Why Greece is the lynchpin that could unleash economic collapse, domestic martial law and global war

Monday, March 23, 2015
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Tags: Greece, European Union, economic collapse

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(NaturalNews) I wish I could download to your brain everything you need to know about the European Crisis unfolding right now. The possibility of the breakup of the European Union could be the spark that sets off the global debt implosion that leads to violent conflict across the globe.

The actions of Greece, it turns out, could set off a chain reaction that leads directly to a Wall Street panic and the "bail-in" seizure of your savings accounts at your favorite hometown bank. It could also radically destabilize Eastern Europe, heightening the risk for conflict between Russia and Western European nations (including NATO members like the United States).

To understand why this is, we first need to grasp the basics of European history. The average American, unfortunately, knows virtually nothing about European history. But that might be asking too much, since the average American also knows nothing about American history, either. Fortunately, this article is written for exceptional Americans who are far better informed than the average Joe.

Socialism keeps running out of other people's money

Greece is bankrupt. Like all socialist states, it has "run out of other people's money," and in this case the "other people" are primarily the German people. Modern-day Germany is the economic miracle of Europe, having risen out of the ashes of World War II, defeated and shamed, to reclaim its role as the single most powerful nation in Europe. What Germany once commanded with its military might, it now commands with its economic miracle machine.

The German people are smart, diligent, innovative and quality-minded. But they've grown weary of bailing out the miserably inefficient government spending of Greece and what they see as a "culture of incompetence and corruption" in that nation. (Can you blame them?) When Germany demanded Greece cut its government spending through austerity programs, the Greek people elected a radical, inexperienced new government into power that declared the austerity cuts to be implausible and refused to play ball with Europe's central bankers.

Right now, Germany and Greece are in a dangerous game of chicken, with Greece saying it won't repay its debt obligations to European banks because those very same central banks functioned as criminals that unfairly exploited the Greek economy through dishonest imperialist debt schemes. Yes, there's a long story here involving Goldman Sachs, mafia banksters and dastardly financial ploys that crippled Greece's economic future, but that's all too much for this short article.

A Greek exit could unravel a cascade of debt

At stake here is the future of the European Union. If Greece pulls out -- a scenario now called a "Grexit" -- most observers believe the European Union will crumble soon after. To call such an outcome catastrophic is a vast understatement. It could cause a massive global unwinding of debt-ridden nations and their banks, potentially leading to a cascading global debt collapse that would very quickly find its way to American shores.

First, as the collapse spread like a virus across Europe, capital would flee to the U.S., causing an unprecedented blowout skyrocketing of U.S. stocks. Soon after, the U.S. stock market would crash hard as even U.S. banks become insolvent due to their exposure to the cascade of European bank failures. (All the globalist banks are fatally intertwined at this point...)

But this isn't even the interesting part yet: Greece is now correctly asserting that Germany has never repaid its war debts to Greek central banks. During the war, the Nazi regime forced the Greek banks to loan it money (at gunpoint, the same way the CDC wants to force Americans to take vaccine shots). These loans accrued over many decades, never being repaid. Instead of repaying the debt, Germany's politicians have attempted to memory hole the issue, pretending that fundamental principles of debt and accounting don't apply wherever the political elite say they don't. But according to this extraordinary article in Der Spiegel, "The commission calculated the outstanding German 'debt' to the Greek central bank and came to a total sum of $12.8 billion as of December 2014."

Germany, in other words, owes Greece $12.8 billion on a debt dating back to the era of Adolf Hitler. Greece is now demanding repayment of this debt as an implied condition of it staying in the European Union. $12.8 billion isn't pocket change. Not even for Germany. And the willingness of the German people to keep funneling money to Greece is rapidly eroding.

Beyond that, there's also the issue of a few hundred million dollars worth of gold stolen by the Third Reich. As Der Spiegel reports:

Karakousis spent five months reading 50,000 pages of original documents from the central bank's archives. It wasn't easy reading. The study calculates right down to the gram the amount of gold plundered from private households, especially those of Greek Jews: 7,358.0014 kilograms of pure gold with an equivalent value today of around [$250 million].

It seems the Greeks want their gold back... or at least a currency equivalent of all the gold that was stolen from them. And now this has become an issue with huge implications for the future of the world.

Why does any of this matter, you say?

A collapse of the European Union would catastrophically destabilize all of Europe

What most Americans don't realize is that Europeans have very long memories of crimes against their people. These memories are passed down from generation to generation and can't simply be greenwashed out of the history books.

The European Union was formed on the hope and assumption that people from an incredibly diverse array of cultural backgrounds might forgive the past and surrender to cultural homogenization as "Europeans." But the hope turned out to be false. The people of Greece in 2015 still remember the crimes of Nazi Germany from 1943, even long after they have been officially absorbed into the European Union. And now that memory may very well result in the shattering of the European Union itself.

If the European Union crumbles, Europe will see a wave of regional wars breaking out over so-called "borderlands" and strategic nations like Ukraine. The fall of the European Union, in fact, would likely embolden Russia to be even more assertive in the Ukraine as it attempts to defend itself from America's ever-encroaching military bases which now occupy most of Russia's border states. (Why did Putin put his country so darn close to all our military bases? Geesh...)

Russia, you see, must maintain strategic control over these border states in order to export its primary resource: energy. Germany, meanwhile, must maintain strong economic ties with wealthy nations that can afford to import Germany's high cost value added exports -- the backbone of the German economy. A shattering of the European Union would destabilize both Germany and Russia for these two reasons (exports of energy and exports of manufactured goods), reigniting the same sort of fears and insecurities that drove the German invasion of Russia in World War II. That invasion was a strategic move to occupy Stalingrad not for the city itself, but because the city was a gateway to the enormous energy and strategic resources of Mother Russia, which Hitler needed to fuel his thirsty war machine.

NATO and Germany are militarily weak

Today, Germany has no military to speak of. Russia, on the other hand, is re-emerging as a very powerful military force with considerable leverage throughout Western Europe due to its energy pipelines. NATO, meanwhile, exists in name only and is primarily backed by the threat of military force from America, a nation bogged down in endless (and pointless) military action in the Middle East.

While America was defusing roadside bombs in Afghanistan, Russia was busy occupying the "strategic high ground" of the North Pole, as described in this article by Dave Hodges. This places Russia in a position where it can credibly threaten all of Western Europe and North America with nuclear strikes (if it ever comes to that).

Russia, too, is populated by strong, rugged, durable people who are used to surviving with little in the way of material goods. They can endure war far more readily than wealthy, pampered nations like America or the UK. As a matter of record, young Americans are now so obese that even the U.S. military must reject almost a quarter of all applicants due to excessive body weight.

Economic warfare will likely precede military warfare

On the economic side, Russia has joined forces with China to erect its own alternative to the SWIFT inter-bank money transfer system. China has been accumulating a massive amount of gold reserves to back its currency, while Russia has been selling off the U.S. dollar and bypassing western sanctions in creative ways by selling energy in exchange for physical gold.

The dollar itself is headed for a global collapse for the simple reason that it isn't backed by anything other than (dwindling) faith. President Nixon removed the gold backing of the dollar in 1971, and ever since, America has been headed toward a day of reckoning where the dollar would eventually collapse as all fiat currencies do. Faith in the dollar is eroding by the day as the Fed keeps printing more money, diluting the existing money supply and silently stealing wealth from those people foolish enough to still be holding dollars when the music stops (i.e. all U.S. wage earners and taxpayers). Fort Knox, meanwhile, isn't filled with gold but rather IOUs. Most of the physical gold has been quietly but diligently accumulated by China over the last two decades.

The stage is now set for a global economic war aimed at America and the dollar hegemony

I'm barely touching the highlights of the global dynamics at play here, but what's really taking shape is a global economic and military war, waged by China and Russia against the Western powers of the United States, NATO, the European Union and Germany in particular. Greece now plays the role of the lynchpin in all this, as its exit from the European Union could loosen the knot that unravels the empire of debt upon which Western nations are now based. An economic implosion leads to systemic weakness which invites more aggressive economic warfare actions on the part of Russia and China.

If a combined economic action by Russia and China were to take place -- for example, China announcing a fire sale of U.S. debt while Russia cuts off energy supplies to Western Europe -- the economic implications for Europe and America would be beyond catastrophic. They might be terminal. We would see the U.S. government, for example, instantly unable to sell any new debt to foreign nations. The only option is to print more money to finance the debt -- a form of economic suicide -- and with the loss of the dollar's global currency reserve status, this would lead very quickly to accelerating money debasement and price hyperinflation in consumer goods. Think Venezuela: price controls, biometric scanning requirements to purchase groceries. Armed guards at grocery stores. Food shortages, street riots, etc.

It wouldn't be long before the U.S. government would be forced to stop funding entitlement programs such as EBT cards and pensions. This would almost immediately lead to massive riots in the streets and the wholesale destruction of large cities such as St. Louis and Chicago. From here, it gets even uglier with declarations of Martial Law, the suspension of the Bill of Rights, and the military occupation of America's cities in order to maintain order.

The problem with all entitlement-based Western nations (including America) is that sooner or later you run out of other people's money. When that day of reckoning comes, the population that has come to depend on entitlements for day-to-day existence finds itself abandoned by the very government that promised to take care of them. Chaos ensues.

This all explains why Germany and the United States are desperate to prevent the breakup of the European Union and the continued illusion of economic stability. As Germany is now discovering to its horror, the problem with debt is that sooner or later you have to repay it. But all the Western governments of the world have accrued far more debt than they can ever repay, and the collapse of the European Union would savagely reveal those debts.

If there's one thing America, the UK and the European Union cannot handle right now, it's debt transparency. The day the truth about debt and spending becomes widely acknowledged, faith in the dollar collapses and the world nosedives into a tailspin. Watch Greece carefully, for your own future depends strongly on what happens there.

I recommend you read www.ZeroHedge.com to stay informed on this issue.