And what is that? The Frau has announced she will be visiting Athens on Tuesday to “discuss the situation in Greece and across the Eurozone”. (I take the “dumb idea” from the tweeter ‘teacherdude’). So why is she coming and why is she coming now after well over two years of horrific punishment for Greece? And what does she expect to achieve?
Well, she has probably decided to take such drastic action as actually visiting the Capital of the state she has decided to make a scapegoat of, because the IMF says Greek debt is not sustainable (which it is not) and that Europe must either agree to a deep hair cut of official sector holdings (which they do not want) OR, failing that then they must throw more money down the Greek plug hole and guarantee all Greek debts.
So Angie panics and decides to take very drastic action! A visit to Athens! To achieve what? Probably to steel little Antoni’s squirming nerve, tell him to be a good boy and carry on with all the cuts and she will praise him for having done more than the other Greek PMs so far. Or something as intelligent and constructive as that.
This will help bridge the gap of less than a month till the American Elections and then all will be fine. Or something like that. It’s just that the idea of Angela Merkel who has, to be polite, totally mismanaged the European crisis, having totally misread it, and Antonis Samaras who does not even have a pea for a brain and is prone to blatant lying, getting together to discuss anything constructively is a nightmare.
Nevertheless, we should at least commend Merkel for her courage in deciding to visit Greece at all in the present climate. She will not be received with flowers. In fact this visit is quite likely to set off really powerful protests. So she is courageous, unless… Well, unless she is even dumber than we thought!
P.S. A slightly irrelevant historical fact. When Hitler decided to invade Crete using his well trained panzer division of paratroops, these boys (because boys they were) had been told that the Cretans would welcome them all as liberators. Instead, they were met with pitchforks and shot guns and in fact this formidable force was wiped out. The German cemetery in Malame with almost 5,000 graves of young German boys, grimly attests to that.