The Eurozone’s Pyrrhic victory over Greece | ROAR Magazine
▻http://roarmag.org/2015/08/eurozone-third-bailout-greece-democracy
Since then, the speed and scale of Tsipras’ climbdown have been astonishing. The character assassination of SYRIZA MPs who voted NO to the bailout deal last month, and the large police mobilization against anti-austerity activists who came out to protest the decision, are just some of the most visible indicators that the Greek Prime Minister intends to discipline domestic opposition to further austerity in the same way that his European counterparts disciplined him and his left-led government over the past 5 months of failed negotiations.
Indeed, it seems that Tsipras and his inner circle of SYRIZA “pragmatists” do not appear content to go down in history as passive puppets for the creditor powers; they are already asserting themselves as the aggressive enforcers of the same disastrous austerity mantra they once so vigorously opposed, even if they continue to exult that they “do not believe” in the measures. While Tsipras reinvents himself as a popular leader of the center, the sense of disillusionment within Greece’s radical circles has become palpable.
Some left “intellectuals” — both inside Greece and abroad — still try to somehow spin this farcical outcome into some kind of revolutionary Disney tale. Slavoj Žižek, for one, is already passing off Tsipras’ capitulation as “a patient guerrilla war against financial occupation.” Such proclamations are sadly divorced from reality. As SYRIZA MP Costas Lapavitsas put it, efforts to buy time in this context simply work for the enemy: “Sometimes reality is simply what it appears to be” — a defeat — “and you don’t have to look beyond the surface.”