So should we bail out the Greeks then?
Or rather should we bail out the banks who've got themselves in up to their necks in bad debt, a lot of it owed by Greece?
Well I guess it's a bit like the question of whether you should give your pocket money to the bully who's dangling you over a railway bridge. In principle no, but in practise....
What's interesting I find though is how little is being said about the debt we owe Greece. This I can only put down to the tragic decline in the study of the Classics in our schools.
The Romans conquered the known world thanks to their classical education, and so before we sent out our sons and daughters to carve out an Empire we gave them a thorough grounding in Latin and Greek history. What else would a future District Commissioner in Utter Pradesh ever need?
An unintended blow back from this policy was that whenever things got a bit sticky at the bottom of the Balkans, we tended to side with the guys who spoke Greek.
It all started in 1821 when the Greek speakers, who'd carved out a nice role for themselves in the bureaucracy of the Ottoman Empire, launched one of their regular uprising and for once actually made a bit of progress. The revolt inspired Classically educated Brits and soon Romantics and demobbed officers from the Napoleonic Wars made their way over to the Peloponnese. Lord Byron went, and died shortly after arriving, and the rebel Greek Navy ended up being commanded by Lord Cochrane, a former Royal Navy officer and the model for Jack Aubrey from Master and Commander.Many of those who went to help though ended up a little disappointed to find that they weren't standing shoulder to shoulder with modern Leonidas's and instead of fighting to the last bullet, the rebels often as not didn't even fighting to the first bullet, and the war consisted quite often of just shouting insults from cover.
The climax of the war was equally bizarre. Worried that imperial rival Russia was going to gain from the insurrection a joint British and French fleet was sent to lend moral support to the Turks. Instead it ended up obliterating the Turkish fleet in a battle that was the last proper battle of wooden sailing ships.
An independent Greece then emerged as a fully fledged Balkan nation, although when they did a stock take they found a few things missing, including the Parthenon Marbles which had been given to Lord Elgin by the Turks just before they scarped.
As a Balkan nation though they part in the confusing series of wars that eventually triggered the First World War. Greece was a late arrival in the conflict and for most of the war did very little.
After the defeat in Gallipoli the British and Australian forces regrouped in Thessaloniki where they spent the next few years camped out in the sunshine in what must have been one of the easier posting of the war.
Greece then sent a delegation to the Versailles conference where they presented a grandiose vision of a Greater Greece which included a huge chunk of what is now Asiatic Turkey. That there were very few Greeks in these new areas, and many of them were lukewarm about the idea, was overlooked by the classically educated British and French leaders. They were committed to dismantling the defeated Ottoman Empire and thought they may as well give as many of the bits as they can to Greece, and so the nation emerged from the war twice as big as it went in.
The new country didn't last very long though, thanks to Kemel Ataturk and resurgent Turkish nationalism and Greece retreated back to its original borders. However just as it appeared that modern forces were now sculpting the former Classical world, history repeated itself and Greece soon faced the return of an ancient foe: Rome.
Mussolini and the Italian King didn't agree on many things, but they both shared a low opinion of the Greeks. The Italian army, woefully prepared for war, crossed was Adriatic only to be soundly thrashed by the underrated Greek army and just as in North Africa Hitler had to send the German army to bail out his fellow dictator.
Churchill meanwhile was as romantically attached to Greece as Byron had been and sent the Eight Army across from Africa to help. The intervention was a disaster and the British Army soon had to be rescued by the Royal Navy. Some, notably General von Manstein, have claimed that this diversion delayed Operation Barbarossa just enough to save Russia, but the evidence seems scanty.
Greece suffered far more under German and Italian occupation than it ever did under the Turks, and its a now nearly forgotten fact that the first shipment of food aid sent by Oxfam was to Greece, in defiance of the Allied blockade, although it didn't stop 100,000 people starving to death.
The Greeks themselves fought back, with the most effective resistance fighters being the Communists. As the Russians advanced the Greeks then fought themselves with the Germans as bemused onlookers. The Communists gained the upper hand and with the Red Army on the way it looked like Greece would join the rest of Eastern Europe in the Soviet sphere of influence.However Churchill hadn't given up yet and British troops landed once more, this time to keep the Communists down and Russians out. Indeed so keen was the west to save Greece for democracy that when a military dictatorship took power in 1967 we conveniently looked the other way.
When democracy was restored the way was open to join the European Economic Community, as it was then called. Greece was soon at the heart of the European community of nations, and that's where the problems started.
Once again Greece was the victim of it's friend's kindness. Instead of a left leaning Middle Eastern nation channelling the spirit of the ancient world, they saw in her a westernised democracy with a neoliberal market economy waiting to burst forth.
Waived into the the Eurozone despite some distinctly non-neoliberal domestic policies it took the Credit Crunch to reveal the ghastly mistake that had been made. Worse, rather than just letting the country go bankrupt, drop out and relaunch a devalued Drachma, which would allow them to offer cheap holidays and consumer goods and rebuild their economy, they are being forced to stay so that our banks won't go bankrupt.
So we've sent them romantic poets and taken their marbles, failed to save them from the Nazis but rescued them from communism, ignored their foray into military dictatorship and allowed them to blag their way into a club they can't afford.
You could say that the west has been pretty good friends to Greece, but they might well reply that with friends like us, who needs enemies?
