GUARDIAN– Deep inside the august halls of Athens University, the renowned political commentator Paschos Mandravelis will deliver a message this week that until very recently was lost on most Greeks.
His speech will focus on a single fact: that the country in the centre of the storm of Europe’s worst crisis since the creation of the common market, missed the biggest story ever – its own looming bankruptcy. “Everyone,” he says, “starting with the Greek media, was in an incredible state of denial.”
Last week escapism was no longer an option as Greece‘s debt drama claimed its first lives and the nation, teetering on the brink of economic collapse, erupted into violent protests over unprecedented austerity measures.
The deaths on Wednesday of three Greeks, killed in a fire set off by hooded youths throwing petrol bombs into the bank in which they worked, has been the wake-up call – one more shocking than ever thought – to ask questions Greeks would have preferred never to ask.
Yesterday, as tributes continued to pour in for the victims – a man and two women, all recent British university graduates who had shown up for work despite a general strike for fear of losing their jobs – they were asking: “How could it come to this?”
“Greece,” says Mandravelis, “is not only confronted with economic failure but a media failure and political failure, and that is what is so frightening.”
Continue reading about Greece’s Resistance.
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