“You can save a country, Greece, by saving the people,” Greece’s Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias was quoted as saying, in a supplement of the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published on Friday.
Outlining his thoughts on the emergence of a “new, emancipated Greece,” Kotzias said the younger generations in Europe were being “fed on stereotypes” while vision and true values were lacking.
According to the Greek minister, people had in recent years been “mathematized” and turned into ‘slaves’ of numbers, with political theory assuming that if the numbers were thriving, then the people were thriving as well.
For SYRIZA, he added, protecting people’s pride, optimism and hope was the most important thing. “If the three most important items in the day’s news for the younger generation are restricted to the words ‘punishment,’ ‘memorandum’ and ‘sanctions,’ then we have a major social problem,” Kotzias said.
It was not that such “political tools” should be eliminated entirely, he added, but interactions could not be confined only to them.
“They expect us to tell our youth that nothing until now was done well, that our Greek way of life has no worth….We Greeks did not lose a war and we didn’t industrially destroy anyone. We do, however, have corruption and bad institutions. The one, corruption, we must abolish and the other, the institutions, we must improve,” he said.
Asked by the reporter what dignity was left to the Greeks, Kotzias replied that people retain their dignity “when they have a sense that they are not following things that are wrong, when they put human nature before need.”
The minister pointed out that 7,000 people had committed suicide in Greece since 2010. “This shows that the worst thing is for someone not to have any prospects,” Kotzias said, while he also spoke of the high cost to Greece of the emigration of the country’s most highly qualified people, whose education had cost the Greek state 12 billion euros.
(source: ana-mpa)
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