There used to be a story shared among some of my Greek family members. They were recalling a time 50 years ago, when the Greek Army generals ruled the country. The story goes that a Greek civilian stood on a sidewalk and asked the man standing next to him if he was in the military. The man shook his head.
“Do you have family in the military?” the Greek civilian asked.
“No,” the stranger answered.
“What about friends or acquaintances? Any of them in the military?”
“No.”
“Well then, would mind getting off my foot?” entreats the first man.
In other words, at that time, during the army junta in Greece (from 1967 to 1974), nobody was brave enough to say the slightest thing negative about military authority for fear of reprisal. Turn the clock ahead to today. And things have turned upside down.
After Sunday’s referendum, in which a majority of the voting Greek public told the European Union (EU) “Oxi!” (No!) to its financial austerity and pay-back plan, Greeks may well feel that they have taken back control of their own house, however weakened, disorganized and financially bankrupt that house may be.
More than 60 per cent of the Greek population that filled out ballots voted against the imposition of an EU-designed bail-out. I think it’s fair to say that the Greeks consider their “Oxi” not a fiscal alternative, but a declaration of independence. A New York Times reporter gathered responses outside one polling booth. Here’s what she heard.
“‘No’ means that we don’t have to say ‘Yes’ to whatever they are saying,” a middle-income Greek woman told the reporter.
Of course, those of us on the New World side of an Old World problem have come up with all kinds of interpretations about what the Greeks have done with their rejection of the bail-out. Andrew Coyne in the National Post said the Greek vote “has implications for every other of the simultaneous games of chicken being played in the eurozone.’
I’m reminded too of the travel guide I met in Greece last summer. Despite her job being essentially to give us a taste of the sights and sounds of the historic Greek centres we were visiting, Vavara felt compelled to offer her feelings about the poor economic state of the country.
“Life is impossible in our country these days,” she said, lamenting the austerity measures that have left many of her countrymen out of work. “Well over 85,000 of people under the age of 30 have gone to Australia to find work.” At one point, Varvara pointed to what looked like empty apartments in downtown Thessalonica.
She explained that most citizens in those addresses were likely unemployed, had no money for furnishings and were paying for rent on credit. She quite unashamedly blamed neighbouring lower-income Eastern Europeans for invading her city, in her opinion, a totally irresponsible Greek government, and unfair taxation. “Most (apartment dwellers) are paying as much as 500 euros ($635) in taxes,” she said. “Who can live like that?”
In response to that kind of criticism, the German economy minister (representing the economy most affected as the chief creditors in this scenario) has been very critical of Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras.
“(He) is leading the Greek people on a path of bitter abandonment and hopelessness,” Sigmar Gabriel told reporters, “(tearing) down the last bridges on which Greece and Europe could have moved toward a compromise.”
Indeed, the troubled relationship between some members of the EU – principally German – has torn open very old wounds, not to mention some classic hatreds. In a television news piece that the CBC’s Margaret Evans assembled last week, she spoke to man on a park bench in Athens. Argyris Sfountouris reminded her what Nazi occupiers did to Greece over during the Second World War. With the Nazis occupying most of the country and crushing anything that resembled insurrection, Sfountouris (then four years old) told Evans that he and his sisters trembled in the face of house-to-house searching by German SS troops.
“I saw the first light and then the terrible noise (of machine guns),” he told Evans. “Then we understood that they were starting to kill people,” among them Sfountouris’s mother as she tried to reach the village. She and 200 other men, women and children, were all bayoneted, hanged and (in the case of the village priest) beheaded. And her story didn’t end there. The man went on to say, rather than owing Germany and the rest of the EU money on a debt, that there were still German reparations to be paid to Greece.
So now – to revisit my original story – Greeks might well be asking strangers on the street whether they have EU euros or old Greek dracmas in their pockets before offering criticism or a point of view.