From The Bodies of Others (Naomi Wolf 2022) pp50-2
How do I know about the value assigned to the holy grail of gaming the system, and the potential for cruelty, shared by certain global elites? I have seen them up close.
I will never forget being in a company car in 2015, heading to the BBC’s flagship political show. It was driven by the BBC’s longtime driver. As a reporter, I always talk to drivers in these circumstances because the elite men and women often do not “see” drivers, waitstaff, cleaners, and other mere mortals. So drivers and waitstaff and cleaners tend to hear everything and know everything.
It was an important week, in which the people of Greece, distraught at having had policies of “austerity” forced upon them by the European Union, were about to engage in a referendum. The papers were full of elderly Greek men and women weeping and in despair because the proposed policies would wipe away their retirement savings. As is common, the European newspapers were portraying the people of Greece, in opposing austerity, as spendthrifts, as ignorant, as having brought their economic disaster upon themselves, and as needing to be rescued by the policies of those wiser heads above the level of their national leaders’ decision-making.
I couldn’t help thinking that maybe it will be the case that rejecting “austerity” policies will turn out to be an economic mistake for the people of Greece. But I knew about referenda: and if there is a majority vote in a referendum, it is by law the will of the people. In a democracy: their decision must be enacted. So you can have your opinion about whether austerity would be smart or not in this context, but since the people have a real nation-state, their referendum would determine what happened in their country. And if the people’s decision turned out to be a mistake, well, it was their mistake to make, with their own country, in their own parliament.
“Oh no,” explained the driver. “EU officials were in this car before you. The referendum Is purely cosmetic, It will be ignored, Whatever happens, they are going ahead with austerity.”
I was dumbfounded.
But as it turned out, the BBC driver was exactly right. The people of Greece voted against austerity. But they were not to get their chosen outcome.
Later that week, back in New York City, I was at a dinner party. It was hosted by a major hedge fund manager. His clients were Chinese, Russian, Ukrainian, and other international investment funds. Ar the party were his colleagues: British, Swedish, Chinese, French, and Belgian hedge fund managers and investors.
My host, an otherwise lovely guy, trained of course in the Ivy League, was apoplectic — furious — at the rank-and-file men and women of Greece. He did not yet know what the EU officials knew. He knew that the people of Greece had rejected austerity in their referendum.® But he had positioned in the opposite direction. Now he was enraged at those grandmas and grandpas, and at their resistant, stubborn sons and daughters, for having temporarily messed up his bet on austerity. He was literally pale with rage. His fists clenched as he spoke about the Greek referendum. How dare they, was his attitude. The fools.
The mansion where we were gathered that night had been built by a robber baron at the end of the nineteenth century. The dining room was staffed by beautiful actors/waiters and actresses/waitresses in black pants and spotless white shirts. They charmingly served us a gorgeous plaice velouté dinner, with sides of grilled asparagus and heirloom beets, The ceilings were twenty feet high and wreathed in shadows. The walls were adorned with a mélange of works of art: Italian Renaissance princelings, luscious still lifes from the sixteenth-century Netherlands, and portraits of late-nineteenth-century American society doyennes.
The conversation was sprightly. To my right, a Norwegian investor spoke about the latest avant-garde theatrical sensation on Broadway. To my left, an artist friend of the host and hostess described escalations in the New York City art market. Everyone was educated, pleasant, and cultured. The money guys were all agreeing with the host about the perfidy and “bad behavior” of the stubborn people of Greece. The wine flowed, red and white; it was beyond excellent. No one at that table was visibly evil. There were no secret signs or shadowy conversations. If this were a movie, you could not identify a villain. No one was part of a cabal.
But the point was that these people did not need to gather in the shadows or to be part of a cabal. Why would this group need a secret sign or a secret meeting? They simply owned the global stratum in which they operated, and they were accountable only to one another.
Neither did anyone there, expressing his or her views about the events of the weeks, think for an instant there was anything wrong with ignoring and overriding the democratically expressed will of an entire nation of citizens who had articulated their wishes lawfully. No one there had to say aloud to anyone else, “Let’s be sure to suppress the eruptions of popular sentiments in nation-states, going forward” to know what kind of unmanageable future events were bad for business.
Thus, the whole nation, all the people of Greece, were being treated with extraordinary cruelty and contempt by these distant non-Greek men and women. This cruelty was possible in part because these men and women would never see them or have to face them or ever answer to them.
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