In this hour of utter despair for Greece, it comes as no consolation that the whole of the so called Euro “project” appears doomed to complete and utter failure. After all, the Greek electorate has just succumbed to the terrorization of: vote for the corrupt and useless guys who ruined your country or else! You will be flung out of the Euro!
You must stay in the Euro at all costs! Ring a bell? The Gold Standard? Yes? It had to be maintained at all costs… Oh dear oh dear.
Today I would like to share with you an article by Simon Jenkins appearing in the Guardian, “The Eurozone’s People Are Like Prisoners in Colditz“. I strongly urge you to read it. It is the quintessence of all that is wrong with the Eurozone, and why it cannot work.
More and more rapidly The Frau in her brilliant intransigence is turning the whole of Europe into a Waste Land. Soon we shall actually look as though we have been devastated by nuclear bombs, bar the mushroom cloud. As for the latest wizard bazooka idea of directly buying bonds by the EFSF to lower the interest rate… well, will it help or will it be just another aspirin?
Since the only thing that will calm The Markets (apart from regulating and taming the damn beast!) is when they can see that growth and prosperity are returning to the Economies of Europe, I doubt whether The Frau’s latest tactical retreat to gain time will really make any difference at all to the fundamental problem Europe is facing.
So we are condemned. First to slump into destitution as we are doing now. Indeed we are prisoners in a system as flexible as granite as Simon Jenkins puts it. And then we shall find ourselves, as we are already to a certain extent, living in a Waste Land. Those few who will have survived, that is.
I think a quote from T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land is quite appropriate here, not about April being the cruelest month, but a little further down:
“A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. […………]
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”
From The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot
‘The Burial of the Dead’