New York
God, it’s great to be Greek right now. We’ve out-front-paged the Holocaust as well as the Israeli ‘existential threat’. (The latter has been jerked up a notch, and Big Bagel papers present the Iran problem as 1939 and the Nazis having the bomb.) When the Greek alarm first sounded in mid-2009 in a report by the IMF, what do you think the elegant Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the towering Sarkozy and the statuesque Merkel did? They did to it what I’d like to do to The Spectator’s deputy editor, squashed it and shoved it into a very dark room where no one could find it. Instead of pricking the boil — or boiling the prick, for that matter — they let it fester. This is the way of great men and women. Like Alexander the Great in front of the Gordian knot, they decided to let it be for a while. The champion of the non-action was Jean-Claude Trichet — his surname means cheat.
What I would like to know is how stupendously stupid and over-the-top dumb we — the so-called people — are? How human beings so lacking in brain function can summon the ability to walk or talk, no less realise that we are being taken for the ride of our lives by the crooks of Brussels? These glassy-eyed ghouls knew all along what the Greek crooks were up to, but kept shtoom for political expedience. The great Greek economist Taki wrote about the problem in these here pages, warning that the politicians were lying and then some, but, like Enoch’s prophecy, it went unheeded. In the meantime, two years have been wasted while Greek politicians have been zipping around on freebies looking awfully busy and doing nothing. Take it from Taki: because of all the denials, lies and delays, Greece will need to write down 85 per cent of her debt, 50 per cent not being even close. You have been warned.
As I speak to Athens daily, I am constantly reminded of the lambent line a fat politico delivered 65 years or so ago, when asked why he was giving up power: ‘Because there’s nothing left to steal.’ These, then, are the power-hungry amateurs who got rid of the monarchy in a fake referendum, and whose only professionalism lies in cheating and stealing. These same crooks now demand sacrifices, yet among them in parliament are those who took bribes of up to €250 million each, immune from prosecution by law. Now what kind of idiot would allow such a thing? Yet the Greeks, who pride themselves on being smart and look down on the Swiss as idiotic, have been accepting this state of affairs since the war.
Not that the Brits are any better. Here you have ineradicable proof that the dealers are dealing from the bottom — the spectre of democracy, as in a referendum — yet the dealers made it clear that people’s opinions were irrelevant to those who run Europe. Sarkozy and Merkel told Papandreou to fuggeraboutit, and he did. And as far as a vigorous assault on tax evasion, an end to rampant public-sector patronage and structural reforms, again, fuggeraboutit. Not a single civil servant has been let go, and we are two years down the line from when the mess was first exposed.
Greek newspapers are as guilty as the politicians, whose patronage they seek. A left-of-centre large-circulation daily headlines that the ‘Germans never beat us, and they’re trying to do it now through the economy’. That was news to the poor little Greek boy. I now wonder what those beautifully uniformed German officers were doing in my house those three years. I used to play ‘Ach du lieber Augustin’ on the piano for them.
When the you-know-what first hit the fan, the deputy prime minister, a clown who could make a leper colony roll about laughing, accused the Germans of having stolen all the Greek gold during the war. This was an official statement. It took the Greek embassy in London subtly to deny it, as the gold had been shipped half to London, the other half to South Africa in 1938, and was duly returned to Athens when things calmed down.
Greece’s place in the euro zone was accomplished by lying to the rest of the liars, which is poetic justice, to say the least. Like the joke about who pays when a Greek, an Italian and a Spaniard go to a bar for a drink. It is, of course, the German. Antiquated labour rules, protected businesses, a bloated public sector, and poorly managed state assets are not about to disappear overnight. By slashing social benefits and services, the numbers of poor and unemployed keep surging. It is a vicious circle which cannot possibly be resolved. Greece has to get out of the euro, even out of Europe. No Greek government can remain in control, no matter what bull-shit it slings under such circumstances. Better prick the boil — that word again — now rather than later.
And another thing you Brits forgot. Delors, Trichet, the generation of 1968 are now in positions of power. The ludicrous Baroness Ashton — still cramming to understand what the word bonjour means — was a CND treasurer; Javier Solana, an ex-Socialist Workers’ Party member; Manuel Barroso, an ex-Maoist; Joschka Fischer, an ex-riot leader, and so on. In other words, the scum who failed to win power over us through force of arms are now leading us by the nose through stealth and the EU Trojan Horse. Somebody wake up David Cameron.
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