The proverbial “average citizen” in Brazil, Egypt and Turkey proved, yet again, that when governments cross a certain line in the direction of injury of majorities a “revolution from below” can influence the situation keenly and, in the case of both Brazil and Egypt, decisively. The jury is still out concerning Turkey.
These cases of mass popular intervention to try and stop collective injury juxtapose starkly with Greece.
With the Land of Gods literally on its last legs, socially, politically and economically after three years of devastating austerity and loss of sovereignty to foreign lenders, the silence of the masses is deafening.
The mass demonstrations of 2011, brutally suppressed by the Papandreou government with the lenders applauding, are a fading memory. In contrast, the causes behind the demonstrations -- mass pauperization, economic devastation, social collapse, political repression, and foreign intervention -- have been steadily expanding with the help of the same amoral, corrupt and subservient political establishment that brought Greece to its present predicament.
Recent Greek governments staunchly claimed “democratic legitimacy” because of elections but have failed, in every other practical respect, to uphold the Constitution and protect and defend Greek democracy, and the Greek people, against foreign “banksters” (as in ‘gangsters’) not to mention Greece’s alien EU “partners,” most of which openly display their hostility toward the “profligate” Greeks and other “lazy” southern Europeans.
The Greek masses have been practically silent for the past eighteen months; the occasional demonstrations these days do not threaten the Samaras administration in any meaningful way.
Even the sudden unrest over the Greek government’s dictatorial shuttering of the national TV and radio station ERT (a completely bankrupt and corrupt organization deserving little pity) failed in the end to topple the government. Samaras has received a blow but he will continue with his scorched earth policies in order to keep the lenders happy and the Greeks dying.
This “Silence of the Lambs” gives permission to Greek ministers to express grotesque “conclusions” as to how supposedly the Greek majority accepts the “necessity” of the country committing hara-kiri in order to save itself from economic collapse.
And why not? The onset of summer has sent huge throngs to the beach, in an apparently lighter vacation mood, when in neighboring Turkey large numbers of citizens continue to challenge Erdogan’s authoritarianism and police brutality.
Twenty-odd years of socialist rule have succeeded in defeating whatever meritocracy there was and transform the bulk of Greece’s body politic into an agglomeration of individuals fearful of losing their “lifestyle” based, almost exclusively, on consumerism.
Values that animated past generations of Greeks have vanished. Patriotism has been transformed into a term of insult. Recognizing Greece’s history has become an affront thanks to the copious efforts of left wing “intellectuals” and a peculiar community of “activists” dedicated to shredding and mocking anything that has to do with Greece’s past struggles to survive, including the wars fought to defend and secure the country’s borders. Public education has been devastated and teaching children that, you know, the genocide of Greek populations in Asia Minor never really happened but, rather, it constitutes a “conspiracy” against Greece living peacefully with its neighbors.
Greeks lost all perception of unity, which was not especially strong, to begin with.
The crisis has pummeled them with such devastating and methodical ferociousness that the large majority has been overtaken by panic: panic that everything will be lost if the Greek people do not prostrate themselves; panic that every man’s little corner of “European affluence,” complete with gadgets bought with borrowed money and an air conditioner for the long, scorching summers, will be taken away if anyone dares to challenge authority beyond innocuous noise in the streets; panic that, by protesting, Greeks would somehow prevent the country returning to the artificial nirvana of the last decade.
Greeks have simply lost all fighting spirit -- an element which is still quoted as the heart of Greek hearts with counterfeit bravado by those few who do fantasize about the supposedly upcoming “tsunami” that will wipe out the corrupt politicians and restart the Greek engine.
Mr. Samaras, and the likes of him, therefore, will continue their wrecker’s job without serious impediments. A “Greek Spring” seems an ever fading possibility.
Greeks, in their headlong retreat, have forgotten that liberty is not on offer but, rather, it must be won every day. Every day that passes with reverberating whimpering instead of getting organized to defend against government brutalities, and the foreign occupation by a German-instructed command authority, constitutes another fatal stab at Hellas.
The worst is still to come.