Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > The Leaders of Greece Are Some of the Phoniest Idealists You'll Ever
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________________________________________
The Leaders of Greece Are Some of the Phoniest Idealists You'll Ever See
By John Pilger [1] / AlterNet [2]
July 14, 2015
An historic betrayal has consumed Greece. Having set aside the mandate of
the Greek electorate, the Syriza government has willfully ignored last
weeks landslide No vote and secretly agreed a raft of repressive,
impoverishing measures in return for a bailout that means sinister foreign
control and a warning to the world.
Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has pushed through parliament a proposal to
cut at least 13 billion euros from the public purse 4 billion euros more
than the austerity figure rejected overwhelmingly by the majority of the
Greek population in a referendum on 5 July.
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.
Anti-austerity party sweeps to stunning victory, declared a Guardian
headline on January 25. Radical leftists the paper called Tsipras and his
impressively-educated comrades. They wore open neck shirts, and the finance
minister rode a motorbike and was described as a rock star of economics.
It was a façade. They were not radical in any sense of that cliched label,
neither were they anti austerity.
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 in accordance with European neo-liberal values and
cheap, highly profitable loans from those now seeking Greeces scalp.
Greeces debt, reports an audit by the Greek parliament, is illegal,
illegitimate and odious. 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 bailout in 2007-8 was barely controversial and
unpunished.
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
intolerable and the dung of the devil. 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.
In their travels to the court of the mighty in Brussels and Berlin, Tsipras
and Varoufakis presented themselves neither as radicals nor leftists 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 foundout about their secret austerity plans in leaks to the
media: such as a 30 June letter published in the Financial Times, in which
Tsipras promised the heads of the EU, the European Central Bank and the IMF
to accept their basic, most vicious demands which he has now accepted.
When the Greek electorate voted no on 5 July to this very kind of rotten
deal, Tsipras said, Come Monday and the Greek government will be at the
negotiating table after the referendum with better terms for the Greek
people. Greeks had not voted for better terms. They had voted for justice
and for sovereignty, as they had done on January 25.
The day after the January election a truly democratic and, yes, radical
government would have stopped every euro leaving the country, repudiated the
illegal and odious debt as Argentina did successfully and expedited a
plan to leave the crippling Eurozone. But there was no plan. There was only
a willingness to be at the table seeking better terms.
The true nature of Syriza has been seldom examined and explained. To the
foreign media it is no more than leftist or far left or hardline the
usual misleading spray. Some of Syrizas international supporters have
reached, at times, levels of cheer leading reminiscent of the rise of Barack
Obama. Few have asked: Who are these radicals? What do they believe in?
In 2013, Yanis Varoufakis wrote: Should 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. Europes crisis is far less likely
to give birth to a better alternative to capitalism
I bow to the criticism that I have campaigned on an agenda founded on the
assumption that the left was, and remains, squarely defeated
. 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 Thatchers victory].
What 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 Thatchers neoliberal trip? Precisely none. What good will it
do today to call for a dismantling of the Eurozone, of the European Union
itself
?
Varoufakis omits all mention of the Social Democratic Party that split the
Labour vote and led to Blairism. In suggesting people in Britain scorned
socialist change when they were given no real opportunity to bring about
that change he echoes Blair.
The leaders of Syriza are revolutionaries of a kind 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, Germanys finance minister, an imperial thug. Like the Labour
Party in Britain and its equivalents among former social democratic parties
such as the Labor Party in Australia, still describing themselves as
liberal or even left, Syriza is the product of an affluent, highly
privileged, educated middle class, schooled in postmodernism, as Alex
Lantier wrote.
For them, class is the unmentionable, let alone an enduring struggle,
regardless of the reality of the lives of most human beings. Syrizas
luminaries are well-groomed; they lead not the resistance that ordinary
people crave, as the Greek electorate has so bravely demonstrated, but
better terms of a venal status quo that corrals and punishes the poor.
When merged with identity politics and its insidious distractions, the
consequence is not resistance, but subservience. Mainstream political life
in Britain exemplifies this.
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.
John Pilger [3]'s documentaries have won academy awards in both the U.K. and
the U.S. His new film, "Utopia [4]," was released in Australia in January.
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Source URL:
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ll-ever-see
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/john-pilger
[2] http://alternet.org
[3] http://johnpilger.com
[4]
http://www.theguardian.com/film/video/2013/oct/22/john-pilger-utopia-watch-t
railer-video?CMP=soc_568
[5] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on The Leaders of Greece
Are Some of the Phoniest Idealists You'll Ever See
[6] http://www.alternet.org/
[7] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > The Leaders of Greece Are Some of the Phoniest Idealists You'll Ever
See
The Leaders of Greece Are Some of the Phoniest Idealists You'll Ever See
By John Pilger [1] / AlterNet [2]
July 14, 2015
An historic betrayal has consumed Greece. Having set aside the mandate of
the Greek electorate, the Syriza government has willfully ignored last
weeks landslide No vote and secretly agreed a raft of repressive,
impoverishing measures in return for a bailout that means sinister foreign
control and a warning to the world.
Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has pushed through parliament a proposal to
cut at least 13 billion euros from the public purse 4 billion euros more
than the austerity figure rejected overwhelmingly by the majority of the
Greek population in a referendum on 5 July.
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.
Anti-austerity party sweeps to stunning victory, declared a Guardian
headline on January 25. Radical leftists the paper called Tsipras and his
impressively-educated comrades. They wore open neck shirts, and the finance
minister rode a motorbike and was described as a rock star of economics.
It was a façade. They were not radical in any sense of that cliched label,
neither were they anti austerity.
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 in accordance with European neo-liberal values and
cheap, highly profitable loans from those now seeking Greeces scalp.
Greeces debt, reports an audit by the Greek parliament, is illegal,
illegitimate and odious. 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 bailout in 2007-8 was barely controversial and
unpunished.
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
intolerable and the dung of the devil. 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.
In their travels to the court of the mighty in Brussels and Berlin, Tsipras
and Varoufakis presented themselves neither as radicals nor leftists 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 foundout about their secret austerity plans in leaks to the
media: such as a 30 June letter published in the Financial Times, in which
Tsipras promised the heads of the EU, the European Central Bank and the IMF
to accept their basic, most vicious demands which he has now accepted.
When the Greek electorate voted no on 5 July to this very kind of rotten
deal, Tsipras said, Come Monday and the Greek government will be at the
negotiating table after the referendum with better terms for the Greek
people. Greeks had not voted for better terms. They had voted for justice
and for sovereignty, as they had done on January 25.
The day after the January election a truly democratic and, yes, radical
government would have stopped every euro leaving the country, repudiated the
illegal and odious debt as Argentina did successfully and expedited a
plan to leave the crippling Eurozone. But there was no plan. There was only
a willingness to be at the table seeking better terms.
The true nature of Syriza has been seldom examined and explained. To the
foreign media it is no more than leftist or far left or hardline the
usual misleading spray. Some of Syrizas international supporters have
reached, at times, levels of cheer leading reminiscent of the rise of Barack
Obama. Few have asked: Who are these radicals? What do they believe in?
In 2013, Yanis Varoufakis wrote: Should 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. Europes crisis is far less likely
to give birth to a better alternative to capitalism
I bow to the criticism that I have campaigned on an agenda founded on the
assumption that the left was, and remains, squarely defeated
. 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 Thatchers victory].
What 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 Thatchers neoliberal trip? Precisely none. What good will it
do today to call for a dismantling of the Eurozone, of the European Union
itself
?
Varoufakis omits all mention of the Social Democratic Party that split the
Labour vote and led to Blairism. In suggesting people in Britain scorned
socialist change when they were given no real opportunity to bring about
that change he echoes Blair.
The leaders of Syriza are revolutionaries of a kind 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, Germanys finance minister, an imperial thug. Like the Labour
Party in Britain and its equivalents among former social democratic parties
such as the Labor Party in Australia, still describing themselves as
liberal or even left, Syriza is the product of an affluent, highly
privileged, educated middle class, schooled in postmodernism, as Alex
Lantier wrote.
For them, class is the unmentionable, let alone an enduring struggle,
regardless of the reality of the lives of most human beings. Syrizas
luminaries are well-groomed; they lead not the resistance that ordinary
people crave, as the Greek electorate has so bravely demonstrated, but
better terms of a venal status quo that corrals and punishes the poor.
When merged with identity politics and its insidious distractions, the
consequence is not resistance, but subservience. Mainstream political life
in Britain exemplifies this.
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.
John Pilger [3]'s documentaries have won academy awards in both the U.K. and
the U.S. His new film, "Utopia [4]," was released in Australia in January.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [5]
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.[6]
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/world/leaders-greece-are-some-phoniest-idealists-you
ll-ever-see
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/john-pilger
[2] http://alternet.org
[3] http://johnpilger.com
[4]
http://www.theguardian.com/film/video/2013/oct/22/john-pilger-utopia-watch-t
railer-video?CMP=soc_568
[5] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on The Leaders of Greece
Are Some of the Phoniest Idealists You'll Ever See
[6] http://www.alternet.org/
[7] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
