News from neighboring Bulgaria, where massive demonstrations toppled the government has spurred debate concerning Greece’s “breaking point” and the form large scale violence in the streets may take.
Will there be a “Greek Spring,” in the manner of the political turmoil that has affected North African Arab societies, or will such violence -- if it occurs-- assume a more ominous turn toward conflict between Greece’s own moribund social groups?
The question is certainly not purely academic. The outbreak of unprecedented violence in Greek streets in December 2008, and the obvious inability of the government, incumbent at the time, to control it, has left the worst possible impressions on observers concerning the ability of the Greek state to protect the majority of the population from a complete breakdown of internal order.
But the lessons of December 2008 appear to have hardly dented the thick hide of Greek politicians or cause any distinct sense of insecurity among the country’s handful of long-surviving oligarchs in close relation with Greece’s cleptocratic political class.
With the Samaras regime acting urgently to protect the lenders rather than its own people, the struggling Greek homeowner, pensioner, and unemployed increasingly feel abandoned and left to rot.
Although there is no quantifiable measure to determine the cut-off point of the incredible patience demonstrated by the Greek population so far, empirical data seem to suggest that we are approaching rapidly a violent crisis caused by desperation, rage, and collective agony at the obvious dead-end about the bankrupt country.
If spontaneous combustion does occur, a possible sequence of what may follow could evolve as below:
1.Massive demonstrations overwhelm police truncheons and tear gas and succeed in sacking government buildings, threaten politicians, and even lay siege on parliament. Shots by retreating police kill demonstrators.
2.The regime’s knee jerk reaction would almost certainly be to turn to the armed forces for help. However, given the catastrophic impact of austerity on the officer corps, attempting to bring the army into the streets could be more than problematic.
3.In such an event, the regime should be expected to dissolve rapidly, with its protagonists and their confederates rushing to the lifeboats and abandoning government.
4.This will spell anarchy. And anarchy may provide the opportunity for a showdown between various groups within Greek society based on perceived past grievances and/or one’s recent past as collaborator of the austerity governments since 2010.
5.The beginning of serious fighting occurs.
This hypothetical sequence may strike many Greek “experts” as “impossible” but, as usual, such assessments will be blinkered by the perennial “these-things-don’t- happen-in-Greece” pseudo-argument.
That this pseudo-argument has no legs to stand on is proved by the very experience of the austerity Armageddon itself: four years ago anyone suggesting that the Greek population as a whole would have accepted a 50% cut in family income, and unemployment of 30%, without a whimper would have been chased out of city gates as a deliberate moron and an unwanted Cassandra.
Today, this same person would have been lauded as a “true prophet” and would be receiving invitations from Ivy League universities to lecture on how the catastrophe occurred and why people cowered.
Historically, the frequency of mass internal violence demonstrates varying incubation periods. One thing that appears though consistent across this variance spectrum is that deprivation and pauperization constitute permanent triggers of internal conflict.
In the case of Greece today we meet the unprecedented example of a relatively developed country, member of such coalition giants as the EU and NATO, being forcibly reverted to a stage of underdevelopment, deprivation and pauperization through the means of asymmetrical economic warfare conducted by lenders and “saviors” wishing to deliver an “example” to other “profligate” countries.
That Greece is presently an occupied state, with its democracy crushed and its social order pummeled to death by outside intervention, would be rejected only by the deliberate political liars in Greece and in Europe, not to mention the media fools and professional claque members in Greece itself; that Greece is a “laboratory” of devastating austerity measures and “rationalization” according to Germany’s whims has already been accepted as the prevailing state of affairs.
Greece is pushed toward becoming a country of helots modeled after Third World societies. Determinants of conflict like income distribution, ethnic homogeneity, quality of life and economic growth, are being put through the troika’s grinder. Political scientists would recognize this “model” as already pregnant with the certainty of internal violent conflict.
What remains to be accurately calculated by “analysts” is the incubation period.