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A comment on Greece. Parent comment

Re:Greece by gizi on Sunday July 05, 2015 @06:57AM (#9833153)
I actually sympathize with the Tsipras guy. He took on an impossible job and in my opinion he is actually making the best of it. You see, Greece has to default. We all know that. All that is needed now, is a sufficient number of face-saving gestures that will allow everybody to come out of this heads up high. Angela Merkel is grumbling and fumbling in the back, but she can be talked in to accepting a new deal, on the condition that the deal is both complicated and ambiguous enough, that she can sell it as a great victory back home. Problem solved.
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Re:Greece by huhtenberg on Sunday July 05, 2015 @07:23AM (#9833192)
> he is actually making the best of it

Please tell me you were making a joke.

Trying to collect WW2 "debt" from Germany? Using "insulted dignity" as an argument in financial negotiations? Deliberately setting up the referendum after the deadline and then "pleading" for extension? Really? He is pulling all the stops, granted, but they are nothing short of sleazy and obnoxious. If EU are to cave in, it would basically mean that EU is susceptible to blatant manipulation. So they won't.

The only way out of this mess is for the referendum to resolve with Yes, for Tsipras to step down and his replacement to agree to whatever the last EU proposal was. Tsipras tried the unorthodox approach and it didn't work, not much left he can do now but to leave.

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Re:Greece by elorant on Sunday July 05, 2015 @08:14AM (#9833285)
There are two kinds of debt claims relating to WWII. One is war reparations. We didn’t received any from Germany and chances are we never will. I assume you have no idea to the extent of damages done by Germans in Greece during the war. They destroyed 80% of our infrastructure. Besides Poland, Greece suffered the most damages during the war. But given that all that happened 70 years ago we should bury the hatchets and stop making claims.

The second debt relates to an official loan that Hitler took in gold from our central bank. It is documented and is considered a state loan. We have every fucking right to claim it. It is somewhere between 8 and 12 billion Euros by today standards.

By the way, back in 1954 the Greek government agreed to write off a big part of the German debt owed to us [1]. Those are state loans completely independent to war reparations. So while we did it for them they deny it to us. And we did it while our economy was in a far worse state than German economy is today.

The problem we have with Germans is that they’re ungrateful pricks.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Agreement_on_German_Ext...

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Re:Greece by MagnumOpus on Monday July 06, 2015 @04:08AM (#9837545)
> war reparations. We didn’t received any from Germany and chances are we never will

Incorrect. West Germany paid 115 million Deutschmarks to Greek victims of Nazi crimes in 1960 (a lot more than the $45 million reparations that were demanded by the 1947 Paris Peace Treaty), while victims of the forced labour camps were also compensated individually.

Shame on you for spreading bald faced lies.

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Re:Greece by elorant on Tuesday July 07, 2015 @05:23AM (#9844347)
The unconvenient truth that none of you fuckers wants to admit:

http://www.truth-out.org/speakout/item/24456-the-math-of-mas...

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Re:Greece by gizi on Sunday July 05, 2015 @08:55AM (#9833376)
Concerning Greece paying up, you have no choice: they can't. Read my lips: They have no money. The EU proposal was simply not realistic. Any proposal that contains the idea that Greece would be paying up, is a dead-end, non-starter.

Concerning Greece remaining in the EU and the Euro, you do have a choice. It would be short-sighted to expel Greece. You see, everybody just has to learn their lesson. In the future, don't let your commercial banks buy too much Greek debt paper, because you will end up paying instead. It takes two to tango. There's no point in blaming just one side of the equation. The other side is responsible too.

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Re:Greece by gaius on Sunday July 05, 2015 @09:18AM (#9833436)
They have no money

Greece doesn't sure. But the Greeks do. That is at the very heart of this situation.

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Re:Greece by kartan on Sunday July 05, 2015 @04:35PM (#9834820)
Have you read the article before posting?
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