Since the Charlie Hebdo/Hyper Cacher massacres happened, this Blawg has focused a lot of attention on those events and related issues, as well as the usual sorts of items in Canadian politics. But history hasn’t stopped elsewhere.
Today, I don’t have too much time to do an in-depth analysis. I’m so busy, there’s no time for a picture on this post! But Europe, particularly the Eurozone, stands at the brink of a long-postponed historical break — perhaps — and I should at least mention this here, as I cannot let it go uncommented. We have just witnessed the European Central Bank making use of one of the worst possible instruments against deflation, quantitative easing — which incidentally happens to be the only one that is remotely neoliberally approved.
Now we watch an old bill come due in the form of the Greek elections today and the possible victory of the declared bĂȘte noire of the Eurozone elite, Alexis Tsipras’ left-wing coalition Syriza, which has declared its intention not to honour the constant, vicious treadmill of austerity forced on it partly by its own feckless, practically treasonous elite. This ugly game has been directly fatal to ordinary Greeks. The Greek people have experienced too much to be sanguine that Syriza is a panacea — they just want things done differently and for someone to take a stand.
In the rest of Europe, however, particular Germany, doing things differently requires bringing the outcomes of their own political decisions back to their own electorates, something that they have attempted to avoid through a sadopolitical combination of force-fed loan “tranches” combined with repeated trips to the amputaton ward for Greece. The political cost of giving this up is just too great for them, and so they have been hollering and making threats.
If by voting for Syriza the Greeks are committing national suicide, then the Greeks have committed it several times over already. Here’s hoping that Tsipras is half the austerity-resister he has painted himself to be.