By Antonis Karakousis
Mr. Tsipras’ emerging political plan is old-fashioned and simplistic in conception.
It developed over 1,000 years ago in the depths of Mesopotamia and is rooted in the absolute dualism of the Manichaeans, who attempted to explain the world as an eternal battle between light and darkness, good and evil, and spirit and matter.
Let us not fool ourselves. The PM’s plan is Manichaean, deeply divisive and absolutely passé.
He is trying to bunch together everyone and everything, to incorporate all his potential opponents in the black camp [or front] of evil, so that he can emerge as a super-hero, defender of the good and protector of the poor and week. For him, there are no shades or differentiations, nor policies in between, but only enemies and opponents.
On the one hand he places the Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Evangelos Venizelos, Stavros Theodorakis, the neo-liberal right, and all the representatives of the “old” and “bankrupt political system” – and along with them businessmen Marinakis and Alafouzos, SEV [Greek industrialists], multinationals, and all possible expressions of the “oligarchy of wealth, corruption, and big interests”.
On the other side he places himself (Tsipras), minister Nikos Pappas, government spokesman Tzanakopoulos, Thanasis [head of his press office], along with “the old and new social fighters, movements, and the masses of poor and vulnerable who want a new world that is bright, just, equally developed, and without inequalities and privileges”.
That is the simplistic, Manichaean dualism that Mr. Tsipras is trying to rebuild in order to persuade citizens to vote for him again.
The problem is that this time there are indisputable experiences that show the world is more complex than the divisive “us or them”.
It has been proven during his three years in power that the crisis was more complex than he acknowledged or imagined, and that it does not obey his illusions or “self-deceptions”.
It was shown that this “us” was not enough to exit the crisis. “Us” became “them”. The annunciations of “light” became identified with the “darkness” of previous governments. “The supposed “left-wing good” became coordinated with the dread “neo-liberal evil”.
In the end, the PM himself cynically accepted and defended all that he cursed and denied.
Unfortunately for the government, the ways of the world are not explained by simplistic antitheses.
Economies have evolved. Societies have changed. People have made progress. Freedom of speech has been won, and freedom of the press is indisputable.
For those reasons, it will fail once again.
