A riot police police officer baton charges a demonstrator during clashes in Athens.|EPA/ALKIS KONSTANTINIDIS
ATHENS - I have long been watching the international trial that my country is undergoing, and I am protesting. Everyone is laying siege to Greece – the story begins with Greek former prime minister George Papandreou who, in a crescendo of political foolishness, defamed my country abroad, to build on his image of being the ‘good guy’ and gain the grace and favour of European leaders for himself. What’s more, in an attempt to show how good a learner he was, he classified the Greeks as a nation of charlatans. At first, they slapped him on the back, congratulating him on his ‘bravery’ and then, as expected, they drove him into the corner. However, Greek pensioners and employees are set to be clobbered for many years to come.
Nevertheless, there is something called ‘national dignity’. I cannot have any other country’s finance minister point the finger at me because he allegedly does me the favour of lending, when he has in fact been paid off during past decades, at very satisfactory rates of interest. In fact, interest rates are even higher now. I cannot allow, and neither have any previous leaders allowed, anyone who is a stranger to this country to humiliate Greece by discrediting it. With our words and deeds, we have given the country a chance to rank among the wealthiest countries in the world, to have much lower unemployment rates than those prevailing in other southern countries and to enjoy the right of having its voice heard on its own national issues. A pointed example is our refusal to have our neighbour, the former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) admitted to NATO, unless the issue of its name is resolved for good.
I know that some of you may perhaps smile when reading about FYROM – maybe it’s because you have forgotten the last time that some of your own neighbours tried to steal and misappropriate a part of your own history. It is typical for us Greeks to always be reminded of the past – some lay additional blame on us, as they believe that in a world dominated by markets, cultural history is of no value. It is like enjoying the fruit of a tree and forgetting that its roots go deep down into the Earth….
Winston Churchill for Greeks
We keep our past alive, but we do not live therein. Some might say that we do not honour our past. That we are not worth being the deserving descendants of prominent ancestors. I believe that such oversimplifications and generalisations are harmful, not only for Greece, but for humanity as a whole. Not all Greeks created miracles in the past, and its’ not just Greeks who are responsible for the current European mess. On the contrary, modern Greeks have decisively contributed to the formulation of a new Europe and to its rescue from totalitarianism. Am I going too far back in time? You, our dear German partners, also go back in time when you claim that you built the modern economic miracle in Europe – and you actually did. You forget, however, that you accomplished this with the solidarity of other people who suffered much at the hands of your ancestors. There are many Greeks living today, such as Manolis Glezos and Mikis Theodorakis, currently into the ninth decade of their lives, who stood up against Nazism and all kinds of fascism and still talk about World War II. They remind us of Winston Churchill’s phrase: “Hence, you will not say that Greeks fight like heroes but that heroes fight like Greeks.” One might ask when all is said and done, why I bother to recall all this and that besides, during the past 70 years, Alsace and Lorraine have heard gunfire only from hunters, not from war rifles, thank God.
Greece, on the other hand, was hearing gunshots even during the 1990s from its neighbouring Balkans and even to this day from its neighbouring countries of North Africa. Do you remember the economic decay that my country suffered because of the Balkan War during the 1990s? Have you forgotten the millions of illegal immigrants who rushed into Greece, and were not removed to other Eurozone countries? I am not looking for excuses, I do not need them – I am only citing facts that are already known.
Greece had the average debt and deficit levels of most European countries (see Eurostat announcement 22.04.10), although it represents only 2% of the European economy – a very low figure to have everyone laid siege to it. Of course, my country does not have the power to threaten foreign rating agencies with public prosecution, as was recently done by France and the US, when such agencies dared to downgrade their own banking systems. In the case of my country, foreign rating agencies simply said that it was a …technical mistake.
Aphrodite de Milos as a ‘sex symbol’ for idiots!
Why all the fuss about Greece? Of course, I do not embrace the justification being spread by some of my countrymen that we are envied because we have the ‘best beach-front land in Europe with plenty of sun’. No. We have also made our own mistakes, we were the first to admit this and it would be unacceptable for us to claim that it is all someone else’s fault. However, there should be a measure for everything – the defamation of Greece is disproportionately huge, if compared with the actual problems that it is causing to Europe. Only idiots can smile at the gross propaganda of the press with the Parthenon sinking into a sea of debts and Aphrodite de Milos sodomising Greeks with her pointing finger. True Europe lovers are aggrieved at this kind of defamation, because they know that the Parthenon and Aphrodite shall modestly stand as magnificent monuments of culture for thousands of years to come.
I am not enjoying my country being made to stand trial, no one would. To be accurate, in the Greek case, sentence was imposed before the hearing began. In this trial, those who are responsible and those who are not responsible, take the blame. The other day, I was informed by a friend that a Greek national who has been professionally active in Germany in transport business for 15 years has been subjected to ruthless financial control on his company premises and his family house, as if he were a common thief. Nothing blameworthy has come out of his business, as has been the case for 15 years. However, it was the first time that a control was carried out with the controllers’ suspiciousness overflowing. ‘He is Greek. Scrutinise him.’ ‘Kristallnacht’ began somewhat like this…
I am implying nothing concerning the leaders of France and Germany. They are democrats who have fought, on a personal level, to climb their way up democratic systems. Their recent behavior, however, towards all other EU countries goes beyond the limit. They accuse my country of having breached the rules of the Eurozone but, at the same time, they themselves are breaching EU rules. Which treaty provides that France and Germany can jointly decide on the future of Europe and announce a new treaty to partners for their consent? Is such behavior not a breach of the fundamental principles of the European Union?
Greece, armaments and ‘Merkozy’
They blame my country for its financial collapse, when the same leaders in all their meetings with Greek prime ministers, have been pushing my country to buy their own super-armaments, priced at many billions of euro. They muttered when they heard the Greek prime minister responding that the economy is not in a good enough situation to procure new armaments, but kept on pushing and pushing. We have now reached the point where Greece ranks between the top three countries of the world in the armaments market in proportion to its population – those leaders pretending to be ignorant and surprised by the drift of Greece’s economy and the same in Europe are therefore partners in crime.
I understand that they are accountable to their own people. However, they have made a fundamental mistake – their populism has destroyed a Europe of solidarity and fostered ethnicism once more, which ruled during the mid-war and the Cold War periods. They have pushed Europe decades backwards. And something more – with their indecisiveness, backsliding and procrastination, they have allowed anonymous markets to determine the destiny of European people and pull the strings out of the stock-exchange markets and bank institutions. Today’s European leaders are not leading people; they are following markets and turning bankers into peer partners in decision-making. Instead of inspiring optimism in the hearts of European citizens and markets, they strike fear. Even Margaret Thatcher, a deeply anti-European leader, would be angered by such incompetence and lack of sound leadership in Europe – even she would become a ‘Europeanist’.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Theodoros Rousopoulos, journalist, former Minister of State and government Spokesman of Greece, government of Kostas Karamanlis, 2004-2008
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