Dear Alexis: We've lost our country!

Dear “patriot” Alexis,
“If today there is something our homeland needs from all of us, from every last Greek, it is a modern, decisive, unshakable patriotism.”
You uttered these words a few days ago. Of course, quotations can’t be added to verbal speech, otherwise I am sure you would have added them to those last three words.
I have been impressed by your “determination” for three years now, like for instance when you so eloquently said in just four words “go back Mrs. Merkel”! I have been impressed by how “tenacious” you are (but only when you have the Greek people in opposition to you). I have been impressed by how “patriotic” you have been when you make reference to an “all-purpose name for Macedonia,” as if you are referring to flour.
This is no accident of course, when considering that the head of strategic planning in the prime minister’s office is a man who has said “[having a] career is like cholera.” I do not know if this is the same person who authored the despicable press release which was signed, “Basement tenants.” In case you weren’t aware, such press releases result in the ridicule of our country and its image internationally.
How much respect can someone have for a neighboring country whose prime minister is self-trolled through the press releases issued by his own office? Of course, one can say that this is the least of your problems. The “feats” of our country — the embarrassments, that is — have become known outside our borders. A colleague of mine at the office where I work in Germany was telling me that he would like to visit “Exarsia” as a tourist, because he has heard that it is a “must” to go there. He was telling me that he heard that if someone gets into a car accident in Exarchia Square and calls the police, they will be told to take the car, go further down, and to call back once again. Entire regions of Athens are “no-go” zones, while at night police stations are transformed into fortresses and the surrounding streets are closed off, in order to protect the officers themselves.
 
You know Alexis, it really is not a good look for you when your own party’s newspaper publishes the headline “The Right Against the Western World” on the same day that the Novartis prosecutions began. An article which chastises the right for “favoring Russian policy” (!!) does not prepare us for good things to come, but instead, it lays the groundwork to impress the leader of the United States, the same leader for whom you once said “I hope we will not face this evil.” The current president of the United States who has not launched invaded or declared war against Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan, unlike his Nobel Prize-winning predecessor.
I do not know if you heard the news, Alexis, but we are losing our country, while you are attempting to imprison half of the opposition parties for scandals and while you are trying to recreate the achievements of Antonis Samaras in the case of Golden Dawn and the achievements of Constantine Mitsotakis against PASOK in 1989, both of which occurred with your party’s assistance.
For a month, Turkish vessels have closed off an area around the islet of Imia, not allowing a single Greek boat to enter the area. This served as the prelude for the attack on a Greek coast guard vessel which followed. As things stand right now, this incident does not signify the end but rather the beginning of further great travails for Greece, and there is no better time than now for our country’s enemies. We concede islands, relinquish names, abandon maritime waters, while the fire sale of our public assets is nearly complete. Our public wealth is in foreign hands, while our private wealth in the hands of the banks to later be auctioned off. Just as our wealth has shrunk, so has the time for our territory and sovereignty to shrink as well.
A country that does not have enough money to pay to upgrade or to maintain its military equipment is doomed to destruction. This is the fate of every bankrupt country historically. Sooner or later, it collapses. And the most tragic thing of all is that in all these cases, there have always been useful idiots that have led their country to destruction. I do not mean you, of course, Alexis. You and your staff there at the Maximou Mansion are people with remarkable wisdom, highly fluent speakers of English, and great diplomats, just like the excellent mayor who talks about renaming the airport, who surely is not revealing secret, under-the-table deals, but is merely speaking for himself…
This is the country which proceeds barefoot and ragged, soon to be stripped of military and defense equipment while at the same time it is launching a national space agency! What a joke! The head of this agency, the one with the Arab-owned satellites, is the government minister who traveled along with the lawyer Mr. Artemiou, the one who specializes in offshore accounts, to distant Venezuela prior to the elections, surely not to purchase peppers and beans from the supermarket.
In closing this letter, Alexis, I will ask for a personal favor. Tell that government minister of yours, the one who coordinates your government’s supposed body of work, to round up that revocable political appointee of yours, the one from Commonview, and tell him to stop threatening me over the internet for exposing his reappointment, as I have already informed the Electronic Crimes Unit of the Greek police.
Of course, you will say that you represent the governing political party, the all-powerful state, while I am a simple citizen. How could I possibly fight back? You have “European Institutes” in Florence to count how many television stations can broadcast in a banana republic, and the police acting in the role of a journalist, circulating edited videos to hide the true size of the protests. You release a news story and within a short time it is parroted in the media and on the internet, regardless of how truthful or objective it actually is. What can I, a solitary citizen, do alone?
Do you know something Alexis? I’m not alone. We are many, and while we may be impoverished, humiliated, or desperate, we are all thinking people. If you do not hear our voice, if we swallow our anger, if we do not appear to be in sorrow and if our pain is muted, that does not mean that they do not exist. And if what I am doing today is done by every citizen who does not wish to see injustice growing all around him, by the citizen who on a daily basis experiences mockery and lies, the citizen who feels desperate and afraid and as a stranger in his own country, then you will not have a platform to stand on and in the next election you will return to where you started, to the 2 percent and 3 percent share you had when you were struggling to enter parliament.
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