Grüezi aus Basel, Welthauptstadt der Kunst

Posted on June 14, 2012 by Antigone1984.com

Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

 Basel, 13 June 2012

In our mission statement on 1 January 2012, we say that, while this blog is essentially political, blogs on art (and literature) may be introduced later.

Well, that time has come.

Today we publish our first post on art.

And where better to publish it than from that diamond among cities of art, that mecca of ancient, modern and contemporary culture, the world’s No 1 municipal Maecenas, the city of Basel in Switzerland.

We are here for the 43rd annual  Basel Art Fair from 14 to 17 June 2012 – the most prestigious modern and contemporary art market in the world, with its offshoots in Miami Beach and Hong Kong.

Here, however, we must declare an interest. We have been attending the Basel Art Fair, in a private capacity, for 22 years – more than half the duration of the fair’s existence. We have witnessed the progress of the legendary dealers of this world of high culture, gallery owners such as Daniel Blaise Thorens at Aeschenvorstadt 15  and  the late lamented Ernst Beyeler (1921 -2010), mythical founder of the Beyeler art foundation in the Basel suburb of Riehen. Over this time we have developed a deep affection for this sophisticated city and its cultured inhabitants. It may be, therefore, that we can justifiably be accused of a certain – hopefully, understandable – bias.

Today’s post is in two parts. First, we set Basel in its cultural and historical context. Then we round off with the famous Basel Picasso legend.

BASEL, BÂLE, BASILEA, BASLE

Let us start by correcting a few misapprehensions.

Basel is not a city in northwest Switzerland, as many people – even some Swiss people – fondly imagine. Basel is an Italian city. Yes, the principal buildings, the Minster on its mound and the Rathaus (1504-1514) in the Marktplatz,  are either Romanesque or in the Teutonic style of the northern Goths. Yes, the people speak German – after a fashion, for this is Schwiitzerdüütsch territory, after all – and the Rhine is not the Po, albeit that the inhabitants also speak the language of Dante, when necessary, and French, as well.  Nor are Sauerkraut or Weisswurst the staple food down this way: most of the good restaurants are Italian. But it is the brio of the people that is the most striking. No one who has mingled at midnight in high summer with the revellers in Barfüsserplatz can have any doubts: that square is the Piazza Navona of northern Europe.

The statistics are stupendous. A medium-sized city with 200 000 inhabitants (850 000 in the built-up area), Basel has no fewer than 40 museums. Modern artists represented in the collections include Richard Serra, Borofski, Rodin, Nikki de Saint Phalle, Tingely, etc.   One third of the winners of the Pritzker architecture prize  – the architectural equivalent of the Nobel – have built in the Basel Region : architects who have worked here include Richard Meier, Mario Botta, Frank Gehry, Renzo Piano, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani, etc). The city has the largest three-tiered theatre in Switzerland. The celebrated Basel Symphony Orchestra plays regularly at the Stadt-Casino.

But it is not only high culture that is on offer. Hoi polloi also get a look-in. Carnivals are normally associated with Catholic regions but in the bleak midwinter time this historic bastion of Protestantism cheers itself up by hosting the largest Carnival (“Fasnacht”) in Switzerland, an event that always starts up at the unearthly hour of four o’clock of a Monday morning and then lasts for three days. Basil’s fun fair has a history of more than 550 years and the city likes to think of itself as “Switzerland’s football capital” .

The Celtic tribe of the Raurici were the first to settle here. The Romans stationed their armies on the Münster Hill in 30BC – just three years before Augustus was dubbed Emperor in Rome, when they called their stronghold Augusta Raurica. After the Dark Ages, a great Council of the Roman Church which questioned the supreme authority of the pope took place in Basel from 1431 to 1449. Switzerland’s first university was founded here in 1460. The botanist Paracelsus (1494-1541) studied medicine here and Thomas Bodley (1545-1613), founder of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, is thought to have attended lectures. Printing was introduced by disciples of Gutenberg and  paper production also flourished. It was here that Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536) wrote many of his most important works. Then came the Reformation, championed in Basel by Zwingli’s associate, Johannes Oecolampadius (1482-1531). In the nineteenth century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) taught in Basel. The great Swiss historian Jacob Burkhardt (1818-1897) was born and died here. His Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (“The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy”), published in 1860, was the most influential interpretation of the Italian Renaissance before the twentieth century. It is still widely read. It was in Basel, too,  in 1897 Theodor Herzl addressed the first World Zionist Congress.

Economically, Basel is a major hub of commerce and banking and a world centre for chemicals and pharmaceuticals, global concerns such as Roche and Novartis having thrived in the city as a result of its historical involvement with textile dyeing and the weaving of silk ribbons.

Sharing with the rest of Switzerland a culture of direct democracy based on referendums (“Volksabstimmungen”) of all citizens, Basel has every right to be considered a fully-fledged  “polis”  (πόλις) on the lines of the classical Greek city-state so vividly revived for us during our recent sojourn in Athens.

PICASSO

We conclude today’s post by recounting below the classic Picasso story that is told and retold in artistic circles whenever the name of Basel comes up.

Basel has had a connection with Picasso since early works by the artist were exhibited at Basel’s Kunsthalle in 1914. No fewer than 55 works by Picasso in the Kunstmuseum’s collections are currently featured in its website.

Here is the story.

In the second half of the 1960s Basel’s Globe Air airline charter company, which belonged to the family of the Basel art collector Rudolph Staechelin, got into financial difficulties.  As a result, in 1967 the Staechelin family trust decided to sell a number of paintings to raise funds. These included The Two Brothers, which Picasso painted in 1906, and The Seated Harlequin of 1923. Both paintings, on loan from the Staechelin trust, were already hanging in the Basler Kunstmuseum.

The threat that these paintings would be sold and leave the museum gave kittens to Franz Meier, then director of the museum.  Meier was afraid that the “collection would lose all its cohesion” and that the Kunstmusem would lose its place on the A-list of the world’s great modern art collections. His fears were shared throughout the Basel art world as well as by the city magnates.

By way of a gesture towards the city, the Staechelin family turned down an offer from a New York dealer to sell the two works for 14 million Swiss franks and offered them instead to the Kunstmuseum for 8.4 million.

On 12 October 1967, with only a handful of votes against, Basel Council voted to set aside 6 million franks for the purchase, the remaining 2.4 million franks to be found through a fund-raising campaign, which climaxed successfully in a memorable “Beggars’ Feast” (Bettlerfest) on 25 November.

It was then that reaction set in. Opponents of the city fathers’s decision to spend a huge sum of taxpayers’ money on acquiring two works of art raised enough support among the population at large to trigger a referendum with the aim of annulling the council vote.

The referendum was held on 17 December 1967.  The turn-out was low (barely 40 per cent of the electorate), but the result produced a clear majority in support of the council’s decision: 32 118 citizens voted in favour of using public money to buy the paintings and 27 190 against.

The result was naturally greeted with jubilation throughout the Basel art community and the story received – and continues even today to receive – widespread media coverage throughout the world, thus enhancing Basel’s status among art lovers everywhere and confirming that a city whose fortunes are based on banking and pharmaceuticals need not necessarily be a hotbed of philistinism.

The story does not end there, however. In a fable-like ending, Picasso himself then enters the scene like a fairy godfather. It appears that when the artist heard what had happened in Basel he was deeply touched. As a result, Picasso and Jacqueline, his wife at the time, decided to donate to the Kunstmuseum a further four of his own works, including a pastel study for the ground-breaking “Les demoiselles d’Avignon”, the 1907 painting which ushered art into the modern world.

A fifth work by Picasso, “The Poet”, a cubist picture of 1912, was also donated to the museum by Basel collector and art patron Maja Sacher-Stehlin to express her delight at the people’s decision.

Finally, in 1974, a year after Picasso’s death, the city council renamed the square behind the Kunstmuseum “Picassoplatz”.

We are indebted for much of this story to the book “Kunstmuseum Basel” (1992) by Christian Geelhaar, a former director of the museum, and to Christian Selz of the museum’s press office.

——————

You might perhaps care to view some of our earlier posts.  For instance:

 1. Why? or How? That is the question(3 Jan 2012)

2. Das Vierte Reich/The Fourth Reich(6 Feb 2012)

3. The shoddiest possible goods at the highest possible prices(2 Feb 2012)

4. Where’s the beef? Ontology and tinned meat(31 Jan 2012)

5. What would Gandhi have said? (30 Jan 2012)

Every so often we shall change this sample of previously published posts.

——————

Posted in Art, Switzerland | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Gray Paree

Posted on June 13, 2012 by Antigone1984.com

Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

 

Paris, 12 June 2012

The last time I saw Paris

Her heart was warm and gay,

I heard the laughter of her heart in ev’ry street café.

 

Oscar Hammerstein (1895-1960). US songwriter.

But let’s not get carried away. Yesterday 11 June we referred to Hemingway’s rose-tinted nostalgia for the Paris of his youth. As always with Hemingway, the language was unadorned, the sentiment baroque. But, of course, he was romanticizing. War-reporter though he was, his forte was fiction, not fact.

We left Athens yesterday where the temperature was 28° C at eight o’clock the evening before. The sun had shone for a week. Nary a cloud in sight. We spent our last evening – where else? – libating at the foot of the Acropolis. Ahead, the Propylaia, the Temple of Nike and the Parthenon itself. To our left, the bare craggy outcrop of the Areopagus, the last redoubt of the oligarchy that was ousted at the birth of democracy in 462 BC. To our right, the 5 000-seat theatre built in 161 AD by Herodes Atticus and still playing to the gallery today some 1800 years later. At our back, beneath a westering sun, the great fan-shaped Pnyx, meeting-place of the people’s assembly (“η Εκκλησία του Δήμου”), the great rostrum (“ το βήμα”) still extant from which Pericles addressed the citizens of Athens in 430 BC in the first flush of the Peloponnesian War. No creature moved. The air was still. The song of a myriad crickets the only sound in the scrawny bush.

Less than 24 hours later we were back in France. Sixty million visitors a year – equivalent to the entire French population – supposedly the most visited country in the world, Paris the jewel in its crown. 2.00 pm. The temperature 16° C. The sky an unbroken slate of cloud.  Rain now, rain again. The café terraces three-quarters empty. Isolated figures flailing, homeward bound, through a chill wind. Leaden light in pavement puddles. The squelch of tyres on wet carriageways. No Hemingway, no Scott Fitzgerald, no John Dos Passos. No Sylvia Beach swapping incunabula with Adrienne Monnier as they trade repartees in the rue de l’Odéon. No, this was no summer in the City of Light. Rather, it was a drab afternoon in late October in the city not of Victor Hugo but of François Hollande, the bleak ambient grisaille reflecting only too accurately this second decade of our grim forlorn century.

Voyage à Paris

 

Ah! La charmante chose

Quitter un pays morose

Pour Paris

Paris joli

Qu’un jour

Dut créer l’Amour

Ah! La charmante chose

Quitter un pays morose

Pour Paris

Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918). French poet.

——————

 You might perhaps care to view some of our earlier posts.  For instance:

 1. Why? or How? That is the question (3 Jan 2012)

2. Das Vierte Reich/The Fourth Reich (6 Feb 2012)

3. The shoddiest possible goods at the highest possible prices (2 Feb 2012)

4. Where’s the beef? Ontology and tinned meat (31 Jan 2012)

5. What would Gandhi have said? (30 Jan 2012)

Every so often we shall change this sample of previously published posts.

——————

Posted in France, Greece, USA | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Paris vaut bien une messe

Posted on June 11, 2012 by Antigone1984.com

Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

 

Paris, 11 June 2012

There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were or how it was changed or with what difficulties, or ease, it could be reached. Paris was always worth it and you received return for whatever you brought to it. But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.

This is the last paragraph of the first edition of “A Moveable Feast” by US writer Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), who won the Nobel Prize for Literature and committed suicide. The collection of memoirs was published posthumously in 1964.

——————

 You might perhaps care to view some of our earlier posts.  For instance:

 1. Why? or How? That is the question (3 Jan 2012)

2. Das Vierte Reich/The Fourth Reich (6 Feb 2012)

3. The shoddiest possible goods at the highest possible prices (2 Feb 2012)

4. Where’s the beef? Ontology and tinned meat (31 Jan 2012)

5. What would Gandhi have said? (30 Jan 2012)

Every so often we shall change this sample of previously published posts.

——————

 

Posted in France, Literature, USA | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Felipe González

Posted on June 10, 2012 by Antigone1984.com

Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

 Athens, 10 June 2012

WE DREAMED A DREAM

We conclude our reports from Greece with a series of reflections on the leftwing political group Syriza.

Syriza (Coalition of the Radical Left) was the reason we came to Greece in the first place. Our first post on the group on 15 May 2012 reflected our hope that here at last, for the first time since the French revolution, a radical leftwing political party was within a shout of taking power in western Europe.

Alas!

It is still possible that Syriza may be the party that secures the most votes when the country goes to the polls next Sunday 17 June, for the second time in five weeks, to elect a parliament.  The first ballot failed to produce a political configuration that could command a majority in parliament.

Opinion polls attempting to predict the outcome of the election put Syriza neck-and-neck with the rightwing New Democracy party as the party that will win the most votes. The stakes could not be higher. This is because the party that comes top will benefit from the extraordinary Greek election rules that give an extra 50 seats to the party winning the largest percentage of the vote, ie over-and-above the number of seats it has won straightforwardly on the basis of proportional representation.

However, even if Syriza beats New Democracy, it will not be the case that a radical leftwing party is about to take power in western Europe. You can forget about the French Revolution. They may not wear ties, but this party knows how to behave.

To understand Syriza, you have to imagine yourself back in Spain in 1982 when the 42-year-old Andalusian Felipe González scored a landslide victory on behalf of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, of which he was Secretary-General. Expectations in Spain then, as in Greece now, were astronomic – but turned out to be misplaced.

Montes parturiebant, est natus ridiculus mus.

González was in power until 1996 but began to jettison pre-election socialist commitments almost from his first day in office.

Here is a passage on the González government from Wikipedia:

Having promised in the election to create 800,000 new jobs, his government’s restructuring of the steel industry actually resulted in job lay offs. When they tried to similarly tackle the debt problems in the dock industry in 1984, the dockers went on strike. The UGT, or Workers’ General Union, called a general strike on 20 June 1985 in protest against social security reforms. The same year his government began a massive privatization, partial or full, of the 200 state-owned companies as well as the hundreds of affiliates dependent on these companies.

The 37-year-old Alexis Tsipras is chair of the Syriza party, which consists of a coalition of leftwing groups. We hope we are wrong, but it is the view of Antigone1984 that Tsipras is the Greek Felipe González.

We come to this view after considering, to the best of our ability, his party’s proposals and their presentation by party spokespersons.

Sadly, Syriza’s programme sounds mostly very reasonable. It is largely what you would expect in the election manifesto of a bog-standard European social democratic party. British Labour Party leader Ed Milliband’s advocacy of “responsible capitalism” comes inevitably to mind.

Some aspects of its programme are so anodyne that any political party of any persuasion could agree to them, such as ending tax evasion, cutting red tape and helping small businesses. Some are genuinely progressive but only to an extent that would be acceptable to any social democratic party, eg reforming the tax system so that the rich pay more than the poor, raising unemployment benefit, freezing wage reductions, halting pension cuts and reversing cuts in the minimum wage.

The core of Syriza’s platform is a rejection of the austerity package forced on the Greek people by the Gang of Three – the European Central Bank (Frankfurt), the European Commission (Brussels) and the International Monetary Fund (Washington) – in return for a super-loan bail-out to enable Greece to keep paying back capital and interest to banks in the countries providing the bail-out from which it had borrowed money. Geddit? The austerity package is known as “the Memorandum” in Greece and the more refined term for the Gang of Three is the Troika.

Syriza seemingly wants to reject the austerity but to keep the super-loan.

However, the Gang of Three are standing firm. They have told the Greeks: “if you want the loan, you do the austerity”.

The austerity package involves a ruthless pruning of the public sector – jobs, pensions, pay, benefits and services. It is a classic programme of the kind the IMF traditionally imposes on Third World countries in exchange for funding.

Syriza is claiming that it will negotiate with the Troika to get a better deal. Moreover, while rejecting the Memorandum, Syriza stresses that will take no unilateral action that might lead to sanctions against it.

Syriza is not going out on a limb when it pledges to renegotiate the austerity package.  Almost all the other parties competing in this election are saying that they too will renegotiate. That includes New Democracy and the nominally socialist PASOK party, both of which signed up to the Memorandum in the first place.

The English-language weekly “Athens News” asked Yiannis Dragasakis, Syriza’s economic spokesperson, the following question:

“Is it correct to say that a Syriza government would refrain from any unilateral act of abrogation of the memorandum of understanding and the loan agreement with the country’s EU-IMF creditors?

Yiannis Dragasakis:

“What we have made clear in our election platform and in the letter Alexis Tsipras sent to top eurozone officials last month is that we want the memorandum policies to be replaced with a programme for the rehabilitation of Greek society, the reconstruction of the economy and fair fiscal consolidation. For two reasons: firstly, because the memorandum has been voted down by the electorate, thus depriving it of political legitimacy; and, secondly, as an economic programme, the memorandum has been catastrophic and cannot continue. But the transition from one programme to another will be the result of planning, consultation and negotiations by the new government. It is self-evident that Greece’s relationship with the European Union is not an external relationship but a multifaceted one of structural independence between our country, EU institutions and member states. Consequently, under no circumstances can we imagine a resolution of problems arising from conflictive procedures instead of consensual agreements.”

The last two sentences will be music to the ears of the Brussels bureaucracy. While America shoots first and asks questions afterwards, the procedure in Brussels is the reverse. In fact, it never comes to shooting as far as the EU is concerned. This is not because they are innately less bellicose there than they are in  America. It is because the Europeans ALWAYS win in negotiations. Negotiations are the hydrogen bombs of the European bureaucracy. Unlike hydrogen bombs they are in constant use. Like hydrogen bombs, however, they can obliterate all resistance. These people have been polishing their negotiating weaponry since the Common Market was formed in 1957. They have painstakingly negotiated the admission to the union of 27 countries with a joint population of 500 million people. Worn down by five, six, seven years of negotiations with Brussels, one by one all 27 of these countries threw in the towel and gave up their national sovereignty. The European negotiator knows every trick in the book. They never lose, those guys from the Berlaymont.

So now this minnow of a country, Greece, with its economy in tatters and its population of 11 million, is going to “negotiate” with the EU. Tell us another. The arguments of the Greek negotiators will be as effective as a gnat’s bite on the hide of an elephant. Oh, they will get something. Oh, some crumbs will be thrown to them. That is how Brussels negotiates. The time Greece has in which to repay its loans will be extended, the interest to be paid will be reduced, some elements of the Memorandum will be reworded in Greece’s favour. No matter which parties win the Greek election. But at the end of the day, the Europeans will win, Greece will fall into line, and the market will rule, OK?

In any case, Greece has already given them what they want. The euro is the spearhead of the European project to create a homogenised market-oriented United States of Europe. The collapse of the euro would set that project back decades and might even lead to the break-up of the Union. The departure from the euro of even a piddling little state such as Greece could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Spain might be next. After that, who knows?

By coming down in favour of retaining the euro and turning a blind eye to the cogent economic arguments for a return to the drachma, Syriza has rejected the chance to recover the independence of Greece as a nation state, preferring instead to remain a bleating sheep within the European fold.

It could all have been so different.

The radical alternative would have been to jettison the euro for a devalued drachma. This could be accompanied by a full or partial cancellation of the country’s debt, following the path laid down by Argentina at the turn of this century. The result would be fewer imports and more exports (including a massive boost to tourism). Indigenous Greek businesses would mushroom to replace the now too-expensive imports. It is a policy that is favoured by a great many – even mainstream – economists.

In a recent interview with Le Monde,  Syriza’s foreign affairs spokesperson, Rena Doulou, said she wants the Greek people to become “a model of resistance to financial capitalism”. The party, she said, wants to put the accent on a spirit of public and cooperative enterprise with a view to sustainable growth and the satisfaction of social needs. Syriza will reform public finance, provide incentives for small and medium-sized enterprises, and create jobs (particularly in hospitals and schools). As a result, “instead of being Europe’s guinea-pig,” she believes that Greek society would become a new model for the people of Europe – “a model which resists the logic of financial capitalism”.

Syriza seems to be blissfully unaware that every country that joins the European Union must agree to run a free-market economy. The market economy is the bedrock upon which the European Union rests. Even if transitional arrangements allowing temporary state intervention are permitted, in the long term the state (representing the people) must hand over the running of its economy to the private businesses. That is why, throughout Europe today, successful state-run railways and postal services are currently being handed over, often at bargain-basement prices, to private firms.

The Syriza programme is, in some ways, diametrically at variance with EU rules. For instance, Syriza says it wants to suspend the flow abroad of Greek bank deposits and to recall money that has already fled the country. But capital controls -being contrary to the free market – are tabou in the European Union.

One specific Syriza foreign policy commitment is to withdraw from Nato “in the long term”.  However, as Keynes said, “in the long term we are all dead”. Spain-watchers will smile at this point. Leaving Nato was a non-negotiable principle for Felipe González. The inevitable U-turn followed when he came to power.

Oh, well, it was a good dream while it lasted.

And, after all, like Paris, Athens is always worth a mess.

ΓΕΙΑ ΣΑΣ !

——————

 You might perhaps care to view some of our earlier posts.  For instance:

 1. Why? or How? That is the question (3 Jan 2012)

2. Das Vierte Reich/The Fourth Reich (6 Feb 2012)

3. The shoddiest possible goods at the highest possible prices (2 Feb 2012)

4. Where’s the beef? Ontology and tinned meat (31 Jan 2012)

5. What would Gandhi have said? (30 Jan 2012)

Every so often we shall change this sample of previously published posts.

——————

Posted in Europe, Greece, Spain | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Acropolis now

Posted on June 9, 2012 by Antigone1984.com

Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

Athens, 9 June 2012

FOOTBALL

To the new Acropolis Museum last night. Nice building, courtesy of Swiss-born architect Bernard Tschumi. Why not a Greek-born architect? Are they not good enough? Odd, since they have a well-known architectural tradition dating back some three thousand years. Some well-known buildings, too (eg Parthenon). Oh well. Then we discover that a Greek architect, Michael Photiadis, was associated with Tschumi in the design. Still, it would have seemed more appropriate had the lead architect been Greek. Not many visitors but then it was the weekly late-night opening, most visitors presumably coming in the day-time. And Greece was playing Poland at football (result: a 1-1 draw). Otherwise, of course, the place would have been teeming with soccer fans. Opened 2009. Contains mostly ancient Greek scupture, lots from the Acropolis. Lots of pottery, too. Many tablets with original writing in ancient Greek that is still perfectly legible today. Fascinating the tablets inscribed with building accounts prepared by the clerk of works during the construction of the Parthenon (447-438 BC). The third-floor Parthenon Gallery contains: (a) original relief sculpture from the Parthenon frieze and (b) modern casts of original relief sculpture from the Parthenon frieze, the originals being in the British Museum in London. Controversy: during the years 1801-1804 Lord Elgin, British Ambassador to the Sublime Porte in Istanbul, had cartloads of Parthenon sculptures sent off to England. He sold them later to the British Museum. The state of play is as follows: (a) of the original slabs from the Parthenon frieze, 40 are in Athens, 56 in London; (b) of the original metopes, 48 are in Athens, 15 in London; and (c) of the original still-intact figures from the pediments, 9 are in Athens, 19 in London. The Greeks regard Lord Elgin’s action as cultural pillage. They want their marbles back. An attendant told us that, in exchange for the restoration of the originals, the Greeks were prepared to let the Brits have the casts. The Brits have replied with a categorical “Oxi”. However, that is unlikely to be the end of the story.

——————

 You might perhaps care to view some of our earlier posts.  For instance:

 1. Why? or How? That is the question (3 Jan 2012)

2. Das Vierte Reich/The Fourth Reich (6 Feb 2012)

3. The shoddiest possible goods at the highest possible prices (2 Feb 2012)

4. Where’s the beef? Ontology and tinned meat (31 Jan 2012)

5. What would Gandhi have said? (30 Jan 2012)

Every so often we shall change this sample of previously published posts.

——————

Posted in Greece, UK | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

It’s all Greek to me

Posted on June 9, 2012 by Antigone1984.com

Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

Athens, 8 June 2012

LOSING IN ORDER TO WIN

To understand European finance these days, there seems no point in studying dusty old economic textbooks like Lipsey or Samuelson. What you need to do is to study magic – particularly the conjuring trick that produces rabbits out of hats. You know the shtick. First the hat is empty, then it houses a rabbit. How come?

Take money, for instance. In the old days, you had to earn your bread by the sweat of your brow, as the Bible says (mind you, my Biblical exegesis is a bit dusty now, too, so don’t quote me on that). Actually, most of us still have to do just that: knuckle down on Monday morning – doncha love ‘em, Monday mornings – and keep our minds focused rigidly for the rest of the week on Friday night’s pay packet (yes, I know, that will mark me out as an old-timer).

But there’s one sector to which this does not seem to apply – and that’s banking.

It was bad enough in the old days. Banks lent you money so that you could work for them and then, when you had earned something, they took most of it back from you.

That was old-fashioned banking.

There was only one thing the banks had to do in the old days to earn their crust – they had to make sure that you would be in funds when the time came for you to pay them back.

The banks had to be prudent. They had to be damn sure that they would get their wonga back.

So they were cautious. They didn’t lend to any Tom, Dick or Harry like you or me.

And quite right too. I wouldn’t lend money to someone like me. Nor to you, either, for that matter.

Only now all that has changed.

The banks don’t need to worry any longer about whether a borrower will repay them. They have invented sophisticated economic investment vehicles called “non-performing loans”.

Note the new language, too. What we used to call credit and loans, they call “investment vehicles”.

Now what are these “non-performing loans”. Well, they are a bit like “performing seals” at a circus – except for one crucial difference: they don’t perform.

Actually, it’s very difficult for old-school economists like you and me to get our heads around this concept.

It means essentially that they have lost the money. Yes, that’s right. They lent the money out, hand over fist, and it’s never going to come back.

One might almost begin to feel sorry for these bankers. They went out and were nice to people and lent them loadsamoney for anything at all they wanted to buy – and, lo and behold, the buggers have done a bunk. Gone. Vanished. Volatilised.

Except that it doesn’t matter at all. To the bankers, that is.

Because, lordy da, now they can get “recapitalised”. Just like that. They can lose as much money as they want, in fact. It really doesn’t matter.

They just turn up the next day at their national central bank, or the European Central Bank, or the Ruritanian Central Mint – and get as much money as they want. Just like that. Just for asking.

You see, unlike you and me, these banks are too big to fail.

That too is a difficult concept to take on board.

An ordinary person might think that they were failing all the time, losing all that money. And, you might imagine, the bigger the bank, the more they would lend. And the more they lent, the more they would lose. So the bigger the bank, the harder they would fail.

Anyone who thinks like that hasn’t a clue about modern banking.

If you and I fail, we’re out. It’s all over. If we lose all our money, well that’s it. Finished. Kaput. If we’re lucky, we get put on a convict ship bound for Tasmania.

But that’s not how it is in banking.

“Recapitalisation” means that when you lose all your capital the central banks – the lenders of last resort, a sort of last chance saloon – not only make your losses good but give you billions and billions of euros, dollars, punts, forints  – or whatever currency you want – more than you lost in the first place. This is because you might need it in future. It is intended to reassure the markets (which mainly consist of banks and para-banks such as hedge funds or private equity investors) . Investors have seen how the banks non-perform. They take the reasonable view that the banks will continue to non-perform. Hence, they need to know that the banks have access to a bottomless honey pot in which to scoop up fresh money when the time comes that they need it. That gives what is called confidence to the market (which is essentially the banks, as I have just tried to explain).

Which brings me, in a roundabout way, admittedly, to Greece.

On 29 May 2012 the Hellenic Financial Stability Fund injected 18 billion euros by way of “recapitalisation” into the four main Greek commercial banks: National Bank of Greece, EFG Eurobank Ergasias, Alpha Bank and Piraeus Bank.

The very next day National Bank of Greece announced what is described in the Greek media as a “surprise” loss of 537 million euros in non-performing loans – an increase of nearly 50 per cent compared with the year before.

It may have come as a surprise to the Greek media but it will no longer come as a surprise to the readers of this column, for the reasons we have just given. As I have tried to explain, it goes like this: you lose your money and then you are “recapitalised” to an extent that more than offsets the money you lost. In other words, a loss is a win – if you’re a banker.

But it doesn’t stop there. Now that they have been “recapitalised”, the banks can go cap in hand to the European Central Bank and ask for yet more money. You see it goes on and on. But I’d better stop there.

Meanwhile, Piraeus, the country’s fourth biggest bank, has announced that it lost 80 million euros before tax. However, using “an outstanding deferred tax asset related to a bond swap” – think rabbits and hats – it was able to post a profit of 298 million euros. This was despite the fact that provisions for non-performing loans were up by 78 per cent compared with the same period last year.

What I would like to know is where does all this money come from? And where is it all going to end?

It’s all Greek to me.

To cap it all, we learn today that the Spanish banking sector needs mind-bogglin bail-out of no less 40 billion euros. [Since we wrote that last sentence six hours ago, the bail-out on offer to Spain has been jacked up to 100 billion euros. This is funny money. The figures mean nothing. They just pick the numbers out of the hat. Why not 45o billion euros while we are at it?  Or, why not, 635 billion? Or even a trillion? The people in charge of our economies are round the bend, loonies, stark raving bonkers. Bring on the men in the white coats before it is too late – except that it is probably too late already.]

You couldn’t make it up. Where do they get these figures from? Do they just make them up? Think of a number, double it, multiply it by a trillion and that’s what we’ll have, thank you very much.

We can now understand why a quartet of bankers in London once bought a bottle of Château Pétrus for £40, 000.

It was so good, they bought another.

By the way, any body out there heard of Lehman Brothers?

Sorry to spoil the party, chaps.

And, by the way, how do I get to be banker?

——————

 You might perhaps care to view some of our earlier posts.  For instance:

 1. Why? or How? That is the question (3 Jan 2012)

2. Das Vierte Reich/The Fourth Reich (6 Feb 2012)

3. The shoddiest possible goods at the highest possible prices (2 Feb 2012)

4. Where’s the beef? Ontology and tinned meat (31 Jan 2012)

5. What would Gandhi have said? (30 Jan 2012)

Every so often we shall change this sample of previously published posts.

——————

Posted in Greece, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

A tale of two cities (2)

Posted on June 9, 2012 by Antigone1984.com

Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

 Athens, 7 June 2012

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE TRACK

You do not have to go far from Syntagma Square to come upon the other Athens. In fact, you do not have to leave the square at all. In the south-west corner stands a tall cypress tree. As it happens, there are a number of cypress trees, along with other varieties, in the square. From an arboreal point of view, there is nothing special about this one. In fact, it is gives the impression of being somewhat down-at-heel, an impression that is much enhanced by the motley collection of torn cardboard boxes, bits of paper, old posters and discarded children’s toys at its foot. A Van Gogh cypress this is not.

Nonetheless, this tree is rather special, after all.

It was at the foot of this cypress in the morning of 4 April 2012 that Dimitris Christoulas, a 77-year-old retired pharmacist, shot himself dead with a pistol. He left the following suicide note hand-written in red ink:

«Η κατοχική κυβέρνηση Τσολάκογλου εκμηδένισε κυριολεκτικά τη δυνατότητα επιβίωσής μου που στηριζόταν σε μια αξιοπρεπή σύνταξη που επί 35 χρόνια εγώ μόνον (χωρίς ενίσχυση κράτους) πλήρωνα γι’ αυτήν. Επειδή έχω μια ηλικία που δεν μου δίνει την ατομική δυνατότητα δυναμικής αντίδρασης (χωρίς βέβαια να αποκλείω αν ένας Ελληνας έπαιρνε το καλάσνικωφ, ο δεύτερος θα ήμουν εγώ), δεν βρίσκω άλλη λύση από ένα αξιοπρεπές τέλος, πριν αρχίσω να ψάχνω τα σκουπίδια για την διατροφή μου. Πιστεύω πως οι νέοι χωρίς μέλλον κάποια μέρα θα πάρουν τα όπλα και στην πλατεία Συντάγματος θα κρεμάσουν ανάποδα τους εθνικούς προδότες, όπως έκαναν το 1945 οι Ιταλοί στον Μουσολίνι (Πιάτσα Λορέτο του Μιλάνου)». 


“Tsolakoglou’s occupation government has literally annihilated my abiity to survive, which was based on a decent pension that I alone paid towards for 35 years (without any contribution from the state). Since I am at an age which does not allow me to react forcibly (although I don’t exclude the possibility that, if one of my compatriots were to grab a Kalashnikov, I would be right behind him), I see no other solution than this dignified end to my life before I start fishing through the garbage for my sustenance. I believe that young people with no future will one day take up arms and hang the quislings upside down in Syntagma Square, just like the Italians did in 1945 to Mussolini (in Piazzale Loreto in Milan).”

General Giorgios Tsolakoglou was a collaborationist prime minister (1941-1942) during Germany’s occupation of Greece during the Second World War. Christoulas, not unreasonably, regarded the government of the technocrat Lucas Papademos (Prime Minister 2011-2012) as being on a par with the collaborationist regime. Papademos was responsible for accepting the dramatic cuts in Greek living standards on which the German-led Brussels elite had insisted in exchange for the loan of European funds to bail out the Greek banks.

The tatty mess of cardboard and paper at the foot of the cypress tree in Syntagma turns out to consist of tributes to Christoulos from well-wishers from many countries.

Taking pride of place among these is a marble plaque emblazoned with the last words of the dead pharmacist.

A synthetic white banner with a red border at its top and bottom is signed by the “March to Athens”. It says (in Italian): “Il gesto di Dimitris per las crisi non deve piú ripetersi per il futuro. Non ti dimenticheremo mai.”

Another message, in Castilian, says “No pasarán” – the legendary slogan of defiance hurled by the Republican leader Dolores Ibárruri Gómez – “La Pasionaria” – at Franco’s advancing rebel army during the 1936 siege of Madrid.

One banner rails against the “economic dictatorship”. Another says “Let people live”. The message on a cardboard box starts with the injunction “Don’t walk like a robot but stop here and open your mind”, concluding with the clarion call “TAKE THE SQUARE”.

Two plush teddy-bears sit incongruously among the debris of tributes.

The suicide provoked much soul-searching throughout Greece, not least in political circles, as reported in the English language weekly “Athens News” at the time.

Laos Party head Yiorgos Karatzaferis told Parliament: “This is not just a person that killed himself. This event should make us understand that we have all been behind this, we have all pulled the trigger. What did this man see from us, before deciding to take his own life? He saw shady goings-on, he saw none of those that stole from him and the Greek people go to jail. What else did he see? He saw no help coming his way, as he tried to deal with his loans and debts. What did this man hear from us? He heard that no slack would be given to him, no room to move, while the political parties would get plenty of money. Money they did not deserve”.

Independent Greeks’ leader Panos Kamenos said: “It wasn’t this man who should have committed suicide. Rather, it should have been those politicians that knowingly led Greece to be crushed.”

Yiannis Dimaras, leader of  the Panhellenic Citizens’ Chariot, said: “Those who have voted away all the rights of this country, those who have given our dignity away, are those that are guilty for spilling the blood of this Greek pensioner”.

However, that was then and this is now and two months is a long time in politics. The caravan has moved on and the media has lost interest Christodoulas. His last desperate gesture may, after all, have been in vain. Moreover, the hopes of the “March to Athens”, quoted above, that his suicide would be the last have not borne fruit.  Self-inflicted deaths linked to the economic crisis continue unabated.  In our post for 5 June 2012, for instance, we reported that an unnamed 61-year-old pensioner who was heavily in debt had hanged himself in a park in Athens on May 30.

The cypress tree is only 150 yards from the splendor of the Hotel Grande Bretagne, whose praises we sang yesterday. Yet it is in another world. As the English poet Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) said:

“Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,

Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat”.

We leave the square and continue our search for the other Athens.

We do not have far to go.

Ermou and its less fancy neighbour Mitropoleos are two parallel shopping streets in central Athens. Both end in Syntagma Square. We saunter along both of them, now in one, now in the other.

At the Syntagma Square end all is well. The shops seem well-stocked and well-patronised. In Mitropoleos we find a shop open selling fur coats and fur hats. This in an afternoon temperature of 32° C ! This is surely a triumph of hope over feasibility. We find it encouraging. We think that if the Greeks can manage to sell furs at temperatures like these, then how can they possibly fail to get their economy up and running again.

But our optimism was short-lived. At the far end of Mitropoleos, towards Monastiraki Square, we hit upon boarded-up shop fronts, for-sale and to-let signs, and notices saying that businesses have moved elsewhere.

Ermou is much longer than Mitropoleos, continuing on well beyond Monastiraki. Up to Monastiraki all is more or less well, but beyond is a disaster zone, a desert of unoccupied shops and boarded-up businesses stretching block after block in graffiti-decked desolation as far as Thiseio.

Surely there must be entrepreneurs able and willing to raise the cash to develop this prime location in the centre of one of Europe’s major capital cities?

But then we read in the UK press that wealthy Greeks have been pouring shedloads of money into London property.

According to a report in the Guardian newspaper on 2 June 2012, upmarket estate agency Savills has seen web searches from Greece jump by 50% compared with six months ago.

Nor does the collapse in the value of the euro appear to have put off rich Greeks “desperate to park their money somewhere safe”, according to the paper.

Traffic at the real estate website PrimeLocation.com is reported to have surged by 40 per cent in a month. Nigel Lewis, the site’s property analyst, told the Guardian: “Greeks are in the top five euro nations buying in London. They were the trail-blazers in the 70s, 80s and 90s and as the economy got worse and worse more high net worth individuals have been moving to London.”

Greeks are said to be after trophy houses in west London where they can throw lavish parties and hold business meetings but where they live for only a few weeks or months a year.

Mike Warburton of accountants Grant Thornton acts for many buyers from overseas. “It happens to be Greeks at the moment,” he told the paper.

Our point is obvious. If Greeks are shoveling money into London property, they are not investing it in Greece. These are funds that could have been used, for instance, to resuscitate shopping streets like Mitropoleos and Ermou.

Rena Dourou, international affairs secretary for the leftwing Syriza party, has told the latest edition of “Athens News” that Syriza’s financial priorities include “creating the conditions to suspend the flow of bank deposits abroad and return transferred money back to our banking system”.

The question is how they are to do this. Capital controls or high interest rates are the obvious tools, but both are outlawed in the eurozone.

The free movement of capital between European Union countries is a bedrock EU principle. European businesses and wealthy individuals, including Greeks, are free to invest wherever they want in the 27 member states of the union. National governments have surrendered to Brussels the power to compel national capital to stay within national boundaries.

If governments want capital to stay at home, they have to provide it with a stable and secure investment environment and a good rate of return. Greece can offer neither at the moment, nor will it be able to do so in the foreseeable future.

In these circumstance, it is difficult to see how Syriza, which has loudly committed itself to staying within the eurozone – or indeed how any other Greek political party, for that matter – can either stem the current capital outflows or entice back capital that has fled abroad.

If we move on to tourism, which makes up 20 per cent of Greek GDP, the picture is not too healthy either. A straw poll of businesses in Athens gives a mixed picture. Yesterday 6 June we mentioned a couple of businesses that had been largely unaffected by the economic crisis. However, it may be that this is because these businesses are more geared to the Greek market and less dependent on foreign tourists than the city centre hotels.

Since then we have come across evidence of a less rosy picture. While the hospitality business in Athens may be resisting the downturn, to some extent at least, we have heard that the situation is catastrophic outside the capital, particularly in the islands, which are normally crowded with tourists at this time of year. International reporting of the crisis has given people outside Greece the idea that the country is a virtual war zone – a cross between Baghdad and Kinshasa: no medicines, no food, no money in the banks, people keeling over and dying in the streets. Nothing could be further from the truth, particularly as far as Athens is concerned.  Yet this is now a widespread perception abroad as a result of negative media coverage. Moreover, if you talk to tourists in Athens, you find that, before they left their home countries to come here, friends would commiserate with them on having made such a bad choice of holiday destination. We spoke to Germans, Americans and Australians and the answer we got was the same: many of their compatriots would not dream of holidaying in Greece this year, some fearing riots in the streets, others unwilling to endure the concentration camp living standards that they believed awaited them in Greece. It must be assumed that this perception has had some significant impact on tourist numbers. Tourists who have been up the Acropolis have told us that they were surprised by the small number of visitors to Greece’s hottest tourist destination. Moreover, not all hotels have had it easy. Even the Hotel Grande Bretagne is having problems. We were told there that the crisis had resulted in a 15 to 20 per cent drop in visitors. Moreover, on 6 June Andreas Andreadis, head of the Association of Greek Tourism Enterprises, predicted that tourist revenues across the country could fall 10 or 15 per cent this year.

New figures show that the unemployment rate in Greece reached a record high of 21.9 per cent in March. This compares with a rate of 15.7 per cent in March 2011. A breakdown of the figures shows that female unemployment in March was 25.8 per cent, compared with 18.9 per cent for men. The percentage of people under 24 who are out of work is 52.8.

If no stable government emerges from the new parliamentary elections on 17 June 2012, the crisis could clearly degenerate into a catastrophe not only for the Greek hospitality industry but for employment across the country as a whole.

——————

 You might perhaps care to view some of our earlier posts.  For instance:

 1. Why? or How? That is the question (3 Jan 2012)

2. Das Vierte Reich/The Fourth Reich (6 Feb 2012)

3. The shoddiest possible goods at the highest possible prices (2 Feb 2012)

4. Where’s the beef? Ontology and tinned meat (31 Jan 2012)

5. What would Gandhi have said? (30 Jan 2012)

Every so often we shall change this sample of previously published posts.

———-

Posted in Greece | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

A tale of two cities (1)

Posted on June 8, 2012 by Antigone1984.com

Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

 

Athens, 6 June 2012

HOT WATER

 Noon.     29° C.    A hotel bedroom somewhere in Athens.

The phone rings.

“Sir, I am in hot water,” says a man’s voice.

All thoughts of the economic crisis vanish from my mind.

“Sir,” the voice repeats, “I am in hot water.”

I am desperately trying to come to cope with this unexpected new insight into the Greek predicament.

“Well, I’m…well, I….,” I struggle to come up with some kind of a response to the  poor unfortunate at the other end of the line. “Well, I’m…I’m very …sorry to hear that.”

My words elicit from the caller a nugget of additional information.

“Sir, I am in hot water for 45 minutes.”

Perhaps this man is being boiled alive. In these circumstances, any thing could happen. I have been in Greece for only a day and I am beginning to think I had better get out again fast.

The surreal refrain starts up again. “Sir, I am in hot water….”

By now my mind is rapidly beginning to take leave of its moorings. I decide to bid a hasty farewell to my new but troubled friend. “Good luck,” I tell him, “….and goodbye.”

I put the phone down and lie on my bed for half an hour.

I need a stiff drink.

CRISIS? WHAT CRISIS?

Athens is a tale of two cities and nowhere is this more evident than in Syntagma Square.

Today we shall attempt to convey the classic face that  Syntagma presents to the world. Tomorrow we shall tell another story.

It seems to be fitting that the central square in Athens, where western democracy originated 2 500 years ago, should be named after the basic law which underpins modern Greek democracy – the constitution.

Syntagma (Constitution) Square is the geographical, political and cultural centre of Athens.  It is fitting too that the grandest building in the square, the pale-apricot palace, perched on a commanding dais, that houses the Boule, the Greek Parliament, should form a theatrical backdrop – taking up the whole east side of the square – to the mundane comings and goings of the citizens of Greece as they go about their everyday business in the busy concourse below.

The Boule is flanked by dark green orange trees, the fruit temptingly low-hanging.

In the first stanza of his most famous lyric poem – Mignon: Kennst du das Land? (Darling, do you know this country?) –  the classically educated German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) wrote:

Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn,

Im dunkeln Laub die Gold-Orangen glühn,

Ein sanfter Wind vom blauen Himmel weht,

Die Myrte still und hoch der Lorbeer steht?

Kennst du es wohl?

Dahin! dahin

Möcht ich mit dir, o mein Geliebter, ziehn.

 

Do you know the country where lemons bloom,

Where gold oranges in dark foliage grow,

Where out the blue welkin a soft wind blows,

Where stands still the myrtle and lofty the laurel?

Do you really know it?

There, there would I fain go with thou, my beloved.

Goethe is generally thought to have had Italy in mind, but surely Greece has a greater claim to the sentiments expressed? Anyway, that is what we thought when we saw the orange trees flanking the Boule. Perhaps someone could put this question to Angela Merkel or Wolfgang Schäuble? Might take their minds off less important matters like the economy.

Troops from an elite infantry corps forming the presidential guard – the legendary evzones – stand to attention at the base of the dais. They are dressed in full ceremonial fig: round red hats, black-and-red shoes, white leggings, a beige tunic with pleated kilt (the fustanella), and black-and-red shoes with prominent black pompons on the toe. They carry black-and-white rifles with bayonets fixed. Their purpose in the square is to stand guard around the clock over the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, which is marked by a flat slab on the parvis just under the dais. Cut into the stone above the tomb is the bas-relief of a dying hoplite, naked but for his helmet.

The retaining wall of the dais sports an irregular array of plaques containing solemn inscriptions, many recording battles in which Greek troops took part, including El Alamein, Rimini Rubicon, the Dodecanese, Korea, Cyprus and Crete.

The most moving plaques, however, particularly for those having endured the pangs and pleasures of a classical education, are two quotations from the History of the Peloponnesian War by the ancient Greek historian Thucydides (460 – 395 BC).

The quotations are from a speech made by the Athenian President Pericles (495 – 429 BC) at the funeral ceremony for Athenians who had died in the first year of the Peloponnesian War (431 – 404), which pitted Athens unsuccessfully against Sparta. The speech, glorifying Athens’ achievements, was intended to boost war-time morale.

The plaque to the left of the dead hoplite contains the words:

Μία κλίνη κενὴ φέρεται ἐστρωμένη τῶν ἀφανῶν (“One bier is carried empty, prepared for those unknown”).

The plaque to the right of the hoplite contains what is possibly the best-known quotation in the corpus of classical Greek literature:

Ἀνδρῶν ἐπιφανῶν πᾶσα γῆ τάφος (“In the case of heroes, it does not matter where they are buried”).

The guard changed as we were there. It was not unlike the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, which brought us down to earth with a bump. A good-humoured family from the Embassy of Northern Sudan – whose ruler Omar al-Bashir is wanted by the International Criminal Court at the Hague on charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide – was posing for photographs alongside the Evzones. It all began to seem a bit touristy. We snapped out of our musings on the Glory that was Greece. Time to move on.

Hardly less resonant than the Boule, if inevitably less impressive, are the two grand hotels that sit side by side along the north side of the square: the Grande Bretagne and its hardly less impressive neighbour, the King George Palace.

Pride of place must inevitably go to the Hotel Grande Bretagne – the name having a certain English connotation, perhaps, the language quaintly Gallic  –  the Grande Dame of the city’s many five-star hotels, a hostelry steeped in historic associations, which stands proudly on a corner of the square, no fewer than three flag-poles hoisting high the gut-wrenching blue-and-white striped flag of the Hellenic Republic. It seems a bulwark of the Ancien Régime, apparently oblivious to and disdainful of the tide of political turmoil that has washed back and forth across the square beneath ever since the moment that an economic tsunami crashed down on the shores of this country eighteen months ago.

From the rooftop bar and restaurant of this famed hotel it seems as if the whole of Greek history is laid out before you in one vast panorama.

To the east you can see the tiny church of St George atop Likavitos Hill, the highest point in Athens, and beyond the great ridge of Mount Ymittos, where the Hellenes kept bees for honey in the time of Pericles. Nestling in its foothills is the Stadium, still pristine, that was built for the re-launched Olympic Games in 1896, the first time that this contest was held since the Roman Emperor Theodosius the Great closed it down in 393 AD on the grounds that, a relic of a pagan past, the games had no place in Christian Byzantium.

To the west the great mound of the Acropolis crowned by the Propylaia, the Erectheion and the Parthenon towers majestically over the plain precisely as it has always done since Ictinus and Callicrates, Mnesicles and Phidias put up this nonpareil of world architecture 2 400 years ago.

To the south the horizon is bounded by the Peloponnese at Troezen, the legendary birthplace of the hero Theseus, while closer to hand, in the glittering waters of the Mediterranean, sits the island of Aegina, renowned for its temple of  Aphaea – and the production of pistachio nuts. Aegina was the earliest state in European Greece to use coins for money, which it did about 650 BC.

“Vedi Napoli e poi muori”, the saying goes. This could surely apply with equal justification to the Athens one views from the rooftop of the Hotel Grande Bretagne.

The first hotel on this site was opened in 1842. The list of famous visitors is legion: Pierre de Coubertin, Winston Churchill, Hitler, Rommel, Archbishop Makarios, Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren and so on. You name them, they were here.

Inevitably, however, in today’s globalised business milieu, this emblematic Greek hotel, like so many of its iconic counterparts elsewhere, is now in American hands,  having been swallowed up by the giant Connecticut-based Starwood Hotels chain (Sheraton, Westin, etc).

Back out in the square, we find immaculately groomed ladies-who-lunch taking afternoon tea in the smart Ethnikon café across the road. It is three-quarters full.

In the middle of the square four young bucks, all aged about 20, are trying their luck. They have thought up a wheeze to enhance their “pull” factor. They are walking about carrying boards offering “free hugs” in large coloured lettering. Presumably, this operation was aimed at the opposite sex. Sadly, we saw no one take up their kind offer but they seemed to be very pleased with themselves nonetheless.

A key feature of Syntagma Square is that it is at the nodal point where two of the city’s three metro lines intersect. And, boy, is this station busy! The underground at Oxford Circus in London has nothing on the crowd here. It has to be said too that the huge underground concourse that the Greeks have constructed at Syntagma can hold its own with any we have seen around the world. The giant space  – the minimalism of the decor mitigated only marginally by a mural of stones from the ancient city – reminded us in its vastness of the great hall at Grand Central Station in Manhattan. There is no way that a city with an underground station like this can go down the swanee.

This then is the Athens that we know and, mostly, love.

Nothing much has changed and that’s how we like it.

At the excellent hotel Athinais in the Ambelokipi district the desk manager tells us, to our surprise, that the economic crisis has not much impacted on the number of visitors. We had the same story of business as usual from the owner of the equally excellent Vlassis restaurant in the same district.

However, as British Prime Minister James Callaghan said in 1979 a few weeks before his government collapsed:

“Crisis, what crisis?”

NOT WATER

Oh yes, that business about the hot water. The cloud of unknowing was lifted later in the day by a notice posted up in the hotel lift. It seems that my cold caller, presumably the hotel manager,  had been ringing round guests to alert them to a temporary cut-off in the water supply. What one assumes he had been trying to say was: “I have no hot water”. The hotel’s hot water supply was cut off for three-quarters of an hour.

——————

 You might perhaps care to view some of our earlier posts.  For instance:

 1. Why? or How? That is the question (3 Jan 2012)

2. Das Vierte Reich/The Fourth Reich (6 Feb 2012)

3. The shoddiest possible goods at the highest possible prices (2 Feb 2012)

4. Where’s the beef? Ontology and tinned meat (31 Jan 2012)

5. What would Gandhi have said? (30 Jan 2012)

Every so often we shall change this sample of previously published posts.

——————

Posted in Germany, Greece | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Athens: business as usual?

Posted on June 6, 2012 by Antigone1984.com

Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

Athens, 5 June 2012

Well, here we are in the Greek capital. After Rome last week, it seemed the natural place to be. Also, we are sure that US author Gore Vidal would agree that Athens is as good a vantage-point as Rome from which to observe the last days of a dying civilization (see “Roma felix” our post for 24 May 2012).  Which, of course, is why we have pitched up here. We thought we would like to have a last look at Greece before the warm waters of the Mediterranean opened up and swallowed it whole.

All the same, we already began to have some doubts about this apocalyptic scenario back at the airport in Paris. Our fellow travellers on Aegean Airlines flight A3611 were not dressed in rags and feeding on dripping. In fact the scene at Charles de Gaulle was much what it is at any time when you board a flight for Greece: French holiday-makers, Greeks returning home, American college students on the Grand Tour, etc. None of them looked unduly perturbed at the prospect of the catastrophic scenes of decline and deprivation that they were shortly to witness. In fact, the lady sitting next to us on the plane turned out to be a doctor heading for a medical seminar in Crete. Quizzing her, we got the distinct impression that she was totally unaware of the incontrovertible fact – fully acknowledged by the rest of the universe – that Greece is now a financial basket case facing irreversible economic meltdown. Still, we thought, these medics, maybe they don’t get out much.

However, when we landed two and a half hours later to find an egg-shell blue sky – these guys don’t do clouds – and a temperature of 25° C at Venizelos Airport, we were gobsmacked to find that it was just like any other airport. Families waiting to greet arriving relatives, American tour groups milling around helplessly, thinking that they were in Barcelona, duty-free shops overflowing with typical Greek brands like Dior and Chanel, smartly dressed airport staff going professionally about their duties. Why, this could have been Frankfurt! (PS: don’t tell that to the Germans!)

Our astonishment deepened as we took the super-smooth spotlessly clean underground train into town. The well-dressed Athenians of all ages who joined the train as it passed through the suburbs gave no obvious sign that they had just feasted at a soup kitchen.

Our hotel was in the bustling Ambelokipi district, not far from the city centre but a place where Athenians tend to live rather a tourist magnet. True, there were some potholes in the roads and the occasional kerbstone was missing. But hey, you know, you can even find that in Paris or Berlin! And anyway, Athens wouldn’t be Athens  without the occasional outcrop of crumbling masonry. This is how we like this city and long may it resist all procrustean attempts to modernise and homogenise it. As all the other great cities of the world, hardly without exception, vie with each other to see which can be the fastest at turning themselves into glossy identikit plate-glass shopping malls, Athens  – and to some extent its sister capital Rome – has largely resisted this fad. Long may that continue to be the case.

Ambelokipi in particular has a bohemian feel to it: lots of small mom-and-pop shops, greengrocers, bookshops, kiosks selling newspapers and a few million other things, cake shops, fancy and not-so-fancy bars, restaurants, kebab houses, shops selling antique furniture, natty clothes boutiques, and so on. It is a bit like the Cowley Road in Oxford or the district east of the Bastille in Paris. The shops were all open for business and there were customers in most of them. We saw no boarded-up premises. We had brought a larger-than-normal amount of euros with us because of press reports that banks were running out of notes and that cash points were empty. What was the reality? The reality was that the banks were open and flush with cash, the ATMs up and running. The streets were as crowded, the roads as congested as ever. The one petrol station we saw was doing a roaring trade. We didn’t see a single person dressed in rags nor were we accosted by a single beggar. In cool northern cities like London or Paris you can’t go three yards without falling over one.

So what was it all about? Were we in the wrong part of town? Should we have gone slumming it elsewhere?

Then we picked up a copy of the current edition of the weekly English language “Athens News”. Here is what we read:

Pensioner hangs himself in park

A 61-year-old pensioner was found hanging from a tree on May 30 in the Agios Filipos park of the Nikea suburb of Athens. The lifeless body of the pensioner was discovered by a park attendant, who also found his suicide note, which read:

“The police do not know me. I have never touched a drink in my life. Of women and drugs I have never even dreamed. I have never been to a kafeneio (coffee house). I just worked all day. But I committed one horrendous crime: I turned self-employed at the age of 40 and I plunged myself in debt. Now I’m an idiot of 61 years of age and I have to pay. I hope my grandchildren are not born in Greece, seeing as there will be no Greeks here from now on. Let them at least learn another language because Greek will be wiped off the map. Unless, of course, there was a politician with Thatcher’s guts so as to put us and our state in line.”

Neighbours described the pensioner – a father of two – as a hard-working man. He had been employed at ship repair and construction sites and up until recently he had been working as an electrician on a merchant ship.

It is hard to follow up so tragic a story with comment of any kind. It speaks for itself.  However, we shall try.

Our first point is to suggest that Greece is living a silent tragedy. On the surface life goes on as normal. It is underneath that the pain is felt. The suicide rate has rocketed. The family solidarity for which the Greeks are famous has not been strong enough to overcome the sense of defeat and loss of self-respect that has sapped the will to go on living in so many individuals. For them it’s a case of: stop the world – I want to get off.

Secondly, as was apparent from the results of the parliamentary elections on 6 May 2012, when both the left-wing Syriza party and the fascist Golden Dawn (“Chrysi Avgi”) party gained unprecedented support, the economic crisis has led large numbers of Greek voters to desert the centrist parties – the nominally socialist Pasok and the right-leaning New Democracy – and vote for genuinely left- or right-wing parties. The unnamed pensioner who hanged himself obviously inclined to the right. His last wish for a strong politician to emerge to rescue his country is a frequent reaction of those who have lost out in any major economic crisis. Hitler drew his support from precisely such attitudes. The leader of Golden Dawn, Nikos Michaloliakos, a supporter of the 1967-1974 military dictatorship, is well aware of this and is selling himself with some success as the man chosen by destiny to rescue Greece from its current plight.

Thirdly, it is also clear that the despairing pensioner believed that the Greek crisis had been caused, at least to some extent, by immigrants. This too is a classic loser reaction: blame your own plight on the foreigner. Here again, spotting his chance, Michaloliakos has been playing the anti-immigrant card for all its worth.

Moreover, we are not talking here about wealthy white Americans, of whom there are large numbers in Greece, partly as a result of the Greek diaspora. The immigrants being targeted are poor black immigrants.

The current number of “Athens News” also carries the following news item:

Migrants attacked

A 32-year-old Pakistani was severely beaten by unidentified individuals late on May 29 in the ISAP ilektrikos (underground) station at Agios Nicolaos. The victim had to be hospitalised. The previous night an unknown individual stabbed a Bangladeshi national on an ISAP train. Police are investigating the cases and whether there was a racist motive.

Antigone1984 is spending the rest of this week in Greece in an attempt that to dig out the skinny on what is really happening here and thus contribute our obol’s worth towards deciphering the crisis.

——————

 You might perhaps care to view some of our earlier posts.  For instance:

 1. Why? or How? That is the question (3 Jan 2012)

2. Das Vierte Reich/The Fourth Reich (6 Feb 2012)

3. The shoddiest possible goods at the highest possible prices (2 Feb 2012)

4. Where’s the beef? Ontology and tinned meat (31 Jan 2012)

5. What would Gandhi have said? (30 Jan 2012)

Every so often we shall change this sample of previously published posts.

——————

Posted in Greece, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Rooting for Romney

Posted on June 4, 2012 by Antigone1984.com

Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

 4 June 2012

Yep, that’s right. We’re rooting for Romney.

There’s a story told about American politics.

Alabama. 1950. Democrat politician Joe McNally is addressing a caucus meeting: “If Governor Johnson is right, I support him because he is right. If Governor Johnson is wrong, I support him because he is a Democrat.”

Actually, the names of the people, the place and the date we have made up, as we were unable to track down the right ones, but the quotation is correct. A reader better versed in US political history than ourselves might perhaps be kind enough to supply the correct historical data in a comment on this post.

The point is this. Antigone1984 does not operate like the fictitious Joe McNally. We support a politician if we believe they are right. We criticise them if we believe they are wrong. Regardless of what party they belong to.

Readers of this blog might, we believe, have come to the conclusion that we favour the Democrats over the Republicans. The truth is rather as we have stated it in the last paragraph.

Furthermore, given the amount of space we have devoted to criticising international military operations conducted by the US Government, we would not be surprised if readers were to imagine that we were somehow irredeemably anti-American.

However, here again they would be wrong. And for the same reason that we have stated above. We support the United States when we think it is right, we do the contrary when we think it is wrong.

For instance, when,  years back, Ronald Reagan famously referred to the Soviet Union as an evil empire, we held the view that he was absolutely right. We did not support much of what Reagan did, but on this point we were solidly behind him.

Which brings us to Mitt Romney.

Most people who are politically awake know that the Syrian Government has committed a war crime of unspeakable enormity in the Syrian town of Houla. Late last month an estimated 108 people were killed there, most of them still in their beds. The UN has said that 49 of the victims were children and that a further 20 were women. The slaughter was perpetrated by militias loyal to the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. This is the latest in an unending series of outrages committed by Assad against his own people. The crackdown has cost an estimated 15 000 lives over the past 15 months.

Romney, the Republic candidate in the US presidential election this November, has now called out for tough action from incumbent president Barack Obama.

“After nearly a year and a half of slaughter, it is far past time for the United States to begin to lead and put an end to the Assad regime,” he said.

“President Obama can no longer ignore calls from Congressional leaders in both parties to take more assertive steps.”

Romney said that the Annan “peace” plan which Obama supports – involving the stationing of a small number of UN observers in Syria to witness the slaughter as it takes place – has “merely granted the Assad regime more time to execute its military onslaught”.

Amen to that, says Antigone 1984. What is the point of sending in observers to observe massacres being committed? This is madness. The point is to take action to stop the massacres – as Romney understands but Obama does not.

It does not matter whether Romney is simply saying this because he thinks it is a vote-winner to talk tough. What matters is that the course of action he is advocating is, in our view, the right one.

Republican senator John McCain, who stood against Obama in the US presidential election four years ago, has aligned himself with Romney, calling the White House feckless for not doing more to halt the slaughter. “This is a shameful episode in American history,” he said. “It’s really an abdication of everything that America stands for.”

The White House reaction to these outbursts by Romney and McCain could not have been more feeble: it did not believe military intervention in Syria was the right course of action as it would “lead to more carnage”.

More carnage? 15 000 already dead? The massacre of the innocents at Houla? How many more people have to die before Obama gets out of bed?

Antigone1984 has made it clear in previous posts that it believes in humanitarian intervention to prevent imminent slaughter. It backed the military action by America and its allies in Libya, the result of which was to prevent the imminent slaughter of the population of Benghazi and to help the Libya people topple their blood-thirsty dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

Many on the political left point out that those western powers who helped overthrow Gaddafi stand to benefit from oil contracts. So what? From the point of view of Antigone1984, action to prevent the imminent slaughter of human beings takes precedent over all other considerations.

Many on the left also criticize the western intervention in Libya on the grounds that, following the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime, the result has not been the immediate establishment of perfect Jeffersonian democracy. Well, you know, as they say, Rome wasn’t built in a day. It will take time to repair the ravages of 42 years of dictatorship.

——————

 You might perhaps care to view some of our earlier posts.  For instance:

 1. Why? or How? That is the question (3 Jan 2012)

2. Das Vierte Reich/The Fourth Reich (6 Feb 2012)

3. The shoddiest possible goods at the highest possible prices (2 Feb 2012)

4. Where’s the beef? Ontology and tinned meat (31 Jan 2012)

5. What would Gandhi have said? (30 Jan 2012)

Every so often we shall change this sample of previously published posts.

——————

Posted in Libya, Military, Russia, Syria, USA | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment