The world seems to have gone mad

That title is the sort of hyperbole that usually makes me snort with disgust but, for once, I can see no other way of describing what is happening in the political and media world. People come up with the most ridiculous comments. Unfortunately, yes I do mean the reactions to what is going on in Greece, though I really had not intended to write about it again so soon.

The number of people who seem to have discovered all of a sudden that "the EU has a democracy problem" is quite spectacular. Apparently, all those discussions about the EU's "democracy deficit" have passed them by; apparently they did not notice what happened when countries voted in a referendum against implementing certain treaties and were made to vote again (with Greece always a reliable cheer-leader for the EU pack and against any change or reform); apparently they have no idea at all how the EU is governed - not through politics but management.

Well, I have news for all these people: the EU has no democracy problem; it was never intended to be a democracy (that is assuming the people in question can actually define democracy). Furthermore, democracy is of little use when you are seriously in debt and are relying on somebody else to fund your lifestyle. Back in the days I had to deal with bailiffs because of money I owed to the local council or the water board, I routinely consulted my household of fluctuating number of humans and cats and each time we voted unanimously against the proposals the bailiffs made about the payment of debts. Sadly, each time our democratic decision was overruled and pay it all we had to.

Then we come to the lunacy of #itsacoup, which people can read on Twitter even if they are not signed up for that particular form of social media themselves. I can only assume that it was started by someone who has no idea what a coup means and has no idea how the EU works (see above). It is, however, rather depressing when one gets a leading eurosceptic like Daniel Hannan coming up with rubbish of that kind.

I managed to miss his article in the Daily Mail on July 6 in which he congratulated the brave Greek people on standing up to the EU bullies and voting no to the proposed bail-out conditions (very similar to the ones they are about to accept). Ha-ha, he said, the Greeks are being threatened with all sorts of nasty things, like not having salaries, pensions and other expenses paid but they said boo to that and if they can do it, so can we. There is a difference between threats of that kind being made by the people who are doing the paying and those who are not. If Mr Hannan really proposes to compare Britain to Greece during the Brexit referendum campaign, we really are doomed: the reaction to that argument will be a colossal support for the staying in side.

He has now produced a film on YouTube in which he pretends to be a broadcaster during the Second World War or the Cold War and tells everyone that yes, this was a coup. As someone who actually was involved in Cold War broadcasting I find this pretentiousness ridiculous but that is what YouTube is for (as well as watching old episodes of The Avengers and listening to various adventures of Paul Temple, which is my preference). No, I really do not think so and, curiously enough, there are people actually in Greece (oh my!) who agree.

Take this article by Andreas Souvaliotis, a Social Entrepreneur (I think I know what that is) who says that au contraire,  Greece: Here Is Why #ThisIsNotACoup. 

That tiny little daily violation of each other's rights is perfectly symbolic of the prevailing national culture in Greece: My freedom does not end where yours begins; it extends indefinitely, unless I'm caught or stopped. It is considered perfectly normal to jump ahead of you at the traffic lights, to smoke where I'm not supposed to smoke, to cheat on my taxes, to cook the nation's books in order to qualify for a currency union, to renege on every single election promise. Those who insist on respecting the rules are considered a little less smart, a little less "Greek" -- and they're often told they are the losers.

That's exactly the country that became financially insolvent recently. My beautiful birth country continues to be the Eurozone's most adolescent, rebellious, blindly self-defeating society. Greece didn't get into all this trouble because its European partners took advantage of it; it went bankrupt because, after more than a generation as a member of a rules-driven, respect-based tight economic community, it never figured out how to play fair, how to fit in and how to build real value. It enjoyed the spoils of membership without ever trying to live up to its end of the bargain; it cheated, squandered, abused, begged for more... and the cycle continued until the financial crisis suddenly brought the entire country to the brink of bankruptcy. And even then, on the strength of charm and an endless stream of fake reform promises over the past half-dozen years, the money kept flowing in from its badly tricked Euro partners in the form of bailouts. And nobody was even humiliated or angry about that. Until now, of course.

Mr Souvaliotis exaggerates the extent to which the eurozone is rules-driven and respect-based, let alone tight economic community but he is spot on about the Greek attitude to it. I have no particular objections to a completely libertarian attitude to life, which is what the Greeks might say they have but I do feel that it is not compatible with an enormous government sector, high pay and pensions and demands that someone else, preferably other countries fund all that. That is all.

Mr Souvaliotis advocates "tough love" and adds this extremely fine sentence that needs to be quoted to a good many people:

Mercy on the Greek state, as a lot of bleeding hearts and newly minted euro-experts have been advocating these past few days, would have only fed a bad culture and perpetuated the problem.

As someone said on another forum: I am looking at you, BBC journalists. Well, yes, the BBC hacks are suddenly dissatisfied with the way the EU has been behaving towards gallant little Greece (unlike the way it had behaved towards gallant little Denmark or Ireland). Again, I can only wonder what their attitude would have been if there had been a right-wing government in that country.

I am also looking at some eurosceptics, led by Mr Hannan and his many acolytes. Mind you, none of these people are quite as hilariously funny as the egregious Owen Jones who has suddenly decided that if the wonderful, extreme left wing government in Greece who just want to get lots of money from everybody else and never pay any of it back is bullied by the nasty EU and even nastier Germany then it is time for us to get out. The Left, he says, must reclaim the eurosceptic cause. All we need is that born-too-late student agitprop purveyor from the SNP, Mhairie Black to decide that the EU is not such a good idea after all. We can but hope that the likes of Owen Jones will swing back to being an idiot on the europhiliac side not an idiot on our side. Still, I am more than a little amused by the unholy alliance of Daniel Hannan and Owen Jones. Way to go, lads.

This is also very funny

A reader has sent me a link to the list of demands from the Occupy Wall Street mob. Incoherent to the point of complete insanity. Even the ridiculous demands of the sixties had more brainwork behind them.

Mark Daniel, the author, among other books of an entertaining history of UKIP has cut across discussions as to whether this bilge was sub-Marxism or moronic Marxism with the word Lennonism. These idiots, he said, get their notions from the songs of a drug-crazed pop-star's writings. A word that needs to be used more often.

Commentary thinks this could be a disaster for the Democrats in a way that the Tea Party was supposed to be for the GOP but was not.

Nick Cohen talks sense

An excellent article about the Left not confronting its extremists from Nick Cohen, himself a man of the left, in the Spectator.

The TUC and Labour Party condemned the violence. But they had not warned in advance that yobs would not be welcome on the march because neither is ready for a full confrontation with the fanatics. On the march itself the TUC allowed the SWP to hand out banners and “brand” the demonstration as its own as it called in apparent seriousness for “a general strike now”.

The folly of ignoring or indulging the far left becomes apparent as soon as you realise that the similarities between the SWP and the BNP are more important than the differences. Both are hysterical totalitarian organisations that love vicious rhetoric and promote anti-Semites. The left wing press and the BBC will never acknowledge the overlap between fascism and communism, because they fear accusations of “betrayal,” and have a mental block that prevents them accepting that evil resides on the left as well as the right of British politics.

As a point of contrast, imagine how they would react if the BNP hijacked a Countryside Alliance march. The Today programme would have had a nervous breakdown on live radio.

As for the anarchists, let us be honest and acknowledge political violence is not always futile. If there isn’t violence, the media will give only perfunctory coverage to a demonstration, something that ought to worry my colleagues more than it does. Today’s proponents of breaking the law and scaring shop girls can also say that riots and a mass refusal to pay destroyed the poll tax in Mrs Thatcher's day. I am sure readers can throw the moral argument against political violence in a democracy in their faces, but for me the decisive point is that by the time of the protests against the poll tax exploded virtually everyone in Britain except Mrs Thatcher had accepted the case against it.

I do have some caveats.

In the first place the BNP is not a party of the right but, I suppose, the media and many political activists see it as such.

In the second place, as I have been pointing out ad nauseam the groups that were smashing up private property to protest against the smallest cuts in government were not anarchists.

Thirdly, though this is a gift to the Conservatives, I don't suppose they will manage to take advantage of it the way Thatcher did in the seventies and eighties. I suspect the Cameroonies will once again snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

But I am glad that Nick Cohen, who was on the march, confirms my impressions about the marchers and the police, though I was watching from outside.

Another problem

The reverberations from the discovery that Benno Ohnesorg's killer was actually a Stasi agent are still going on. In the meantime, another potentially embarrassing discovery may have been made. It seems possible that Rosa Luxembourg's grave, "a shrine of sorts, visited every year by a procession of old communists and young left-wing activists", may not hold the murdered revolutionary's body after all.

As Der Spiegel reports:

But now, a startling discovery indicates that Rosa Luxemburg may never have inhabited that much-hallowed grave. If Michael Tsokos, head of the Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences at Berlin's Charité hospital, is correct, then Luxemburg's body has been stored in the hospital's basement since 1919.

One would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at this.

Does this change anything?

In the last few months I have read a good deal about the much more frightening period of the international terrorist movement of the seventies. It all started with my seeing "The Baader-Meinhof Complex", an interesting but somewhat inadequate film, and writing about it for The Salisbury Review [full article in print only].

I re-read Jillian Becker's "Hitler's Children" and read Stephan Aust's account on which the film was based. At present I am reading Michael Burleigh's ground-breaking study of terrorism and culture, "Blood and Rage". Indeed, I am beginning to feel as if my life were filled with words about terrorists, terrorism and those who support both.

Going back to the German Red Army Faction, all those who remember anything about it will know that the violent protests, which eventually developed into the RAF were started by the shooting of a student, Benno Ohnesorg in West Berlin in 1967. He was demonstrating against the visit of the Shah of Iran (how that takes one back); there were serious clashes between demonstrators and supporters of the Shah; the police tried to control events and a police officer fired his gun as Ohnesorg rolled up on the ground trying to protect himself.

Karl-Heinz Kurras was tried for reckless manslaughter and acquitted for lack of evidence. To the overwrought students this proved that the state was out to get them. Among the most overwrought ones was Gudrun Ensslin, Andreas Baader's girl-friend and one of the real organizers of the Red Army Faction.

The most likely explanation, it always seemed, was that Herr Kurras lost his head in the violent chaos that was going on. That may still be true.

However, there is some new evidence that adds an interesting twist to the story. It seems that Karl-Heinz Kurras was a Stasi agent, tasked with spying on the West German police. There is no evidence that he was ordered to kill Benno Ohnesorg or that he was ordered to kill anyone. But the outcome of his action was many years of fear and instability in West Germany and widespread sympathy for the enemy of the West, in this case East Germany. We are sill not rid of that incubus.

Would it have been any different if this information had been available at the time, asks Deutsche Welle. By definition, something like this cannot be known. More interestingly, will this piece of information change anything in our perception of what happened then?

More on the whole story and the unlikelihood of Kurras making a mistake at the time here.