Today I have woken to the best news for ages, the Greek election win for the anti-austerity Syriza party. This is not only good news for Greece but Europe and the planet. This is a defeat of the criminal austerity policies inflicted by the .1% on the rest of us. The policies of the people who caused the economic crises to make the victims pay for it. The recent – only 30 year old – free market economic orthodoxy has been resoundingly defeated at the ballot box in the country, which 2500 years ago invented and gave us the word ‘democracy’.
However the Independent in its lead article is already raising the prospect of the ’empire’ striking back when it put the following caption under the above victory photo:
‘Success for Syriza party may provoke economic siege by European Union‘
The paper seems to seriously suggest at a time when the US administration starts to see the light after over 50 years of failed policy that Europe creates is own Cuba under economic siege for daring to defy the banksters.
To advocate historically proven Keynesian economic policies, which for instance got us out of the Great Depression of the 1920-30ies and led to the economically good times after WWII has become a crime. This seems to have become a greater threat to the ruling elites than antibiotic drug resistant bugs, climate change and war in Europe combined. It is a sign that we are ruled not by reason but ideology when heresy is prosecuted like in the times of the Great Inquisition. A modern form of burning the books and heretics as the ruling elites have no arguments left to counter their ideas.
Huge public burnings took place of those convicted of Heresy
So far so good as Stathis Kouvelakis, a member of Syriza’s central committee and a political theory professor at King’s College London said in a recent interview : “In terms of its programmatic and ideological identity, Syriza has a strong anticapitalist line, and it has very sharply set itself apart from social democracy.”
The big question was already posed by award winning Canadian journalist Naomi Klein
in her latest 2014 book “This Changes Everything – Capitalism vs The Climate”
The very last paragraph reads :
A year ago, I was having dinner with some newfound friends in Athens. I asked them for ideas about what question I should put to Alexis Tsipras, the young leader of Greece’s official opposition party and one of the few sources of hope in a Europe ravaged by austerity.
Someone suggested, “Ask him: History knocked on your door, did you answer?”
That’s a good question, for all of us.