"Generalising is the first step toward racism. Every sentence beginning with 'The Germans believe this' or 'The Greeks do that' is an initial slide on a slippery slope leading, eventually, to bigotry. As I have argued before (click here for a video version) there is no such thing as the Germans, or the Brits, or the Greeks for that matter."Unfortunately, we see many people on both sides of the political divide failing precisely on this account.
The Spaniards are in for a bashing by the so-called "right-of-centre" commentariat: they are lazy, don't pay taxes, lived beyond their means, overused the credit card. By now readers should know the whole string of stupid slander the right-of-centre scum is capable of. So, that's only to be expected.
More disappointing is that among the so-called left-wing commentariat we often find the same kind of shit, dished out with the same self-satisfied moronic self-righteousness. The only thing that changes is the target: now it is everybody's favorite villains, the Germans.
The truth of the matter is that there is no "us" encompassing everybody in a country: there is only those who fuck things up (say, the miserable private banks in Spain and their equally miserable government) and there is those who pay for them. There is those who work, and those who become rich with the product of our effort. Those who get bailed out and those who are evicted.
Exactly the same happens in Australia: there is no "us" becoming more prosperous, "us" benefiting from the wonders of economic rationalism.
As Varoufakis said: "There is no such thing as the ‘representative’ German, Greek or American".
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