Greeks Bearing Gifts

There is a wonderful, almost divine irony in the fact that Greece, of all places, turned out to be the Achilles’ heel of the European Union, the weak spot that may in the end lead to the death of the whole mad project of a one-size-fits-all currency.  So much nonsense has been written about the Greek debacle that is easy to lose sight of some basic facts.  To begin with it had nothing to do with international currency speculation and everything to do with Greeks bearing gifts…to themselves. 

It’s easy to understand the anger of the Germans, now faced with paying the bill for the way in which the Greeks have pampered themselves, effectively at their expense.  Greece created one of the most madly extravagant welfare and benefits systems in the whole Continent.  The working day often finishes at 2.30pm.  Retirement provisions are absurdly generous, with some people able to stop working at the age of fifty-three.  Add to that a culture of corruption, symbolised in the words “fakelaki”, meaning envelopes containing bribes, and “rousfeti”, meaning political favours, then a bad situation became cancerous.

The revealing thing in this is that many Greeks themselves, at least those who are not communists and anarchists, recognise the depths of their own blameworthiness.  Commenting on tax evasion, something of a national sport, one newspaper headline jeered with heavy irony: “No taxes – we’re Greek.”  In public hospitals doctors often refuse to treat patients until the “fakelaki” is forthcoming.  The private sector has all but been destroyed by an ever expanding bureaucracy.  Loukas Tsoukalis, a professor at Athens University, has said that Greece has a capitalist system with a Soviet state.

The fact that Greece was allowed to join the euro at all when it clearly did not meet the preconditions for membership can be put down to what I would call the ‘Byron Illusion.’  When Lord Byron went to fight and die in the nineteenth century Greek War of Independence he went not for a living nation but for a dead idea, an idea nurtured in generations brought up on the classics.  The Greeks continued to play on the romance of the ancient past in their application for euro membership, something that seduced Europe’s leaders, many of them also educated in the classics.

But Greece of the modern age is not the Greece of the ancients, not the Greece of Plato and Pericles.  Writing in the New York Times, Robert D. Kaplan rightly argued that it is far more the child of Byzantine and Turkish despotism.  The EU, preoccupied with balancing France and Germany, ignored not just economic facts in the rush into the euro but far deeper historical fractures between the north and the south.  Greece is not the ‘cradle of democracy,’ a label that is no more than a shallow pretence.  In the modern age it has more often been the nursery of despotism. 

So forget irresponsible bankers and wicked speculators.  The whole of the sovereign debt crisis was based on one simple truth: it’s impossible to overcome centuries of cultural, economic and political differences in the illusion of monetary and political union.  Europe is not one; Europe will never be one.  History is not fooled. 

Deeper Still and Deeper

As the euro crisis moves downward in ever tighter circles I recall a piece I wrote a year and a half ago for the Daily Telegraph readers’ blog site.  Reading reports in the Sunday press I thought I would have another look at it.  It’s astonishing how little has changed; astonishing that grown-up people with grown-up minds could ever have embraced this madness in the first place.  How ill-led we are, how deceived; how unworthy are those in positions of power, who have neither prescience nor judgement. 

Anyway, judge the relevance for yourself.  The original article was headed Moussaka Money, published on 16 February, 2011. 

The Greek crisis is a superb demonstration of the intellectual absurdity and institutional vanity at the core of the whole European maze.  The important thing here is that we are dealing with a political as much as an economic crisis, perhaps more of a political crisis. We are dealing more specifically with blindness, blindness and hubris caused by a combination of self-delusion and self-interest.

The euro itself, the single European currency zone, was always about prestige, a desire for the grand gesture.  Looking at it in hard economic terms who would ever have agreed to allow the Greeks, or the Spanish, or the Irish to join the club? All it would take is for these fragile economies to come under sustained pressure for questions to be asked about the operation of a whole euro zone, combining rich and poor and supposedly treating them as equal partners.  

The Greeks, the poor cousins, were effectively given a Euro credit card, and they used it, without caution or reservation.  The Germans were paying, yes, but they also benefited with a massive trade surplus, another source of imbalance.  Angela is resisting a bail-out; she has to, if only for the sake of form and political credibility.  Sarko does want a bail out, but that comes at a price; there has be convergence across Europe. Athens, as I said previously, is facing a new Macedonian hegemony, a new dependency in all but name. 

The Germans in particular are heading for the perfect storm; they have too much of their economic self-interest invested in the euro-zone to allow it to collapse altogether, but they are horrified of the consequences of countries like Greece riding on the prosperity of the old D-mark, abandoned with considerable reluctance.

We know the Eurocrats are not fond of votes.  After all, they have a tendency to go the wrong way.  But the Germans are least fond of a particular kind of vote than any other European nation, so much so that referendums are actually banned by law because of the use they were put to by the nasty Nazis.  Just as well for the Eurocrats, I suppose, because the Germans would never have abandoned the D-mark if they had been given a choice on the matter eleven years ago.  

At the time the opponents of the euro ran a campaign warning of the dangers of being linked up with the ‘spaghetti money’ of southern Europe.  So, poor old Angela finds herself in an impossible position.  Pressures at home force her to talk tough.  Auntie Angela does not come to the Greeks bearing gifts, no, she waves her Aryan finger and talks austerity.  But this is tomorrow and now we know just how much the Greeks have been spending, as if there was, well, no tomorrow.  

Yes, what a mess this is.  If the Greeks get a handout - as they almost certainly will - the markets will turn on the next most vulnerable, the other partners in the union of the Piigs (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain).  The contradictions, there from the outset, are being revealed one by one.  

Angela is a high-wire artist, a gambler as much as those who speculate on the currency markets, who speculate against the euro.  She is playing for time, her fingers crossed behind her back, hoping that austerity in Athens is enough.  And if it is not? Well, then we will perhaps be talking about moussaka money. 

A Frightful Fiend

Look at this picture. Can you guess who or what it is? No? Well I’ll tell you – it’s the new face of Greek democracy! His name is George Germenis, a black metal rocker, although he uses the stage name ‘Kaiadas’, after the chasm where Spartans threw deformed babies.

Germenis or Kaiadas – whose next album, incidentally, is called Long Live Death – was thrown into another chasm - the Greek parliament. He is there along with another twenty members of Golden Dawn, an extreme nationalist movement entering the assembly for the first time ever. It won seven percent of the poll in the election held a week last Sunday, that’s well over 400,000 votes. It’s a remarkable achievement considering that Golden Dawn was long in the murky twilight of Greek politics, securing less than one percent of the vote the last time round.

Kaiadas and Golden Dawn is a sign of the times, said the mayor of Salonika. They certainly are; a sign of the European times, a sign of Greek anger at the austerity programme imposed at the diktat of the European Union, a sign of the madness that has arisen from monetary union. It’s a consequence of the arrogance of the politicians and bureaucrats who govern the destiny of Europe, who believed that national electorates could be ignored and sidestepped with impunity.

Greece, sinking ever deeper into recession, wanted to make a gesture, and it has. In making the gesture, in retreating from the mainstream into the fringe, people were clear what they were voting against; it’s just that they seemed to have no clear idea what they were voting for. Since the election many have said that they were shocked over what they subsequently learned about Golden Dawn.

What have they learned? Why, that it’s racist, violently so, and reactionary, rejecting, in the words of its own manifesto, “the so-called Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.” It is also irredentist, rejecting Greece’s present borders. We are, in short, dealing with a Nazi-style party which has a Nazi-style logo, though it rejects the label, saying that they are inspired by the regime of Ioannis Metaxas. He was dictator of Greece on the threshold of the Second World War, himself inspired by – can you guess? – the Nazis. They had their Third Reich; he had his Third Hellenic Civilization. In time to come – who knows? -there may be a Fourth Hellenic Civilization.

Golden Dawn is led Nikolaos Michaloliakos, once jailed for the possession of explosives. In the best non-fascist style the party’s charter places him in total control. In the best non-fascist style the charter also authorises the straight armed Roman salute, or is that Greek salute? The leader, though, has eschewed such gestures when his people march into parliament. His people, incidentally, include one who was facing trial for allegedly allowing his car to be used for an assault on a left-wing university lecturer. I say ‘was’ because he will be facing trial no longer; he now enjoys parliamentary immunity.

The ascent of Golden Dawn should not be seen in isolation. The door was already held open, ironically, by the socialist Pasok party and New Democracy, the respectable face of Greek politics. In forcing through the austerity package insisted on by the European Central Bank and the IMF, they formed a less than respectable coalition with the Popular Orthodox Rally, another movement on the extremist fringe, closely allied with Golden Dawn. In other words, Greece’s political class, dancing to a tune played from Brussels, effectively made right-wing extremism a respectable choice.

"May God help us. I dread to think that they got in," said Maria Savelona, a 51-year-old widow, who claims not to have voted for the Golden boys. "People voted in anger, without thinking. When they realize what they did, they'll be afraid." They should be. It isn’t just Germenis, his heavy metal makeup, his knives and his fake blood. No; since the election people have been shown images of his party comrades smiling next to an Auschwitz crematorium.

Michaloliakos, in his first public appearance after the election, said that getting into parliament would not turn his "brave boys in black" into moderates. He warned those who "betrayed the motherland" to run scared, banging his clenched fist on the podium, a bodyguard on each side: "We are coming!" They certainly are.

Like one who, on a lonely road, Doth walk in fear and dread, And, having once turned round, walks on, And turns no more his head; Because he knows a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread.

Tomb Raiders

Stephen Fry, a huge twit, all round mouth and super luvvie, recently argued that Britain should “redress a great wrong” by returning the Elgin Marbles to Greece, as a gesture to mark the London Olympics. 

These precious reliefs once adorned the Parthenon in Athens. They were brought Britain by the seventh earl of Elgin in the early part of the nineteenth century.  They can be seen in all of their pristine beauty in the British Museum’s purpose-built Duveen Gallery.  Lord alone knows what they would be like if they had remained a further two hundred years in situ. 

This is not a good time for antiquities in Greece.  Driven made by EU imposed austerity, many people have taken to digging up the ancestors in a spot of tomb raiding.  Even Olympia, the birthplace of the ancient games, has been desecrated by pirates looking for buried treasure.  Running short of cash, the government is struggling to provide adequate security for some of the most precious locations in human civilization. 

Last month, according to a recent report in the Times, grave robbers were seen digging pits in the ancient Mycenaean cemetery on two occasions before a farmer raised the alarm.  Without any official support, local people mounted their own guard for ten nights running in an attempt to scare the thieves away.   Nikolas Zirganos, a journalist who has helped to retrieve pillaged artefacts places the problem in a bigger context;

In any political, social, economic crisis you always see a rise ion looting and robberies, whether it’s a war or a collapse of society.  I don’t say we are at war, but we are in a very deep crisis and this affects the cultural heritage very much. 

The tragic thing is that the problem has become so bad that the culture ministry has decided to rebury recently discovered sites of historic importance, including an early Christian basilica at Thessalonica.  Michalis Tiverios, professor of archaeology at the local university, said of this “Mother Earth is the best protector of our antiquities.  Let us leave our antiquities in the soil, to be found by archaeologists in 10,000AD when Greeks will perhaps show more respect for their history.”

The prof, in his sardonic whimsy, seems rather too optimistic.  In 10,000AD there will be no Greece just an undifferentiated Euromass, a unity of wealthy northern Herrenvolk and abject southern Helots.  By then all antiquities will have disappeared into the central core, the new capital of this monster land, a capital that might very well go by the name of Germania. 

Meanwhile, back in 2011AD, the situation gets worse by the day as the recession and the austerity bite ever harder.  Fewer jobs mean more tomb raiders.  Shortage of cash means fewer security guards.  Even the Acropolis, from whence the Elgin Marbles came, is being closed at 3pm on weekends, instead of 7pm, for want of staff. 

Please do not think that this is a problem restricted to open sites.  Even museums are under attack.  In February that at Ancient Olympia was looted.  After tying up the sole female guard, the thieves smashed display cases with hammers, making off with various artefacts including a three thousand year old gold ring with an estimated value of £3.3million. 

This is not the time to consider returning the Elgin Marbles to Greece.  That time, I rather think, will never come, no matter how much Stephen Fry bleats.  

No Second No

It's the most famous negative in Greek history – Epeteios tou Ohi, literally the Anniversary of the 'No', Ohi Day, celebrated every year on 28 October. It marks the occasion in October, 1940 when General Metaxas, then prime minister, rejected an ultimatum from Mussolini to allow Italian troops on Greek soil or else. He replied, in laconic Spartan style, with that single word - No!

The Euro crisis, a Greek tragedy by any measure, is now in its final act, bodies strewn across the stage, the chorus wailing in the background. Of the prologue I said over a year ago on another news blog that there was a wonderful, almost divine irony in the fact that Greece, of all places, turned out to be the Achilles' Heel of the European Union, the weak spot that may in the end lead to the death of the whole mad project of a one-size-fits-all currency.

And so it has proved. For weeks now one crisis summit of European leaders has followed hard upon another, the intervals between them getting shorter and shorter, the smiles at the end, as yet another 'solution' is announced, ever more artificial and forced. The political implication of the latest bail-out deal is something else I anticipated as long ago as February of last year:

What the Greek situation exposes is the absurdity of the whole Euro project. This was a crisis waiting to happen: a small, relatively poor country building an economy on unsupportable levels of debt but unable to manage that same economy because it is unable to mange the national currency. You see, a single currency could only ever be built successfully on a unified polity, where a central authority is able to manage just about all of those areas that fall under the prerogative of a sovereign state; where a central authority is able to advance some areas while neglecting others. The Greek crisis is set to expose not only the underlying political weakness of Europe of the Euro; it's also set to expose the limits of national freedom itself. A new bastard Union is likely to arise, increasingly authoritarian in tone; not just undemocratic but anti-democratic.

Yes, a new bastard, less perfect Union, fleshed out on Greek bones, predicated on the death of democracy, predicated on the demise of the nation itself; that's what's on offer; that's the final solution.

All this looked as if it was going to change, as if some resistance was about to be offered, as if Greece discovered something of its old spirit of defiance. In a remarkable development George Papandreou, the present Greek Prime Minister, looked as if he was set to take on the role of a greater Metaxas, offering his own people a say on the devil's bargain that he signed up to last week.

Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, panicked; in the chanceries and presidential palaces of Europe there was panic over this dire threat of democracy by democracy. Abide by the rules of the Brussels deal, pocket Napoleon shouted, or leave the eurozone, an ultimatum echoed by Angela Merkel, Germany's Brass Chancellor. She had her own unique spin here, saying that Europe's leaders would "not abandon the principles of democracy. We cannot put at stake the great work of the unification of the euro."

Hmm, is this 'great work' anything like that of her Iron predecessor, which saw the emergence of the German Empire in the nineteenth century? Then it was said that the smaller states forced into Bismarck's 'great work' were like the fleas uniting with a dog. Is Greece a flea to be united with the Franco-German dog?

It would seem so, because, under intense pressure, not stopping short of financial blackmail, Papandreou has backed down. It looks as if his government will be ousted in a confidence vote to be held tomorrow in the Greek parliament. It no longer matters, now that the referendum has been abandoned. He is no Metaxas, just a bewildered and unhappy little man. There will be no opportunity for a second no day.

The Greeks are certainly at a crossroads in the long history of their nation. Perhaps in future they may have cause to reflect ruefully on a few lines of Byron;

The mountains look on Marathon---
And Marathon looks on the sea;
And musing there an hour alone,
I dream'd that Greece might yet be free

A New Old Young Plan

Be assured: the crisis is over. The smug smiles said it all, as the European leaders emerged from the end of last week’s summit on the euro debt disaster. They emerged bearing gifts to the Greeks, a second bail-out of the profligate nation worth over $130billion. The details are all a bit vague, though; who, exactly, is going to pay what? Never mind that. Rejoice; the crisis is over; the euro lives; the European ideal lives. The crisis is over…until the next time.

I have only one thing to say: keep a close eye on Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor. That smile is, I predict, set to freeze before her mouth turns down at the edges. She seems to have become the architect of a new old Young Plan, with Germany set to pay foreigners subsidies far into the future, just to preserve an economic absurdity, that and the political credibility of Nicholas Sarkozy, the French president, an even greater absurdity.

The Young Plan, if you are unaware of the history here, was a scheme, devised by an American banker in 1929, to regularise the reparations payments imposed on Germany as part of the Treaty of Versailles at the end of the First World War. It was supposed to make them more manageable by spreading them out over time, a period of sixty years to be exact. It upset quite a few people then; it should upset people now: for once again Germany’s future has been mortgaged.

There are no reparations, of course, in the brave new fraternal Europe, just the internationalisation of national debts. A ‘joint liability’ it’s being called, as the Greek sovereign debt is swallowed whole along with Greek sovereignty. It’s really a German liability, something I’ll come to in a moment, but first consider inglorious Greece.

The mountains look on Marathon--
And Marathon looks on the sea;
And musing there an hour alone,
I dream'd that Greece might yet be free
For, standing on the Persians' grave,
I could not deem myself a slave.

So wrote Lord Byron in a mood of romantic reverie, dreaming of the ideal of Greece. Another poet, perhaps a Greek one (do the Greeks write poetry anymore?), may soon express a similar sentiment as Europa, or the bull, stands on the grave of this country, a country that for centuries fought the Turks for freedom only, in the end, to give that freedom to the Germans.

Why, oh why do the Germans want this? It will be German taxpayers, principally, who will pay, Young-plan style, for the acquisition of Greek bad debts. They have gained nothing by this fraud other than a greater personal burden, their future for a dubious Greek present, for an even more dubious currency, based on ideology not fiscal realism, a currency that even the Bulgarians (for the love of God – the Bulgarians!) are shying away from.

No matter, I feel sure that the pensioners of the Fatherland, many of whom survive on no more than 1000 Euros a month, think it all worthwhile; think that it is a jolly good thing that their Greek equivalents, who retire more than ten years earlier, receive more than twice as much.

The reality is that the problem of Greek solvency has not been addressed; it’s being hidden behind back-slapping and cheesy grins, all part of a kind of political medicine show. There is no long-term plan for dealing with the economic fecklessness of the Greeks, just a faster and faster bail-out of a decrepit old trireme, sinking by perceptible stages.

Merkel, contrary to past assurances, contrary to the law of her own country, has bought Greek debt to saddle on German taxpayers; more moussaka, less sauerkraut. The cheque’s been signed, the deal has been done. The Germans can boot this woman out of office but she has bequeathed to them of legacy that makes Young look benign.

Inglorious Greece

Just imagine if the countries of North and South America joined together in a more perfect union. I give you the American Union, the AU. This borderless combination, allowing for a free exchange of peoples and goods, is based on a unified currency, let’s call it the Americo.

Now if you further imagine that this currency has the same exchange value right across the AU, that it is no different in, say, Guatemala or Bolivia than it is in the USA or Canada. Now imagine a central bank with low interest rates; imagine no detailed auditing of national borrowing and finance; imagine governments living on credit, endlessly beyond their means. Imagine American tax payers working until they are seventy to ensure that Guatemalans can retire at fifty. Do you think this is a nightmare? Well, then look across the Atlantic to see it in reality, look not at my chimera but at the real life European Union.

Greece is on the verge of bankruptcy, on the verge of defaulting on what is called sovereign debt, the liabilities falling to the state. The euro, the currency of a good bit of the European Union (not Britain, thankfully) is on the verge of collapse. President Nicholas Sarkozy of France is in a mood of high anxiety:

Without the euro, there is no Europe, and without Europe there is no possibility of peace and stability.

It’s a wild exaggeration, of course, clearly intended to propel Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, whom he met in Berlin recently for crisis talks, into a joint-effort to save an impossible dream. The language is clearly intended to hit the Germans at the most vulnerable spot in their national psyche, past unhappy memories, ever present dangers; it’s a form, if you like, of historical blackmail.

The Greek crisis is a superb demonstration of the intellectual absurdity and institutional vanity at the core of the whole European maze. There it sat, right from the outset, a bit like a brooding Minotaur. The important thing here is that we are dealing with a political as much as an economic crisis, perhaps more of a political crisis. We are dealing more specifically with blindness, blindness and hubris caused by a combination of self-delusion and self-interest.

The euro itself, the single European currency zone, was always about prestige, a desire for the grand gesture. Looking at it in hard economic terms who would ever have agreed to allow the Greeks, or the Spanish, or the Portuguese, or the Irish to join the club? All it would take is for these fragile economies to come under sustained pressure for questions to be asked about the operation of a whole euro zone, combining rich and poor and supposedly treating them as equal partners.

The Greeks, the poorest of the European cousins, were effectively given a euro credit card, and they used it, without caution or reservation, almost as if they had won a lottery, which, in a way, they had. The Germans were paying, yes, but they also benefited with a massive trade surplus, another source of imbalance.

The Germans in particular are heading for the perfect storm; they have too much of their economic self-interest invested in the euro-zone to allow it to collapse altogether, but they are horrified of the consequences of countries like Greece riding on the prosperity of the old Deutch-mark, abandoned with considerable reluctance.

We know the Eurocrats are not fond of votes. After all, they have a tendency to go the wrong way. But the Germans are least fond of a particular kind of vote than any other European nation, so much so that referenda are actually banned by law because of the use they were put to by the nasty Nazis. Just as well for the Eurocrats, I suppose, because the Germans would never have abandoned the D-mark if they had been given a choice on the matter twelve years ago.

At the time the opponents of the euro ran a campaign warning of the dangers of being linked up with the ‘spaghetti money’ of southern Europe. So, poor old Angela finds herself in an impossible position. Pressures at home force her to talk tough. Auntie Angela does not come to the Greeks bearing gifts, no, she waves her Aryan finger and talks austerity. Think of tomorrow, she says.

Alas, the Greeks have been spending, as if there was, well, no tomorrow. But tomorrow is here and Europe has been wounded in its Achilles’ heel, the poison now spreading throughout the body. An ancient Greek myth thus becomes a practical reality. How the gods love irony.

A Certain Brutality

In view of the current, ahem, tensions between Greece and Germany in the benighted euro zone I thought I might just mention the war, with particular reference to the career of Alexander Löhr, commander-in-chief of Army Group E in Greece and Yugoslavia from 1943 until the end of the war.

Löhr was in many ways quite a tragic figure. A soldier of the old school, and Russian Orthodox by birth, he was far from being a committed Nazi. He had, in fact, served in the army of the Habsburg Empire during the First World War, as did many of his senior officers, and thus brought to his command many of the imperial prejudices many older Austrians felt towards the Balkan peoples.

Though tied by the stupid and ultimately self-defeating counter-terrorism guidelines issued to the German Army, he implemented them without a great deal of latitude or imagination. His task in Greece was to eliminate the andartes, and that is what he attempted to do with all thoroughness.

I suppose it did not help matters much that most of his troops, Wehrmacht and SS, had been brutalised by service on the Eastern Front. Indeed, one formation, the 117 Jaeger Division, was specifically told that eine gewisse Brutalität (a certain brutality) was absolutely necessary. The usual measures were adopted against the insurgents, including hostage-taking, wholesale executions and casual atrocities. The consequences of this were exactly the same as elsewhere in Europe; the resistance movement grew steadily in both strength and confidence.

The guerrilla war changed the preconceptions with which the Germans had first arrived in Greece. Philhellenism gave way to notions of the wild 'Balkan fanatic', with the Greeks being seen as little different from the Serbs. As a consequence the Greeks slipped steadily down the racial ladder in the Nazi scheme of things, with the connection between the ancient peoples and 'this land of neo-Greeks' being openly doubted.