by theluckycountry » Thu 11 Jan 2024, 04:27:10
That sort of activity happens a lot in the third world I am afraid, and Greece, in spite of it's international standing, is really just that nowadays. I attribute it to the lost empire syndrome. Egypt suffers from it, Italy too, Spain and Portugal to a degree. You go back far enough and you see that modern Iraq was once the Assyrian empire's homeland.
The further back in time the empire existed the less prosperous the modern nation appears to be, the less cohesive, the less the people strive. True many had a resurgence of prosperity and order in the 20th century, due to the flow on effects of cheap coal and oil, but now they have sunk back into relative obscurity having never achieved stable prosperity. Their militaries were strong (relatively) back in the middle of last century too but that's passed now as well.
The Aztec Empire was conquered by Spain, now it's Mexico, another second or third world dump. Why have these one magnificent empire lands never been able to get their shit together in the modern era? It's an interesting phenomena, I mean not one nation, not a single one comes to mind, aside from Israel and they are an outlier anyway, the people were driven off, they never inhabited the land like the Egyptians or Italians did through the millennia.
I suspect myself that it has to do with the cultures, the people's themselves. They suffer from this past-empire mentality, they grow up with the notion that they were once the rulers of the known world and having achieved such they can now rest on their laurels so to speak. They are lazy, they want to sit around all day sipping coffee and looking at the ruins of 2000 years ago, or 300 in the case of Spain. They just don't have the collective getup and go that many modern civilizations have. Canada, Australia, the US even, though now it's losing it I suspect. I mean a whole nation on pills and illicit drugs? The average younger person there is giving up hope it seems.
Once the decline sets in and becomes obvious, people lose their mojo. Why work hard, you'll only be taxed to death or buried under a mountain of regulation. What passes for an entrepreneur now is basically a just a huckster, a grifter milking the public purse. The same thing is happening in Australia, though we're a couple of decades behind. So in Greece you have a handful of hardworking farmers and tens of thousands that would rather just steal stuff. If you want to get looted though just go to Egypt.
après moi le déluge