Sometimes silence is the only available stance in the face of an unbearable reality. Language is simply too poor to express the horror that we have lived through this month. The Swedish finance minister spoke some days ago about the "wolf-packs" of speculators trying to tear apart the weaker states of the EU. But we here came face to face with very real wolves with a human countenance who deliberately and in cold blood burned to death three innocent workers trapped in their building which these beasts torched. And all around this horrendous scene the "revolutionary" crowds of protesters cheered the crime, cursed the victims gasping for breath and fought to prevent the fire brigade to come near to put out the fire. That we would be living in such hell on earth today I could never have imagined even in my worst nightmares, despite the face that the depraved condition of this society was quite evident to me within a couple of years of my return.

Meanwhile the government is degenerating into a collection of clueless buffoons, constantly announcing new measures of restructuring that at this point are nothing but a bunch of words. At the same time the greater part of the government itself together with the middle echelons of the state administration are skilfully conspiring to nullify the few changes that have managed to percolate downwards, while the opposition parties are engaged in a destructive politics as usual guaranteed to keep the country under foreign economic tutelage indefinitely -if not actually to push it over the cliff of financial ruin from which it was saved in the last minute. No wonder, then, that no one abroad considers it slightly likely that the country will indeed manage to dig itself out of its self-inflicted disaster.

A glimmer of hope might be left if things had stabilized on the European plane. But even from that planet the news are hugely discouraging. The stubborn self-righteousness of the Germans which initially managed to turn the relatively minor Greek debacle into a full-blown European and then world crisis has in the past couple of days mutated into a panicky sort of maladroitness -unless it be a deliberate strategy to scuttle the Euro so that Germany might once again revert to its splendid Kantian and Prussian aloneness. One is assailed by crazy thoughts like that in the current darkness. In one of my early posts back in February I wrote that the situation could be saved provided that the chief actors did not all of them together manage to screw up completely in all fields at the same time. At this point it seems that they have achieved precisely that exceedingly rare feat.