Roger Cohen Laments his Inadequate Schadenfreude because the Greeks Don’t Suffer Enough

By William K. Black
Quito: June 11, 2015

“Schadenfreude” is a German word that describes taking a “malicious, gloating pleasure in the suffering of other people.” It is a form of sadism. Roger Cohen has written an extraordinary column describing how much he hates the Greek people. Change the name “Greek” to almost any other group and it is certain that the New York Times would refuse to print such a mass of ethnic slurs. The Greeks are fair game, however, for even the crudest slurs in the NYT.

But what causes Cohen’s June 8, 2015 column attacking the Greek people to reach a new level in hate speech is this paragraph.

The European Union has done its healing work here. There will not be another civil war, come what may. The sun will still shine; a gazillion islands will still delight; Greeks will still curse every form of authority; they will still smoke in every restaurant in defiance of the law; they will still have more money than they appear to have; tables in cheap “tavernas” will still offer views that have no price. A Greek meltdown is not the same as a Slovakian meltdown. Life is not just.

Did you get that last sentence? Cohen despairs that “life is not just” because the Greek people, who he makes clear he despises, are not suffering enough to slake Cohen’s hate – and will not suffer enough for Cohen’s taste even if the troika pushes Greece into its second, post-crisis Great Depression. Cohen takes a malicious, gloating pleasure in the suffering of the Greek people, but he laments that his schadenfreude is incomplete because the Greeks will still have beautiful, sun lit islands. In a “just” world the Greeks would suffer far more, and feed Cohen’s joy.

For the sake of brevity I will simply mention and provide the links to three articles that describe the “healing work” of the EU (the most economically illiterate and vicious member of the troika). “Healing” is a particularly Orwellian word usage by Cohen. The reality is that the troika’s austerity demands are destroying health care in Greece. Cohen would know this if he read the relevant article published by an obscure newspaper entitled the NYT about a week before Cohen’s column. And the Cohen meme, so reminiscent of every ethnic slur, about the happy but shiftless and always complaining Greeks might have been informed by a column in that same obscure paper that explained how Greek suicide rates had surged dramatically as the troika’s austerity demands forced the Greek economy into worse than Great Depression levels of unemployment and greatly increased poverty. Cohen’s concern for smoke in Greece is laudatory. Cohen is a cheerleader and apologist for the troika’s austerity that has led the desperate Greek people to cut down public forests to burn the wood to keep their homes and children warm – causing dangerous pollution and some fatal home fires. The Wall Street Journal article notes:

Such woodcutting was last common in Greece during Germany’s brutal occupation in the 1940s, underscoring how five years of recession and waves of austerity measures have spawned drastic measures.

The EU’s austerity demands are driven most fervently by Germany and its closest allies.

Not that it will do any good, but people who do not take a malicious, gloating pleasure in the pointless suffering of the Greek people through self-destructive austerity can join me in calling on the New York Times to retract Cohen’s exercise in sadism and ethnic slurs. I will not bother asking Cohen to apologize for there is no chance that it would be sincere.