Ready or Not Here We Come

Theodore Patsellis | PRP
Feb 18, 2015
3 min read

Even if we wanted to keep a low profile these days we would not be able to achieve that as a nation. It is "Greece" all over the headlines, and it is for the most part with a negative connotation. Many of my friends from around the world call me up to ask me what is wrong with our nation, and how do we dare to challenge the agreements that we have signed with our partners instead of honouring them? They don't spare any effort to remind me that essentially we are talking about monies that this country has received from its European partners/lenders, and that it is borderline acceptable to entertain any discussion about a possible haircut or a partial forgiveness of the debt. Their questions are fair quite honestly, and so are their arguments. But if there is one thing that this ongoing debate about the Greek crisis has shown, it is that there are many truths to the same subject depending on the angle one adopts. While Greece has been injected with money, this money was used to capitalise its banks. In other words this money never made it into the real economy of the country, thus the Greek nation never benefited from it. Subsequent injections were only used to repay previous loans and interests accumulated on them. In a simplistic approach and for the better understanding of the issue one should replace the word "Greece" against the more accurate term "Greek Banks". And while this money was given to the banks also with the expectation that the banks would channel the funds into the real economy, this never happened. Yanis Varoufakis made the allegoric comparison of Greece to a drug addict. And while his stance to deny further money from the EU was argued with the contention that you are not curing the addict by giving him his next dose, most voices rushed to criticise him as the arrogant beggar who dares to value his pride over his addiction, just to make a nonsense point. For those who need to decipher his words, what he really meant was that Greece does not need treatment for the symptoms of a disease but a cure for the disease itself. And from a "living room couch" perspective, it is very easy for all to suggest solutions creative or less creative, workable or non-workable, but fact is and remains that the treatment we were applying until today has completely failed. And because politics is the art of the possible many see the failure of the programme in the failure of Greece to implement it across the board. And while Mr. Schauble sees Greece as the terminally ill cancer patient, he keeps prescribing one of the same, i.e. the same recipe that was not able to intercept the metastasis. I am not convinced that Europeans understand what is going on in Greece since January 25th, 2015, but in layman terms our Government has endeavoured in this huge campaign to restore our national pride. I am not going to debate whether this is right or wrong, but I do want to make a clear statement to all our European partners. This nation is not in confusion about its debt. This nation acknowledges its debt. This is exactly what pride is about. It is about honouring your obligations. What the world, however, needs to understand is that, if one is to measure pride and compare it against the morality of a system that has forced pride into its knees thinking that it could continue destroying a country at the cost of keeping banks alive, then one should grant this nation the benefit of understanding the causes of its terminal disease and the right to fight the causes even at the risk of displeasing the Doctors!