Foolishness and Shame

In today's Greece the worst case scenaria always materialize, and I was silly to forget this capital truth on the eve of last Sunday's election which put the tombstone on the country's prospects as a member of the European family of nations. As I have repeatedly argued and explained here and elsewhere its European identity was a big lie anyway, and lies do not last. But I allowed myself to be carried away by the vain hope that the the majority of the people would rationally assess nothing more than their personal material interest before casting their ballots.

In the event they did nothing of the kind and instead they followed loud-mouthed charlatans who offered them the pie-in-the-sky of a return to the parasitic bliss of former times through the unilateral renunciation of the economic discipline agreed with the European Union. They also convinced them that the Europeans and the rest of the world would meekly bow to this reversal and would continue to shell out the billions needed to fund the thousands of fake pensions and other outrageous privileges awarded in the past to the clientele of our political parties. The repeated warnings from abroad that reneging on the obligations formally undertaken by the Greek state would result in the cessation of the foreign subventions and hence the sudden financial death of the country were denounced as "blackmail" by foreign enemies -the very same "enemies" who borrow on the international markets at 5 and 6 percent in order to lend Greece at 3,5.

The result was a mindless insurrection of "national pride", a choice for outright penury, destitution and starvation. It appeared to them preferable, instead of forfeiting a quarter, let's say, of your income for five years with a prospect of a gradual recovery afterwards, to lose all of it for good. Instead of submitting to painful cautery they elected to kill the doctor. They will soon enough taste the bitter fruit of their self-destructive choice -not later than the end of the year I reckon. But of course the calamity will by then be irreversible. The country has already lost all the international sympathy it could count on throughout this ordeal. It has presented itself in the ugliest light, what with a political elite consisting of ignorant and delusional demagogues and a public opinion thoroughly corrupted by decades of vulgar brain-washing by the brutish (and shamelessly thieving) media moguls and manniquins. It will be abandoned to its miserable fate, not least because that fate will have been self-chosen.

It is a sad, but rather remarkable, fact requiring thorough investigation by experts in psychosocial pathology that the competence for elemental rational thinking has vanished in this society over the last generation or so. The demise of education, as I have repeatedly argued, is the prime cause of this human disaster: the school as a hive of critical thought was the first target and victim of the party mafias that have ruled this country for so long, hiding their merciless plunder of the commonweal under "socialist" and "communist" slogans. Now we have come to the end of the road. The emperor is wearing no clothes and his body is unbearably ugly. This is not the end of the post-junta period (μεταπολίτευση) as many people say, but rather the despicable triumph of its worst features and tendencies.

So much for the stupidity in the latest developments. But there is also the shame. And this is the powerful presence of the neo-nazis in the new parliament. Of course one hears a lot of hypocritical cries of consternation about this, but they come mostly from people whose mentality and political behavior is identical, apart from the external trimmings, with those of the humanoid apes of Golden Dawn. The legitimization of lawlessness, political hatred, violence and -not least- antisemitism is widespread among various groups and through them among the populace at large. It was just a matter of time that its neo-nazi variant would profit from this general climate. Still, this is a new abhorrent peak in our political evolution that we have reached. The parliamentary presence of the neo-nazis has thus obliterated the last vestiges of this country's image as a nation of civility and civilization. From now on the course is pre-determined. We are tumbling into an abyss of social misery and civil strife, while the authors of this descent to hell are full of glee at their triumph. The only thing that people of good will around the world can offer us now is prayer.