Greek finance minister's gesture was taken out of context
but the finger was pointed in the right direction.
18 Mar 2015
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2015/03/give-germany-finger-150318054035307.html
As the two among the organisers and participants of the
Subversive Festival in Zagreb in May 2013, we were happy to invite Yanis
Varoufakis - now Greece's finance minister - to give a public lecture
at the Festival and to present his book "The Global Minotaur".
In answering a question from the public, Varoufakis did not
point the middle finger at Germany or the Germans but was talking about a
hypothetical situation referring to January 2010 when Greece owed not one Euro
to German taxpayers. His idea was that Greece should have defaulted to its
private creditors rather than take on a huge loan from its European partners
(including of course Germany).
The recent outcry, Varoufakis's gesture (or a figure of
speech) and its meaning were thus torn out of the context by German media and manipulated in
the most brutal propaganda manner: his figure of speech from two years ago was
related to a totally different situation.
Low level of attacks
So why bring out that forgotten detail from a conference in
Zagreb? The answer is easy to guess: it is part of a very dubious strategy to
discredit the Syriza government.
What should worry us all is the low personal level of the
attacks on the key persons of the Syriza government. First, Alexis Tsipras was
attacked for living
in the same modest apartment as before the elections, and now
Varoufakis is attacked for living in a comfortable apartment.
All the racist cliches about the lazy Greeks who want to
live at the expense of hard-working Europeans are shamelessly mobilised. What
reality does such an approach obfuscate?
In negotiations with the EU as well as in his public statements,
Varoufakis consistently displayed a modest approach of finding a rational way
out of the deadlock, expressing readiness for compromises which even triggered
the first demonstrations against Syriza in Greece. What he and Greece are
getting in response is a repeated humiliating refusal to engage in serious
negotiations.
Rational debate
Clearly avoiding rational debate, German media are now more
and more descending to the level of yellow press, presenting Varoufakis and
Tsipras as eccentrics who just perform circus-like tricks and offer
irresponsible demagogic proposals.
The sad message of all this is clear: to add insult to
injury, Greece has to be not only kept in financial chains but also humiliated.
And the ultimate victim of it will be all of us, in short: Europe.
Insofar as "sticking the finger to Germany",
"Germany" clearly didn't refer to the state or people but to the
German government which was at the time (and is today) the main representative
of the disastrous austerity policies in the EU.
In this respect, it was the finger pointed in the right
direction. That message was clearly understood by anyone present at the
Subversive Festival in May 2013 as it should be today, especially in Germany.
Thus the real scandal is not the use of the good old Greek
tradition of the middle finger (who hasn't shown the middle finger at least
once in his life?), but what Germany (or the German government to be more
precise) is doing to Greece and the rest of Europe.
So in the midst of this debate about fingers, let's not
forget the big fat finger Berlin and Brussels are raising at Greece.
Srecko Horvat is a philosopher from Croatia. His latest
books include "After the End of History. From the Arab Spring to the
Occupy Movement" and "What Does Europe Want?", co-authored with
Slavoj Zizek.
Slavoj Zizek is a Slovenian Marxist philosopher and cultural
critic. He is currently a senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology
and Philosophy, University of Ljubljana in Slovenia.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and
do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
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