Δημοσίευμα του περιοδικού του Η.Β "Η συντηρητική Γυναίκα", όπου αναφέρεται στα στοιχεία των θανάτων των Ελλήνων για το έτος το 2017, που δημοσίευσε ο Πρέσβης ε.τ. και μέλος της προσωρινής Π.Γ. του "Μετώπου για μια ΕΛΕΥΘΕΡΗ ΕΛΛΑΔΑ" Λεωνίδας Χρυσανθόπουλος, στο μπούλλετιν της Πρωτοβουλίας για μια ανεξάρτητη Βρετανία.
March 19, 2018
The death rate in Greece is accelerating as the country
enters its eighth year of EU-imposed financial management. In a recent note to
the Campaign for an Independent Britain, Leonidas Chrysanthopoulos, a former
Greek ambassador and one time Director General of EU Affairs for the Greek
government, highlighted this little-publicised consequence of the ‘intensive
care’ imposed on Greece by Brussels.
The EU’s financial management medicine for Greece may be
working in part but only at the expense of killing the patient – literally.
Although the Greek economy grew for the fourth successive quarter between
October and December the costs of that recovery have not been making the
headlines.
As from January, the Greek government has felt it necessary
to cease publishing monthly statistics of births and deaths. Chrysanthopoulos
explains why:
‘The number of deaths in 2017 was 123,700, in 2016
118,623 and in 2013 it was 70,830. The average number of deaths before the
crisis was about 60,000 yearly.’
Different statistical methodologies can generate different
conclusions. In this case, however, the same conclusion is consistently reached
– the death rate in Greece has been increasing sharply. It is being covered up
to spare the blushes of the EU. Meanwhile, the Greek birthrate is in decline.
According to World Population Review, hospitals have recorded 10
per cent fewer births in the past four years.
In the UK our so-called ‘austerity’ still involves an annual
budget overspend of £18.2billion. That is not austerity as the Greeks have come
to understand the term. EU medicine has dissolved much of the country’s health
service, for example, especially for that impoverished fifth of the population
who lack any health insurance. Recent economic growth, after years of
recession, has done little to alleviate the savage impact of EU ‘help’,
‘support’ and ‘guidance’.
Poverty, hunger and want have not departed for most Greeks.
Indeed, the rate of unemployment rose a full percentage point to 21.2 per cent
in the last quarter as the pace of economic growth slowed.
According to Chrysanthopoulos, around five million Greeks
now lack the funds to pay their taxes in full. Reductions in salaries and
pensions, alongside increases in both direct and indirect taxes, have taken a
severe toll. In response, the EU is pressurising the Athens government to step
up the auctioning off of property belonging to those defaulting on mortgage
repayments.
Chrysanthopoulos describes the EU’s policies as ‘actually
murderous’. He reminds us that Oxfam, despite its appallingly abusive recent
behaviour, is partly funded by the EU and that it was originally set up in 1942
by private individuals at a church in Oxford for the relief of famine in
Nazi-occupied Greece. The present situation, he suggests, ‘is hardly less
horrific. Yet we hear little or nothing of it on the BBC or national press’.
Too often Greece is condemned as a land of profligate
tax-dodgers, responsible for its own demise. In contrast, Germany is portrayed
as a model of financial restraint, good sense and propriety. This ‘good
Germany/bad Greece’ perspective is used to explain why the EU’s intervention
and support for Greece has been delivered with a gun to the country’s head.
Whatever the cost, it seems, member states of the EU are obliged to fit in with
what works for sane and sensible Germany.
This is unfair, wrong-headed and amoral. Greece may have
gone astray through over-borrowing but it was not alone in so doing. If blame
is to be apportioned it should fall as much on Berlin as on Athens. By December
2009, according to Bloomberg, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain had together
accumulated $704billion of debt to German banks:
According to Albrecht Ritschl, professor of economic history
at the London School of Economics, Germany was the largest debt defaulter of
the 20th century. In 2014 Ritschl accused the German government of hypocrisy
for lecturing Greece on financial rectitude and pointed out that Germany’s
post-war ‘economic miracle’ was tied to American financial support and eventual
willingness to write
off German debts accrued under the post-war Marshall Plan.
Ritschl’s views received backing from a number of other
economists but did not prevail over the hard line of the Finance Minister at
the time, Wolfgang Schaeuble. Rather than recognising reality and putting
Greece into insolvency, Schaeuble insisted that Greece be made to pay its way
out of debt via the austerity route.
The task
facing Greece has an appropriately mythical parallel in the story of Sisyphus.
The gods punished the erring king by requiring him to roll a great boulder up a
hill only for it to roll back down every time he neared the summit.
The death rate in Greece is rising and the desperation of
many Greeks is unending. In Brussels and Berlin, meanwhile, there is grim
satisfaction that all is going according to plan.
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