By Dimitis Konstantakopoulos
March 12, 2020
If there was a tribunal for crimes during peacetime similar to the Nuremberg Tribunal, one of the first cases to be judged would be the exemplary destruction of Greece by the European Union and the governments of its member states, by the International Monetary Fund and by the European Central Bank. The participation of the IMF in the Greek program proves also the indirect but clear agreement of the US to the program of destruction of Greece.
These organizations took a country that was facing serious problems (the responsibility for which lies both on its own elites and those in Europe at large… the two are deeply interlinked, especially in terms of their corruption) and “rescued” it by nearly destroying it. These forces imposed “reform” on Greece and initiated a “bailout” program which caused the country to lose more than a quarter of its GDP, to increase its public debt by 50% in relation to GDP and to acquire massive private debt. This program had an enormous social impact, destroying the lives of millions of Greeks and leading thousands of them to commit suicide, while the most important social rights Greeks had won during the 20th century were all but abolished.
The decline in Greek GDP was a material loss similar to the one suffered by the US or German economy during the Great Depression of 1929. It was higher in relation to the GDP than the material losses of Germany or France during World War I. As a result of this program, the Greek public debt increased from 110% to 180% of GDP, a large private debt bubble was created and the country’s competitiveness was reduced drastically, alongside its human capital (as a result of the mass migration of young scientists abroad and demographic shrinkage). Most of Greece’s problems today are worse than they were ten years ago.
Despite the propaganda of European governments, the EU and the main Greek political parties, Greece remains trapped in long-term “extremely unsustainable debt”, according to the IMF, and is bound by the unprecedented, even for the Third World countries, neo-colonial terms of the agreements imposed on it, despite the will of its people, as expressed in the 2015 referendum. This means that, unless this debt is restructured, Greece itself will not be sustainable in the long run. The long-term unsustainability of the Greek state is evident in its demographic decline, the ageing of its population and the emigration of the young people. Greece will always exist as a geographical location, but if things continue to go the way they are going now, it will become a “Greece without Greeks” within a few decades. This, by the way, has long been the dream of various Western politicians, including Adolph Hitler himself. According to what Winston Churchill wrote in his Memoirs, the German Chancellor was planning to move all Greeks to the Middle East and transform their country into a region for Aryans to vacation. Hitler was unable to realize this goal, but it seems the alliance of Bankers, Germany and the EU has a serious chance to. The only difference with Hitler’s projects being that Greeks are emigrating everywhere rather than just the Middle East.
If we examine the Greek “bail-out” program as a program to “help save” the country, it is clear that it is by far the worst economic policy program ever implemented. In the future, all university books on economy will begin with a chapter: “The Greek program: what a country must never do.”
However, if we examine the program as an exercise in how to loot and destroy an entire country, it is perhaps one of the most effective ever implemented, with the sole exception of the “shock therapies” and rapid introduction of capitalism in the former Soviet Union and the Balkans.
I once asked Mr. Reichenbach, the head of the European Task Force for Greece, why Greek GDP fell by 27%, while in other countries in Southern Europe it fell by little more than 8%. He gave me a rather straight answer: “We subtracted from the Greek economy three times the demand we subtracted from the Portuguese one. As a result we had a depression three times bigger in Greece than in Portugal.”
The Greek program was not a mistake. The ECB, the EU, the IMF and the European governments employ the services of some of the best economists in the world. How were they able, all of them and simultaneously, to make such a colossal mistake? And when they discovered the mistake, why did they not fix it?
This is why we have argued from the beginning of the implementation of this program, that it was not a mistake, it was a crime. This is why we believe those who forced this program on Greece deserve to be tried by a court similar to the one convened in Nuremberg in the aftermath of World War II.
Read more at https://uwidata.com/8678-eurogroup-2015-the-birth-of-post-modern-totalitarianism/
