GREECE ON THE BRINK?

"Alexis Tsipras, the Greek prime minister, vowed not to give in to demands made by his country’s international creditors, accusing them of “pillaging” Greece for the past five years and insisting it was now up to them to propose another rescue plan to save Athens from bankruptcy. Mr Tsipras’s remarks came less than 24 hours after the collapse of last-ditch talks aimed at reaching agreement on the release of €7.2bn in desperately needed rescue funds. The comments were part of a chorus of defiance in Athens that left many senior EU officials convinced they can no longer clinch a deal with Greece to prevent it from crashing out of the eurozone. Without a deal to release the final tranche of Greece’s current bailout, Athens is likely to default on a €1.5bn loan repayment due to be paid to the International Monetary Fund in two weeks, an event officials fear would set off a financial chain reaction from which Greece would be unable to recover. “One can only suspect political motives behind the fact that [bailout negotiators] insist on further pension cuts, despite five years of pillaging,” Mr Tsipras said in a statement. “We are carrying our people’s dignity as well as the aspirations of all Europeans. We cannot ignore this responsibility. It is not a matter of ideological stubbornness. It has to do with democracy....Hardliners in Mr Tsipras’s ruling Syriza party demanded a definitive break with creditors, calling on supporters to stage street protests against further austerity measures.".

Peter Spiegel and Kerin Hope, "Defiant Alexis Tsipras accuses creditors of ‘pillaging’ Greece". The Financial Times. 16 June 2015, in www.ft.com.

"The Communists must exert every effort to direct the working-class movement and social development in general along the straightest and shortest road to the victory of Soviet power and the dictatorship of the proletariat on a world-wide scale. That is an incontestable truth. But it is enough to take one little step farther—a step that might seem to be in the same direction—and truth turns into error. We have only to say, as the German and British Left Communists do, that we recognise only one road, only the direct road, and that we will not permit tacking, conciliatory manoeuvres, or compromising—and it will be a mistake which may cause, and in part has already caused and is causing, very grave prejudices to communism."

Vladimir I. Ulyanov [Lenin]. 'Left-wing' Communism: an Infantile Disorder. (1920).

The Syriza Government of Tsipras, et. al., appears to be inclined, nay eager to commit national suicide for purposes of proving his and his party's soixante-huitard like credentials. The fact that it will mean that Greece will be thrown into a violent recession, nay Depression, with capital controls, wild-inflation, plunging values and with the final upshot being violence in the streets, does not in the least appear to influence the Tovarish Tsipras. Au fond, if Greece possessed something approaching a normal government and a normal governing regime, then I would strongly contend that it is incumbent upon the European Union, et. al., to come to some compromise with Athens over the austerity programme. As I for quite awhile now would agree that austerity per se, is a political and economic cul-de-sac. However, given the overtly gauchiste, if not indeed left-wing Communist tenor to the Syrizia Government, it seems to the case that the responsible negotiators for the European Union, have no chose in the matter but let Greece hang itself by its own revolutionary petard. As Ulyanov if he were alive to-day (and thankfully he is not...), would comment, it is due to left-wing infants of the Syrizia type that Europe has never had (thankfully) a Communist Revolution.