2 ΝΟΕΜΒΡΊΟΥ 2011
By Dimitris Konstantakopouloshttp://konstantakopoulos.
Greece is on the verge of revolt or revolution, at least if its government will continue to refuse an early election everybody in Greece is asking now. The markets seem ready to launch an even bigger attack against Italy. There is military tension in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea, increasing the probability of a military conflict involving two members of the EU, a candidate member and Israel. As for Berlin, it is repeating, in the way it is handling the European crisis, the same pattern of strategic mistakes which contributed to its military defeats in World War I and II, the only difference being that in the 20th century we were engaged in military wars while now we are facing a financial total war.
Germany has a rare opportunity in history to re-establish itself as a normal power, to transform itself into the political and economic leader of all Europe against the “Markets”, a Good and Democratic “hegemon” of the continent, investing its ambitions into a radically reformed European project of world significance. Instead, its policies undermine the European project and they are fuelling intra-european debt and political wars. Germany becomes, one more time in its history, a hostage in an extremely narrow, provincial sense of nationalism, the same primitive form of nationalism that destroyed in the past the German Volk. By doing that, Germans risk a “third Waterloo” in two centuries, a defeat more heavy than the one they suffered in 1945. There is no much time left before the historic defeat of the European Idea, a collapse of the EU and a global economic crisis worse than the one of 1929, which will have catastrophic consequences for Europe, the world and Germany itself.
Using a more systemic approach, we can easily discern in the ways the crisis is developing in the European Union and the world economic architecture, some of the characteristics that led to the rapid self-demise of the soviet system and the self-destruction of the Soviet Union, a system very different but as “closed”, as the current monetarist and neoliberal European and global economic system. The way European leaders are handling the European crisis, brings strong memories to the way Gorbachev was behaving, by destabilizing vital functions of his system and structure, without having any clear idea with what to replace them. Unlike the Chinese CP, Gorbachev borrowed massively and legitimized western values, to use them in his internal political struggles, thus destroying the “image of the enemy” which was the heart of his political system. The same we bear witness in Europe right now. Our “regime” is based on the “freedom, prosperity and democracy” promise. The “regime” will simply not survive because it is trying to ensure more and more profits for the banks and it is destroying whole communities, in order to repay the mountain of debt it has accumulated.
In this paper we try to see how different financial, political, ideological, national and geopolitical factors are contributing to the current crisis of the EU. We propose a synthesis of two seemingly opposed interpretations, one that is favoring the chaotic nature of the financial crisis and another one which is attempting to see in every stage of the crisis the advansing project of an “Empire of Finance”, shaping Europe and the world according to its interests and its world vision. We focus on German policy, because now Germany is the only remaining nation of Europe trying to produce a policy for Europe. The only other real actor in Europe is Greece, because it became the experimentation field for the new economic and social order in Europe. But also because the Greek government, under the direct control of centers in the international financial capital, behaves as a real “agent of chaos” in European affairs.
We are at a defining moment in European and, in particular, German history. The same malevolent mechanisms we have witnessed in Europe before World War I and II, are again in action, in financial, not in military terms this time (at least for now), but with the same, potentially catastrophic, consequences. European prosperity, democracy and civilization, everything we were able to achieve since 1945, are now at stake. As a result of the way German leadership is handling the European crisis, Germany runs the very real risk of experiencing at the end, an economic, political, geopolitical, moral and strategic defeat, comparable to the military defeat it has suffered in 1945.
Our minds cannot really and fully grasp the new situation. Our way of thinking is still based on the realities and certainties of the world as it was between 1945 and 2008; a good analogy is how the Europeans were completely taken aback by the eruption of World War I in 1914, thinking still in terms of the Belle Epoque, while crossing well into the new era of Wars and Revolutions which characterized the first half of 20th century. “We won’t pay for the Greeks” say the Germans, very much like the French said in a not so different occasion, “we will not die for Dantsig”. But the “assasination” of Greece risks having the same consequences with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo, in 1914.
The debt crisis is rapidly destroying the political foundations not only of the existing EU, but of any kind of European integration. A media war has been launched against Greece and other countries of the European periphery, the so called PIIGS, which reminds us of the psychological campaigns against “hostile”, “rogue” states like Iraq or Serbia. Such campaigns preceded in fact the military attacks against these countries, much in the same way they preceded the speculative attacks against Greece, transforming rapidly, in fact, a country-member of the eurozone, into the financial equivalent of Iraq.
Two years later the EU summits remind us now more and more of boxing matches and they are more and more ineffective. Germany, France, Britain and Italy have the worse relations they ever had. The “European” Central Bank tries to include, in the “restructuring” deal of Greek debt, the exclusion of the debt it bought at very low price in the secondary market – that is, it is speculating against and making money of a member country of the EU in a situation of distress! Common people in Germany say they don’t want to pay out of their hard work Greek crooks’ debt, unaware that Greeks work much more than Germans and, anyway, German “help for Greece” money does not go to Greece but to the international megabanks, which are the real crooks. The Bulgarian Prime Minister says he is happy because Greek society is destroyed, much as the Bulgarian society was destroyed at the fall of communism. Greeks themselves are more and more accusing the Germans of behaving in exactly the same way as in World War II, that is destroying and looting their country. They talk, in increasing numbers, about a 4th Reich and they tend to remember more and more of their EAM, the legendary National Liberation Front, the more important resistance movement in all of Europe, active between 1941 and 1944. What does this all mean? It means that less than two years after the eruption of the European sovereign debt crisis, the financial, political and ideological prerequisites for a destruction of the whole European project are now in place. World forces, especially the new “Empire of Finance”, having an interest in dominating or destroying Europe, have new and important tools to achieve their goals. Every European nation is blaming the other member states for crisis; a crisis which the world banks and the complete unregulated world finance and economy are mainly to blame!
The German dilemma
For the first time in eighty years, Germany is keeping now, in its hands, the key to the fate of Europe, its democracy and civilization. But it will not keep it for long and does not seem to know what to do with it. Germans have used the “markets” against Greece as a kind of “Maastricht police”, to “punish” Greeks and “discipline” other Europeans, without realizing the terrible price they will pay, as Faust did, for their alliance with the devil. They torn apart Greece economically, just like Stalin and Hitler did with Poland in 1939. Germany is overestimating itself and it’s relying too much to its economic power, the same way it overestimated and relied too much on its military power, during the 20th century. Berlin thinks it can play with the Markets, as Dalladier, Chamberlain or Stalin thought they could play with and use Hitler.
Between 1939 and 1941, Hitler attacked all Europeans, trying to unite and discipline them, before addressing his main concern, the conquest of Russia and the defeat of Bolshevism. But Hitler’s project was reflecting the essentially provincial, narrow and violent character of German nationalism. Germany has never understood its own great theoretician of War, the Prussian Carl von Clauzevitch, who rightly saw behind the victories of Napoleon, the force of the ideas of the Great French Revolution. The more successful and stable hegemonies were those based on general ideas and that also included a “carrot” for the nations under their dominion. This was the case of the US hegemony, based on the vision of an “independent, free and successful individual”, of USSR, based on “socialism”, or of the EU as long as it was based on the common dream of “prosperity and freedom for all”.
Hitler failed to conquer Britain and he paid a big price for attacking Greece. He could have wined over USSR, but when he finally attacked it, in June 1941, he had already lost precious energy and time. In a way that would let Zigmund Freud voiceless, Angela Merkel is doing exactly the same. She is trying to punish Greece and discipline all Europeans, before addressing the question of the Markets, on behalf of all the EU. She is running the risk of destroying all political capital of Germany in European Union.
The Markets’ and the IMF’s “police”, that Germany itself invited, welcomed and cooperated with, not only “punished” the supposed Greek “criminal”, as a matter of fact it destroyed him literally, and it is now attacking one country after another in Europe and even the USA. Thus proving that Greece is not an exception, but an extreme case, permitting us to understand and realize the fundamental mechanisms in action. For two years everybody is trying to address the Greek problem, but the only result of these efforts is the immense increase of the debt of this country and the rapid and unprecedented destruction of its economy and society.
No solution inside the system
German and European politicians try to find a solution, but everything that is proposed and then agreed, fails in the following weeks or months, proving that the problem is systematic, i.e. there is no solution inside the given political and economic “model”, the so called “liberal globalization”, characterized by the accumulation of enormous economic and political power to the financial “captains” and the complete deregulation of financial and other markets, practically of every financial, economic and trade activity around the globe. We are destroying Europe, precipitating a world crisis worse than the one we suffered in 1929.
The financial monster we created in the last 40 years, a world “Empire of Money”, is now destroying our states, nations and civilization. As long as the solution we propose avoids in aiming at the main cause of the problem, the problem will persist, having as a consequence the very existence not only of the European Union, but of the entire European civilization, welfare state and democracy, everything Europeans were able to achieve after 1945. If we really try to repay the mountain of debt accumulated by the banks and other financial institutions, we will have to destroy our societies, to transform European citizens into a kind of life-long slaves, to organize the social equivalent of new world wars, or to launch new military wars in a scale even more massive than the ones we experienced in the Middle East during the last decade or to destroy even faster the natural environment of the planet, the very foundations of our existence.
History is putting Germans in a dramatic strategic dilemma. They now have a really historic chance to become again a “normal” nation, escaping the mental “prison” that was imposed to them after their defeat in the 2nd World War and because of the way this defeat was handled by both Germans and their conquerors (1). To succeed, it would require of Germany to become the leader of the European nations, in their effort to control the financial monster threatening European society, democracy and civilization. It would require of Germans to take the lead in a really titanic, extremely difficult, but also absolutely necessary radical shift of paradigm, towards another economic model, if we really wish to save our continent from the totalitarian force of the so-called “Markets”. We need to radically restructure the European debt, to ban or at least regulate heavily CDS and other derivatives, to create a European economic model that produces debt with a production model, turning towards keynsianism, some form of protectionism and regulation. We need a gigantic redistribution of income and wealth, to reverse the path we are following for forty years. We need a European government and not governance, but such a government must be democratic and must also meet social, development and ecological goals, not just guarantee the value of money, as Maastricht does. We need a new New Deal and, in order to achieve it, a political leadership with the courage and skills of Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill or Charles de Gaulle is needed, in order to address the present crisis and save Europe.
The other way for Berlin is to continue doing what it is doing, to precipitate the destruction of the Union and alienate the majority of its nations, laying itself the foundations of the dominance of the “Empire of Money” on the whole continent, including finally Germany itself as one of the subject-states. This country possesses of course important comparative advantages and it will be able to survive longer without the other Europeans, but how can it stand up globally as a unit, compared to China or India, in 20 years? What kind of “soft” (not only “economic”) power will it possess, after the terrible political and ideological fall-out from a total European destruction under its leadership? Such an outcome could in fact signify an economic, moral, political, and strategic defeat of Germany worse than the military one it suffered in 1945. No more, no less.
Empire against Germany
It was the first secretary of NATO, Lord Ismay, who defined the goal of the Atlantic Alliance with his famous formula: «To keep the Americans in, the Germans down, the Russians out». The British Empire has delivered its mantle to the US Empire, the US Empire kept its crown by an alliance of financial power and American weapons, the USSR has committed suicide, but the imperial “know-how” remains intact. Ways and subjects are changing, not fundamental goals. Now, it is probably not the Secretary General of NATO who is of importance, but the President of Goldman Sachs Lloyd Blankfein, who was once heard saying “I do the job of God”. (3)
Blankfein could not slip in 2008. He had everything well planned in advance, but still he could not be sure of the direction things could take. His man, Polson, had to beg literally in front of the Congressmen to save the Banks. Three years later, Lloyd and his colleagues are probably laughing at the Germans and the Europeans, Merkel, Sarkozy or Obama, all of them trying in a humiliating way to “calm the markets”. Not only he and his colleagues were able to conserve and expand their empire and its fantastic profits, not only they were able to pass to the states their own losses, thus creating the sovereign debt crisis, but they are now at the point of “regulating” the size of state budgets, the level of social expenditure and investment in Europe and US, even how many members the European Union should have or if it will continue to exist!
A Goldman Sachs’ man was appointed chief of the “European” Central Bank. Another, Otmar Issing, is writing in the Financial Times Deutschland, putting essentially Europeans in front of the dilemma either to transform their Union into a “dictatorship of the Markets”, in proper form, or see it dissolved. This same Issing, who is considered in Germany, God knows why, the biggest authority in monetary policy, was explaining in another famous article, in March 2010, why Europe should not help Greece. In the latter article he hid his capacity as paid advisor of Goldman Sachs, the bank that, while being an advisor of the Greek government, did not see any conflict of interest in orchestrating, since September 2009, the speculative attack against Athens.
Financiers like Issing or Soros, the later known for the great financial attack against British participation in the EMU, an early predecessor of the attack now launched against Europe by the financial empire, are now the main people discussing in European newspapers the fate of the continent that created all the basic and essential ideas of modern times in all spheres of life and knowledge. This is what’s become now the Europe of Kant and Voltaire, Marx and Nietsche, Robespierre and Garivaldi, Sartre and Goethe, of French Revolution, German romanticism or socialism. Soros, Issing, Goldman Sachs, or people like Barroso (!), are discussing and deciding the fate of European civilisation, that is how they will destroy it.
City’s “friendly” advice to Germans or the imperial trap for Berlin
At the end of September, the London Financial Times published an unusual, blunt editorial, urging EU, ECB and IMF not to deliver the sixth tranche of the loan they had agreed to provide Greece with. The editorial explained that Greece had not any international financial obligations to fulfill until the end of the year. If the tranche would not be delivered, the Greek government would be unable to pay salaries and pensions, explained the editorial of the newspaper, spokesman for the City financiers. (In the weeks following the publication of this editorial, the Greek government, under the threat of stopping of financing, begun to act in complete disarray and panic, slaughtering literally all social classes in the country, under the close supervision of the “EU, ECB, IMF” troika which sent to Greece and is practically acting as high level economic murderer).
British know Greeks and Germans, their national character, much better than Greeks and Germans know themselves. They fought and won over both of these nations repeatedly and in various ways. The City financiers are in a very good position to predict the probable result, if their advice would be followed and it is followed. It will precipitate the catastrophe of Greece, thus putting this country and Europe in a much weaker position to confront them. Very probably, it will also push the Greek people, sooner or later, to some kind of revolt or revolution, against their government first of all, but also, probably, against Germany and EU. You can accuse Greeks of everything you wish. But they made the second more important European revolution after the French and they convened a constituent assembly in 1822, when Napoleon was already defeated and a “Holly Alliance” was ruling over Europe that banned any kind of revolt. They also organized the most massive, taking into account the population of the country, resistance, during the 2nd world war.
City financiers know also, very well, the German character, they know that Germans like discipline as much as Greeks like revolt. They believe that Berlin will respond to a Greek revolt in a harsh, unpolitical and unflexible way. Germany and the EU have, probably, the political and economic weight to provoke an even bigger catastrophe for Greece, than the one they have already provoked with their policy, in cooperation with the Greek government. But what they don’t have are the means to escape the financial and, even more important, the terrible political, ideological and geopolitical fall out from the destruction of a small but at the same time the most historic country in Europe. They can do it, they will probably do it, but they will precipitate their own doom. If Americans spoke about the “law of unintended consequences”, after their adventures in the Middle East, we will have to introduce in Europe the new “law of assymetrical results”.
The idea of political integration in Europe will receive a fatal blow for decades. Even now, the political climate in Europe is becoming poisonous enough. Both “rich” and “poor” nations begin to protest against “helping” Greece, unaware that they don’t help Greeks in any way, what they do is help the banks destroy Greece, sometimes even speculating on and profiting from the difficulties of a fellow country-member. Everybody in Europe begins now to look to national solutions. In France, always the political barometer of the whole continent, the fascist National Front of Marine Le Pen is now a respected political force. The fundamental political axioms, based on which the post-war prosperity, democracy and peace in Europe was created and endured are now rapidly undermined, in front of our very own eyes.
When the catastrophe will occur, when the dust will fall down, every European nation will begin to accuse the other Europeans, and all of them the Greeks. German and other European leaders probably will accuse Greeks for all the ills of Europe and use them as a pretext to impose draconian economic and social policies in Germany and Europe. Greeks from their own view will be frustrated being negated by Europe, towards which they are turned for two and a half centuries. They will turn not so much against the “markets”, who lack “address” and telephone number, but against Europe and Germany in particular, accusing it of destroying their country for the second time in less than a century. They will remember that Germans did not pay any war reparation and they did not return even the gold stolen from the Greek central bank. They will reopen the accounts of the Ziemens and other contracts, given the fact that European firms were massively paying Greek politicians. The International Herald Tribune, the Time, or even the Financial Times will then publish very accurate reports of hunger in Athens or analyses of how it has proven impossible for the Europeans to solve their own problems. The implications will be clear. First, the spectacle of Greek social catastrophe will be used to terrorize all European citizens in accepting the salaries and pensions that their governments will be allowed by the banks to give them. Second, everybody outside Germany will make the same conclusion: “Germans did not change. They remain the same. We can’ trust them”.
This is exactly the fundamental psychological and ideological mechanism used by the Empire to dominate after the War over Germany and Europe and keep the continent divided and dependent, in spite of its very important economic, social or intellectual achievements. And it will be a big irony of History that German nationalism will have, once more in recent history, contributed to the demise of the German national interests.
Let us remember what happened in 1956. The Soviet Union had still a tremendous prestige in Europe, due to its role in the defeat of Hitler. Nikita Khrushchev was trying to reform the country internally, to get it out of its terrible Stalinist legacy. When the Hungarian revolution erupted, some forces encouraged Budapest to revolt, by assuring it will have western backing. Hungarians quit the Warsaw Pact. It was more than what Moscow could afford. Soviet tanks did not smash only the Hungarians, they also destroyed the soviet prestige in Europe, the western European communist movement and the chances of a successful reform of the Soviet Union itself. The foundations of its own dissolution, decades later, were already laid. Israel found, by the way, an opportunity, as events were unfolding in Central Europe to unleash another of its wars in the Middle East.
Now put European Union in the place of the Soviet Union, Germany in the place of Russia, Greece in the place of Hungary, CDS in the place of tanks, and you will have a probable scenario for the immediate future. Many things are also already happening now, and more will happen, as in 1956, in the Middle East, as our attention will be kept by the European wars of debt. By the way, this is the classic way powers outside Europe were able to dominate over its nations in the 20th century, i.e. by having Europeans fight among themselves. In the previous century it was by military means, now it is by financial.
The markets “ultimatum” to Europe: submit or dissolve
The strategy of the markets towards Europe is an important point we can’t analyze in depth in the space constraints we have. The fact is that we tend to look to the markets as semi-automatic capital mechanisms, we tend to see the banks and other financial institutions as simple economic, profit-looking actors. They are not. We confuse the nearly automatic function of the markets with the possibility of a very concentrated group of capital holders to orchestrate and catalyze market events. We forget that the ten biggest banks in the world are able to mobilize a capital equal to the debt of all nations. They have the same financial power with all nations!
Private financial institutions are strategic actors. They represent the biggest concentration of financial power and international political influence the world has ever known. They were even able to partially hijack, through derivatives, the main state function of money emission. Their level of strategic planning is the level required of empires. Our states and politicians do not have anything even remotely comparable, not to speak of their own dependence towards money owners. The only weakness of this world of “State behind the States” is that it is lacking political legitimacy and military force: it has to rely mainly to the US armed forces and military-industrial complex. They are radical in their thought, we are conservatives. They manage the radical change of the system in their direction, we try to manage a more and more unmanageable system. They tend to look in the long-term, we tend to manage day-to-day affairs, preparing for the next municipal or national elections. They see the big picture, we see the small. This is why they are winning.
In the geopolitical sphere, the Wolfowitch and Jeremia reports, which shaped the post cold war strategy of the USA and established the foundation of the wars in the Middle East that followed, constitute a very useful example of the imperial thinking, a model which can help us understand also how the “Leninists of the markets” are also thinking and acting. In fact, the financial attack against Greece follows the same strategic logic with the military attack against Iraq, it is the cornerstone, the overture for a radical reshape of the world.
What the two reports essentially explain is that the Empire must not wait for “threats” to its dominion appear or activate, that there is a need for proactive action, having as a goal to preclude beforehand the emergence of power poles able to compete the American global domination. If the European Union becomes a political entity in its own right, it will constitute an obvious threat to the geopolitical monopoly of the Empire. If the euro establishes itself as the world reserve money, it will undermine one of the pillars of Us domination and the possibility of financing in the future the US economy.
By the way, and speaking about the economy, the markets know better than anyone else that a second, deeper financial tsunami is coming. Instead of trying to stop it, they obviously wish to channel it and use it in a way profitable for them. They are even obliged to do so, because otherwise, they are rightly afraid that finally some politician will be found to blame banks and markets for the crisis and ask for them to pay a considerable part of the debt, instead of demolishing the whole European postwar edifice in order to repay it. They know also that times of upheaval are also big opportunities to shape things for decades to come. If they don’t use them in their own profit, they will suffer serious, probably fatal losses. The present crisis is, from their perspective, a huge, historic opportunity to demolish the European welfare state and probably the European democracy, transforming European workers into slaves working all their life to repay the amount of debt accumulated.
The markets can afford an EU working strictly according to the Maastricht monetary monster, thus becoming their agent. They can’t afford the transformation of EU into any kind of “state” power really controlling them. If the EU can transform itself successfully into an instrument of the Empire, they will probably use it. If not, they will use the environment of chaotic decomposition of the euro and the EU, in order to achieve the above mentioned political, economic and social goals.
In a revealing recent article, the Wall Street Journal could not resist the temptation to express its enormous enthusiasm for the direction European crisis was taking. First, it said, this crisis has committed a fatal blow to the dangerous dream of a “European super-nation”. Second, the euro has played its role provoking the crisis. Third, WSJ was insisting that the upcoming crisis really represents a truly historic chance to destroy the social state in the continent and in the US.
The markets hate modern humanism, they hate strong states in general and the Germans in particular. In ancient Athens we had the first “restructuring” of the debt by Solon, which led to the first experiment of Democracy. The theoretician of ancient democracy Protagoras epitomized the slogan of this democracy by saying “man is the measure of all money”. But for the “civilization” of finance, it is the other way around: “Money is the measure of all men” or, more practically, markets regulate everything.
The upcoming Greek revolt
The program applied now in Greece by the EU, the ECB, the IMF and a “Greek government”, which finds itself in better terms with the Rotchild family than with the Greek people, does not let the Greeks with many options, other than to revolt, even without the canny pushing of Financial Times editorials. The program is tantamount to economic and social genocide and has, already, destroyed the foundations of parliamentary democracy in this country. Under European and international “help” the Greek economy is in a free fall, at a rhythm superior to this of the Weimar Republic, before Hitler took power. Every single social class, including the middle classes, is rapidly getting destroyed, with the exception of very thin layers of super rich people, its social structure transforming rapidly towards the usual Latin American models. The average living standards and available income is on a 50% reduction spiral without any perspective of stabilization. Social security and health care is destroyed, the state is melting down. The irony of history, if the term is appropriate, is that the “cure” applied to Greece punishes especially the most productive, hard working and honest among its citizens, thus destroying any possibility of a national renaissance. Most of the young, more talented and better educated and dynamic people of the country dream of emigrating. The only reason we do not yet witness armed groups of the far left and the far right fighting in the streets, is the inertia of human mind which tends always to be late compared to the change of situations. The morale of the Greek nation is now in its worse situation since the first terrible winter of German occupation, in 1941-42, before the appearance of the enormous resistance movement, the biggest in Europe during the 2nd World War, compared to the scope of the country. Greeks are already experiencing, in the big urban centers, not just poverty, but the first widespread cases of famine. If this was not enough, different international agents appear proposing to get the whole property of the Greek state in order to alleviate the country from part of its debt or presenting themselves as the “builders” of a new Greek nation state, much in the same way they looted and destroyed the ex-Soviet Republics and Russia, during the years of “transition to nothing” and “shock without therapy”.
The forces which planned and are now executing the destruction of Greece, prefer probably an implosion to an explosion of the country. Especially the Germans seem to wait for this, and anyway they never understood the “rationality in irrationality” of revolts and revolutions and they probably think that Greeks will accept the decimation of their conditions of life passively, like it happened in Eastern Europe. We can’t exclude such a scenario, but it doesn’t seem plausible. Greeks have a completely different political tradition than Eastern Europeans. There is no communism to blame for everything in the Greek case. There is of course a massively corrupted political class and state elite. They were corrupt by themselves, but they were also in the payroll of many big European firms like Siemens, which, in exchange of the bribes given, they exploited for decades the Greek market, sometimes literally looting the Greek state and budget.
The rapid destruction of all social bonds and national ideas taking now place in Greece, as a result of the European and IMF program, is unleashing a terrible force, waiting to express itself. The Empire knows that. To the perspective of a social explosion in Greece, they would prefer to channel the energy unleashed to other directions. Except implosion or explosion, there are two other possible directions. One would be towards a “war” between Greeks and immigrants. 80-90% of the emigration flows to Europe try to use Greece as a transit gate to Europe, but they stay finally in Greece, decomposing all its social structures, that are already problematic. The second possibility is towards small “wars”, nationalism and fascism.
Mars meets Venus
Greece is not only the epicenter of the debt crisis. It is a fractal of all the possible crises with the potential of threatening Europe. Greece and Cyprus, unfortunately for their people, are located in one of the more important geostrategic points in the world, controlling the access of Russia to the “warm seas”, of France and Germany to the energy of the Middle East, of Israel to the western world. They are at the crossroads of the Middle Eastern “world of Mars”, the Slavic world, in temporary retreat and decline, and the European “world of Venus”. Cyprus seems to posses important energy reserves. If anywhere, it is in this region that can be combined the explosive dynamics of “geopolitical revisionism”, in action in the Middle East, especially during the last decade, and of the “market revisionism”, trying to reshape fundamentally and in its own profit the state of affairs established in Europe after the War.
For the time being the debt wars in Europe and the military conflicts in the Middle East follow separate, but equally explosive paths. What can happen if they combine?
Has the European Union any, even remote capacity, of handling at the same time its debt crisis and a geopolitical one, or is it risking to be destroyed before anybody understands what is happening? Look at the map of the region. What do you see? A situation of unprecedented instability after 1989-91. Five countries that cope with very different, but very deep crises (Syria, Libya, Egypt, Cyprus, Greece). And, between Cyprus and Syria, an unprecedented concentration of US, Israeli, Turkish forces, to which a Russian flotilla will be added by the end of November. Greek, British, French ships are also present.
The Republic of Cyprus, exerting its absolute right has begun, in cooperation with Israel and Noble Energy drilling research for gas in its Exclusive Economic Zone. Turkey did not like it at all and thus send to the region an important naval flotilla. The conflict risks to trigger a “reopening” of a vast array of Greek-Turkish differences. Israel, which wishes to find an opportunity for including Cyprus and Greece into a larger sphere of influence in the region, is proposing its own defense umbrella to Cyprus. Now, we have Israeli aviation confronting Turkish navy in the region. In November we will have Greek planes in common exercises with Israeli aviation. At the end of November, a Russian flotilla will be added. Objectively speaking, what we see is the mounting of a mechanism which can be used by various players with different possible, regional or world agendas, to trigger a “limited military conflict”, even by next month.
Greece was used by the “Empire of the Finance” to begin the attack against all Europe, to invite the IMF inside the European affairs and as an experimentation case for the most extreme neoliberal policies applied in Europe. It may also be used for the destruction of the EU and also, as an experimental field for the re-imposing of authoritarian regimes in Europe. The Greek nation, living in Greece and Cyprus is approaching the situation Poland was found in 1939, between Germany and Russia. Now Greeks risk to be torn apart geoeconomically, between Germany and the Markets, geopolitically between Israel and Turkey.
We can’t be sure what will happen and when. In the worse case scenario, a “limited military conflict” in Mediterranean can be used to:
Α. direct the enormous forces unleashed by the destruction of Greek society towards an external enemy, not towards Greek political elite and legitimize, thus, an authoritarian regime in Greece
B. incorporate more strongly Cyprus and Greece inside an upgraded Israeli sphere of influence, along with Bulgaria, Romania and other, bigger members of EU, especially if Greece is thrown out of the EU or if the EU is dissolved. Such events will completely annihilate any German or European strategic influence in South Eastern Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean and can constitute a geopolitical defeat of strategic proportions
C. there will be one more mechanism of “crisis provocation” inside the EU, but it will be controlled by no Europeans powers
Germany has a rare opportunity in history to re-establish itself as a normal power, to transform itself into the political and economic leader of all Europe against the “Markets”, a Good and Democratic “hegemon” of the continent, investing its ambitions into a radically reformed European project of world significance. Instead, its policies undermine the European project and they are fuelling intra-european debt and political wars. Germany becomes, one more time in its history, a hostage in an extremely narrow, provincial sense of nationalism, the same primitive form of nationalism that destroyed in the past the German Volk. By doing that, Germans risk a “third Waterloo” in two centuries, a defeat more heavy than the one they suffered in 1945. There is no much time left before the historic defeat of the European Idea, a collapse of the EU and a global economic crisis worse than the one of 1929, which will have catastrophic consequences for Europe, the world and Germany itself.
Using a more systemic approach, we can easily discern in the ways the crisis is developing in the European Union and the world economic architecture, some of the characteristics that led to the rapid self-demise of the soviet system and the self-destruction of the Soviet Union, a system very different but as “closed”, as the current monetarist and neoliberal European and global economic system. The way European leaders are handling the European crisis, brings strong memories to the way Gorbachev was behaving, by destabilizing vital functions of his system and structure, without having any clear idea with what to replace them. Unlike the Chinese CP, Gorbachev borrowed massively and legitimized western values, to use them in his internal political struggles, thus destroying the “image of the enemy” which was the heart of his political system. The same we bear witness in Europe right now. Our “regime” is based on the “freedom, prosperity and democracy” promise. The “regime” will simply not survive because it is trying to ensure more and more profits for the banks and it is destroying whole communities, in order to repay the mountain of debt it has accumulated.
In this paper we try to see how different financial, political, ideological, national and geopolitical factors are contributing to the current crisis of the EU. We propose a synthesis of two seemingly opposed interpretations, one that is favoring the chaotic nature of the financial crisis and another one which is attempting to see in every stage of the crisis the advansing project of an “Empire of Finance”, shaping Europe and the world according to its interests and its world vision. We focus on German policy, because now Germany is the only remaining nation of Europe trying to produce a policy for Europe. The only other real actor in Europe is Greece, because it became the experimentation field for the new economic and social order in Europe. But also because the Greek government, under the direct control of centers in the international financial capital, behaves as a real “agent of chaos” in European affairs.
We are at a defining moment in European and, in particular, German history. The same malevolent mechanisms we have witnessed in Europe before World War I and II, are again in action, in financial, not in military terms this time (at least for now), but with the same, potentially catastrophic, consequences. European prosperity, democracy and civilization, everything we were able to achieve since 1945, are now at stake. As a result of the way German leadership is handling the European crisis, Germany runs the very real risk of experiencing at the end, an economic, political, geopolitical, moral and strategic defeat, comparable to the military defeat it has suffered in 1945.
Our minds cannot really and fully grasp the new situation. Our way of thinking is still based on the realities and certainties of the world as it was between 1945 and 2008; a good analogy is how the Europeans were completely taken aback by the eruption of World War I in 1914, thinking still in terms of the Belle Epoque, while crossing well into the new era of Wars and Revolutions which characterized the first half of 20th century. “We won’t pay for the Greeks” say the Germans, very much like the French said in a not so different occasion, “we will not die for Dantsig”. But the “assasination” of Greece risks having the same consequences with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo, in 1914.
The debt crisis is rapidly destroying the political foundations not only of the existing EU, but of any kind of European integration. A media war has been launched against Greece and other countries of the European periphery, the so called PIIGS, which reminds us of the psychological campaigns against “hostile”, “rogue” states like Iraq or Serbia. Such campaigns preceded in fact the military attacks against these countries, much in the same way they preceded the speculative attacks against Greece, transforming rapidly, in fact, a country-member of the eurozone, into the financial equivalent of Iraq.
Two years later the EU summits remind us now more and more of boxing matches and they are more and more ineffective. Germany, France, Britain and Italy have the worse relations they ever had. The “European” Central Bank tries to include, in the “restructuring” deal of Greek debt, the exclusion of the debt it bought at very low price in the secondary market – that is, it is speculating against and making money of a member country of the EU in a situation of distress! Common people in Germany say they don’t want to pay out of their hard work Greek crooks’ debt, unaware that Greeks work much more than Germans and, anyway, German “help for Greece” money does not go to Greece but to the international megabanks, which are the real crooks. The Bulgarian Prime Minister says he is happy because Greek society is destroyed, much as the Bulgarian society was destroyed at the fall of communism. Greeks themselves are more and more accusing the Germans of behaving in exactly the same way as in World War II, that is destroying and looting their country. They talk, in increasing numbers, about a 4th Reich and they tend to remember more and more of their EAM, the legendary National Liberation Front, the more important resistance movement in all of Europe, active between 1941 and 1944. What does this all mean? It means that less than two years after the eruption of the European sovereign debt crisis, the financial, political and ideological prerequisites for a destruction of the whole European project are now in place. World forces, especially the new “Empire of Finance”, having an interest in dominating or destroying Europe, have new and important tools to achieve their goals. Every European nation is blaming the other member states for crisis; a crisis which the world banks and the complete unregulated world finance and economy are mainly to blame!
The German dilemma
For the first time in eighty years, Germany is keeping now, in its hands, the key to the fate of Europe, its democracy and civilization. But it will not keep it for long and does not seem to know what to do with it. Germans have used the “markets” against Greece as a kind of “Maastricht police”, to “punish” Greeks and “discipline” other Europeans, without realizing the terrible price they will pay, as Faust did, for their alliance with the devil. They torn apart Greece economically, just like Stalin and Hitler did with Poland in 1939. Germany is overestimating itself and it’s relying too much to its economic power, the same way it overestimated and relied too much on its military power, during the 20th century. Berlin thinks it can play with the Markets, as Dalladier, Chamberlain or Stalin thought they could play with and use Hitler.
Between 1939 and 1941, Hitler attacked all Europeans, trying to unite and discipline them, before addressing his main concern, the conquest of Russia and the defeat of Bolshevism. But Hitler’s project was reflecting the essentially provincial, narrow and violent character of German nationalism. Germany has never understood its own great theoretician of War, the Prussian Carl von Clauzevitch, who rightly saw behind the victories of Napoleon, the force of the ideas of the Great French Revolution. The more successful and stable hegemonies were those based on general ideas and that also included a “carrot” for the nations under their dominion. This was the case of the US hegemony, based on the vision of an “independent, free and successful individual”, of USSR, based on “socialism”, or of the EU as long as it was based on the common dream of “prosperity and freedom for all”.
Hitler failed to conquer Britain and he paid a big price for attacking Greece. He could have wined over USSR, but when he finally attacked it, in June 1941, he had already lost precious energy and time. In a way that would let Zigmund Freud voiceless, Angela Merkel is doing exactly the same. She is trying to punish Greece and discipline all Europeans, before addressing the question of the Markets, on behalf of all the EU. She is running the risk of destroying all political capital of Germany in European Union.
The Markets’ and the IMF’s “police”, that Germany itself invited, welcomed and cooperated with, not only “punished” the supposed Greek “criminal”, as a matter of fact it destroyed him literally, and it is now attacking one country after another in Europe and even the USA. Thus proving that Greece is not an exception, but an extreme case, permitting us to understand and realize the fundamental mechanisms in action. For two years everybody is trying to address the Greek problem, but the only result of these efforts is the immense increase of the debt of this country and the rapid and unprecedented destruction of its economy and society.
No solution inside the system
German and European politicians try to find a solution, but everything that is proposed and then agreed, fails in the following weeks or months, proving that the problem is systematic, i.e. there is no solution inside the given political and economic “model”, the so called “liberal globalization”, characterized by the accumulation of enormous economic and political power to the financial “captains” and the complete deregulation of financial and other markets, practically of every financial, economic and trade activity around the globe. We are destroying Europe, precipitating a world crisis worse than the one we suffered in 1929.
The financial monster we created in the last 40 years, a world “Empire of Money”, is now destroying our states, nations and civilization. As long as the solution we propose avoids in aiming at the main cause of the problem, the problem will persist, having as a consequence the very existence not only of the European Union, but of the entire European civilization, welfare state and democracy, everything Europeans were able to achieve after 1945. If we really try to repay the mountain of debt accumulated by the banks and other financial institutions, we will have to destroy our societies, to transform European citizens into a kind of life-long slaves, to organize the social equivalent of new world wars, or to launch new military wars in a scale even more massive than the ones we experienced in the Middle East during the last decade or to destroy even faster the natural environment of the planet, the very foundations of our existence.
History is putting Germans in a dramatic strategic dilemma. They now have a really historic chance to become again a “normal” nation, escaping the mental “prison” that was imposed to them after their defeat in the 2nd World War and because of the way this defeat was handled by both Germans and their conquerors (1). To succeed, it would require of Germany to become the leader of the European nations, in their effort to control the financial monster threatening European society, democracy and civilization. It would require of Germans to take the lead in a really titanic, extremely difficult, but also absolutely necessary radical shift of paradigm, towards another economic model, if we really wish to save our continent from the totalitarian force of the so-called “Markets”. We need to radically restructure the European debt, to ban or at least regulate heavily CDS and other derivatives, to create a European economic model that produces debt with a production model, turning towards keynsianism, some form of protectionism and regulation. We need a gigantic redistribution of income and wealth, to reverse the path we are following for forty years. We need a European government and not governance, but such a government must be democratic and must also meet social, development and ecological goals, not just guarantee the value of money, as Maastricht does. We need a new New Deal and, in order to achieve it, a political leadership with the courage and skills of Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill or Charles de Gaulle is needed, in order to address the present crisis and save Europe.
The other way for Berlin is to continue doing what it is doing, to precipitate the destruction of the Union and alienate the majority of its nations, laying itself the foundations of the dominance of the “Empire of Money” on the whole continent, including finally Germany itself as one of the subject-states. This country possesses of course important comparative advantages and it will be able to survive longer without the other Europeans, but how can it stand up globally as a unit, compared to China or India, in 20 years? What kind of “soft” (not only “economic”) power will it possess, after the terrible political and ideological fall-out from a total European destruction under its leadership? Such an outcome could in fact signify an economic, moral, political, and strategic defeat of Germany worse than the military one it suffered in 1945. No more, no less.
Empire against Germany
It was the first secretary of NATO, Lord Ismay, who defined the goal of the Atlantic Alliance with his famous formula: «To keep the Americans in, the Germans down, the Russians out». The British Empire has delivered its mantle to the US Empire, the US Empire kept its crown by an alliance of financial power and American weapons, the USSR has committed suicide, but the imperial “know-how” remains intact. Ways and subjects are changing, not fundamental goals. Now, it is probably not the Secretary General of NATO who is of importance, but the President of Goldman Sachs Lloyd Blankfein, who was once heard saying “I do the job of God”. (3)
Blankfein could not slip in 2008. He had everything well planned in advance, but still he could not be sure of the direction things could take. His man, Polson, had to beg literally in front of the Congressmen to save the Banks. Three years later, Lloyd and his colleagues are probably laughing at the Germans and the Europeans, Merkel, Sarkozy or Obama, all of them trying in a humiliating way to “calm the markets”. Not only he and his colleagues were able to conserve and expand their empire and its fantastic profits, not only they were able to pass to the states their own losses, thus creating the sovereign debt crisis, but they are now at the point of “regulating” the size of state budgets, the level of social expenditure and investment in Europe and US, even how many members the European Union should have or if it will continue to exist!
A Goldman Sachs’ man was appointed chief of the “European” Central Bank. Another, Otmar Issing, is writing in the Financial Times Deutschland, putting essentially Europeans in front of the dilemma either to transform their Union into a “dictatorship of the Markets”, in proper form, or see it dissolved. This same Issing, who is considered in Germany, God knows why, the biggest authority in monetary policy, was explaining in another famous article, in March 2010, why Europe should not help Greece. In the latter article he hid his capacity as paid advisor of Goldman Sachs, the bank that, while being an advisor of the Greek government, did not see any conflict of interest in orchestrating, since September 2009, the speculative attack against Athens.
Financiers like Issing or Soros, the later known for the great financial attack against British participation in the EMU, an early predecessor of the attack now launched against Europe by the financial empire, are now the main people discussing in European newspapers the fate of the continent that created all the basic and essential ideas of modern times in all spheres of life and knowledge. This is what’s become now the Europe of Kant and Voltaire, Marx and Nietsche, Robespierre and Garivaldi, Sartre and Goethe, of French Revolution, German romanticism or socialism. Soros, Issing, Goldman Sachs, or people like Barroso (!), are discussing and deciding the fate of European civilisation, that is how they will destroy it.
City’s “friendly” advice to Germans or the imperial trap for Berlin
At the end of September, the London Financial Times published an unusual, blunt editorial, urging EU, ECB and IMF not to deliver the sixth tranche of the loan they had agreed to provide Greece with. The editorial explained that Greece had not any international financial obligations to fulfill until the end of the year. If the tranche would not be delivered, the Greek government would be unable to pay salaries and pensions, explained the editorial of the newspaper, spokesman for the City financiers. (In the weeks following the publication of this editorial, the Greek government, under the threat of stopping of financing, begun to act in complete disarray and panic, slaughtering literally all social classes in the country, under the close supervision of the “EU, ECB, IMF” troika which sent to Greece and is practically acting as high level economic murderer).
British know Greeks and Germans, their national character, much better than Greeks and Germans know themselves. They fought and won over both of these nations repeatedly and in various ways. The City financiers are in a very good position to predict the probable result, if their advice would be followed and it is followed. It will precipitate the catastrophe of Greece, thus putting this country and Europe in a much weaker position to confront them. Very probably, it will also push the Greek people, sooner or later, to some kind of revolt or revolution, against their government first of all, but also, probably, against Germany and EU. You can accuse Greeks of everything you wish. But they made the second more important European revolution after the French and they convened a constituent assembly in 1822, when Napoleon was already defeated and a “Holly Alliance” was ruling over Europe that banned any kind of revolt. They also organized the most massive, taking into account the population of the country, resistance, during the 2nd world war.
City financiers know also, very well, the German character, they know that Germans like discipline as much as Greeks like revolt. They believe that Berlin will respond to a Greek revolt in a harsh, unpolitical and unflexible way. Germany and the EU have, probably, the political and economic weight to provoke an even bigger catastrophe for Greece, than the one they have already provoked with their policy, in cooperation with the Greek government. But what they don’t have are the means to escape the financial and, even more important, the terrible political, ideological and geopolitical fall out from the destruction of a small but at the same time the most historic country in Europe. They can do it, they will probably do it, but they will precipitate their own doom. If Americans spoke about the “law of unintended consequences”, after their adventures in the Middle East, we will have to introduce in Europe the new “law of assymetrical results”.
The idea of political integration in Europe will receive a fatal blow for decades. Even now, the political climate in Europe is becoming poisonous enough. Both “rich” and “poor” nations begin to protest against “helping” Greece, unaware that they don’t help Greeks in any way, what they do is help the banks destroy Greece, sometimes even speculating on and profiting from the difficulties of a fellow country-member. Everybody in Europe begins now to look to national solutions. In France, always the political barometer of the whole continent, the fascist National Front of Marine Le Pen is now a respected political force. The fundamental political axioms, based on which the post-war prosperity, democracy and peace in Europe was created and endured are now rapidly undermined, in front of our very own eyes.
When the catastrophe will occur, when the dust will fall down, every European nation will begin to accuse the other Europeans, and all of them the Greeks. German and other European leaders probably will accuse Greeks for all the ills of Europe and use them as a pretext to impose draconian economic and social policies in Germany and Europe. Greeks from their own view will be frustrated being negated by Europe, towards which they are turned for two and a half centuries. They will turn not so much against the “markets”, who lack “address” and telephone number, but against Europe and Germany in particular, accusing it of destroying their country for the second time in less than a century. They will remember that Germans did not pay any war reparation and they did not return even the gold stolen from the Greek central bank. They will reopen the accounts of the Ziemens and other contracts, given the fact that European firms were massively paying Greek politicians. The International Herald Tribune, the Time, or even the Financial Times will then publish very accurate reports of hunger in Athens or analyses of how it has proven impossible for the Europeans to solve their own problems. The implications will be clear. First, the spectacle of Greek social catastrophe will be used to terrorize all European citizens in accepting the salaries and pensions that their governments will be allowed by the banks to give them. Second, everybody outside Germany will make the same conclusion: “Germans did not change. They remain the same. We can’ trust them”.
This is exactly the fundamental psychological and ideological mechanism used by the Empire to dominate after the War over Germany and Europe and keep the continent divided and dependent, in spite of its very important economic, social or intellectual achievements. And it will be a big irony of History that German nationalism will have, once more in recent history, contributed to the demise of the German national interests.
Let us remember what happened in 1956. The Soviet Union had still a tremendous prestige in Europe, due to its role in the defeat of Hitler. Nikita Khrushchev was trying to reform the country internally, to get it out of its terrible Stalinist legacy. When the Hungarian revolution erupted, some forces encouraged Budapest to revolt, by assuring it will have western backing. Hungarians quit the Warsaw Pact. It was more than what Moscow could afford. Soviet tanks did not smash only the Hungarians, they also destroyed the soviet prestige in Europe, the western European communist movement and the chances of a successful reform of the Soviet Union itself. The foundations of its own dissolution, decades later, were already laid. Israel found, by the way, an opportunity, as events were unfolding in Central Europe to unleash another of its wars in the Middle East.
Now put European Union in the place of the Soviet Union, Germany in the place of Russia, Greece in the place of Hungary, CDS in the place of tanks, and you will have a probable scenario for the immediate future. Many things are also already happening now, and more will happen, as in 1956, in the Middle East, as our attention will be kept by the European wars of debt. By the way, this is the classic way powers outside Europe were able to dominate over its nations in the 20th century, i.e. by having Europeans fight among themselves. In the previous century it was by military means, now it is by financial.
The markets “ultimatum” to Europe: submit or dissolve
The strategy of the markets towards Europe is an important point we can’t analyze in depth in the space constraints we have. The fact is that we tend to look to the markets as semi-automatic capital mechanisms, we tend to see the banks and other financial institutions as simple economic, profit-looking actors. They are not. We confuse the nearly automatic function of the markets with the possibility of a very concentrated group of capital holders to orchestrate and catalyze market events. We forget that the ten biggest banks in the world are able to mobilize a capital equal to the debt of all nations. They have the same financial power with all nations!
Private financial institutions are strategic actors. They represent the biggest concentration of financial power and international political influence the world has ever known. They were even able to partially hijack, through derivatives, the main state function of money emission. Their level of strategic planning is the level required of empires. Our states and politicians do not have anything even remotely comparable, not to speak of their own dependence towards money owners. The only weakness of this world of “State behind the States” is that it is lacking political legitimacy and military force: it has to rely mainly to the US armed forces and military-industrial complex. They are radical in their thought, we are conservatives. They manage the radical change of the system in their direction, we try to manage a more and more unmanageable system. They tend to look in the long-term, we tend to manage day-to-day affairs, preparing for the next municipal or national elections. They see the big picture, we see the small. This is why they are winning.
In the geopolitical sphere, the Wolfowitch and Jeremia reports, which shaped the post cold war strategy of the USA and established the foundation of the wars in the Middle East that followed, constitute a very useful example of the imperial thinking, a model which can help us understand also how the “Leninists of the markets” are also thinking and acting. In fact, the financial attack against Greece follows the same strategic logic with the military attack against Iraq, it is the cornerstone, the overture for a radical reshape of the world.
What the two reports essentially explain is that the Empire must not wait for “threats” to its dominion appear or activate, that there is a need for proactive action, having as a goal to preclude beforehand the emergence of power poles able to compete the American global domination. If the European Union becomes a political entity in its own right, it will constitute an obvious threat to the geopolitical monopoly of the Empire. If the euro establishes itself as the world reserve money, it will undermine one of the pillars of Us domination and the possibility of financing in the future the US economy.
By the way, and speaking about the economy, the markets know better than anyone else that a second, deeper financial tsunami is coming. Instead of trying to stop it, they obviously wish to channel it and use it in a way profitable for them. They are even obliged to do so, because otherwise, they are rightly afraid that finally some politician will be found to blame banks and markets for the crisis and ask for them to pay a considerable part of the debt, instead of demolishing the whole European postwar edifice in order to repay it. They know also that times of upheaval are also big opportunities to shape things for decades to come. If they don’t use them in their own profit, they will suffer serious, probably fatal losses. The present crisis is, from their perspective, a huge, historic opportunity to demolish the European welfare state and probably the European democracy, transforming European workers into slaves working all their life to repay the amount of debt accumulated.
The markets can afford an EU working strictly according to the Maastricht monetary monster, thus becoming their agent. They can’t afford the transformation of EU into any kind of “state” power really controlling them. If the EU can transform itself successfully into an instrument of the Empire, they will probably use it. If not, they will use the environment of chaotic decomposition of the euro and the EU, in order to achieve the above mentioned political, economic and social goals.
In a revealing recent article, the Wall Street Journal could not resist the temptation to express its enormous enthusiasm for the direction European crisis was taking. First, it said, this crisis has committed a fatal blow to the dangerous dream of a “European super-nation”. Second, the euro has played its role provoking the crisis. Third, WSJ was insisting that the upcoming crisis really represents a truly historic chance to destroy the social state in the continent and in the US.
The markets hate modern humanism, they hate strong states in general and the Germans in particular. In ancient Athens we had the first “restructuring” of the debt by Solon, which led to the first experiment of Democracy. The theoretician of ancient democracy Protagoras epitomized the slogan of this democracy by saying “man is the measure of all money”. But for the “civilization” of finance, it is the other way around: “Money is the measure of all men” or, more practically, markets regulate everything.
The upcoming Greek revolt
The program applied now in Greece by the EU, the ECB, the IMF and a “Greek government”, which finds itself in better terms with the Rotchild family than with the Greek people, does not let the Greeks with many options, other than to revolt, even without the canny pushing of Financial Times editorials. The program is tantamount to economic and social genocide and has, already, destroyed the foundations of parliamentary democracy in this country. Under European and international “help” the Greek economy is in a free fall, at a rhythm superior to this of the Weimar Republic, before Hitler took power. Every single social class, including the middle classes, is rapidly getting destroyed, with the exception of very thin layers of super rich people, its social structure transforming rapidly towards the usual Latin American models. The average living standards and available income is on a 50% reduction spiral without any perspective of stabilization. Social security and health care is destroyed, the state is melting down. The irony of history, if the term is appropriate, is that the “cure” applied to Greece punishes especially the most productive, hard working and honest among its citizens, thus destroying any possibility of a national renaissance. Most of the young, more talented and better educated and dynamic people of the country dream of emigrating. The only reason we do not yet witness armed groups of the far left and the far right fighting in the streets, is the inertia of human mind which tends always to be late compared to the change of situations. The morale of the Greek nation is now in its worse situation since the first terrible winter of German occupation, in 1941-42, before the appearance of the enormous resistance movement, the biggest in Europe during the 2nd World War, compared to the scope of the country. Greeks are already experiencing, in the big urban centers, not just poverty, but the first widespread cases of famine. If this was not enough, different international agents appear proposing to get the whole property of the Greek state in order to alleviate the country from part of its debt or presenting themselves as the “builders” of a new Greek nation state, much in the same way they looted and destroyed the ex-Soviet Republics and Russia, during the years of “transition to nothing” and “shock without therapy”.
The forces which planned and are now executing the destruction of Greece, prefer probably an implosion to an explosion of the country. Especially the Germans seem to wait for this, and anyway they never understood the “rationality in irrationality” of revolts and revolutions and they probably think that Greeks will accept the decimation of their conditions of life passively, like it happened in Eastern Europe. We can’t exclude such a scenario, but it doesn’t seem plausible. Greeks have a completely different political tradition than Eastern Europeans. There is no communism to blame for everything in the Greek case. There is of course a massively corrupted political class and state elite. They were corrupt by themselves, but they were also in the payroll of many big European firms like Siemens, which, in exchange of the bribes given, they exploited for decades the Greek market, sometimes literally looting the Greek state and budget.
The rapid destruction of all social bonds and national ideas taking now place in Greece, as a result of the European and IMF program, is unleashing a terrible force, waiting to express itself. The Empire knows that. To the perspective of a social explosion in Greece, they would prefer to channel the energy unleashed to other directions. Except implosion or explosion, there are two other possible directions. One would be towards a “war” between Greeks and immigrants. 80-90% of the emigration flows to Europe try to use Greece as a transit gate to Europe, but they stay finally in Greece, decomposing all its social structures, that are already problematic. The second possibility is towards small “wars”, nationalism and fascism.
Mars meets Venus
Greece is not only the epicenter of the debt crisis. It is a fractal of all the possible crises with the potential of threatening Europe. Greece and Cyprus, unfortunately for their people, are located in one of the more important geostrategic points in the world, controlling the access of Russia to the “warm seas”, of France and Germany to the energy of the Middle East, of Israel to the western world. They are at the crossroads of the Middle Eastern “world of Mars”, the Slavic world, in temporary retreat and decline, and the European “world of Venus”. Cyprus seems to posses important energy reserves. If anywhere, it is in this region that can be combined the explosive dynamics of “geopolitical revisionism”, in action in the Middle East, especially during the last decade, and of the “market revisionism”, trying to reshape fundamentally and in its own profit the state of affairs established in Europe after the War.
For the time being the debt wars in Europe and the military conflicts in the Middle East follow separate, but equally explosive paths. What can happen if they combine?
Has the European Union any, even remote capacity, of handling at the same time its debt crisis and a geopolitical one, or is it risking to be destroyed before anybody understands what is happening? Look at the map of the region. What do you see? A situation of unprecedented instability after 1989-91. Five countries that cope with very different, but very deep crises (Syria, Libya, Egypt, Cyprus, Greece). And, between Cyprus and Syria, an unprecedented concentration of US, Israeli, Turkish forces, to which a Russian flotilla will be added by the end of November. Greek, British, French ships are also present.
The Republic of Cyprus, exerting its absolute right has begun, in cooperation with Israel and Noble Energy drilling research for gas in its Exclusive Economic Zone. Turkey did not like it at all and thus send to the region an important naval flotilla. The conflict risks to trigger a “reopening” of a vast array of Greek-Turkish differences. Israel, which wishes to find an opportunity for including Cyprus and Greece into a larger sphere of influence in the region, is proposing its own defense umbrella to Cyprus. Now, we have Israeli aviation confronting Turkish navy in the region. In November we will have Greek planes in common exercises with Israeli aviation. At the end of November, a Russian flotilla will be added. Objectively speaking, what we see is the mounting of a mechanism which can be used by various players with different possible, regional or world agendas, to trigger a “limited military conflict”, even by next month.
Greece was used by the “Empire of the Finance” to begin the attack against all Europe, to invite the IMF inside the European affairs and as an experimentation case for the most extreme neoliberal policies applied in Europe. It may also be used for the destruction of the EU and also, as an experimental field for the re-imposing of authoritarian regimes in Europe. The Greek nation, living in Greece and Cyprus is approaching the situation Poland was found in 1939, between Germany and Russia. Now Greeks risk to be torn apart geoeconomically, between Germany and the Markets, geopolitically between Israel and Turkey.
We can’t be sure what will happen and when. In the worse case scenario, a “limited military conflict” in Mediterranean can be used to:
Α. direct the enormous forces unleashed by the destruction of Greek society towards an external enemy, not towards Greek political elite and legitimize, thus, an authoritarian regime in Greece
B. incorporate more strongly Cyprus and Greece inside an upgraded Israeli sphere of influence, along with Bulgaria, Romania and other, bigger members of EU, especially if Greece is thrown out of the EU or if the EU is dissolved. Such events will completely annihilate any German or European strategic influence in South Eastern Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean and can constitute a geopolitical defeat of strategic proportions
C. there will be one more mechanism of “crisis provocation” inside the EU, but it will be controlled by no Europeans powers
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