{"id":10169,"date":"2015-07-18T08:16:57","date_gmt":"2015-07-18T13:16:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=10169"},"modified":"2015-07-18T08:16:57","modified_gmt":"2015-07-18T13:16:57","slug":"greece-surrendered-but-to-whom-exactly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=10169","title":{"rendered":"Greece Surrendered: But to Whom Exactly?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Greece Surrendered: But to Whom Exactly?<\/a><\/h3>\n

On July 12, Greece surrendered abjectly and totally.\u00a0 Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, who had promised to combat the austerity measure that are driving the Greek people to ruin, poverty and suicide, betrayed all his promises, denied the will of the people expressed in the July 5 referendum, and led the Greek parliament to accept an agreement with the nation\u2019s creditors even worse than all those that had already caused the economy to shrink and which further abandoned the last scraps of national sovereignty.<\/p>\n

Yes, Greece surrendered unconditionally, as has been thoroughly and eloquently expressed here on CounterPunch and elsewhere.\u00a0 But one crucial question appears not to have been adequately answered.\u00a0 To whom, exactly, did Greece surrender?<\/p>\n

A common answer to that question is: Germany.\u00a0 The poor Greeks surrendered to the arrogant Germans.\u00a0 This theme has served to revive anti-German feelings left over from World War II. Frau Merkel is portrayed as the heartless villain.\u00a0 One thing is sure: the animosity between Greece and Germany aroused by this debt catastrophe is proof that the \u201cEuropean dream\u201d of transforming the historic nations of Western Europe into one single brotherly federation, on the model of the United States of America, is a total flop.\u00a0 The sense of belonging to a single nation, with all for one and one for all, simply does not exist between peoples whose languages, traditions and customs are as diverse as those between Finns and Greeks. Adopting a common currency, far from bringing them together, has driven them farther apart.<\/p>\n

But was this disaster actually dictated by the wicked Germans?<\/p>\n

n reality, very many Germans, from the right-wing Finance Minister Wolfgang Scha\u00fcble all the way to the former leader of the left party \u201cDie Linke\u201d Oskar Lafontaine would have preferred a very different solution: Greece\u2019s exit from the Eurozone.\u00a0 Scha\u00fcble was thinking of German finances, while Lafontaine was thinking of what would be best for the people of Greece \u2013 and of Europe as a whole.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Greece Surrendered: But to Whom Exactly? On July 12, Greece surrendered abjectly and totally.\u00a0 Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, who had promised to combat the austerity measure that are driving the Greek people to ruin, poverty and suicide, betrayed all his promises, denied the will of the people expressed in the July 5 referendum, and led […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,5],"tags":[5493,195,200,7363,279,280,359,1167],"class_list":["post-10169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-geopolitics","tag-counterpunch","tag-debt","tag-default","tag-diana-johnstone","tag-eu","tag-euro","tag-germany","tag-greece"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10169","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10169"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10169\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10170,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10169\/revisions\/10170"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}