The Little Engine That Couldn’t
The above illustration (and linked story) are a (not-so) wonderful metaphor for the Greek leadership’s propensity to believe in fairy-tales. The illustration is also a very competent metaphor for what will become of Greece, post ‘the little engine that couldn’t’ or that is to say Alex Tsipras & Yanis Varoufakis.
Now, what we have here is, Mutti Merkel is playing the good Schwabian housewife, reading Grimm’s fairy-tales to her adopted little boys Alex and Yanis, while tucking them into bed each night with promises of sweet dreams. And these boys run off to school each morning informing their classmates (the Greek people) ‘We are close to a deal’ but then .. in math class, the evil Mr Jean ‘clod’ Juncker informs our ‘boys’ 2 + 2 = 22.
Confused, our ‘boys’ ask the school principal, that is Ms LaGarde, why they get failing grades when attempting to make sense of Mr Juncker’s math lessons and her answer is quite straightforward:
Despondent, our boys walk home after school and Mutti tucks them into bed with a reassuring fairy-tale.
What Alex Tsipras & Yanis Varoufakis fail to understand is, there is no authentic ‘deal’ will be made. Greece will be put to ‘the rack’ and in the meanwhile, there was never any intention except to make an example of the Greeks, Alex Tsipras & Yanis Varoufakis will either buckle or be broken and that will be the end of any ‘pesky left’ pretensions of social equity. As it stands, Alex Tsipras & Yanis Varoufakis were suckered into the last payout to make the inevitable ‘my way (buckle to the Troika) or the highway’ (default) all that more painful and difficult, that money should have lessened the impact of an earlier Greek exit of the Euro. Yet, having already forked over Greece’s last cash reserves, and with nothing but capitulation in the offering, our boys continued telling the other kids ‘we are close to a deal.’
Alex Tsipras & Yanis Varoufakis should have had a study of the Germans running the EU (LaGarde at the IMF is little more than a French hooker working the streets of Berlin) and understood Mutti is preparing to pop them into her Schwarzwald oven and serve them up as gingerbread at a privitization party for corporate oligarchy’s insatiable appetite.
Never, never, it would seem, were there two greater fools than our ‘boys’ Alex Tsipras & Yanis Varoufakis.
What they might have done is tell the Greek people the truth, there is NO, NONE, ZIP, ZILCH, indications of good faith in what amounts to negotiations intended to string out the Greeks until either they buckle or collapse. But no, our ‘boys’ insisted on believing in Mutti’s fairy tales when better they had gone to the Greek people with the truth; either we will be the slaves to German run oligarchy or we will have to make a break and that will be extremely rough, because in that case we are to be the whipping boys made example of, to deliver a lesson to the other ‘PIIGS’ .. DON’T YOU DARE dream to be free –
Trusting the people who’re complicit in this:
and responsible for this:
Germany’s Martyrs of the Maidan
wasn’t so different to Hansel and Gretel trusting the old woman in the forest (oh, and for my American readers, the kids didn’t escape the witch that baked them, that’s a USA historical revisionism.)
If the Greeks do default and exit the Euro, all sorts of new dirty tricks will be brought to bear, ‘color revolution’ will be in the works with attending ‘terror’ .. all the same crap that has been used to tamp down on those who ‘don’t play’ the oligarchy’s game according to the unwritten rules.
The biggest mistake the present Greek leadership has made is to string out the Greek people with ‘hope’ for a fair deal (fairy-tales) as they played into a trap intended to destroy Syriza’s political capital .. instead of building political capital by facing reality and telling the Greek people the truth; there was never any intention of the Troika to do right by Greece.
In their hubris, whether because they are morons or merely naïve, our ‘boys’ Alex Tsipras & Yanis Varoufakis are delivering the Greek people little more than a basting in preparation for Mutti’s oven.
Good luck with that –
23 June 2015 update: Mutti’s ‘boys’ begin to cave in (what cowards)
25 June 2015 update: The Troika suckered the boys with a ‘bait and switch’
27 June 2015 update: Tsipras rediscovers his gonads
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The little engine that couldn’t (episode 2)
The little engine that couldn’t (episode 3)
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Ronald Thomas West 