To be an accomplished, all around numbskull takes effort; to be a numbskull of world renown is the product of high art; to be a numbskull of world renown that also manages simultaneously to shoot himself in the head is the work of unparalleled genius. The Greek political classes and their lick-spittle "journalist" helpers have managed to excel in all three departments in the past few days.

This is a supremely critical moment: the Greek government is running out of cash to pay its bills in two weeks, and our survival depends upon the willingness of our EU partners, especially the Germans, to offer a financial helping hand. And yet, quite on form, the slimy non-entities that run this country have chosen precisely this moment to put on display their abysmal meanness of spirit and their autistic primitivism by unleashing an anti-German furor for which alone they would deserve to be left to to stew in their malodorous juices.

If they were literate, they might just read the blood-curdling deadline of the Daily Telegraph declaring that Greece has well-nigh buried her chances of rescue on account of her anti-German rhetoric.

The latest salvo in this obscene campaign was delivered by our traditionally self-obsessed deputy prime minister, who in a rambling discourse on the BBC basically equated the present German government with the nazis. This earned him the enthusiastic approbation of the extreme nationalist right. It also gave the signal for a cacophony of ignorant hatred that flooded the airwaves with intellectual filth of nauseating virulence. Language is being depleted of words potent enough to characterize this orgy of mental stupefaction and moral degeneracy, whose protagonists are precisely the people who in the last thirty years have grown fat by misappropriating the funds provided principally by those they are calumniating for the purpose of modernizing this country.

Truth to be told, the British journalist conducting the interview deliberately provoked the outburst of the weighty gentleman in question -not that the latter did not relish the opportunity to unleash his warped historical interpretations. The British press, as is well known, is steeped in anti-German bias too -of course on a much more sophisticated level of historical awareness (I am talking about its serious component) compared to its Greek counterpart. So, they have used the Greek crisis as an opportunity to pour some of that traditional venom, using expressions such as "the sound of Wehrmacht boots in the streets of Athens" (in the Guardian) and "Greece balks at self-immolation for the sake of Germany". This Schadenfreude is of inestimable use to the Europhobic segment of the British establishment, with Cameron emphasizing that under his prospective stewardship (which I hope never materializes) the UK will never adopt the Euro.

Of course, some of the British columnists were trying to make a legitimate point, one that I also stressed in one of my previous posts: namely, that the rescue of Greece would be in Germany's own interest given the latter's economic predominance in the Eurozone. This is a point of view which is also given prominence in German newspapers as well in an attempt to counteract the understandable, but still simplistic and wholesale, anti-Greek animus in the populist press and in the streets.

But these reasonable counter-arguments to the hardline opponents of the Greek rescue such as Issing are picked up here not as arguments, but as a pretext to deny any wrongdoing on the part of the Greek ruling elites and to blame the current situation wholly on the evil machinations of imperialist enemies who want to strangle history's "chosen people". The shameful thing about our domestic situation is that it has long degenerated into a collective psychopathy where the few rational voices are drowned in the drum roll of bestial emotionalism. The most laughable delusions have taken on the status of sacred truths, in a puerile self-absorption that has cut off the public mind from any connection with the wider world.

To his credit the Greek prime minister, despite some verbal concessions in parliament, did not kowtow to the screeching vermin of nationalist idiocy -although given the extremity of the hour he should have thrown out by the ear both his deputy and the comical Speaker of parliament who led the anti-German raucous threatening to bury us as a people worth the name.

I fervently hope that there are enough sane and sober leaders on the German side to rise above the gutter in which prominent opinion leaders here are flailing and writhing -and indeed the signs are that there are such, with the chancellor among them. She has invited the Greek leader to Berlin and during their meeting on March 5 let's hope that the final deal will be struck pulling us out of the hell hole that the malfeasance of the Greek feudal party-political aristocracy has dug for the Greek people.