Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Utopia Builders Set Up Boutiques to Sell Shoddy Product

A retort to Dr Peter McMahon's "Global neo-imperial Fantasies Come Unstuck".
By Con George-Kotzabasis


The utopia builders, a la McMahon, have set up their boutiques in the global market to sell their shoddy product. After the collapse of the historically misplaced Communist utopia, with its Gulag Archipelagos and Killing Fields, the Left's sorcerers apprentices are now concocting their new mantric utopia of "global governance'', to take the place of the displaced one. Two fundamental contradictions haunt your argument, and ultimately bury the phantoms of the ne-cons and of neo-imperialism that you raised in your piece. You state that "in the 1970's a new global system was emerging". Your phantoms however, the neo-cons, were only in power in 2000. By this time the system was already robust and on its course. The neo-cons were not fabricating a new version of it, as you claim, but were merely its new "managers". And in the aftermath of 9/11, they were also trying to protect it. That was the reason why they went to war, not oil.

The second fundamental flaw in your argument is, that while you claim that "human experiences are too diverse to bend to the logic of one homogeneous society... Or one global market", your panacea for the ills of "global neo-imperialism" is "global-scale governance". At the same time you concede that such "governance" will have "to bend to the logic of...One global market". But how will you put in place such governance upon such "diverse" non-homogeneous societies? Didn't the recent failure of the EU to unite in reference to the amendments of its constitution, which is, moreover, culturally homogeneous, teach you anything?

Your remedy of "global-scale governance", is intellectually unhinged and cannot be taken seriously. All you accomplish with your piece is to replace the "phantoms" of the neo-cons with your greater phantom of universal governance. By such intellectual credentials, Plato would never allow you to enter his Academy.

Friday, June 15, 2012

New Democracy under Strong Leadership of Samaras Will Win Elections on June 17

By Con George-Kotzabasis June 15

The survival of nations may sometimes depend on the life of one man. Edward Gibbon

It is inordinately difficult, even for a modern Tiresias, to predict the outcome of the Greek elections, especially when voters are actuated by their intense hopes and fears about the results of either the pro or anti-memorandum scenario that would affect so profoundly their future existence. However judging from the swift change of Syriza’s policy only few days before the voting from the hard position of denouncing the Memorandum to the soft position of solely re-negotiating the burdensome points of the Memorandum with the European leaders, which is no different from the position of New Democracy, Pasok, and the Democratic Left,  Syriza was forced to change its intransigent stand in annulling the Memorandum, as it was pronounced in its pre-electoral programme last week, as a result, I suspect, of an internal private poll that showed clearly that New Democracy was outdistancing by a wide margin Syriza in the opinion poll, thus compelling the latter to abandon its principle policy of annulling the Memorandum that apparently scared the electorate that such action would entail Greece’s exit from the Eurozone. Now Syriza sings its hosannas to re-negotiating the Memorandum and making a desperate attempt to join the chorus of reason from its previous dangerous position of denouncing it and taking Greece out of the European Union. But this reversal of policy is too late for Syriza and is exposing it also to the fraud that it attempted to perpetrate on the Greek people.

Antonis Samaras, the illustrious leader of New Democracy, in his sagacious move to form a Pro-European Patriotic Front that would anchor Greece within Europe while negotiating the shoals of the Memorandum that threatened the country’s sinking into everlasting debt and economic poverty, will be the justified victor of the election on June 17. The Tsipras phenomenon was always a flash in the pan and as soon as it was placed upon the burning coals of reality would be blackened and return back to its true colour that from the beginning was its natural intellectual and political shade.