German Propaganda...

...has been remarkably successful in portraying the Greeks as the villains of the current debt fiasco, and Europe has bought into it, big time. The US has been slightly less gullible, probably because we were less of a target, but also because several of our top economists have repeatedly called "bullshit" on this particular pile of crap.

Of course it helps the propaganda machine that the Greeks, both citizen and government, have screwed up badly, especially before the financial crisis of 2007. Most bankruptcies involve either really bad luck or stupidity on the part of both borrower and lender. The Greek disaster initially involved all three: reckless borrowing by an irresponsible Greek government, reckless lending by (mainly German) banks, and the bad fortune to get caught up in a global financial meltdown.

The blame for this really bad situation becoming a disaster lies almost entirely with the Troika (EU and IMF) who imposed a brutal austerity which crushed the Greek economy and destroyed any potential it had to repay. The big banks (again, mostly German) bear most of the blame for the Troika's bad behavior - the same folly that led them to make stupid loans made them cling to the fictional repayment of these loans long after the money was gone.

The propaganda effort follows the traditional formula of modern masters like Reagan and his predecessors in the Soviet Union and Germany: blame the victim. Find (or, more usually, just invent) examples of somebody in Greece getting away with something and extrapolate to every Greek. Ignore the fact that almost all the disasters have been provoked by the bad economic policies of the T.

I notice that the US has been getting a late dose of the same garbage.

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