Notes from the underground

The Greek parliament ought to be an elevated place, but in recent years it has been striving hard to come level with the gutter. This is certainly true with respect to the basic political (as well as other) intelligence of the average member. As for elementary integrity, the issue should be better avoided. This is terrible news for the notion as well as the practice of democracy in this country, which in recent years has disintegrated into an unprincipled free-for-all for the satisfaction of private interest and/or sectarian ideological delusion at the expense of the commonweal. This as a rule involves the deliberate wrecking of public institutions, space and property in the name of sundry ideological obfuscations of bogus "social" coloring, such as nationalism, Stalinism or (quite often) an odious combination of the two.

This is a shattering disappointment for many of us, who a generation or so ago fought the colonels' regime with the vain (as it is clear now) hope that we might put a free and decent society in its place. We paid a terrible price for this delusion, not necessarily in terms of personal suffering -although in quite a few cases this was also involved. I am talking rather in terms of the misguided life goals that we set ourselves in the light of the betrayed ideals of those years, such as the determination to abandon prospects of academic and personal advancement abroad in order to participate in the effort, as we saw it, to build that society. It was all so utterly futile. When Papadopoulos died in prison a few years ago, I wrote in my personal journal that he should rest easy because the behavior of his ostensible enemies actually vindicated him ideologically. His silly doctrine of "Greco-Christian" messianism was soon after his overthrow triumphant, penetrating all components of the political spectrum. As for the spectacular venality of the "democratic" power holders, of all ideological persuasions and on all levels of government, it worked as a retrospective confirmation of his dismissal of the entire political class as corrupt. One of the saddest things in the past couple of years especially has been hearing ordinary people of impeccable democratic and leftist credentials openly express a longing for his dictatorship as a last ditch cure for the moral, social and economic breakdown that our pithecanthropic political and intellectual leaders have plunged us into.

These are of course counsels of desperation. And, all told, it is still the sullen and cowed mass of the people that offers the long-term hope that this problematic historical experiment called modern Greece will still emerge as a viable social and cultural concern after the present shipwreck. And the reason is simple. It is they, the anonymous masses, that silently bear the brunt of the present catastrophe. They are its only witnesses in a basic existential sense. And, to utilize a valuable insight of the great Hegel, it is through this "fear and labor" inflicted upon them by those that falsely claim to speak for them that they will find the inner strength to endure and to build a new life upon today's ruins. They have done it in the past, and therefore it is reasonable to assume that the feat will be repeated. For there is true seriousness in their silence. They, and only they, have instinctively understood the depth and significance of the present disintegration, for it affects their existence immediately and painfully without the mediation of junk ideologies and political slogans. They know, for they have always known, that it is only through work, serious, concentrated work personal and social, that their society and nation will pull through. Work has reappeared as a value in the present despond. It had well nigh evaporated in the great debauch of the past generation, where getting something for nothing, blackmailing the community for personal gain, sucking the marrow out of the bones of the commonweal was the watchword of "democratic" advancement. In this sense there is a return to the essentials of, yes, Marxism (as well as of the classical social and political theory of modernity) -of a genuine Marxism, though, as opposed to the tattered and lying caricatures thereof with which the Greek people had been hoodwinked and oppressed. It is in this undertow that long-term hope may be detected -not foolishly I hope.

As opposed to this, there are no signs that, even in the midst of the terminal crisis we are going through, our rotten elites can offer even a morsel of inspiration to counteract the gloom. Instead, they are still engaged in their selfish games of jockeying for power, even as the whole edifice is crumbling around them. Their incorrigibility is the cause of the fact that among broad segments of the population, and especially the rudderless and fearful youth, the very democratic ideal, which they quite naturally identify with its vile usurpers, has been discredited. The feeling in the air is sometimes akin to the twilight of the Weimar republic. A kind of defensive fascism is rampant, blindly nihilistic and reflexively violent, no matter what the ideological pretensions it dons. This knee-jerk reactionary paroxysm, often taking the form of real flames devouring the center of Athens, can cause incalculable devastation. But, as I argued above, it is not preordained that it will prevail.

These sad thoughts (and only this kind seems to be possible nowadays) were occasioned by the antics of our self-admiring parliamentarians yesterday. The director of the IMF was in town and he agreed to appear before the economic affairs committee in order to answer questions about the rescue program etc. The antediluvian left boycotted the proceedings claiming that he had no right to be in the country (!!!!!) at all. The deputies present then proceeded to basically insult him. The attack was orchestrated by a prominent individual of the ruling party (!!!!), a person who was a chief contributor to the unspeakable kleptokratic mess from the consequences of which those foreign agencies currently reviled in the media and in parliament consented to save us, provided we decided to mend our ways. The sight of the very protagonists of the calamity that threatens our existence as a country abusing one of the agents of our possible salvation would be utterly laughable -if it weren't so tragic. The perversity of all this is so extreme that it ends up provoking a certain admiration. The political sense of our elected leaders is so abysmal for so many reasons that one's head just spins. To begin with, the IMF, for all its real and imaginary faults, is an official agency of the United Nations. Greece is a certified member of it, paying its dues regularly since WW2. Many prominent Greeks have been and are still among its ranks. So much for its "right" to be present in the country. All this is of course arcane science for our Neanderthal revolutionaries whose great vision for the country has all the hallmarks of North Korea. But one might think that a basic sense of self-preservation would deter at least the members of the ruling party that had to go a-begging to the IMF's door from their egregious rudeness. It so happens that at the present moment among our rescuers it is precisely the IMF that supports Greece's request for a prolongation of the period of repayment of the loans, in the face of opposition from Germany. Among all their accumulated misdeeds, it is this suicidal stupidity of our representatives which is so frightening. We are at God's mercy.......

Leaks and Reactions

As things stand right now, it seems to me that America is more likely to be hurt by her own reaction to the publication of the Wikileaks documents rather than by the documents themselves. When the Attorney General darkly intones that an investigation of a criminal nature is afoot targeting Assange for the unveiling of diplomatic secrets, not only is he on dubious legal ground, but -much worse- he is being stampeded by Palin and her ilk. This bodes ill for the administration and of course the world in the coming years.

If Assange broke US law with his leaks, then so did the NY Times. Assange did not steal the secrets himself, he just received the proceeds from an admittedly illegal act under US law (Manning is already in custody for the criminal side of this issue). He then acted as any other bona fide journalist would do and did, namely he decided that it was in the public interest to publish. He also deserves credit for waiting for the established news media to publish selected redacted documents, with information jeopardizing the safety of individuals excised, and then posting the same documents on his website. All these wild cries about putting a CIA hit squad on him etc. is just right wing extremism at its most odious. If this type of response prevails, then America will play into the hands of its worst enemies. Such hysteria would contradict and obscure America's glorious tradition of press freedom, which brought down a president after all back in the seventies. America ought to protest certainly; but in the name of the principle of diplomatic confidentiality which is of the essence in conducting international relations, a principle that all nations are interested in seeing upheld. For the rest, let the State Department put its own discombobulated house in order so that such a breach may not occur again.

That the Obama administration seems to be so easily cowed by the screeching and howling of the most reactionary right in a century is a symptom of a deep-going malaise. When Jimmy Carter in a misguided attempt to appear "tough" began his demagogic campaign against the presence of a "Russian brigade" on Cuba (a force that had been there since the early sixties and everyone knew about), this was a sure sign that his presidency had run out of steam and that he was throwing in the towel in the bout with Reagan. Could it be that Obama is mesmerized by the perverse charisma of that empty and stunted person, Palin, even though he says that he does not waste time thinking about her? Why are American liberals so complex-ridden in the face of that uncouth and hypocritical crowd of Tea Party Republicans, whose previous incarnation as the Bush neocons ran the American and the world economy to the ground and offered Iraq on a platter to Iran and Al Qaeda (forgetting for the moment the numerous human lives destroyed by that truly criminal enterprise)? And are the American people as a whole so uneducated and misinformed that they cannot perceive these facts? I believe that this is false. I believe that a serious political effort from the pulpit of the White House to broadcast the disaster that weirdo Republicanism has inflicted upon American society, and the texture of lies that is their present "policy", would easily overrun the defenses of that Neanderthal crowd. If Helmut Schmid can call the Budesbank and Angela Merkel a bunch of reactionaries, surely Obama can summon up some more fire from his political belly to underline the true cause of the American people's current economic suffering. In attacking the editorial and opinion pages of the NY Times as out of touch with ordinary people he is shooting himself in the foot. It just happens that Paul Krugman, for instance, is right on target precisely from an "ordinary people" perspective and Obama's advisors would do themselves a favor to heed some of his warnings.

With respect to the actual content of the published dispatches I do not think that America has anything to be ashamed of so far - with the exception of those stupid CIA instructions to America's UN diplomats to spy on their colleagues there. (Of course it is not to be doubted that their Russian and Chinese etc. counterparts returned the favor). As Neal Acherson cogently explained in the Guardian the other day, America's diplomats by and large emerge from Assange's disrobing as a crowd of sensible and well-meaning individuals, on the whole performing commendably the task allotted to them, namely to report the truth about local conditions and personalities and to manage the myriad crises thrown up in today's fragmented world with a view to maintaining peace and stability. Obama's handling of relations with Russia, what with the scrapping of Bush's missile shield in Poland so that Putin can be won over for sanctions against Iran, is a case in point.To be sure, this activity is conducted from a perspective of safeguarding America's predominant position internationally -but there is nothing new or astonishing in that. However, what does clearly emerge from the exchanges is the weakened imperial posture of the last superpower in the midst of numerous crosscurrents and shifts of power.

Whether one likes it or not, America's power is still the ultimate foundation of whatever coherence remains in the international system with reference to some residual legality and mutual recognition of legitimate interests. The way this power is wielded is, thus, of vital importance to all of us. And the classified cables clearly show that there is a world of difference between the Bush procedure of riding roughshod over the international landscape in the name of various half-baked ideologies of America's metaphysical mission and Obama's efforts to mediate in the name of a reasonable mutuality. That is why his possible overthrow by the crazed Palin crowd is such a nightmare.

Lastly a note of local interest. Among the Wikileaks documents there are about 1300 dispatches from the Athens embassy and the Thessalonica consulate. These have not yet been published. I desperately hope that nothing is contained in them that might fan the anti-American, anti-Western psychosis of the political and journalistic classes here. So far, the Wikileaks revelations have been greeted with the expected glee on account of the US embarrassment, as well as inane declarations, from certain numbskulls of the main opposition party no less, that Assange ought to be declared a "hero of humanity". Of course, if Greece had been the target of similar diplomatic exposure you would have seen a general hue and cry about an "imperialist attack" against the nations sacred rights. If, for instance, in the Greek dispatches there is as much as a veiled hint of a hint that Greece ought to compromise on Macedonia's name, you can safely expect an anti-American explosion, with ample invoking of the case of Purifoy and such instances from sixty years ago.

The fact that the Obama administration has been from the very start firmly on the side of Greece in its present travails, urging the Europeans to bail her out, declaring its willingness to contribute to this rescue through the IMF, opposing the bloody-minded deflationary and monetarist diktat of the Germans in the EU and generally following a neo-Keynesian economic course at home which if followed here would offer an escape for Europe from its present vicious spiral, has not registered on the defunct minds of our political and intellectuals leaders. Let's hope that Assange's, otherwise well-meaning, initiatives do not drag us deeper into this suicidal swamp.

The eyes of Myrtis

If war is a "violent instructor", as Thucydides claimed, then humanity has learned next to nothing over the centuries. Kant sounded more optimistic in assuming that unsocial man at some point gets fed up with the beastliness of the Hobbesian war of all against all and turns towards cooperative modes of existence. But this is a somewhat spurious optimism, for the consummation of the social enterprise in which the hard, physical ego accepts a bounded freedom within its communal destiny and violence on all levels is renounced, is put off until an ever receding terminus of our historical itinerary. Meanwhile we have to make do with the brutishness of empirical life and hope that legal violence in the hands of a constitutional government will mitigate the general unpleasantness. Trusting in violence from above to keep in check the violence from below is a very precarious balancing act, in which all sides can very easily go berserk and the whole thing can descend into the hell of a Corcyra-type στάσις.

Myrtis found out the hard way about how the schemes of well-meaning, and even great, individuals, such as Pericles for instance, can mutate into raging carnage in which the citizens and their families -who are after all the content and the purpose of the legal democratic regime- are expended on the altar of some grandiose ideal that transcends their humdrum littleness. For, after all, all the inspiring rhetoric of the Epitaphios cannot disguise the fact that the great leader is pronouncing his oratorical masterpiece before a pile of mute and dumb corpses, and that most of his audience who are supposed to be comforted by his lofty thoughts would soon enough join that heap of lifeless limbs. Nay, even he himself in the space of a few months would become part of it. Might that not amount to fair retribution, if viewed from some higher metaphysical standpoint? For there is no way getting around it: the supreme democratic leader of all times was in fact the chief advocate and driving force of the warlike conduct of his Polis. He knew fully well, and he expressed it ably, that the Ἀρχὴ is the higher, compelling necessity. It is the Empire that dictates the urgencies and tendencies of political planning. And, if the citizens of Athens want to lord it over the rest of the Hellenes, then they must commit themselves to military action. The Epitaphios can be read not so much as a hymn to democracy, as is the usual -and useful- interpretation, but as as a paean to war. For Pericles' point is that despite its promotion of culture and private freedom (the pursuit of happiness, maybe?), the greatest testimonial to democracy is its ability also to fight, as bravely and as tenaciously as any militarist autocracy. The democratic warrior is just as fearsome as any Spartan muscleman blindly plunging into battle.

In all this his assumption is that Empire is indeed naturally desired by all men -and all Athenians. Maybe most of his audience did indeed -foolishly- share his assumption. But certainly Myrtis, who may very well have been part of it, did not. The reason is not just that she was only ten years old. She was probably there to mourn her father or her brother, or a neighbor. So even if she had been an adult, how do you put aside as an adult the grief and the pain of a very personal loss in order to elevate yourself to the empyrean of world-historical reflection? This is what Pericles was exhorting them to do. Shed your tears by all means, he told them, but then again do not let private feeling erase from your mind the Idea of Athens, that stupendous experiment in the refashioning of the principles of human social life.

Well, yes and no. For when Athens, or any other state, extinguishes the real existence of tangible individuals for no other purpose than to exalt some notion of collective destiny however admirable, then if you find yourself at the receiving end of this deal it is well-nigh inhuman to justify this eradication of life by means of some abstraction. If your fields have been ravaged and your crops burned by Archidamos, you are asked to disregard a loss striking at the very fundaments of humanity, i.e. the duty to nourish life in fusion with (ὁμολογουμένως) the eternal rhythms of the earth. You are asked to betray your gods. What does the majestic shape of the Parthenon, gleaming in the sunshine and presiding as it were over these morbid proceedings, mean to you whose ontological significance is expunged in the midst of this pageant? Political authority trumps existential self-worth. The exigencies of raw power drain the world of its vital juices. The price you pay for being a citizen is the shedding of (part of) your human substance. This is an insoluble mystery. This was Antigone's dilemma, and we know how that situation turned out. It is much easier to be high-minded about Athens at a distance of two and a half millennia. We do, and ought to, admire it. But this admiration should not blunt a keen and sober historical understanding. When you look into the eyes of Myrtis it is a dark reality of struggle and agony, of highhandedness and deceit, of callous calculation and mercilessness, of naked jostling for material advantage that comes flooding back. And, mind you, Melos has not yet happened....Myrtis is Thucydides made real and present. Her eyes accuse the centuries.

But who is this Myrtis? Myrtis is the most moving and eloquent remnant of antiquity to have come down to us in recent memory.She is the ens realissimum of classical times, the reconstructed face of an eleven year old girl who died during the plague in Athens in the first year of the Peloponnesian war. The emotion laden flesh of a being senselessly cut down has come alive again. And through her faint smile we can again be reminded that the stuff of history is not marvelously chiseled prose deposited among the covers of books, but the woes and sufferings of forgotten creatures very like ourselves. Her bones were found mixed up with those of many others in a mass grave near Kerameikos as they were digging for the new subway in Athens. They took her skull, they studied it and through it they refashioned her young head, now staring at us again timid and somewhat startled, but still full with the latent vigor that was squashed before it could bloom into the works of love of a fully fledged life. That skull is the first item in the exhibition currently housed in the Archaeological Museum here, a noble and gentle thing in the depths of which which you can still intuit the stirrings of a tender spirit. I couldn't bring myself to photograph it: it would have been such a violation.

Myrtis is the witness. And her presence is a balm in the midst of the gloom and decay of our present time. She has lived on.

The oracles of Delphi

Greek education has been moribund for quite some time now -and everybody knows and acknowledges it. For the umpteenth time in the past generation the present government claims to be embarking on a "radical reform" of higher education in order to make it competitive on the international level. The project, if this is what it is, was announced during a rather pompous gathering in Delphi last weekend, in the presence of various foreign personalities that are to function as advisors for the intended overhaul. These are all distinguished individuals no doubt, and their hiring replicates a favorite tactic of the current ruling team especially with regard to the economy where a variety of experts has been engaged to contribute their lights about what is to be done -as if what needs to be done were not clearer than sunlight in the first place. At least they will not collect fees for their services.

I do not mean to doubt the good intentions of anyone, but I am afraid that the whole show is just another exercise in futility. The "radical" proposals aired in the Delphi meeting basically came down to a change in the structure of university administration, which is the least significant aspect of higher education malaise. If the government or anyone else were serious about introducing meaningful reforms, all they need to do is to peruse the organizational and educational policy handbook of any internationally recognized school of higher learning from anywhere in the civilized world. It would take them at most a couple of hours to note the basic guidelines and another day to draft a legislative decree for their application here. But this they are not going to do, for what passes for a university here is completely at odds with universally accepted principles and criteria of what learning means at this level.

Instead of going from the bottom up (as is the usual method in this totalitarian-minded society), they should have started at the bottom, namely with goes on -or rather with what does not go on- in the classrooms. They should have instituted the obligation of the students to be present in the classroom and follow the lectures, their obligation to pass a given course at the end of the semester or else repeat it or take another one in order to complete the credits required for a degree, their obligation to fulfill the evaluation requirements demanded by the teachers (i.e. research papers, midterm and final exams etc.) and finally their obligation to successfully complete a lower level course before proceeding to the higher level one. It is quite astonishing and indeed incomprehensible to any person (expert or not) coming from a genuine educational environment to realize that none of the above criteria and procedures are in place here. The students are not required to attend classes and in fact most of them do not, they never write a single paper in their four-year career, they appear only at the end of the semester in order to write an exam in which cheating is rampant and is in fact considered a student "right" (!), and they do not give a damn if they fail for they can go on taking this wretched "exam" again and again for ever until the teacher becomes tired and/or disgusted and gives them a passing grade just to rid himself of their presence. Failure successfully to complete a lower level course does not prevent them going on to take a higher level one, where the aforementioned conditions also apply. If one as much as mentions the mot maudit "requirements" s/he will immediately face the ridicule, hostility -and more- of the student "unions", whose most recent demand is that teachers should not assign research papers in their courses because this constitutes class discrimination against working students.

The said "unions" are the branches of the various political parties, those represented in parliament as well as those of the extremist left, all of them united under two basic demands, firstly that degrees should be given to all with practically no learning effort involved, and secondly that all those with such worthless degrees should upon graduation be given jobs by the state. Most recently in some schools and departments, as I hear and I find easy to believe, these "unions" have put forward the demand that they have a say in writing up the questions to be put in exams. As for cheating, as I have already mentioned, it is not only established and widespread practice, but also declared a "right" under the protection of these champions of the working class. In all universities the rectors are elected as a result of deals with these groupings, given the fact that students participate in the election of the administration under a formula of weighted votes according to which even if one student votes as opposed to hundreds of others this one vote still counts for 40 percent of the total. This is the local idea of democracy in education, the like of which one would have to go to the other side of the universe to discover. It is no wonder that the so-called universities are basically factories for the mass production of illiterates, who also believe that it is their inalienable right to be supported for life by the society at large without them contributing anything to it. Needless to say, these despicable practices and attitudes are presented under the guise of communism, socialism, anarchism and what have you. This is not to say that in the universities one does not find brilliant, conscientious and committed individuals, both teachers and students. But these do not in any way set the tone or determine the direction of these rotten structures. I could add other graphic details about the way worthless individuals climb to the top without any academic credentials or by means of political connections, outright plagiarism, blackmail etc. etc., details that would make anyone coming from a proper university abroad cringe. These things are even beginning to be written in the press as of late.

Hence, what is to be done if there is to be education at all in this place is quite plain. You don't need armies of well-meaning experts from abroad coming here to prescribe solutions. The solutions are obvious and simple, and they are never going to be implemented. For one thing the very same political men and women shedding tears nowadays about the state of our schools and promising to be their saviors are the very ones who brought them to this horrific state of decomposition -one just cannot forget that the present prime minister was himself a minister of education for a number of years. Besides, the young people that under the direction of this corrupt and ignorant political class grew to believe that the world owes them and that they owe nothing to the world are not going to allow even the slightest movement in the direction of true Paideia. They would be ready and willing to shut down and even burn down (it's happened many times before) their schools, rather than see any real change.

The oracles of Delphi have always been deceptive.

After the silence

The long silence is only partly due to summer laziness. The chief reason is that thinking and writing about the desolate state of this society wears you down emotionally and morally. You may excoriate the filth gushing forth from every institution and just about every person molded by that iron-clad public mentality, but you still cannot avoid being fouled by it. You try to keep clean by averting your gaze, by constructing an alternative universe where the essentials of humanity mocked and falsified in this place are still alive. But this is also a desperate subterfuge. The evil and the ugliness keeps pounding you from all sides, and in order to keep it out of doors you have to exert a mighty effort that also sucks up every ounce of your vitality.

With respect to the economy the disaster keeps dragging on. The political establishment is engaged in a suicidal race of business as usual, with mutual recriminations about entirely inessential issues when the boat is steadily sinking. The general stupidity of the government, combined with the dissolution of the civil service and the resolute resistance to any change of what is left of it, is pushing us further and further into the whole. The prime minister keeps absenting himself on extended trips abroad, apparently imagining that public relations alone and nebulous rhetoric about the "goals of the millennium" will massage foreign attitudes, and especially that of the markets, into the illusion that the country has turned the corner. But everybody knows otherwise. At the same time, his idea of managing the crisis at home is to keep reshuffling his government adding more and more useless individuals to its roster, breaking up the ministries and giving them funny, and Orwellian, names, so that nobody knows anymore who is responsible for what. The opposition is playing their usual irresponsible game of disagreeing with everything, and blaming the reforms imposed by the foreign supervisors for the dire condition of the country, whereas this foreign assistance and control is the only thing that prevented the bankruptcy back in May and the only thing that promises an eventual return to a semblance of health if its prescriptions are carried out. As for the antediluvian left, they are tearing themselves apart about who is to be the more efficient wrecker of what is left standing. There are only two faint rays of hope: first, that the people at large seem to have realized the gravity of the situation and the nature of the dilemma we are facing, namely that we either suffer a lot in the medium term or we die completely; and second, that at this point Europe is in fact the captive member in its relation to this incorrigibly reactionary and self-devouring country. If Greece founders, then Europe does as well. So, whether they like it or not they are forced to do everything to prevent that. This means that foreign economic tutelage -thank God- is certainly going to be extended beyond the current three-year period of the rescue plan, and that eventually the colossal debt is going to be restructured in some orderly way. As for me I plan to be out of here before that happens -and plenty of others are also thinking along the same lines. It is just so thankless to talk about this situation. The body politic and social is putrescent by now, and the rot has penetrated to the very core of the collective mind.

But, to change the subject (it is not a change really, but a discussion of the same collapse from a different perspective) it is interesting to discuss another aspect of this anxious summer. I want to refer to what passes for "culture" here, and especially the way in which a faulty and degenerate sense of identity lays hands upon the works of the ancient classics and completely mangles their meaning, their aesthetic integrity, their human significance. As usual in the past couple of decades, miserable collections of untalented and illiterate nonentities calling themselves actors and directors put up shows of Aristophanes in particular, as well as of the other classical tragedians, in which they arbitrarily change the text, inserting their own inane rantings in order to make them "contemporary", and perform "experimental" or avant-garde renditions that are the silliest and most insufferable concoctions pompous puerility can come up with. All this is clothed in foolish post-modern verbiage of "subverting" the canon etc. amounting to nothing more than the license they give themselves to insult, sully and destroy the mightiest monuments of the European spirit to which these ugly dwarfs and usurpers have no intellectual or emotional connection. Their notion of Aristophanic raillery and ridicule is to dress up in clownish costumes, paint their faces in screaming colors and perform hideous contortions, in order to cajole laughter by means of gutter vulgarity rather than the majesty of the poetic word. The same with respect to tragedy, where their understanding of pathos is to scream with hoarse and brutish voice, so that one can barely hear any words at all, splash themselves with red paint to simulate blood, and make "horrible" faces and gestures, in an apotheosis of disgusting kitsch. This disease has penetrated all the way up to the venerable National Theater, which is today but a collection of these idiotic mannequins pretending to be the flower of contemporary artistry. The National Theater, roughly up to the end of the sixties, had worked out a respected tradition of tragic sublimity, which -replete with academic rigidity as it undoubtedly was- still managed to evoke the existential mystery that pervades the ancient texts. This well-honed idiom harmonized with the splendid venues of Epidaurus, Dodona, Philippi etc., which in the summer used to come alive with something approaching the soul of that stupendous poetry. Today, these hallowed places also have been demeaned and insulted as stages for the pestilential arrogance of those buffoons. This protest is surely as ineffectual and self-wounding as that about the state of politics and the economy here -but it has to be registered nevertheless.

In today's Handelsblatt the remarkable essay by the newspaper's editor in chief, Gabor Steingart, must be read very carefully by all committed to the European idea in one way or another -and especially by those assembled tonight in Brussels in order to lay the foundation of a common governing mechanism. The essay convincingly shows that the federal Europe that some loathed and others pined for was actually inaugurated on May 10, under the alias of the financial support mechanism for those countries in the Eurozone that might in the future face the same debt travails as Greece. This, together with the effective financial takeover of Greece by Brussels, means nothing less than that the old "no bail out" pieties have been thrown overboard and that a new institutional framework of interdependence and mutuality, i.e. of functional political unity, has been embarked on. Otmar Issing, a staunch enemy of such a development, had predicted this eventuality back in February as he argued against any rescue of Greece. He was right in his predictions, wrong in his evaluations.

The Euro in and of itself, naked of all political significance, was just a financial phantom meant to be blown away by the gales of the market sooner or later. In order to save it, the collective will of the European governments was forced to extract the political dimension of this experiment, which some wanted to ignore, but which was uppermost in the minds of all those statesmen who since the fifties took all the crucial initiatives in the direction of a unified economic area.

The ultimate goal of European togetherness was primarily cultural, even philosophical, in conception and intent: an attempt to work against the historical legacy that wreaked havoc on the continent. This means that it was primarily continental in scope: the Brits had no essential place in it, even though they were and are indispensable as partners contributing, advising and influencing from a distance. This is a choice that they themselves have irrevocably made. It is a choice right for themselves, and they are entitled to it.

It is from this perspective that the case of Greece must be analyzed. The decision to include the country in the common market and the Euro area was never an economic one to begin with: neither by the Greek nor by the European leaders. The economic weakness of the country was well known to all, and despite the chicanery that everybody is pouncing on these days all responsible international authorities were fully cognizant of the real situation. This in no way absolves, of course, the Greek ruling classes of their criminal mishandling of the European bonanza that flowed in. But something like that was to be rationally expected. As Ken Rogoff has shown the country has been in a recurring state of financial default from its very inception in the 19th. century. And it was rather a pleasant surprise that a feeble attempt was made under Simitis between 1996 and 2000 to rein in the endemic corruption and waste -an attempt that soon fizzled out of course under the relentless onslaught of the forces of plunder and debauchery represented primarily by Simitis' own party.

Nay, Greece has always been an idea and just an idea in Europe's mind -and the present-day country called Greece owes its existence to the potency of that idea and the irresistible hold it exercised over Europe's collective consciousness. Had the political fate of the country been left to its inhabitants it would never have arisen in the nineteenth century or managed to stand on its own feet in the face of tough reality both in its immediate neighborhood and in the wider European theater. It would have gone under in 1898, reduced once again to an Ottoman province; and later in 1944 it would have been gobbled up as a mere amputated province in Stalin's Balkan Federation.

Its internal society has always been extremely weak and disparate, lacking any solid cultural or moral cohesion. Its varied contents have been constantly at war among themselves -a diagnosis, interestingly, that was only yesterday repeated in a report by the IMF delegation resident here. The various factions have always felt, and continue feel, an intense and consuming hatred primarily against their domestic opponents, on the altar of which they are blindly willing to sacrifice the common country and its collective interests. For, indeed, as far as they are concerned there is no common country, and in the place of the collective interest they place their particular selfish designs. This is a self-destructive political culture, once again splendidly evinced in the present turmoil, in which the ideological obsession of anti-westernism, under leftist or rightist guise, has been the vital motivation of the majority of political formations, including the ruling "socialist" party. That this immovable attachment threatens to cost the country's bankruptcy, i.e. people going without the basics of life, is of complete indifference to all these militant champions of the people.

Greece on the ground is, hence, nothing but geography: the eternal "isles of Greece" sung by Byron that are still today drenched with the glorious spirit of antiquity. It is this spirit that informs the collective soul of Europe, and it was for this spirit's sake that Europe undertook to effect the independence of Greece back in the 1820's. It was that same spirit that prompted and guided the decision to include Greece in the architecture of united Europe. Without Greece the idea of Europe is mutilated. Europe understood this quite well, even though it knew of the decisive discrepancy between this idea and the human and social reality that unfolded within the geographical confines it pointed to. In the same way the Philhellenes of the 19th c. were soon enough disabused of their romantic notions concerning the Greek insurgents as reincarnations of the heroes of antiquity. And if they persevered in the defense of Greece it was out of loyalty to the glowing concept of eternal Hellenism to which they were unwaveringly committed. As to the indigenous tribes they were either oblivious or outright hostile to these ideals, which they rightly perceived as possessions now of the western nations having died out in their geographical place of birth.

The same holds true today. Of the inhabitants of the country only a small minority has any truck or trade with the legacy of classical antiquity, with the very language itself being ground to dust under the feet of the marauding political cliques that have destroyed the country -first the educational system and then inevitably the economy. Among this minority,surely, are found individuals of the highest intellectual and moral quality, capable of shining to world-class achievement under any decent and just political system -and they frequently prove this when they escape from here. But it is these individuals precisely that are trampled underfoot by the ugly nonentities that control the levers of power domestically. So, these unfortunates just hide away in their undergrounds or attics, communicating secretly among themselves and just praying for the wolf-packs in control of public space to go away. Which they won't.

Hence, the concepts of Hellenism -and Latinity for that matter- are among the noblest attributes of the European identity, and the construction of a united Europe has been meant above all as a resurrection of a common civilization founded upon these universal pursuits. Greece, and Italy, as components of Europe were never meant as a money-spinning enterprise. It is quite gross to express it in these terms, but for Europe to affirm itself in its universality, i.e. as a latter day incarnation of the cultural prototypes of classical Greece and Rome, it would indeed have to pay through the nose. If alternatively you chose to integrate Europe on narrow criteria of economic efficiency and financial probity, then you would have to content yourself with a much truncated version thereof, which would forfeit the alluring aura of universality inspiring peoples far and wide to transcend their forlorn and miserable nationalism. The Germans, for one, know full well what it means to sacrifice narrow economic interest in favor of an overriding moral and political idea: they after all granted parity between the East and the West German Mark (a patent economic absurdity, for which they paid dearly in material terms) in order to secure the unification of their people. The same order of priorities applies, then, on a European plane. The Greeks are, of course, not the Germans' "blood brothers". But to express the problem in these terms would mean to drag it further down into the swamp of biology, into which presumably present day Germans would not want to be again sunk.

The integrity of the idea of Europe is comprised of the complementary, but also antithetical, components of a northern culture of austerity and a southern one of vital enjoyment -just ask Goethe about it. If it is rather expensive to achieve it, and the material burden falls inordinately upon the shoulders of the northern puritanical peoples, then this must be suffered and endured. The moral and political greatness of Germany up to now has been to boldly shoulder this. Besides, she has also done pretty well economically out of the arrangement.

We have now reached a threshold of decision and opportunity, i.e. the necessity to proceed to the next inevitable step of closer political union. As for the miscreant Greek elites they are going to be punished anyway -either by being forced to dismantle their evil system of mendacity and exploitation, thus empowering the decent minority to assert itself and truly help the people at large to a new dawn of just well-being; or by being thrown out of the European project altogether. But this is a mere side issue, and it was a huge mistake by Merkel to turn it into the main consideration in the present crisis. The essential challenge, as she herself has belatedly realized, is the further consolidation of European oneness, as a matter not merely of economic prosperity, but also of political peace and cultural progress. The true Europeans, in other words the true Greeks, in Greece will cheer on this epic endeavor from whatever place the harsh winds of history consign them to.

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.