"The German Menace"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-kuttner/the-german-menace_b_7922376.html?utm_hp_ref=politics

To give you the tone of the article:
The EU was created to expand democracy, boost economic growth, and contain Germany within a democratic whole. Instead, it is destroying democracy, crushing growth, and leaving Germany's most churlish impulses to rule Europe.

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"Thanks to this fortuitous trilogy of unusual expansionist policies, Germany not only recovered; it became Europe's economic powerhouse. And after reunification, Germany because Europe's dominant political power as well.

These of course are the very policies being denied to the Greeks. Ordinary Greeks are being blamed for fake budgetary maneuvers produced by a right-wing cabinet three governments ago."

There is something crucial info missing here.
Do you want to know of the campaign-slogan of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, the first german head-of-government after WWII? "No experiments."
That's it. That was literally his slogan. The Germans were terrified of what they had done, of what been done in their name, when things got out of control. This must never be allowed to happen again. No experiments. The federal democracy of West-Germany was intentionally designed to be clunky and unwieldy, to prevent abrupt changes in the internal balance of power. West-Germany's culture at that time was boring and bourgeois, stable and careful. It wasn't a climate of investment-frenzy that made Germany's economy big again. It was a climate of close-mindedly sticking to the basics: industry and output. Nothing new. Nothing radical. No experiments.
In fact, West-Germany was so conservative and bourgeois and so hostile to change, that it gave birth to radical anarchistic/leftist counter-movements that feared that Germany would slip back into the fascist ways of Nazi-Germany. That's what gave birth to the "Rote Armee Fraktion" terror-organization.

The reunification meant a lot to the Germans, but aside from the wider contemporary phenomenon of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the reunification of Germany only meant problems for Germany: East-Germany was economically massively underdeveloped. There were huge disparities in wages and industrial output. Massive investments were necessary to put East-Germany back on its own feet and the process isn't completely finished by 2015 although it's winding down.
And for the purported increase in political power: First, there were the FRG and the GDR, then the GDR was absorbed into the FRG. The GDR had never been important in itself. It lay right on the border to the West, that's what made it important to the Soviet Union. It wielded little political influence internationally and its economic output was laughably bad due to socialist mismanagement.

Now, to the Greeks. The Greeks would not be blamed for the budgetary wizadry that happened many legislative periods ago if they had done something about it in the meantime. Seriously, it started in the 1970s and the greek government turned it up a notch in the 2000s.
How many people were in on this? Let's see... All politicians and everybody who ever worked in the finance-ministry. And yet there was never a whistleblower. There was no government that said "This is a scandal! This is dangerous! This has to stop!".
How is it possible to maintain a conspiracy that involves thousands of conspirators and nobody blows the lid?
How is it possible to maintain a fraudulent scheme that involves millions of people and nobody comes forward and reveals it as a fraud?
Simple: They looked the other way because profit. Everybody knew their country was rife with corruption, but nobody cared because it worked. Everybody knew that everybody was cheating on their taxes and cheating the greek government out of money, but nobody cared because you would be stupid to step forward and complain about receiving too much money.
Everybody knew what was going on, and the greek people refused to act because the money kept flowing in. Where does this money come from? Shut your mouth and take the money.

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"Even worse, a newly hegemonic Germany took only one lesson from its economic history -- avoid debt. Forgotten were the lessons of Versailles, the allied generosity, the perverse folly of austerity. The German view of debt became part of the European constitution."

MAYBE BECAUSE THERE WERE MORE IMPORTANT LESSONS TO LEARN ABOUT WWII THAN ECONOMY!!!!!!!!!!
How easy it is to criticize with decades of hindsight and from the cushy confines of your ivory-tower.

And the lesson contained nothing about austerity. Germany wasn't hit by a catastrophic depression and inflation in the 1920s because of austerity. It got into that because of overblown reparation-demands that were designed to cripple and destroy Germany and remove it as a political challenger to France. Austerity was never part of the picture.

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"Even more fundamentally, the EU itself is in jeopardy. The perverse dominance of the austerity mongers in Brussels and Berlin has left Europe entering its seventh year of near-depression, and created a backlash of nationalist rightwing parties all over the continent that rejected the EU. The crushing of a freely elected leftist government shows the sheer brute force of the unholy alliance of Germany and global finance."

If times are hard, voters look for someone to blame and rightwing-parties routinely make suggestions who's to blame.

The crushing of a freely elected leftist government... Oooh, spooky!
The Tsipras-government is simply a victim of circumstances: 1. It made populist promises it wouldn't be able to fulfill. 2. Greece was structurally geared towards waste, fraud and corruption. 3. The EU was weary because Greece had systematically falsified documents for the last decade. And that's why Schäuble insisted on a bloated, comprehensive deal that would tackle all of Greece's shortcomings at once.

Greece had nothing hard to offer and thanks to the cheating of its former governments, the promises of this government were worthless. Why wouldn't Tsipras weasel his way out of serious reforms? Judging by the past governments, that's what greek governments do!

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"Unlike World Wars I and II, the destruction being wrought by Germany is not military. But it is just as poisonous and more insidious. Before it is over, one of history's noblest experiments in enlightened statecraft -- the project of European union -- could end in ruins."

No article about the future of economics and politics is complete without a dire, nebulous warning that we might or might not be at the brink of disaster. It lends some gravitas and an air of importance to the author.