In his severe article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung a few days ago condemning in categorical terms any attempt of bailing out Greece as an effective dismantling of the Euro, Othmar Issing remarks that no country has benefited more from the common European currency while at the same time systematically violating all obligations and collective goals flowing from its membership.

On this he is absolutely right. The structural funds flowing in since 1981 were used for parasitic consumption, while at the same time a warped ideology of national exceptionalism took hold which gradually distanced the country from the core of values and cultural attitudes defining the European project. An egregious "closing of the Greek mind" took effect, whereby the more the material standard of living rose towards the EU average (at the expense primarily of the German taxpayer) the more rabid the anti-European and anti-Western orientation of the collective mind became. Half of the population, practically, declared themselves journalists, professors, actors, intellectuals of various itinerant sorts, all of them demanding to be supported by government funds (drawn, again, from Europe's purse and from taxing the rest of the population to death) and seeing as their lives' purpose to denigrate and to vilify the very project of integration that made their bloated and conceited existence possible.

Since the beginning of the 80's Greek governments constantly declared that they were going to Brussels to "do battle" in favor of "the people". This meant that they were going to fight to secure the continuing flow of European monies that fed the increasingly venal political class and their business cronies and arse-licking hangers on. The notorious cotton farmers of Thessaly, in particular, were gorged on subsidies from the CAP. Emboldened by the tacit and open support of the ministry of agriculture they filled their crates with stones under a thin layer of the white stuff in order to suck ever growing amounts of Brussels lucre. The result was the execrable quality of their cotton at artificially high prices, the ruining of the livelihood of third world cotton producers, and finally the destruction of the Thessaly plain itself under unconscionable use of water, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, an environmental calamity of the magnitude of lake Baikal.

A byproduct of this was the effective demolition of traditional architecture in the country under a spate of phony development. Greece (which boasts of being the only country with an article in its constitution protecting the environment!) was in a couple of decades transformed into an immense eye-sore of ugly concrete, a heap of formless and soulless structures stifling the mind and even robbing you of breath. What remained of the countryside was put to the torch.

All this, mind you, occurred under the label of socialism and "anti-imperialist" militancy. And by the nineties of the previous century everybody in the country, all political formations were socialists or communists of some sort -even the extreme right declaring that in social terms they were red collectivists.

This lurch to utter depravity was given its final push by the Yugoslav conflagration. Suddenly, the journalistic and political establishment, that bunch of vulgar and corrupt ignoramuses believing in nothing else but their bellies (κακ'ἐλέγχεα, γαστέρες οἷον: never were the words of Homer better applied) discovered Orthodoxy!!!! Our "brothers in faith" were under attack by the perfidious and scheming West. A wave of hysterical racism drowned the country. Suddenly we were back in the days of the Balkan wars, the "Macedonian struggle" commenced all over again. Even the communist party itself, shrugging away the implosion of the "fraternal regimes" in eastern Europe, took up the nationalist banner openly and unashamedly. Within the past year they have combined this with a full-blown return to Stalin.

Thus, the economic dimensions that Issing underlined are only one side of this tragic and suicidal story. The more dependent for its economic well-being the country became upon European largesse, the more rabid its hatred for Europe and the west in general, the greater the distance between its collective consciousness (molded by comic and rotten opinion makers) and the fundaments of the European mind. In fact, as education itself decomposed under a spate of "reforms" introducing ideological and party-political manipulation as the guiding principle at all levels, elementary knowledge of history, including Greek history, disappeared. Historical awareness degenerated into a cacophony of primitivist screams pouring from the air-waves, public property hijacked now with the blessing of the governments by various charlatans, bigots and dunces who had appointed themselves leaders of the nation -becoming filthy rich in the process.

In this maelstrom even the very language itself became deformed and warped in order to serve the interests of these vandal hordes, mutating into what can only be described as a spiritless patois devoid of all historical depth and aesthetic integrity. As a life-long educator, it pains me to attest that the younger generations have well-nigh forfeited not just the capacity to formulate a coherent thought, but even the ability to put together words on a line, or to voice a comprehensible utterance. It is no accident that Greece ranks last in all international surveys (PISA etc.) on education -and sinking fast. It is very traumatic to say it, but this descent into a Neanderthal-like anti-Europeanism has ipso facto been a de-Hellenization of the country. I believe it is fair to say (and again it pains me immensely to pronounce this) that there is no other place where there is less knowledge of and less love for the basics of Hellenic culture. This is a society that has deliberately severed all its vital links with the historical past that flourished in its geographic area, including the recent one. It is a broken branch on the ground. Oh, but of course: invocations of "our glorious ancestors" are rampant. But all this is a meaningless and tasteless rhetorical flourish, just as fake as the 2004 "return of the Games to their homeland" and the drug-soaked triumphs of the local athletes in them.