Disaster Capitalism in Action in Europe

Television images of demonstrators being teargassed by riot police in Athens on Sunday night followed the usual rules of media coverage of civil unrest – plenty of graphic images with little or no honest representation of the story behind the actual events.

Make no mistake: what took place in Greece on the 12th of February 2012 – the agreement by the majority of the Greek parliament to the wholesale sell-off of their country – is about something far bigger, and much more insidious and dangerous, than debt, the story that is being sold to the public across Europe.  To demonise the Greek people, as the European media has largely done, for failing to pay their taxes and therefore being responsible for what has happened, is simply smoke and mirrors on the part of the powers-that-be.  

It’s the same, tired but highly effective old story of divide-and-rule: pitch nation against nation by feeding people inaccurate information in order to evoke reactions favourable to governments and big business, keeping hidden the real corruption at the heart of the problem – the collusion between politicians and bankers – and then reducing some obvious facts to infantile simplicities and selling them to the public by way of inflammatory and inaccurate information as the root reason for the current situation.

Greece, now ruled by an unelected technocrat, is the first casualty of the suspension of democracy as we have come to know it, and the first country to fall victim to what can only be described as a hostile takeover.  As described by Naomi Klein in “The Shock Doctrine”, this is disaster capitalism in action.   As opposed to the simple explanation proffered by the media of this being the result of people just not paying their taxes and allowing their country to come apart at the seams, this is, in fact,  ultimately all about the imminent expropriation by big business and vested interests of Greece’s national resources.

In July 2011, as reported by the Greek magazine Epikaira and the Greek website Hellas Frappe, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, accompanied by US Special Envoy for Eurasian Energy Richard Morningstar, visited Athens for talks with PM George Papandreou.  A law passed by the government shortly after allowed for the liquidation of assets to creditors “ of all of Greece’s mineral wealth, including its proven reserves..as well as those that may be discovered in the future and the total potential revenue from them”.  Imagine, if you will, the huge profits to be made now that Greece has has been thrown, by its own parliament, to the wolves.

So what does this mean for the rest of us in Europe?  Greece has now been reduced to little other than  a giant laboratory, where the powers-that-be will carefully observe just how far, and for how long, the unwilling and miserable ‘rats’ can be pushed without jeopardising the experiment, tweaking and refining  their plan for the rest of us according to the results obtained.  For that reason, we need to think long and hard as to whether it is appropriate, in the light of what is currently going on, for an independent Scotland to willingly submit itself to becoming part of the Eurozone and whose interests would best be served if that were to be the case.

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  1. Paul Carline says:

    Perceptive – and true. It’s part of the “Grand Chess Board” strategy of demonic Brzezinski and his pals – picking off the ‘pawns’ one by one, whether by faked ‘democratic’ revolutions, or engineered financial crises.

    How is it that the UK is not under similar pressure when real British debt is many times greater than that of Greece – or just about any country in the world other than Japan? Ah well, Britain – like the USA – can continue to print its own money (another £50 billion recently of the so-called “quantitative easing”) to keep the punctured economic balloon in the air.

  2. W. Rewolb says:

    What’s never discussed in the mainstream media is that that much of the Greek debt is not entirely for lax tax collection or over-high public or private pay-rates, the overwhelming majority of it is for arms purchases from Germany and France, harsh intervention is to secure payment or secure those assets themselves before they are re-sold to all-comers by any saner Greek government that might have arisen, otherwise they’re only useful to the Greeks for suppressing their own people lethally.

    I don’t think Greece is uniquely a laboratory, we’re all lab-rats at present, though Greece was recently used as a substitute target by Israel for a training exercise simulated attack on Syria.

    There’s no reason a Scottish currency for an independent Scotland couldn’t continue to be called the pound, for simplicity’s sake, without any connection whatever to the rump-UK’s own pound sterling.

    I don’t think we need international organs to dispense justice to rectify this state of affairs for ourselves; we can, of our volition, try those political figures responsible; a trial of Cameron for ongoing warcrimes in Syria, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan outrages, Blair for the same, Major for prosecution of the vicious Iraq sanctions, Thatcher for Gulf War 1, through thousands of extra-judicial killings in Ireland, to the wilful sinking of the Belgrano with the loss of thousands of injured and fatigued young Argentinian conscripts, even figures from Harold Wilson’s era for the dispossesion of the Chagos Islanders and the creation of the Diego Garcia military base, now used as a concentration camp and for routine bits of torture –unless we the people teach our putative leaders a lesson, the criminal element will infest those positions perpetually.

  3. Paul Carline says:

    I’m right with Mr.(?) Rewolb on this. Didn’t know about the arms sales debt – but it figures that it’s Germany and France which have been putting most of the pressure on Greece.

    But his point about trying war criminals is excellent. The ICC in The Hague is a farce. It only tries people the Western elites want to punish, never our own criminals – and there are plenty of them. According to the ICC Act, all the members of the Blair government who backed the invasion of Iraq are war criminals – and anyone subsequently who has failed to indict all those responsible (that could include the Queen) is guilty of being an accessory.

    The problem for Scotland is that its own military would also be indicted and people would have to learn to stop calling them ‘heroes’.

  4. John Souter says:

    Here is a link that explains much of the strategy behind the financial idiocy that is the cause and purpose of this crises.

    It is scary stuff and Greece is merely the precursor.

  5. David Smillie says:

    Effectively Greece is ‘in administration’, just like Rangers FC will be before long.

  6. Grant says:

    Excellent stuff Moira

  7. Pingback: Resolution |

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