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Bulletins and News Discussion from March 3rd to March 9th, 2025 - Austerity And Its Consequences - COTW: Greece

Image is of a crowd protesting in Athens.

Last week, on Friday, hundreds of thousands of Greeks poured into the streets to strike and protest on the second anniversary of the deadliest train crash in Greek history, in which 57 people died when a passenger train collided with a freight train. On this February 28th, public transportation was virtually halted, with train drivers, air traffic controllers, and seafarers taking part in a 24 hour strike - alongside other professions like lawyers, teachers, and doctors.

The train crash is emblematic of the decay of state institutions brought about from austerity being forced on Greece in the aftermath of the 2008 Great Recession, in which the IMF and the EU (particularly Germany) plundered the country and forced privatization. While Greece has somewhat recovered from the dire straits it was in during the early 2010s, the consequences of neoliberalism are very clearly ongoing. Mitsotakis' right-wing government has still not even successfully implemented the necessary safety procedures two years on, and so far, nobody has been convicted nor punished for their role in the accident. The austerity measures were deeply unpopular inside Greece and yet the government did not respond to, or ignored, democratic outcry.

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  • Bucovina

    Lol are you seriously trying to open this can of worms?

    1. Like I give a shit about Carpathian land bullshit, I barely care about Ukrainian land bullshit.
    2. If you didn't want Bucovina to be taken away permanently maybe Romania shouldn't have allied with the fucking Nazis.

    Please get off your Romanian high horse as if the fact that your romantic language means that Western Europe treats you any differently than the rest of us Eastern European trash.

    As if the borders speak Ukrainian or Romanian or are real. Lmao.

    • Not at all,I hate the west as much and maybe a bit more than anyone here,check my profile if you think I'm on a "high horse" and how "disconnected" I am from this conflict

      You'd be surprised

      My point is simply to claim that any Ukrainians claiming those are core Ukrainian lands are fucking delulu

      By the way, Ukraine wronged it's Romanian minority in similar way to it's Russian speaking one, pushing the fabricated "Moldovan" language label and refusing to open schools that teach Romanian

      I, being from the delta also have beef with your Bîstroe canal fucking up the ecosystem so that you can circumvent using the navigable branches of the Danube in Romania

      I don't buy into the "neither Moscow or Kiev" narrative you're pushing

      Look, fundamentally I don't disagree with what you said about neo Nazism in Russia , their evil is nothing compared to the insane Ukrainian government and their European backers who seem dead set on expanding this conflict. Again,check my profile and you'll quickly understand why I have this stance.

      And I do not condone our participation in the Axis,the we're lucky the soviets didn't do more,and we deserved it

      But those lands should have been given to the Moldovan SSR,not Ukraine! Ukraine had no claim to those lands

      • My point is simply to claim that any Ukrainians claiming those are core Ukrainian lands are fucking delulu

        All nations are fucking made up, there's a millennia of history of people living in fucking Villages without a clue as to what' Romania or Ukraine are, all they knew was they hated the village next to them.

        All this land recrimination bullshit is the reason why all this bullshit is unproductive. It's just reprisals and counter reprisals over a label on a fucking map. Who cares.

        The problem is fair resource distribution and emancipation, ultimately I don't really care where the border is as long as both peoples on each side are living in peace, have fair resource distribution and are emancipated from capitalism and foreign oppression.

        By the way, Ukraine wronged it's Romanian minority in similar way to it's Russian speaking one, pushing the fabricated "Moldovan" language label and refusing to open schools that teach Romanian

        Yeah I also hate the language bullshit, it's entirely stupid and a manufactured social response that does the same kind of political nonproductive bullshit that ends in reprisals and counter reprisals. Half the country + president learn a whole new language in 3 years is deranged. Even if you care about "the language of the oppressor" crap (which I don't mainly because I'm a utilitarian), it's lulzy that in their liberalism they managed to fuck up multiple ethnic minorities in the state.

        I, being from the delta also have beef with your Bîstroe canal fucking up the ecosystem so that you can circumvent using the navigable branches of the Danube in Romania

        Yeah they're absolute idiots for that one, esp. because they just didn't maintain the Soviet canals.

        their evil is nothing compared to the insane Ukrainian government and their European backers who seem dead set on expanding this conflict.

        I mean the expansion of the conflict is idiotic and is a lot riskier than the "inherent threat of Russia" that's 100% true. My problem is that many Westerners on here have this pretense that Russia is some kind of "solution" to anything or "better than". That point especially coming from a "leftist" is just completely irrational. It's a completely captured oligarchic state with a single capitalist ruling party who has no ideology except maintaining power. The gap between the rich and the poor in Russia is insane and not even officially documented since the majority of the rich function in a shadow economy. United Russia is less interested in helping out normal people than the Democrats are.

        • Maybe some people are a bit more atteched to Russia,but to me it's like this:they place value on the USSR,which I do too,it was a monumental achievement of humanity,and that sort of bleeds over into liking them as they are because they're fighting the world hegemon,NATO

          My take is that I don't care much about the current Russian state's internal affairs, although I would like to see communism win there again, obviously,but I care more about them taking on NATO and beginning to shatter this monster through this conflict

          Whatever you may say,this was a big big blow to western hegemony and it's potentially paving the way for a multipolar world

          Personally as long as Russia is satisfied with their gains in Ukraine and work to undermine NATO and the EU through non-military mean,I can't say they are as evil as the west

          • Whatever you may say,this was a big big blow to western hegemony and it's potentially paving the way for a multipolar world

            Personally as long as Russia is satisfied with their gains in Ukraine and work to undermine NATO and the EU through non-military mean,I can't say they are as evil as the west

            The question really is "why should Ukraine pay?" for a geopolitical play between two great powers. Ultimately they got scammed regardless of how you look at it. The whole point is that this is not something a socialist should advocate for because the people who are paying for it (Ukrainians) do not have the power to say no.

            This is essentially the same argument that squishy leftists make about rolling the clock back to the 1950's in the US. A "reset" of capitalism to a better place for workers. The problem is that you're still stuck in this system, nothing has structurally changed, except the allocations. In much the same way the destruction of NATO whether fast or slow will come, the reality is that the current way that NATO is falling apart is not transforming the situation into something structurally better.

            Likewise any "acceleration" or "chaos" argument falls flat as well because there are no Bolsheviks to take advantage of it so to speak.

1143 comments