Jeff--Saturday
I was planning on writing about the most recent
scandal/fakenews/witchhunt/revelation plaguing the US political scene, but as
my post doesn’t go up until midnight Friday EST, I feared it would be long
surpassed by another “breaking news” story in the few hours between now and
then.
So, I thought I’d write about something less chaotic. No, not the Greek debt owed to its European
creditors; that’s so fixed in concrete as to be boring—at least for the time
being, what with the Greek government once again about to cave-in amid its well
rehearsed smoke and mirrors show of protest.
No, what I’m talking about are Turkish-Greek relations. All
hell threatens to go off between them. Yes,
I know, so what else is new?
Answer: President
Erdogan. He’s making this big pitch to
become Turkey’s “supreme ruler” in a referendum called for April 16, and that
involves stoking the fires of nationalism to drive his campaign. Sound
familiar?
Turkey’s foreign minister and his Greek counterpart are
exchanging fresh barbs over longstanding territorial disputes and differences, and
asylum seekers who fled to Greece following Turkey’s failed coup provide daily red meat for Turkish
government rants.
In return, prognosticators in Greece are having a field day
extemporizing over what they expect to happen there, and political hawks are calling
for military preparedness as a demonstration of their country’s own nationalistic
pride—a sure fire distraction from the fertilizer load of domestic problems besetting
their nation (See Orwell, Animal Farm).
As tempting as it might be to wail away at a historically
vilified foreign neighbor for the sake of generating support for a domestic
agenda, what happens to that strategy when one side happens to land a punch? How
it plays out from there won’t likely turn on whether it was accidental or
intended, but on how blindly committed each side is to its own sabre rattling rhetoric.
 |
| Greece's Prime Minister Tsipras, and Turkey's President Erdogan |
And who suffers in the end should this perfect storm come to
pass? The same folks who always do…those
who already are.
Hey guys, wake up and smell the coffee, be it Turkish or
Greek you’re all cooking on the same fire…and each stand to get badly burned if
you’re not careful.
—Jeff
