I was born shortly after the end of WWII in a country, Hellas, that was on the verge of collapse.
Less that one year before I saw the light of day, Greece, with massive help initially from Britain and, later, from the United States, had defeated a ferocious blood-drenched attempt by the local Stalinist communists to push Hellas onto the lethal embrace of the USSR.
Greece of the 1950s was struggling to recover not only from the deep wounds of communist insurrection but, also, from the catastrophic impact of Nazi occupation, 1941-44.
The Germans, in their trademark manner of doing everything by the book, plundered the Greek economy (which was not anything to write home about in the first place), viciously attacked the population with indiscriminate military “internal security” sweeps and retaliation attacks, leading to the destruction of an estimated 1000 villages, and robbed the country, aside from foodstuffs, of everything that could be uprooted, dismantled, and moved back to the Fatherland.
Postwar estimates suggest at least 300,000 Greeks fell victims of Nazi military retaliation. A Greek parliamentary commission has estimated Germany owes Greece €289 billion ($339 billion) in war reparations, a figure that “includes a loan that Greece was forced to grant the German central bank.”
By the time I turned ten years old, Greece, with the help of the Marshal Plan, was rebuilding and modernizing its economy. But, still, large numbers of Greeks, unable to find work in Hellas, were ironically emigrating to former Nazi Germany as Gastarbeiter (guest workers) and, to a lesser extent, to Belgium, Sweden, the United States, and Australia.
Those left behind enjoyed the trademark immediate-postwar Greek domestic politics of thin standards of living, political partisan divisions, economic corruption, and the almost daily fisticuffs taking place in the arena called “Hellenic Parliament.”
[[ One of my favorite pastimes, during my grammar school years, was scanning the dailies for the latest photographs of our nation’s fathers (there were no ‘mothers’ at that time save one notable exception) engaging in impromptu MMA matches on the parliamentary floor, augmented with the deployment of chairs, microphones, and benchtops as “power multipliers” in bouts against equally armed opponents.]]
That tumultuous early postwar period culminated in the April 1967 putsch, a 7-year long dictatorship, the disaster of the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in July 1974, and the restoration of parliamentary rule that was closely followed by Greece’s entry into the European Economic Community (EEC), which eventually morphed into the European Union (EU).
Post-junta Greece put on her best parliamentary attire, adopted the European Acquis (i.e. the full body of EEC/EU legal regime), and went to work to benefit, at last, from being “European.”
On the surface, it all looked ideal. At last, the quarrelsome undisciplined Greeks were in possession of a complete and detailed playbook
of how to arrange their affairs in a “technocratic,” well-defined, manner en route to a true “European” society.
In harsh reality, however, the untamed Mediterranean Hellenes, harking all the way back to a unique Ancient Hellenic civilization, found it almost impossible to adopt the a bland unexciting regimentation of a rules-based daily existence.
And this is where things began to go wrong.
The Greek system, centered on a hydrocephalous public sector dominated by union bosses in cahoots with political party hacks, was inherently designed to sabotage/undermine/block
any Brussels-originating modernization and streamlining initiative.
Both the public sector bosses, and a quickly-emergent oligarchic multi-millionaire class, tethered to the political establishment, took control of the levers of power to divert European development funds away from growth and directly into a quickly established Mafia-like “distribution” regime siphoning off cash to offshore deposit accounts.
“Honest” central government initiatives were quickly sabotaged, undermined, and transformed into instruments ensuring the stability of the oligarch Mafia’s system of directing government budget monies into the deep pockets of an invisible, South American-style, backdoor government of Greece.
Public sector hiring, well established as a political tool since the very first days of independent Greece, quickly exceeded that of a struggling private sector.
Public servants anchored privileges like comprehensive health care, regular periodic salary increases, generous annual paid vacation, and early retirement privileges, with guaranteed pensions amounting to, usually, 70 pc of the last working salary.
On the contrary, private initiative was discouraged by limited sources of borrowing seed capital, punitive taxation, and minimal protections for private sector workers.
National defense became a vast network of kickbacks, and “complimentary payments,” to a small cabal involving both cabinet ministers and local jet-set Mafiosi.
This corruption scheme was promoted, improved, and firmly established as an integral part of Hellenic governance—and continues, almost unaltered, to this very day.
In all the years since the return to parliamentary rule, documenting, investigating, and prosecuting government corruption remain at the very bottom of official state priorities.
It was almost inevitable that post-junta Greece would come to pay for her Balkan cross-eyed politics, and her indefatigable push to establish corruption as the country’s axis of governance.
The day of reckoning arrived in 2010 with the country’s financial collapse and her immediate, German-controlled, relegation to debtor’s prison as the only way to “save” her and return her to a viable state of affairs.
The 2019 election that ousted the tragicomic amateurs of the neo-communist SYRIZA groupuscule, elected by a confused electorate in 2015, brought to power the “Europeanized” conservatives of the New Democracy (ND) party.
ND’s accession was heralded as the long-awaited “new beginning” following four years of alarmingly kindergarten-ish “politics” by a bunch of cross-eyed, self-appointed, neo-communist “revolutionaries,” with an enhanced taste for Greece’s eternal oiling of the system’s innards with corruption money.
But the sense of relief thus engendered was short-lived. ND’s PM Kyriakos “Koulis” Mitsotakis, US-trained and the scion of Greece’s commanding conservative famiglia, is currently mired in the same corruption impasse as his predecessors.
The sad, but inevitable, conclusion of all of the above is that Hellas, just like many countries, outside the established presumed core of the de facto developed world (US, Western Europe, Australia, Japan, South Korea), is functionally and ideologically “challenged” when it comes to pursuing serious and durable reform.
This conclusion is further reinforced by Greece’s accelerating slippage down the well-oiled chute of US-induced “wokism,” gender politics, and the demonization of all those who reject the upending of societies in defense of the warped “rights" of miniscule, deviant, early-phase psychotic minorities.
Against all of the above, Greece’s future appears to still mired in a stubborn, if familiar, self-imposed Twilight Zone.
Still, though, there’s always tomorrow.
(Note: Keep dreaming, it’s free).