Friday, March 5, 2010

So, finally the Greek prime minister bit the bullet. He did it after five months of prevarication trying to appease the old-school "socialists" of his own party, the ones that laid the foundations for the present disaster, the ones that were responsible for loading the pre-election manifesto of the governing party with all kinds of mendacious promises flying in the face of reality.

No matter the delay and its heavy cost: he still has to be lauded for the radical decisions that he took, admittedly with the watchdogs of the EU breathing fiercely over his shoulder.

The measures are not just, for they will hit hard not the party-affiliated caste that stole the European billions and secreted them away in Swiss bank accounts in order to finance a disgustingly lavish lifestyle, but the millions of ordinary citizens who have been bled white over the years in order to support a lying and cheating government in cahoots with the aforementioned kleptocrats.

But, at this extreme point where survival is at stake retroactive justice is simply not possible.

If, despite this, the decades-long orgy of debauchery and exploitation of our "socialist" feudal classes is finally ended and the pseudo-welfare state that they erected is dismantled, the price is worth paying for the sake of our children.

But this is the beginning of a hesitant beginning that may be easily derailed if the traditional inertia of blatantly egoistic interests posing as the defenders of social values is allowed to reassert itself. For this not to happen Europe must not avert its gaze. It must keep pressing for the completion of the institutional dimension of the process of reform, i.e. the elimination of absurd bureaucratic regulation and control in all fields whose purpose was precisely to stifle all creative initiative from below, whether in the economy or in education, that would truly benefit the commonweal.

This is not, by any stretch of the imagination, an argument against the welfare state as such, or against government intervention in the economic field, in a general theoretical sense -in the same way that being against Stalinism or Brezhnevism is not at all tantamount to being an opponent of socialism, Marxist or otherwise.

It is the Greek state apparatus of the past thirty years, its particular mode of control of the society, its rotten national-socialist ideology and the attitudes of parasitic passivity that it inculcated in the population at large that ought to be the target of uncompromising hatred and loathing.

It is the Greek political elites of all ideological hues that usurped the honorable and praiseworthy demand for a political authority that cares for its citizens, and especially those on the bottom rungs of the social ladder, and used it as a lying pretext for the most shameless regime of catering to insatiable minorities at the expense of society as a whole.

The aforementioned demand represented a genuine longing of the masses which in previous generations had been subjected to multiform deprivation and suffering. But the upstart political leaderships that emerged after the fall of the dictatorship just proved to be morally worthless and intellectually empty in the management of this legitimate political aspiration. They hijacked it, thus hoodwinking the people that they were custodians of their interests. But in fact, precisely at the moment when the accession to Europe provided the material means to erect a decent system of mutuality and effective social services, they proceeded to distort this ideology into a cover for the most ruthless rapacity of strategically situated cliques.

This tyrannical exploitation was underpinned and furthered by a deliberate cultural practice of deconstructing traditional values and verities, such as politeness, respect for one's fellow human beings, recognition for diverging points of view, tolerance for alternative modes of existence etc.

Aggressive dogmatism, inhuman bullying and slander of those thinking differently from the self-appointed prophets of mock-revolutionary truth, hatred of all sorts and plain rudeness gradually prevailed as the mark of "progressivism". Sartre's famous dictum that hell is the other came to be realized in the streets and other public spaces of this country.

The very idea of morality, i.e. the recognition of the other as an equal in terms of his/her rational essence and autonomy, was ironically debunked as the lie of "bourgeois society". Thus, schools and universities, especially after the bogus reform of 1982 that turned them over to uncouth party apparatchiks, began producing illiterate individuals despising the whole set of ideas and values that comprise human civilization, as well as the basic stances that define humanity per se.

This does not mean that right thinking, humane and intelligent people just disappeared -quite the contrary. But they had to retreat into obscure niches, the only place where they could retain integrity and exercise their right to think for themselves. The public sphere was taken over by the wild-eyed inquisitors of national and "socialist" orthodoxy -the two merging into a foul mixture in due time.

Unless this contamination of the public mind is somehow healed any economic reform, however radical, is bound to remain ineffective. Unless people grasp the elementary thought that socialism is not your right to benefit yourself at the expense of others, but rather conscious and self-denying labor in service of the common good, i.e. the supreme manifestation of morality; unless the goose-stepping detachments of various pseudo-revolutionary groups understand that occupying the Acropolis or the ministry of finance or burning the city down is fascist barbarism; unless high-living "trade unionists" grasp that defending, often through violence, the outrageous privileges of civil service aristocracies that suck the life-blood of the great masses of ordinary workers is reactionary oppression, there is no real way out of the crisis.

Meanwhile, the prime minister ought to be commended for making a bold start -even though his choices are going to hurt people that are not to blame for this debacle.

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