Politics

We’re in trouble.

Victor Davis Hanson’s brief synopsis below also affects Constantinople and may help explain why it is so anxious to direct the American Church.

The Corner

At the present rate, Turkey has about as much business in NATO as Greece does in the EU. Both countries seem out of place in their respective organizations; both envy and resent northern Europe and the United States, and seek their attention through petulance; and both seem to traffic daily in conspiracy theories about going to war against each other.

The problem with both the EU and NATO is that, while there is always much gala celebration about who gets in and under what particular conditions, there is almost no attention given to the circumstances under which a member gets out of either organization. That will change in the next few years, given southern European debt, growing Islamization, and the apparent planned financial and military regression of the West.

In the meantime, we should pay attention to a growing concern in the southeastern Mediterranean: A bankrupt Greece has alienated its patrons in northern Europe, has alienated the U.S. through years of anti-American rhetoric, has little or no financial resources, and will be facing cutbacks in its military — and a newly assertive Turkey is carving out a position of influence in the region as the real, and far more serious, representative of Islamic government, perhaps in the fashion of the old Ottomans.

London Telegraph

The attack on an Athens bank that left three dead stirred memories of the blood-spattered years of Greek civil war in the 1940s.

When 44-year-old Marie-Therese Iatrou, who lives in a comfortable suburb outside Athens, spoke this week to her mother, Renna Nezos, she detected a note of panic in the 78-year-old’s voice.

“I want to come and live with you outside the city,” said Mrs Nezos, whose childhood home was occupied by the Nazis and who has vivid memories of the bloodshed of the civil war that followed. “I’ve seen this before.”

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The sovereign debt of the Socialist Republic of Greece is 12% of its GDP. By comparison the sovereign debt of the United States of America is 10% of its GDP. If left uncorrected, America will be Greece within the next five years.