Europäische Union - Defiance: Greece and Europe

The Greek people today find themselves doubly trapped by the human consequences of twin aspects of a single catastrophe: a capitalist crisis which is simultaneously both stripping them of the elementary requirements of civilised life, and driving millions of global refugees onto its shores in flight from the wars, civil wars and environmental degradation it has left in its wake.

Greece has always uneasily straddled the border between Europe and the global south. Even since the Second World War, while the rest of Europe enjoyed a healing respite from the horrors of the past in half a century or more of relative peace, Greece was facing yet more war and repression. As in Korea, Vietnam and the Philippines, fighting continued for many more years against overwhelming odds as a war for independence. Greeces postwar history belongs more to Asia than Europe; it bears especially uncanny parallels with that of the Philippines. In both countries, a ragtag wartime guerrilla resistance movement had overthrown a fascist occupation army virtually singlehanded; in both, it was forced to continue its struggle, this time against the worlds strongest economic and military superpower and its allies within the local elite, among them outright wartime quisling collaborators. And where the conflict in Korea ended in a draw, and in Vietnam a humiliating defeat for US imperialism, in both Greece and the Philippines the guerrilla struggle was ground down by a relentless war of attrition. In both cases, later generations were to rise up in massive popular mobilisations that brought new dictatorships crashing to their downfall: the Greek colonels fleeing for their lives and the Marcoses clambering on to their palace roof to the helicopter that lifted them to exile.

Today the old neat tripartite partition of the postwar world between two rival superpowers and a so-called third world has long since vanished. Stalinism has crumbled into history; capitalism is reeling from a downturn comparable to the 1930s. It is Europe now that is staggering from one crisis to the next, and tracts of Asia where capitalism still fitfully flourishes above all, paradoxically, in Maos China, whose Stalinist state bureaucracy had cleared the path to development by sweeping away the blight of landlordism. On a world scale, the rich have got stupendously and senselessly richer than ever before in history, largely nowadays by parasitic speculation; the poor stripped bare of the most basic means of subsistence and nowadays even of a viable homeland, as they roam the seas in leaky boats and trudge barefoot across continents.

This is the consequence of a breathtaking concentration of wealth. 1% of the worlds population now own more wealth than all the other 99% combined. According to the latest report from Oxfam, the worlds richest 62 people own as much wealth as half of the worlds entire population. (Only five years previously, in 2010, the equivalent number was 388 people.) These 62 masters of the universe had seen their wealth grow within five years by half a trillion dollars to $1.76 trillion. Meanwhile, between 2010 and 2015, despite a population increase of 400 million, the total wealth of the poorest 50% fell by an astounding 41%. Nowhere in the world have the poor got poorer so catastrophically fast as in Greece; and nowhere have they stood up so boldly for their rights.

This book is frankly partisan. It expresses a consistent interpretation of past as well as current events that is controversial, and that will no doubt be contested by others. I dont claim to be an expert on Greece, though I have tried to justify my assertions with references to sources. My interest in Greece is as a fellow campaigner against austerity, and as a champion of the Greek peoples inspiring stand against it.