“As long as you earn salaries and the unions work with a certain normality, it is possible to organize actions and struggles; however, since there is no salary and there is no minimum economic monitoring, then something else begins.” This is how the anthropologist Panagiotis Grigoriou addressed the trade unionists in Belgium. Because Greece is immersed in another world.

In the presentation of the www.greekcrisis.fr blog that retains thanks to the donations of readers, says: “Temps du vent mauvais” (Evil wind time): “One day in May 2009, the International Monetary Fund, the core of the European Union and the European Central Bank entered our daily lives. The Troika and the Troika changed our lives and our ways of behaving. One thing is until then and another is the next. Like in war, in occupation. There is an evil wind, poison in the air, condemnation to the death of our great and small customs, rapid collective mutation, loss of references. Since then, we have also been immersed in smaller neighborhoods... in garbage containers."

Grigoriou analyzes the daily anecdotes of passersby and the debates and decisions of militants or communicators as political leaders, through a researcher specialized in the evolution of societies. At the end of September 3, one of the photographs shows the note hanging by a doctor at the door of an outpatient clinic in Athens: “Behind this door your doctor is now consulting with precarious contracts, working without a social contribution, he also has no insurance and will not get the retirement award.” If the doctor doesn't have a flush...

Panagiotis Grigoriou Europe without Euro was transferred to Rome last April. Costs and benefits for European businesses and families. What the anthropologist said there is captured in a Youtube video. This is his summary, in the voice of Grigoriou himself.

I regret that Italy is today like Greece was in 2009-2010. We are far from what is in Greece. We live in the crisis as if there had been a war: before it was one thing, now it is very different.

Such a crisis has destroyed most Greeks the power to organize time, the futuro.No can be programmed trips, weekend departures, and retirement periods. Everything has been turned upside down. We have had a strong acceleration of history that will probably also suffer elsewhere. The future has disappeared from the people's heads.

The economic aspects of the situation are well known. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has lost a quarter in just four years. Reduce trade by 30 to 40%. Officially, unemployment is 30% among young people, who account for 65% of the total. Such losses are seen only in wars.

Anthropophages as legislators

The troika – Grigoriou continues in her speech in Rome – reached out to Greece in May 2009 and, by assuming power, now commands in the smallest detail of the daily lives of citizens. Change has been radical and not caused by people. In Greece we are said to be living in a new regime, that of the Memorandum.

The changes that the Memorandum signed by Greece with the Troika has brought to the lives of citizens herald a new world. Salaries have fallen, most of the time by half. They have taken over their property and the Greeks realise that they have been robbed of their property as in a war. I'm not going to talk about the wreck of the healthcare system, which you've seen in a number of documentaries. And all of that has happened in one fell swoop.

In the world of work, conventions and new labour relations have been dissolved, including in the civil service, it can be said that they are anthropophagias. More than in other countries of the euro area, the crisis in Greece has brought a new socialization that represents survival and more specifically survival [survivre] as a fall. For example, using wood again to heat houses because the price of fuel has multiplied by three. People are living in a terrible setback, many remember how they lived before 1960.

Then there's the issue of suicides. It's not just statistical or symbolic, it's up to us all. I've seen four around me. Two of my homeland. Then the woman of an electrician I know. And a cousin in January. He suffered because his trade lost 85 per cent of the activity. I wasn't poor, I still had money, but I didn't see the future, how to get past the seven years she was missing until her retirement by quoting every month... He threw himself from the balcony.

I have already told you that the problem is more than cold data, the situation transcends the anatomical limit of societies. The relationships between life and death are not the same after the troika.

The crisis has also shaken politics, either on the right or on the left. But how can we distinguish the right from the left when 80% of the population has suffered this shock? We basically live in an unconstitutional regime. The memoranda established by the troika (referred to by Grigoriou) have been accepted by parliamentarians without reading them in their entirety, forced to accept them from one day to the next, and with these decrees the labor and civil laws that had been achieved for decades have been charged with brutal.

The citizens, concerned about survival, have not been very serious about changing the regime. Greece is going through a Western constitutional regime, but that is not the case at all.

This is a historic break, not only in Greece, but the situation we have experienced from 1945 until the 1990s has been broken. It's a mutation. A regime has been created that we can call oblique totalitarianism. It is being born in Europe and, moreover, under the umbrella of the European institutions and driven by the European elites, including the German elites.

So far, passages from the Grigoriou conference in Rome. Moreover, in his blog he collects the events and testimonies of each day. Like this journalist you know: “My humpback has fallen in half and my wife is unemployed. We had two homes in Athens and we couldn't afford the expenses. The second has been sold, at a price of EUR 15,000. In 5,000 taxes on the State, part to pay debts and... to the house bought by his wife's parents paying their whole life, we've taken him six thousand euros. They have robbed us of goods to the same extent that they have robbed us of the quotes.”