Forget the Holocaust

What Israel is trying to do is erase Gaza from the map, wipe it from history.

For decades, Gaza has been the world’s largest open air prison (even David Cameron used those words after he visited). It is a source of profound shame precisely because it replicates the ghetto conditions Jews were forced to endure under Nazism. And now, after a year of unimaginable destruction, the Israeli Parliament has voted to make the UN agency for Palestine, UNRWA, illegal. There can be no doubt any more that Israel is and has been deliberately targeting the entire population of Gaza including civilians, and not just with bombardment and large scale military destruction but with mass starvation. They have repeatedly said as much, despite the simultaneous rebuttals in the international media; and that is what they have been doing.

Of course, their pretext is, as usual, their claim (with no evidence) that UNRWA is somehow tied to Hamas. This too they learned from the Nazis, who likewise labelled anyone they disliked “terrorists”. No, really, I am not making this up - the US army actually developed their counterinsurgency tactics after WWII by consulting Wehrmacht officers and copying and adapting Nazi manuals. And then they trained the Israelis. There is one recurring theme here, taken directly from the Nazis - anything you want to target or destroy, you label it as “terrorist”. A hospital becomes a “terrorist base”. A UN school becomes a “terrorist hideout”. A refugee camp becomes a “terrorist training camp”. A freedom fighter legitimately exercising their rights under ethical principle as well as international law by engaging in armed struggle against an illegal occupation and an apartheid state? “Terrorist”.

But the real fact of the matter is that the thousands of civilians in Gaza who have been killed, the millions who have been left homeless as entire buildings have been levelled to the ground, are actually being targeted - not for anything they have done, but for what they are, what they might one day become, and what they might do one day in the future, in their legitimate struggle against oppression. For any of you who watched ‘Minority Report’ or know the Philip K. Dick story, this is ‘precrime’ - something straight out of dystopian science fiction. (Something along these lines has in fact been part of secret US policy for years, including drone strikes on children and family of “terrorists”, which have been well documented by investigative journalists.)

Some Israelis get upset at such comparisons and hurl accusations of anti-semitism precisely because the comparisons ring true, because in fact the irony could not be more palpable, that Jews are perpetrating on another group of people the inhuman conditions once imposed on them by the Nazis, and have been doing so for decades, maintaining an illegal occupation and a brutal apartheid police state (while also deliberately funding and supporting extremist factions like Hamas in order to radicalise Palestinian leadership and undermine moderates, and derail any possibility of a peace process).

I think it is time to strip from Israel the veil of perpetual victimhood and consign the Holocaust to history where it belongs. It does not belong to any one nation, and Jews weren’t the only victims of Nazism - tens of millions of others died in WWII. Israeli leaders, of whatever political persuasion, clearly have not learned the lessons of history, certainly not the lessons I learned from my own grandparents’ struggle against Nazism, the lesson that almost any genuine Holocaust survivor would surely agree with: “never again” means never again. Not just “never again” for Jews, but “never again” for anyone.

Or as one great writer put it, “when you fight monsters, beware that you do not become a monster yourself. When you gaze deep into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”

Treating Israel as the perpetual victim in today’s context, where they clearly are the oppressor and aggressor, far worse than Putin and the Russian invasion in Ukraine - applying double standards in this way, just because of the Holocaust and European historical guilt, is not much different from excusing a serial child rapist murderer just because he was molested as a child himself. The historical facts of the Holocaust do not exempt Israel from the principles of international law and morality and ethics that apply to other nations.

Forget the Holocaust, which the Palestinians had nothing to do with anyway - look at what is happening now, in Gaza and the West Bank, what has been happening for 70 years and is still happening, and the devastating consequences for the whole world if the conflict in the Middle East escalates further. This is genocide. This bloody mess was created by European colonialism (not much better than Nazism); and it will not be fixed by shipping more weapons from the US and UK and Germany to Israel and providing them military and logistical support - this will only make it worse in the long run.

The US is the most advanced and powerful military in the world, and together Israel and its backers can in theory easily achieve military supremacy in the short term. And yet, will that make the world a safer place in the long term? Will we be safer, friends, when bombs start exploding in New York and London as a result of this debacle? Look what happened in Afghanistan - the US, for all its military might, failed. 20 years on, they withdrew and the Taliban is back in power. The world is not a better or safer place. And this is the effect that Western meddling in world affairs and military intervention generally has in the world, especially the Middle East - it leads to more chaos and violence and destruction and horror. The kind of chaos that opens up a power vacuum and leads to the emergence of more and more extreme factions. Ever wonder why we have a refugee crisis in Europe? Well, it has a lot to do with the massive doses of pointless violence unleashed by our governments in the west on less fortunate parts of the world (e.g. Iraq and Afghanistan), which destabilised the whole region.

Recently, in response to demands from Caribbean leaders, our prime minister said that he won’t engage in any discussions about Britain paying reparations for slavery or even making an official apology, for the millions of Africans who were brutally enslaved and transported across the world as forced labourers (another thing the Nazis liked to do, and not just to Jews, to feed their war machine); not to mention the millions killed by colonisation, by Europeans illegally migrating and occupying and pillaging and plundering across Africa and Asia for centuries.

How ironic, given that, as I recall, Diane Abbott was suspended from the Labour Party last year for making comments to the effect that the racist discrimination suffered by black people is worse than the discrimination suffered by white people such as Irish and Jews. A bit tactless, but I’d say she has a point.

Just think, how often we hear from politicians and commentators talk about the Holocaust and anti-semitism and so forth, how much money and technology has been poured into Israel by the US and UK and Germany and other western countries, how all the world leaders get together for Holocaust Remembrance Day every year, and so on. But the millions of Africans who were brutally enslaved, or the millions murdered by colonial rampages? Nada. Keir Starmer doesn’t even wanna talk about it, because he’d rather “look to the future”.

It’s not as if this is all ancient history. It was more devastating, and the African continent has yet to recover from the ravages of slavery and colonialism.

The Holocaust is easy, when it comes to political point-scoring, because it is easy for politicians today to distance themselves from the Nazis (well, most of them anyway). But colonialism and empire and slavery, not so much. Emmanuel Macron stands pretty much alone among western leaders (certainly among those from former colonial powers) in denouncing European colonialism as “barbarity”. This is because of widespread and deeply institutionalised racism, and because the wealth of many western nations was built on colonialism, on theft and murder and genocide, it was built by hordes of illegal immigrants from Europe, armed and dangerous, plundering and pillaging across Asia and Africa, rampaging and then pretending they were bringing ‘civilisation’ to the ancient civilisations they had ravaged. This is the bedrock of the current world order and the key reason for the pre-eminent position of Europe and the United States in it. What is alarming in what Israel has been doing to the Palestinians for the past 70 years is not just how much it resembles Nazism, but how much it resembles what Europeans did in Africa and Asia and the Americas. That is ultimately another reason why the key European powers and the US are so closely aligned with Israel - the sympathy of fellow genocidal settler colonialists. Western European and American wealth is built on the enslavement and murder of Africans and Native Americans, Israeli wealth is built on the ghettoisation and imprisonment and murder of Palestinians. Israel is a criminal enterprise built on the blood and crushed bones of Palestinian children.

Sure, the Germans may have lingering historical guilt over the Holocaust, which may be why they support Israel as part of their ‘staatsraison’ - but it’s not as if they only killed Jews in World War II. They killed a lot more Russians, for instance - a lot more. Around 20 million, including at least 13 million civilians (of whom only around 10 percent were Jews). Yet that somehow doesn’t bring Russian interests to feature anywhere in Germany's ’staatsraison’ nor lead to any special German-Russian relationship based on historical guilt. On the contrary, the Germans have taken a very different stance toward Russia’s territorial pretensions in Ukraine, versus Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestine which is far more brutal. But oh, you might say, the Nazis didn’t gas the Russians or burn them in the ovens like the Jews, they just used brutal military tactics, bombardment, starvation policies, mass executions, forced labour, and so forth - so that makes it somehow less tragic or less reprehensible? I don’t think so. I think the real reasons for this double standard and for Germany’s pro-Israel ‘staatsraison’ have less to do with logic or ethical or moral principles or even history, and more to do with ideology.

It’s almost as if all the Holocaust remembrance, all the incantations and incitements to remember, the mantras of “never again” repeated by Holocaust survivors, it’s as if the real point here, the real effect of all this “remembering” is actually to induce a sort of collective amnesia, to make us forget - to obscure all the other genocides and atrocities throughout history, before and after, to ignore or pardon in particular the atrocities committed by Jews or the Jewish Israeli state, to preserve the Holocaust as an exceptional event like no other and to put the suffering of Jews on a pedestal as being somehow exceptional. If you follow only the mainstream corporate media, you might be forgiven for thinking the Israelis are now somehow suffering just as much as the Palestinians in Gaza (who, even before the latest round of conflict, had been living in prison conditions under an illegal occupation for 70 years, routinely targeted by extrajudicial killings and indefinite detention without trial, dispossession, land theft, etc). On CNN they even feature sympathy pieces about the trauma that Israeli soldiers experience (poor sods) from crushing Palestinian civilians alive under their tanks (all “terrorists” of course).

Why is it the Irish and South Africans and their governments, regardless of political persuasion, who see no issue with supporting Palestine and calling for a ceasefire, and condemning Israel’s actions? They are both as nations historic victims of European colonialism, apartheid and genocidal policies. That’s why.

On the scale of suffering, what is actually exceptional in history is the sheer destruction wrought upon the world by mainly western imperial and neo-imperial powers, from the early colonial exploits and genocides and the trans-Atlantic slave trade to the world wars and the Vietnam war and the various US military rampages and coup d'etats particularly across Latin America, the murder of millions, along with the more recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the occupation of Palestine for the past 70 years and the current genocide being broadcast in real time on social media. All this has gone on far longer and has had far wider repercussions, and is rooted in a far deeper racism. Just look at all the outpouring of support for Ukrainian refugees from the British public and politicians alike - can you even imagine anything like that for Syrians or Iraqis? On the contrary, with non-European refugees, even those from wars the UK itself has caused (or especially those) far more has been done to keep them out and malign them in the tabloid press and government PR than to welcome them.

Just the other day, a court handed down a verdict in the criminal trial of a police officer who shot and killed an unarmed black man during a routine stop and search in Streatham, South London, where I work - not guilty. Of course, the policeman was just “doing his job” as a firearms officer, which is to shoot people, even if they are unarmed, apparently. The jury took just 3 hours to reach a verdict. I’ll bet that if the victim, instead of an unarmed black man, was white - the outcome would have been very different. The jury would have had a very different interpretation of what a firearms officer’s job is.

I’d say Diane Abbott has a point. The reason why these things keep happening and the reason so little is done about it (except when protests like Black Lives Matter break out into the open, or the 2011 riots), is the same reason why there is so much concern with the Holocaust in officialdom or among our political leaders, and so little concern with slavery and colonialism, or the genocide taking place right now in Gaza. So little concern for the latter, that they banned any reference to genocide at the recently-held Labour Party conference here in the UK. So much for free speech.

So let us forget the term “Holocaust” and speak instead of holocausts and genocides and atrocities, of racism and slavery, of crimes against humanity, of crimes that no nation or group can commit with impunity and for which any nation must be judged harshly, and equally so.

And history will judge Israel and the US and their allies harshly, in the long run - not least because, when you label all your enemies and your victims “terrorists”, you risk the fate of the proverbial ‘boy who cried “wolf”’ - when you actually do get attacked by real terrorists, nobody will believe you.

The Violence of the Oppressed

"Do you condemn Hamas violence?" Another oft-repeated cue, a question routinely put to Palestinian leaders (non-Hamas) interviewed in the mainstream media.

Martin Luther King had a good response here - as a leader in the civil rights movement in the 1960s who preached non-violent resistance, similar questions would be put to him by establishment figures and the media, and he faced a similar dilemma when it came to black youth who sometimes resorted to violent means in struggling against the brutality they faced, particularly in the American South. At the same time, the Vietnam war was raging, and many fellow civil rights leaders urged him not to speak out on the issue (as they wanted the US Government on their side in enacting reforms to bring about racial equality and desegregation). This is what he said, in a key speech entitled 'Beyond Vietnam':

"As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked, and rightly so, "What about Vietnam?" They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government."



Likewise, I cannot bring myself to denounce the violence of Palestinians in their struggle, until I see world leaders denounce the illegal occupation of Palestinian land by Israel and the blockade of Gaza, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and Israel's deliberate targeting of Palestinian civilians including children over the past 70 years, resulting in thousands of deaths, cheered on (literally) by Israeli civilians. Until that happens, and until world leaders put serious pressure on Israel to end the blockade of Gaza which has gone on for over a decade, and agree a workable two state solution that gives the Palestinians full self-determination, until then I do not think it appropriate to expect any Palestinian to "condemn" Hamas violence. First things first. We cannot conflate the violence of the oppressed with that of the oppressor.

To boot, Israel helped create Hamas (literally), in order to undermine the moderate Fatah and the Palestinian Authority in their efforts to pursue recognition and pressure Israel through international institutions. Israeli politicians have for that reason explicitly referred to Hamas as an "asset" - amongst other things, it has given Israeli officials a pretext to treat Palestinian civilians in Gaza as a legitimate target, and they have made statements to that effect, including in public comments and leaked diplomatic cables.

In other words, just as they conflate criticism of Israel with anti-semitism, as if they are one and the same, they conflate the Palestinians (including civilians) with Hamas, making them in turn legitimate targets. These are two sides of the same deranged coin.

And yet, former commander of US forces in Iraq, David Petraus, speaking on Radio 4's Today Programme the other today tells us that Israel "fully understands" the complexity of fighting in a densely-populated urban environment against an enemy who "doesn't have the regard for civilians that we do."

What a bunch of hypocrite bollocks. This coming from the US establishment, which has, since WWII, caused more bloodshed and civilian deaths than virtually anyone else, including by funding and supporting the violent overthrow of democratically-elected governments worldwide, directly training and financing death squads and torturers across Latin America, not to mention the illegal coup of the Palestinian Authority in 2006-07, or for that matter Iraq.

At the moment, most of what I hear from the top leadership in the US and here in the UK and other European countries is sickening. The US is preparing to deploy 2,000 troops to support Israel. Seeing things like this, I can imagine how something like the Holocaust or any other genocide could have happened, as the world stood by - back then, the tabloid press wrote about and demonised Jewish refugees from Germany in the same way they demonise refugees from the middle east these days. Their pain - the pain the Palestinians suffer and have suffered under a brutal occupation, and a decade-long blockade of Gaza, as their civilians and leaders are systematically killed, abducted, and so forth - their pain simply doesn't matter to our leaders the same way that Israeli pain does. Their pain has been legalised.

I would also add, for all the talk of beheadings of babies by Hamas (for which the IDF now admits they have no evidence, despite President Biden claiming he had seen it), it is worth remembering one of the worst crimes in history, certainly the worst in the past century or so, perpetrated by Nazis against the Jewish people, the Holocaust - the real horror of it was not this type of spectacular violence, but precisely what is termed 'administrative massacre'. Annihilating Palestinians by way of 'collateral damage' in the way Israel has been doing for decades through indiscriminate bombing (with deliberate disregard for any distinction between civilians and combatants, as per the comments referenced above), levelling entire apartment blocks and neighbourhoods, fits into the same general category. They kill a lot more Palestinians than Hamas could Israelis, don’t they?

I can also imagine here how world wars start, as Iran and the US have both now conditionally pledged their involvement - wars have started over less. World War I was famously triggered by the assassination of the archduke Franz Ferdinand in my hometown, Sarajevo, by a young Bosnian anarchist rebel.

Keir Starmer was on Radio 4 too, shortly after Petraus, and his lack of any moral or ethical backbone is equally sickening. How far the Labour Party has fallen. I would liken this to a situation where, say, the Ukrainians, in resisting Russian occupation (and in retaliation for years of Russian atrocities), have crossed into Russia and committed atrocities, and killed civilians - and suddenly now we all "stand with Russia", instead of the occupied and oppressed Ukrainians.

Except that this would never happen in regards to Russians and Ukrainians, because the Ukrainians are 'White' - when it’s White against White, it’s ok to side with the obvious underdog, the victims in the fight. We will even give them weapons. But in the Middle East, our leaders urge everyone that we must "stand with Israel", because Israel is more 'White' than Palestinians, and our leaders are a bunch of morally bankrupt racists and Islamophobes. The war in Gaza is part of a modern Judeo-Christian continuation of the Crusades, aimed at purging the Brown Arab heathen from the Holy Land. We really haven't advanced much since the Middle Ages, here in Europe.

"Israel has a right to defend itself"

“Israel has a right to defend itself” - I hear this phrase unthinkingly parroted so often, but it seems almost nobody expressing or questioning this sentiment gives much thought to what it means, to the difference between a war of defence and a war of aggression or occupation, or to the fact that notwithstanding this currently pending invasion of Gaza, the Palestinians have been living under a brutal Israeli apartheid occupation for decades. I've written a lot about it in a previous post here.

Is the forced expulsion of 1.1 million residents in a humanitarian disaster zone under siege - virtually the entirety of Gaza city - and a full scale invasion that is likely to flatten their homes and leave many of those who survive nothing to return to, in the world’s largest open-air prison - a war of defence? Imagine that Iraqis or Vietnamese or Chileans or Iranians or any other country that has suffered unchecked aggression or terrorism by British or American forces (or by US-funded militias or terrorists) had the resources to “defend” themselves in this way, and did the same - imagine that they amassed troops on the border and ordered the expulsion of the entire population of New York or Washington or London from their homes in advance of a full scale military invasion - because they, too, have a right to defend themselves. If that is how we define "defence", where does it stop? The war in Iraq itself - which we now all know was justified by a hoax orchestrated by top-level leadership in the US and Britain - was pitched to the British and American public as a pre-emptive war of “defence”.

There is a racist, imperial logic underpinning all this - when Palestinians kill Israeli soldiers and civilians as an act of resistance to occupation, they are "terrorists". Yet British or American or Israeli troops, no matter what they do, even when they invade other countries illegaly and with impunity, murder civilians and commit war crimes, torture, rape women and children, are always fighting a war of "defence". Once they have defined their objective as 'defence' and ensured the effective dissemination of that message via an entire array of military-industrial media networks, there is no limit to what they can do.

Anyone who doesn't get the point, I have no words for you. Trigger warning - I've survived two years under siege by Serbs in Sarajevo, all the while they were proclaiming in the media that the Bosnians / Muslims were "bombing themselves" and using civilians as "human shields" - as if it's even possible to fight a war under siege in a densely-populated urban area, to resist occupation, without defending fighters at some point being in close proximity to civilians, at least from the viewpoint of long-range artillery. The Nazis themselves perfected this kind of logic, referring to the partisans as 'terrorists'. And the Serbs too saw themselves as "defending" Europe from Muslim hordes, in the process committing genocide.

But "Hamas denies Israel's right to exist, it's in their charter." Oh yes, and Israel likewise, quite clearly denies the Palestinian state the right to exist, and has been much more successful at it than Hamas, given that the Palestinians don’t have a state - Israel has denied them that since long before Hamas existed, from the creation of Israel and the Nakba in 1948. When they tried legitimate means, through free and fair elections in 2005, Israel reacted by arresting Palestinian legislators, jailing hundreds of them indefinitely without trial - for the crime of election campaigning. Not exactly the way to encourage a peaceful solution and dialogue.

On the whole, it is not really in the Palestinians' interest to disrupt the peace process - it has largely been successive Israeli governments that have repeatedly disrupted the peace process, because they cannot possibly ever agree either a one state or two state solution, for as long as Palestinians outnumber Israelis, and for as long as a number of Palestinians or their descendants may seek to exercise a 'right of return' to the homes they were expelled from in what is now Israel. Even the creation of Hamas as a formidable force is the Israeli government and IDF's doing - because they needed to undermine the legitimacy of the moderate and secular PLO led by Yasser Arafat, and demonise the Palestinians. You can read all about it here.

And, I have to add, putting my lawyer hat on - technically, any Palestinian questioning Israel's right to exist does have an arguable case here. The population of Mandatory Palestine under British rule in the 1920s was around 80% Arab - if a democratic state had been created, it should have been majority Arab; which is why the creation of a Jewish state necessitated the forced expulsion of a significant portion of the Arab population from what is today Israel, which resulted in the 'Nakba' - in other words, ethnic cleansing, which is not only unethical but illegal under international law. Any fair-minded person, equipped with the facts and knowledge of the history of the region, should be able to appreciate that you don't have to be a bloodthirsty religious fanatic to legitimately think that Israel should not exist. It's not very different from Native Americans feeling that the United States should not exist, however impractical the sentiment may be as the foundation for a political platform.

And make no mistake - the historical expulsion of Jews from the Holy Land over the millennia was not the Palestinians' or Arabs' doing - oh no, for most of history, until the early 20th century, and until the British colonial administration massively fucked things up with their 'divide and conquer' style of governance, the Arabs were among the few allies Jews have had had in the region. The exile and persecution of Jews in the Holy Land has been largely at the hands of Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, and later Christian Crusaders in the Middle Ages. Ironically, it was the Persians (ancestors of modern Iranians) and later the Arabs and Ottomans who brought the Jews back to the Holy Land. The Ottoman empire was a refuge for Jews exiled from Europe during the Spanish Inquisition and various other pogroms. And in Jerusalem under Ottoman rule for four whole centuries (until 1917), it was common practice for Muslims and Jews and Christians to all pray together at the site of the Al Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount - one of the holiest sites in Islam, and for Jews as well, being the location of the former Jewish Temple (first destroyed by Babylonians, later the Romans). That this would be unthinkable today, is a measure of how bad things have got, and how fast.

Understandably, the Zionist cause got a boost after the Holocaust. The Jews needed a state of their own. But why did the Palestinians have to pay the price for it? Why wasn't it somehow pinned to those responsible for the historical wrongs done to Jews, from the Roman Empire and Christian Crusades to the Spanish Inquisition and the Holocaust - the Germans, Italians, Spanish? They should have been made to pay. You think Hamas are extremists for taking extreme measures to resist occupation? Think of the Nazis, the Fascists, the Inquisitors and Conquistadores - nobody did anything to them to make them genocidal psychopaths. They were not oppressed or living under siege. Let's also not forget previous incursions into Gaza, or the Lebanon war of 2006, in which Israel launched a full scale invasion of southern Lebanon, displacing around 1 million people and killing over a thousand, and causing extensive damage to civilian infrastructure. Why? Because Hezbollah attacked an Israeli military transport patrolling the border and kidnapped two Israeli soldiers, demanding the release of prisoners held by Israel.

But I digress. What I want to say is, this pending invasion of Gaza is not about 'defence'. The Israeli leadership are seizing on an opportunity to kill more Palestinians, flatten more Palestinian homes (something they have been doing for decades, not just with artillery but even plain old bulldozers), and in the long term seize more land, once it’s become uninhabitable for Palestinians. Hamas is useful to them. They started the occupation, they created Hamas (literally), and they ultimately provoked this. There is no fair solution, fair to all - two state or one state - that the Israeli leadership would accept. They are outnumbered, and they know that. You think Hamas are extremists? Look at the Israeli politicians. Ayelet Shaked, one of the most influential Israeli lawmakers, formerly Minister of Justice and Minister of the Interior, has in the past posted statements on Facebook referring to Palestinian children as "little snakes", and condoning the collective punishment of Palestinian civilians, suggesting they should all be treated as "enemy combatants", not just those doing the actual fighting. I fear that many Israelis themselves have, in their historical memory of exile, internalised the European racism that was once turned against Jews and Arabs alike (rooted in the Crusades and Inquisition), just as many Arabs have internalised the anti-semitism that led to the Holocaust (also a European creation). Yet they remain brethren - the Jews claiming descent from Isaac, the Palestinians from Ishmael, both sons of Abraham.

Paris je t’aime

After the attacks in Paris on Friday, for some reason I keep thinking back to Sarajevo circa ’92. Maybe because of the sudden intrusion of extreme violence in a relatively peaceful place. Maybe because I’ve been to Paris, walked its streets, have friends who live there or are from there. And maybe also because, unlike previous incidents of this type, the targets chosen by the attackers are not the edifices of power and privilege, or the transport networks, nor the source of any specific provocation - but seemingly random targets in the less privileged multicultural, multi-ethnic and anti-establishmentarian neighbourhoods of Paris. They have no particular strategic value (relative to other potential targets), unless the attackers’ aim (or that of their commanders) was precisely to attack that multiculturalism, to sow discord and hatred where there was none before, to tacitly collude with the political forces of the Right and the military-industrial complex to close Europe’s borders and stem the flow of refugees fleeing ISIS on the one hand, and stimulate increased military expenditure on the other.

There is such violence in the world all the time of course, most notably in recent days in Beirut - ironically, a city once nicknamed the ‘Paris of the Middle East’. Yet some of the accusations of racism in the outpourings of solidarity after the Paris attacks seem misplaced. On one hand, because many of us did speak out en masse against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Palestine, etc - even before they happened in some cases. Some key figures in the French government at the time did so too. We all know about the root causes. And I’ve spoken much more about those than about this.

On the other hand, major violence in a place that you have a connection to (material and philosophical), especially if it’s a short train ride away, affects you more on a personal level. I know people there, I’ve been there, I could have been there. I even had a strange sense of foreboding on Friday morning - maybe just because it was the 13th. (It also happens to be a few days before what would have been the birthday of my late dad, from whom I inherited a certain appreciation for Foucault, Deleuze, and other French postwar thinkers whose spirit very much imbues those multicultural and anti-establishmentarian neighbourhoods of Paris.)

There may be an element of self-interest involved in all this, but not racism (unless you’re a supporter of the Front National) - especially since the victims, according to reports, are of at least 15 different nationalities from all over the world. It's not so much about how we value the lives of others, but about how close to home the violence gets, or how connected we are to it.

I won’t pray for Paris because, as one French artist pointed out, on average Parisians aren’t really into religion. Except one, I might suggest - Religion of Love, Church of Rock n’ Roll. In the words of one famous adherent and inhabitant of Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, Jim Morrison (aka the Lizard King):

Do you know how pale and wanton thrillful
comes death on a strange hour
unannounced, unplanned for
like a scaring over-friendly guest you've
brought to bed
Death makes angels of us all
and gives us wings
where we had shoulders
smooth as ravens’ claws

I will not go
Prefer a Feast of Friends
To the Giant Family

There is a New Berlin Wall and it's called The Euro

"The whole of the Mediterranean now finds itself in the wrong currency, and yet virtually nobody in the political arena has the courage to stand up and say that. I feel that the continent is now divided from north to south. There is a new Berlin Wall and it's called the euro."

I find myself surprised to report that these incisive and insightful words were uttered recently before the European Parliament by none other than Nigel Farage, the leader of Britain's far-right Euroskeptic party, UKIP - though I'm not sure the label 'far-right' is really appropriate any more. For in the charged political climate of today's Europe, it is perhaps an indication of just how acrimonious and divisive the politics of the eurozone have become - how irrational, fanatical, and hegemonic the policies of certain of its members - that Farage comes off sounding like the Voice of Reason. The eurozone seems to be in the grip of an economic neo-fascism far more extreme than anything UKIP could drum up.

I now officially count myself among the Euro-skeptics - not just with regard to currency union (that was the case before) but with regard to the EU project as a whole. I am not going to fault the UK or anyone for wanting to hold a referendum on EU membership in the future. All the worst fears about the EU, so far mostly peddled in the tabloid press - about surrendering national sovereignty and decision-making to faceless technocrats in Brussels, and EU politicians unaccountable to the people over whom they exercise enormous power - have been fully confirmed. And even worse - it would be bad enough if we were simply ruled by technocrats and bureaucrats in Brussels, but that would suggest at least a commitment to rational, data-driven policies. This is far worse. The latest rumblings over the Greek debt in Brussels - deal or no deal - suggest a political union driven by an irrational, sadistic, vindictive, fanatical and divisive neo-fascist politics of domination and hegemony, a conspiracy against the public, a conspiracy against democratic politics, led by politicians who are prepared to punish voters in a member country for their choice of government, for demanding rational economic policy, for making choices that their EU overlords dislike.



Economist Tim Worstall, writing in Forbes (hardly a lefty political rag), is more-less in line with Krugman, Stiglitz, and any number of award-winning economists: "It’s very difficult indeed to design plans for Greece that are actually worse than the one the European Union is trying to impose upon that benighted country. Decades of enforced poverty in order to maintain a currency (and possibly even a political order) that the country should never have embraced, should never have been allowed into, just isn’t one of those things that would win you a gold star in your high school economics class. Everyone from Milton Friedman to Paul Krugman, with a few insignificant bag carriers like myself bringing up the rear, has been screaming that the problem is the euro and while that remains so will the problem...However, amazingly, the German finance ministry seems to have managed to come up with a plan that is even worse...As has been pointed out, those who don’t [study history] are doomed to repeat it."

Paul Krugman in The New York Times calls the Eurogroup's demands "madness...This goes beyond harsh into pure vindictiveness, complete destruction of national sovereignty, and no hope of relief. It is, presumably, meant to be an offer Greece can’t accept…" And while Chancellor Merkel is harping on about trust, Krugman insists - "Who will ever trust Germany’s good intentions after this?...In a way, the economics have almost become secondary. But still, let’s be clear: what we’ve learned these past couple of weeks is that being a member of the eurozone means that the creditors can destroy your economy if you step out of line...even a complete Greek capitulation would be a dead end...The European project — a project I have always praised and supported — has just been dealt a terrible, perhaps fatal blow. And whatever you think of Syriza, or Greece, it wasn’t the Greeks who did it."

Joseph Stiglitz, another Nobel-winning economist, also insists that the real problem is Germany, which has benefited greatly under the euro. While he believes the eurozone should stay together, he notes that most economists (including himself) hold that "the best solution for Europe, if it's going to break up, is for Germany to leave. The mark would raise, the German economy would be dampened...and Germany would find out just how much it needs the euro to stay together...and possibly be more willing to help out the countries that are struggling...There's a whole set of an unfinished economic agenda which most economists agree on, except Germany doesn't."

"If Greece leaves," Stiglitz adds, "I think Greece will actually do better...There will be a period of adjustment. But Greece will start to grow."

Even on this side of the Atlantic, Wolfgang Munchau, associate editor of the Financial Times and former co-editor of FT Deutschland, writes that Greece's creditors "have destroyed the eurozone as we know it and demolished the idea of a monetary union as a step towards a democratic political union...In doing so they reverted to the nationalist European power struggles of the 19th and early 20th century. They demoted the eurozone into a toxic fixed exchange-rate system, with a shared single currency, run in the interests of Germany, held together by the threat of absolute destitution for those who challenge the prevailing order...This brings us back to a more toxic version of the old exchange-rate mechanism of the 1990s that left countries trapped in a system run primarily for the benefit of Germany, which led to the exit of the English pound and the temporary departure of the Italian lira. What was left was a coalition of countries willing to adjust their economies to Germany’s. Britain had to leave because it was not...Once you strip the eurozone of any ambitions for a political and economic union, it changes into a utilitarian project in which member states will coldly weigh the benefits and costs, just as Britain is currently assessing the relative advantages or disadvantages of EU membership. In such a system, someone, somewhere, will want to leave sometime. And the strong political commitment to save it will no longer be there either."

In fact, I have yet to read a credible, independent expert opinion that has anything positive to say about Greece's creditors and their role in this debacle. One financial analyst, Marc Ostwald of ADM Investor Services, claimed the latest deal offered by the creditors was worse than the 1919 Treaty of Versailles that crushed Weimar Germany with debt and paved the way for the second world war. The creditors, he added, seem to be trying “to completely destroy Greece”.



Even Jeffrey Sachs, one of the infamous 'shock doctors' much-maligned by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine (he is in fact credited with having coined the term 'economic shock therapy'), has effectively cast his lot with Syriza, writing that "Europe’s demands – ostensibly aimed at ensuring that Greece can service its foreign debt – are petulant, naive, and fundamentally self-destructive. In rejecting them, the Greeks are not playing games; they are trying to stay alive...The Greek government is right to have drawn the line. It has a responsibility to its citizens. The real choice, after all, lies not with Greece, but with Europe."

Already in the lead-up to Syriza's election several months ago, Sachs wrote: "The leftwing party Syriza is no anomaly; it is telling the financial and political truth in the runup to Sunday’s elections, however unpleasant that may be to politicians in Berlin and Brussels."

What is becoming increasingly clear, given the near-consensus of eminent international economists - Nobel laureates and esteemed economic thinkers all - on the utter fallacy of the Eurozone creditors' position, and the correctness of Syriza's demands, is that Syriza is really not very radical at all. As Slavoj Zizek put it in a recent article in New Statesman, "if one looks closely at the proposals offered by Syriza, one cannot help noticing that they were once part of the standard moderate social-democratic agenda (in Sweden of the 1960s, the programme of the government was much more radical). It is a sad sign of our times that today you have to belong to a 'radical' left to advocate these same measures..." The label 'radical left', as I've said before, only has meaning in a charged political context where the 'centre' has become the technocratic neo-fascism currently gripping the imaginations of many eurozone leaders. If Syriza are radical, it is only as radically rational pragmatists.

In light of all this, the account given in a recent interview by Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek finance minister, of the past few months of negotiations, makes a lot of sense:

...[T]he inside information one gets...to have your worst fears confirmed...To have “the powers that be” speak to you directly, and it be as you feared – the situation was worse than you imagined! the complete lack of any democratic scruples, on behalf of the supposed defenders of Europe’s democracy. The quite clear understanding on the other side that we are on the same page analytically...To have very powerful figures look at you in the eye and say "You’re right in what you’re saying, but we’re going to crunch you anyway."

It’s not that it didn’t go down well – it’s that there was point blank refusal to engage in economic arguments. Point blank...You put forward an argument that you’ve really worked on – to make sure it’s logically coherent – and you’re just faced with blank stares. It is as if you haven’t spoken.

Schäuble was consistent throughout. His view was "I’m not discussing the programme – this was accepted by the previous government and we can’t possibly allow an election to change anything..." So at that point I had to get up and say "Well perhaps we should simply not hold elections anymore for indebted countries," and there was no answer.

My constant proposal to the Troika was very simple: let us agree on three or four important reforms that we agree upon, like the tax system, like VAT, and let’s implement them immediately. And you relax the restrictions on liqiuidity from the ECB. You want a comprehensive agreement – let’s carry on negotiating – and in the meantime let us introduce these reforms in parliament by agreement between us and you...And they said "No, no, no, this has to be a comprehensive review. Nothing will be implemented if you dare introduce any legislation. It will be considered unilateral action inimical to the process of reaching an agreement." And then of course a few months later they would leak to the media that we had not reformed the country and that we were wasting time! And so... [chuckles] we were set up, in a sense, in an important sense.



The palpable hysteria with which European elites met Syriza's mere election a few months ago, with talk of markets tumbling and predictions of general mayhem, is reminiscent of C.P. Cavafy's famous poem, 'Waiting for the Barbarians', in which he describes a 'civilized' society in decline, preparing for an imminent invasion by barbarians who never, in the end, turn up - and ends with these lines:

Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home so lost in thought?

Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
And some who have just returned from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.

And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.

The eurogroup's disappointment with and consequent resentment of Syriza amounts precisely to this - Syriza are the barbarians who never materialized, who turned out to be in fact the rational, pragmatic and moderate antidote to the irrational, German-led neo-fascist economic extremism driving the poorer European economies into debt servitude - Syriza made them look bad, simply put. Syriza as extremist barbarians would have been 'a kind of solution' - they would have justified harsh measures, in the eyes of creditors. When Chancellor Merkel talks about 'trust', this is probably what she is getting at, or where these sentiments come from. As some commentators have pointed out, the Germans have shown themselves to be less trustworthy than anyone - but they are nonetheless fanatically, obsessively, hysterically convinced that behind these rational, pragmatic moderates in Syriza, the barbarians still lurk, in wait.



What is also clear is that, even if Syriza has lost the political battle - for now - it has clearly won the rational argument. The forces of Reason and Rational Economic Policy are clearly on its side. And the development of science, even economic science, isn't subject to socio-political fluctuations, market movements, and special interests quite as much as the political field is.

During negotiations in Brussels yesterday, it emerged that one of the creditors' demands (specifically a German idea), as a condition of the Greek bailout, was to transfer 50 billion euros of 'valuable Greek assets' as collateral to a shady Luxembourg-based 'Institution for Growth'. This entity, as later reported, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of German KfW, chaired by none other than Germany's finance minister Wolfgang Schauble. Quite apart from the cronyism and conflicts of interest - this, dear reader, is tantamount to me giving you a loan to help you repay your debts, but in return demanding that you, say, sign over the mortgage on your house to me as collateral - which in the long run makes you poorer, as you are giving up an asset that will appreciate in value, and less likely to be able to repay your debts, including your debts to me. This is just another example of how fantastically stupid the austerity regime imposed on Greece for the past 5 years has been, and goes a long way in explaining why economists around the world are railing against it. Even if this idea was watered down in the latest form of the agreement - the assets now will be transferred to an entity based in Athens - the principle is the same: the Greek government is somehow expected to achieve major budget surpluses while at the same time making itself poorer in the long run (by selling off assets), and growing the economy, and repaying its debts, and making those debts more sustainable.



As for the cronyism and conflicts of interest in the suggested version of the plan, we should remember that Schauble, Germany's finance minister and chief EU moralizer in the Greece debt crisis, resigned from office as party chairman back in 2000 due to his role at the centre of a massive corruption scandal in Germany involving illegal campaign financing and "a labyrinthine network of secret slush funds fed by millions of Deutsche marks in undeclared - and therefore illegal - campaign contributions." Schauble, by his own admission "personally ran the slush-fund system during his 25 years as party chairman...At first the chairman insisted that he had only briefly met Karlheinz Schreiber, the fugitive weapons dealer who regularly handed bags of cash to CDU officials. Then last month Schauble was forced to admit that he had personally accepted a 100,000 Deutsche mark donation from Schreiber - in cash."

Well, I guess that makes it kind of easy to stay solvent and lecture others about financial responsibility, when you get regularly handed personal 'donations' of millions in cash by dodgy weapons dealers on the run from the law. And then, to have the cheek to talk about 'trust'…With this in mind, I suspect that Schauble hates Syriza so much precisely because they have no links to previous Greek governments, to the corrupt political elites with whom he did deals in the past and who, like him, had a penchant for failing to declare moneys (received or spent), which ultimately led to their demise, and the demise of the Greek economy once Wall Street imploded. Schauble, in other words, prefers to deal with corrupt neo-fascist stooges like himself. With his wheelchair and irrational intransigence that leads to disaster, he actually seems a great fit for the role of latent Nazi Dr Strangelove, director of weapons research and development in Kubrick's epic film - a man willing to risk everything, including the fate of the world, for the sake of his own misguided intellectual obsessions...



In the Guardian's reporting on the talks in Brussels last night, there was mention that the Eurogroup, among other things, wants "rigorous review of collective bargaining" - as if collective bargaining rights and unions caused the financial crisis, not corrupt banks propped up by the same corrupt politicians who are now trying to get rid of Greece's first non-corrupt government in at least a decade. Nice try. This clearly has nothing to do with constructive, rational economic policy. In negotiations described by one senior EU official as an "exercise in extensive mental waterboarding" of the Greeks (for those unaware this is a form of torture favoured by CIA interrogators), the new terms reached "are much stiffer than those imposed by the creditors over the past five years." This, said the senior official, was payback for the emphatic no to the creditors’ terms delivered in the Greek referendum last week. “He was warned a yes vote would get better terms, that a no vote would be much harder,” said the senior official.

Greece, in other words, is being collectively punished for voting 'no' in the referendum. Quite literally - punished. This really is terrorism, as former Greek finance minister Varoufakis put it. According to the BBC's Paul Mason, "in Greece large numbers of people – on all sides of politics – believe the Europeans are trying to force the elected government to resign before a deal is concluded." I'd say that's been pretty clear for a while now.

So here's hoping that the Greeks will have the courage to resist, and perhaps take the plunge out of the euro zone themselves. There are some signs of fierce opposition to the latest deal from within Syriza itself, not least the President of Parliament, Zoe Konstantopoulou, who delivered these blistering words to Greek legislators yesterday:

After the Second World War, Germany enjoyed the greatest remission of debt [in history], so as to allow it to get back on track. This was done with the generous partnership of Greece...And yet Germany is behaving as if history and the Greek people owe a debt to her, as if she expects to receive a historic payback for her own atrocities…

The artificial and deliberate creation of conditions of humanitarian disaster so as to keep the people and the government in conditions of suffocation and under the threat of a chaotic bankruptcy constitutes a direct violation of all international human rights protection treaties, including the Charter of the United Nations, the European treaties, and even the statutes of the International Criminal Court. Blackmail is not legal. And those who create conditions that eliminate freedom of the will may not speak of "options." The lenders are blackmailing the government. They are acting fraudulently, since they have known since 2010 that this debt is unsustainable. They are acting consciously, since their statements anticipate the need for humanitarian aid in Greece. Humanitarian assistance for what? For an unexpected and inadvertent natural disaster? Is it an unpredictable earthquake, flooding, a fire?

No.

Humanitarian aid [would be required] because of their conscious and calculated choice to deprive the people of the means of survival, closing the tap of liquidity in retaliation for the democratic choice of the government and the parliament to call a referendum and to turn to the people to decide their own future...

NO to blackmail

NO to ultimatums

NO to the Memoranda of servitude

NO to the repayment of a debt they did not create and that is not attributable to them

NO to new measures of impoverishment and exhaustion

. . .

It is important to keep reminding ourselves in all this that the global financial crisis that started in 2007-08, and which reverberates to this day in Greece, at its root has nothing to do with 'lazy Greeks' or the welfare state (as Paul Krugman pointed out many times) or poor people living beyond their means, and very little to do with Greece - it is the direct result of catastrophic incompetence, greed and corruption among top executives in the biggest banks in the richest country in the world - the United States - who were bailed out unconditionally with funds many times greater than the money merely funneled through Greece (and back to foreign banks in the form of loan payments). Some of the reasons why Greece is suffering to this day:

• In a global financial crisis, the weakest economies are hit hardest (especially in a common currency zone, which goes back to the argument why Greece should never have joined the euro);
• Years of mismanagement by previous Greek governments (i.e. hiding their debts), made up of the same corrupt politicians favoured and propped-up for years by equally corrupt foreign (mainly French and German) banks, and today supported by corrupt Eurozone and Troika officials who want to get rid of Syriza; they were effectively hiding structural weaknesses in the Greek economy which were exposed when global financial markets slid into recession;
• Failure by Troika and Eurozone officials to acknowledge their failures and follow rational economic policy in relation to Greece, making the crisis there far worse through austerity measures that led to record unemployment levels and even deeper recession since 2010…

As one commentator notes in the Washington Post, "This latest melodrama playing out in Brussels as European finance ministers meet to discuss whether or not to approve a new Greek bailout, appears so nonsensical that it can be hard to believe these people are deciding the future of Europe."

I would even go so far as to say, we have here an entire currency union run by a cabal of incompetent, sadistic, fanatical neo-fascist buffoons and stooges - instead of obsessing about cutting Greek pensions, these people should be pensioned off and locked up in a care home somewhere where their senile babble will be muffled behind sound-proof doors instead of shaping policies that affect millions of people.




I have coined a new word: Oxi-mandias. In reference to the Greek 'Oxi' in the referendum, and Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem 'Ozymandias' - this is the impending fate of the European project, so long as it remains in the hands of its current fanatical, irrational, neo-fascist architects:

And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is OZYMANDIAS, King of Kings.
Look on my works ye Mighty, and despair!"
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Or, in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:

We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The "tide in the affairs of men" does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: "Too late."

When asked about the Versailles analogy, German Chancellor Angela Merkel responded: “I never make historical comparisons.”

How ironic, cynical, and loaded a statement for a German head of state to make. As Louis Armstrong 'Satchmo' put it, "Denial ain't nothin' but a river in Egypt." And indeed, those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. If Karl Marx is to be believed - that history repeats itself, "first as tragedy, then as farce" - this one could well end in tragedy. A Greek, or Greco-German tragedy, no less.

Economics 101: Greece and the Financial Crisis

A friend asked me to explain what's happening in Greece "in a nutshell"...So as a more practical follow-up to my previous post on this blog, here is a slightly edited version of what I wrote to her, in case anyone else needs a primer (pretty accurate nutshell summary I think) -

In a nutshell? How about, an epic struggle between inhuman, irrational, world-destroying neoliberal capitalism and an authentic, democratic politics of hope? I don't know how much you know, but it all goes back to the 2008 financial crisis and the subprime mortgages in the U.S., which caused the Great Recession. Greece, like other European countries, had a lot of debt, due to years of mismanagement by corrupt governments backed by equally corrupt French and German banks. But what made things worse was that, in order to keep the government budget deficit within eurozone limits (to be able to join the euro currency), starting in the 1990s Goldman Sachs helped them 'cook the books' by hiding part of their debt. Keeping the debt off the books basically allowed them to keep borrowing without growing the budget deficit. When a new government was elected in 2010, they revealed this hidden debt, and revised deficit figures - the budget deficit effectively skyrocketed from around 6% to 15% of GDP overnight. As this meant that any further borrowing (and financing the government) was going to be very difficult, Greece was about to default on its debt. So in 2010 the Troika of creditors - the European Central Bank, the IMF and Eurozone countries (represented by the European Commission) - loaned all this money to Greece, in order to help them keep paying their debt - but most of the bailout money went right back into French and German banks in the form of loan payments, not into the Greek economy. And in return for those loans, the creditors demanded 'austerity' cuts from Greece, which were ostensibly meant to bring the deficit back down and make Greece's economy more efficient, but in reality (as many economists predicted) caused an even deeper recession because it reduced the amount of money going into the economy and therefore the amount of revenue (due to pension cuts, lowered wages, unemployment due to public sector job losses, etc), which led to three general trends:

1. more debt for Greece to repay
2. less revenue/income for repaying that debt
3. even less growth, income, productivity, deeper recession, etc

Greece effectively merely functioned as a conduit for European taxpayers' money to be funneled into French and German banks, who were the real target of the bailout. From the viewpoint of sound economics, this is either a colossal policy failure on the part of the EU and Troika, or a cynical conspiracy against the public on an equally colossal scale. It's kind of like if I were to lend you a bunch of money so that you can keep making interest payments on your debt to my friend Jeremy, but in return I demanded that you close your small business selling oysters because you're spending too much money on it (in my opinion), and take a minimum-wage job instead, and use most of the money I gave you to pay Jeremy - meaning you now owe more money (to me and Jeremy) and have less income from which to repay it - and less opportunity for growth and financial stability/sustainability.

What's happening now is that the creditors - Eurozone leaders, ECB and IMF - are essentially demanding that Greece continue in more-less the same fashion as it has for the past 5 years, and even implement further austerity cuts - against the advice of virtually every credible economist in the world - in exchange for further loans/credit from the creditors. The Greeks, who a few months ago elected a left-wing anti-austerity government unconnected to the previous corruption, are saying no - we need to grow our economy, we need debt relief (i.e. part of the debt to be forgiven), job creation, we need to get on a sustainable path that will allow us to actually repay our debt, which means stimulus spending, not further cuts... The irony is that back in 2012, there was a leaked report suggesting that the Troika's own internal review believed that “even under the most optimistic scenario, the austerity measures being imposed on Athens risk a recession so deep that Greece will not be able to climb out of the debt hole.”

Since they couldn't come to an agreement, the current programme expired, and Greece was about to default on its debt again as the ECB refused to provide emergency funding to Greek banks - and they cannot print their own money (in euros), being part of the common currency - some of the creditors were insisting that if the Greeks reject the bailout terms (further austerity cuts with no debt relief) in the referendum, they would have to leave the Euro (currency), meaning start printing their own money, or drachmas, which was the Greek currency before they joined the euro.

Bear in mind also that in both Europe and the US, it wasn't just struggling economies but the banks themselves - the ones who caused the global crisis in the first place - that were bailed out with taxpayers' money...But no structural reforms or 'austerity' cuts were demanded of the banks in exchange for those bailouts, which in some cases were even greater than the bailouts received by Greece or Ireland, amounting to trillions of dollars. In one notable case, AIG executives were reported to have received bonuses of up to a million dollars (per head) a year or two after the bailouts, taxpayer-funded...

Varoufakis, the controversial but in my view awesomely cool former Greek finance minister (he resigned right after the referendum as a tactical move), explaining some of the issues:

Either/Or: the Greek Democratic Pharmakon in the Age of Austerity

In a seminal essay titled 'Plato's Pharmacy', Jacques Derrida engages in an extended discussion of one of Plato's less well-regarded dialogues, the Phaedrus, expounding on the ambiguity of one word - pharmakon - which is repeatedly used as a metaphor in the text. Often translated simply as 'drug' or 'medicine', to the ancient Greeks pharmakon could in fact mean either medicine and/or poison:

Pharmacia (Pharmakeia) is also a common noun signifying the administration of the pharmakon, the drug: the medicine and/or poison. "Poisoning" was not the least usual meaning of "pharmacia." (p. 70)

But the ambiguity evoked here is not merely linguistic or semantic - it goes to the very heart of nature itself, and distills to its very core the famous slogan attributed to the ancient Greeks - 'everything in moderation'. Every medicine can be a poison at a given dosage or formulation, and vice versa - some of the deadliest venoms on the planet are today the subject of ground-breaking research into a wide range of potential therapeutic uses, for instance - new drugs derived from venom for everything from heart disease and diabetes to autoimmune diseases, cancer, and pain could be available within a decade. “We aren’t talking just a few novel drugs but entire classes of drugs,” according to one researcher. And the properties that make venom deadly are also what make it so valuable for medicine.



Taken metaphorically in the economic arena, fiscal discipline is a pharmakon; fiscal austerity, on the other hand, is fiscal discipline taken to a level where it becomes poison - where it kills, rather than heals. When fiscal discipline becomes an ideological end in itself, rather than a means to an end, it becomes toxic. And it becomes all the more dangerous when those who administer it, failing to distinguish between the divergent effects of this pharmakon at different dosages, are utterly, fanatically convinced of the purity of their cause.

Contrary to the widely propagated (in the West, at least) perception of 'lazy Greeks' living off the welfare state and so forth (more on that here and here - Greeks work longer hours than Germans and the Greek welfare state takes up a smaller percentage of GDP), a closer examination shows that it is in fact the Troika and the Eurozone finance ministers who are the epitome of intellectual laziness and incompetence, and ideological fanaticism - like a doctor who fanatically believes in a particular drug or form of therapy and administers it recklessly with no concern for dosages or formulations and no interest in the finer points of fine-tuning treatment, in the process killing or seriously harming his patients. Or as Nobel-Prize winning economist Paul Krugman put it, "Europe’s self-styled technocrats are like medieval doctors who insisted on bleeding their patients — and when their treatment made the patients sicker, demanded even more bleeding." Greece didn't even get a real bailout or any kind of stimulus in exchange for being forced to undercut its own growth (and hope of recovery) through austerity measures - as economist Mark Blyth points out, most of the bailout money ostensibly loaned to Greece simply went right back into French and German banks, who were the real target of the bailout - Greece merely served as a conduit for European taxpayers' money to be funneled into European private banks. This is either a colossal policy failure or a cynical neoliberal conspiracy against the public on an equally colossal scale.

By contrast, it is precisely the Greek Syriza government, and perhaps most of all its controversial finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, that emerge as thoroughly modern (or even post-modern) proponents of intellectual rigour, method, and rational economic discipline - insisting on precise policies that produce the right outcomes, and which are supported by measurable evidence as well as a democratic mandate. Varoufakis' economic background is in cutting-edge academic game theory, and he has worked for several years as a consultant for Seattle-based video game developer Valve Corporation (incidentally, on scaling up virtual economies and linking multiple economies together on the Steam digital delivery platform, looking at exchange rates and trade deficits). And he has, according to BBC's Paul Mason "templated a style of politics that may be equally adaptable for the right as on the left, for those with the will to try it: operating from principles, being as open as possible with information, engaging the public in language they can understand, and putting his entire persona on the line." Last but not least, the Greeks have been more adept than any current European political figure at using technology and social media.

Even Varoufakis' resignation, following the insistence of Eurozone finance ministers and despite Syriza winning the popular mandate by a landslide in the Greferendum, is not only a brilliant tactical move (unsurprising given the game theory background), but shows just how serious Greece's new government is about doing right by its people. They understand the momentum of the crowd, the dynamics of the herculean task in front of them, and the discipline required to complete it - Varoufakis is like the star football player who has scored a potentially game-changing goal (in calling the referendum) but must now be sent off the pitch in order to preserve the lead as he is disliked by the petty referees. He walks off the pitch smiling and upbeat, having served his purpose - no arguing with coach Tsipras - and writing on his blog: "I shall wear the creditors' loathing with pride."



And it is interesting to consider where this loathing comes from. I cannot help thinking that there must be a component of jealousy involved - seething, burning jealousy. Syriza enjoy popular support of a kind that most European politicians can only dream of - and I don't mean simply that they won an election. They walk into packed crowds on busy public squares to heartfelt hugs and kisses from throngs of supporters. They are for the people, of the people. And despite their casual attire, which only makes them that much cooler and more approachable, they are in fact the rigorous, methodical, rational moderates - there is nothing especially radical about what they are pushing for - while the eurozone finance ministers and the Troika are the incompetent, petty, bumbling ideological fanatics in suits and ties, advocating policies that virtually every credible economist in the world has declared unsustainable and lacking economic sense - and admitting at the 11th hour before the referendum that they were, after all, mistaken. We should not be misled by Syriza's name, either - Coalition of the Radical Left - which only has meaning in a specific historical and political context where the 'centre' has become a morbid and inhuman techno-capitalist normativity. And anyway - moderation, after all, in the sense in which the ancient Greeks meant and practiced it, is less about substance and more about form - it is not about your choice of pharmakon so much as how you take it, in what dosage, and how it relates to the symptoms you are treating.

But Syriza is about chemistry in more ways than one - it is "a coalition whose colours are red for socialism, green for ecology and purple for feminism." It is a united left front that has managed to rally over 61% of Greek voters in the referendum behind it, in a leap of faith into an uncertain future, in a country in crisis, on the brink of collapse, experiencing food and medicine shortages, caught between a rock and a hard place - no mean feat, given the internal fractiousness of leftist movements in general, and the external pressures acting against this one in particular. To accomplish this kind of synthesis, and go on to win an election, and a referendum (by a landslide) in a maverick negotiating move, and quite possibly overcome overwhelming odds against an army of international creditors led by hard-line pro-austerity conservative governments to win a better deal for Greece, and without actually compromising one's political ideals - this requires a very delicate yet bold balancing act.



In the wake of the Greferendum, the latest word from London-based bookmakers William Hill (as reported on BBC Radio 4's Today Programme this morning) is that they have 'closed their market' on whether Greece will leave the Eurozone before 2016 - a spokesman for the company said that "in such a volatile situation, in which events can move very quickly, it is very difficult to be confident that our odds are accurate."

In other words, all bets are off - quite literally. The Greek referendum has introduced a genuine state of exception, something genuinely new into politics, where 'what comes next' is so unpredictable that even the world's biggest bookmakers, seasoned professionals who make a living from betting and setting odds on everything under the sun - from sports matches and horse races to election outcomes and royal weddings - are holding their breath. This is a ball balanced on a knife edge, a chemical reaction at the quantum level that calls to mind the Heisenberg uncertainty principle - it could go either way.

"Syriza does not have a mandate to take Greece out of the eurozone, nor does it have a mandate to apply unworkable austerity," says Euclid Tsakalotos, Syriza's new finance minister. Everything hangs in the balance, and something's gotta give. But despite his posh British accent and Oxford training, creditors and Eurozone finance ministers will be disappointed if they expect this man to be a pushover - unlike Varoufakis, he is from the more radical Marxist branch of Syriza and a bit of a Euroskeptic. (Also, he was drawn to the euro-communist left during his student days at Oxford largely on account of Britain's bloody postwar betrayal of the Greek left, their wartime allies.)

It is worth remembering here that the Greeks have a long tradition of questioning the status quo and arguing the exception, going back to the ancients. As classics scholar Edith Hall, writing in the Guardian, reminds us (in a piece unrelated to the current political situation):

The Greeks, more even than the Romans, show us how to question received opinion and authority. The earliest myths reveal mankind actively disputing the terms on which the Olympian gods want to rule them, and the philanthropic god Prometheus rebelling against Zeus in order to steal fire – a divine prerogative – and give it to mortal men. Sophocles’ Antigone refuses to accept her tyrannical uncle’s arbitrary edict, draws crucial distinctions between moral decency and contingent legislation, and buries her brother anyway. Aristophanes, in his democratic comedies, subjected politicians who wielded power to satire of eye-watering savagery. Socrates dedicated his life to proving the difference between the truth and received opinion, the unexamined life being, in his view, not worth living. No wonder Hobbes thought that reading Greek and Roman authors should be banned by any self-respecting tyrant, in Leviathan arguing that they foment revolution under the slogan of liberty, instilling in people a habit "of favouring uproars, lawlessly controlling the actions of their sovereigns, and then controlling those controllers".

Whatever happens next, unpredictable as it is, even if Greece buckles under and bows to the demands of creditors - for Greek history is rife with both victories and heroic defeats against vastly superior opponents (one never can tell), fought by vastly outnumbered Greeks - this is surely an exceptional moment, which may well signal decisively the beginning of the end of capitalism, in the long run. Perhaps as some on the French progressive left have been saying, nous sommes tous des Grecs européens.

Everything in moderation, as the ancients had it - even a dose of Varoufakis, antagonizing and divisive as he may be for some, has its place and time, like every good good-cop-bad-cop routine. And in all things we must - in the words of Walter White of Breaking Bad fame (a.k.a. Heisenberg) - 'respect the chemistry.'