Athens, 2015

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The good news is that a Greek suppository is about to relieve the EU’s economic constipation. The bad is that there’s a Castro in our midst, posing—just like Fidel did 56 years ago—as a democratically elected populist. Back then it was Uncle Sam who was the bogeyman. Now it’s the EU. Back then the Soviet Bear came to Fidel’s rescue. Now it’s Putin. Personally, I’ll take Vlad over the faceless unelected Brussels gang anytime. The problem is Tsipras, a vulgar-sounding name if there ever was one. Add to it the fact that he has two sons, one named after Che Guevara, and the other, I suspect, after Carlos, the murdering Venezuelan terrorist who’s at present rotting in a French jail. Does that tell you anything about the person the Greeks voted to lead them out of their misery? It tells me plenty.

Athens was very quiet the night of Syriza’s victory. Most of my friends were appalled at the size of Tsipras’s win. I asked them, what did they expect after four years of austerity? A Samaras victory? A good friend expostulated, “But Samaras is a cousin of mine …” As if that made it OK. They’re funny, the Greeks. The gang of Brussels inserts a Trojan Horse, Samaras, to do its bidding; the middle class disappears—6000 doctors go west—and my Greek friends are surprised when a Castro appears and wins big.

The losing center-right and center-left made mistakes, big-time. The first was not to leave—or threaten to leave—the Euro when the crisis first broke. The Brussels gang were running very scared in 2010. No longer. Another was to turn all the power of government against Golden Dawn, a so-called neo-Nazi party, something Golden Dawn is not. Many of its members are languishing in jail on trumped-up charges now, something that will come back to haunt Greeks once Tsipras shows his real colors and begins to jail people for “anti-Greek activities,” such as speaking out against his Marxist policies. Let’s not forget that it was Golden Dawn who made sure Muslim extremists did not spread their evil messages and activities around Athens and Salonica, the two largest cities. They beat the crap out of budding jihadists and criminals threatening the poor, something the long-suffering Brits and French should have done years ago.

As I said, they’re funny, these modern Hellenes. Just last week as I was watching the Andrew Neil BBC program, he had a Greek comedian on the show, someone I had never heard of, but whose dress and manners reminded me of the modern Greece. All the comedian did was bitch against the Germans. He was apparently a man who never asked himself whether it was the Germans who forced the Greeks to borrow far more than they could afford and then fiddled the figures under the expert advice of Goldman Sachs. A man who never doubted the guilt of Angela Merkel where tax collection is concerned, a system that lost 20 billion euros per year in unpaid taxes. Who is certain it was Merkel’s fault that a Greek government came begging Germany for help once the game was up.

Never mind. Introspection is not our strongest characteristic. Had we pegged the drachma to the dollar five years ago and asked nicely to be allowed to exit, while offering some port facilities to Uncle Vlad in return for cheap oil, we’d be today thumbing our noses to the perma-tanned head of IMF and to the rest of the EU clowns. But no, Samaras and his acolytes wanted the outriders, the Brussels conferences, and the rest of the jazz that goes with being in power nowadays. And to hell with the people who have lost everything, especially the young who still have an almost 50 percent unemployment rate. Fidel Tsipras was elected when it dawned on the people that nearly all the money given to Greece has been used to pay interest and principal on debt. The present bunch is a motley collection of communist trade-unionists, long-winded academics with no experience of governing whatsoever, and corner café left-wing orators. They are as likely to govern well as I am to stop drinking and devote my life to furthering minority rights.