I’ve been looking forward to Dalrymple’s thoughts on the Greek situation, and he offers them in a short, new piece for City Journal, in which he states much more succinctly what many of us have no doubt been thinking:
When the crowd tried to storm the Greek parliament, shouting, “Thieves! Thieves!,” its anger was misdirected. It was a classic case of what Freudians call projection: the attribution to others of one’s own faults… The crime of that substantial proportion of the Greek population was to accept the bribe that the politicians offered; they were only too prepared to live well at someone else’s expense. The thieves were not principally the politicians, but the demonstrators.
Such popular dishonesty is by no means confined to Greece. In varying degrees, most countries in the West have displayed it, Britain above all. It is perhaps an inherent problem wherever the universal franchise is unaccompanied by widespread virtues such as honesty, self-control, providence, prudence, and self-respect. Greece is therefore a cradle not only of democracy, but of democratic corruption.
A similar article from the Oz press here:
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/greece-laid-low-by-its-decadence-20100516-v66z.html?autostart=1
The collapse of the social welfare model seems inevitable, but we should prepare ourselves for the possibility that the collapse will not shame the Left into silence but rather speed their depravity by forcing them to come up with ever more extreme justifications.