Enemies of Reason Poundshop potshots at the media moral maze.

The Greek situation

This is a guest post by Jonas Kyratzes. Jonas is a writer, independent computer game designer and filmmaker of sorts. He was born in Germany and raised in Greece. He currently lives in Germany with his wife and a monstrous black cat,
where they all agree that the weather is terrible. His website, and much of his work, can be found at http://www.jonas-kyratzes.net.

On February 22nd, the German magazine Focus published the following issue:

"Cheaters in the Euro-Family"

The main article described Greece as a degenerate country. The modern Greeks, it disturbingly emphasized, are genetically unrelated to the ancient Greeks, and totally unlike them. In the last century, they have produced no valuable poetry or music, or culture of any sort. They are lazy and corrupt, and they live beyond their means at the expense of the rest of Europe. And now their cheating ways might bring down the entire European economy.

This article was only one of many with a similar tone published in Germany (and around the world), but this one was prominent enough (and obvious enough in its racism) to create an uproar in Greece. The uproar, in turn, created an angry response from sections of the left, who perceived this as nothing more than an explosion of macho nationalism. Maybe the Focus article is right, some said - this country is pretty screwed up, after all. Maybe they're just telling us what we don't want to hear.

But the situation is not that simple. In fact, it's massively complex; so complex that, I have to admit, this article cannot cover all of it. But I'm hoping to give you a basic idea of the lies that are being told and the real problems that are being ignored.

To put my perspective into context, I have a Greek father and a German mother, was raised in Greece and currently live in Germany, where I spend most of my time writing and speaking in English. I have never fully identified with any country and do not intend to start doing so; I see myself as an internationalist, and as Homo sapiens above anything else.

The Economic Situation

According to what we generally hear in the news, the Greek economy is completely in the toilet, and Greece is about to go down burning, taking Europe with it. Public debt is at nearly $406 billion, and new debt for 2009 was at 12.7% of GDP - the latter revealed by the new government that came to power in October 2009. According to news reports, and statements made by European politicians, this is an utter catastrophe.

But is Greece really the only country in Europe with such numbers? Spain's public debt is at $653 billion, Italy's over 2 trillion. Greece is far too small to really pull the European economy down all that much; Italy is a much more likely candidate. New debt in Britain and Spain in 2009 was only fractionally less than in Greece. The economic situation in Greece is not fantastic, far from it, but it's also not unique. After all, Greece is a poor country, and the world is in the middle of a financial crisis – to which Europe, including Greece, responded by throwing a whole lot of money at the banks that caused it.

Profit Motive

So why are some people claiming that Greece is about to default? In January 2010, Greece had no problem at all finding investors to borrow money from. European countries have recovered from worse situations before. So why would someone try to create a panic? Why is the German government insisting so aggressively that Greece shouldn't get any support from the European Union, even when Greece isn't actually asking for a bailout? And why are they insisting on cost-cutting and free market measures that even conservative economists say will only make it harder for Greece to recover?

Well, there's usually a simple answer to such questions: financial or political gain. Here are three possible reasons for the actions of the German government and its supporters:

1) Credit default swaps. Yes, those things again. CDS allow speculators (banks and hedge

funds) to bet on whether a company or even a country will default; it's an extremely

profitable game, and still completely unregulated, despite the financial crisis. As the New York Times wrote:

Bets by some of the same banks that helped Greece shroud its mounting debts may actually now be pushing the nation closer to the brink of financial ruin.

Echoing the kind of trades that nearly toppled the American International Group, the increasingly popular insurance against the risk of a Greek default is making it harder for Athens to raise the money it needs to pay its bills, according to traders and money managers.

These contracts, known as credit-default swaps, effectively let banks and hedge funds wager on the financial equivalent of a four-alarm fire: a default by a company or, in the case of Greece, an entire country. If Greece reneges on its debts, traders who own these swaps stand to profit.

“It’s like buying fire insurance on your neighbor’s house — you create an incentive to burn down the house,” said Philip Gisdakis, head of credit strategy at UniCredit in Munich.

As Greece’s financial condition has worsened, undermining the euro, the role of Goldman Sachs and other major banks in masking the true extent of the country’s problems has drawn criticism from European leaders. But even before that issue became apparent, a little-known company backed by Goldman, JP Morgan Chase and about a dozen other banks had created an index that enabled market players to bet on whether Greece and other European nations would go bust.

In other words, a lot of people stand to profit if Greece defaults, and the more panic they create, the more likely Greece is to default. And who runs the German government? The CDU ("Christian Democrats" – neoliberal conservatives, with plenty of far-far-right people in their ranks) and the FDP (libertarian free market fanatics; pretty much openly nothing but a party of lobbyists). The FDP in particular is a direct spokesman for banks and hedge funds. If you think about it that way, it's not much of a surprise that Germany has no problem giving billions to the banks that caused the financial crisis, but is refusing to show even the slightest amount of solidarity with another European government.

2) Making the Greek economy collapse means making Greek companies cheaper to acquire. German companies already own substantial parts of the Greek economy, and this would make it very easy for them to get more. (Sources inside the CDU have reported this as a motive.) Greece is a popular tourist destination, and there's a lot of money to be made. Several German politicians, in fact, suggested that a way for Greece to alleviate its debt would be to sell some of its islands at cheap prices. Wrap your mind around that for a moment.

(The notion, apart from the very disturbing political implications of a sovereign nation selling its land to private individuals, is made extra offensive by the fact that the islands are, symbolically speaking, at the heart of Greek culture and identity.)

3) Greece is being made an example of. The measures the European Union - especially Germany - is demanding are all attacks on the living standards of the population. The corrupt wealthy Greek elite, on the other hand, can just keep on going. If these measures can be pushed through in Greece, a country with a fairly strong spririt of resistance, it will send a powerful message to the rest of Europe. Someone's going to have to pay for the financial crisis, and obviously that's going to be working people. Can it be a coincidence that these attacks are happening just as a conservative government has been kicked out of office and replaced by a (supposedly, anyway) more left-leaning social democrat party? The people who made the shady deals with the banks and caused one scandal after the other were the Greek equivalent of the CDU; no-one did anything about them when they were in power.

But that's from from being the full answer. It would be entirely foolish to assume that there are only two players in this game. It is not in everyone's interest for Greece to default – some may only want its economy to sink low, others may only want certain new laws and regulations passed, and others may have completely different motivations that we don't know about. What exactly, one has to wonder, is the role of the International Monetary Fund in all this? What do the United States want?

The only thing that's really clear is that there's more fishy stuff going on here than in the Mediterranean itself.

Dehumanize Your Enemy

It's the oldest trick in the book: before you attack someone, you convince your followers that the enemy is not human. If you don't, you risk the possibility that your people might sympathize with the people on the other side, and realize they have more in common with them than with you. The German population, for example, is suffering more and more under falling wages, a social system that's being quickly dismantled, and an educational system geared towards producing wage slaves. Germany is at war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and German soldiers are committing war crimes that raise eerie memories. So demonizing Greeks has two major advantages: you keep Germans from sympathizing, and give them a good distraction. The same goes for several other countries, obviously.

This is the purpose magazines like Focus serve. The same magazine, for example, published an article in its travel guide section, which portrays Greece in terms that can only be described as racist caricature. Some highlights:

• The Greeks give their children heathen names. Think about it: heathen names! They do this, according to the article, because they are so obsessed with the glories of the past. Not because they are simply Greek names, and have been for thousands of years, but because of a blind nationalism that makes them worship the ancestors that really have nothing to do with them. (Also, apparently Germany is now a Christian theocracy.)
• The Greeks are also silly nationalists because they won't consider changing their alphabet, even though they are the only ones who are using it! The article also makes a snide comment about the teaching of ancient Greek in Greek schools, comparing it to German children being forced to learn Old High German or even Gothic – a comparison that is utterly misleading and linguistically wrong. (Sorry, I have to point this out. Seven years in academia make you sensitive to this kind of distortion.) But think about it: the Greeks are being accused of being backwards for keeping their alphabet.
• Greek streets apparently have no street signs, and only postmen know the names of the streets. This may seem like a small issue, but it's such an absurd lie, and once again makes Greeks sound like oblivious people living in a country ruled entirely by chaos. Yes, there's plenty of chaos, but give me a break.
• All Greeks hate each other, which is why the Civil War cost more lives than World War Two. A particularly disturbing statement to make, given Germany's actions in Greece and the lack of reparations for many of its war crimes.
• And very importantly (it gets mentioned several times): the Greeks love to take money from Europe and spend it on their own stuff. Everyone is always cheating and thinking only of themselves. But this is described in terms of individuals, not the government. It's the individual Greeks who are leeches living off Europe.

The effect of articles like this one (and there's plenty of them) is to make the Greek population the scapegoat for the actions of their government(s) and the international financial system. The Greek economic catastrophe, people are made to think, is the result of fat lazy Greeks living off the system that others work so hard for.

Does that sound familiar? What works with England/immigrants (or any other country), also works with Europe/Greeks.

The Real Situation

One blog I came across, basing itself on the coverage of the International Herald Tribune, summarized the situation in Greece like this:

The basic deal is that the political party that used to run Greece figured the way to stay in power was to give the citizens everything they wanted regardless of cost including huge pensions, free health care, a shit ton of unemployment insurance and tons and tons of public sector jobs.

Their problem was that there wasn't anywhere near enough tax revenue to do so and they figured that if they tried to raise taxes they'd get voted out.

This is another example of how the media can distort the facts to justify government actions: in this case, the attack on Greek living standards. But reality is quite different.

Greece is a poor country that has been through a lot of political turmoil. World War II caused massive destruction, especially because the Greeks resisted the Nazis; then came a civil war (between a far-right government backed by Western powers and a communist insurgency manipulated and ultimately betrayed by Stalinist Russia) that tore the country apart. Then, to top it all off, came a brutal military dictatorship backed by the United States. None of this made the country richer or easier to live in.

According to recent studies, 2.2 million Greeks live with less than 540€ a month. That's one fifth of the entire Greek population, and the highest percentage in the Eurozone. Unemployment is around 10% and expected to hit 12% soon. Average salaries are about a third of what they are in most major European countries; the social security system is utterly inadequate and has been scaled back even further in recent years. Even with the cutbacks of the last decade, unemployed people in Germany or France are still considerably better off than uneployed people in Greece. The only thing that allows many Greek people to survive is the strength of the family in Greek society (not always a positive thing). Why do so many Greek grandparents live with their children? It's because they simply cannot live off their pensions.

The myth of the lazy Greek is further demolished by the statistics published by the Groningen Growth & Development Centre: between 1995 and 2005, Greek people worked 1900 hours/year, more than any other people in Europe. Germans, on the other hand, worked less than 1500.

Don't worry, this is not going to turn into some kind of nationalist propaganda piece about how Greeks are the best people on Earth. We're getting to the real problems soon. But it's very important to establish that these myths about Greece, both about its culture and its economy, are nothing but easily abused stereotypes.

To fully understand what the statistics mean, you also have to keep in mind that – thanks to the European Union – product prices in Greece are generally either the same or even higher than those of Europe. This has made life incredibly hard.

Here's a personal anecdote from my mother: before the euro, she could buy two full bags of tomatoes for approximately 35 cents. Now a handful of tomatoes costs more than 2€, but people still get the same salaries as before.

The Real Problems

There are a lot of real problems in Greece that are worth talking about. Unfortunately, even when these problems are mentioned in the foreign media, they are still completely distorted.

Corruption is one of the big keywords, and it really is a big issue. Corruption is widespread in Greek society, and it's something that makes everyday life quite a bit harder for most people. But one has to distinguish between government corruption and personal, low-level corruption. It is popular, both in Greece and outside it, to attribute corruption to a problematic mindset. But apart from being racist, this is also inaccurate.

Poverty breeds corruption. A good example is the medical system, which is well-known for being highly corrupt. While things aren't as bad as they are sometimes presented by magazines like Focus ("no-one can get any treatment without tons of bribes!"), corruption really is rampant. I should know; my mother's a doctor and my father a chemist. And a lot of people immediately react to hearing about corrupt doctors with great indignation – after all, doctors get paid so much! Even in Greece, this reaction is not uncommon, especially since there is still a bit of prestige attached to the job. But the reality is that Greek doctors are amongst the worst-paid in Europe. They often work ridiculous hours, have far too many patients, and often work under atrocious conditions. (Try working with sick people in a building that has no air conditioning in the summer in Greece.) Most doctors could not live off their income.

And that's how a lot of corruption happens. It's silly, of course, because the systemic result of corruption is usually negative for everyone, but people don't think about the system when they need money for next month's rent.

Then there's the widespread corruption in the Greek government, exemplified by the previous government's record-setting amount of scandals. There's nothing essentially Greek to this corruption, however – it is the usual corruption of rich people using their power to get richer.

Another very serious problem is racism and nationalism. Greece has its equivalent of the BNP, a far-right party called LAOS. When Greece recently passed new legislation that would allow the children of immigrants who live in Greece to acquire Greek citizenship, these were the people who shouted and complained about the destruction of the Greek nation. These are the people who tell us that immigrants get everything from the state and go to the front of the line. These are the people who scream MIGRANTS TAKE ALL NEW JOBS IN GREECE. You know who they are.

The list goes on. There's too many morons who like to go "Yeah, Greece is the best, innit?" The Orthodox Church has an unholy amount of power and money and mostly uses it to make more money or cover up sex scandals. Greece spends shocking amounts of money on its military and on patrolling Europe's borders. And because people are too busy worrying about their finances and everything else, they don't think about what the pursuit of profit is doing to the environment, and Greece's amazing flora and fauna are suffering every day.

Feeding Racism

If there is one thing you can say about Greece, it's that it has a history of resistance. "Hence we will not say that Greeks fight like heroes, but that heroes fight like Greeks." Winston Churchill said about Greek resistance in World War II. The Greeks fought against the Ottoman Empire, against Italian fascism, against the Nazis, and against their own dictators, with a great deal of courage and dedication. They suffered great losses in their fight for freedom. That's not empty rhetoric, it's something that has touched every family in Greece. My grandparents were both resistance fighters, and I know more than enough people whose parents or grandparents fought the dictatorship or the Nazis or the fascists and were exiled, imprisoned or tortured.

The real danger for Greece, however, is that the justified outrage that many feel can so easily be channelled into racist or nationalist hatred. Simultaneously this creates a problem where forward-thinking people will, to differentiate themselves from the racists, end up taking positions that are equally wrong-headed and destructive.

As shown above, Germany and Europe in general are trying to push the responsibility for the financial crisis, which has more to do with worldwide capitalism than with Greece specifically, onto the Greek population. Greeks should resist this. But the nationalists and the racists are describing this as "the foreigners are attacking us," missing the fact that the Greek élite is deeply involved in this situation and equally responsible, and blaming generic "foreigners" instead of specific governments. Thus an Albanian immigrant or a half-German schoolchild are likely to experience racism due to the actions of the right-wing parties running Germany or the lunatics at Goldman Sachs.

On the other hand, there are many progressives who will react to the racists by saying "actually, the foreigners are right about us." But by doing so, all they are doing is supporting the racists in another country, and doing nothing against the real problems of Greece.

The attacks on Greek culture create a similar situation. Greece does have a rich culture, both ancient and modern. It has world-famous composers like Mikis Theodorakis (possibly the greatest musical genius of the last few centuries), great poets like Odysseas Elytis and powerful novelists like Nikos Kazantzakis. And the claim that modern and ancient Greece are totally unrelated is absurd; their unique link is already proven by the Greek language, noted by linguists for the remarkably small amount it has changed in the last three thousand or so years. The ideas and ideals of ancient Greece are part and parcel of modern Greek culture.

But I can understand how hard it is to remember this when some macho goon is going on about how absolutely superior Greek culture is to everything else in the known universe. I can understand how hard it is to defend Greek culture from racist attacks when some of the others "defending" it are despicable morons who would, not too long ago, have been informers or secret policemen for the junta. I can understand it because I've been there. I've felt that way.

The same goes for so many other issues in Greece. Take the problems over the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia claiming the name Macedonia. This is a rallying point for fascists and fanatics all over Greece. Unfortunately, it's also an historical absurdity with no basis in anything but propaganda. Anyone with half a brain cell should stand against this kind of historical falsification and the dangerous political games that come with it. But too many progressives feel uncomfortable dealing with this very important issue, because it's so popular with the far right; and so the only voices raised against historical falsification are those of the lunatics, who would falsify history in other ways. And when a country like FYROM suddenly starts making claims about an oppressed "Macedonian" minority, it becomes very hard to explain that this is nonsense – especially when there are so many immigrants who really do have terrible problems in Greece, thanks to the racists in the streets, in the government and especially in the police.

Or take Turkey. There are constant provocations from Turkey, such as hundreds of intentional violations of Greek airspace per year. Greeks have every right to be alarmed by the aggressive militarism of Turkey, a country noted for the influence of its military over politics and an absolutely terrible human rights situation. But in the face of the bellowing idiots who drool over taking back Constantinople, many Greek progressives find it very difficult to speak up, or speak only about the many things the two countries have in common, as if the conflict was a cultural one and not a political one. So when they hear about yet another provocation from Turkey, people too easily turn to the Greek version of the people who start such provocations.

It's not so much that the lunatics have a point, as that they know how to pick topics which provoke honest outrage in people, and channel that outrage into racism.

The Greek Legacy

The sad irony is that Greece does have a legacy. In fact, it has two interconnected ones: the legacies of ancient and modern Greece. But the Greek legacy isn't a legacy of nationalism and racism: it's a legacy of democracy, philosophy and resistance. It's a legacy of freedom, not in the superficial sense of freedom fries and liberty cabbage, but in the very real sense of Ελευθερία ή Θάνατος, freedom or death, that people gave their lives for in the face of overwhelming odds. Because everything that racist idiots will cite – every great victory, every great song that all Greeks sing, every well-remembered and beloved piece of poetry – is actually about freedom. The Greek heroes of the 20^th century are those who fought fascists and Nazis and dictators. They fought against racism and nationalism in its ugliest forms and often paid a steep price.

And, in the name of punishing the population for the crimes of the rich across the world, this is what is happening to these heroes:

Manolis Glezos (b. 1922), resistance fighter, attacked by police.

I vividly remember protesting against the Iraq war in 2003 and seeing so many old people in the streets, protesting with everyone else. Many of these people were at least eighty years old, but they were still out there. Not because they hated the Americans, but because they felt that a great injustice was being done. My mother told me about how the people she treated, people who were often old and poor and had many problems to deal with, were genuinely worried for the people in Iraq, half a world away.

If there's any hope for Greece, or Europe, or this planet of ours, it's only going to be found in that spirit. The spirit of recognizing our common humanity, and standing up to the racists and the morons in the name of democracy and justice and reason. And if you think that's just fancy rhetoric, well, here are two and half thousand years of history that say otherwise.

No related posts.