© GettyAfter EU demands for greater austerity, as Greece debt has deepened despite multi-billion bailouts, Greek social spending has been cut by nine per cent while military budgets have risen, by as much as 18 per cent
European Union countries have been accused of hypocrisy over imposing savage austerity measures on Greece while at the same time selling the highly indebted country over £1 billion of arms. New official figures show that bailouts and an EU austerity programme aimed at reducing Greek living standards by 30 per cent have not dented lucrative arms sales to Greece.
In 2010, as Greece was plunged into crisis and the EU began a scheduled £200 billion in aid payments, European countries continued to sell aircraft, tanks, artillery and submarines to the Greek military.
In the same year, France concluded a £662 million military aircraft deal with Greece, a lucrative deal for the French arms industry that will be underwritten by EU bail-out funds.
Official German trade figures showed that in 2010 Germany, which has demanded draconian cuts to Greek social welfare spending, sold weaponry, including a submarine, worth £336 million to the impoverished southern Mediterranean country.
In October 2011, as the EU negotiated a second bail-out for Greece,
Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor and Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President told the Greek government that all existing arms contracts must be honoured.
Comment: According to Bob Altemeyer, in his book The Authoritarians :
"Authoritarians are highly submissive to established authority, aggressive in the name of that authority, and conventional to the point of insisting everyone should behave as their authorities decide. They are fearful and self-righteous and have a lot of hostility in them that they readily direct toward various outgroups. They are easily incited, easily led, rather un-inclined to think for themselves, largely impervious to facts and reason, and rely instead on social support to maintain their beliefs. They bring strong loyalty to their in-groups, have thick-walled, highly compartmentalized minds, use lots of double standards in their judgments, are surprisingly unprincipled at times, and are often hypocrites. But they are also Teflon-coated when it comes to guilt. They are blind to themselves, ethnocentric and prejudiced, and as close-minded as they are narrow-minded."