The world has a short memory and a selective one. Things are never as straightforward as they seem. Today Greece is treated as an economic pariah that cannot control its borrowing and to whom no sane person would lend money. Germany is treated as paragon of economic virtue in which we should repose our confidence.
It seems so perfectly normal but is actually quite odd from the historical perspective of the past one hundred years.
In 1918 Germany lost the Second World War and was forced to pay huge reparations to the allies. It did not pay them. Eventually those reparations and other international debt of Germany were written off. In 1945 German debt was written off and the end of the Second World War. In effect in the past one hundred years Germany defaulted on its international obligations twice.
In April 1941 Germany invaded Greece and captured it by the end of May. The Germans took the Greek Treasury’s gold (as damages for the cost of the invasion) – today worth many billions of Euros – and have never repaid it.
Of course the Germans will not want to repay the gold because to do so would create a historical precedent for Germany and no doubt all the other invaded nations would be lining up for repayment of what was confiscated from them.
The Greeks, while by no means faultless, are not financially reckless as the world claims. Rather they have to an extent been victims. When some nations can borrow Euros at 2% interest and relend those Euros to Greece at 5%, with a guarantee that the Greeks will pay by the very institution that made the loan at 2%, then something is seriously systemically wrong with the world’s financial system.
Of course nations should pay their debts or else if they cannot pay simply default. But we should not claim that those nations that are economically successful are more virtuous than those that are economically unsuccessful, any more than we should regard a wealthy man as more virtuous than a poor one.
Filed under: climate change Tagged: | confiscation of greek gold by germany, german debt default, german reparations, Greek debt
Adam
just found something related you and others might find interesting reading, I don’t agree 100% with what he is saying, but it sums up what is going on today with the debt crisis and the banks and what is possibly coming.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=27188
In a hundred years and more the one thing that is common is the corruption offered by the worlds banking elite! It’s no more than a cartel that deliberately and systematically defrauds the majority of the world’s population. When it suits them they even send in their goon squad to do their dirty work, i.e. the UN and the military, waging illegal wars to further it’s corrupt plans to control everything and extract even more money from the rest of us! The reason Germany was allowed to default on it’s financial obligations after the wars is simple, it was sponsored by the corrupt bankers in the first place and thus it follows that they would never have to yield it’s ill gotten gains. When you have all of the major politicians in your pocket, then you effectively have control of the world and in turn rise above the law.
The majority of people are blind to this fact! Even though they moan about the bail outs for the banks after they poisoned the world’s economy with the derivitives scam. The politicians have enforced austerity measures upon us, whilst they funnel more corrupt money back into the banking system. None of this happening by accident, it’s all part of their plan, a plan which includes the systematic deconstruction of the American and European economies. The federal reserve is a private bank! Whose policy of quantative easing is no more than a scam to milk the Americans of trillions of dollars, in a bid to strangle any hope of recovery and plunge it into an impossible debt situation, thus making it vulnerable and ripe to collapse. The banking elite are moving their money out of the states and into China, India, Brazil and any other country ripe for exploitation, Egypt and Libya spring to mind. Greece is just the first of the many vulnerable countries to witness the financial implosion caused by the elite. This plan has been in place for many years and will continue, until the rest of us wake up and oust the corrupt from our societies.
Great up to date foresight Adam,
And we do indeed forget that it’s all been done before, back in 1864 the biggest ever silver load was discoved at the Humboldt, with this amount of physical metals in circulation it would mean that the country would be out of debt from the paper IOU’s being pushed at the time.
What Greece has been given today is akin to the consolidatary loan where one puts all their debts into yet another loan with a 50 percent discount and then bump up the limit even further.
Back in 1864 the privately owned BOE sent an envoy with a 100 thousand in gold to bribe all the polliticians of the day to demonetise Silver to control the moneies already in circulation, it worked and the same cartel are still holding the whip today.
Back to Greece, these poor people are at the mercy of the same private banks and have’nt a hope of paying off their debt with olive oil and we now see wholesale hostile take overs of sovrein countries main assets.
I predict that when Greece finally fails a brand new oil pipeline will then be allowed to flow through it with oil from Iran fairly soon.
This system will all change when the majority of energy has been withdrawn and redirected just like the credit debt within society that has been withdrawn of late to create a dought from nowhere, on the back of money that’s not worth the paper it’s not written upon.
Banks are too big to fail but whole countries must fail and without a country the people fail to see that.
“One can rob a bank with a gun but you can also rob the world with a bank”.
These people and those that hedged all the bets with the honest hard folks physical labour should now all be in their own vaults locked up with all of our gold as their food and never let free.