Once again the truth is being withheld
Greece
Is On The Brink Of Civil War
16
December, 2012
“I’m
wondering how much this society can endure before it explodes,”
said Georg Pieper, a German psychotherapist who specializes in
treating post-traumatic stress disorders following catastrophes,
large accidents (including the deadliest train wreck ever in
Germany), acts of violence, freed hostages....
But
now he was talking about Greece.
He’d
spent several days in Athens to give continuing education courses in
trauma therapy for psychologist, psychiatrists, and doctors—for
free, this being a country in crisis.
He
was accompanied by Melanie Mühl, an editor at the daily paper
Frankfurter Allgemeine. And in her report, she decries how “news
consumers” in Germany were fed the crisis in Greece.
It
was “no more than a distant threat somewhere on the horizon,”
defined by barely understood terms, such as bank bailout, haircut,
billion-euro holes, mismanagement, Troika, debt buyback....
“Instead
of understanding the global context, we see a serious-faced Angela
Merkel getting out of dark limos in Berlin, Brussels or elsewhere, on
the way to the next summit where the bailout of Greece, and thus of
Europe, is to be moved forward another step” [also read... The
Curse Of The “Irreversible” Euro].
But
what is really happening in Greece is silenced to death in the media.
Pieper calls this phenomenon a “giant feat of repression.”
And
so they report their findings that cannot be dressed up in the by now
normal euro bailout jargon and acronyms. There were pregnant women
rushing from hospital to hospital, begging to be admitted to give
birth. They had no health insurance and no money, and no one wanted
to help them. People who used to be middle class were picking through
discarded fruit and vegetables off the street as the stands from a
farmers’ market were being taken down.
[I
have seen that dreary activity even in Paris; if Mühl spent some
time looking, she could see it in Germany as well. It’s not just in
Greece where people, demolished by joblessness or falling real wages,
are deploying desperate measures to put food on the table. And the
largest consumer products companies are already reacting to it: The
“Pauperization of Europe”.]
Heart-braking,
the plight of the Greeks. There was an old man who’d worked over 40
years, but now his pension had been cut in half, and he couldn’t
afford his heart medication any longer. To check into the hospital,
he had to bring his own sheets and food. Since the cleaning staff had
been let go, doctors and nurses, who hadn’t been paid in months,
were cleaning the toilets themselves. The hospital was running short
on basic medical supplies, such as latex gloves and catheters. And
the suicide rate doubled over the last three years—two-thirds of
them, men.
“Collective
trauma” is how Pieper described the society whose bottom had been
pulled out from under it. “Men are particularly hard hit by the
crisis,” Pieper said, as their pay had been decimated, or their
jobs eliminated. They’re seething with anger at the utterly corrupt
system and a kleptocratic government that have done so much damage to
the country; and they’re furious at the international bailout
politics whose money only benefits big banks, not the people.
These
men take their anger to their families, and their sons take that
anger to the street. Hence the growing number of violent gangs that
attack minorities. The will to survive in humans is enormous, Pieper
points out, and so humans are able to overcome even incredibly
difficult situations. To do that, they need a functioning society
with real structures and safety nets. But in Greece, society has been
hollowed out for years to the point where it is collapsing.
“In
such a dramatic situation as can be observed in Greece, the human
being becomes a sort of predator, only seeing himself and his own
survival,” Pieper said. “Sheer necessity pushes him into
irrationality, and in the worst case, this irrationality transcends
into criminality.” At that stage in society, he said, “solidarity
is replaced by selfishness.”
And
so he wondered, “how much this society can endure before it
explodes.” Greece is on the brink of civil war, he went on, and it
seems only a question of time before the collective desperation of
the people erupts into violence and spreads across the country. A
ricocheting indictment of the euro bailout policies.
As
the Eurozone flails about to keep its chin above the debt crisis that
is drowning Greece and other periphery countries, and as the EU
struggles to duct-tape itself together with more governance by
unelected transnational eurocrats, Sweden is having second thoughts:
never before has there been such hostility toward the euro. Read....
Sweden’s
Euro Hostility Hits A Record.
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