However, I do have to make some comments about all this. Yes, SOPA/PIPA is a disaster, a significant free speech issue, and could affect the technological development of humanity. I’m all for protesting it. However – what’s more important, a website being taken down or people being tortured to death by your own government? What about the President of the United States claiming the authority to have any individual worldwide killed without any form of due process? What about indefinite detention without trial? Yes, it’s nasty that they can take down your site. But they have already given themselves the authority to break down your door, kidnap you from your home, fly you to another country, put you in a dark prison and torture you until you are dead, with no oversight, no chance of legal representation, and without any evidence being required. This has already happened to a significant number of people, almost all of whom have no connection to the mostly-invented bogeyman that is al-Qaeda. There are prisons (plural – it’s a lot more than just Guantanamo) right now where these things are happening, where innocent people are locked up, physically and psychologically damaged by torturers working – directly or indirectly – for our governments.

Furthermore: where do you think this legislation came from? Do you think it’s just a misunderstanding, something that happened because the politicians in charge don’t understand the internet? Of course not. This is yet another step in the long process of capital (you know, the 1%) asserting political power over our lives. It has to be fought, yes, but that fight is utterly meaningless if we don’t also fight the larger system behind these specific instances of internet censorship, which is also the same system behind the open wars in the Middle East, the secret wars in South America, the corporate crimes in Africa, the economic genocide in Europe, and many other global problems.

SOPA/PIPA may be defeated, but if that happens it will mostly be because large internet-based corporations opposed it. Do you really think any political party cares in the slightest about what you think? Obama has proven pretty conclusively that apart from PR, the Democrats and the Republicans are puppets for the same interests. And the same is true of the major parties in every other country, too – just look at the so-called Social Democrats in Greece. It’s unavoidable. We live in a system based on profit, and those who make the most profit have the most power, which they can use to increase their profits, giving them more power, and so on, until everything is in the hands of a tiny amount of people.

Do you think this is just random socialist ranting? Well, think again. All of this – wars, assassinations, censorship – will continue to happen. They will continue to get worse, in fact, as the system collapses and the elites find themselves forced to go to bigger and bigger extremes to hold on to their positions. So please fight SOPA/PIPA, but don’t stop there, because they’ll come back – and because things much worse than either are already here.

When I wrote yesterday that today I would be posting about future projects and all that, I had forgotten something: today was Verena’s grandfather’s 89th birthday, and we were supposed to go visit him and his wife. And we did, which means that I have gotten no work done at all and am now entirely too exhausted to write a Compendium entry.

I don’t really regret going, though. For one thing, both of them were very happy to see us. For some odd reason they seem to really like me, even though I’m a strange hairy foreigner. They’re a lot less formal and conservative than Verena’s other grandparents, and it’s a lot easier to talk to them, so hanging out with them is a lot less awkward than such situations tend to be. I guess I also feel that you should hang out with people while you can; I greatly regret not visiting my Greek grandmother, Eleni, before she died. I was in Germany and it was exams time and it wasn’t clear that she was going to die, but in retrospect… I should’ve gone. It’s not like I finished my damn studies anyway, and she would’ve been happy to see me.

That’s how you grow older, I guess. You don’t change, you just accumulate regrets.

Verena’s grandfather told us a number of fascinating stories from World War II today. We’d heard some of them before, but not all. Unlike some old people who just mechanically repeat the same stuff over and over, he’s genuinely telling the story, thinking about it, still wondering about why things were done this way and not that way. He told us about being at the Battle of Monte Cassino, about how the ground shook when the abbey was bombed. He still can’t believe the Allies did that when the Germans weren’t actually occupying it – in fact they had orders to stay away. He told us how the Germans removed all the treasures from the abbey and took them to safety to keep them from being destroyed, which was then reported as the Germans stealing the treasures. The soldiers were outraged by that.

He told us about being a prisoner of war in Africa, about the conflicts between American and French-Algerian troops. How the French were almost as badly off as the prisoners themselves. He was a cook there, cooking for the other prisoners, so many of his stories have to do with food. Like how the Americans were burning supplies because they were about to reach their expiration date, while everyone else was starving. This was then brought to their attention, and they gave the hungry German prisoners truckfuls of supplies – but then the French came and took them for themselves. And then, after someone complained about this, a group of really tough American soldiers showed up, gave the French soldiers a really bad beating and returned the supplies to the Germans.

Another bit that I thought remarkable is how much the SS were hated by the common soldiers. Always trying to solve everything with violence, behaving like bullies.

It’s strange, isn’t it? The way most movies and books portray the war, you’d think every German soldier was a Nazi. But as usual, the people who did the dying were just regular folks. They weren’t too happy about the war, but they thought there was no alternative. They were wrong, of course they were, and absolutely horrific things were done because of that, but we shouldn’t forget that in every war, the people on the ground are just people. Like you and me. Like the people fighting in Afghanistan. That you feel the camaraderie of shared suffering, that the other side does terrible things, that you are an essentially kind human being with no desire to kill, that you love your country… all of that doesn’t mean you’re on the right side. It may mean that there is no right side, except the side of humanity. There was no reason to bomb Monte Cassino. There was also no reason for soldiers to be there in the first place.

Until then, here’s a video I would like you to watch. I know it’s long, and I know it’s all about economics, but this is crucial information about the world we live in. And even if you disagree with it, it might still get you thinking.

Edit: So you want a better reason for why you should watch this? Jeez, people, whatever happened to curiosity? Just think of how many times a week you spend far more time on utter bullshit. Listening to a speech about economics will definitely be more valuable than that, right?

But let me say a few words anyway. The wonderfully bearded man in this video is Prof. David Harvey, a notable Marxist scholar and one of the best and clearest voices speaking out against capitalism today. And when I say “Marxist” please do not imagine some stereotypical fanatic who cannot see past his own dogma, as the media present anyone who thinks outside the box imposed by their owners. Harvey is a serious thinker who approaches economics scientifically; which, after all, is the point of Marxism. (OK, Marxism is a stupid word, as Marx himself also thought. But Harvey prominently uses Marx in his own work.) Thus Harvey’s arguments are hard to refute – they’re based on the mathematical instability of the system.

This video is just one of many you can find. I am particularly fond of it, however, because it addresses several issues that are rarely mentioned these days. Its demonstration of why capitalism cannot and does not work, while not as detailed as others Harvey has provided, contains many important facts about what’s going on in the world of finance that people simply aren’t aware of; it’s an economic critique, not a moral one, and one which is fairly complex, looking also at what countries like China are doing (and why that won’t work either). It genuinely exposes some of the fundamental mathematical/logical problems of the whole setup; it shows what capitalism does, and why, and makes it self-evident that this logic simply cannot be sustained.

As the title suggests, Harvey also speaks about the end of capitalism. This is particularly interesting because so few on the Left do anymore, and that’s disastrous. One of the biggest problems in the world right now, in my opinion, is that people simply cannot imagine that capitalism could come to an end and a different system could be created; we’ve been conditioned to think it’s impossible, as if capitalism had always existed. Which is, historically speaking, utterly absurd. Harvey addresses this peculiar belief. At the end he also spends a bit of time discussing what kind of system could replace capitalism, and how it might be organized. His suggestions on that matter are excellent and thought-provoking; like Marx, he doesn’t actually demonize capitalism, but believes a great deal can be learned from it.

If all of that wasn’t enough, David Harvey is also immensely likeable and funny, and listening to him is very pleasant. I could listen to David Harvey analyzing Das Kapital just to relax.

I’m serious when I say that you need to watch this. The media never provide us with a real critique of capitalism; sometimes, rarely, we hear someone speak out against one excess or another, but always as if it were an individual crime or mistake, something that can easily be fixed with a law or two. And the alternative we usually get is some kind of anti-modern technophobic bullshit about going and living in the wild, eating tofu and drinking homeopathic cocktails. Thus most people end up thinking that capitalism is immoral but unavoidable, the “only system that works.” But a proper critique shows us that it fundamentally does not; not because bankers are evil, but because of the economic processes that underlie it. And such a critique also allows people to start thinking about real change.

Now you have a vague summary, but you don’t have the actual contents, the actual arguments. You need those. So go watch the video.

(You can skip the introduction.)

I feel like the year was a failure; that feeling is surprisingly strong. It’s probably not entire accurate, however. Looking back, I do see that there was some interesting stuff:

• I made You Shall Know The Truth. It didn’t get as much attention as I would’ve liked, but I think it’s pretty good. I wish I hadn’t spent so much time working only on this one game, though, since that started us on a downward financial slide that was hard to stop.
• I made Alphaland (with Terry’s help). The game was quite successful, especially if you keep in mind that it’s a game about a small blue rectangle. Unfortunately this was the point where I realized that the limitations of Multimedia Fusion when it comes to making Flash games were more severe than I’d realized. That’s why several of my more interesting projects – Rise Like Lions and A Candle in the Dark – had to be postponed.
• Alphaland was later featured at Spielsalon, in one of the oldest museums in Europe. That was cool.
• I wrote a science fiction screenplay called Melinoe, of which I was very proud, and which got a very good response from Amazon Studios users, but which hasn’t even been nominated for anything on the site, let alone won. After getting so many positive comments and emails (more than most scripts on there), it was crushing not to even be given a chance.
• We made The Book of Living Magic. I still get a ton of mail about the game, so it’s obviously not a failure, but the near-impossibility of finding a sponsor was shocking. I did not see that coming, especially not after The Infinite Ocean did so well. The aggressively negative attitude of FlashGameLicense towards the game didn’t help its chances or my morale.
• I wrote a short story called Fuck Vampires. Not everyone liked it, but that doesn’t really matter. I know some people found it inspiring, and inspiration was what it was meant to provide. I’m perfectly content with it.
• Verena and I created a cooking show and produced the first episode. It seemed to go over well. Soon we’ll be putting up a small IndieGoGo campaign for it. (We don’t have the money for a website, and the show needs a website.)
• Two of my four articles for the Escapist were published in 2011: Second-Hand Elf and The Bolshevik in the Borderlands. They were fun to write (though the latter was also really hard) and the results were pleasing to me. I even got in touch with some very nice people because of them.
• I wrote a complete script for the as-yet untitled Nexus City Prequel. I can’t wait for the game to be finished and for people to get to know some of the characters in it.
• Verena and I created the Oneiropolis Compendium. I still haven’t managed to find a way of getting any attention for it, but I can certainly say it’s been popular with the regular readers of this site, and has kept us from starving.
• Verena published a novelette called Life Support. Sadly, due to the enormously long time we spent without an internet connection and because Verena had to spend ages making graphics for games and the Compendium, we haven’t managed to promote it enough. Still hoping to do that.
• On a less creative level, I very much enjoyed being interviewed for Matt Chat (1|2|3) and Electron Dance (1|2). Good questions make for good conversation.
• I did my best to maintain this blog and keep writing interesting entries/articles. I love the idea of this blog as not just a place to announce games or other projects, but as somewhere you can go to read interesting, thought-provoking or simply silly stuff about all manner of subjects. One of the better things I wrote this year was Every Night I Dream Of Home. Mostly because it’s just so painfully true.
• I learned how to use Stencyl, and almost finished two games: Catroidvania and Traitor. Let’s see how they do in 2012.
• Oh, and I wrote a children’s book that Verena illustrated, which will be published in Greece this year. Except I still need to revise the text and I have so little time. Argh…

That’s a pretty good list, isn’t it? Nevertheless, my memories of 2011 will not be pleasant ones. What I will remember most is that escalating sense of despair, the emotional highs of hopefulness followed by rapid plunges into disappointment, the poverty and the helplessness. The country I grew up in turned more and more into a fascist state openly ruled over by banks while my family, like most Greek families, found it harder and harder to survive the new policies of financial genocide. When I think of Greece, of how long and hard my parents worked to have even a semblance of dignity and safety, and how rapidly it’s all being taken away, my despair triples.

I’m not going to lie to you. I go into 2012 with a sense of trepidation. Not because of misunderstood facts about ancient Mesoamerican calendars, but because 2011 showed me just how little hard work really counts for – whether it’s my work or anyone else’s. Not that you can avoid it, but it doesn’t necessarily get you anywhere.

I also became very aware of how harmful stress is. I’ve been living in a pretty much constant state of anxiety for a long time now, and it’s showing. My work fell behind on several occasions because I got so sick. A massive insomnia problem isn’t helping, either. I know other people are worse off – one of my aunts died of cancer this year, and seeing a human being waste away like that shows you how fragile we are – but it has been a real problem.

Still. Trepidation or no trepidation, we’re not giving up. There are stories to tell and recipes to film. Let’s just hope that we find a bit of success this time around. Just enough to feel a little safer, to have a little breathing space. Then we can get started on the real work.

Then today I got really negative feedback about Traitor, a game that I thought was enormous fun, and I kind of broke down. I’ve worked so hard for so many years, sacrificed so much for my belief in making art, and I feel like I’m about to tumble down an abyss from which there is no coming back. I know we can make this, I know we can make games and movies and books and everything else… but we need a success. Anything. Something needs to take off, to make it big, give us some room to breathe. I feel like I’ve been working nonstop for years – and come to think of it, I have. When was the last time I had a free day? When was the last time I didn’t spend twelve hours a day in front of the computer? But I can’t afford to stop.

I’m trying not to lose faith. I know there are people who enjoy what we do, who would be sad if it went away.

There are plans. Lots of plans. More games to make, stories to tell, projects that might be successful. But it’s hard to look forward to all that, to say we can do this, when you’ve been at it for so long and by now you’re so poor you can’t buy your wife a Christmas present.

What’s keeping me going is imagination, the creative impulse. I have stories to tell. I feel that I am supposed to tell these stories. I feel that they matter. So the struggle goes on. Somehow. It has to.

Reason and Enlightenment had very little to do with any of that: he gladly spread lies about WMDs in Iraq, ranted about the “apocalytic weapons” of Iran, and perpetuated the myth of a global terror network. Christopher Hitchens was an enthusiastic supporter of some of the worst criminals of our time, a man who wrote with joy about the violent deaths of hundreds of thousands; that he could disguise his hatred and racism with terms like “Islamofascism” and various pseudo-intellectual discourses does not justify or excuse that.

Anyway, I was going to write that post, but Glenn Greenwald, without a question America’s best and most serious journalist, has already written a much better one: Christopher Hitchens and the protocol for public figure deaths. Go read it.

It begins like this:

Greece is the cradle of democracy, but, as the world saw this past week, a financial crisis is no time to put important questions to the people. Prime Minister George Papandreou’s proposed referendum on the country’s loan deal with the European Union, called off quickly after intense international opposition, illustrated that perfectly. Plato and Aristotle would have approved of dropping the referendum. They didn’t like democracy of the direct kind. Neither trusted the people that much.

It’s a peculiar opening sentence, one that initially made me wonder whether it is meant ironically or not. Surely it had to be? Surely the anti-democratic mindset implied, while held by many in the elites of the world, cannot be something that one actually dares admit to? “No time to put important questions to the people” – there was a time not too long ago when anyone would have been booed for speaking in such a paternalistic, dismissive way of the right of the people to govern themselves. And people would have booed from both sides of the political spectrum.

I would also like to point out that Plato and Aristotle, whose opinions are presented here without context or meaningful details, do not constitute the totality of Ancient Greek thought. Thank you.

Sinking deeper into the gravest economic crisis in its postwar history, Greece is no nearer to finding an exit from its woes, despite the vote of confidence that Papandreou narrowly managed to win Friday night. A toxic mix of anxiety and fear hangs in the air in Athens.

Papandreou is gone by now, replaced by a new, unelected government of “national unity” that includes several outright fascists (in the Hitler-was-a-good-man, Let’s-kill-foreigners, Jews-are-evil sense), but I suppose the rest still applies: Greece is mired in crisis and nowhere near an exit. The measures imposed by the European Union and the IMF, instead of helping, have caused the crisis to deepen – as they have done in every single country where they have ever been applied.

The ordeal shows that living up to lofty idealism is never easy.

Now one wonders – is the author speaking of the lofty idealism of the International Monetary Fund? The idealism of believing that austerity measures can take a county out of crisis when this idea has lost ground even with conservative, pro-capitalist economists because of the very simple fact that it has never – let me repeat this, never – worked?

Modern Greeks know that well, for we are, in many ways, the imperfect reflection of an ideal that the West imagined for itself.

This would appear to be the text’s central thesis, one which I hope raises alarm bells in anyone who has spent some time studying racism and colonial discourses. In a single sentence, Greece is robbed of any kind of real identity, of cultural selfhood, and becomes nothing more than a Western fantasy. We’ll go into detail about this in a bit.

When the Greek crisis began two years ago, a popular German magazine printed an image of Aphrodite of Milo on its cover. She was depicted gesturing crudely to German readers, with the headline: “The fraudster in the euro family.” The story led to protests in the streets of Athens. In the article, modern Greeks were described as indolent sloths, cheats and liars, masters of corruption, unworthy descendents of their glorious Hellenic past. The irony of the article, and of the angry Greek protests against it, was that modern Greece has little in common with Pericles or Plato. If anything, it is a failed German project.

Here we see a paragraph that contains the seeds of its own destruction. While the author is trying to imply that what made the Greek people so angry was the implication that they aren’t “proper” Greeks (because German tabloids get to define what is proper culture), it glosses over the fact that Greeks were described as, in its own words “indolent sloths, cheats and liars, masters of corruption.” Would you not get upset at such an accusation? Would you not get very upset at such an accusation if you lived in a poor country with next to no social security, in which people work extremely hard and still have a quality of life much lower than that of countries like Germany?

There’s more to it than that, though. The cultural aspect does come into play, because the Focus article claimed that Greece has no modern culture and that the Greeks cling to the glories of the ancients to whom they are not related. (The racist undercurrent of “they do not have the same blood, they are not true Greeks” is one that crops up again and again. The implication seems to be that the modern Greeks have interbred with other people, especially those nasty Turks, and are now impure. It is, of course, never stated in these words, but if one does not believe in racist pseudo-science, why bring it up at all?) This dismissal of modern Greek culture – of which there is a great deal – is very important, and another thing to keep in mind as we go on.

Now we get a very compressed history of modern Greece, which I will not quote in its entirety:

The year was 1832, and Greece had just won its independence from the Ottoman Empire. The “Big Powers” of the time — Britain, France and Russia — duly appointed a Bavarian prince as Greece’s first king. His name was Otto. He arrived in his new kingdom with an entourage of German architects, engineers, doctors and soldiers — and set out to reconfigure the country to the romantic ideal of the times. [...] Otto saw to it that modern Greece lived up to that romantic image. Athens, at that time a small hamlet of a few goatherds, was inaugurated as the new national capital. The architects from Munich designed and built a royal palace, an academy, a library, a university and all the beautiful neoclassical edifices that contemporary Greek anarchists adorn with graffiti. [...] Modern Greece was thus invented as a backdrop to contemporary European art and imagination, a historical precursor of many Disneylands to come.

This version of Greek history is peculiar, in that it seems to occur solely from the top down, and to start with Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire. Yes, the article will get to the difference between the rulers and the people, but you cannot simply assert that Greece was “invented” as a European fantasy when Greece already existed – with a strong, vibrant culture, including poetry and literature. And while the influence of the Great (not Big) Powers was no doubt massive, the picture Zarkadakis paints is one that utterly infantilizes the Greek people, as if the War of Independence had happened without them and as if no politicians or intellectuals had emerged from it. It is precisely this kind of image of history – uncomplicated, lacking in local detail, to be seen only as it affects us – that is the real fantasy of the West.

It is also quite telling that Zarkadakis refers to Greece as a kind of Disneyland – a shockingly offensive image to those who know the country’s long history of poverty and starvation. A couple of stylized buildings do not define a country – besides, any tourist knows that Greece does not have the infrastructure of Disneyland.

Equally telling is the reference to anarchists – because graffiti is a uniquely Greek problem, and one that will clearly contribute to the downfall of the country.

Despite the Bavarian soldiers who escorted him, King Otto was eventually expelled by a coup. But the foundations of historical misunderstanding had been laid, to haunt Greece and its relations with itself and other European nations forever.

And how exactly could this happen? Did the Greeks suddenly change their minds, losing their history and culture as it existed at that point? Did they suddenly start believing what they were told by some inbred Bavarian whom they hated enough to kick out of the country?

No matter what Otto may have imagined, the truth was that my real forefathers, the brave people who started fighting for their freedom against the Turks in 1821, had not been in suspended animation for 2,000 years. Although their bonds with the land, the ruined temples, the living Greek language, the names and the myths were strong and rich, they were not walking around in white cloaks wearing laurels on their heads.

This is actually true. Though one does wonder about the portrayal of Otto as a kind, wonderful royal who just thought the Greeks were better than they are. But wait a second – if the Greeks had remained Greek but also greatly evolved and changed, how did this historical misunderstanding come to be?

They were Christian orthodox, conservative and fiercely antagonistic toward their governing institutions.

Because the Enlightenment is just something that happened to other people? What about, you know, the Modern Greek Enlightenment? The heroes of that time, like Rigas Feraios, were inspired by the French Revolution. Some of their religious ideas may seem old-fashioned now, and though conservatism surely existed and much can be criticized about these individuals, the sentence quoted paints a highly misleading portrait of the Greek population and its culture. As for “fiercely antagonistic toward their governing institutions” – a sentence clearly designed to make the reader think of the modern day – what exactly is strange about this antagonism when their governing institutions consisted first of the old imperial power that had conquered them, then of a monarchy imposed by the new imperial powers?

In other words, they were an embarrassment to all those folks in Berlin, Paris and London who expected resurrected philosophers sacrificing to Zeus.

Of course, had they actually sacrificed to Zeus, the Greeks would have been branded heretics and barbarians, but never mind that. Do note, however, how the lack of “resurrected philosophers” fits so well with the assertion that Greece had no culture, when in fact a great upsurge of cultural activity had begun in Greece even before independence.

The profound gap between the ancient and the modern had to be bridged somehow, in order to satisfy the romantic expectations that Europe had of Greece. So a historical narrative was put together claiming uninterrupted continuity with the ancient past. With time, this narrative became the central dogma of Greek national policy and identity.

Now we’re getting into dangerous territory, because this is a half-truth, and we all know that that’s the worst kind of lie. It is certainly true that Greek nationalists have constructed a narrative that attempts to present an ethnic purity that does not exist – not because Greece is impure, but because this kind of “purity” is simply a myth invented at the birth of the modern nation. Not a Greek myth, mind you, but one that every single European country has claimed for itself in the process of turning interconnected but not identical groups into a political unit. This kind of discourse is dangerous and foolish, and also rather sad – for example, the city I come from, Thessaloniki, has a rich transcultural history which it would be a great loss to forget.

But Zarkadakis is wrong on two levels. First of all, the conservative narrative of Greek history, as fictional as it is, doesn’t claim quite as much of a connection to ancient Greece as he says it does. Why? Because modern Greek conservatives are Christians, and Christianity pretty much destroyed ancient Greek culture. The nationalists may go on and on about Alexander the Great, but there’s always an uncomfortable (and at times hilarious) divide between their supposed admiration of the Greek (pagan!) past and their devotion to the Greek Orthodox Church.

More importantly, there is uninterrupted continuity with the ancient past. Zarkadakis said so himself! The Greeks “had not been in suspended animation for 2,000 years. Although their bonds with the land, the ruined temples, the living Greek language, the names and the myths were strong and rich, they were not walking around in white cloaks wearing laurels on their heads.” Greek language and culture changed and evolved, but stayed recognizably Greek (a fact noted by linguists and historians for decades now). It would be absurd to claim that the modern Greeks are identical with the ancient Greeks, because that would mean that time had not passed. It has. But there is no break – there couldn’t be, or the language would not have survived as it did. Greece was conquered, not eradicated or destroyed. It was influenced greatly by other cultures – but then again, that is nothing new or unique.

In fact – though that deserves a longer exploration elsewhere – I would argue that it is precisely the ability of Greek culture to learn from others and improve that which is learned that is Greece’s greatest strength. The alphabet was not invented by the Greeks, but it was the Greeks who took it and turned it into the highly flexible tool that it is today. Similarily, the Greek philosophers did not exist in a vacuum, but were influenced by older, non-Greek theological traditions – but they took what they learned there and turned Greece into a centre of thought unlike anything the world had seen. There is much to admire there, but very little that is good for nationalism. Invention has always been a transcultural process, and it was precisely the openness of the Greeks to other people’s ideas (even religions) that led to their glory.

Anyway, Zarkadakis goes on:

As a kid growing up in Greece in the 1970s, I had to learn not one, but three Greek languages. First, it was the demotic parlance of everyday life, the living words people exchanged at the marketplaces and in the streets. But at school, we were taught something different: It was called “katharevousa” — “cleansed” — a language designed by 19th-century intellectuals to purify demotic from the cornucopia of borrowed Turkish, Slavic and Latin words.

Katharevousa was a disaster, but the divide between the “official” language and the language of the people was actually the expression of a much, much older problem going back centuries; and the article forgets to mention that this nonsense is no longer taught in schools.

Finally, we had to study ancient Greek, the language of our classical ancestors, the heroes of Marathon and Thermopylae. We were supposed to learn “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” in the original, by heart, in case some time machine transported us back to Homeric times.

I’ve been ambivalent about the teaching of Ancient Greek in schools. (To clarify, I went to the German School of Thessaloniki, so I didn’t have Ancient Greek lessons.) I used to think it was simply a dead language and something that pupils shouldn’t be tortured with, but I cannot deny the value of understanding the roots of a language, especially when that language has been so very influential in the development of other languages. Furthermore, though I wouldn’t be opposed to having a time machine, such a device is not required to read the foundational texts of Western culture in their original language. All that is required is being able to speak that language; something which is a lot to learn when you already speak a language that is quite similar to it. It may be right or it may be wrong to teach Ancient Greek, and if it is taught it will certainly require a better educational system to do it properly, but it is not half as ludicrous to teach it as Zarkadakis claims it is.

As it happened, most of us managed to learn none of the three, ending up mixing them in one grammatically anarchic jargon that communicated mostly the confusion of our age.

By “most of us” I must assume that the writer is referring to his close circle of intellectually-challenged friends, who were mocked by everyone else for failing to speak understandable Greek. The implication that most Greeks cannot even speak regular modern Greek surely is the result of the writer having difficulty understanding them due to his Frankenstein’s monster of a linguistic background; the only other explanations are either that he is a half-wit or that he is deliberately portraying the Greek people as uncultured peasants.

Like its language, Greek society suffers from an equal number of divisions. First, there is the political class that, for almost two centuries now, has shown great subservience to foreign masters. They discovered early that claiming to be Euripides’ relative goes a long way toward procuring handsome loans and diplomatic sympathies.

This almost sounds reasonable; “great subservience to foreign masters” is as good a description as any. But then the second sentence turns it all around – the problem isn’t that the Greek ruling class has often acted as representative of foreign powers intent on exploiting Greece, but it has tricked those poor, trusting Great Powers into being exploited by Greece! “Claiming to be Euripides’ relative” – that’s the level of stereotyping absurdity Zarkadakis descends to in order to portray the Greeks as the swindling thieves so often imagined by racists. And are we really naive enough to believe that countries give loans on that basis? That’s without considering the interconnected nature of loans and the development of European economies in the past two centuries. No, all we get from Zarkadakis is the filthy, short, balding man who speaks with a funny accent and tries to swindle poor Europeans out of their hard-earned money.

 The geopolitical position of Greece, controlling shipping routes from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, also helps. No wonder that modern Greece never became truly independent. It has always been much too easy to be dependent on foreign power and capital.

Again a half-truth that sounds almost reasonable. Yes, the geopolitical position of Greece is an important part of the puzzle, because it means it’s a key strategic location that everyone wants to have. But Zarkadakis turns it around to say that this had made things too easy. Too easy! That’s like saying “All that oil in Iraq also helps. No wonder Iraq never became truly independent. It has always been much too easy to be dependent on foreign power and capital.” The geopolitical position of Greece has made it a target for conquest and control, a pawn in conflicts between the Great Powers (greatly affecting, for example, the Greek Civil War and the military dictatorship of 1967-1974).

Although there have been periods of vigorous economic development and industrial renaissance, our economic history is one of successive defaults.

And how is this unique? How is this tied to the Greek character, if such a thing could be said to exist, and not to the patterns of uncontrolled industrial growth and their effects on a country that was exceedingly poor to begin with? Greece may be in crisis right now, but so is the rest of the economic system. And I’m sure you remember the Great Depression, and the myriad of crashes and lows in the international economy before and since?

Becoming a member of the European Union and of the euro zone, only to amass a titanic debt, has been the latest chapter in this modern odyssey.

And Greece is the only country with debt? And how does the debt have anything to do with the Greek people, who did not benefit from it in any palpable way? (Again, the Greek population is forced to work hard and long for few benefits.) And let’s not go into the details of how much money is actually owed (no-one wants to tell), where that money went (bank bailouts, German and French weapons manufacturers), or how much money Germany owes Greece (and I’m not talking about unpaid reparations, but about forced loans).

Second, the intellectuals, mostly foreign-educated and well traveled, dream of a truly westernized Greece through some miracle of economic and social science.

Foreign-educated and well travelled? What does that mean? Perhaps he’s referring to the fact that the austerity policies (which began long, long before the current crisis) have utterly destroyed the Greek university system, forcing most young people who want to study to go abroad? Perhaps by well travelled he means that it’s so hard to survive as an academic or intellectual of any kind in Greece that people have gone all over the place to work?

And what does “a truly westernized Greece” mean? I find the term “westernized” to be suspicious and more than a little reminiscent of colonial discourses. By choosing such a term he implicitly turns Greeks into the Oriental Other, who should be turned into proper civilized people but are almost too inherently childish for this to work. But maybe, just maybe, we can “kill the Greek and save the man.”

When the loan referendum was announced, like a thunderbolt out of a clear sky, most of them opposed it. Greece had to show that it belonged to the European family of nations, whatever that may mean. Rebellion was not to be tolerated, lest the country was kicked out of the euro, the symbol of Greek westernization.

Who are these intellectuals, anyway? Who is he talking about? Not everyone opposed the referendum for the same reasons. Many, for example, felt that it was simply a sham, a publicity manoeuvre designed to blame the Greek people for decisions that already been made. (Why was there no referendum when this whole mess began in the first place?) Despite everything, Greece still has a genuine intellectual world, and it contains people from all political and philosophical directions. While I do believe that there is a desire to be cosmopolitan and belong to Europe that manifests itself as subservience to the European Union (which is not the same as Europe at all), I think his references to intellectuals are rather confusing.

In the end, the intellectuals and politicians — with a lot of persuasion from angry European leaders and technocrats — had the referendum quashed. Besides, the invention of fantastical modern Greece demanded that its people, the third division of society, also remained imaginary.

This is… quite true, actually.

Naturally, they are real as anything. They despise the loss of their sovereignty, particularly to the Germans, as well as the bitter medicine prescribed by their European brethren for their “rescue.” Austerity enforced by unelected officials from the troika — the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank — is perceived not as a remedy but as a punishment, an alien and distasteful concept to the orthodox Greeks whose core value is mercy.

No, it’s not perceived as a punishment. It is seen as an act of economic conquest and colonial exploitation, which is what it is. And seeing it as a remedy would be absurd in the face of hard, empirical evidence: austerity measures intensify a crisis that was caused by austerity measures in the first place. (If taxes for the rich hadn’t been taken further and further down, and spent on corporate advertising projects like the Olympic Games or measures like the bank bailouts, Greece would have a lot of spare cash. Greece still has more income than costs per year.)

As for “the orthodox Greeks whose core value is mercy” – what a pile of Orientalist, foolish-noble-savage tosh. Survival and a decent quality of life, those are their core values – the same core values everyone else has, too. The Greeks don’t want mercy, they want to stop being exploited by international elites. They want to get rid of their government and do what the people of Iceland did: tell the markets to get lost, because democracy and quality of life are more important than the giant casino that is the modern banking system. Iceland, incidentally, is seen as now recovering from its problems, even by the IMF – because it refused to bow to the IMF and did the exact opposite of what is supposedly a remedy.

Burdened with the improbable weight of forefathers who supposedly laid the foundations of Western civilization, driven by strong cultural undercurrents that undermine the authority of the state, they long for the realization of a dream promised by their political class: that Greece can somehow be something different from the rest of the world, a utopia where mortals can live like Olympians.

See, Greek people aren’t even conscious of being opposed to the state. Decades of political thought, of organization and resistance, don’t exist. It’s a “strong cultural undercurrent” – Greeks are so childish that they are essentially only acting out of instinct, and only a few, like Mr. Zarkadakis here, can rise above the unthinking masses. That’s why people like him should be in charge – they are the grown-ups!

(I wonder if Zarkadakis would have said the same about this regrettable undercurrent that undermines the authority of the state when the Greeks were fighting the fascist invaders during World War II. Then it was seen as heroism and a dedication to freedom, but now it’s an infantile reflex.)

Wait, let’s have that last bit again:

they long for the realization of a dream promised by their political class: that Greece can somehow be something different from the rest of the world, a utopia where mortals can live like Olympians.

So the desire for fair wages, for having a roof over one’s head, for not being beaten and abused by the police, is the desire for utopia? The desire for a functioning healthcare system, for an educational system that is not sacrificed to the whims of a few bankers, is a dream of living like Olympians?

In fact, people aren’t even protesting for something as “radical” as, say, getting the same pay as Germans when they have to pay the same prices. Or working as few hours as the Germans, or having as many holidays as the Germans, or – to pick another nation – going into retirement as early as the French? (The international media consistently claim that the Greeks are better off in all these sectors, but the statistics show that the exact opposite is true. And by statistics I mean the statistics of capitalist organizations like Eurostat and the OECD, not numbers published in some left-wing blog.) All that the Greeks are protesting against is having what little they’ve got being taken away from them to enrich the very people who caused the economic crisis.

The Greek financial crisis is a crisis of identity as much as anything else. Unless the people redefine themselves, this could become the perfect catastrophe: a country designed as a romantic theme park two centuries ago, propped up with loans ever since, and unable to adjust to the crude realities of 21st-century globalization.

This sentence is so far removed from the real Greece, with its dusty country roads, its falling-apart infrastructure, its chaotic cities and its rapidly falling quality of life (the center of Athens has been declared an emergency zone by medical organizations) that it simply boggles the mind. Even the great tourist attractions, the Acropolis and the Agora and all those ancient places, are far from being anything like a romantic theme park. I was on the Acropolis just a couple of months ago, as were millions of tourists. I doubt any of them saw a theme park, there or in any other part of Athens. Unless they went to an actual theme park, of course.

This fantasy Greece, so unrelated to actual facts, reveals more about the author than about the actual country. It reveals a great deal about his political sympathies, his economic allegiances, and his position in society and culture. It is extremely telling that he mentions Greek resistance to authority, but fails to mention the US-supported dictatorship that terrorized the country for seven years. It is extremely telling that he mentions ancient Greek culture, but neglects to mention modern Greek culture – neglects or rather chooses not to mention giants like Mikis Theodorakis, Odysseas Elytis, Giorgos Seferis; the thriving Greek musical scene which includes everything from powerful and political hip-hop to some of the most accomplished and internationally renowned classical composers of our time, the long and complex and very much alive poetic tradition, and all the other artforms that are both thoroughly Greek and thoroughly modern. Because, you see, Greek culture doesn’t fawn over ancient history – some crazy right-wingers do, sure, but where don’t they do that? Modern Greek art concerns itself almost not at all with the ancients, but with the themes that have shaped modern Greece: exile, war, poverty, resistance, immigration; and of course love and humour in the face of the difficulties of life. That’s not to say that there isn’t a ton of painfully idiotic kitsch; but Greece has, in the last two centuries, produced a remarkable amount of extraordinary art.

No, I’m not going to say it’s the only country to do so. That would be silly. But what is rare, though certainly not unique, about all this art is the degree to which it is connected to the people. This is especially true of the music, much of which treats themes that are highly relevant today, much of which was written in opposition to dictatorship; and much of which is known to everyone. I don’t want to overly romanticize this, or pretend that every Greek person is born singing hymns to freedom. But there’s something there, something powerful in the culture of the people, not of the elite few. The most renowned of all the composers, Mikis Theodorakis, perhaps one of the greatest musical geniuses ever to walk the earth, wrote music that people know; that the people know. That kind of overlap between the classical, the epic, the traditional and the spirit of common people, is rarely seen. And it’s more than just this one composer. It is also not accidental that Theodorakis, whose opposition to the military regime inspired people so profoundly, has spoken out eloquently against the new economic dictatorship.

But all that – the idea that there is a modern Greece, with its own culture and its own ideas, its history of struggles informed by but not defined by ancient Greece, is completely ignored by Zarkadakis, in favour of a patronizing and simplistic explanation based on a Western fantasy of identity.

There’s a great deal wrong with Greek society and culture – the power of the military and the church, corruption, nationalism – but a longing for utopia has little to do with it. The Greeks are angry, and the Greeks want change – but what you’ll hear in every corner of the country, from the streets to the beaches to the slums, is people talking about politics. They disagree with each other, and many of their ideas are probably terribly wrong, but they’re talking about the real world, the world of today, the world that they have to deal with it. They’re talking about market stability and odious debt and the dangers of deregulation, not Euripides or Plato or Aristotle.

By infantilising the Greek population, Zarkadakis is trying to distract us from the systemic problems faced by the modern world, blaming instead the uncivilized Other, the noble savages who will either have to adapt to harsh modern realities (i.e. destroy themselves) or cling to their old-fashioned ideas (i.e. be destroyed). It’s sad, he’s telling us, but that’s simply the march of civilization – it’s inevitable. I think we’ve heard the same ideas before, and they were just as wrong then as they are now.

It is precisely this sort of thinking that is the problem. Instead of forcing us to confront the complex reality of a fatally outdated economic system coupled with a thoroughly corrupt political system, making us think about why the whole world is in crisis, about how extremely unpopular parties can cling to power, how a supposedly democratic system fails again and again to represent the will of the people, or how people were so often duped into supporting a system that exploited them, this kind of thinking shifts the blame from practical reality to vague notions of cultural inferiority. And of course it makes sure it is the population, the supposedly unthinking masses, that is really at fault – and thus perfectly deserves having to pay for the reckless gambling of a tiny plutocracy. But thank God there’s a tiny percentage of wise, enlightened upper-class people like Mr. Zarkadakis, able to see all this from above, able to act as middlemen for those who are making a killing helping the Greeks help themselves.

Mr. Zarkadakis, incidentally, is the Editor-in-Chief of the Greek version of Focus, the tabloid masquerading as a popular science magazine, and thus intimately related to the people who published the racist article he mentions in the beginning. Thus it should come as no surprise that he defends this mindset: it is the mindset of the class of people he belongs to, the lapdogs of the elite eager to prove themselves to their masters. But he is right about one thing: the Greek people do need to redefine themselves. They need to redefine themselves as not including people like him. Because the problem isn’t the Germans or the French or the Turks: it’s you, dear sir.

Since I do want to post something interesting, however, I thought I’d give you a link to this interview with the Gnome of Gnome’s Lair, and point out the following bit:

Actually, this might come as a shock to you, but I’d love to not have to dabble in anything political. I’d rather be creative, serene, content and not think about distressing matters, but sadly this cannot be. Nobody is allowed -or has the luxury- to ignore the simple fact that mankind is poor, starving, dying and going downhill. We sadly don’t have the choice of ignoring everyone else and that’s why I too feel obliged to engage in politics; to engage, that is, in the affairs of humanity, for I truly believe we will either create a better world together or become cannon fodder.

This is something that is also true about myself, and I really can’t stress that enough. I’m not interested in politics per se; I am only interested in politics to help create a world where we don’t have to worry about politics. Or at least politics in the modern sense; I do believe that everyone should be interested in the affairs of the polis, the community we are all inevitably part of, and I strongly believe that artists must not lose touch with that. But I don’t give a rat’s arse about politicians, parties, slogans, the “excitement” of demonstrations or any of that crap. I’m not opposed to the system as a lifestyle choice, I have no desire to glorify outsiderdom. Neither am I looking for Utopia. I just think it’s entirely obvious that the system we’ve got is irrational and destructive, because it’s fucking up the world and the people in it, and a much better system is far from impossible to create.

I just want to tell stories. I don’t want to be rich or powerful or even famous. If I could live a comfortable, simple life in a place I love (i.e. somewhere near the sea, preferably in Chalkidiki), doing the things I love, with the people I love, I would want for nothing. That may seem like an obvious statement, but it’s not; that’s not the life that the ultra-rich have, the supposed best the system has to offer. I don’t need twenty villas, I just need a small house with a view of the sea. I don’t need a billion dollars, I just need enough to buy good food and the occasional book/game/movie. And fame? I want my work to be famous, yes, but if the condition for living in a better world was that all art be published anonymously, I’d go for it. Fame and money, to the degree that I do pursue them (and there’s no denying that I am, in some sense, trying to achieve those), are necessary to me only in the current system, because they are the only way for me to be able to work on bigger projects, to have enough money to be able to do things my way.

But if we lived in a different system – one, say, where the means of production were owned by workers, and a basic quality of life was provided for all, where no-one was ultra-rich but no-one was starving, where profit (i.e. greed) was not the basis of the economy? I would have no need for any of this. There’s nothing more wonderful for an artist than not having to worry, not having to compromise. I can imagine nothing more awesome than sitting on the beach and working, writing a novel a year, making games unlike anything you’ve seen before, and just putting them out there for people to enjoy.

I take great pleasure in seeing people enjoy my work: a comment like “this game is amazing!” makes my day. But when people tell me “you have an amazing mind” or “you are so great”… well, I know it’s kindly meant, and I appreciate it, but the truth is I’m just a dude. I go to the toilet, I drool in my sleep, I fart, I make silly faces, I do petty things, I get scared of the world. I like to believe that I’m good at what I do, and I’m happy when people think so, but the real joy of having created something is not when it boosts one’s ego, it’s when people love the creation itself.

We can never create a perfect world. Sadness, disappointment and frustration will always be with us. Even in the best system, people will hurt each other, do stupid things. Artists will fail to create the great work they wanted to make. Accidents will happen, lives will be lost. Tragedy is part of existence. But this bullshit we’re currently experiencing? A tiny percentage of the world’s population owning almost everything, with a political system designed only to defend these absurd property relations with increasing amounts of violence, and an economic system that is a thinly-disguised casino with rules that have no relation to reality and which cannot but eventually implode? Unending wars to make the rich richer, to keep everything under the control of an oligarchic few? We don’t need that shit, and we shouldn’t tolerate it.

Thus the politics. But if I never had to worry about this crap again, I’d be a happy man.

Links, thoughts, stuff:

• Occupy the first person plural. If you only read one thing on this list, read this one. An excellent piece of writing.
• Anonymous: An ignorant assault on Shakespeare. The WSWS rarely has good film reviews, but if there is one thing that sets my teeth on edge, it’s bullshit like the Shakespeare “authorship question.” And no, I haven’t seen the movie, and you might say I’m strossing, but I don’t think that’s the case here. I can tell you that any movie that claims the Holocaust didn’t happen is crap, and the same goes for any movie that tries to push this long-disproven elitist rubbish on people.
• We attended a presentation of the new Robert Harris book, The Fear Index, featuring the man himself. He was charming and nice and signed Verena’s copy of Imperium.
• I’m currently reading China Miéville’s Iron Council. After Perdido Street Station impressed me with some of its ideas but massively pissed me off with its plot and structure,  this one is a pleasant surprise. I’m not done yet, so there’s still room for a fuckup, but everything I’ve read so far has been much more enjoyable and meaningful.
• I recently read The Alphabet by David Sacks (a book known under a variety of titles). Parts of it were quite interesting, but there was entirely too much repetition, to a large degree because the book originally was a series of newspaper articles. It also contained a number of annoying factual errors, mostly about the pronunciation of words in languages I happen to speak, which unfortunately had the effect of making me question what else might be wrong. Still, if you know nothing about the subject matter (and I happen to know a fair amount, given my general interests and my studies, so I’m probably not the book’s intended audience), you’ll probably find that the story of one of our most important inventions is quite a fascinating one.
• I can’t wait to have a proper internet connection again. This situation has really crippled our ability to work.
• Anne McCaffrey died. I don’t want to be mean about her. I think her books are astoundingly terrible, and sexist to boot. I don’t know what to say without sounding condescending. Verena read her books as a child and thus got into reading, so I can’t say the woman didn’t do any good in the world; inspiring people to read is a great thing. But I still think her writing is terrible.
• The Gnome’s Lair review of Fate of the World is interesting, and mentions something that I think deserves a detailed analysis: the way the climate change situation is often discussed only within the parameters of the current economic and political system, when in fact it is that very system which is causing the problem, or at least making it near-impossible to fix. It’s kind of like wondering how we could get the Nazis to treat the Jews better. By not electing those fuckers, that’s how.
• It’s getting more and more uncomfortable to be Greek in Germany these days. Newspapers raving about “the Greeks,” people casually repeating the most absurd nonsense, and of course everyone having to comment on the situation the moment they realize you’re Greek, as if you were personally responsible for destroying Germany. The other day we were shopping and someone had put up an anti-Greece poster on the wall next to his stall. I never fail to be shocked by how willing people are to be fed the latest scapegoat. Especially in Germany, where they should really know better.
• And in Greece itself, as well as in Italy, we now don’t even need the appearance of democracy anymore, we just switch governments when the markets tell us to. As a friend of mine recently put it to me, “I hate the markets because they made me sympathize with Berlusconi.” Do we really have to keep taking this crap so a few douchebags can keep paying for cocaine and hookers? Our ecocomic system isn’t just problematic, it’s a fucking joke. Does anyone even know what these “markets” are? What do they have to do with the reality of work and production? Nothing, absolutely nothing. We’re shutting down schools to pay for a casino.
• Something more positive from Greece: Greek adventure gaming site Adventure Advocate published an article about me. That doesn’t really counterbalance the whole, you know, destruction of the country by an idiotic international financial elite thing, but it did make me smile, so hey. I was particularly fascinated by the part where my work is categorized into two “phases” (the first being darker and more lonely, the second more open, more satirical and generally more social and colourful) – it may even be true (though I don’t see my work like that), but it’s extremely odd to be talked about in this way. Not bad-odd, just odd.
• Is it just me or does Skyrim have some of the worst voice acting ever recorded? I read various journalists claiming that it all sounded so authentic, so Scandinavian, but… err, what? Is this like that thing where English-speaking people really, really don’t get what German is supposed to sound like? (If you actually speak German, going to the movies can be a painful experience. X-Men: First Class caused a mixture of shock and giggling in the cinema when Kevin Bacon spoke… eh, “German.”) Granted, I’ve only seen the first 30-40 minutes of the game, since my PC is going to hell and I can’t get any 3D game to work without hanging, and no I haven’t bought Skyrim (I’m waiting for the GOTY edition)… but I have seen quite a few NPCs speak, and there is nothing authentic about that shit. In fact, their accents sound half Russian, half Austrian, their pronunciation of names is utterly American, and their children apparently all went to a boarding school in the US. It is, sadly, hilarious. How can a big-budget title like this be so amateurish? And let’s not even mention the writing, which made me groan before the intro was even over. What happened to the people who made something as brilliant as Morrowind?
• I hope you’re enjoying The Oneiropolis Compendium. We certainly are, and while it’s not making us rich, it’s keeping us from starving (literally). If you enjoy the entries, it would be awesome if you could retweet them, share them with friends who might like them, rate them up on StumbleUpon, and generally use the potential of social media to spread the word. Thanks.

We’ve been meaning to get a new internet connection for a while now – we were paying for phone and internet separately, and it was fairly expensive compared to a lot of newer offers. So we, being poor (not we-can’t-afford-to-go-to-Bali poor, but how-will-we-afford-food-next-week poor), thought it might be a good idea to switch providers. Especially given the problems we’ve had on occasion with both companies.

But as it turns out, everyone just wants to rip you off. Oh, sure, the money per month is less awful than before. But then there’s a fee for setting up the account (which is utter bullshit), a fee for the router (you used to get them for free with your account; now you don’t even get to keep them), a fee for sending you the router and assorted stuff (way more money than it actually costs to send that stuff)… and by the end you’re paying nearly 100€ extra, which means that you’re not really better off than before unless you use the new account for a really long time.

It’s not that I’m not willing to pay for good service. I am. (Though I do believe that in a democratic society everyone should have free access to the internet.) But I’m willing to pay a reasonable amount based on the actual work performed. These companies could lower their prices quite a bit and still make enough money to pay all their employees – and have something extra on the side. But no. Every single cent that can be had must be had, even if means strangling people’s financial reserves until they can no longer buy anything. And then they wonder where their markets went and why everything is collapsing around their ears.

This was originally going to be my Major Project Update post, but right now I just don’t have the strength.