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Sin Agog wrote: You'd've thunk everyone north of Stevenage would have gotten the message when the mines closed down: we want you all to gracefully just die out. Please stop flopping on the deck and suffocate with a bit of self-respect.
... snip ...
Only a retrogressive status quodiot would be rooting for Syriza's failure.
Pretty much agree with every word. If anything, I think you've undersold the position.
I'd go so far as to say that anyone rooting for Syriza's failure is (unwittingly) rooting for a dangerous swing to the far right in Southern Europe. And it's not just on little-read web forums you hear this... the bloody Guardian is full of so-called "moderate leftists" suggesting that Syriza need to retreat to the centre, agree to EU/IMF instructions and calm down.
There are two things to be said about that... firstly, it totally misreads the situation in Greece which is on a real knife-edge. And secondly, it is incompatible with being "of the left". At best it's an ignorant centre-right position. At worst it's a bit more sinister than that.
There is genuine concern among my Greek friends about the volatility of politics there right now. The country is on the verge of complete economic collapse (in the sense of there being no money in the banks and no bread in the shops; not in the sense of middle class Greeks being unable to afford a second holiday this year.) And the reason for this is two decades of centrist corruption coupled with a European banking crisis.
They had a centre-left/centre-right political class which actively falsified national accounts at the behest of wealthy oligarchs who refused to pay tax. Everybody knew it was happening. The far left and the far right, both screamed about it, but so long as the status quo permitted the Greek government to generate ECB credit notes; it was ECB policy to encourage it to continue.
And then, surprise surprise, the whole thing collapses. The European financial institutions act shocked (just as they did when the Irish property bubble burst... because that was never going to happen, right?) and demand that the people of Greece be punished for the sins of their corrupt government. It was ECB policy to offer limitless credit to corrupt Irish property developers. And it was ECB policy to offer limitless credit to a corrupt Greek oligarchy (via the Greek Central Bank). I find it mystifying that so many people have bought into the idea that the citizenry of those countries be held responsible for the reckless gambling debts of a few private individuals and institutions.
And that, of course, is the point being made by Tsipras when he demands German reparations. This seems to have gone over the heads of so many people (or else they are wilfully ignoring it). He's a pretty smart guy; he knows he's not going to get any bloody war reparations. He's merely pointing out a vast discrepancy... how the German people were supported after their government betrayed them, and yet the Germans (who are the principal drivers of the troika) are demanding the Greeks be treated entirely differently. It is not distasteful to point out a very relevant truth.
And Tsipras knows he's not getting war reparations. He and Varoufakis are walking a tight-rope. The IMF/ECB intervention was not working in Greece. It didn't need "tweaking", it needed a new approach. In Ireland austerity is biting very hard, but fact is - life here now is still better than it was in the 70s and 80s, so people have adjusted. It irks me that they've accepted this debt with so little resistance, but that's how it went.
In Greece though... circumstances are very different and the country has been decimated by the policies imposed by the troika. In 2005 Greece had the lowest suicide rate in Europe. Today it has the highest. Let that statistic sink in. And think about how radically a society must have changed for the worse for that to have happened... how socially damaging the policies of the troika have been to result in that outcome. And tell me you'd be happy with unaccountable international financial institutions doing that to your country. And worse still... all of the mainstream political parties have accepted this situation and are talking about "a further 10 years of austerity".
Of course the Greeks have looked for an alternative. To not do so is literally suicidal.
The policies currently being imposed on Greece today are very similar to those imposed on Yugoslavia in the 1980s by the IMF (under the behest of a rabidly anti-socialist Reagan administration). Are we really dooming ourselves to walking that path again? My Greek friends know that Golden Dawn are unlikely to gain a popular mandate the way Syriza did... but they also know that the Greek people will not return to the centre ground either. If Syriza fails, if the current government collapses, it is very likely that a right wing coalition will find themselves requiring the tacit support of Golden Dawn in order to hold power. And once you let fascists into government, it tends to be pretty tough to get them out again.
My own view is that Tsipras has one card - and one card only - he needs to stall the troika until the Spanish elections and hope (against hope) that Podemos somehow do in Madrid what Syriza managed in Athens. If that happens, it's just about possible that a leftwing bloc within Europe, strong enough to demand policy change, could emerge. Very unlikely but it's really their best bet (and I suspect they know it). Hence all the delays and stalling and missed meetings and "promises to review".
If you want Syriza to fail in Greece then you are either hoping for a hard-right government or - at best - another decade of the Greek people watching their grandparents kill themselves because they can no longer afford their medicine, and their kids kill themselves because youth unemployment has now passed 50% and is still rising. The Greek people don't deserve what is happening to them. And it is the centre that is doing it. So the only choice is "left" or "right"?
Those who want the left to fail should - in this instance - be very careful what they are wishing for.
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