By now the tragic – and it is no irony to use such a word where Western notions of Tragedy were born – capitulation of Greece to the Troika is a fait accompli.
The Tsipras government, the same government who gained office through the powers invested in them by the populace who strenuously voted ‘no’ to the strangling noose tightened by the EU, caved in. Who knows by what other ways they were threatened by their creditors?
So Greece will exist not as a nation, but as a property of the greater EU bankster set, who have already privatised the vast majority of their public assets and will privatise even more. It’s getting the last remaining drops of blood from the corpse of their own creation.
Former Greek finance minister Varoufakis has rightly called the ‘deal’ a failure before it has begun.
So the reasonably intelligent follower of world news must ask himself or herself? What does this mean for the rest of us?
Noam Chomsky was fond of saying that understanding geopolitics was well within the grasp of hoi polloi who, after all, expend a great deal of creative intelligence following sports and suchlike.
Since I am far from being a political genius or political economist, let me offer a few thoughts, but let me begin by asking who will benefit from the present situation, aside from the usual corporate suspects.
The destruction of the nationhood of Greece and its debt subservience for the foreseeable future will serve as an example to those other countries in similar situations: Spain, Portugal, Ireland and Italy, for example, to toe the line.
Despite exorbitant unemployment rates, and despite a drain of the future of such countries of their talented and intelligent youth, they will remain in the EU upon pain of … of what? Well, even more extreme economic occupation, so that they will become an emasculated reservoir of assets for the elite, or a source of cheap labour for the rest of Europe, not unlike what has already happened to the former Yugoslavia.
However the EU itself, with such a divisively elite hierarchy, will hardly be able to survive as a powerful bloc. And here is where it gets interesting.
Who benefits from a disunited Europe? A disunited Europe that will not be able to mount action independent of the United States, for example? Well, the United States.
The Great Game now being played out is a game that pits East versus West: the Sino-Soviet alliance and associated partners (BRICS), versus the United States and its vassal dominion, Europe.
Europe, which itself has mastered the bloody art of brutal dismemberment via centuries of internecine war, can benefit from friendly relations with its Soviet neighbours and, by extension, the newly proposed Silk Road.
But in the quest for unipolar global dominance the United States, driven by its own corporatocracy, will smile while a weakened and compliant EU allows NATO to use its territory to flex geopolitical muscle.
The capitulation of Greece signals an end of a truly unified Europe and the stark beginning of a flexibly accommodating European economic oligarchy – accommodating not to the citizens populating the countries that constitute the EU, but to imperial ambition. So much for the demos.
It’s not so hard to figure out, really, but it’s hard to stomach, especially if you live there.
Dr. Garcia is a Philadelphia-born physician and writer who now resides in New Zealand.