Greece News Overload

In spite of being saturated with news on Greece I would like to add a comment to bring some realistic perspective to certain opinions voiced over the last few days. Opinions in my modest view extremist:

Slovakia's finance minister talked of Greeks reaping what they sowed in their "Greek spring". It was a comparison of facility. The Arab world had attempted to throw of the yoke of dictatorship and oppression, which was not the case in Greece, theirs was one of poor government and widespread corruption. There was no torture and death, the days of the "colonels" were long gone.

Certain commentators likened the Greek acceptance to EU demands as another Versailles, of course there was not twenty million dead, or great swaths of Europe devastated by war. It was a plain old fashioned bankruptcy arrangement where the debtor was put under the tutelage of the court.

It was a result of the refusal or the incapacity of a country to reform, policies of appeasing every demand for more; deferring tough decisions with a short-term solutions, namely burdening the country with more unsustainable debt, in the vague hope the problem would go away. Were the Greeks profligate? Yes, but no more than their fellow member countries in the EU including France, Italy and the UK, whose decision making process dodged the real issues and whose debt burdens were perhaps the greatest in history during peace time.

The vociferous British press led a sustained campaign against the Eurozone and the EU in general; to find a comparable outpouring of vitriol it would have been necessary to go back of English pamphleteers lampooned Napoleon, when his armies occupied large swaths of Europe and his puppets, including his own family members, were thrust onto the thrones of Europe including those of Italy, Holland, Spain and Westphalia.

Napoleon declared: "I wished to found a European system, a European Code of Laws, a European judiciary: there would be but one people in Europe." The ideas was noble but not the means. In 2015, Europe's talked wrangling through the night to find a compromise, as they had been doing for sixty years.

Had Europe come of age, could those fools who stood on the sidelines crying for disunion and strife, the little Englanders of UKIP, Podemos, the Front National, the PVV of Geert Wilders and others be held in check, if not the dogs of war and strife would be unleashed and the consequences terrible.