The narrative continues to run that while the banks along with the EU finance ministers who serve them, stand firm in their austere principles, the bourgeois left, the radicals, the people cheer on this electoral victory against hegemonic Germany imposing loan-shark policy on broken economies. It is an insurgent democracy, and banks do not like this.
If only other brash insurgencies in other countries played out so cleanly!
The other countries I am thinking of are in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. And in their narratives they were not permitted to even get so far as hold an election of bourgeois leftists before disappearances and assassinations became the norm ended their dreams of better societies.
Roughly two paths towards colonial independence after World War II emerged:
One, was through peaceful negotiation where the imperial power granted the colony nominal independence. A handover was staged, where usually a royal personage was dispatched to had over the keys and watch the imperial flag lowered and a new one hoisted.
The second path was militant, armed revolution.
Behind the peaceful path lay a lot of machinations. The colony was essentially indebted to pay reparations to the imperial power. Since this obligation flew in the face of internal development, the newly independent colony had to have the worst kind of government - the client class, corrupt presidents and kleptocratic cabinets that looked like the locals but served the white empire.
Elections were essentially nullified, and no meaningful talk of democracy and free elections ever again came out of London, Paris, or Washington. The times where it happened, such as in Haiti with Jean-Bertrand Aristide's LAVALAS victory, the US immediately undermined and overturned the people's will for that of international capital.
For obvious reasons, the path of armed revolution, has been given a warped treatment by the West and its doyenne intellectuals. Part of this distortion of the facts is recreating the leaders of these armed resistance movements larger than life - that is, exaggerating their role vis-a-vis the mass struggles of the people - and then making these leaders into the worst kinds of human beings that ever walked the face of the earth.
Ho Chi Minh, before he founded the Vietnamese Communist Party, was a young ideologue in Paris who wanted a liberal democracy in Indochina in place of the brutal, occupying French.
The French refused to leave Indochina, and when their economy could no longer sustain a long, guerrilla war against the Viet Cong, the US as the rising imperial power stepped in.
He was rejected by the Americans and Europeans at the Versailles Peace Talks after World War I.
The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in the early 1920's as an intellectual movement against the borders imposed and fake kings installed after the demise of the Ottoman Empire.
They were immediately marginalized by the fake sheiks.The Brotherhood is still marginalized by the fake sheiks, potentates, and false presidents propped up by the US, the French, and the British.
Fidel Castro was a young, crusading lawyer, married to the Bacardi Rum heiress, living hand to mouth and running for a seat in the Cuban senate with a nationalist political party.
On the eve of the 1952 election what looked like a landslide election for Fidel and the Orthodoxo Party was cancelled by a US-backed military junta. The US sent weapons to that same army to crush resistance to this coups.
The common denominator of these incidents was a Western imperial power backed, financed, armed, and demanded a particular course that was diametrically opposed to the one set out by the mass movements and revolutionaries.
Remember this when you think of the Greece narrative today.Greece gets elections. Greece gets a seat at the table to go head to head with the other European powers
Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Cong resistance, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Fidel and the Cuban revolution are just three examples of how the West treats its inferiors; and you might like to put these cases in "history." But they are not only the history of all of the former colonies, they are also the present of these falsely free nations, run by client classes, armed by French, British, and US weapons manufactures to suppress insurgencies of any kind - be they trades-unions, legalizing political parties, access to voting, land reforms, preserving sacred, indigenous spaces.
The imperial logic vis-a-vis the colonies is that nothing must be done in any area to spark a democratic blaze.
Except, it seems, Greece today; Spain tomorrow. Ireland soon after. They are allowed elections.
Greece is allowed an election of bourgeois leftists, some of whom were formerly hardcore Marxists, we are told; but in a Europe built literally on the backs of the colonies I cannot imagine what being a Marxist in Europe means.
The colonial world is not allowed to take a breath, let alone hold an election! Fidel once admonished the US for "hanging us by our necks" then "criticizing us for not breathing."
I know that the late, assassinated Guyanese Marxist scholar-activist, Walter Rodney, found the British Marxists he revered from afar, as simpletons, lacking inertia, and verbose. I do not know if he found them as dashing as they media today like to portray the new Greek government.
The contrast is stark.
During the 80's much of the former colonies were plunged further into chaos and misery by Western powers with the same austerity measures and structural adjustment programs being unleashed on Greece. The colonies were never given the opportunity to hold an election. No PODEMOS or SYRIZA were allowed by the Europeans in the former colonies, now "free". Their suffering colonial economies were squeezed even harder, people died, medical and social infrastructure could not be built, and these European Marxists wrote dissertations.
So my joy at SYRIZA's victory is short-lived and tempered with the reality that Equatorial Guinea, Afghanistan, The Congo, Egypt, and US states, such as Texas, Florida, and Georgia, among many others[!] do not have free elections, and there is hardly democracy in the Dakotas, where some of the poorest First Nations live among white-settler millionaires.
What are we to do? It is clear that we must be equally militant, equally armed, and equally revolutionary as Ho Chi Minh, the Brotherhood, and Fidel, among many others. The West will not let its colonials break free without a fight, or, as the FBI most feared day and night, a militant messiah cannot be allowed to emerge: this remains canon law to the Western empires.
Greece can have its election of young, male upstart radicals; African cannot. Georgia, whose gerrymandered congressional districts dilute African and First Nation power, cannot. Greece, I propose, can because like the rest of Europe it is a junior co-conspirator, but a co-conspirator nonetheless. The finance ministers of the EU know where the chips fall and how the bread is really collected. Greece would no more exist than its more dominant partner in crime, Germany, without the rape and pillage of the colonial world. That is the nature of their union; that was the impetus to Hitler bringing Europe together, by any means necessary.
Whatever these people agree to, Africa will be screwed.
