By Brian Cronin:

I am old enough to remember the horrendous conflict in the Congo in the 1960s. The players: Patrice Lumumba, Joseph Kasavubu, Dag Hammarskjold and Moise Tschombe of the breakaway province of Katanga are all still clear memories. What is also clear, unfortunately, is the question asked by a particularly insensitive British TV reporter of Belgian nuns in a refugee camp who were desperately trying to stay out of harm’s way: “Anyone here been raped and speaks English?”.

The war correspondent Edward Behr used that question as the title for his 1978 book on his experiences covering various conflicts. It is insensitive on at least three levels. First, to ask traumatized nuns such a personal question, secondly that they had to be able to express the answer in English to satisfy the reporter and lastly, that the most important thing in the reporter’s mind was getting the story and getting it first, never mind whether the story involved grievous bodily harm.

This particularly crass question came back unbidden to mind as I saw the strikes and protests going on in Spain and Greece this past week. If you read last week’s essay on the effects of hyper-inflation on people, you might begin to see why. It is an undeniable fact that those involved in the financial markets do not look at the human cost at all or very little anyway. The overriding reaction to calamities, riots, protests, assassinations and such like is: what will this do to my position? Does the dollar go up or go down? Should I buy or sell? It sounds callous because it is callous.

How society is affected and what the turmoil caused by the profligacy of governments does to people’s psyche is very often ignored. “One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is just a statistic” said Joseph Stalin who was responsible for vast numbers of deaths himself. “The show trials were a great success” says Garbo in 1939’s “Ninotchka”. “We now have fewer but better Russians”. The humor had stark truth underlying it. But each of those millions was a human being and had the same hopes and dreams as we all do.

In 1978, Hans Askenazy wrote a book called “Are We All Nazis?”. In it, he posited that people react in an entirely different way if given orders to do something that they know is inherently wrong but do not witness the effects of those orders. If the emotion is taken out of the equation and all you have to do is just push a button, you become desensitized.

The point is that if you are not connected to the human misery that ensues from bad governance or immoral orders, you cannot feel the same as one who actually experiences it or even empathize except on a superficial level. Obvious? Certainly, but I would be willing to bet that most people look at the protests in other countries without too much emotion or thought, offering a Seinfeld-type response: “that’s a shame” and move on. That distance provides some comfort but if you have relatives in Europe or still have parents or grandparents who lived through the Great Depression, you’ll get a sense from them of what’s going on now over there.

It does bear thinking about, if only because, if we are not careful, what is happening in Europe right now might be visited upon our shores and we may become part of the statistics ourselves, heaven forbid. The financial markets and news media concentrate on the politics and the mathematics of the catastrophe in Greece, Spain and the others but there is precious little about the misery that underlies the headlines. So, in a small attempt to redress that imbalance, let’s take a look at Greece.

The Greek government wants more time, up to two years, to be able to conform to the demands of the troika bankers. In the meantime, the populace goes through more and more hardships every day. And if the reaction is: that’s what you get for electing politicians who turned your country into a nanny state and it’s basically your own fault anyway, you should have paid your taxes, you might be excused – unless one of the people is a relative or a friend. Then it’s different. So, put yourself in their position and see what it’s like to live their life.

The riots and the protests are the end results of anger and frustration at government incompetence and mismanagement. Wages, pensions, benefits have all been slashed. Daily living has become existence, survival. Any thought of vacation as a relief from all the turmoil is long since gone. People are reducing expenses wherever they can, cutting out the middleman, buying produce from farmers directly rather than going to the supermarket, even sometimes resorting to barter instead of using money of which they have less and less. What money they do have is probably by now safely out of the banks and under the mattress or in a safety deposit box.

Soup kitchens are everywhere and people stand in line for hours waiting for handouts of food and vegetables. More and more of them are very well dressed. People are defaulting on loans and are being evicted from their homes. Many people, mainly pensioners, are openly begging on the streets. Urban drift is being reversed. Young people who moved to the city and off the farms to get good jobs are moving back to the country, back in with their parents, putting their dignity and pride in their pocket. Life in the country is not as exciting but it is less expensive.

Some who can’t or won’t move back have joined the exodus of young people moving north into Europe to look for work. Official unemployment is around 22.5% and those who are still lucky enough to work often strike or protest at further strictures. Mobility of labor is guaranteed in the EU, but other countries are hurting too. Those who can do so make the move north.

There is an increasing loss of self worth, an increase in self-loathing and humiliation that they can’t make a go of it. Those who can’t stand it anymore either resort to anti-depressant drugs or take their own life out of despair. Not wanting to be a burden to their family, they opt for the only way out that makes sense. Greece used to have one of lowest suicide rates in the world. Not anymore.

Last April, 77-year old Dimitris Christoulas blew his brains out in Syntagma Square across from the parliament building. His suicide note read: “I am not committing suicide, they (the government) are killing me. I see no other solution than this dignified end to my life so I don’t find myself fishing through garbage cans for sustenance”.

For those who succeed in killing themselves, it is a political statement. There are plenty more who attempt it and fail. You have to wonder too whether the increased number of fatal car crashes are another way of ending it all but at least you do get a Greek Orthodox church service and burial and the police are smart enough to write them up as traffic accidents. How desperate must life be that the only solution that makes any sense is topping yourself?

More grimly, racism is on the rise. Angry, bottle-wielding mobs, generally thought to be from the anti-immigrant far right Golden Dawn party, are turning on immigrants and asylum seekers who are just trying to get through the maze of paperwork in order to move on elsewhere within Europe. Looking for scapegoats or just someone to take out your frustrations on has become commonplace. Looting is on the rise and so is crime in general.

Americans have had to endure hardships in the last four years as unemployment remains stubbornly high. House prices have tanked and many have been foreclosed upon but it hasn’t yet gotten to the point of doing away with oneself though there are isolated cases to be sure. The human cost of mismanagement of Greek finances should be a warning bell and a wake-up call to everyone as we head into the election in November.

Last Thursday, the final read on second quarter GDP was released at a downwardly revised 1.3%. The dollar value of the nation’s GDP was $15,585,600,000. The national debt is $16.064 trillion and counting. Everything we produce is now not enough to pay for what we owe. That tells you all you need to know.