Offended Lands¹

The so-called “Greek crisis” officially started at the end of 2009. At that time, I was defending my Ph.D. thesis at the Humanities Faculty of Copenhagen University, after having moved to Denmark in early 2006, to pursue a Ph.D. degree there.

A year prior to the crisis, I attended a public presentation in Copenhagen, which attempted to analyze the recent “December 2008” events in Greece – an upheaval sparkled by the cold-blooded murder of a teenager named Alexis Grigoropoulos by a far-right policeman. What to me and others (Vradis & Dalakoglou, 2011) was a class and generation-based revolt – related to the cumulated contradictions of late capitalism in a peripheral European state – to the Danish scholar it seemed to be yet another case of Greek exceptionality. Under an indignant tone, the presenter stressed common liberal arguments that place issues such as gerontocracy and a male-dominated political system at the core of Greece’s problems. However true these dimensions may be (although not exclusive to Greece), this approach showed a limited understanding of the system’s flaws. Following the presenter’s line of thought, one can even assume that young neoliberal “centrists” like the banker Emmanuel Macron in the French Presidency, or, neoliberal, right-wing, conservative women like Angela Merkel (or, Margaret Thatcher to this regard), are presumably “solutions” or signs of political health.

In 2010, a “Greek-crisis” publicity emerged with Greece entering the global news agendas on a nearly daily basis, which soon took a very malicious turn particularly during 2011 and 2012. The Greek crisis popular narrative was conceptualised through various pre-existing demeaning stereotypes deployed to viciously attack the Greek people as a whole, but in reality, aiming especially at those of the middle and the lower social strata. A selection of fragmented bits of negative information that sought to “expose” the reality of Greece, often presented in a highly detailed manner, was spectacularly exhibited to publics across the European Union (EU) (and beyond), sequenced in a way that proved the “Greek scrounger” thesis on one hand, and the “self-inflicting” character of the Greek crisis on the other. Demeaning stereotypes and prejudices over Greece pre-existed in the Western world. One can argue that the media and the “Greek crisis” publicity only amplified what already was in place, preying on racist “gut feelings” on what Greece “really is”, while tapping on general anxieties and creating a moral panic around the Greek crisis theme. The subtle bigotry of culture and class emerged in unprecedented ways, intensified by an economic emergency policy framework. The media’s amplification and repetition of such new racist tropes legitimised their everyday uses, serving the formation of a popular consensus around the imposition of harsh austerity regimes in Greece that were soon to be implemented in other crisis-struck Eurozone states too. This publicity created a regime of entitlement to address the Greek people in demeaning terms, objectifying them and demanding the implementation of policies that bared no democratic legitimacy. Built on upper-class knowledge regimes and marked by a general ignorance towards the periphery and its context, this sense of entitlement produces consensus over austerity, depoliticises the crisis and curbs the development of solidarities, while intensifying nationalism and a market-orientated understanding of the world.

Between 2010 and 2012, I was employed by Lund University in Sweden, to work as a post-doctoral scholar in media sociology. In 2010, and 2011 in particular, the Greek/Eurozone crisis’ publicity intensified an assemblage of micro (and major) aggressions that the Greeks living in the North/West were exposed to daily. I can recall numerous occasions of unprovoked aggression coming from a variety of people in the countries I worked at and resided then, notably Denmark and Sweden, ranging from co-workers in the academia to students, policemen, bank clerks, bartenders, and to be sure, mere acquaintances and encounters. Such stories are common among many Greeks living abroad during those years. Unsurprisingly, acts of aggression also came from citizens of peripheral EU states like, for example, Poland, whose large migrant waves across Europe have experienced equivalent racist degradation to those that the Greeks have. Migrants from non-EU states also exhibited similar anti-Greek sentiments. Possibly, citizens of peripheral states saw in the Greek crisis publicity a further possibility to identify with the West/North European norm and thus “integrate” further in their host countries. “Ordinary people”, of middle and working-class backgrounds, even self-designed “leftists” felt entitled to express their loath openly. A sense of joy, indeed, seemed to follow the iteration of discriminatory and shaming remarks (particularly mild ones, made to pass as “humorous”), which confirmed a habitus of supremacy, which in the North passes largely uncontested. The “Greek crisis” political management and publicity by the liberal dominant class became a source of what Deleuze and Guattari call micro-fascisms in the terrain of everyday life.

In times of high uncertainty, the publicity of the “Greek crisis” produced a bitter result, corroding the relations of people and undermining the emergence of possibilities of solidarity. In fact, the EU’s conservatives and neoliberals colonised the word solidarity itself, creating a rather false, “newspeak” version of it, associated with “no-alternative” policy agendas. Hence, they named solidarity the flow of loans forced to Greece in the no-alternative crisis-policy context. These “bailout loans” augmented Greece’s debt, so as not to cancel it as odious at the expense of private creditors, such as German, French and American banks who were exposed to the Greek public debt. The bailout loans legitimised the pursuing of austerity and privatisations in Greece, which severely undermined the living standards of the Greek people and the state of the Greek democracy itself. So much for “help”; or, to use some Danish irony, “tak for hjælpen!”

The escalation of the “Greek crisis” spectacle probed me to the study of the hegemonic crisis and austerity discourse, as represented in mainstream mass media. The reason for that was to deploy critical theory in a coherent and systematic way to criticise and challenge the hegemonic neoliberal ideology, as it unfolded in Europe and the Eurozone crisis context. Most importantly, I focused on the media because it was the media that endlessly propagated the demeaning and fictitious themes enunciated by influential European politicians. The media were caught in a process of destruction of local contexts and subjective experiences that capitalist restructuring requires. This means the erasing of modes of life, meanings and social relations viewed as not economically productive, from the public sphere.

After publishing my first critical analysis of the German media representations of the Greek crisis in June 2012, a German colleague wrote back to me that “Bild is already known” for what it is, implying that my analysis was offering nothing really new. She then pointed towards the existence of the more serious German media that supposedly approached the crisis in more actual and objective terms. Further, I was also told in a reassuring fashion that “it is not as bad” (probably as I wrote in my analysis that it was), as if this knowledge was somehow held by natives like her better than myself and others, potentially “complaining” and exaggerating Southerners living in the North. Nevertheless, it seemed like my critique had touched upon a sensitive nerve, challenging a white/bourgeois sense of entitlement to point the finger to others, without accepting any critique back.

While in Madrid in March 2014, following the “New abduction of Europa: debt, war, democratic revolution” conference, and during a visit at Prado museum, I had the chance to view Francisco Goya’s “Black paintings”. What struck me the most was his “Fight with cudgels”, which was later chosen as the cover image of this book. There, two men that both seem to be equally ordinary, are viciously striking each other with clubs, appearing grounded in a standstill, at what gives the impression of a deserted space. The painting seemed to represent the position of the oppressed people of Greece, especially after the rise of the neo-nazi party of the Golden Dawn into a parliamentary force during the crisis years. But on a further level too, Goya’s painting also seemed to represent the position where the entire world’s oppressed are today, immersed in competition norms, and generally lacking counter-hegemonic perspectives, identities, and strategies. In short, during social crises, the lack of a widely shared vision for the making of a better world that can be more just, equal, and joyful, is substituted by social cannibalism. In his excellent book “On Artists”, John Berger notes that, besides being a graphic artist, Goya was also a commentator. For Berger (2015: 173), Goya’s underlining theme of commentary has to do with “the consequences of Man’s neglect of his most precious faculty, Reason”. Reason, however, often appears to be constitutive of mainstream liberal repertoires. For instance, in the “Greek crisis” context, a public call to reason has been deployed to serve the ends of the “no alternative” to austerity thesis, blocking critique and counter-hegemonic politics. To this regard, in their first volume of “Capitalism and Schizophrenia”, Deleuze and Guattari (1977) note that it is not the sleep of reason that breeds monsters but instead, monsters are bread by the sleepless reason itself, submerged in the structures of power and conformity of the modern capitalist societies. Therefore, the idea of reason is also a site of contestation between competing practices, ideologies, and interests. The developing of a critical form of reason though remains an important dimension to understand the systemic nature of the problems that the world faces today and to counter the widespread tendencies of inertia, regression, fragmentation, and pessimism.

Despite the ghastly rise of inequality today, where the 1% of the wealthiest people control 50% of the world’s wealth, or, the rapid catastrophe of the natural environment caused by an industrial civilisation based on the acceleration of production and consumption of commodities, no political formation currently exist to “reach for the emergency brake” in Walter Benjamin’s (1974) sense, and halt capitalism’s catastrophic course. Instead, there is a widespread faith in capitalism, strongly shared by the dominant classes, and also followed by the lower ones. Potentially, this proves the religious dimension of capitalism, as perceived by Walter Benjamin. Nevertheless, bright and courageous minorities from across the world were the ones expressing solidarity to the symbolic and material plight of Greece, particularly during the most crucial, first crisis years, and addressing the crisis and austerity in political terms. It seemed that such minorities kept alive a sense of collective humanity that is burdened by the same problems and is marked by the same universal emancipatory aspirations. As capitalism is today – despite its grotesque signs of decadence – possibly stronger than ever before, the introducing of counter-hegemonic concepts and critical analyses may estrange what passes as “common sense”, and trigger the imagination for the crafting of critique and politics that can escape the margins and become popular and mass.