A year after the IMF and the EU imposed their now infamous austerity memorandum on Greece, life here has changed radically. If you are between 18 and 24 years old, the chances are that you are unemployed, like 40 percent of your generation. If you are in your 30s and do have a job, it is likely to be part-time and flexible; you probably cannot imagine it being secure, and you have no idea how much longer it is going to last. Your wages are gradually getting lower, you cannot go on strike, you cannot organize collectively, you cannot even demand to get paid. Holidays are out of the question, getting sick is too much of a risk and you cannot afford an apartment of your own.
Young people in Greece can no longer make ordinary life choices: They cannot plan for the present, let alone for the future. However, they are told — and many of them feel — that they cannot -complain. They belong, after all, to a doomed generation.
Many ordinary Greeks have stopped watching the news or thinking about why all this is happening, but everybody talks with one another about what is going on: friends, children and parents, shopkeepers, taxi drivers, teachers — everyone says this austerity is unfair and unjust, but everyone also feels insecure and fearful; there is nothing we can do about it, after all. This new reality feels as if it has been cast upon us — almost like a supernatural phenomenon.
We are told that we bear the blame of the crisis because “we all partied and spent beyond our means,” but those suffering the most know we had nothing to do with it.
It has been less than 12 months since this crisis began, but little stories that illustrate the change keep bubbling up: homeless people looking for food in dustbins; friends fired without compensation or accepting wage cuts; police officers beating up citizens who protest; schools and hospitals shutting; teachers and doctors losing their jobs; journalists censored; trade unionists persecuted; racist attacks downtown. Legality, majority, democracy and equality start to seem like odd little words.
All of a sudden, things that only a year ago happened in remote, underdeveloped places — as if to prove how lucky we were to belong in civilized Europe — are now happening here in Greece. However, Greeks cannot complain, cannot react, because they are told that the crisis is their fault — even if everyone knows it cannot be just their fault.
Beyond the mainstream media coverage and the declarations of the elites and the politicians, more and more people experience the lack of meaning, rationality, justice and freedom in their everyday lives. Some refuse to pay transport and hospital fees, tolls and debts, and others create tiny local networks of solidarity, alternative commerce or self--education in their districts. Some read blogs and narrate different stories reconfirming their dignity with humble, daily acts of resistance because they feel the difference between “us” and “them” that no media or state narrative can obscure.
A whole people cannot live in isolation, fear and guilt for much longer, facing a future full of problems that cannot be resolved. What the IMF and Greek politicians know and are fearful of is that an oppressed people can learn to communicate without speaking, to step forward without appearing to move, to resist without resisting — they will gradually find each other and make sense of what is going on, and who is really to blame. And, then, as happened in December 2008, there may be a mass reaction here in Greece, one that may be violent and that will once again be said to be unpredictable and irrational.
Hara Kouki is a researcher in Athens.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs