Blame it on Game of Thrones

What’s happening in Greece today? It’s all the fault of Game of Thrones, if you ask me. And I say this as a long-standing (though now wavering) fan of the fantasy genre.

But let’s put this into perspective first. Before Game of Thrones came along to muddy the waters, there used to be a fairly clear distinction between ‘fantasy’ and ‘reality’. That was, in fact, the whole point: to be successful, fantasy requires the suspension of disbelief… and this becomes slightly difficult, when the fantasy universe starts resembling reality too closely.

Harry Potter is a good example, though it wouldn’t be my first choice. Rowling’s creation now ranks as one of the most successful literary franchises of all time. Would this have been the case, had the books told the story of a young smarmy kid from a broken home, who gets sent to a boarding school where nothing of note actually happens? 

Perhaps. Charles Dickens wrote one or two novels that would fit that description. And they sold pretty well, as I recall.

But I somehow suspect that the entire global Harry Potter craze would never have taken root at all, had JK Rowlings dispensed with all the ingredients that made them so memorable in the first place. Magic wands. Flying brooms. Invisibility cloaks. Giants named ‘Hagrid’. A time-reversal mechanism which can be used to right all the wrongs caused by war and genocide … but which only ever gets used to save the life of a Hippogriff (note: as a reflection of human priorities, that’s actually pretty realistic). You know, that sort of thing.

The same could be said for most of the classics in the genre. The Lord of the Rings would certainly have lost some of its universal appeal, had Gandalf been a wandering carpet salesman instead of a wizard. And take magic out of Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea Quartet, and you’d be left with practically nothing at all. (Sparrowhawk would never have gone to Roke island to study wizardry, would never have become Archmage, would never have unleashed the Dark Shadow, or gone to Atuan, or pretty much anything else that happens in the rest of the series).

So no: until fairly recently, it was broadly accepted that fantasy couldn’t really exist without the arcane underpinnings of magic. Readers (or viewers) expected to be temporarily drawn into an imaginary world… and if they recognised occasional parallels with their own world while they were there, well, so much the better. 

But then ‘Game of Thrones’ came along, and two things happened that irreversibly shattered this delicate equilibrium of the fantasy/reality continuum. The first was the emergence of a TV series that claimed an audience far broader and more diverse than even the most successful book series in the genre.

For whatever reason – personally I suspect witchcraft – the TV version of Game of Thrones has attracted an unimaginably diverse global audience, including millions of people who would otherwise never give classic fantasy even a cursory second glance. And bearing in mind that the novels were still being written while the show was on air (a classic dragon-and-flaming-egg scenario if ever there was one), feedback from a decidedly non-fantasy viewership began to influence the story as it unfolded.

The second thing that happened was that reality started to emulate the fantasy universe, instead of the other way round. Perhaps because Martin consciously modelled his universe on actual world geo-politics, or perhaps because his audience started to base their own value judgments on his work… the distinction between ‘what happens in reality’ and ‘what happens in Games of Thrones’ began to steadily diminish.

And what happens in Game of Thrones? Oh, the usual… murder, rape, blackmail and treachery… all in the name of naked power (hence the title). And yes, eventually dragons do come into the picture too. But that’s all an afterthought, really. The plot of Game of Thrones is essentially identical to the reality of everyday international politics. In both scenarios, you have uneasy alliances in which different factions are locked in an endless cycle of violence and treachery, in a no-holds barred scramble for absolute power. 

This brings us to the reality of present-day Greece, where life has long grown to resemble a particularly bloody and brutal Game of Thrones episode… and for more reasons than just the obvious. 

But let’s start with the obvious anyway. Watching the events of the last two weeks unfold, it became more than evident that the main power brokers of the ‘Eurogroup’ (as the EU-based half of Greece’s creditors has come to be known) modelled all their negotiation stratagems on the behaviour of King Joffrey Baratheon. 

Actually, they were even more sadistic that Martin’s super-creep from Hell. For one thing, the people they so unfairly punished for the wrongdoing of others were not their enemies, but their own partners in a ‘union’ that is supposed to be built on equality (more of which in a sec). For another, unlike Martin’s twisted creation, it is highly unlikely that any of them will ever meet their comeuppance in the form of a (literally) poisoned chalice.

And yes, I’ll admit that the Greeks brought their own fair share of fantasy to the table, too. The country’s past attitudes towards things like the sustainability of the welfare state, for instance, were clearly rooted in a belief in magic. “Somehow it will all work out in the end, and we’ll all live happily ever after”. That, by the way, was just before the troll and orc invasion.

But though Greece had a hand in writing this particular fantasy script, its contribution pales to insignificance when compared to the demands now placed upon her by the European Commission and the European Central Bank… conditions which even the IMF (the remaining third of this unholy alliance called the ‘troika’) now admits are both punitive and counter-productive. 

Just like a fantasy novel, you need to suspend disbelief to appreciate the sheer insanity of what has just taken place in Europe. There is mounting evidence that the conditions previously imposed by the troika for the last two bailouts have already wreaked havoc in Greece, placing any hope of economic recovery permanently out of reach. 

After five years of austerity, the country’s GDP shrank by a quarter, its youth unemployment shot up to 60%. So what conditions were imposed for the third bailout? Well, George RR Martin would no doubt insist on even harsher and more stringent measures… because the ultimate aim of every villainous character in his novels is the total humiliation and annihilation of pretty much everyone else.

And sure enough, the EU and ECB – but not the IMF – imposed more spending cuts, higher taxes on everything, and compelled the country to put up its national assets (including, it would seem, entire islands of the Greek archipelago) up for sale, to contribute to an ‘independent fund’ to be administered by Luxembourg. 

Luxembourg, incidentally, has just been home to a massive tax avoidance scandal of its own. But strangely, on this occasion the EU showed no interest in punishing the home country of the president of its own Commission. In fact it showed no interest at all, with the result that the scandal has since died a natural death. Odd, isn’t it?

Leaving aside the glaring double standards, and the fact that Europe’s ‘remedy’ for Greece is itself a half-baked fantasy… it was the method used to achieve these aims that might have been scripted by George RR Martin. The European Bank crippled Greece by curtailing its banking system, starving out the country’s finances so that its public officials – including doctors, nurses, the police, etc. – could not be paid. Thus Greece was pre-emptively weakened so the negotiators could move in for the kill. This they did by giving Greece an ultimatum: accept our terms, or we’ll temporarily expel you from the Eurozone. Needless to add, no proposal brought to the table by Greece was ever even glanced at. 

Unsurprisingly, EU officials were heard gleefully describing their own negotiating methods as ‘mental waterboarding’… so we can add torture to the motifs lifted straight out of Game of Thrones.

But where the analogy strikes deepest is the requirement of a suspension of disbelief. It takes belief in magic and the preternatural to argue (as the EU has done) that these conditions will result in anything but the complete annihilation of the Greek state. Greek sovereignty has already vanished into thin air: its assets have been carved up and appropriated by the European Union. Hopes of economic recovery have likewise been spirited away: the two prerequisites, growth and liquidity, having been banished from the country indefinitely. 

Yet the EU argues these impositions are necessary for Greece’s future prosperity (a prosperity that will presumably be enjoyed by the remote descendants of those Greeks who do not commit suicide in the coming years.)

Perhaps the Eurogroup does believe in magic; perhaps it is so high on its own power trip that it no longer sees any difference between its own political fantasies and the ugly reality it has now unleashed. Or perhaps, like Martin’s villains, the whole point of the exercise was in fact to humiliate and utterly destroy its political ‘enemies’ in the name of absolute power. 

There is mounting evidence that the second hypothesis is true. Jurgen Habermas, one of the architects of the vision of a united Europe, had this to say on the matter: “Forcing the Greek government to agree to an economically questionable, predominantly symbolic privatisation fund cannot be understood as anything other than an act of punishment against a leftwing government.”

Punishment for what, one might ask? For Greece’s past economic mismanagement? If so, it is clearly misdirected. Syriza is not responsible for the crisis; and, more importantly, neither is the ordinary Greek man in the street who will be bearing the brunt of the consequences.

No, the punishment meted is for a much more sinister crime. By riding on a democratic wave of anti-austerity sentiment, Greek PM Alexis Tsipras was threatening the cosy arrangement that has already proved so profitable for his country’s creditors. The Eurogroup had in fact engineered a situation whereby Greece had to constantly be lent more money in order to pay back what it already owed. And 90% of the last two bailouts went directly back to Europe to bail out German and French banks.

How dare this Greek upstart try to upset our comfortable little applecart like that? And how dare the Greek people refuse to lie prostrate while their country was raped and pillaged, Game of Thrones-style, so that they themselves are kept in poverty while the rest of Europe greedily gobbles up their assets? No, this cannot be countenanced. How would George RR Martin handle this? He’d send in one of his most psychotic and demented characters to torture them all into submission, of course… so we’ll do the same.

Well, we’ve ‘done the same’ in more ways than that. For just like Game of Thrones blurred the distinction between fantasy and reality, the EU’s actions these past two weeks have exposed the fallacy at the heart of its own mythology. 

So far, we have always spoken about Europe in terms lifted straight out of the fantasy genre: ‘the European dream’, for instance, which once stood for a vision of willingly-pooled sovereignty, of equal rights under the same treaties, and of European integration under a banner of unity and peace.

All that is ancient history now. The resentment left in the wake of Greece’s humiliation has left the EU divided and embittered, and about as likely to ‘unite’ as rival band clubs at a local village festa. And the economic divisions that will arise from this new Europe – a Europe where power is concentrated among only two or three countries, while the rest kow-tow to their political masters – will also spell an end to the myth of a Europe in which everyone is supposed to be subject to the same rights and opportunities.

Europe has, in a nutshell, just tortured its own fantasy to death. And the reality that has arisen to take its place is every bit as ugly as the ultraviolence of Game of Thrones.