The Marxist face of the Greek crisis
The Greeks who voted for Tsipras were just as misinformed as were the Romanians in 1967 when they voted to bring to power another two-bit Marxist Dracula, named Ceausescu. I was one of them, and I will never forgive myself for that. In December 1989, 1,104 Romanians died in order to reverse that disastrous decision.
It took many years for my native Romania – and for me – to learn that Marxism leaves nothing behind but countries looking as though they had been devastated by a hurricane, with their leaders roasting in Dante’s Inferno. All Marxist rulers have inevitably ended up in Hell – all, from Trotsky to Stalin, Tito to Zhivkov, Enver Hoxha to Mátyás Rakosi, Sékou Touré to Nyerere and Hugo Chavez. All had their days of temporary glory, but all ended in eternal disgrace.
Seen from my vantage point, the current Greek financial crisis is the façade of a new Marxist cataclysm that could this time bring Marxism to power in a NATO country, and we should do everything in our power to prevent such a disaster.
Greece has a tradition of flirting with Marxism. Twice, in 1944 and 1947, Marxist leaders set up governments in the Greek mountains and extended their rule over most of the country. Markos Vafiades, the leader of the Greek Marxist guerrillas, became leader of the Greek army, and in 1947 was appointed prime minister and war minister in a “Provisional Democratic Government.”
We should prevent Greece from falling in the Marxist trap again. Otherwise Greece may again withdraw its military forces from the integrated military structure of NATO, as it did between 1974 and 1980. That could now ignite a geopolitical and military disaster, since Spain and Portugal – which are also coquetting with Marxism – may follow suit.
Most of our politicians and the media believe there is no simple solution to Tsipras’s Marxist popular rebellion in Greece. But my native Romania recently went through a crisis almost identical to the one Greece is going through today, and it solved it brilliantly, setting a superb example for its neighboring Greece – and the rest of the world.
Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa’s “The Red Horizons” is the inside story of how Communist Party leaders really live and his “Disinformation,” which is available at a special price for both book and DVD movie versions, pulls back the veil from intelligence campaigns that had great impact, but were largely unknown, in our day. Both are available at the WND Superstore.
Three years ago, Romania got its own Tsipras. His name is Victor Ponta, and he leads a Romanian version of the Greek SYRIZA, an undercover Marxist outfit rooted in the Moscow-born Romanian Communist Party, which is also hiding its Marxist face behind a mask of socialist patriotism.
Ponta rose to power because the Romanians foolishly placed their trust in him without carefully looking into his background, just as the Greeks are now doing with Tsipras. Everyone in Romania was given to understand that Ponta had become an authority on building Western-style democracy during the years he spent in Italy at the University of Catania, where he claimed to have gotten a master’s degree. Belatedly, the Romanians checked with Catania and were astounded to learn that Ponta had never even attended that university. More investigations established that Ponta was secretly married in China, and that he had hidden Marxist sympathies – as Tsipras has.
Tsipras is Ponta revisited. In 2012, Ponta also organized a national referendum intended to give his Romanian kind of SYRIZA party absolute power. Ponta won the referendum, as Tsipras did, but a courageous Romanian Supreme Court canceled it because of fraud in the vote. In November 2014, Ponta ran for the position of Romanian president. He lost the election, but remained prime minister, just like Tsipras. Furthermore, Ponta canceled most budget-austerity measures, as Tsipras did, started spending the country’s wealth on social welfare to gain personal popularity, as Tsipras did, and began moving the Romanian government closer to Moscow, also as Tsipras did.
Romania entered 2015 as politically divided as today’s Greece. Romania’s newly rebuilt judicial power, however, declared war on corruption, which is the quintessence of Marxism. (Ceausescu alternately resided in 21 lavishly furnished palaces, 41 “residential villas” and 20 hunting lodges.) Last month, Ponta, who started spending his weekends in Dubai and other exotic places, was indicted for embezzlement, traffic of influence and theft.
Ponta temporarily escaped arrest by running off to Belorussia, and he is now hiding out in Turkey under a medical pretext. Quite a few of Ponta’s cabinet members were also found guilty of embezzlement, traffic of influence and theft, and were forced to resign. Most Romanians who voted for Ponta suddenly began to see the light.
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Romania’s new president, Klaus Johannis, a relatively unknown professor of German descent who was formerly the mayor of a medium-sized Romanian city of German heritage, is now successfully working with German Chancellor Angela Merkel to rebuild the Romanian economy, which has been severely damaged by Ponta’s undercover Marxism and its redistribution of wealth. Maybe appointing President Johannis as mediator for the Greek crisis would help.
Just before he died, French philosopher Jacques Derrida, who claimed he had broken with Marxism but confessed to still being choked with emotion whenever he heard the Internationale, reminded us that the first noun in Marx’s “The Communist Manifesto” is “specter”: “A specter is haunting Europe, the specter of Communism.” According to Derrida, Marx began “The Communist Manifesto” with “specter” because a specter never dies.
Marx’s specter is now 167 years old and has chalked up enough victims; it is time for it to be sent to the scaffold. Otherwise, it will continue to haunt the world. Not long ago, the cover of Newsweek proclaimed: “We Are All Socialists Now.” It would be an apocalyptic catastrophe if that should actually come true.
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