The Haiti of Europe

Greece is a small beautiful country in the southeastern part of Europe, a place of jasmine, bougainvillea, mimosa, cypresses, olive trees, pines, oregano, sage, and thyme; sand, rock, and the bluest and cleanest water on earth. It was the birthplace of (selective) democracy, philosophy, Attic tragedy, poetry, history, and, of course, tyranny. The most beautiful and symmetrical edifice ever constructed still stands in the sacred rock that is the Acropolis, and Greece is the country that first embraced the power of reason and persuasion and sought the embodiment of the “nous.” Ancient Athens, the capital of this small country, produced Pericles, the closest to a perfect leader any country has had since. Pericles believed in intelligence, reason, restraint, and peace. He was a soldier’s general who preferred to carry out his goals by diplomacy rather than war. He was an aristocrat, politician, imperialist, peacemaker, visionary, educator, private citizen, statesman, strategist, and hero. We know about him from sources such as Plutarch, Thucydides, and the comic poets. His death from the plague in 429 BC, during the Peloponnesian War, saw the end of Athens as a major power. And then there were the philosophers. Philosophy ended with the Greeks, no ifs or buts about it. The history of Greek philosophy is unlike anything else. One can understand the history of warfare without becoming Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, or Napoleon. But one cannot understand Aristotle unless one becomes in a small way a Greek thinker. Ancient Athens was full of people who were philosophers. Philosophy was as popular as, say, rap is among the ignorant today, but as the Oracle of Delphi pronounced, “Socrates was the wisest of them all because he alone knew that he was ignorant.”

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Having said all this, I imagine some of you may have guessed that I am Greek, and I am, with a dose of blue Danube blood in me. And I do have a confession to make: We Greeks reached our peak 2,500 years ago, and it’s been downhill ever since. Never mind. Greece has enough other problems pending to worry about what happened to its greatness. Greece’s financial position is terminal. It cannot hope to save, invest, and grow its way out of trouble. Like Germany following World War I, Greece has been choked by its obligations to foreign creditors. The archvillains are the megacrooks of the E.U. Children go hungry so that banks can tell their investors they’ve refused to take a haircut. The situation is similar to that of a fighter who is a middleweight, is put on a strict, starvation-like diet, and is expected to grow and fight as a heavyweight. Mind you, the Greeks themselves were the ones who started it. Once Greece joined the dictatorship that the fourth estate dares not call by its real name, the E.U., in 1980, credit became the cocaine of both left- and right-wing governments. The more the E.U. lent, the more successive Greek governments wanted and received from the dealer, Brussels, that knew from day one what was going on and, like all good drug dealers, let the addict sniff to its heart’s content.

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