By Con George-Kotzabasis November 19, 2014
The Greek Opposition and the media in general by demonizing
The Memorandum with its austere measures that has been imposed upon Greece by
the Troika, i.e., the European Commission, the ECB, and the IMF, as a condition
for the flow of funds from the latter to the Greek Treasury for the purpose of
saving the country from insolvency and gradually placing it on a trajectory of
economic recovery, has made it impossible for anyone to reasonably argue, or
even to imply, that this necessary austerity, after a mindless profligate
spending by previous governments that sunk Greece into an unfathomable debt and
debarred it from the financial markets and threw it into an unprecedented spin
of economic crisis since the ending of World War II, would generate beneficent
results and would pull the country eventually out of its economic crisis.
History has repeatedly shown that countries in critical
situations, almost like a law of nature, give rise to extraordinary men/women
of stupendous wisdom, mettle, and will power that saved their nations from
destruction. Themistocles at the battle of Salamis that saved Greece from
Xerxes’ despotism and his barbarian myrmidons, Lincoln in the American Civil
War, and Churchill in World War II, are outstanding examples. Likewise in
contemporary Greece from the ashes of its economic holocaust, a phoenix, in the
figure of Antonis Samaras, had risen to salvage the country from its tragic
economic mess. In the short space of two years the Samaras government
accomplished an unprecedented feat, that no other government in the world was ever
able to consummate, i.e., to draw the country from the edge of a precipitous
calamity and place it by gradual firm steps on the solid ground of inchoate
economic recovery. This was achieved by a series of structural reforms that
made the country more competitive, and by painful cuts in the budget that generated
for the first time a primary surplus in the current year, after many years of
budget deficits that was the embedded malaise of the policies of previous
governments and were the major cause that pushed Greece into bankruptcy. Also,
for the first time after forgetting, but not forgiving, many years of negative
growth, the country’s GDP in 2014 has increased by 0.7%, and unemployment has
decreased from 28% to 25.9%, in the same year, and is estimated to decrease to
25% by the end of 2014.
It is because of these achievements of the Samaras
government, that I believe that the TROIKA will be compelled to back down from
its severe and apparently unyielding demands, in its impending negotiations
with the Greek government in a few days, and will render a positive review of
the policies implemented by the latter as stipulated in the Memorandum, which
is the sine qua non of Greece’s exit
from the strictures of the Memorandum by the end of 2014. It is inconceivable
that the TROIKA will persevere with its hard position and put in jeopardy these
successes of the Samaras government, that after all, emanated from its own
austerity measures that were contained in its own directives as designated in
the Memorandum. The TROIKA cannot be so foolish as to throw a spanner in its
own works! Hence, the nonsensical fear, that has been so gloomily and
frivolously fanned by the Greek media that the TROIKA will continue its
hard-line toward the government and place in predicament, and waste, all the
sacrifices Greeks had made to turn their country into a modern economy and
fecund with prosperity, will dissipate with the softening and compulsion of the
TROIKA to withdraw its hard stand.
I rest
on my oars: your turn now.
