[From the Spin Doctor archives, written nineteen months ago, and yet ever so relevant, and will remain so for some time.]
‘Do they think that the EU’s ever-declining hold on the loyalty of Europe’s youth can be reversed by creating a martyr state on the Left? Do they not realize that this is their own Guatemala, the radical experiment of Jacobo Arbenz that was extinguished by the CIA in 1954, only to set off the Cuban revolution and thirty years of guerrilla warfare across Latin America? Don’t these lawyers – and yes they are almost all lawyers – ever look beyond their noses?’ ~ Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
An excellent quote from an excellent article on Greece and how its creditors are exhibiting foresight and tact befitting a buffoon! (see link at the bottom of this post.)
Here’s the lowdown. I, like the writer of said piece, find SYRIZA not to my liking. That’s an understatement. Their party represents a dysfunctional and destructive set of affairs, all of it dressed up as noble and people-loving, all of it unsustainable and preposterous.
Yet I have to admit that this neo-Marxist party of lunatics have achieved something major over the past month. They have successfully exposed a fundamental flaw, if not an endemic evil, in the current system. By holding out against the massive peer pressure placed on them by their creditors and sundry, they have highlighted the resurgence of the Iron Banks, whose balance sheets have seized command of policy around the world.
It’s real and it’s happening. Banks and monetary funds of all kinds are trying to run the show overtly, dictating not just policy but also politics round the world.
It’s a terrible development. Banks have never been good leaders. Good buttresses yes, great providers and nourishers, safe havens in times of trouble, but never great leaders, at least not in political and sociocultural terms.
Yet they have risen above everyone else, dictating policy-slash-politics with a vengeance.
It doesn’t end there. Tsipras and his ideologically slanted gang of hotheads have also managed to expose another great crack in the system: powerlust; the folly of kings at arms, who clash and scheme and battle for power . . . a madness taking over the Union, threatening to tear the European Realm to shreds.
This is not purple prose, nor some idle Game Of Thrones metaphor. There is something all too true about the choice of words. The clash of kings playing their game of thrones is real and underway. Lords and bannermen have gathered in anger, or panic, presumably both, to claim what they deem theirs by right. They’re looking for ways to crush the unruly vassals and keep their territories intact, their authority untarnished, their pride undented and waxed.
In the process they have sowed panic and terror across the land. People fear them, and mistrust their advisers, for good reason. Statesmen and stateswomen have given way to courtiers. Flatterers and technocrats of questionable worth have risen in rank and influence in the form of glorified accountants, cunning lawyers and lickspittle diplomats and middlemen of all sorts, whose obedience is to writ, number and network alone, common sense and leadership be damned. Unabated they advance, these courtiers and their lords, turning the realm into an arena of scheming, plotting, backstabbing and stonewalling in the name of vested interest and shortsighted policy.
Who will prevail is uncertain. The victors can merely be presumed. Kings, queens, queen regents, princes and princesses, little lordlings and bastards of great ambition, their armies of henchmen and gold-hungry mercenaries by their side, the population at their mercy, they’re all in it together, dancing a dance of daggers, striving to stay alive.
Watch this space for Part 2
PS – For a less fantastic but equally dramatic version of the European Crisis, read this article: