The robbers Greek - The culture of the financial crisis.
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\"But what about the Greeks? Your national character is based on idea of a man's arms and while for the best in the world around him by sheer List oppressed.
" - Lawrence Durrell, Prospero's Cell (1945)
The Greek crisis has exposed existential weaknesses in the Greek economy and revealed shortcomings in the larger European system of financial checks and balances.
But the emotional reactions often have a cultural polarity between North and South under.
The German magazine, Focus, captured this antagonism by an image of the Venus of Milo suggestively sticking up the middle finger at Germany.
Angry Greeks in exchange reminded Germans of the Nazi looting of gold reserves and pay claims Greek War.
Beyond this populism in the media, there exists a fundamental rift in policy views between Mediterranean countries on the one side and Atlantic countries on the other side.
In his important book, L Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), the German sociologist Max Weber already examined the relationship between culture and economic performance.
Weber considered the Protestant working ethic a pivotal element in the development of capitalist modernity.
Behind the crisis of the Greek situation causes deep roots in Greek culture, the immediate problems of government and economic structure.
The traces of these historic roots carve an individual psychology and shape social norms that are difficult to change with measures of policy by politicians responding to the market's wits.
In traditional Greek dances and a group of dancers interlocked arm over his shoulder, forming a circle and move with a series of steps prescribed.
The Greeks do not easily break with their tradition and they do not possess an innate curiosity for the new like Western culture.
Greek depend on relations with the family and their community.
Arms locked, only the leader of the dance improvises, while the rest do not break the line of the circle.
The eyes of the international financial markets on the tax measures by George Papandreou, the first citizen of Athens and announced the reforms to be implemented by the central government.
The response of Greek society and the economic support by the European Union members will be decisive in their success.
The question is whether the government will introduce new measures in a country must be so geographically dispersed and with a history of tax evasion, such as Greece.
Historically Greeks dislike central government and have relied primarily on local self-governance, strengthened by the geographic distance of the islands from Athens and the isolation of mountainous villages.
Not even the supreme god Zeus was able to exclude minor Greek gods from the heights of Mount Olympus, the highest mountain in the country.
Greek history justifies mistrust in a Greek success.
Measures to centralize the government and form an efficient and modern state resists have always done from ancient times to the Delian League, which was in the Peloponnesian War, the occupation of the Ottoman Empire, the birth of Palikir, l Greek folk hero, ol increase the current government in which corruption el evasion are emblematic.
When the Persian empire threatened the independence of the Greek city states, Athens and the allied Greek city states formed the Delian League in 487 BCE.
Members of the League were required to contribute troops to the defense of democracies Greek or help alternatively, they could pay taxes to the league.
When Athens started to control the League, Athens forced other city states to continue paying taxes to the League solely for its own benefit.
When the city refused, they faced the wrath of the Athenian army and were simply annexed Athens.
But when the famous statesman Pericles moved the treasury holding the paid tax contributions, from the island of Delos to Athens, the rest of the Greeks defied.
The resistance to the dominance of Athens led to the Peloponnesian War and to finally defeat and surrender of Athens in 404 BC.
Can Athens ensure a different outcome now?
Already under the Ottoman empire the Greeks resisted taxation, which was a symbol of oppression.
From the fifteenth century, heavy taxation suffered by the Ottomans.
As Christians under Islamic rule they were obliged to pay a land tax and the jizya, a tax for non-Muslims which was symbolic for subjection to the Ottoman rule.
high taxes reduced to a majority of Greeks subsistence farming, while the estate fell into the hands of the Ottoman aristocracy.
Resentment against such taxation accumulated over almost five hundred years of occupation.
The problems of modern Greece, not without understanding of the Ottoman occupation of Greece and the long struggle for independence that lasted more than a century, only bitter end for the Greeks understood the catastrophic defeat against the forces of the modern Turkish state in 1922 Atatürk.
The 1922 defeat meant an end to the Greek megali idea or great idea of a larger Greece that included Asia Minor and Constantinople, current day Istanbul.
This defeat of the Greek state in Asia Minor was a failure by the central government with traumatic consequences.
The Museum for the Macedonian Struggle in Thessaloniki is a very small museum but with a deeply significant meaning for Greeks.
In a corner of the building behind Piazza Aristotle, tells the story of the Macedonian struggle, guerrilla war against the Ottomans 1900-1908, which included the territory of Macedonia in Greek independent people.
In 1821 the Greeks had won independence but it did not extend far beyond the Peloponnesos and Attica.
L annexation of Macedonia has given the Greek government renewed confidence that the Greek national identity is defined and asked a question on the entire territory of the region with the largest Greek population.
One room in the museum is devoted to Pavlos Melas who fought in the Macedonian Struggle.
Behind glass lay on the view Melas and relics of his former personal things, a Smith \& Wesson revolver 38, a ticket invitation to your wedding bands from his memorial wreaths and a tin cup.
He is a national symbol for the enosi or union of Greece that was hard fought and thereby of the Greek national identity.
He is the incarnation of traditional Greek folk hero who Palikir.
As a lieutenant he left the regular service in the new army of the Greek state in order to fight as a brigand or irregular fighter against Ottoman occupation in Northern Greece.
Greece was essentially confined to the Peloponnese and consisted of a mosaic of people with different dialects.
The irregular fighters became folk heroes to the Greeks, where the regular Greek army seemed incapable to protect the occupied Greeks in the north.
The irregular fighters fought in the same tradition as the Greek Klepths.
These men had fled to the mountains in the eighteenth century to avoid the rule of the Ottomans and had formed bands of outlaws that later fought in the Greek War of Independence from 1821 to 1829.
But the Ottomans had irregular forces for control of the mountains, impenetrable.
They allowed powerful local captains in these lawless areas to rule at will under oversight of distant Ottoman overlords.
In our time, the use of irregular fighters, during the last war started in the Balkans.
The palikare was in essence not more than a small brigand, who in groups roamed the mountains under the banner of irredentism and liberation of the Greeks.
Have circumvented the rule of law and often hung masters, the exercise of their power were local.
The Greek national writer, Nikos Kazantzakis, describes this archetype colorful in his novels.
In the wild, and the death of Captain Michales Palika refuses to swallow the occupation of Crete by the Turks, and the undisciplined Zorba is in the novel Zorba the Greek, brilliantly by Anthony Quinn adopted described in the 1964 film.
The mountain freedom fighter, evading authority and growing a beard in defiance, this is the Greek traditional spirit.
The Palika is a symbol of the Greek financial crisis, as reflected in a popular sentiment that rejects the modern centralized state, and commends the outlaws.
The Greeks do not identify with the politics of central government, despite the fact that one out of every four Greeks is a public servant and is directly dependent on the government for their income.
The central government as wasteful and corrupt, of which there are justified to extort money.
While the citizen rejects subjection to the rule of the central state, the central state is a corrupt body that accommodates a game of lies in order to accumulate monetary gain.
The Greeks sent an income from the government, while avoiding taxes and participate in the informal economy, deceive the Central Government.
This lack of loyalty extends to the even more remote European Union.
Greek gladly accept grants the European Union pay lip service to their needs, they often suffer from interference in their lives.
This practice goes back to the times of the Ottoman state, where Greek subjects evaded being taxed but sent representatives to Constantinople to request fiscal favors.
While the Ottomans had set up local self-government as a means of l-tax assessment and tax collection, developed the system, the municipal councils of powerful local captains and wealthy families have dominated, with a dependence on patron-client.
Since its independence in 1821 the modern Greek state that emerged out of the Ottoman system has not been able to eradicate this local patron-client system which depends on counter dealings and favoritism.
On the contrary, could arise only survive and favoring the interests of powerful local patrons or masters in return for their support in a process similar to that of the central power has advanced European Union only by returning political favors.
Prime-minister George Papandreou understands the Atlantic European perspective and sensitivities.
How many Greeks, in Germany or in America for the better part of their lives, lived and studied in America and Sweden, worked in the formative years of his life.
But although George Papandreou calms European suspicions by vocalizing a firm though nothing but verbal promise of reform, he himself is a vested representative of those powerful families that are symbolic of the centuries-old formalized corruption.
Papandreou's grandfather, was three times prime minister of Greece, his father founded the social democratic party PASOK and also served as prime minister, while the New Democracy party by the patrons of the family Karamanlis was dominated.
Greek promises and measures of reform have pacified international markets and appeased European political leaders for the time being.
After the accession of Greece to the EU, however, Greek promises and assurances have been given constantly under very similar scandals, and c is a little assurance that the recent developments in Greece this time will be different.
The cotton-growers of Thessaly are perhaps exemplary for the problems of the Greek economy which is simply not compatible on the international market and for Greek fraud.
Cotton farmers are highly dependent not avoid subsidies to the profitability, fraud and corruption, how to increase wetting of the cotton crop with water to the weight of the cotton.
In 1992, for instance Greek farmers invented one fifth of its cotton crop in order to claim extra EU subsidies, and in Greece cotton farmers recently blocked most of the highways in Northern Greece, demanding payments from the government to offset loss of income from falling cotton prices on the international markets, while having resisted agricultural reforms for decades.
And while Prime Minister Georgios Papandreou was a tour credibility to build the European capitals, talks between otherwise at the World Economic Forum in Davos, tensions calm the financial markets and restore the credibility of the policy, the minister of his own farm Katerina Batzeli has an agreement with the offer protesting farmers a compensation achieved.
Among the key measures was the injection of five and a half billion Euro by the Greek state to boost incomes and liquidity, promising little change in policies at home.
And ask for a Greek analysis of the current crisis is not a point, except for the corruption of politicians at a distance, only some admissions to blame a delay in Sub-clause.
But Europe has always been blinded by its love for Greece and one must fear that this will not change overnight.
It was always admired Greece as the ideological basis of European values and culture.
We learn from Greece the principles of Athenian democracy and copy Greek architecture, our secular thinkers study Heraclitus and Parmenides, our Christian moralists study Aristotle, Plato and Socrates, we learn the mathematics of Pythagoras, Euclid and Archimedes, our intellectuals learn by heart the Iliad and the Odyssey, even European cynics and stoics cling to the Greek.
But the hope romantic impression of Greece and Byron, and it must be that it will soon be replaced by a north-Realpolitik.
The Philhellenic idea of a pastoral Greece in perfect harmony with nature disputes the complex reality of a twenty first century Greece.
The sense of betrayal felt in Europe is as a self-deception by a European Byronic complex.
As Greece struggles to reconcile Western austerity with its Orthodox Byzantine generosity.
Greeks celebrated the suitors and the time of reckoning has come.
The return of order must be considered without sentimental attachments or unreasonable demands, while Europe must not be blinded by Greek cunning and abuse.
The Greeks have to decide, lose part of Europe and enforcing its own tax laws or return to the drachma as a political currency, and his place at the European table.
"I detest that man, who hides one thing in the depths of his heart, and speaks forth another.
\"- Homer, Iliad IX, 312-13.
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