Many still believe today that the threat of leaving the Eurozone that Greece faced was a ruse, a blackmail attempt, a bluff from the European leaders, a Merkel and Schäuble creation intended to subdue Samaras, Venizelos, the media and other “systemic” forces in the country.
There is no greater lie.
The recent revelations in the international press, along with the references to the former US Secretary of Treasure Timothy Geithner only confirm the critical circumstances that the Greek leadership dealt with from the summer of 2011 until the second elections in June 2012.
The revelations also justify all those who during that period were warning of a catastrophe and predicted that a great disaster would follow if irrational policies prevailed.
At best these people were treated as propagandists or professional alarmists and at worse as traitors, turncoats and criminals in general who presumably served the interests of the powerful and strived to harm the people!
The revelations in the international press, as well as the chronicle included in the Sunday edition of To Vima, leave no doubt as to what really happened, as well as the extent and intensity of the threat the country faced in that critical period, from one summer to the next.
There can be no doubt that the threat, the plan for Greece to leave the euro, was real, it had been prepared in every detail and was ready to be implemented if for any reason our European partners estimated that the rescue program was not effective or could not be implemented by the Greek leadership.
The details of an upcoming banking crisis and chilling and go far beyond what happened in Cyprus in spring of 2013.
Let us not doubt the intentions of our partners. They felt that Greece was financially and politically too week to manage the crisis. In order to protect themselves they were planning to expel Greece from the Eurozone. That is the bitter truth. No blackmail, no bluff, no high treason or other nonsense like the sort spouted by thoughtless politicians who cannot guarantee a single thing.
What we must hold onto from this whole debacle is that we must secure the country, the economy and Greek politics, so that we don’t find ourselves on the brink again and faced with such dramatic dilemmas such as salvation or national catastrophe.
Antonis Karakousis
