The coming to office of the new Greek government has inspired a new rhetoric of democracy and Philhellenism intriguingly similar to the Philhellenism that accompanied the establishment of the modern Greek state in the 1820s, in an international environment of post-Napoleonic reaction analogous in a number of ways to today’s reactionary environment of post-Soviet-collapse.
To take a characteristic example of this rhetoric, let us quote Paul Craig Roberts, dissident former assistant secretary of the Treasury under the Reagan administration in the US: “The Greeks, who were once to be contended with, who were able with 300 Spartans, supplemented with a few thousand Corinthians, Thebans, and other warriors, to stop a one hundred thousand man Persian army at Thermopylae, with the final outcome being the defeat of the Persian fleet in the Battle of Salamis and the defeat of the Persian army in the Battle of Plataea, are no more.
The Greeks of history have become a people of legend. Not even the Romans were able to conquer Persia, but little more than a handful of Greeks stopped the attempted Persian conquest of Greece.
But the Greeks, despite their glorious history, could not stop their conquest by the EU and a handful of German and Dutch banks. If the Greece of history still existed, the EU and the private banks would be cowering in fear, because the EU and the private banks have ruthlessly exploited the Greek people and represent the same threat to Greek sovereignty as Persia did. (….)
Greece is prostrate. Greeks are actually committing suicide, because Greeks cannot provide for themselves in the depressed conditions that the EU and the private banks have created for them for no other reason than that the private banks must not have to write down the loans.
So, one result from “democracy” in Greece is suicide. With enough democracy, we can control world population and halt the destruction of nature’s capital. All we have to do is to enable the banksters to loot the entire world.
What can Syriza do?
Without Spartans, very little.”
The implication of the article is anything but flattering for democracy, but it reminds us of something about ancient Greece: that democracy was merely one side of a bipolar conflict in which democracy did not always have the best arguments. On the contrary: the majority of great texts that have survived from the golden age of Athenian democracy are anti-democratic in content or implication.
Aegina was among the prime challengers and victims of the imperialistic democracy of the Athenians, because of geopolitical factors, because of the island’s less than resolute stance – initially – against the Persians (and, yes, fighting “for democracy” against the Persians is still a thorny subject) and because of the Aeginetans’ alliance with Sparta. Aegina was nevertheless chosen to be first capital of the modern Greek state, de facto, pending the establishment of security in the formal first capital, Nafplion. The island was able to provide a safe working environment for Greece’s brilliant, enlightened, liberal, humane, popular, but not democratic, first governor Ioannis Capodistrias , a statesman who can have claims to be the preliminary architect of today’s European Union (and, certainly, of the Swiss federation). .
It was in Nafplion that Capodistrias was later assassinated, by an alliance of foreign imperialists and what might facetiously and provocatively be called local Greek “democrats”.
Aegina is back in the Greek media today in these first days in office of the new government, because so many of the ministers, from Varoufakis and Tsipras to less internationally-known figures, have houses here and/or are frequent visitors.
In its programme SYRIZA features gestures in the direction of citizens’ democracy: participation in decision making, the ability to call referenda, and similar such innovations . But citizen participation in a context of corporate mass media control is no guarantee of politics that are in the objective interests of citizens. On the contrary, in such a context citizen participation can easily be a Trojan horse facilitating imposition of policies by foreign-controlled NGOs. Possible first steps towards dealing with this problem have been put forward and discussed to a very limited extent https://epamaegina.wordpress.com/2012/04/02/independent-citizens-assembly/ but the discussion has not acquired any traction within SYRIZA (or much traction elsewhere).
Paul Craig Roberts says, or implies, that what is needed now is not only Athenians (democrats) but also Spartans (oligarchs). Whether that is good or bad advice depends on how it is interpreted.
Aegina, 31st January 2015