There have been some rather shallow articles trying to explain why Greece today is not like the Weimar Republic. One even had the audacity or ignorance to say that the difference was that Greece has the democratic EZ supporting it, because otherwise it would have collapsed.
This preposterous statement fails to realise that Greece would be neither over indebted nor so uncompetitive if it had never entered the Euro. Furthermore it choses to ignore the fact that the very stringent austerity imposed by Europe together with a German ban on any funds to help growth is what have ruined Greece, not saved it from catastrophe.
A blogger in the Guardian reminded us of a very perceptive article on the BBC by Paul Mason dating 11 months ago.
He says and I quote: “Faced with a recession, [Heinrich] Bruning followed a policy of austerity, while keeping Germany’s currency pegged to the Gold Standard (much as Greece has follows a policy of austerity dictated by euro membership). This made the recession worse.”
The situation today is even worse than it was when the article was written. But I think the main aspect of it is truer than ever. He described the “hopeless inertia” we have succumbed to, how people have stopped protesting and reacting and withdrawn into themelves, into drug and drink and the purely personal, and quotes from Kurt Weill’s Opera, the Silver Lake:
“You escape from the horror,” Fennimore sings; “that may destroy all we know. Yet the germ of creation will struggle to grow.”
“All this can be a beginning
“And though time turns our day back to night
“Yet the hours of dark will lead onwards
To the dawning of glorious light.”
And this is what expresses the mood in Greece today. Not fight as Mason says, but flight. Flight either abroad, for those younger, or into the personal, substances or even, perhaps above all, flights of fancy. One day we will be reborn again. Perhaps…