Helga Zepp-LaRouche Hits Merkel’s and Schäuble’s Greece Policy

“neither debt reduction nor a debt conference, such as that held for Germany in London in 1953, are subjects to be discussed, and the ECB in addition, with its decision to no longer accept any Greek government bonds as collateral, and to force the country instead to turn to expensive emergency liquidity, has gone for confrontation. European principles and treaties must be respected, Schäuble insists, even if that arrogance and intransigence will likely accelerate the demise of the euro.

“But exactly those principles and treaties are the problem. It was the Troika’s austerity policy which made economic recovery in Greece impossible, which slashed the Greek economy by one-third, and plunged the population into despair. From the beginning, I warned that the austerity policy in the tradition of Heinrich Brüning could not work. As early as February 2008, shortly after the signing of the Lisbon Treaty, I warned that ratification of that Treaty would mean signing a second Versailles Treaty — for all of Europe, that is — and that no one should forget that the first Versailles Treaty contained the seeds of the Second World War.

“[greek] Finance Minister Varoufakis emphasized in an interview with Die Zeit, that much suffering would have been prevented, had the Versailles Treaty been broken at the time, and pointed out that the Nazi party ‘Golden Dawn’ has become the third largest political party in Greece as a reaction to the austerity policy imposed.

“But while the blockheads only turn their tunnel vision to the banking sector’s interests … the image is being consolidated in the rest of Europe and in many parts of the world of the brutal Germans, whose medicine has poisoned the Southern Europeans, and who are now too hard-hearted to give the Greeks the same opportunity that the United States offered to Germany after World War II. Indeed, without the Marshall Plan and the 1953 Debt Conference, which cut in half Germany’s total debt and made payments conditional on the surplus in exports, Germany would never have developed from a rubble field into the country of the ‘economic miracle’ which was admired throughout the entire world.

“As a result of the ECB policy and Schäuble’s hard line, tens of thousands of people in many Greek cities took to the streets to support the Tsipras government. In Madrid on Saturday [Jan. 31], 300,000 people demonstrated. If the EU, the ECB and the German government stick to their refusal to compromise, the euro threatens to break up in chaos. The callousness of the Schäubles can only make the social catastrophe worse, but they apparently do not understand what historical processes are at play. ‘The World as Will and Representation.'” [A reference to Schopenhauer’s well-known work Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung]