums that are also required to buttress the European southern periphery but also, conceivably, the healthier core of Euroland. But Merkel is still stalling, in full knowledge that another dud of a solution at Thursday's Brussels summit risks igniting a market stampede.

Why is she persisting with this wrong-headed approach? It could well be the dogmatism of the famed "Swabian housewife" which she is in thrall to, a fundamentalist protestantism of economic surpluses of the kind immortalized by Max Weber's great book with a generous dollop of memory of the runaway inflation of the 1920's thrown in.

But a true statesman cannot remain indebted to the past in this slavish fashion, for then he/she risks sacrificing the future of the substantial progress of European unity achieved so far. Whatever the truth concerning Helmut Kohl's reported thrashing of Merkel's policies as undermining Europe (and there is no smoke without fire, despite the obligatory denials) the real effect of her stubbornness seems to be exactly that. So much so that it gives rise to the suspicion that she has actually charted a non-European course for her country. This is the frustration reflected in Sarkozy's comments, reported yesterday in Le canard enchaîné, even though -again- the report may have been exaggerated.

For once the Greek leadership seems to be in the right in the current juncture: the Greek government has adopted all the harsh measures asked of it and at great political cost (they are not going to survive the next election, if things continue as they are today). It is now Europe's turn to devise a drastic and definitive solution to the debt crisis. It is simply unfair and also suicidal to keep harping on the deficiencies of the Greek tax-collecting apparatus as well as on the endemic populism of the worthless politicians here.

These things are true, they are the facts of life. But the whole thing turns on whether one will simply bow to the inevitability of their wreaking havoc with the European idea, or whether Europe will rise above them -even if this means in a sense rewarding the vileness of the Greek establishment (the proverbial "moral hazard"). At this point it might very well be that the price that Europe must pay to save itself is precisely taking upon itself the costs of the profligacy of the Greek establishment.

This is indeed morally outrageous and politically very hard to sell to the northern European electorates. But what if punishing the Greek kleptocracy with all the harshness that it deserves also involves the demise of the European project as a whole? Would the satisfaction of seeing the incorrigible Greeks stewing in their own juice (for they plainly do not want to be saved) be reward enough for the world-wide havoc that will ensue when both the Euro and the European union unravel? Only a fundamentalist madman would answer in the affirmative.

It is clear in retrospect that admitting Greece into the European union, and especially into the Eurozone, was a monumental mistake. But the clock cannot be turned back. And besides at that time nobody could have foreseen the utter degradation of Greek society following that admission -least of all thousands of people, such as myself, who abandoned careers abroad to join what we saw as the project of building a new society of justice and welfare here. All we can say now is that we were all victims of a noble illusion that soon enough turned into ashes.

On the other hand, the original architects of European integration plainly had in mind a process of political as well as economic unification as they laid out their plans. This vision was informed with the lessons of recent history, lessons much greater than the episode of astronomic inter-war German inflation that currently mesmerizes the ruling coalition in Germany. The goal was political and cultural and not just economic -and Germany herself declared as much when she incorporated her eastern territories at crippling economic cost.

It was clear from the outset that -to put it bluntly- if Germany were to mitigate somewhat the shame of her recent past she would have to pay through the nose. She would indeed have to become the paymaster of a united Europe with a European Germany in its core, which meant jettisoning the dangerous aspiration of a German Europe. As I wrote back in May 2010 Madame Merkel would simply have to shut up and pay up, if she still was interested in the European vision of Schmid and Kohl. The political implication of this was a move towards federalism or con-federalism on the institutional plane. The common currency was the opening gambit in such an evolution, and it is simply disingenuous to argue otherwise. If the Euro is seen as the end of an economic, rather than the beginning of a political, process it has no future.

Germany is, fortunately, strong enough to undertake this journey, however unpopular it may to the readership of Bild. It is powerful economically, politically and culturally. In a curious way Merkel's prevarications evince a pusillanimity at adds with the immense energy and drive at the core of the society that she represents. Her incessant to and fro is, thus, a betrayal of the best in the German spirit.

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.