The real story is of course very different.
The prominent European powers, cross eyed and indecisive every step of the way, have suddenly discovered that their own banking systems are in a mess and that there is no sufficient “recovery” to drive their advanced economies into another cycle of boom (by selling their wares to already indebted countries, like Greece, via loans which they now demand to be paid back in full and at healthy interest rates).
The financial crisis -- of which Greece is but a blip on the radar screen -- threatens to spiral out of control and take down both the strong and the weak in one full swing.
Right now though, Greeks have their minds fixed on their own tragic predicament.
The Papandreou regime, acting as the agent for the Troika, has been methodically destroying the livelihoods, hopes, and longer term prospects of millions of people, who have suddenly discovered themselves under foreign, mainly German, occupation yet again.
Soaring unemployment, estimated to reach perhaps as much as 25% by the end of 2012, is devouring the guts of Greek society, leaving entire families with no income at all. The parallel devastation of an already meager net of welfare and state unemployment protection has also removed the last tiny hope for all these hundreds of thousands who have been relegated to the status of the Untermenschen in a matter of months.
These catastrophic, genocidal “reforms” are now congealing into a whole that apparently constituted Papandreou’s idea of “changing the country” long before he came to power in October 2009.
Little did he know though that once he took Greece deliberately and conspiratorially to the IMF in May 2010 even his wildest dreams of demolishing these “backward” Greeks to make room for an “open multicultural society” without a sense of its own national history and tradition would assume the dimensions of today’s genocide (if he did have even an inkling of what was going to happen, and he proceeded nevertheless, then his case becomes automatically one to be deliberated before a war crimes special tribunal).
So, here we are faced with the end game for Greece: No amount of “reform” has helped lessening the immense mountain of debt that’s crushing the country; no amount of “reform” has been implemented in ways that would cut enormous government waste instead of reducing salaries and pensions to a pittance; and no amount of reform has quenched the thirst of creditors, led by the Germans, to turn the country into a subject colonial region populated by a Third World slave population destined to work for foreign “investors” for starvation wages.
A “credit event” that will bankrupt Greece officially is ante portas. Once that happens, Gauleiters already in place will assume the effective administration of Greece just like in the good old days of 1941-44. Already, conservative members of Frau Merkel’s party predict that “Greece must give up something, like some of its national sovereignty” if she really wants to continue being “saved” by her creditors. And already, the head of the International Monetary Fund’s European department, Antonio Borges, has suggested that the present plan to make Greece “competitive” (read: turn it into Bangladesh or, at best, Albania) must be revised to become “qualitatively different” so that it attracts “investors” (the Germans are of course rather ahead of Mr. Borges having suggested that privatization of state assets in Greece must be conducted by a foreign agency, controlled by creditors, to assure that everything goes at fire sale prices, with whatever receipts collected being paid directly into the lenders’ coffers).
So, we have come full circle: the Papandreou regime, now plainly illegitimate and without even an artificial constitutional leg to stand on, continues the onslaught on the occupied territory and the destruction of the Greek economy and society; the Germans continue delivering lessons and sermons on how to run an already ruined economy with due diligence; and inconvenient facts and figures on how Greece’s ended up like this are relegated to the finest fine print as to become irrelevant.
The critical question is how much more of this Greeks are willing to absorb?
Greece’s Final Solution, all set in legible quantitative terms, beckons.
Postscript: History has its own tragically ironic ways. On October 12, 1944, Nazi troops pulled out of Athens as Hitler’s armies had begun their retreat from the Balkans. In October 2011, Greece faces again the lengthening shadow of foreign -- and, coincidentally, again German -- occupation, this time by economic means and under a local government that many Greeks have come to openly call “quisling.” The immediate results may be different on the surface (no jackboots, no tanks, no firing squads), but the longer term story will be as devastating and country-killing as that of those dark, blood-soaked years.