Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D.
Greece is a country renowned for its bureaucracy, where such procedures take place the ‘old-fashioned way’ and where court cases may take years or decades to be concluded. A common sight at public services are huge piles of paper folders, with nary any technology in sight.
Enter COVID, and suddenly Greece is a technological trailblazer. Seemingly overnight, the Greek state unveiled an SMS text messaging system through which, during the country’s two lockdowns, citizens were obliged to text before leaving their homes. Vaccine appointments were conducted digitally and swiftly while ‘efficient’ Germany lagged. And Greece was the first country to propose ‘vaccine passports’ to the EU. Greece’s digital COVID response was praised by The Economist.
Far from a contradiction, this is part of a longstanding trend in Greece. Due to the country’s geopolitical importance and wealth of resources, it has long lacked full sovereignty. As such, Greece has long been an ‘early adopter’ of policies which one may broadly associate with what we call ‘globalism’.
Along with bureaucracy, Greece is known for shipping–and shipping magnates. As far back as 1933, the Bank of Greece found that most shipping revenues never entered the Greek economy. In 1953, the Greek government issued tax breaks for shipowners, which have remained, while shipowners registered their fleets in tax havens and proceeded to hire sailors from developing countries such as the Philippines, where they also set up training programs.
From early on, magnates such as Aristotle Onassis were jet-setting globalist icons–and relied upon the global financial system for their capital. Onassis also maintained close ties with the military junta which ruled Greece from 1967-1974; the same regime that pioneered the first wave of imported cheap labor to Greece, from Pakistan and other downtrodden countries, undercutting local labor, which fueled a new migration wave in the late 60s to mid 70s.
And lest one believe that a massive amount of migrants only reached Aegean islands such as Lesvos in 2015, when the international media ‘discovered’ the story, the islands–and Greece–have received migration waves since prior to the “War on Terror,” as this April 2001 poll from the Lesvos newspaper Aegean Times indicates.
At the same time, in the 50s and 60s, the Greek government’s official policy to “reduce unemployment” was not to create jobs and develop industry, but to export Greeks to countries like Germany, via the Gastarbeiter agreement, to help them industrialize instead, while Greece ‘developed’ from remittances sent back by migrant Greeks.
Ah yes, the ‘economic crisis’. How did Greece get there? One starting point is in 1981, when Greece joined the then-European Community–and ‘socialist’ Andreas Papandreou, son of a former prime minister, came to power. Papandreou ran on a platform of leaving NATO and the EC and expelling U.S. military bases, but proceeded to renege on those promises. In the meantime, the beautiful Greek language was neutered, while crass Western culture was delivered straight to households’ TV screens by the state broadcaster, which began rebroadcasting foreign private broadcasters while independent Greek broadcasting was still banned.
His successor, Konstantinos Mitsotakis, father of the current prime minister, began a privatization wave in the 90s presented in Greece then and now as “foreign investment.” Later in the 90s, the technocratic prime minister Kostas Simitis sold the national telecommunication company and the management stake of the new Athens airport to German firms, while bringing Greece into the Eurozone in 2002 amid a spending spree for the 2004 Olympic Games, whose infrastructure was largely built by illegal migrant labor. Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs assisted in the performance of ‘Greek accounting’.
As a prelude to the economic crisis, and long before ‘social justice’ protests went mainstream, December 2008 riots following the Grigoropoulos shooting incident wrecked central Athens. In shades of Big Tech surveillance, the riots led to the government requiring SIM cards to be registered.
The ‘economic crisis’ itself was not a Greek first. The IMF previously had imposed “structural adjustment programs” in Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere. However, for the first time, the ‘chickens came home to roost’ within the EU, while the bloc’s first technocratic government, that of non-elected central banker Lucas Papademos, was installed in 2011.
SYRIZA later helped usher in the first elements of a cashless society in 2015, imposing capital controls via ATM withdrawal limits, which de facto forced individuals to conduct transactions via debit card. Cash transactions over a certain amount were banned, while mandatory QR codes for all cash register receipts, and connection of all cash registers to the tax authorities, were introduced.
The crisis also delivered a de facto carbon tax, with heating oil so heavily taxed that few could–or can–afford it. This ‘green’ policy fuels (pun intended) a noxious smog over Greek cities each winter, from the use of haphazard fireplaces.
Greece has indeed been at the forefront of the climate crisis since the 90s. Massive ‘wildfires’ would burn large swaths of land and would then be blamed on unscrupulous property developers (even though affected areas often were inaccessible), lit cigarettes, and grandmothers accidentally setting cooking oil ablaze in outdoor stoves. In 2007, two such fires burned large swaths of Attica and the Peloponnese.
A documentary aired by Russia 24 referenced the “Pythia” plan for the destabilization of Greece and then-prime minister Konstantinos Karamanlis, via the 2007 fires, the 2008 riots, the Vodafone wiretapping scandal, and the attempted suicide of a close adviser following a sex scandal, put into place over Karamanlis’ plans to bring the South Stream gas pipeline from Russia to Greece.
Destructive fires in 2018 and in summer 2021 were increasingly blamed on climate change, which however was used as the impetus to bring purportedly ‘green’ policies to Greece. Lignite mines in northern Greece–the country’s main source of energy–are being privatized, completing efforts launched in the 1950s by Nazi collaborators, as revealed by declassified CIA documents.
Of course, long before 9/11 and the “War of Terror,” Greece (and Italy) were at the forefront of CIA-infiltrated ‘terror’ groups used as a bogeyman; namely, Greece’s November 17 and Italy’s Red Bridgades (think Operation Gladio).
Meanwhile, in a foreshadowing of COVID, the Greek government purchased, in 2009, 24 million doses of the Tamiflu vaccine (for a country of 11 million), presented by Greek state virologist Sotiris Tsiodras, who in 2020 became the public face of Greece’s COVID response and harsh lockdowns.
January 2022
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