Schiller Institute on YouTube Schiller Institute on Facebook RSS

Home >

Long Live a Free Greece!

By Jacques Cheminade
Candidate for President, France 2012

November 2011

EIRNS/Christopher Lewis
Jacques Cheminade, Presidential candidate of the Solidarity and Progress party of France.

By organizing a referendum and allowing the Greek people to pronounce itself on the status of a protectorate imposed by the EU, [Prime Minister] George Papandreou created sheer panic in financial circles. When the most elementary rules of a republican democracy are applied, the conglomerates of financial interests which compose the City and Wall Street howl that it is an abomination. In effect, it reveals their true nature in the eyes of all. For them, it is the Troika, composed of the EU, the IMF, and the ECB which must impose its law. And if you object, you will be treated as an irresponsible or as a populist.

It appears clearly that this phony Europe is constructed against the interest of the people and their mode of free and democratic expression, as for example Mr. Jean-Claude Juncker acknowledged, himself, by claiming that the experts — i.e., the financial experts — know far better than anybody else what must be done. Hence, the latest shaky arrangement cooked up by the European Council finds itself now turned upside down in less time than it takes to say the word "yuan."

Under these conditions, I support the Greek people against what I branded during my 2006-07 Presidential election campaign "the blackmail of financial fascism," since that is the truth of the matter today. The Greeks on October 28 commemorated their day of "No," a "No" they adopted on October 28, 1940 against Benito Mussolini, leading to the defeat of his army. Hitler had to send his troops later to crush Greece and was obliged to delay his offensive against the Soviet Union in 1941, a situation which led to his defeat before reaching Moscow under Russian winter conditions. Hence, we owe a large debt to Greece. As an old Greek Resistance fighter declared: "Yesterday we said no to the Fascist occupation, today we say no to the protectorate."

The time has come to end the bailout of megabanks and to separate investment banks from deposit and credit banks in order to deprive the speculators of their ammunition. Nicolas Sarkozy said the opposite during his television remarks on Oct. 27. That puts him on the side of Obama and the adversaries of the independence of nation-states.

It is a policy contrary to Greece's, a country which still defends it existence as a republic. Since for Greece, as for us, once the "universal" investment banks are prevented from being a nuisance, then a public system of productive credit has to be created, a system capable of reorganizing our economies, not in the interest of substance-looting imperial monetarism, but in the interest of the creation of resources for the common good. Such a policy never employs austerity imposed by strangulation of its victims and complacency among the authors of the crime.

Organized bankruptcies must be undertaken immediately in this context, protecting what is required for society to operate and eliminating what has been a parasite for 40 years. Long live a Free Greece, and a long live our own liberation from the financial powers!