Greek prime minister blasts Western imperialism’s attack on his country

Video: Greece’s membership of the EU – A short history.

George Papandreou, the Greek prime minister, has slammed the EU for displaying ‘timidity’ in its dealings with Greece’s financial crisis. In a live address to his cabinet following his return from an emergency summit in Brussels, the normally mild-mannered leader hit out at the lack of united support from the EU. ‘Greece is not a political or an economic superpower to fight this alone. The EU gave political support in the last few months of this crisis, but in the battle against impressions and the psychology of the market it was at the very least timid.’ He went on, ‘There was speculation about our country which created a psychology of imminent collapse, prophesies which risked becoming self-fulfilling’. Indeed, ‘There was a lack of co-ordination between various bodies of the union, the commission, the member states, the European Central Bank, even different opinions within those bodies.’

‘In other words,’ continued Papandreou, ‘the fact that our stupendously bloated and corrupt state has stuffed its face to the point of heart-failure can conveniently be blamed on Western imperialism which, as we know, is to blame for absolutely everything that goes wrong for us.’ Papandreou then went on to explain the long history of Western imperialism’s persecution of the Greeks, beginning with the Latin conquest of Constantinople in 1204: ‘The Western powers enabled the Greek nationalist right to defeat the Communists in the Greek civil war. NATO defended Greece from the Communist bloc throughout the Cold War. The European Economic Community let Greece join in 1981, even though our scandalous human-rights record meant that we belonged there the way a hippopotamus belongs in a pole-vaulting competition. It supported us against Macedonia – sorry, against FYROM – in the ‘name dispute’ from 1992 – God alone knows why. It turned a blind eye to our support for Slobodan Milosevic. It has continued to keep Turkey out on account of Cyprus – even after the Turkish Cypriots supported and the Greek Cypriots sabotaged the Annan Plan to reunify the island. It has subsidised us so much that we are literally bursting at the seams. And now that our state is literally collapsing under the weight of its EU-funded profligacy, the EU is refusing to give us even more money to get us out of the mess we created. How dare they ?’

‘The evidence is clear’, continued Papandreou, ‘that the West has always been against Greece and is plotting against us in all possible ways. What will these heartless bastards think of next ?’

Greater Surbiton News Service