Stuart J. Hooper
21st Century Wire

This is completely inexcusable. A captain should never abandon his ship.

Watch a video of this report here:


Alexis Tsipras, the Prime Minister of Greece, has resigned.

Tsipras and his party Syriza came to power on a wave on anti-austerity rhetoric that had the West shaking in their boots. Western mainstream media even called the country a ‘hub for terrorism’ the very day after they came to power! Their demands were seen as the main reason for their colossal victory just a few short months ago. 

When it came to zero-hour Syriza and Tsipras held firm for a while, imposing capital controls and shutting down banks, yet ultimately they ended up giving in to what some saw as act of treason committed against their own people.

Tsipras plans to stage an early election, and said in a live address that ‘the political mandate of the January 25 elections has exhausted its limits and now the Greek people have to have their say’.

This is an outright lie.


These are the real, desperate and suffering people Tsipras abandoned. (Photo Credit: Kotsolis)

The political mandate of the elections got no where close to ‘exhausting its limits’, it could even be argued that it didn’t even get off the starting line. There were numerous creative plans that could have been deployed by Tsipras and Syriza, such as using the current migrant crisis to claim a debt write-off for national security reasons. Yet, they did nothing of the sort.

A Syriza Party campaigner said working ‘in an environment of banking and economic asphyxiation forced on the country’ was the reason for their capitulation to EU creditor demands.

In other news, the sky is blue. Syriza knew that this was the tumultuous political situation that they were entering into. What happened is, they failed to come up with any real plan on how to solve it. You can only scapegoat an issue for so long.

Professor of Sociology at City University, New York, Costas Panayotakis said of the situation:

‘European leaders got what they wanted, which was continuation of the austerity policies and from their point of view that sends a message to other anti-austerity forces in Europe, notably in Spain, that there is no alternative. What has happened in Greece, for the moment, is a bit of a setback for anti-austerity throughout the continent and that may affect the elections that will be coming up in many other parts of Europe’.

In other words, the only ones who have gained anything from Tsipras’s time in power are those he said he was going to fight against. Tsipras’s resignation, and to be perfectly honest his entire time in power, is nothing short of pathetic.


All hat and no cattle. (Photo Credit: Frangisco Der)

Syriza could have held firm against the creditors and they should have had a plan to do so, something far more than what now amounts to absolutely meaningless rhetoric.

Say all you want of the ‘Yes We Can!’ and ‘Change!’ rhetoric that Obama pulled on the American people back in 2007 and 2008, now, with both the Iran Deal and Cuban relations normalisation, he has actually (at long last) changed something! The same cannot be said for Tsipras and Syriza.

When a Captain abandons his ship when encountering troubled waters, it is held as the most downright dishonourable thing he could ever do. The Captain of the Costa Condordia, who abandoned ship after crashing it into shallow rocks killing 32 people, received a 16 year jail sentence.

Syriza and Tsipras will now be transferred to the trash can of history, where they both undoubtedly belong, and have highlighted the necessity for alternative political forces to have tangible and meaningful plans, to backup their rhetoric, or face political devastation.

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