Posted by the Slog
With 50% of young Greeks jobless, Troika plans to end Greek military service.
My inbox this morning is full of irate Greek persons with only two
topics on their minds: George Papandreou’s pro-Brussels piece in
Huffington Post calling for a new European Dawn, and the apparent
intention of the Troika to cut back Greece’s armed forces in yet another
round of It pains me to offer anyone a link to Huffpost, as it remains a shameless source of Common Purpose-style New York Times hypocrisy, perfectly personified by Arianna herself – the girl who trousered $54m by persuading all her contributors to work for nothing. Ms Huffington is not so much false flag as flash hag, but in publishing this Papandreou piece last Thursday she artlessly reveals that the colour of George’s flag is not blue with gold stars, but pure lilly-white.
There were two moments in the Greek debt saga when I began to get seriously negative feelings about the EU in general and Berlin in particular. The first was when Papandreou (as Prime Minister) announced a referendum on the proposed bailout deal in 2011, and Merkel and Sarkozy treated him like the little boy who broke wind noisily in a funeral parlour. As a piece of international bullying, it was second only to Hitler giving the Czech foreign minister a heart attack at Berchtesgarden in 1938.
The second came when You-better-stay-in-my-gang Schäuble ‘forbade’ Greek elections after the 2012 Brussels Accord, and I suddenly ceased to feel bad about beating up disabled people. On this occasion, Sarkozy was around to declare what Wolfie had said an unstatement, but it was too late by then: Herr Doktor Strangelove had removed his mask of sombre disapproval to reveal a surface of unyielding granite underneath.
I think last week’s article by George Papandreou is the third moment in the series, because any reader with an ounce of discernment can see what the formerly much-respected politician is doing in the piece.
Fair enough, he makes a rousing plea to end the dictatorship of Berlin-am-Brussels; it’s just that the hope is empty. There is not one shred of practical strategy offered as the way to stop dictatorial Teutonics and Belgian fifth columnists doing what they clearly like doing best: telling everyone else to halt’s Maul. Papandreou’s rosy outlook is the triumph of shallow optimism over the experience of profound authoritarianism.
It is when George starts writing in the manner of a post show-trial enemy of Comrade Stalin (admitting that yes, he had conspired with agents of reactionary decadence to assassinate the Great Father) that one finds the nape-hairs beginning to fidget.
‘Over the decades we have become more and more interdependent in Europe,’ Papandreou writes. ‘This was not by chance, this was by design – from the days of Monnet and Schuman. It is this interdependence that has made the wars of the past unthinkable.’
Well, it would’ve been nice if the Sprouts had informed the British people of this during the 1970s, when they flatly denied any such plans. But for a man of his standing to suggest that the EU now beginning its death-throes has made war unthinkable is pure fancy. The EEC managed that, for sure: it gave us half a century of peace before anyone in Brussels surreptitiously inserted a ‘u’ at the end of the brand-name. What the Troika of bankers, Berliners and Brusselian boobies has been doing since 2009 is to engender hatred, and display all the stereotypical behaviour that has always made the UK wary of Europeans and their ambitions. A European war is far more likely today than it was fifteen years ago.
Sadly, there is even worse drivel to come. The one-time Greek white hope tells us that, ‘Our citizens wonder whether this European structure is still useful, or if we should go our own separate, independent ways. As in The Odyssey, the sirens are beckoning that we change course. However sweet their song, we know their purpose is that we crash on the shallow rocks.’
Paranoid Gaullist bollocks. Who are these sirens, where is their sweet song, and where the evidence that they wish us to crash? I see, hear and discern none of it: America would like to pick Greece off, but that has nothing to do with the EU. Washington and Wall Street are terrified of a eurozone meltdown. And in case you hadn’t noticed George, it’s all crashing over the cliff entirely unaided by wicked foreign powers moving in mysteriously pernicious ways.
Before leaving this depressing topic, I should point out that Mr Papandreou was writing the piece sort of under the auspices of/immediately after attending one of these murky New York seminars where George Soros turns up to say I’m quite a nice chap really. And perhaps more pertinently, last April Papa told Huffpost readers that ‘the European Union is being driven by a “dogma” of belt-tightening that he describes as “too mechanistic.”‘ So clearly the Bodysnatchers had a word with the guy, and now he’s just another Stepford Wife. What a shame.
Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth there is an unpleasant Troika development that should (based on his article) be more than enough to persuade Papandreou that nasty people have dishonourable designs on Greece. The Trident of Economic Death is seeking to abolish compulsory military service there, according to Greek magazine To Pontiki, ‘in order to reduce state expenditures’.
More accurately, I suspect, this is a move to dilute national identity and blunt any remaining sense of Greek pride. But even if this should not turn out to be the case, only a bean-counter (with youth unemployment at 50%) would suggest putting yet more people on the streets with nothing to do. The accountant blinded by the balance sheet must soon himself become unbalanced. I wonder if the clown who suggested this has ever heard of Golden Dawn.
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