I have found the Greek financial crisis endlessly fascinating over the last five years. The main reason I can’t get enough of it is that unlike American political scandals, all of the important parts of the Greek drama are hidden. What we see from the performers is their reaction to those important actions and we are left to guess what is going on behind the screen.

After all, the Greeks have no money and they owe a massive amount of money relative to what they can possibly raise over the next ten years. Even if they stated auctioning off islands and national treasures, they are never paying off their debts. We finally learned that they will never be able to pay the interest on those debts. There’s some other reason Europe is spending countless hours pretending to disentangle an “impossible” knot.

Reading this post on ZH this morning, I think I may now know the answer. The European Project is all about reducing cultural and national identity administrative distinctions. Being an Italian simply means living in a place that used to be a country called Italy. If you are a Bantu who floated over last week, granted EU citizenship and now reside in Milan, you are an Italian!

Here we have the Greek stubbornly acting like Greeks by voting out politicians who go along with the European program. They voted out one main party for another and when that failed they voted out the main parties altogether. Syriza, despite its Marxist trappings, won on an explicit appeal to Greek patriotism. The Greeks even went so far as to vote in huge numbers against the EU proposal in last week’s plebiscite.

The result, as that Zero Hedge piece points out, is the Greek parliament voting in favor of the same deal that was rejected last week by the people. Talk about the ultimate in humiliation. If you are a Greek who voted for Syriza and against this plan, you have to feel like a fool. The people in charge are laughing at you. All you did with your silly voting is waste the ruler’s time and for that you will suffer.

And that has been the point all along. It’s not the money. It’s the humiliation. The Greeks have been cast in a German snuff film for the titillation of German technocrats and as a warning to everyone now living under the German yoke. You either goose step to the tune being played in Brussels or end up like Greece.

In the last century, Marxism relied on personal humiliation to break the will of people. The rulers would require the people to say ridiculous things in public about the wonderfulness of the regime and it’s animating theodicies. Children would be made to sing party songs and officials would be required to participate in official charades. It was all intended to humiliate the people. It is hard to rise up in revolt after you have been made to toady to the state in front of your peers.

There was also the forced confession and the struggle sessions. Forced confessions were how individual heresies were made into collective ones. They turned a natural virtue – empathy – into a vice. How could one feel sorry for a suffering human who had gone against the revolution? It was intended to atomize the citizen, cutting off his loyalties to his fellows and replacing it with loyalty to the state.

The struggle session worked similarly. The heretic would be forced to confront their own apostasies in such a way that altered them emotionally. Everything about them, right down to their core, was challenged and questioned. Once they could no longer trust themselves, they could only trust their masters in the party.

Ultimately, that is what has happened in Greece. It is one long struggle session. Like the forced confessions and show trials the Soviets were so fond of, this was intended not just for the Greeks, but the rest of Europe. The Greek Finance Minister said it was to warn the French, about being French. It was certainly a warning to the Brits and others who have patriotic parties making noises about Europe.

If you are a Greek citizen, how can you have any faith in your Greek democracy? Why would you bother with it? You now see that voting is just a charade. The people making the decisions are in Berlin and Brussels and they speak German. Those are the people in charge, not those guys lobbying for your vote. Comrade, why are you struggling against the tide of history?

As an aside, if you ever thought about what Europe would have been like if the Nazis had won, take a look at today’s Europe. Eventually Hitler would have died, probably assassinated, and been replaced by technocrats like Albert Speer. The Germans love technocrats more than they love scat films. By now, rule by street thug would have given way to rule by lemon-pussed technocrats.