A study in obsessive compulsive disorder

Greek nationalism answers Germany’s fiscal imperialism

At 14.30 precisely today, Athens categorically rejected the German proposal to cede control over its budget to the European Union as a precondition for the second bailout package for Greece. “We can never accept this. A similar proposal was made in the past by a  Dutch minister. We will not even discuss it” senior governmental sources told Athens News Agency. This is an encouraging sign. If only the same could be said for the British media’s near-zero coverage of Teutonic neurosis. 

To requote Franklin Roosevelt, “Today is a day that will live in infamy”. This is not to be melodramatic about Germany’s hysterical call for Athens to hand over its sovereignty: after the abrupt replacement of Democracy in Greece by a Goldman Sachs/EU appointee last year, it was obvious to anyone with a feeling for history – and some common sense – where this would end. What’s happened is appalling; but the British response to it makes me, yet again, ashamed to be British. Our response is not so much appalling as apathetic.

Of the two most anti-Europe newspapers here – the Mail and Express – neither has printed a word about the German proposal circulated during Friday late afternoon. The main eurosceptic paper, the Telegraph, has similarly been in denial about its existence. The Independent ran a small panel about it this morning, since dropped in favour of a slight piece about Davos. The Guardian – silly old tartar – headlines Cameron’s ‘U-turn on fiscal enforcement’ without bothering to mention that Germany has moved beyond enforcement to financial annexation.

We are a strange race: our isles may no longer be sceptred, but they remain sceptical about everything. Unfortunately, our scepticism too often erodes into selfish disinterest and fixed ideas. Thus my own take on why the German proposal to take the job of Government away from Greece has gone unreported here is that all the right-wing papers hate foreigners (who gives a f**k about the Greeks?) and the liberal press hates anyone criticising the EU (It’s all for the best dearie, the Greeks – I mean, yah? – I love their dancing and all that, but who else other than the Germans can sort them out?).

I’ve been reminded today by wise comment-threaders at The Slog of Chamberlain’s disgraceful remarks about Czechoslovakia after the Munich ‘agreement’ in 1938: “a country far, far away with which we have little or nothing in common”. This was very much in the tradition of British assumptions about superiority: ‘Large Earthquake in China – not many Dead’, as the Times once reported in the 1890s.

But either way, today marks something of a turning point for me. A real Buddhist truth is that good comes from bad. The good for me today has been to realise that no good at all is going to come from me wittering on about how terrible something is any more because, as a form of civilisation, the West has lost the ability to feel what one means by ‘terrible’. All those precepts with which I was raised about justice, equality of opportunity, national self-determination and liberty have fallen down the crevasse that yawns between “Yeh…whatever” and “The markets must decide”. It takes me back to a great Shavian quote from Pygmalion, where Liza’s feckless Dad says, “Morals sir? I can’t afford ’em”.

Two things are obvious from the non-reportage of today’s massively significant European developments:

1. Lone bloggers aren’t going to have any effect on these deeply disturbed people we call our leaders. I’ve been saying this for over a year now, so it’s about time I took my own advice: only concerted and mutual efforts by influential writers – in a collective, a virtual haven, a cloud or whatever the bloody hell else one chooses to call it – can ever act as a bulwark against this witches’ coven of sociopathic belief in the idea that money is the object, and the human race the subject.

2. As I’ve posted endlessly before, we are witnessing a step-change – one of those periods of history in which not only the way the game is played changes….so too does the ownership of The Club. This is why, ignoring even those who say football is “just a game” (may Matt Busby help them) I will keep reporting about its dissolution: for it is part of the problem, and presages broader developments. As braindead foreign players have made the UK’s Premier League the last word in fine footie, the wages paid indirectly by the Beastly Murdoch  have ensured that all self-restraint, grass-roots development and decency have disappeared from ‘The Beautiful Game’. In and of itself, it is a very, very beautiful game: but perverted beauty is a profoundly sad thing.

There seems to me little point in getting an ‘inside track’ on the news any more: doing so is merely playing to the generic news gallery of f**kwits who think this is what the media should be about. From here on, the only games in town worth playing for a thinking blogger are (a) taking the merciless piss out of all those characters who’s one defining character trait is that they lack character; and (b) writing with as little didacticism as possible about how much better things could be without all these people and their entirely valueless values.

This is going to lose me thousands of readers – I accept that. But in the end, I’m confident the mainstream will come to us. It will take more annexations of power by the financial psychos, more humiliations of nation States, and further destruction of those hundreds of years of achievement devoted to protecting real people from dictatorial gargoyles. It will involve the eventual collapse of the globalist ideal, the dysfunctional banking system, America, the EU and pretty much everyone up to China.

It may take a hundred years (although I think five would be nearer the mark) but in the end there will be a reaction. History never was and never will be a tediously extrapolated straight line: it is rather a continual learning process – held back only by poor little Homo sapiens’ dullness when it comes to learning. The three Rs and the slate beckon, and we will – in the end – all be the better for it.