The Greek Story Is About German Hubris

What the international media has totally missed is that if Germany pays Greece what it is morally and legally bound to do, it would halve Greece’s public debt and solve the crisis.

The isles of Greece! the isles of Greece!
Where burning Sappho loved and sung,
Where grew the arts of war and peace,
Where Delos rose and Phoebus sprung!
Eternal summer gilds them yet,
But all, except their sun, is set.

The mountains look on Marathon—
And Marathon looks on the sea;
And musing there an hour alone,
I dream’d that Greece might yet be free
For, standing on the Persians’ grave,
I could not deem myself a slave.

—Byron, A poem inside the 3rd canto of Don Juan, 1819

The great poet penned these immortal lines a few years before he fulfilled his desire and actually traveled to the land that he loved so much. He took part in the Greek war of independence against the Ottoman Turks and died at the age of 36 in the Greek town of Messolonghi in 1824. The Greeks revere him with a dedication and commitment that has to be seen and heard to be believed.

Because of this phenomenal minstrel, the Greeks were prepared to overlook, at least partially, the infamous larceny perpetrated by one of Byron’s countrymen, Lord Elgin, who pilfered the priceless sculptures from the Parthenon, as well as other ancient sites venerated by the Greeks. Till today, the British government resolutely refuses to return Greece’s patrimony. This act of cultural vandalism serves as a very apt and relevant backdrop for the analysis of the current Greek tragedy that follows.

Fast forward to 1941–1945, when the Germans occupied Greece and treated the citizens of the ancient land with a level of barbarism and cruelty that matched anything that they had done in Eastern Europe.

Under Nazi occupation from April 1941 to October 1944, the number of Greeks who actually starved to death because of denial of food supplies by the occupying forces exceeded 300,000. More than 130,000 were executed in carefully-planned German reprisals that invariably followed any instances of resistance by the underground liberation forces. The vast majority of Greek Jews were sent to the death camps in various parts of Europe. As a percentage of the population, these figures are abysmally high.

One of the particularly vicious German atrocities in Greece was the massacre of around 218 children, women and men by a Waffen-SS unit that wanted to send a message to the people of Greece after an ambush on German troops outside the village of Distomo near Delphi. This outrage took place on 10th June 1944, when, ironically, a village in France, Oradour-sur-Glane, was also obliterated by the SS Das Reich division, following a Resistance attack.

President Francois Hollande may be blotting out memories of that heartrending incident when he socialises and ingratiates himself with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, but the Hellenic people have no intention of forgetting what happened at Distomo. It is imprinted in their national psyche.

For all those pathetic hacks, even in India, who are talking about how generous the Germans have been by lending money to Greece at exorbitant rates, it is necessary to give some details. When the International Red Cross team visited the site a few days after the incident, they found bodies still hanging from trees on the road to the martyred village. The remains of the hapless victims of the German savagery in Distomo are kept with great care in an ossuary near the site of the atrocity.

It is now apposite to look at what the Germans do when it comes to repaying their own legitimate debts such as war reparations. Their stonewalling, prevarication and legal sleights of hand would do credit to the numerous Indian businesspersons who have defalcated humongous amounts of money from the public-sector banks and the government and then used all the tricks and loopholes of law to avoid paying their legitimate dues to the Indian State and its banks.

The bottom line is that Germany has never paid its debts; I have only to draw upon the most perceptive assessment of this subject by the iconic economist Thomas Piketty, whose path-making work on inequalities has propelled him into the very top league of economic thinkers. In a recent scathing interview with the German magazine Die Zeit, Piketty pulls no punches when he tells France’s eastern neighbours why they, the Germans, have been the most unscrupulous and dishonest players in international economic history and jurisprudence.

In Piketty’s remarkably frank words, Germany, has “no standing” to lecture other nations about debt repayment, having never paid back its own debts after both World Wars.  “Germany is really the single best example of a country that, throughout its history, has never repaid its external debt. However, it has frequently made other nations pay up, such as after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, when it demanded massive reparations from France and indeed received them. The French state suffered for decades under this debt. The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice”.

The towering scholar goes on to demolish the “infantile” moral uprightness of Germany, whose economic success was built very largely on the victors of the Second World War (primarily the United States) writing off huge amounts of reparations that Germany was morally and legally liable to pay after wreaking so much havoc during the war. Chancellor Merkel, who suffers from selective memory lapses, should be reminded that the London Debt Agreement of 1953 cancelled 60 per cent of Germany’s foreign debt and restructured its internal debt.

As an apposite lesson for the plethora of illiterate financial commentators in the international rags, as well as the moronic anchor-persons in the western electronic media, Piketty points out that new generations cannot be asked to pay for the mistakes of their parents. Admittedly, Greece, under the corrupt and profligate regimes that ruled the country from the 1950s till the 1980s, including the infamous Colonels’ junta that staged a coup d’etat in 1967, made critical mistakes.

Indeed, during those three decades, successive Greek governments cooked their books. However, as the Germans argued so astutely after the Second World War, the burden  of a nation’s “collective guilt” cannot be passed on to future generations. What is good for the goose is equally good for the gander.  Picketty  reminded the readers of  Die Zeit that modern-day Europe was “founded on debt forgiveness and investment in the future. Not on the idea of endless penance. We need to remember this.”

We should now look at a case study of how the Germans behaved in the case of Greece when it came to paying compensation for their horrendous war crimes. The surviving villagers of the 1944 atrocity in Distomo demanded compensation in the 1990s. They were led to believe that they could file for claims individually and they took their case to a Greek district court, which backed their claims in 1997. The matter went up to Greece’s Supreme Court which ordered that German assets in Greece should be seized. However no Greek government at that time had the marbles (pun intended) to implement this verdict. There are shades of India all over this scenario.

The hapless Greek victims joined hands with Italian victims of German war crimes who were also seeking damages from Germany. In 2010, an Italian tribunal upheld the ruling of the Greek court. Not surprisingly, the German riposte was to take the matter to the International Court of Justice, which is yet to deliver its verdict. The struggle of the Distomo victims, of course, strikes a chord across the entire spectrum of Greek society, unlike in India, where we are so blasé about the atrocities inflicted on us by various occupying forces.

Manolis Glezos, the 92-year-old hero of the Greek resistance, who made history by tearing down the swastika on the Acropolis in May 1941, right under the noses of the German occupiers, said pithily that the survivors were “quite rightly, and very belatedly, asking for €165m (£140m) in compensation”.

It is time now to squarely look at what Germany owes Greece for the damages and atrocities it inflicted on the hapless country. Germany has long argued that it settled the issue with a bilateral agreement in March 1960 that gave the Greek state the equivalent of €59m in damages for loss of life, looting and “enforced” loans, including gold seized from the central bank. However, this is a legerdemain and scam that needs to be refuted as strongly as possible.

The Greek Finance Ministry compiled a confidential report in 2013 that is based on all the available data and facts that have emerged over the last six decades. It arrives at a justifiable and almost irrefutable claim, on behalf of Greece, of €108 billion for damage to its infrastructure caused by the Germans during the Second World War and €54 billion as repayment of a loan the Greek National Bank was forced to give to Nazi Germany during the war, both figures being adjusted for inflation.

The total sum of €162 billion, in current terms, is the equivalent of almost 80 percent of Greece’s present-day annual gross domestic product. To give an accurate idea  of the amounts involved, if Germany pays Greece the full amount, it would reduce Greece’s public debt by more than half.

These are uncomfortable facts for the barrage of pseudo-analysts who are spouting rubbish in the Western media, particularly the American broadsheets. Even on our shores, the internet is swamped with puerile humour, presumably from the same sources, about the Greeks gypping the international banking community. One can somehow imagine a grotesque modern-day version of the infamous Goebbels sitting in a rat-hole in Germany and coming up with this drivel.

To conclude, what we are seeing here is the deliberate humiliation of a proud nation that laid the foundations of Western civilisation. Its entire population is reeling under the burden of “austerity” imposed by Merkel’s Germany and its poodle, Hollande’s France. However, the Greeks remain unbowed. If we Indians had even a minuscule percentage of the dignity and awareness of history that the Greeks possess, we would have had Amartya Sen and his likes taking up the cause of compensation for the Bengal famine created by the British Empire in its dying throes. Alas, the Sens of the world are obsessed by their own disappearing bailiwicks like Nalanda University and their ability to dish out patronage.

Back to Thomas Piketty :  “Those who want to chase Greece out of the Eurozone today will end up in the trash heap of history.”

And the final words to Byron:

And a thousand years scarce serve to form a state, an hour may lay it in the dust.

Fair Greece! sad relic of departed worth! Immortal, though no more! though fallen, great!