SYRIZA'S GREEK TRAGICOMEDY

Alexis Tsipras welcoming those who have no wish to stay.

by Daniel Barge

Greece, as is well known, was the birthplace of comedy and tragedy. Recently, with the GREXIT crisis, the “Greferendum” (the vote on whether Alexis Tsipras should prostrate himself to Angela Merkel or simply kow-tow), and all the other absurdities of recent months, we have seen both of these thespian aspects in constant interplay. One simply doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Greece has effectively become a tragicomedy

The main problem all Western countries have is that we now have highly-evolved economic, administrative, and policing systems – coping systems – that can manage most of the problems now deeply embedded in our societies. This sounds great but it isn’t. What it really means is that we seldom have to directly face any of our problems and thus we seldom have to solve them. Our system is essentially maladaptive. Having a gang of idiots like SYRIZA in power, however, changes this dynamic. This is the main value of the Left today.

The main benefit to Greece of the present crisis is that a lot of these coping systems, such as Keynsian economics, artificial job creation, pump priming, welfarism, anti-racism, and efficient policing, are now breaking down, or at least being stretched so thin that they have lost their ability to cushion the Greek people from the unpleasant realities. The more this happens, the closer things get to a meaningful relationship with reality, and the more that this happens the more likely we are to see problems being faced and solved rather than avoided. For this, at least, we can thank SYRIZA.

If the old parties had been in place – PASOK, say, or New Democracy – the whole process of Greece going cap in hand to the Troika would have been expedited: more debts to pay off existing ones with less austerity, less fuss, and a semblance of normalcy. Greece could have continued ticking over, almost as before, perhaps with the weight of the country’s debt burden subtly redistributed to those points of society that could bear its growing burden better. True austerity – of the sort we are now seeing – and emotional humiliation would have been avoided, while Greece continued to serve out its role as a vassal state and dumping ground for the turbocharged economic centres of the Euro Empire.

But, luckily the Greek voters were idiotic enough and inspired enough to choose SYRIZA at the general election back in January – a party predicated on the notion that wanting something makes it so.

You may not be interested in austerity,
but austerity is certainly interested in you.

SYRIZA is a conglomerate party, made up of tiny, oddball extreme Left groups that clubbed together in order to pull themselves above the percentage threshold that allows representation in parliament, and therefore access to the gravy train. The plan was never to get this big, but the political vacuum caused by the 2008 economic crisis and the subsequent suppression of Golden Dawn threw then to the forefront of Greek politics.

There is a tendency to see leftist parties as purveyors of fantasy and conservative parties as boring realists, but actually the opposite is true. Today it is conservative parties, like Greece’s New Democracy, the UK’s Conservative Party, or Germany’s Christian Democrats, that are best able to maintain the coping systems that allow modern Western societies to stave off reality and live with the welter of problems that lie just under the surface of any Western multicultural state.

SYRIZA, by contrast, are the latest in a long line of Leftist parties that are unwitting harbingers of reality. In the old Soviet Bloc it was parties of this shade that prevented the Disneyland consumerism, sexual polymorphousness, and racial menageries of the West from forming. Thanks to the grim limitations of Communism, those societies remained closer to the uncushioned bedrock realities. It was only in the West, where there was a synthesis of conservative practicality with Leftist utopianism, that we could create the kind system that could keep swallowing all our contemporary poisons without immediately choking to death on them.

After Greece joined the EU in 1981, it adopted a similar synthesis as its fellow Europeans, enjoying the miasma of affluence on the rotting corpse of traditionalism and sound finances. But when the global system, founded on this Left-Right synthesis, experienced shocks in 2008 and 2009, Greece, as a peripheral state, started to come undone. The need to boost the practical conservative side of the equation created a countervailing excess of delusional Leftism. With PASOK tainted by co-option in the system and Golden Dawn effectively removed from the picture by legal repression, SYRIZA was the main beneficiary.

The old, slick managers, with their crafty accountancy and sympathetic friends in Brussels, were thrown out by the naive voters in favour of a much less tenable and tenacious illusion – SYRIZA's local Leftist hoopla and fantasy of a broad-based, Europe-wide revolution against austerity. The corrupt, cosy arrangements that had massaged and managed the Greek economy, and which had allowed its senility to develop to the diaper-wearing and spoon-feeding stage, were now stripped away, revealing it in its true guise.

Some more pointless pointing.

The main threat that any Western society faces is a demographic one, the threat that it will be overrun by an envious horde of Third Worlders, who will grow fat on welfare, outbreed the natives, and replace them and everything they stand for. The modern Western political synthesis of well-managed insanity is particularly adept at managing this toxic social element, allowing it to grow like a cancer until it destroys its host. SYRIZA’s big contribution – through sheer economic naivety and pigheadedness – has been to make Greece a lot less hospitable for Third World invaders.

With tough austerity, welfare slashed, the economy shrinking, and angry natives, Greece's real problem – the demographic one – is well on the way to being solved. SYRIZA is effectively chemotherapy for mass immigration.

The country's position, between Africa and the Middle East and Europe, and its long and awkwardly shaped coastline, will continue to make it a gateway for Third World migrants invading Europe. According to some reports around 1,000 have been arriving every day. In the past, the majority tried to move on to more affluent and generous European countries, but now, thanks to SYRIZA, possibly all of them might move on – along with many Greeks.

SYRIZA may offer these invaders citizenship, the right to vote in meaningless referendums, and other leftist "benefits" like "gay marriage," but with the Greek economy subordinated to German ordoliberalism, welfare slashed to the bone, and ordinary Greeks looking for scapegoats, the numbers that will choose to stay will probably be even less than if the hard right, ultra-nationalist Golden Dawn party had been elected.

While that party takes a dim view of Third World immigration, their economic policies (exiting the Euro, boosting local manufacturing to replace imports, etc.) would probably have created an a lively economic environment that would have been more inviting to refugees than the present one. Nobody, it seems, does tragicomedy like the Greeks!