Finis Graeciae

I think it is safe to say that after one hundred and ninety years the experiment of modern Greece has, barring a miracle or two, finally failed. One, of course, still hopes against hope, for the realization of this finality weighs like a hellish gloom upon the soul. But these are subjective considerations. If one approaches the case in a sober-minded way, the evidence appears overwhelming that the project inaugurated in the early nineteenth century has run out of moral and cultural steam -the economic implosion is merely a side effect of this.

The phrase of the title was floated back in the eighties by a coterie of right-wing mystics to lament the incorporation of the country into the "Frankish" construct of united Europe, thus forfeiting its "Orthodox" authenticity and its folkish ways of a communalism based on blood ties and sentiment. At the very moment when the country was given its best, and last as it turned out, chance to shake off the torpor of traditionalism and the pettiness of personal kinship that trumps considerations of the common good and universal justice, this whining from the fringes became more and more persistent and acquired a wide audience.

In due time it penetrated the discourse of almost all segments of political opinion. It brought together a revived nationalism (that through this stratagem managed to jettison the legacy of the dictatorship precisely as it salvaged the core of its ideology of Messianic Greekness) and the unrepentant Stalinism of the left, who finally realized that they shared an enemy. And thus was engendered the monstrosity of an "Orthodox communism" or a "communist Orthodoxy" which considered their obsessive hatreds vindicated by the West's intervention in Kossovo, where the "imperialists" attacked a "fellow Orthodox" nation. Greek volunteers fought on the side of the Serbs in the killing fields of Srebrenica proudly raising the blue and white flag in celebration of that horrific massacre. And the few lonely voices that were raised here in protest against that indelible stain on the country's honor were shouted off the stage as agents of imperialism.

Today it is clear that the proclamation of the "end of Greece" has indeed come true, but for reasons exactly opposite of those alleged by its original authors. Greece has been finished precisely because that medieval mysticism and its "leftist" equivalent of a "people's commune" has swept away from public life all belief in constitutionalism and the rule of law as "western fictions" tyrannizing over the "soul of the people". One sees a direct parallel here with the visions of the Russian Slavophiles, denounced by Marx as reactionary fantasies for all the "communistic" pretensions that they also donned. The only "right" that has been left standing in this desolate social landscape is the brutal one of first possession, by those of superior might or political and personal connections. We are unmistakeably headed towards (if not actually in) a Hobbesian nightmare of morally unrestrained rapacity.

The political elites of the past generation are directly responsible for this state of affairs. They milked the European cow with gusto, using that largesse to fatten the cliques of their hatchet men that took control of state institutions -as well as their personal bank accounts abroad, of course. And they covered this up with a shrill rhetoric of "national pride" in combat with enemies at all points of the compass -beginning with weak northern neighbors and including the very Europeans whose subsidies made their debauchery possible.

They thus turned Greece into a pariah in the European system, claiming endless exceptions to European legal regulations that somehow threatened the domestic kleptocracy and broadcasting a retrograde nationalism that made a mockery of the trans-national (but not anti-national) comity that the European Union was trying so laboriously to forge. And this was the pitiful betrayal of that grandiose universalist endeavor that the revolutionary uprising of the Greeks symbolized, in the eyes of progressive Europeans and a part of the Greek elite itself, back at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

The tragedy of all this is that Greece had at its disposal a national myth among the most potent and vibrant of all national myths at the time. It was the projection of a destiny among the civilized (and Christian) nations of the west, whose culture had Hellenic foundations, that legitimized the political aspirations of those revolutionary fighters on the international plane. And it was to this vision, enunciated by Korais, but also by Ypsilanti and the first Greek national assembly at Epidaurus, that progressive Europe responded. This response, eventually maturing into a collective political intervention, actually saved the Greek revolution at the very moment when it had been extinguished on the ground, despite the magnificent epic of Messolongi.

But after that this nurturing national idea was systematically mismanaged and eventually botched. The European face and aspiration of Greekness was still alive in the official paideia of the nation through the nineteenth century. But in the course of the twentieth it gradually mutated into a particularist caricature of its original universalist inspiration. In this ideological presentation the Hellenic historical phenomenon, including the revolution, was systematically denuded of every European significance and dimension. European history was actually not taught in Greek schools, except incidentally as a tale of evil machinations against the "chosen race" and attempts to "steal" our cultural primogeniture (vide Elgin). This went hand in hand with the failure to construct a functioning civil and political society domestically. The greater the calamities heaped upon the Greek people by the incompetence and wrong-headedness of Greek politicians, the more ear-piercing the rhetorical shrillness of the official nationalism, attributing all disasters, external and domestic, to foreign causes.

We are at the present moment going through another bout of this collective hysteria, to which the Greek public sphere is characteristically prone. The cause is insignificant -but also highly revealing. A historical documentary about the revolution of 1821 is being shown on television, in which certain "sacred" truths are questioned (clumsily it ought to be said -but this is another issue) and the opinion of foreign scholars (among them a Turk, sacrilege of sacrileges!) is also aired. The crowd of intellectual thugs occupying the public sphere, the same ones raging against the "foreign occupation" of the country (meaning its financial rescue by the EU and the IMF), are up in arms denouncing the conspiracy (by Soros, the Freemasons, the Zionists and what have you) to rob us of our national identity.

The conclusion is sad but simple. The triumph of this degenerate nationalism is the result of the fact that, in the end, the modern Greeks have failed to become a nation. A nation is a community unified by common memories and sentiments, but also by commitments to political values and institutions that uphold the equal dignity and freedom of all members thereof. A national consciousness in its genuine form is a way of transcending private interest in the search of the common good, a mode of living together in mutual acceptance. And it does not imply contempt for other national cultures and ideals. This is the concept of the nation that springs from the writings of Rousseau and the experience of the French revolution, a notion that the leaders of the Greek renaissance of the 18th century subscribed to.

In contrast, the cult of "sacred" national symbols in present day Greece is mere rhetorical posturing and devoid of any moral or intellectual substance. It is a mere masque of hatred. In fact hatred has come to be the defining mark of this society, both internally and externally. Hence, the condition of latent civil war that defines its political and social life. It is in fact a non-community, an assemblage of particular associations ready to attack and devour those on the outside if the occasion presents itself and there is a prospect of success. Under these conditions "democracy" is simply a stalemate of opposing forces that are simply biding their time until given a chance to annihilate their opponents. The constitution and the laws are a mere sham, invoked as a pretext if it suits one's interest, but systematically violated to procure private advantage.

Greece has the most, the most complicated and the most wide-ranging laws (even some that are extremely enlightened), none of which is taken seriously or applied. The Hobbesian absence of law and right mentioned above is the dark reality underneath the legalistic facade. A statement by our comical "minister of justice" just a few days ago is indicative of the dominant ethos: when a person or a group violates the law, he pontificated in his usual asinine pompousness, "social realism" must be the guiding consideration. This means that if the law-breaker can argue that his/her circumstances somehow outweigh the obligation to obey the law then the crime is justified. This is the dominant attitude in this fake society. Lasciate ogni speranza chi voi entrate........

Dionysios Solomos, writing at the time of the revolution, expressed it trenchantly: if they hate one another they do not deserve freedom. I am afraid that he has not been proven wrong.