In this review of the new Yanis Varoufakis memoir, Doug Henwood confirms Varoufakis was against Grexit, but explains why Varoufakis was against Grexit, and why he then became an advocate of defaulting. Henwood also shows that the Eurogroup had people who wanted the Greeks to exit as way to punish the entire European social welfare state, starting with the French welfare state. If anything, Henwood's reading of the memoir shows why Jeremy Corbyn and others are spot on about the bankers and banker-acolytes who control the European monetary system are enemies to economic decency. I have long believed Varoufakis' one and true mistake of judgment was to trust in the good faith of the Eurogroup. I felt it in the early months of 2015, too, which is why I still think Eric Toussaint's much more critical and longer essay-review of Varoufakis' memoir is correct that the Greek government in which Varoufakis was a leader should have forced an early confrontation to leverage the negotiations--and that the Greek government should have been taking active steps to re-create a currency to show the Eurogroup that the then-new left government meant...shall we say, business. The missing element in Toussaint's article is what Henwood highlights, which is that Varoufakis wanted to have Greece default on the loans by June 2015 in order to increase leverage--and the left leadership for whom Varoufakis worked for blinked.
For those of us who wonder, here is a snapshot from May 2017 as to how the Greek economy is doing these days post-austerity measures the nominally leftist government accepted over Varoufakis' objections, which had led Varoufakis to resign in mid-2015. Funny how Greece was in the corporate media orbit here in the USA in those first six months of 2015, and then, when the Greek government capitulated to the banker interests, the corporate media glare was removed from our gaze. One struggles to find information in corporate media in the US about the Greek people's suffering post-June 2015.
