Understanding the Greek crisis…

Να και ένα άρθρο για τους αγγλόφωνους αναγνώστες μας.

For the past five years Greece has been at the centre of the world’s attention… for all the wrong reasons.

The average European tries desperately to understand how and why a country with such a rich heritage, blessed by its geographic position (and its climate), has managed to turn itself into a failed state.

To understand what is happening, it is necessary to provide a brief background to the Greek psychosynthesis, or better yet the Greek mentality...

Ever since the fall of the mighty Roman Empire, of which the area that is modern Greece was a secondary province, the country and its people were largely forgotten, lost in the “backwaters” of western civilization.

As part of the Ottoman Empire, Greece was a poverty stricken agrarian society, isolated from major intellectual, cultural, scientific, and economic developments such as the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution, and so forth. Isolated in essence from all those things that made Europe what it is today. The great Athens, the cradle of democracy, and why not civilization itself, was nothing but a small dusty village for the better part of the last 2.000 years, with its ignorant inhabitants distancing themselves from the “heroic” and “mythical” ancient Athenians, who once walked its streets.

Greece has been accurately described as the  guide dog that once led the caravan of civilization, yet at some point the caravan went ahead leaving behind the dog, which stranded has nothing else to do but scratch itself and bark at the moon.

In the course of Greece’s existence as an independent nation, apart from the extreme political discord which has characterized its politics, and its inadequate political class, Greece has always been dependent on foreign aid, whether military or financial.

As such, Greece has survived, and in a sense prospered beyond its meager means, mainly through foreign loans, since she skipped capitalism all together, transcending from an agrarian to a service (mainly tourism) providing economy, with deeply embedded arteriosclerotic, and anachronistic bureaucratic hinges in the core of its state and financial institutions. All this coupled with a deeply rooted resentment of taxes, on behalf of its citizenry, and an array of obstacles imposed on free entrepreneurship.

In the past few decades, due to its membership in the EU, and more importantly the eurozone, Greece accomplished a small economic miracle, which is far from analogous to its financial capabilities.

Cheap credit, grantees, subsidies, financial packages, and all these “goodies” which the EU provided the Greeks with, created a “false prosperity” within which one or two generations grew up with. Generations that were artificially isolated from the proverbial poverty which for countless centuries was the main characteristic of life in Greece. Generations that came to believe that their prosperity was a given, a hereditary right owed to them, because they were the descendants of Plato… and not something to be fought for, not something that could easily disappear in the blink of an eye.

And then came the crisis… which hit Greece like a tsunami.

An unexpected  turn in events that caught the average Greek by surprise, and politicized him violently.

Whereas a large part of the populace, especially the young,  had long turned its back on the whole of the traditionally crooked political system, preferring to live the pseudepigraph “Greek dream”, proud to be apolitical, it now faced, literally out of the blue, a shattering of its fake world, and a sudden end of its ill deserved prosperity.

And thus, shocked, instead of  pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, and uniting in the face of this new common enemy, many Greeks fell back on their “leftist” past, siding with those demagogue politicians (that Greece has an abundance of) who promised them everything under the sun, flattering them as the “chosen people”, who are targeted and victimized by the “bad European loansharks”, who jealous of their glorious Greek past, want to enslave them, by making them serfs of an eternal and unethical debt. This is the main dominant  Greek narrative today…

In other words, the majority of the Greeks fell in denial, refusing to accept the fact that their country played in the big leagues and lost, that it (essentially) defaulted, not being capable of controlling or managing its budget, and thus it was necessary for its European partners to provide a safety net through the (truly harsh) Memorandum of Understanding, which offered them money in return for a long due modernization of Greek stale economic, and political institutions.

Many Greeks, even today, five or six years into the crisis, truly believe that the country defaulted, and crumbled, because of the Memorandum that was imposed on it. A lie that is effectively propagated daily by extreme political forces who tend to thrive in periods of political and economic upheaval. Forces, that in Greece have always flourished, compounding the political and financial chaos.

Thus, when the coalition government of the liberal Mr. Samaras tried to remedy the situation, and at the same time to placate the Greek populace, applying itself to bringing the necessary reforms, apart from the demonized and in a large part insatiable “troika”, it had to also face a lethal opposition from both the extreme right and the extreme left of the political spectrum, who mesmerized the “dizzy” population, that turned itself against the government, not realizing that it was digging its own grave.

Both these political forces criticized (on a daily basis) both the government and the EU, using every mean at their disposal, and accusing the troika as nazis, while labeling the Greek government, and its supporters, as “collaborators”, bringing back relatively recent and truly horrendous memories from Greece’s tragic involvement in WW2, and polarizing its people in extremis.

And at the same time promising that if they ever came to power, they would “tear apart” the disgraceful MOU, cancel the onerous debt, and bring back a “Shangri La” that actually never existed!

That was  the basic agenda of SYRIZA, a radical leftist party, comprised of Maoists, Trotskyists, anarchists, etc. and its 41 year old leader Mr Tsipras, who along with the flamboyant Dr. Varoufakis, took Europe by storm, managing in only six months of governance to alienate Greece from all its traditional friends and allies, and to literally destroy every fragile financial gain that the previous government had achieved through pain and suffering.

And that is the good part, because if we believe all the recent revelations, following Mr Tsipras’ spectacular “somersault”, which caused a deep rift within the ruling party and a political turmoil in general, the primary plan of the “First Time Left” government was a return to the national currency, the drachma.

A turn of events, orchestrated secretly by its Minister of Finance and a small group of confidants, with the backing of the extreme leftists who comprise the backbone of SYRIZA,  a fringe party that only five years ago enjoyed no more than 3-4% of the total votes, and which feeding on the crisis, grew disproportionately, and succeeded in becoming the legitimate government of a western European modern state, amongst the richest in the world, while all the time declaring in all tones its clear adherence to communist practices and principles!

A government however that in only six months time would set Greece back for decades at best, throwing its “pampered” citizens into an abyss of confusion and undeserved poverty.

And yet, such is the indignation and the disillusionment of the Greeks, that even today, after almost a full month of strict capital controls, and six months of catastrophic policies in every tenet of society, the majority of the population continues to back Mr Tsipras, refusing to deal with the stark reality… the need that is for financial prudence and deep reforms, that would set Greece back on the tracks of growth and development.

And while Mr Tsipras himself, like all his predecessors  since the crisis erupted, saw the light (even at the last minute), having clashed with reality and lost, realizing that the alternative is political, social, and financial suicide, the great majority of Greeks, are still in a trance, suffering from psychological reactance, an continue to believe in non existent magic wands, accepting at face value the tin marbles and the fake glass jewelry that the opportunistic politicians offer to them, promising them

a financial safe haven that does not exist.

Such is the Greek condition today… a country torn between its European future and its Oriental despotic past.

A country flirting with Bolshevism, 25 years after the communist experiment failed sensationally and for good in the rest of the world.

Lets all hope, for the sake of Europe and the Greeks themselves, that sanity prevails in the end. Otherwise, the consequences will be dire for all parties concerned.

Strange Attractor