As the Neo-Liberal paradigm continues to flounder, even collapse, engulfing the E.U. with it, it is vital that we not forget the question of Germany’s war time reparations debt to Greece, as much as the Economist would like to trivialize it:while not perceiving the fact that the victors set the whole standard of that repayment, not in the interests of Greece but in their own parochial political interests. Add to that the fact that Germany was rescued from it’s own bad economic decisions four times in the 20th Century,1924, 1929, 1932 and 1953. See Gillian Tett’s January 15,2015 essay titled ‘The debt of history’ on a speech by Benjamin Friedman on that vexing question at The Financial Times, The Economist’s sister publication:
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/927efd1e-9c32-11e4-b9f8-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=intl#axzz3Uvo4Rghs
That should have laid to rest the manufactured political melodrama of the Virtuous North vs the profligate South. But still The Economist trades on that shopworn, not to speak of bankrupt dramaturgy, as it’s rhetorical frame!
Allied to that is the usual fixation of the ‘Left’ as the looming threat, the Sword of Damocles, to adhere to the melodramatic frame. Although, should we be surprised that in the face of a collapsing Neo-Liberalism that the rise of both the ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ was a political inevitability? But as intransigent Capitalist apologists, The Economist writers can’t resist exercising their idée fixe, their political obsession.
Almost Marx
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