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Comment by oaiey | Hacker News Reader

Be sorry for the Ukrainians. They suffer.

The rest of the Eurozone will deal with the stuff. We always have. It's not the first crisis.

I can remember what the Eurozone, as the Commission, Central Bank and IMF did to countries after the European sovereign debt crisis.

There was a complete lack of solidarity, which precipitated a humanitarian crisis in countries like Greece.

The idea of the Eurozone as something akin to a nation state is a myth.

> There was a complete lack of solidarity

You seem to remember things that are arguably untrue, I wonder why. The EU, ECB and IMF spent something like €300 billions for loans at extremely low interest rates (€30,000 for each Greek citizen) to keep Greece afloat and prevent it from going down in the way that Lebanon or other places outside the EU's aegis did more recently. And that despite the fact that Greek officials conspired to lie about debt/GDP numbers to get into the Eurozone, immediately broke Eurozone guidelines about deficits and debts to start fiscal giveaways, and after the crisis broke every promise about raising cash through privatisations.

> to keep Greece afloat and prevent it from going down in the way that Lebanon or other places outside the EU's aegis did more recently

No, they did it to keep the EU banking system afloat, which was exposed to Greek debt.

They also wanted Greece to remain in the Euro, rather than returning to the drachma and admitting they couldn't square the circle of a shared currency without shared fiscal policy. Greece in the Euro vs Lebanon is a false dichotomy.

The humanitarian crisis in Greece was caused by Greeks, not by a lack of Eurozone solidarity. And in humanitarian terms it wasn't even much of a crisis. No one starved to death.

The austerity measures imposed by the EU Troika increased preventable mortality in Greece.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/francescoppola/2018/08/31/the-t...

At the time, the German taxpayer rightly said "Why should I help the innocent citizens of Greece, when they can retire before me?"

EU solidarity was not possible, as this would have meant the Germans having some say in cleaning up Greek corruption and/or equalising things like retirement age, in return for fiscal stimulus from the German taxpayer.

Of course this can't happen under the EU, and will arguably never happen. So the only route is austerity.

You know you can be sorry for more than one group of people at once, right?

Self-neglect of the EU for “good causes” outside the EU is a well-established pattern with the media and political elites and also in significant parts of the financially comfortable middle class.

In the end, for them, poverty and additional difficulties in the lower classes are a good trade-off for silencing political rivals, feeding the military complex and most of all, feeling good about themselves.

As the old saying goes, never let a crisis go to waste.

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