The oracle

I met up with an Athenian friend (to be referred to, pseudonymously, as Phoebus by this agora-nonymous blogger) tonight for a cold cappuccino among the elegant denizens of Kolonaki. He heard out my views on the financial crisis but had a few complications to add to my clean picture. There were two main ones, and I think they say a lot about the mistrust that exists between many Greeks and their governing institutions and officials. He had a lot of other things to say besides, but they were complex, difficult to interpret, and overwhelmingly in hexameter verse.

First of all he suggested that a few members of the Greek political elite - together with a few members of the international financial elite - had been arranging loans without the full consent of parliament and without following the proper procedures. Because of this, many Greeks (especially those who found employment with the state in the boom years and are now out of work) feel that it would be unfair to force the Greek nation to pay back loans on terms improperly contracted by a few.

Secondly - and at points his voice quietened somewhat - he alleged that members of the police were manufacturing outbursts of violence so that they could seem justifying in clearing large numbers of protestors from the square using truncheons and tear gas. He implied that plain-clothed agents, or sometimes simply right-wing conspirators, were being planted among the protestors, so that they could throw enough stones at the cops for violent counter-measures to appear proportionate.

The oracle had many other things to say besides, along the lines of the analyses that have appeared in the British and American press, about the failure of Greece to develop her own industries with the money it borrowed. But most interesting to me was the distinctive character of the first Greek voice I've had the opportunity to consult at any length during my first fortnight here. Whatever the international press may say about the need for Greece to pull together to solve the problems now pressing upon them, it's clear that there are trenches of mistrust between the people and their overseers that go much deeper than superficial political squabbling.