We continue with excerpts from Professor George Dertilis's book, "Seven Wars, Four Civil Wars, Seven Bankruptcies, 1821-2016," for national self-knowledge:

After the unjustified and failed war of 1897, Alexandros Zaimis took over the government, with Georgios Streit as finance minister and governor of the National Bank. In eleven months, Zaimis achieved terms similar to those that all today's political parties, without exception, needed seven years of fruitless negotiations to accept, cynically delaying reforms, fueling capital flight, discouraging investors, quarreling incessantly, and hiding the problem behind demagogic pre-election false dilemmas: memorandum or anti-memorandum, and YES or NO in Bonapartist referendums.

If we assume that two-thirds of our society's population suffer from ignorance and/or poor judgment, that crowd is the largest reservoir of voters for demagogues. And if we add to that segment of the electorate, imitating Erasmus, the inevitable fools that all societies contain, the electorate will keep electing, with enthusiasm, the demagogic leaders of two broad camps. One will drag us to patriotic rallies, sometimes in the name of the state and sometimes in the name of the church, while the other will take revenge by removing Thucydides from the school curriculum.

After 2002, with the euro and cheap money, the Greek economy had one last chance to become more productive and competitive, and it missed it. It had already missed another chance to take part in the Third Industrial Revolution by investing massively in the information technology services sector.

The most important cause of bankruptcy in the postwar period was obviously not military spending. It was the broader spree of spending, mainly between 2003 and 2009, but also the inability of all governments, since 1980, to modernize the economy through investment, public investment with European funds and private investment by attracting capital and know-how from around the world. For that matter, the country's political class has always generally ignored investments that require long-term strategy and do not yield immediate political gain.

The decline of politics and the free fall of the economy are due mainly to the semi-education of almost all party and government officials, to everyone's refusal to promote any reform, to the reaction to everything with pompous generalities and wishful thinking, to everyone's inability to study deeply and propose a documented and costed development program, and, of course, to the relentless and violent reaction of the extreme groups of one party or the other, and of one union or interest group or another.

The half-knowledge and poor judgment of the political class, combined with the extreme demagoguery of all parties, perpetuated the syndromes of broader social lack of education: xenophobia, Europhobia, the absence of dialogue, and the escalation of violence.

The price paid by Greek democracy over its 150 years of life was heavy and multifaceted. A political cost: a democracy eaten away by the cancers of demagoguery and populism. An economic cost: taxes rendered futile by vote-seeking, administrative spending swollen by patronage, military spending made bloody by chauvinist bidding wars. A cultural cost: a society corrupted by demagogic flattery and the mythologizing of material quid pro quo, which sees its values overturned, its historical identity distorted, and its traditional culture disappear without any new one being created in its place. Reversing this course, whether it begins with awakening, or through social rupture or an international complication, will be long and painful.

To stop the vicious spiral and ensure it never starts again, Greece needs something far more important than economic reforms: education. It must give its children once again the critical, broad, and humanistic education they need to become good citizens and creative people. This is possible only through a consensual and long-term education policy (to be continued).

Paul Marantos

marantosp@gmail.com