Jean-Claude Trichet

That was news to the poor little Greek boy. I now wonder what those beautifully uniformed German officers were doing in my house those three years. I used to play Oh du lieber Augustin on the piano for them. When the you-know-what hit the fan, the deputy prime minister, a clown who could make a leper colony roll in laughter, accused the Germans of having stolen all the Greek gold during the war. This was an official statement. It took the Greek Embassy in London to subtly deny it, as half the gold had been shipped to London and the other half to South Africa in 1938, all of it duly returned to Athens when things calmed down.

Greece’s place in the eurozone was accomplished by lying to the rest of the liars, which is poetic justice to say the least. It’s like the joke about who pays when a Greek, an Italian, and a Spaniard go to a bar for a drink—the German, of course. Antiquated labor rules, protected businesses, a bloated public sector, and poorly managed state assets are not about to disappear overnight. By slashing social benefits and services, the numbers of poor and unemployed keep surging. It is a vicious circle which cannot possibly be resolved. Greece has to get out of the euro—even from Europe. No Greek government can remain in control, no matter what BS it slings under such circumstances. Better prick the boil—that phrase again—now than later.

Another thing you Brits forgot: Delors, Trichet, and the generation of 1968 are now in the positions of power. The ludicrous Baroness Ashton—still cramming to understand what the word bonjour means—was a CND/CPGB fellow traveler; Javier Solana an ex-Trotskyite; Manuel Barroso an ex-Maoist; Joschka Fisher an ex-terrorist; and so on. In other words, the scum that failed to win power over us through force of arms is now leading us by the nose through stealth and the EU Trojan horse. Somebody wake up David Cameron.