By Richard Cottrell: Greece is a small country of about ten million people, who normally mind their own business and don’t give a lunchtime ouzo for what the rest of the world is doing.
Yet here they are slap bang in the eye of the great fiscal storm wracking the euro and the European proto-superstate.
Lately they have been behaving really badly, such as voting for the wrong parties in the recent general election, refusing to swallow the toxic medicine force-fed by mad foreign doctors, and worst of all, ignoring diktats issued by German politicians.
Just over twenty years ago I wrote a book (see here) that explained how it is always the curse of Greeks to be pushed and shoved around by big bullies.
Examples: the Italian and German invasion of 1940; then the bitter, deadly Greek civil war stirred up by Churchill and Truman after WW2 because they were obsessed with the idea that the communists would seize the gateway to the Suez Canal; and not least the imposition of the fascist military junta at the behest of NATO in 1967.
I address my readers to the last sentence in particular, partially because the episode is largely forgotten and partially because another putsch on similar lines may be just around the corner.
In 1967 a trio of obscure middle ranking officers subsequently frozen in the Greek collective consciousness as ‘The Colonels’ seized control of the country on the eve of a tightly fought general election.
All the signs pointed to a victory for the veteran politician Giorgios Papandreou’s Center Union. Papandreou was a prickly thorn in the side of the United States and NATO because he was flirting with the heresy of a neutral Greece outside NATO.
Furthermore, he refused to co-operate with the US-hatched plan to forcibly split the island of Cyprus between Greeks and Turks, a running sore which lasts to this day.
Lyndon Johnson was convinced by Israeli intelligence that an island festooned with NATO furniture was about to turn into a Mediterranean Cuba.
The island’s president was actually a notably robust and highly conservative Greek orthodox prelate, a certain Archbishop Makarios, who caused offence because Cyprus belonged to the Non-Aligned group at the United Nations.
NATO has always protested that its hands were clean in the whole affair. Unfortunately the trio of Colonels were all leading figures in the NATO secret army in Greece code-named Sheepskin.
They seized power using a NATO blueprint called Prometheus, specifically designed to forestall a communist insurrection.
The election never took place. Papandreou himself died under house arrest, as much as anything from lack of the medicines that he urgently needed.
Greece labored under the junta for almost eight years. Thousands were hurled into prisons and wickedly tortured.
This is a country with sound reasons to fear foreign dominion.
Yet it seems the wheel of history has turned full circle. Young Mr. Alexis Tsipras, whose radical left Syriza coalition is odds on to win the repeat general election next month, assuming that it actually happens, was born in 1975, just a year after the junta collapsed.
So we can be sure that the events of those years are etched in his mind. It means that he must anticipate the risks that he is now facing.
The stakes are high. Will the globalists really allow Greeks, flying in the face of all historical experience, a free ride to vote in a government that promises to tear up the hated austerity pact with the EU, the IMF and the European Central Bank?
The problem is that the junta-installed Greek quisling, Lukas Papademos, is a victim of his own over-heated hyperbole. Likewise the troika spokesman, that pompous and ridiculous Luxembourg mini-state premier Jean-Claude Junker who has uttered remarks such as, “The Greek public, the Greek citizens, have to know that we agreed on a program and this program has to be implemented.”
The final solution then?
The constitutional procedure allows for a caretaker government in the interval before the election. The newspapers are circling June 10th or 24th. I incline to the latter to allow a creeping barrage of propaganda designed to thoroughly scare and generally terrify Greeks into believing that the end of the world is nigh.
The opening shots have already been fired, the sad and hopelessly confused president Karolos Papoulias repeating warnings from the Greek central bank head George Provopoulos that a run on the country’s banks will end in calamity.
Of course the €700 million ($891 million) that Greeks have indeed sensibly withdrawn and either stuffed under the floorboards or dispatched to foreign safe havens was a safety measure against the austerity program wrecking the country altogether.
This is now being twisted into fear of an incoming Syriza government that will pull the plug on the euro. This is just a small taste of things to come.
I suspect that the cabal around the cornered Papademos is thinking along the following lines.
1) Install a caretaker government ostensibly to prepare for the election, headed up by some seemingly innocent figure such as another faceless technocrat.
2) Allow a certain haziness to surround the election date.
3) Fomenting a mood of increasing national crisis, winding up the decibels that the irresponsible Tsipras and his friends are playing dice with the future of the sacred homeland.
4) Finally, declare a state of national emergency – capital flight, synthetic strife in the streets, bomb attacks on prominent government targets and so forth – which serve to dye Syriza as a pro-terrorist stalking horse.
5) Postpone the scheduled election until a ‘state of calm’ sets in.
6) To make sure, station the Greek army in the streets.
Another history lesson:
For the best part of 30 years an urban terrorist group calling itself November 17 was allowed a free hand to attack prominent targets of Western capitalism. The victims included American and British diplomats gunned down in cold blood.
This gang of supposedly Anarcho-Marxist guerillas were led by a Greco-French academic called Alexandros Giotopoulos, whose father was an aide to Leon Trotsky. November 17 commemorated a brutal massacre of anti-junta protestors at the Athens Polytechnic on that day in 1973.
However, the silvery-haired 60-year-old claimed at the show trial after he and his band were finally rounded up early in the 21st century that all along he was working for Western intelligence.
Certainly this is a better explanation as to how the gang managed to remain completely invisible and elude detection in such a small country for three long decades.
Of all such terror groups in Europe, notably the Baader-Meinhof Gang and the Italian Red Brigades, this is a record.
As I discuss in my book (see below) which deals with this episode, the November 17 organization appeared to be tailored exactly to NATO’s Cold War ‘strategy of tension.’ Namely to milk the fear driven by commissioned, synthetic urban terrorism in order to drive voters into the hands of safe right wing governments.
Thus massive public disturbances would be designed to deter voters from supporting a potential government that would lead the country into anarchy and catastrophe.
The impudence that Greeks would demonstrate by allowing Alexis Tsipras and his friends to form a popular government committed to reneging on the austerity contract can scarcely be exaggerated.
The real nightmare is that Syriza would demonstrate the following:
- That it is possible to disengage from the austerity contract and as a consequence witness a sharp rebound in the economy.
- Set aside the issue of being in or out of the euro as largely irrelevant until the Greek economy is set right.
- Allow the Greek people – for once – to make their own decisions relevant to the national home without being bullied by over-bearing foreigners.
Of course the globalists privately regard Greece as nothing more than an obstinate peanut. Their greater concern is the gathering evidence of serious fractures in the concept of a currency which is not part of a binding fiscal union.
Should one country escape, then as I have argued in these columns here at End the Lie, others will be encouraged to go down the same road.
The euro is the flagship project of European Union. Greece was foolishly admitted on the basis of data exaggerating the health of the national economy, thanks in part to the handiwork of Goldman sachs.
We are watching a Greek tragedy in real time simply because political considerations outweighed sound judgment.
That is more less the same story as perhaps the most important election in Greece’s history as a modern independent state approaches. Shall we see a repeat of 1967? I fear it is all too possible, perhaps even likely.
Already the tug-of-war is under way.
The Austrian foreign minister Maria Fektyer has chimed in to insist that leaving the euro is the same as leaving the EU.
So, obviously the non-eurozone states like the UK, Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Lithuania and Latvia are not really members of the EU.
This is another scare tactic to undermine Syriza which favors Greece remaining in the Union and even the euro if the terms and conditions play out.
It seems that the Greek president has not weaned himself away from an interim techno-government to last for 18 months.
He is still doing the rounds with this weary idea, but it is not impossible that the establishment cronies might yet come around to it.
The president’s chief occupation to ensure respect for the constitution. If he installs an unelected government by ignoring the constitution then that would be a formal putsch, and of course an insult to Greek voters of all persuasions.
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