An autumn of futility and despair

The weather is still hot and sunny, but the summer with its deliberate forgetfulness is definitely over. More about the remarkable experiences of this summer in future posts, but for now it suffices to note that we are back on the track of collective destruction. Our abject leaders, whom we had gleefully erased from our mental screens for the duration of a few weeks, are back with a vengeance and still bent upon their same old pursuits of dismantling the little that has been left of this place -and this applies to all of them.

The government is paralyzed. After the stressful days of June, when they passed in Parliament the tough measures demanded by the EU in order to continue to keep the country artificially alive, they reverted to their time-honored game of doing absolutely nothing in order to put these measures into effect. The idea is to give to the Europeans what they want on paper, and then to proceed to violate all these verbal commitments in practice.

No wonder that the latest round of negotiations concerning the progress of the (fictional) reforms supposedly implemented by the government collapsed in acrimony. The Europeans departed last Friday in disgust at the tricks of the Greek ministers and bureaucrats trying to evade their legal obligations. The fact is that no one in government, with the exception of one or two individuals, supports the goal of trimming the monstrous public sector, for this means going against their very electoral base.

The strategy of the new economics minister is "political". This amounts to a blackmail of the Europeans, to the effect that they should accept that no structural reforms (opening up the closed-shop professions etc.) will be carried through and that they should be satisfied with the savage reductions of the salaries and pensions of the weakest groups that have been imposed so far. So they should shut up and continue funding the obscene absurdity that is the Greek state sector, for if they refuse the bankruptcy of the country will sweep the whole Euro area away.

This gamble is certainly desperate, but it has to be admitted that it has its own implacable logic. As I have remarked in the past in a very real sense Europe is Greece's captive under the present circumstances. But of course if matters are taken to that extreme, then the "political" -again- reactions of the European political classes and electorates become highly unpredictable. In this climate the attitude may very well prevail that it is preferable to let Greece go to the devil (given that its ruling elites ardently desire it), with Europe then going through a sharp but manageable crisis with highly beneficial consequences for its healthy core in the medium term. Europe will thus be rid of a stone around its neck.

This kind of thinking seems to be gradually winning the day in Germany, despite the protestations of the likes of Helmut Schmidt, Helmut Kohl and Gerhard Schroeder. What also weighs in its favor is the fact that the other countries of the European periphery are following a course of genuine reform quite the opposite of the sham "corrections" effected here.

It could well be argued that that contagion is a real and present danger as long as an unreconstructed Greece of rotten and stubborn Sovietism remains inside the Euro system. Whereas if this abscess is lanced immediately by letting the country go bankrupt and kicking it out of the European institutions altogether, the healthy core of the European project will soon recover: this would be the Befreiungsschlag as the Germans call it.

I personally dread such an eventuality, for it would forthwith destroy this place as a viable economic and cultural concern. This society would immediately descend into the savagery of a Hobbesian state of nature, a civil carnage much more barbaric than the one we went through back in the 1940's -and then Europe would have another kind of problem in its hands. And yet this is the outcome that our present leaders are blindly steering towards. This seems incredible to the average rational individual observing events from the outside. But for those of us who have lived through the moral and political beastliness of the Greek system of the past few decades it remains, unfortunately, a probable denouement.