{"id":61001,"date":"2015-07-20T12:00:43","date_gmt":"2015-07-20T11:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=61001"},"modified":"2015-07-13T21:34:19","modified_gmt":"2015-07-13T20:34:19","slug":"the-problem-of-greece-is-not-only-a-tragedy-it-is-a-lie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/07\/the-problem-of-greece-is-not-only-a-tragedy-it-is-a-lie\/","title":{"rendered":"The Problem of Greece Is Not Only a Tragedy. It Is a Lie."},"content":{"rendered":"

13 Jul 2015 –<\/em> An historic betrayal has consumed Greece. Having set aside the mandate of the Greek electorate, the Syriza government has willfully ignored last week\u2019s landslide \u201cNo\u201d vote and secretly agreed a raft of repressive, impoverishing measures in return for a \u201cbailout\u201d that means sinister foreign control and a warning to the world.<\/p>\n

Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has pushed through parliament a proposal to cut at least 13 billion euros from the public purse \u2013 4 billion euros more than the \u201causterity\u201d figure rejected overwhelmingly by the majority of the Greek population in a referendum on 5 July.<\/p>\n

These reportedly include a 50 per cent increase in the cost of healthcare for pensioners, almost 40 per cent of whom live in poverty; deep cuts in public sector wages; the complete privatization of public facilities such as airports and ports; a rise in value added tax to 23 per cent, now applied to the Greek islands where people struggle to eke out a living. There is more to come.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnti-austerity party sweeps to stunning victory\u201d, declared aGuardian<\/em>\u00a0headline on\u00a0January 25. \u201cRadical leftists\u201d the paper called Tsipras and his impressively-educated comrades. \u00a0They wore open neck shirts, and the finance minister rode a motorbike and was described as a \u201crock star of economics\u201d. It was a fa\u00e7ade. They were not radical in any sense of that cliched label, neither were they \u201canti austerity\u201d.<\/p>\n

For six months Tsipras and the recently discarded finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, shuttled between Athens and Brussels, Berlin and the other centres of European money power. Instead of social justice for Greece, they achieved a new indebtedness, a deeper impoverishment that would merely replace a systemic rottenness based on the theft of tax revenue by the Greek super-wealthy \u2013 in accordance with European \u201cneo-liberal\u201d values \u2014 and cheap, highly profitable loans from those now seeking Greece\u2019s scalp.<\/p>\n

Greece\u2019s debt, reports an audit by the Greek parliament, \u201cis illegal, illegitimate and odious\u201d. Proportionally, it is less than 30 per cent that of the debit of Germany, its major creditor. It is less than the debt of European banks whose \u201cbailout\u201d in 2007-8 was barely controversial and unpunished.<\/p>\n

For a small country such as Greece, the euro is a colonial currency: a tether to a capitalist ideology so extreme that even the Pope pronounces it \u201cintolerable\u201d and \u201cthe dung of the devil\u201d. The euro is to Greece what the US dollar is to remote territories in the Pacific, whose poverty and servility is guaranteed by their dependency.<\/p>\n

In their travels to the court of the mighty in Brussels and Berlin, Tsipras and Varoufakis presented themselves neither as radicals nor \u201cleftists\u201d nor even honest social democrats, but as two slightly upstart supplicants in their pleas and demands. Without underestimating the hostility they faced, it is fair to say they displayed no political courage. More than once, the Greek people found out about their \u201csecret austerity plans\u201d in leaks to the media: such as a 30 June letter published in the\u00a0Financial Times<\/em>, in which Tsipras promised the heads of the EU, the European Central Bank and the IMF to accept their basic, most vicious demands \u2013 which he has now accepted.<\/p>\n

When the Greek electorate voted \u201cno\u201d on 5 July to this very kind of rotten deal, Tsipras said, \u201cCome\u00a0Monday\u00a0and the Greek government will be at the negotiating table after the referendum with better terms for the Greek people\u201d. Greeks had not voted for \u201cbetter terms\u201d. They had voted for justice and for sovereignty, as they had done on January 25.<\/p>\n

The day after the January election a truly democratic and, yes, radical government would have stopped every euro leaving the country, repudiated the \u201cillegal and odious\u201d debt \u2013 as Argentina did successfully \u2014 and expedited a plan to leave the crippling Eurozone. But there was no plan. There was only a willingness to be \u201cat the table\u201d seeking \u201cbetter terms\u201d.<\/p>\n

The true nature of Syriza has been seldom examined and explained. To the foreign media it is no more than \u201cleftist\u201d or \u201cfar left\u201d or \u201chardline\u201d \u2013 the usual misleading spray. Some of Syriza\u2019s international supporters have reached, at times, levels of cheer leading reminiscent of the rise of Barack Obama. Few have asked: Who are these \u201cradicals\u201d? What do they believe in?<\/p>\n

In 2013, Yanis Varoufakis wrote:<\/p>\n

\u201cShould we welcome this crisis of European capitalism as an opportunity to replace it with a better system? Or should we be so worried about it as to embark upon a campaign for stabilising capitalism? To me, the answer is clear. Europe\u2019s crisis is far less likely to give birth to a better alternative to capitalism \u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cI bow to the criticism that I have campaigned on an agenda founded on the assumption that the left was, and remains, squarely defeated \u2026. Yes, I would love to put forward [a] radical agenda. But, no, I am not prepared to commit the [error of the British Labour Party following Thatcher\u2019s victory].<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat good did we achieve in Britain in the early 1980s by promoting an agenda of socialist change that British society scorned while falling headlong into Thatcher\u2019s neoliberal trip? Precisely none. What good will it do today to call for a dismantling of the Eurozone, of the European Union itself\u00a0 \u2026?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Varoufakis omits all mention of the Social Democratic Party that split the Labour vote and led to Blairism. In suggesting people in Britain \u201cscorned socialist change\u201d \u2013 when they were given no real opportunity to bring about that change \u2013 he echoes Blair.<\/p>\n

The leaders of Syriza are revolutionaries of a kind \u2013 but their revolution is the perverse, familiar appropriation of social democratic and parliamentary movements by liberals groomed to comply with neo-liberal drivel and a social engineering whose authentic face is that of Wolfgang Schauble, Germany\u2019s finance minister, an imperial thug. Like the Labour Party in Britain and its equivalents among those former social democratic parties still describing themselves as \u201cliberal\u201d or even \u201cleft\u201d, \u00a0Syriza is the product of an affluent, highly privileged, educated middle class, \u201cschooled in postmodernism\u201d, as Alex Lantier wrote.<\/p>\n

For them, class is the unmentionable, let alone an enduring struggle, regardless of the reality of the lives of most human beings. Syriza\u2019s luminaries are well-groomed; they lead not the resistance that ordinary people crave, as the Greek electorate has so bravely demonstrated, but \u201cbetter terms\u201d of a venal status quo that corrals and punishes the poor. When merged with \u201cidentity politics\u201d and its insidious distractions, the consequence is not resistance, but subservience. \u201cMainstream\u201d political life in Britain exemplifies this.<\/p>\n

This is not inevitable, a done deal, if we wake up from the long, postmodern coma and reject the myths and deceptions of those who claim to represent us, and fight.<\/p>\n

__________________________________<\/p>\n

John Pilger has won an Emmy and a BAFTA for his documentaries, which have also won numerous US and European awards. His articles appear worldwide in newspapers such as the Guardian, the Independent, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Mail & Guardian (South Africa), Aftonbladet (Sweden), Il Manifesto (Italy). He writes a regular column for the New Statesman, London. In 2003, he was awarded the prestigious Sophie Prize for \u201930 years of exposing injustice and promoting human rights.\u2019 In 2009 he was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize. His latest film is The War You Don\u2019t See<\/a> (2010). He <\/em>can be reached through his website:\u00a0www.johnpilger.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 johnpilger.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

13 Jul 2015 – An historic betrayal has consumed Greece. Having set aside the mandate of the Greek electorate, the Syriza government has willfully ignored last week\u2019s landslide \u201cNo\u201d vote and secretly agreed a raft of repressive, impoverishing measures in return for a \u201cbailout\u201d that means sinister foreign control and a warning to the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61001","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61001","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61001"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61001\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61001"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61001"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61001"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}