Lessons for Greece

Greece is thousands of years old. At her golden age, some 25 centuries ago, Greece was like light, giving birth to democracy, philosophy, science, technology and other arts of civilisation.

At that time, Greece was several hundred states spread over Greece proper and all over the Mediterranean. In the fourth century BCE, Alexander the Great united Greece and created a vast empire that disseminated Hellenic culture all over the world.

The Greeks then were pious to many gods. They considered the earth mother of the gods and the cosmos eternal and divine.

However, Rome changed the Greek world forever. Rome took advantage of Greek disunity and jealousy and ended the independence of Greece in the second century BCE. Six hundred years later, the Roman Empire took another step with even more deleterious effects on Greece.

The Roman Emperor Constantine made Christianity a state religion. Christianity then with the blessings of the Christian emperors made Greece a palimpsest: violently removing the Greeks’ many gods and culture from Greece and writing Jesus on the body of the country.

Fragments from the ancient Greek culture, five centuries ago, made the modern world, including America. Greece, however, was not included in that Renaissance because the Turks captured it.

As a result, Greece today is of little consequence. The Christianisation of the country and the effect of four centuries of Turkish conquest all but extinguished the Hellenic culture of the country.

America, on the other hand, is a giant country of gigantic consequences. At its revolutionary moment in 1776, America recognised its debt to ancient Greece, borrowing Greek democracy and wisdom.

Thomas Jefferson, schooled in classical Greek learning, met the great Greek scholar Adamantios Koraes who was working in Paris for the liberation of Greece from Turkey. Jefferson advised Koraes how the emerging Greek republic should organise itself.

Now, however, America is bereft of politicians like Jefferson, keeping the Greek classics strictly in the college classrooms. Politicians dream of empire and wealth. They, and those who fund them, resemble the oligarchy of the Roman Empire. They are obsessed with money and “security” to protect their ill-gotten riches.

Greeks and other Europeans come to America to learn how to make money the American way.

This moneymaking machine - known as globalisation - wrecks national cultures and threatens the viability of the planet. First, corporations are free to do as they please. So they pollute and undermine life on earth. Global warming is largely a corporate product. Second, America’s preoccupation with money and greed is universal corruption, eating away at democracy and recreating feudalism. And, third, in the case of Greece: globalisation pushed the country to its current existential crisis.

Evidence of this crisis in Greece is the International Monetary Fund managing Greek finances. The IMF routinely impoverishes national economies for the benefit of its corporate masters.

The Greek kleptocrats have the same masters as IMF. They receive their education in America and do internships at IMF and the World Bank, a sister institution of the IMF. The Greek Prime Minister, George Papandreou, was born and educated in the US. The former Prime Minister, Kostas Karamanlis, studied at Tufts University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Tufts and American universities are caught in the frenzy of money as well. They ignore their mission of educating good men and women. Instead, they model their training after Wall Street. The “best and the brightest” from American universities fail to study the Greek classics, history, science, and engineering. They go straight to law or business schools and the bonuses of Wall Street.

The result of this collusion of state, academe and Wall Street is a cannibalistic monster of capitalism devouring democracy and civilisation for a short-lived extravagance of riches for the very few and abuse and violence for the many.

Wall Street nearly annihilated the US in 2008. Millions of Americans lost their jobs and homes. Wall Street executives responsible for that financial and social calamity are not in prison but continue making enormous profits. The administration of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama bailed out the banks that brought the economic meltdown on America.

This catastrophe has been the business product of decades of corruption. Corporate lobbyists bribe politicians who then “deregulate” the government’s oversight of corporations. In fact, deregulation also brings corporate power within the government, essentially the government becoming a colony of polluters and oligarchs.

The spring 2010 poisoning of the Gulf of Mexico by BP was a direct effect of deregulation of the oil industry.

In Greece, corruption of the political system has created a curious phenomenon, thoroughly oligarchic: the country being an almost private fiefdom of a handful of families producing prime ministers. The American-educated politicians have stripped the country of industry and self-reliance. Greece even follows America’s terrible agribusiness practices. From millions of peasants working the land and growing the country’s food, now Greece imports food while hundreds of villages are ghosts of their former self. Rural people have flocked to Athens and a few other large cities, abandoning the countryside to the toxic grasp of agribusiness and the church.

The Greek government borrows continuously but fails to tax the rich and the church, the country’s richest institution and largest landowner.

The Greek government also does the bidding of America in foreign policy: opening the country to the machinations and aggression of Moslem Turkey. For example, on October 29, 2010, Turks desecrated dozens of graves in a Greek Orthodox cemetery in the tiny island of Imbros, which is under Turkish occupation.

Greeks don’t trust their government. Instead, they periodically take to the street in protest but fail to terminate family rule. In desperation, many of them try to join the civil service that guarantees them a modicum of security.

Small shopkeepers and cottage industries offer an alternative but limited future. They get little support from the government hell-bent on globalisation and multiculturalism, two faces of the same corporate monster: wrecking local industry with imports and abandoning the guarding of its borders. Such policies are undermining a Greece that can barely support its own people much less hundreds of thousands of illegal foreigners (largely from Africa, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran) crossing into the country from Turkey. In fact, the hoards of illegal migrants have made the situation so bad that European Union soldiers are joining Greek soldiers in guarding the Greco-Turkish border.

Illegal migrants have made some neighbourhoods in Greek cities dangerous places to be.

Meanwhile, Papandreou calls himself and his party “socialist” but his Greek and foreign allies are millionaires. In this as well as other deceptions, Papandreou mirrors Obama: saying and doing different things.

But the worst thing about Papandreou is that his government is building a future that is almost hostile to Greece: undermining education, democracy, the territorial integrity of the country, and national defence.

Americans and Greeks are unlikely to get rid of corrupt politicians any time soon. Their only effective antidote to the corporate class is democracy, the more, the better.

Greece has several parties but, like America, only two of those parties take turns in governing the country. This is unacceptable.

With the exception of the tiny Ecological party, Greek parties peddle foreign ideas and interests. They are a legacy of the French, British and Russian parties foreigners imposed on Greece after the country’s Independence in 1828. The post-World War II division of Greece into communist and capitalist has further intensified foreign influence in Greek politics.

Greeks need to look after their national interests: invigorate tourism with the country’s glorious classical heritage; teach Greek students ancient Greek and Latin in both elementary and high school; spread public libraries all over the country; put people to work by having them do at home most of the things they need, including the manufacture of ships, cars, and weapons; rebuild the universities to high standards of excellence; revitalise the countryside with small family agriculture; abolish monasteries; tax the church and the rich and strengthen national defence.

The Greeks no longer need political parties with their toxic baggage. They need only look back at their history and borrow their ancestors’ direct democracy for lessons on governing their country.

As for America, the monopoly of the two parties and the imperial presidency fighting perpetual petroleum wars is a recipe for disaster. They have been emasculating democracy and replacing it with a corporate-government-academic agency - what president Dwight Eisenhower called the industrial-military complex - that resembles an incipient police state without the storm troopers.

America needs an adequate defence force but not hundreds of military bases all over the world, mercenary armies, a gulag archipelago of secret prisons and torture, and a defence budget that is larger than that of the military budget for the rest of the world combined. This is where systematic corruption and danger come from. America must abandon its empire and return to its democratic traditions. Empire and democracy don’t mix.

Unless Americans move their country back to democratic armed forces and democratic and just economy, the imperial presidency and corporations, including “too large to fail” banks, will take a hold of the country for good.

Unfortunately, the victory of Republicans in the midterm elections brings the country another step closer to tyranny. Both Obama and the Democrats must fight this danger openly by embracing democracy: end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; break corporate power; start manufacturing most things at home; and put the unemployed to work.