For years before the current catastrophe struck, the very few and far between in this country, who kept insisting that the numbers simply did not add up and the whole storefront was bound to collapse in one fell swoop, were treated as pariahs.

Currently, they have the bitter satisfaction of knowing they were correct all along and everybody else was wrong, including those who posed as “experts,” “diplomats,” “academics,” and the assorted riffraff that man the decks of “investigative journalism” in Greece.

Dr. Shlomo Shpiro
(Deputy Head of the Political Studies Department at Bar-Ilan University in Israel.  He has been closely cooperating with Greek academics for almost two decades)

Copyright: www.rieas.gr

An old proverb in the Middle East says that necessity makes good friends.  It could not have been better illustrated as in the case of the Greek-Israeli relations, which are now seeing both countries move closer than ever before.  But the recent closeness is not only a matter of changing regional interests – it is also the result of generational changes which transcend old animosities and bring together cold political realities with cultural and historical heritage.

The visit of the Greek prime minister George Papandreou to Israel on July 21-22 has been cautiously greeted as a new beginning in Greek- Israeli relations. Greece has traditionally shunned expanded relations with the Jewish state. In a way, it is an irony of history that the incumbent Greek prime minister took the initiative to pay a visit to Israel: his late father, Andreas Papandreou, was an unabashed friend of the PLO and Yassir Arafat and missed no opportunity, while he was prime minister of Greece, to publicly slam and vilify Israel with complete abandon. It was in December 1981 that Papandreou the Elder granted the PLO equal diplomatic status to that of Israel (but, in the background, even a ‘non-aligned’ firebrand like the old Papandreou was quietly searching for ways to improve ties with Israel, beginning with the signing of bilateral cultural and commercial agreements in 1984).

The International Monetary Fund has just issued an interim report titled “Greece: Stand-By Arrangement -- Review Under the Emergency Financing Mechanism.”   Let’s do a reality check and explain what lies behind some of this template language, so familiar to those who actually have the guts and the time to apply themselves to such reading. Plain “on the ground” English actually shows the real facts hidden behind these eery “technocratic” documents. Text in italics is lifted verbatim from the report.

The Greek government was “surprised,” newspapers said, because, suddenly, Turkey sent one of its hydrographic vessels to loiter in the northern Aegean near the Greek island of Samothrace performing, the Turks said, updating of navigational charts! This was a tin excuse of course, but the Turks aren’t amateurs at this. Ever since the Imia crisis in 1996, they have been working persistently at creating tensions and “incidents” that can be then woven permanently into a broader scheme of pushing Greek sovereignty in the Aegean back and advancing their own interpretation of the so-called “gray zones” theory in the Archipelago.

The catastrophic fiscal crisis that is rapidly consuming Greece, with the unabashed and eager help of her own government, is having many unintended consequences, aside from viciously impoverishing millions of Greeks and returning them to the level of standard-of-living expectations of the 1960s. As bone-crushing deficits, plain and hidden, consume large swaths of the country’s public sector, the Lego construction of the current Greek state reveals itself in all its awe-inspiring glory and structural brittleness.

A NOTE BY THE EDITOR

In recent months, with the fiscal crisis consuming our last vestiges of self-respect and whatever was left of a sense of individual security, Greek society has descended into an uncharted dark cave of horrors. So far, fears of widespread rebellion and street unrest have not been realized, but it would be hard to find an individual in this country who does not harbor deep, often debilitating, dread about what is to happen next. Young people, especially, see little, if any, light at the end of the proverbial tunnel. Contrary to what many will tell you, Greek youth isn’t completely lost: there are young people today who surprise with their wisdom and analytical skill in the face of the worst crisis this country has met since the Second World War. Let, then, one of them speak on “What does it mean to be Greek?” at this time of the most brutal New Occupation of the country by foreign powers with the open collaboration of local “saviors.”

Sic vis pacem, para bellum

Throughout human history leaders who kept their eye on narrow domestic expediencies, and failed to appreciate the proverbial "forest" whose trees one must look not separately but as a whole, have invariably faltered -- and, along with them, their nations have similarly stumbled and fell. At the root of this malaise lies, almost without fail, the absence of strategy.

More than a year ago we asked on this very page the question of What Happened to Greek strategy? The disheartening answer, which has not changed since, was that Greece has simply left strategy by the wayside. Greek leaders, motivated by partisan politics and domestic wranglings, have had little time for strategy. To put it plainly, strategic thinking does not inform Greek governments.

Greece is not only the land of miracles, it is also a land of dreams. Dreams constitute the strongest component in prime minister Papandreou's current repertoire of boilerplate speeches he delivers everywhere he goes. And the dream of dreams in this package of shadows Mr. Papandreou calls "stability and growth program" is the claim that Greece will somehow pay back an enormous, back-breaking sovereign debt plus interest within a low number of years.

History has a way of paying back those who consistently mock it with their unthinking actions.

The case of Turkey is perhaps one of the most poignant. For decades, the United States and the rest of NATO countries stroked the successor of the Ottoman sultanate as if there was no tomorrow. Turkey was the "rampart" of the Western alliance against the Soviet Union. Turkey was the "bridge" between East and West. Turkey was "irreplaceable" strategically and an "emerging regional power" politically, a sleeping giant of a country that the West could not afford to alienate in any way.

But, suddenly, Turkey is shooting into a very different and ominous orbit.

It is an accepted, if quiet, fact in the foreign "news" industry that correspondents avoid painful or unpalatable details when it comes to reporting about governments which have already attracted positive remarks and are generally seen as "competent."

The current Greek government is an example of such a "competent" administration that garners mostly laudatory remarks from foreign correspondents, whose news stories are then beamed far and wide to reach not only average readers but also "policy-making consumers," "opinion makers," and other such stuffed shirts, who often possess make-or-break powers on others.

(In recent weeks, Greece has gone through spasm demonstrations against her government's futile, brutal, and destructive austerity measures.

On May 5, anarchist murderers set a bank in downtown Athens on fire, killing three employees, one of whom was pregnant.

The outrage took place in plain view of hundreds of demonstrators, who nevertheless did nothing to stop the gang of killers from carrying out their heinous job. There were even reports of some from among the crowd applauding the murders and verbally abusing the bank employees caught in the inferno.

When there are disputes on territorial details, solutions are provided by third parties charged with the task.

It is a national shame to buy weapons that we do not need over an imaginary danger that can be resolved politically.
Theodoros Pangalos
Deputy prime minister of Greece during the Erdogan visit to Athens, May 14-15, 2010

One of the oldest principles of negotiation is to never sit at the table when in want and weakness.

On May 5 a gang of hooded perpetrators used firebombs and a canister of petrol to set a bank in downtown Athens alight. In plain view of throngs of demonstrators rallying against the government's merciless budget cuts, the gang, comprising four or five individuals, first smashed the bank's front window with ax and sledgehammer and then tossed the can full of petrol inside. The hooded assassins followed up with several Molotov cocktails. None of the onlookers, although outnumbering the gang 100 to 1, attempted to stop the crime.

There is an almost eerie silence these days in Greece, only punctuated by sharp, angry demonstrations in the streets of Athens and Thessaloniki.

Greeks are numbed by the vicious austerity measures, and the apparent determination of their government to sink them and keep them in the worst economic plight since the end of World War II for an undetermined number of years, all of course in the name of "saving" the country.

This page is not prone to conspiracy theories. Neither is it inclined to entertain the usual wild accusations leveled against the current government of Greece that it is being "manipulated" by foreign powers.  Such charges have been launched against almost every government that has seen the light of day in this country ever since the War of Independence against the Ottomans, so the issue has become trite and worn out.

Yet, there are signs that various "arrangements," not all necessarily in favor of this Nation, which could not have been initiated without the presence of our current head of government in place and the outbreak of the fiscal crisis, may be under way.

Greek authorities, benefiting from an incident similar to the one that led police to discover the 17 November terrorist gang in 2002, have swiftly rounded up six suspects who belong, police say, to the "new generation" of Greek terrorists.

The arrests came in the wake of a shootout in early March which resulted in the killing by police of a suspected terrorist, Lambros Foundas. An investigation of Foundas's unobtrusive but, as it turned out, quite busy underground past and present did yield enough leads to guide the anti-terrorist squad, authorities claim, directly to 17 November's successor terror gang, Revolutionary Struggle. 

Increasingly, some among the avalanche of reports on Greece are touching on the central question underlying the country's devastating fiscal crisis: can Greece survive this trial by fire intact -- i.e. with its current system more or less unchanged -- or would there be deep and lasting change in the way Greeks do things?

There are rumors that the Greek government is surreptitiously "talking" to the European Commission on changing the Hellenic national flag by removing the sign of the Cross from it.

The "cross project," sources in the know say, is a "pan-European" plan to "streamline" national flags with the view of creating "religion-free" symbols so that "others" -- read: mainly Muslims -- are not "offended" by the display of national flags. 

Europe's and America's reaction to the threat of Islamic fundamentalism is a growing replay of "Munich."

While history purists may object to the comparison, the way the European powers of the 1930s, Britain and France, reacted to Adolf Hitler's naked power call that resulted in the absorption of Czechoslovakia into the Reich without a shot being fired, has many common characteristics with the furtive, almost apologetic, way European and American leaders assume toward Islam today.