On Debt and Default (for Greece)

Let’s be more explicit about debt. The question of default is not, as presented in the media, about a struggle between interested parties like any other contract. The matter is not about lent money and interest all floating financially in the sea of products. Rather, it is about a relation to history, and about the sacrifice of the present to the continuum that leads smoothly from past into the future. The struggle is between, on the one side, those parties that want to maintain that continuum and maintain its invisibility, those who want to hush the waste of life in every instant for a progress crowned with the glory of death we call profit. On the other side is the scream of oppression and suffering that says that this cannot continue, that the unliveable present is not worth it, and in that moment recognises the injustice done to the past, to those who have already died, when that past becomes nothing but the brutal strait through which we are forced to travel. For the henchmen of the ECB and the Eurozone the question was never one of how we can live better, but merely who the next sacrificial victim would be. When they, on the other hand, are finally burnt by the people of Europe it will not be as a sacrifice: they will not be mere examples whose fate will presage our own, but the flames will glow in historical truth and freedom. Freude! Die schöne Götterfunken werden gezündet werden!