Many of EU & IMF bureaucrats genuinely believed that they were helping the Greek economy recover while they were actually engaged in destroying it.
And no the Greeks destroyed their own economy though systematic hard and soft corruption, knowingly hiding irregularities, unwillingness to make any necessary reforms, etc. etc..
The IMF's 'dogma' operates under the assumption that there are conscientious, reasonable and rational actors on the other side of the loan.
One might argue that it is this assumption that needs to be revisited ... though what some lament as 'austerity' (required by lenders) to others simply is 'being responsible with the massive loan we are about to take'.
If you are assigning moral faults, then please do so for the banks too who made their loans knowing the facts & assuming that they would be bailed out by EU if things went bad.
A more rational thing to do would have been to force the banks to grant Greece a debt haircut, waiving off 50% of the loans, while helping Greece restructure its economy in a realistic manner.
Instead, many people especially at the EU saw the Greek economic problems as a moral failure of all the Greek people for which all of them, including pensioners, must be punished while safely bailing out the banks that originally lent. Somehow, it is unacceptable to blame the banks.
I doubt this. The ECB and EU have not ever done this, and thinking through it just for a minute means that this is highly unlikely. I can't fathom why anyone would actually think this is going to happen with any degree of certainty. But I get the impetus that 'way back in the 2000's' that people might have 'felt this way'.
Also - there's a lot of fault still on the side of the Greeks in this case.
It’s happened before in history and even has a name: debt bondage.
It is not done with malice.
The IMF/WB believe that nations that have basic infrastructure, basic forms of democracy, low corruption and relatively open markets ... will be successfull. This is neither malicious nor entirely naive.
It's pragmatically naive when you consider the leader of some nation may take a 10% cut off the loan, hire his buddies to 'build the dam that never gets built' and then of course you have a nation in debt ... but those debts are not advantageous to the West at all, so the conspiracy theories are wrong.
Now - where there is actual malice is when a large, Western industrial conglomerate might win a big contract and so they influence, bribe, fake data - and then get the contract to 'totally overbuild' some kind of capacity leaving a nation with way more than they need. That's malice, but it's definitely not the IMF/WB or lending nations that win there.