Yanis Varoufakis, der linke Star, erzählt, wie die EU sein Land zu einer Kolonie gemacht hat.
Er hat recht von Alpha bis Omega. Yanis Varoufakis, der wilde Marxist, der kluge Ökonom, kritisiert in seinem neuen Buch die Europäische Union. Bild: Keystone
24η Ιουλίου 2017
In a Guardian interview (24 July), the Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, having admitted to “big mistakes”, was asked if appointing me as his first finance minister was one of them. According to the interviewer, Mr Tsipras said “Varoufakis … was the right choice for an initial strategy of ‘collision politics’, but he dismisses the plan he presented had Greece been forced to make the dramatic move to a new currency as ‘so vague, it wasn’t worth talking about’”.
In a recent article entitled “Varoufakis and the 2015 debt talks – behind closed doors”, published on the English language site of Kathimerini, Yannis Paleologos is putting forward an innovative new criticism of my 2015 negotiating stance regarding Greece’s public debt.
Today, on the anniversary of the stupendous NO with which 62% of Greek voters responded to a third predatory loan ultimatum from Greece’s ‘official’ lenders (the troika: IMF, ECB, EU), Greece’s oligarchic press – in cahoots with the troika itself – is hard at work in its attempt to demonise the people of Greece for having dared to say NO to yet another lost generation. The memory of our collective defiance still prevents the oligarchy from sleeping tightly at night, it seems. In the process of demonising the NO, they are paying me, personally, a huge compliment. This is why/how:
Reading Varoufakis: Frustrated Strategist of Greek Financial Deterrence (click here for the original site)
by Adam Tooze
Adam Tooze holds the Shelby Cullom Davis chair of History at Columbia University and serves as Director of the European Institute. He is currently at work on a history of the global financial crisis 2008-2018, which will appear in time for the anniversary in September 2018.
This is a superbly written account of the struggle to alleviate the austerity imposed upon the Greek people by the eurozone. Greece, argues Varoufakis, has been put in a debtors’ prison and robbed of autonomy and dignity for the indefinite future. Critics would argue that he failed as finance minister in 2015 because he was insufficiently politic. More plausibly, he could never have succeeded, such were the vested interests arrayed against him. This outcome was — and is — a tragedy, because he was — and is — right. The bulk of Greek debt should indeed be cancelled outright.
It is no surprise that Yanis Varoufakis, the former finance minister of Greece, turns up to our interview without a tie. The 56-year-old famously arrived at Downing Street in 2015 for a meeting with the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, with his shirt untucked.
More surprising is that the left-wing economist, who led negotiations with creditors during the 2015 Greek government-debt crisis, is wearing a suit jacket.
