Death Wish 6: Tsipras, Greek Financial Suicide Co-Pilot

Hitch a ride with the infantile Tsipras.

Andreas Lubitz, the suicidal Germanwings co-pilot who crashed an Airbus A320 into the French Alps, has understandably gone down in infamy for his actions. Suicide is bad enough from the perspective of any number of major world religions, but taking another 149 lives with you is much, much worse. I was reminded of the Lubitz episode when Greece's amateur-grade pinko of a "leader," Alexis Tsipras, engaged in financial suicide that took the entire Greek nation to an unknown, likely morbid, fate.

You see, like Lubitz practicing how to plunge a jetliner to its grave, Tsipras had premeditated financial suicide, taking 11 million people along for the ride to oblivion. Readers of my generation should be familiar with the Charles Bronson action franchise Death Wish that ran from the 1970s to the 1990s. Let's just say the latter sequels were not any good...but Death Wish 6: Tsipras, Greek Financial Suicide Co-Pilot would be the worst of the lot. In this 2015 remake, Tsipras plunges the Eurozone into turmoil out of his Narcissist-Leninist convictions to speed the demise of capitalism.

What evidence do I offer that Tsipras' suicide act--pretending a referendum was a "democratic" choice even it was to be held after financial lifelines are cut--was premeditated? I offer you two things. First, Greek negotiators thought they were talking in good faith with the nation's creditors when Tsipras pulled a "gotcha" on everyone--including them:

No one was more surprised by Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s call for a referendum than his team of negotiators in Brussels. Shortly before midnight on Friday in the Belgian capital, the Greeks and representatives of the European Union and International Monetary Fund, tucked away in the EU Commission’s Charlemagne building, learned via Twitter that their efforts were in vain, according to an EU official. It was the first they’d heard about it. They soon left the room, their attempts to thrash out a compromise in tatters.

Second, Tsipras ignored his so-called "finance minister," self-styled erratic Marxist Yanis Varoufakis, over imposing capital controls on the Greek people. Said Varoufakis:

Capital controls within a monetary union are a contradiction in terms. The Greek government opposes the very concept.

Yeah, whatever. The upshot is that Tsipras had no intention of concluding an agreement with Greece's creditors anyway--the Greek negotiators were props. Even the leftist agitator Varoufakis was only there for show. While we don't know when Tsipras became convinced of his death wish any more than Lubitz did, that he had one is certain.

Reading the concluding text of the Communist Manifesto, Tsipras' methods are perfectly understandable in hindsight as he attempts to make the ruling classes tremble. He may not singlehandedly destroy the Eurozone, but he certainly will try his darndest to do so even if he damns the whole Greek nation to oblivion:

The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried out under more advanced conditions of European civilisation, and with a much more developed proletariat, than that of England was in the seventeenth, and of France in the eighteenth century, and because the bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution.

In short, the Communists [e.g., Syriza--ed.] everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things. In all these movements they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time. Finally, they labour everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries.

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win [my emphasis]. 

Proletariat of all countries, unite, and all that.

UPDATE 1: I obviously agree with Chris Giles of the FT that Tsipras is getting what he deserves.

UPDATE 2: Here is a more sympathetic view of Tsipras despite costing Greece billions with his antics.