From the library: The Full Catastrophe by James Angelos

Last updated on: July 26, 2015 at 7:45 am by Jane the Actuary

From the library: The Full Catastrophe by James Angelos 2015-07-26T07:45:21-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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The book is subtitled “Travels Among the New Greek Ruins” but this is a bit misleading; though the author does indeed travel throughout Greece for an eye-witness view of the events there (he’s an American son of Greek immigrants, so he speaks the fluent Greek he learned in Saturday Greek School and understands Greek culture as passed down to him, but with an outsider’s perspective), he spends the majority of the book providing historical and cultural context. To be honest, this dragged a bit, but here’s the bottom line:

1) The Faulkner quote — “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” It’s here in spades. The suggestion that Syriza’s leaders made, that Germany should cut a deal on their debt because they still owed Greece reparations ($150 billion) for the destruction in World War II? It wasn’t a new idea then — leftist Greeks have been calling for reparations ever since the end of the war, and were peeved that the 2+4 treaty that paved the way for German reunification left out this demand. To be fair, though, the Marshall Plan went a long way towards the rebuilding of the infrastructure that the Germans destroyed.

2) What struck me in reading this book was this: fundamentally, I think we have an attitude that: “Greece is a part of Europe. Europe is civilized (and white). Therefore Greeks ought to behave like Germans, and ought to be able to follow the obvious policy prescriptions, and fix their country.” But the history and culture and geography of Greece is not simply the same as that of Northern Europe, or even of the other PIIGS.

During the years when Catholic Europe was developing its very identity, in the Middle Ages, Greece was a part of the Byzantine Empire.

Then, for a good 300 years, Greece was a part of the Ottoman Turkish Empire.

Then an independent country — though only half the size of present-day Greece, and their “civilized” backers from Northern/Western Europe were appalled that the modern day Greek peasants and bandits were not at all the ancient Greeks they romanticized. Nonetheless, they installed Otto from Germany on the throne and, in modern Greek telling, kept the country under foreign domination.

They gained further territory along the way, including a major slice of what’s now northern Greece, as a result of the Balkan Wars (1912); after World War I there were uneven population swaps with Turkey, as they expelled Muslims to Turkey and the Turks expelled Greeks.

They were occupied by German during World War II and experienced starvation as the Germans shipped foodstuffs out; the retreating army also destroyed bridges, roads, etc.

But that’s not all! the rest of Europe fairly quickly settled into new, stable governments, whether Western democracies or Soviet-controlled communist governments, but Greece decided they hadn’t had enough of war, so they fought a civil war, between Soviet-backed communists and US/British-backed government forces, until 1949. As an added bonus, there was a military junta from 1967 – 1974 — but this didn’t prevent what, though unmentioned in the book, Wikipedia calls the “Greek economic miracle“, substantial sustained growth from the end of the civil war to 1973. But there’s also been a significant leftist element as well through Greece’s recent past.

Greece is a country with an extreme degree of tax evasion — blamed on cultural attitudes dating back to the time of the Turks, that evading taxes is a form of resistance against the occupier. Tax compliance would have gone a long way, if not all the way, towards dealing with deficits. And it’s not just day-laborer types working under the table, but doctors and other professionals, to the extent that banks back into a “real” income when granting mortgages, rather than using officially-declared income.

Greece is a country with a high degree of corruption, both petty (local doctors/municipalities approving individuals for blindness benefits even their vision was perfectly fine) and large-scale (government spending on unneeded weapons systems in which it was later learned that the top government officials approving these systems were receiving kickbacks from the arms dealers). Don’t forget, too, the government cooking of the books that masked its high deficit and made them appear eligible for Euro membership in the first place.

And the weapons themselves? Enmity towards Turkey keeps military spending far higher than its neighbors.

Labor unions keep government workers employed regardless of their productivity, and produces regular strikes, and civil servants are paid twice as much as their private sector counterparts, while being woefully inefficient with implementation of computers to a paltry degree.

And at the same time, Greece is not only a cultural borderland with Turkey and the Mediterranean, but it is a literal geographic border, and right now bears the brunt of that. Not only are there migrants working illegally, but others who come, following European Union protocol, have the right to file for asylum and be granted residency permits for as long as it takes the (painfully slow) Greek bureaucracy to process their cases.

And the Greeks themselves? They feel cheated, that it’s unfair that they have to suffer to pay for someone else’s sins (whether that someone else is the Turks, or the Germans, or other Greeks), and think that, if perhaps they, also, are a little bit corrupt too, it’s only fair, to make up for the injustices they experience.

All of which means that Greece is simply unable to turn on a dime and become German in outlook.

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