Six inches from the riot policeman’s shield outside the Greek parliament on Friday, a tall, pale boy was shouting at a man who could have been his uncle: “It’s your generation that brought us to this point, but it’s mine that has to pay for it. You have to take responsibility for what’s happening here.”
Across the road, a middle-aged woman roared at the line of cops: “Traitors! Collaborators! We’re Greeks. You’re beating up your mothers and your sisters.”
Another, her head wrapped in a pink scarf, screamed at the parliament: “They’ve drunk our blood, we don’t have anything to eat. They’ve sold us to the Germans. My child owes money, they’re about to take her house. I hope they all get cancer.”
All of them were in an ecstasy of rage, reluctant to go home and lose that temporary release.
As I write, the Greek parliament is preparing to vote on the bond swap agreed with the country’s private creditors and on the new deal with the EU and the IMF, which would lend the country 130 billion euros (US$172 billion) in exchange for cuts that slice the last little bits of flesh from the economy — including a 22 percent reduction in the minimum wage and 150,000 public sector job losses by 2016. Without the deal, Greece will default by next month; with it, the country will sink into a still deeper depression, with no end in sight. In a televised effort to rally the country behind yet more austerity, Greek Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos laid out a blunt choice between sacrifices and worse sacrifices, humiliation and still deeper humiliation, if Greece should default and leave the eurozone.
It is not clear, though, how many people were listening. Exhausted by interminable cliffhangers and last chances, many Greeks have turned off the terrorist soap opera of the TV news and are trying as best they can to get on with their lives. The misery to which Athenians have been reduced — the soup kitchens, the homelessness, the depression and suicides, the rising tide of poverty that is swallowing the middle class — is now a staple of the features pages. It is harder to describe the sense of pervasive breakdown that gets under the skin; the feeling of disorientation and lost identity that comes with the collapse of the assumptions people lived by and the stories they told themselves about the future and the past.
When you ask people on the street if they would rather Greece went bankrupt than submit to further measures, many now say that it is already bankrupt, that public sector workers have gone unpaid for months, that hospitals have no supplies, that the poor are being wrung dry to pay the banks.
“Let’s get it over with,” a woman who works for the education ministry said to me. “Then we’d know we only had 250 euros a month and we could start again. This is not the people’s Europe we dreamed of.”
The fact that IMF European deputy director Poul Thomsen, the eurozone’s poster boy, Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti, the markets and countless economists agree that more austerity will deepen Greece’s depression without making the debt sustainable adds weight to her argument. The icy reception given last week to the Greek delegation in Brussels confirms the sense that its lenders are ready to end the relationship.
Why, then, have large sections of the Greek elite clung so hard to the fantasy that a new loan deal can “save” the country? The obvious answer is that default is a black hole and an enormous risk. No one can predict what suffering a default might bring. Another is that the current crop of politicians built their careers in the system that is now unraveling, based on oligarchies, clientelism and corruption; they have proved unwilling to make the reforms that might, in a different global climate, have revived both Greece’s economy and its democracy.
The deeper reasons, though, may be cultural and political. The crisis has intensified old splits in Greek society. You can see it in the polls, which show support ebbing from the center to the edges of the political spectrum and especially to the fragmented left. You can see it, too, in the historical parallels people reach for in a vain attempt to name this unprecedented nightmare. Protesters chant slogans from the dictatorship of 1967 to 1974, comparing the deal’s Greek enforcers with the CIA-backed junta. Both left and right talk about a new German occupation — an understandable reference given that Germany is calling the shots and that Greeks last lined up at soup kitchens in the 1940s, but one that can edge into racism or crude exaggeration, as in a recent headline that read simply “Dachau.” Both those tropes call up the silent ghosts of the Greek Civil War, which launched the Cold War in Europe and outlawed the Greek left for the next 30 years. In this story, the West plays the part of the repressive imperial interloper.
For the liberal center this is populist anathema. To them, Europe is still Greece’s heartland and its hope, the only guarantor of liberal capitalism, human rights and democracy. A few weeks ago, a distinguished law professor compared the prospect of default to the Asia Minor disaster of 1922, which brought a million-and-a-half refugees into Greece and convulsed the state, and went so far as to suggest that leaving the eurozone would end the 200-year cycle of the Greek Enlightenment.
The trouble with historical metaphors is that they can obscure the present: What is really at stake here is not Greece’s identity, but Europe’s. All eyes are fixed on Athens, but the way out of the crisis requires a choice about what kind of Europe we want. The one we have now, with its deep structural inequalities and its rigid adherence to a failed economic ideology, protects neither democracy nor human rights. Stiff-necked and punitive, it prefers to eat its children.
Maria Margaronis is London correspondent for The Nation.
A response to my article (“Invite ‘will-bes,’ not has-beens,” Aug. 12, page 8) mischaracterizes my arguments, as well as a speech by former British prime minister Boris Johnson at the Ketagalan Forum in Taipei early last month. Tseng Yueh-ying (曾月英) in the response (“A misreading of Johnson’s speech,” Aug. 24, page 8) does not dispute that Johnson referred repeatedly to Taiwan as “a segment of the Chinese population,” but asserts that the phrase challenged Beijing by questioning whether parts of “the Chinese population” could be “differently Chinese.” This is essentially a confirmation of Beijing’s “one country, two systems” formulation, which says that
“History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes” (attributed to Mark Twain). The USSR was the international bully during the Cold War as it sought to make the world safe for Soviet-style Communism. China is now the global bully as it applies economic power and invests in Mao’s (毛澤東) magic weapons (the People’s Liberation Army [PLA], the United Front Work Department, and the Chinese Communist Party [CCP]) to achieve world domination. Freedom-loving countries must respond to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), especially in the Indo-Pacific (IP), as resolutely as they did against the USSR. In 1954, the US and its allies
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived in China yesterday, where he is to attend a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and Russian President Vladimir Putin today. As this coincides with the 50 percent US tariff levied on Indian products, some Western news media have suggested that Modi is moving away from the US, and into the arms of China and Russia. Taiwan-Asia Exchange Foundation fellow Sana Hashmi in a Taipei Times article published yesterday titled “Myths around Modi’s China visit” said that those analyses have misrepresented India’s strategic calculations, and attempted to view
When Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) stood in front of the Potala Palace in Lhasa on Thursday last week, flanked by Chinese flags, synchronized schoolchildren and armed Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) troops, he was not just celebrating the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the “Tibet Autonomous Region,” he was making a calculated declaration: Tibet is China. It always has been. Case closed. Except it has not. The case remains wide open — not just in the hearts of Tibetans, but in history records. For decades, Beijing has insisted that Tibet has “always been part of China.” It is a phrase
RSS