re: #267 Dark_Falcon

My original comment said no such thing because it meant what it said. I’ve changed my mind since writing it. I’ve also calmed down since my Air Conditioning is working again.

As for the attitude adjustment part, I don’t think that problematic. It’s my right to say that I think someone else has a bad attitude, its not putting on lofty airs. It’s saying “You need to correct your thinking or you’ll keep hurting yourself”.

It’s true that there are several structural problems in Greek society, but one of the most major is shared in many places - an entrenched elite upper class fed by a government that is at turns either corrupt and complicit or deliberately hobbled by the powers that be. These elite forces profit off of graft from public spending, exemplified in the German submarine fiasco mentioned upthread:

“We paid double for three submarines from Germany,” says an Athenian source who has lodged several incriminating documents with The Slog. Most of this, once again, seems to involve the near-ubiquitous role in German engineering and arms supplies of the multiply corrupt company Ferrostaal. Looking at the numbers, some of this appears to have been German profiteering connected to payoffs: “we give you 3 million euros, you lets us stuff the invoice with another 20 million” and so forth. And always in this farrago of filled pockets lurks the presence of numerous company acronyms MFI, MIE (Marine International), PDM, Zelan etc….all odd joint ventures and often registered in Liberia or Cyprus. All of them have obvious attachments to Greek elite members, and most of them in turn have connections to civil service procurement officers and/or senior politicians.

Compounding this is rampant tax dodging, endemic through all layers of society:

Tax dodging in Greece is so rampant that the Bank of Greece estimates the country could be losing as much as five billion euros a year. While that’s a far cry from the €54 billion needed for 2010, it could result in much harsher cuts as the country tries to get out from under its crushing debts.

Also Greece’s retirement age is the lowest in the EU and Eurozone, which the German psyche simply can’t look at as anything other than an insult.

At the same time the Germans should have a sense of the past, and the rise of the far right in Greece should reinforce a lesson they learned in the aftermath of World War I. Forcing unsustainably huge debt payments and austerity is what the Allies did to Germany in the Treaty of Versailles, and all that did was foster hatred and resentment creating a perfect incubator for national socialism.