In Greece, pensioners are dying more quickly, the life expectancy and the general health of the population is declining. For the first time since the end of the Civil War (1949), people are thinking twice before having children, young, educated Greeks emigrate, thus depriving the country of the necessary human capital. Greeks are paying to educate some of the best doctors in Europe who then go and work for the German hospitals. The total population of Greece is diminishing in absolute terms and the percentage of Greeks in origin and conscience among the population is also declining.
A population which is getting older, materially deprived, which feels morally betrayed, in total despair and insecurity, without any rights and any protection, is living in Greece today!
Even if the methods are different, what is happening to the Greeks bears some analogies with what the Romans are said to have done to the Jews in the year 60CE.
It is also quite astonishing that the results of the Troika policies are quite similar, even if the methods are very different, to Hitler’s plans for Greece, as described by Winston Churchill in his memoirs. Hitler’s project was to transform Greece into a vacation area for Arians and transport Greeks to the Middle East.
The Western establishment, and not only Germans, was always deeply divided in its attitude towards Greeks and Greece, somehow reflecting also its division between its more democratic and its more totalitarian wing (this quarrel is reflected somehow in the different way Oxford and Cambridge view ancient Greek Democracy and the Roman Empire).
There was always a strong philhellenic attitude, but also a strong “hate the Greeks” attitude (like the one of British PM Disraeli) in the West. As for Samuel Huntington, the ideologue of the “War of Civilizations”, he essentially classifies Greeks as “enemy nations” along with Russians. Orthodox Christians are for him the second worst enemy after Islamic nations.
How international finance and Germany destroyed Greece to create a totalitarian EU
Coup d’ Etat
The whole program constituted a flagrant violation of the core principles of the Greek constitutional order (which is part of European law), the core principles upon which the European Union was founded and of key provisions of the international law.
According to some specialists, the provisions of this clearly neo-colonial program have not an equivalent even in any of the IMF programs applied in Third World countries. (For an analysis in depth of the legal and even “regime change” questions the reader can consult the speech by one of the top European constitutional law specialists Prof. Kasimatis here)
This program was applied against the direct will of the Greek citizens, which they expressed in a clear way the only time they had the opportunity to express it, during the 2015 referendum.
In order to impose this program, the leading European powers and institutions, the IMF and the Greek politicians who collaborated with them, have used the methods of fraude, blackmail, political and economic pressure, all of them unacceptable in general and inside a supposedly democratic Union of equal states, peoples and nations, in particular. All the agreements signed by Greek governments to apply the bail-out program were the result of coercion and of violation of core principles of both national and international democratic order.
The imposition of the Greek program was a coup d’ etat, but a coup d’ etat in Carl Schmitt’s sense, one that was aimed at establishing a new regime, first in Greece, subsequently in all Europe.
The democratic institutions are now but a mere form in Greece, as the program has in fact abolished the principles of Popular, National and State sovereignty, at least in economic policy, the capacity of the Greek society to reproduce itself and the economic bases of parliamentary democracy. In effect it has turned Greece from a usual, European capitalist nation-state and parliamentary democracy into a new form of colony, a Debt Colony of the International Finance operated through European institutions and the IMF. In the summer of 2015, the creditors offered to the Greek government a new program consisting of many thousands of pages in English. The program was translated by automatic translation programs into Greek in two days and voted into law in two more days. The same procedure was followed in the spring of 2006.
This is exactly what makes the Greek experiment an operation of fundamental importance for the transformation of the Western social and political regime, representing a clear cut from the principles of Popular and National Sovereignty, on which Western regimes were based, at least in theory, after the French Revolution.
All that hardly can be considered a “coincidence” or an accident. The architects of the Maastricht Treaty seem to have taken into account such a scenario and how to use it, when they introduced into the Treaty clauses forbidding the solidarity of the Union to its members. Goldman Sachs has also played a critical role from the very beginning to the creation of the Greek debt bubble problem, with its Greek swaps.
Kafka in action: A deep “anthropological” experiment
For regime change to be stable, it must produce the human beings who will accept it, even if accepting that means to accept passively the death of their country, of their nation and, finally, but only finally, their own death. A similar procedure transforming a normal human being into a being praying for his own death is described by Kafka in his masterpiece The Trial.
This was done in Greece with dissemination of fear and assumption of death, plus guilt, thus producing depression and not revolt, in the first years of application. It was also done by massive use of confusion and of inverse use of identities, like using socialists to destroy society or “nationalists” to destroy the nation. The triumph came in 2015, with manipulating and using the leaders of the Revolt, in an operation which had as a result a tremendous moral and psychological blow to self-confidence and the capacity of the population to believe and trust anything and anybody. Defeat, capitulation and betrayal killed the Hope making the feelings of Shame and Despair dominate people and the attitude “Everybody for Himself” the dominant one.
The Greek people has received one of the worst psychological and moral blows in its long history with the imposition of this program and then by the betrayal of the SYRIZA party, which it had entrusted with defending its country. The “tree” of the Greek nation has received a quasi – mortal blow, but we believe there are still its roots which remain alive. But of course the Nation remains decapitated for the time being, without leaders, forces, or intellectuals to articulate its Truth and struggle for its Rights.
The Geopolitical Consequences of the Greek “experiment”
Europeans have mobilized hundreds of billions of Euros to implement this program, but less than 5% of that remained in Greece, most of the money was used to pay back German, French, Belgian, or Italian banks.
By destroying Greece and making it pay all its debt, Europe has bought some years of financial pseudo-stability, its banks avoided losses, even Germany had a net profit out of the Greek bail-out program, while the same is true of the ECB which speculated against a member-state of the Union in difficulty!
But such financial gains, while very important per se, are probably not sufficient to explain an operation of such magnitude and huge political, geopolitical and “ideological” consequences.
International Finance, directly responsible for the banking crisis of 2008, was able not only to avoid suffering any losses but also to transform its debts into European sovereign debt and its own crisis into a crisis of the EU, thus leading to a sort of “civil war” inside Europe. Such a civil, inter-European war was and remains the privileged weapon of both the Empire of Finance and the US to dominate Europe (in the past it was also the main weapon of the British Empire). Europe seems now to have two paths in front of it, either to accept being transformed into a totalitarian “Empire”, as José Barroso once named it, or to be destroyed.
In theory there is also a third way. That is the way of a conscious effort by a coalition of progressive, social forces of the continent to transform it in a radical and deep way. But it remains theoretical as long as such forces do not appear and, in particular, are not coordinated at the European level.
By doing what they did in Greece, the alliance of big international Finance and of German and other European elites has clearly created the conditions for generalized centrifugal tendencies, we have witnessed since 2015 from Catalonia to northern Italy. Brexit itself would be inconceivable without the 2015 spectacle of Germany suppressing and squeezing a small European country.
Berlin smashed Greece in 2015 but by doing so it has destroyed much of the political capital accumulated during many decades, becoming again the hated power it used to be in much of Europe, even if people do not always say that openly.
For both the United States and the other Western superpower, the international Finance, what has happened was a colossal triumph. Germans have created the “New Europe” Donald Rumsfeld was trying to organize back in 2003, against France and Germany!
Greece is not so important economically, but it is a key country in geopolitical terms. Since the Crusades, all Western campaigns against the Islamic or the Russian East had to begin by controlling Greek space. This is why the Greek defeat represents also an indirect, still very important victory of the extremist “party of war” inside the Western establishment, in organizing its campaigns against Iran, Russia and China. US military bases are now covering in an astonishing speed all Greek territory. Greece and Cyprus became, to a considerable degree, Israel’s satellites, against the will of the Greek people.
Many people are enthusiastic in Europe, and outside of it, by the prospect of having the European Union dissolved, given its policies. Still, as the example of the Soviet Union should have taught us, it is one thing is to get rid of a structure you do not like, but the most important thing is what you put in its place.
The dissolution of the European Union may present some advantages given its power to oppress European nations, but in total, and in the present circumstances, its dissolution most probably will lead to the multiplication of a galaxy of small states, competing between themselves and unable to resist the pressure of the two Western superpowers (Finance and the US).
After the defeat of the Left in 2015, the dissatisfaction fueled the radical Right, which is more appropriate if things will evolve towards a dissolution of the EU. But, if it proved so easy for forces inside the Western establishment to micro-control and manipulate the leaders of a party like SYRIZA, it will be much easier to do the same with forces of the European “Radical Right”, thus channeling social and national dissatisfaction towards external enemies, other European countries, Islam today, Russia or China the day after. The fact that Netanyahu has excellent relations with 22 out of the 25 bigger movements of European Radical Right and also the fact that he practically commands US policy under Trump speaks to the real nature and character of the radical right wingers and supposed “anti-globalizers”.
A large-scale European crisis seems quite probable now, as European leaders have nothing else to propose than increasing inequalities inside their countries and the EU as a whole. More than ever in Europe, we need a new federation of political forces, radical and serious enough to meet the challenges of the so deep and multiple crises Europe and the world are facing, to struggle for an independent, green and social Europe which acts as a pillar of a “multipolar world”; a radically different international order.