Oh but the current generation of Germans has a moral responsibility to help the current generation of Greeks because Germany got debt forgiveness 60 years ago ???
At this point it is pretty clear that Greece can never pay off the debt which is just another way of saying that they should never have been lent the money in the first place. Write off the debt and vow to never lend the Greek state any money ever again. Both sides are at fault here.
Just that it will be doing better than if don't forgive its debt.
Greece doesn't have a modern history of military aggression. Germany did. What the Allies put in place was in their own interests.
The Allies didn't want to make that mistake twice (one could argue 3rd time). Hence they made sure that Germany [a] had a political system that was extremely balanced and stable (ironically much more than their own).
And [b] (most importantly of all), they made sure that they Germans had hope. Hope to be able to dig themselves out of what must have appeared to be almost a impossible mess at the beginning. Hope is like a virus. It starts small and becomes a self fulfilling cycle upwards (the reverse is also true).
That is what the Greece requires now. It needs to restructure its debt in order to take advantage of the quantitative easing policy of the ECB and low interest rates.
It also needs time to put its house in this order and it needs stability (politically and economically) to build itself back up.
The EU powers that be hates referendums. The people always vote that opposite to what they want. Welcome to democracy.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_military_junta_of_1967%E...
To quote, "he Allies also confiscated large amounts of German intellectual property (patents and copyrights, but also trademarks).[27] Beginning immediately after the German surrender and continuing for the next two years the US pursued a vigorous program to harvest all technological and scientific know-how as well as all patents in Germany"
Reference here, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_plans_for_German_indu...
If you do the research, the U.S. Leveraged a similar deal over the UK to obtain all patents royalty free as an incentive to enter WWII.
There may be some leverage that can be applied. These corporate and IP raids netted the U.S. hundreds of trillions of dollars.
I was first devastated when I first found this out. It reminded me that the line between the "goodies" and "baddies" was not so clear.
Germans are somewhat aware that the Soviet Union practically strip mined the industry in East Germany after the war but what the other Allies (and the US in particular) did is less widely known. Especially the fact that the original (pre-Marshall) plan was to convert Germany to a pre-industrial level (which would have been a death sentence for a large part of the population which would have been unable to sustain itself on agriculture alone) to avoid a repeat of the mobilization that enabled the Blitz.
Also, there was quite a bit of reparations going on after WW2. I'd wager that every German adult has heard stories from their grandparents about stealing supplies off those trains -- something that became so frequent the archbishop of Cologne (Cardinal Frings) absolved the practice and people began calling it "fringsen".
War means everybody loses -- even the "winners". There are no good guys, just various degrees of badness.
No. No one is saying that. People are saying that Germans should help Greece because it's a rational thing to do. No one, except complete idiots, is saying that they have moral obligation to do it. Here's the quote from OP:
> Nonsense! This had nothing to do with moral clarity; it was a rational political and economic decision
I would be very surprised if a person who's so invested in a situation would act intelligently and rationally about it.