Guardian
June 22, 2011
The Greek debt crisis has given rise to a new stock character in Athens: the All-seeing Public Economist (APE). The APE claims to exactly understand our predicament, present and future, and he counsels the hoi polloi with a degree of certainty unmatched since the days of the blind seer, Tiresias (I use the gendered pronoun intentionally: for some reason – possibly because men are more prone to intellectual hubris than women – almost every APE is a "he").
Economics is purportedly the key to the wisdom of the APE. Thus, whenever he addresses a mass meeting in Constitution Square, appears on a TV panel or pontificates from a newspaper, he refers to knowledge that goes over the audience's heads. Kindly, he explains it: "What is really happening is (insert diagnosis) and what the government/Greece/EU/IMF/banks (take your pick) should do is (insert therapy)."
Our APEs don't agree on everything, yet under their rhetoric runs a basic narrative, often unstated. This goes like this: Greece is a country of the "periphery", whose essential nature is to be poor but honest (the blend of fashionable social science, metaphysics and archaic moralism is not mine, but the narrative's). The present crisis is a symptom of our exploitation by the European "centre", whose essential nature is to be rich and exploitative (ditto). We poor Greeks were duped into entering the EU and adopting the euro, the narrative continues. The cunning centre gave us grants for our honest labour as the conquistadors gave beads to native Americans in exchange for gold. Eventually, we were sucked dry: but the centre's greed is boundless, and now they want to gain more through usury and, if bad comes to worse, political domination. The latter is the continuation of war by other means, you see, as EU technocrats are really the modern reincarnation of the Wehrmacht, and the Greek government their lackeys, the modern quislings.
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