By Con George-Kotzabasis November 27, 2015-
A few
days ago, Reuters ranked the Tsipras government as the worst ever government of
all times amongst the developed and Western world. It was this government that
you served with overweening pride and engendered, by your unprecedented
irresponsibility in the annals of politics and quack economic policies as its
finance minister, this historically ignominious rank in which Reuters placed
Greece.
Strutting,
in an extraordinary theatrical performance, the European corridors of power
clad in the mournful colours of a mortician with a red ribbon around your neck
symbolizing that you were no run of the mill mortician but a proletarian one
(It was this red ribbon that within the short span of six months would strangle
economically both the proletariat and the bourgeoisie in Greece) who had come
to slay and bury the “Minotaur” of capitalist exploitation and save the peoples
of Greece, and indeed, of Europe, from the grisly and greedy fangs of their
exploiters. But in an ironic twist of fate, after the guffaws for your thespian
performance on the stage of Europe by your European confreres and the kick-out
from the economic portfolio by your comrades for your total failure as finance
minister, you have finished-up not as a saviour of Greece and Europe but as a
slaughtering gladiator. Killing the beasts of capitalism in your global
performance of panem et circenses before
an audience of bien pensants and nipple-fed intellectuals, AKA the lost generation, who have learnt nothing from recent
history and who lack the spiritual and moral fortitude to free themselves from
their childish obsession of the socialist nirvana.
The Tsipras
Government’s performance since its ascension to power on January 25 can be
described by its three basic characteristics, infantilism, naiveté, and
insouciant irresponsibility, which, as its finance minister, you embodied to
the highest degree. Don’t expect to be treated kindly, at least by me, for the most
unkind cut you inflicted upon the Greek people. Within the short time
of six months you managed to destroy the economy by closing the banks and
bringing in capital controls, and nipping in the bud the positive results of
the Samaras Government that slowly but decisively were pulling the country out
of the crisis. For the first time after the long economic stagnancy and
recession, growth was recorded to be 0.8% and expected to be 2.5%-2.9 of GDP
for the years 2014 and 2015 respectively, according to the IMF; also,
unemployment was prevented from rising to 35%, as was predicted by eminent
analysts, and indeed, had fallen by 2%, from 26% to 24% by the end of 2014. And
all these heartening results happened within two and a half years under the
prime ministership of Antonis Samaras. But you, like a revengeful immortal
Olympian god full of envy for these mortal achievements of the Samaras
Government, destroyed them with ambrosial delight. Your ludicrously eccentric
policies and your barren and inflexible arrogant stand in your negotiations
with the European Union brought the country back into recession and you capped this
with a bill to Greece of an extra 90 billion to be paid to its creditors, which
would come from the pockets of future Greek taxpayers. This was your enviable success
story in contrast to the real success story of Samaras.
And yet blind and callous
before this stupendous calamity that you delivered upon Greece, you proudly and
insensitively claim to be “sitting on top of the world.” (I would add in your
first word “sitting,” an h, so to make it a better fit to your ravishing
pleasure: It must have been a relishing sensation to you, almost an aphrodisiacal
one, defecating on “top of the world”.) You should be instead sitting in a dock
charged with high treason for the great hurt and harm you afflicted, with such
insouciant irresponsibility, upon the ordinary people, whom with unheard
hypocrisy you claim to represent. And no wonder that your European confreres
were not listening to the bullshit you were emitting in your negotiations with
them on the Memorandum, and their justifiable rebuke of your crank economic
policies delivered to them in the form of lectures, in an aura of omniscience.
You claim to be a
“liberal Marxist.” But you seem to be oblivious of the dismal fact that
“Marxism” with any epithet before it, is “a skull that will never smile again,”
to quote the ex-Marxist Polish philosopher, Leszek Kolakowski. You are not a
denizen of the real world but a denizen of the phantasmagorical world of
Marxism whose legacy left behind not the Eden of Marx’s polytropos, many-sided,
man, fishing in the morning, playing the flute in the evening, and writing
poetry at night, but the police state of the NKVD, Gulag Archipelagos and
Killing Fields.
In a footnote of the
history of the twentieth-first century you will be described as a crank
economist, a cowardly chicken gamester--taking risks not with your own but with
other people's money-- and intellectual highjacker, who filched the writings of
Marx and Keynes for the purpose of making your hybrid mulish economic doctrine,
on whose back, as finance minister, you carried Greece to perfidious
treasonable economic and political destruction.
Alas, after your
pernicious mischiefs and gross offences toward the Greek people, you stand
between the ferryman to Hades, Charon, and the butt of Aristophanes. Whom of
the two would you choose, an afterlife of torture in the Underworld or a
present life of ridicule in this world?
