I always read with deep interest everything written by Christos Tsiolkas; especially when he talks about himself, his voice has a special warmth and punch rarely found in the catatonic style of contemporary writing.

However, after his mainstreaming, it seems that his struggle for self-presentation has become rather struggle for self-dramatisation. And whenever he decides to talk about big contexts like the current crisis in Greece the dramatic becomes melodramatic and unfolds somehow into a fantasy of his own escapism.
In his latest essay in The Monthly (May 2014, No. 100) on the Greek situation, the melodramatic mode reached an extreme which must be discussed. It starts with a grand statement about “the social death brought on by the financial crisis and the austerity measures” and after a litany of events big and small, such as the statement by his friend that “the European Union is anti-smoking and copyright laws”, or his own about “the European Union culpability in blindly bankrolling the Greek state” (!), and ends, after a number of digressions about Didier Eribon’s memoirs, with the sad realisation that he has no answer as to why unemployment led his working class friend to vote for the Neo-Nazi party, the Golden Dawn.

It is obvious that Tsiolkas loves the country of his parents, and love makes him see the current situation as the splendid opportunity for self-commiseration, the internalised masochism of all Left-wing martyrdom. Deep down this means that he believes the myth of innocence that many Greeks have constructed to defend themselves against the pangs for their own guilty conscience.

However, both historical truth and social experience show completely different realities. I left Greece in 1986 when it was already obvious that something was going really wrong with its political governance. Since 1985, after the economic wizardry of Andrea Papandreou had failed, the country started borrowing heavily in order not to balance its books but to distribute the loans in giving them out to the people as social benefits and free subsidies.
I was a teacher on the majestic island of Santorini back then; I remember that the European Union (EU) had awarded the island authorities, all supported by the Socialist Party, a substantial amount to construct a desalination plant, as fresh water is rare on the island. The funds disappeared in several months and when the EU auditors came to the island, they were expelled, after the furious mobilisation of the local authorities, because, they violated national sovereignty!

It was the same year when Papandreou changed the constitution and made the political establishment and all politicians immune to any prosecution. All checks and balances were abolished and the familiocracy that already existed became an institution, indeed the only dominant political practice. The right-wing parties did also the same when in power and no one ever thought of changing the constitution until last month.

My point is that the Greek crisis is the result of institutional failure: the higher immorality of the political establishment became a constitutionally sanctioned everyday mentality. What happens at the moment in the country is the inevitable result of that mentality, established and legitimised by the inability of the political order to define parameters for civic culture. As an old student told me: “my compatriots think that they can be free without laws”, which to my mind is the gravest indictment of the descendants of Pericles.

This mentality of lawlessness became beyond control during the period that followed the 80s; it was constructed and disseminated through the mass media, the political patronage system, the state imposed clientelism, the popular culture system and finally by the unethical impunity of its political order.
Furthermore, during the same period the political order imposed a phobic identity on the new generations (the people who mostly vote for the neo-Nazis) on the basis of what they didn’t want to be, not on what they actually were.

The rise of the Neo-Nazis was the ultimate fruit of that political culture: the theory of the special case, the belief that Greece was always an exception, that it should be part of the European Unification but not obliged to follow its protocols, the idea that for some strange reasons the Greek state was above accountability has led to the delusional and pernicious ethno-populism of the Neo-Nazis. The fact that there is a crisis is a necessary but not a sufficient condition to explain their rise to prominence. The Greek state itself nourished fascism, xenophobia, homophobia and something larger that encompasses them all: the hatred of democracy.

The people who are complaining now knew very well what was happening for years around them: the myth of innocence, the lie of inculpability, the pretence of guiltlessness show that deep down they all struggle psychologically to take responsibility for their actions-but they cannot take responsibility and consequently project their guilt on anyone who tells me how wrong they are.

The fascists who vote for Golden Dawn are all opportunistic cowards: for decades, they punted on the best horse for profit and affluence but, after they lost their money, they hide behind the blackness of the big fascist rituals, blaming everybody else for their failure. This is what Tsiolkas’ friend should have heard: that he is a gutless opportunist and a spiteful loser who doesn’t want to take responsibility for what he did in the past and what he is actually doing now.
On the other hand, the pseudo-Marxist triumphalist rhetoric of SYRIZA against the Troika, EU and chancellor Merkel perpetuates that very same pernicious myth of Greek exceptionalism. SYRIZA is the last remnant of the ultra-nationalistic and populist language employed by the political establishment in order to avoid accountability and transparency – they represent the last pseudo-prophet of modernity which promises utopian policies for retrieving a paradise lost, which never existed.

In his last books, Tsiolkas exoticised Greek-Australians presenting them as the noble savages of Australian society, unable to make moral choices, remaining in perpetual confusion, having unorgasmic sex and leading a purposeless existence. And the literary establishment adores such self-dramatisations and rewards them accordingly: they confirm a specific hierarchy of values which perpetuates the clichés of an unreflective individuality: Greeks are really simple people, unself-conscious, and sex-maniacs but not moral agents.

This is what he also projected to the metropolitan Greeks: out of love, he cannot say anything bad about them and he sentimentalises their experience, to the point of transforming them into asocial dissociative machines: everything was happening around them but no one ever understood or took notice.
I expected a more critical look, or even a more nuanced depiction, by an intellectual, a more philosophical approach towards the descendants of Plato: the unexamined life is not worth living said Plato’s teacher. So many centuries later, his people do their best to deny their own heritage-but we must tell them, at our own peril, that they are wrong.

* Professor Vrasidas Karalis is Head of the Department of Modern Greek and Byzantine Studies at the University of Sydney.