The new Greek government of Alexis Tsipras came into power committed to rejecting the murderous austerity conditions of the Troika, and to pursuing an approach explicitly identified with the 60% writedown of German debt in 1953, the so-called London Debt Conference. Whether it will pursue this aim—not to mention, achieve it—has come to the top of the agenda, not just for Greece, but for bankrupt Europe as a whole.
What is clear is that the Greek debt is fraudulent and unpayable—and that no amount of financial warfare against the country, such as was applied Jan. 28, will change that. Financial warfare is more likely to bring on a financial explosion.
In a major article in the Daily Telegraph Thursday, international business editor Ambrose Evans-Pritchard takes up this issue in dramatic terms. “Investors have woken up to Greece’s nuclear risk,” reads the headline. Pritchard then proceed to quote the radical rejection of the debt burden by the incoming government—the Finance Minister calling the austerity policy “fiscal waterboarding,” and the deputy Finance Minister authoring a book called “The Rape of Greece”—and to agree! The EU-IMF-ECB Troika forced the debt and “scorched earth austerity” on Greece, he writes— and the debt can’t be paid. Their demand for a “European Conference” for debt restructuring of all the southern European countries is “right.”
Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis showed a determined fighting spirit in an interview with El Mundo, one of Spain’s leading newspapers, on Jan. 21. What is happening in Greece is savage, he said,
“a bestial humanitarian crisis. And the next ones will be you.”
El Mundo asked: Do you really believe that Spain is going to end up like Greece?
“Absolutely. This crisis is exactly the same in Spain, in Greece, in Ireland… It is the result of the bad design of the Eurozone. Greece collapsed first, but if it hadn’t been us, it would have been Spain or Ireland, and the domino effect would have been the same.”…
“But in Greece we are going to have a government which says ‘enough’. Not for us, but for Europe. Because the only ones benefiting from all this which is occurring are the Greek neo-Nazis and the National Front of Le Pen. We are Europe’s last opportunity.”
On the whole ECB game: the ECB knows we don’t have the money to pay for their mistakes, so they are forcing us to take loans from the Germans, the Spaniards, and from the ECB itself, to give it to the ECB.
“And if at that time I am Economics Minister, I will tell them that they can assassinate me if they wish, they can kill my children, but I will not do that.”
Whether this attitude will continue, may well depend upon the amount of support the Greeks get. Most crucial is support from the United States.
In that regard, it is interesting to note that Thursday’s column by Washington Post regular Harold Meyerson, is devoted to supporting the 1953 London debt conference. Germans should remember that part of their history, he argues, in relation to Europe. Indeed, Americans should remember their history of Hamiltonian bankruptcy reorganization as well—before bankrupt Wall Street blows up the world.
In an interview with the Interfax news agency, Mikhail Gorbachov, who had presided over the dissolution of the Soviet Union more than two decades ago at the behest of his “friends” in the West, has expressed fear that the U.S. is dragging Russia into a…
The first two EIR seminars in Berlin and Frankfurt by Helga Zepp-LaRouche have brought the reality of the imminent thermonuclear war danger—and the World Landbridge alternative—to Germany and Europe as a whole, at a moment of heightened danger and growing political warfare. The fact that the two Zepp-LaRouche events, on Tuesday and Thursday, came immediately on the heels of the shock of the Greek elections only added to the impact.
Wall Street and London are hopelessly, irreversibly bankrupt, and the only genuine war-avoidance option is immediate orderly bankruptcy proceedings against the $1.7 quadrillion dollars in derivatives and other gambling debts—starting with the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall.
It is becoming more and more obvious that the Greek debt can never be paid and that the Greek actions in the first days of the Syriza government—cancelling privatization legislation that had been dictated by the Troika—means that the Greek break with the genocide policies can be both a trigger for a new policy, and a detonator for a desperate London-Wall Street bloc to press for war on Russia and China. As Lyndon LaRouche warned on Tuesday, the Greek elections accelerate the danger of war and demand immediate emergency action.
On Thursday, both Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, the British intelligence mouthpiece at the Daily Telegraph, and Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson, wrote about the need for the convening of a European debt write-off conference on the model of the 1953 London conference, which cancelled half of the German war debts from both world wars, stretched out the remaining debt over 30 years, and brought about, in conjunction with the Marshall Plan, the German economic miracle. Pritchard made clear that the Greek debt can never be paid, and that the Greek people made the right choice in repudiating the Troika, while Meyerson demanded that Germany treat Greece the way the U.S. treated Germany after the defeat of Hitler.
While details have not been made public yet, it is clear that the meeting of the European foreign ministers, to push new sanctions against Russia—-which is nothing short of further war provocations—was a brawl, which ended with the decision to maintain existing sanctions through September, but impose no new sanctions. Before the meeting began, Greece made clear that there was no “consensus” for new sanctions, because they had never yet been consulted.
These push-back gestures are indicative of a growing fear of a thermonuclear armageddon. Last week’s published warnings, by Igor Ivanov, Sam Nunn, Richard Lugar, and Theodore Postol, were joined by Mikhail Gorbachov on Thursday, in an Interfax interview, in which he again warned that the West is provoking a new Cold War that will quickly turn into a hot war—including thermonuclear war.
Obama is a stooge for the London-Wall Street forces that are driving the world to general war. As Lyndon LaRouche has repeatedly warned in recent weeks, the only way out of armageddon is to take down the controlling apparatus behind the war drive. That means shutting down Wall Street and putting in place a Hamiltonian credit system to ally the United States with the BRICS.
Russian, Chinese, and Indian foreign ministers will be meeting Feb. 2 in Beijing to advance the BRICS agenda and, no doubt, to review and assess the building danger of general war. President Obama’s performance in India, according to observers, was an abomination—insulting to India. Obama cut short the India visit, commemorating India’s Republic Day, to race off to Riyadh to fawn over the new Saudi King, whose ties to Al Qaeda and other jihadists are well-known and well-documented in world intelligence circles. At home, Obama continues to stick to the Bush-Cheney cover-up of the 28 pages. This performance in Riyadh added to the already intense pre-war buildup globally. As soon as he got back to Washington, Obama publicly professed his partnership with the House of Saud.