PARIS, March 2 — A military dictatorship is the only way to force the Greek people to pay the nation’s debt to international finance capital, according to Michel Rocard, a French Socialist Party (SP) leader. Rocard was prime minister from 1988 to 1991.
“Forced shrinking of the economy leads to civil war,” Rocard told the daily paper Libération. “It’s untenable and it poses a big question for Greece, which is subject to forced shrinking of the economy. In this context, how can you maintain elections? It’s not possible to govern these people while telling them that they’re going to lose 25% of their income over the next ten years in order to pay off all the debt. Nobody says it out loud, but the solution for Greece is a military government.”
War on the Horizon
While Rocard was spilling the beans on the bosses’ vision of a fascist Greece, he also indicated that world war is close:
Nobody [in France] is paying attention to the greater Middle East. We have an Anglo-American strategy, which the other allies, and notably France, have accepted. The strategy is to scuttle any possibility of serious discussion with the Iranians. And even to provoke them a little from time to time. It’s as if it was…preparing a situation of tolerance that would make an Israeli strike possible. In this case, the war will become a Syrian-Iranian war, backed up by China and Russia,…a war broadly against the West and its client states.… This is an affair of millions of deaths, the hypothesis being that it will begin as a nuclear war.
Workers Lose, Banks Collect
The austerity plan imposed on Greece by the International Monetary Fund, the European Union and the European Central Bank has slashed wages and pensions. The Greek public debt is $395 billion. Seventy percent of it is owed to foreign institutions, mainly banks.
Andreas Makris, a porter at the Athens public hospital has had his wages cut 40 percent from four years ago when he netted 15,000 euros (USD $19,800) a year on a 37½-hour work-week. Now he nets 9,628 euros (USD $12,712) annually for a 40-hour week.
Dimitris Papadikolao, an Athens steelworker, was laid off in December. He used to make 1,200 euros a month net (USD $1584). Now he survives on 359 euros a month (USD $474) in unemployment benefits. Stelios Sandalakis is retired but cannot make ends meet on his 600-euro-a-month pension (USD $792) and must eat in soup kitchens.
Many Greeks are turning to charities like Doctors of the World for health care because they cannot afford the charges Greek hospitals now make patients pay for medicines. Meanwhile, military spending is up as Greece buys arms from Germany and France.
War and fascism are high on the agenda of the world’s ruling classes. Rocard’s words should be an eye-opener to any worker in France who thinks that François Hollande, the SP’s presidential candidate in the April 22 election, is a lesser evil. War and fascism are the inevitable products of capitalism. The only way to eliminate them is through communist revolution.