HUMAN SECURITY AND GROWTH

One of the key factors upon which viable growth can be built is human security. Approaching human security with the requisite attention has been practically absent from the continuing chaotic “debate” on how to address the Greek crisis.

Two years into sterile and failed rescue “memoranda” based on pauperizing the great majority of the Greek people, even Europe’s stern Mutter, Frau Merkel, admitted the other day that, in effect, all the sacrifices by the Greeks have come to naught. If indeed we want to take the pointer from Mutter the whole Greek “rescue planning” needs to be radically changed.

We regret to say that we see little hope for that in light of the successive useless governments at the helm in Greece and the generalized failure of Greek “leaders” to comprehend that the country is on the verge of a fatal implosion and possibly the kind of unrest that will grow quickly beyond police measures. Any such eventuality will bring to the fore the root necessity of effective human security as a pre-condition for stability. Early last year, commenting on this page about exploding crime and illegal immigration in Greece, we noted: “Without human security no ‘growth’ can exist, no foreign ‘direct investment’ can take firm hold, and no ‘economic reconstruction’ can be affected.” This statement holds as much true today as it did in March 2011 and its implications have become even more pressing.

With Germany now allegedly demanding that Greece takes one step further in surrendering her sovereignty by relinquishing control over its budget policy, the possibilities of social instability and violence are increased multifold. According to the sources of this news story, for example, if the German plan takes effect then Greece will be unable to help, and spend for, her own people before the lenders have been satisfied for any given period of time.

Translated into plain English, this policy will dramatically accelerate the pauperization of the Greek people and will certainly lead to the rapid spread of desperation, want and even famine. Only last week, and in the shadow of the Greek Parliament in Athens’s central Constitution square, hundreds of hungry Greeks jostled, quarreled, and in some cases exchanged blows as they tried to get to the bench of some farmers who were distributing potatoes and onions for free right across some of the most luxurious hotels of the Greek capital. These scenes, unprecedented in post-war Greece, brought back again memories of the Axis occupation of 1941-44, which, among other calamities, cost Greece hundreds of thousands of deaths from malnutrition and disease thus caused.

Ignoring human security as the primary foundation of stability is the nexus of a potential national catastrophe. Our European “partners,” and their local puppet “technocrats,” seem oblivious to the hard figures of Greek disintegration: more than a million unemployed workers, collapsed social security and welfare services, public hospitals that are being reduced to Third World “quality” levels and hundreds of thousands of elderly pensioners at an impasse over basic needs not to mention medical cover. The Greek people continue to bear these burdens without significant resistance. But can anybody guarantee that this will be the state of affairs tomorrow, especially after the unemployed, plus members of their families, reach two or three million in the immediate future?

It would be the ultimate irony to watch our “rescuers” confronted with a sudden catastrophic confluence of exploding crime, social rebellion, and possibly a “new role” for the throngs of illegal Muslim immigrants thick in the middle of Athens -- a development that will keenly endanger Greece continuing to pay the lenders. Would then the German army arrive again with its panzers to “pacify” Greece and transport the incorrigible and famine -stricken Greek “enemies of the state” to European Reich factories to teach them a lesson as slave labor?

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