Many are calling it a game of Chicken. Others have likened it to the cold war. What? The Great Showdown between the EU and… little Greece! How extraordinary! The bullying and threats and blackmail the Greek voters (yes, the Greek voters, not some government) are being pelted with relentlessly on the one hand, and the counter threat that: yes, okay, but if Greece goes down it will pull the rest of the world down with it, is basically what this is all about.
If you step back a bit and look at this miserable little performance from a distance all you can come up with is, You must be joking! Unfortunately, whatever else it might be, a joke it is not. An Ionesco play maybe, but a joke no. At least not for the Greeks living through this horrible nightmare and not for the peoples of Europe being subjected to policies that risk turning them into the next Greece either.
Who is benefiting? That is always a good place to start. The instant answer that might snap to mind is Germany of course! It is making money from all these extra loans piled on Greece at a pretty good interest rate (it’s own borrowing rate has slipped to under 1%, whereas it lends to Greece at over 4% and more). But even that doesn’t warrant subjecting a country to destruction policies and insisting on their continuation in this way.
The only result will be killing the chicken that lays the golden egg. This chicken, in the game of chicken, is already moribund. So it can’t be that either. What then? All sorts of wicked and evil German schemes are being concocted by the Conspiracy Theorists. Angela is about to succeed where Hitler failed! And all that crap. But none of these cut the mustard either.
Nevertheless we are indeed witnessing this so called “cold war” between Greece and the EU, perhaps even the rest of the world. Out of fear of the outcome of the Greek election, this barrage of threats and bullying tactics has been unleashed on the Greek voter. The Greeks MUST vote the way the EU wants, or else… Greece will be consigned to a savage stone age at best.
But what are they insisting on? That Greece carry out without fail its “commitments” (which were agreed to under duress but never mind that). Now these commitments include measures that if taken as demanded will consign Greece to a savage stone age anyway, so why all the huffing and puffing?
On the other hand, the terror this side is trying to induce in the piddly little country it has chosen to so bully, may show something interesting. Could it be that they, in their turn, are terrified that if Greece does blow its gasket in this election, the whole continent, not to say the global economy as such, is in danger of devastating consequences?
So, the Cold War designation. Each side holds a bomb that could annihilate the other. The loser is the one who blinks first and puts down his bomb. A zero sum game?
The big guys want to coerce Greece any way they can into doing what they want. Quite regardless of the fact that what they want has already proved a most devastating failure and not only for Greece. In its efforts to defend itself Greece is holding onto its own bomb, ready to detonate it. Greece is being told severely, “This is not a bluff! You really will be consigned to the stone age!” To which it is feared the Greek answer may be, “One way or another that’s where we’re headed anyway, so we may as well take the lot of you with us. What have we got to lose?”
This seems to upset The Frau terribly, poor dear. But couldn’t this great woman, let alone all those minor nonentities fluttering wildly around her like moths, think of a more sensible way of dealing with this impasse? Would it really hurt her pride just to talk things over and perhaps recognize that throwing a country into prolonged Economic Depression is only going to create more problems rather than solve anything at all?
Firstly, this policy means that no one will ever get paid anything back. How? From an economy that has ceased to function because of your policies? Not to mention the fact that usually, when something like this goes on for too long, insurrection and revolution flare up. And these manifestations have proved particularly contagious in Europe.
So why this stupid game of Chicken that will lead nowhere however it goes? Except for throwing the whole of Europe in the soup sooner rather than later.
Translation: “During yesterday’s G8 summit, Frau Merkel, Mr. Cameron, Obama, Francois Hollande, Signor Monti, Barroso and… found themselves completely isolated.”
Caption on the explosives: “Memorandum” or loan agreement.