“The assassination of Michael Vranopoulos, a former chief of State Bank who had handled the sale, by the terrorist group November 17, highlighted the public’s discontent.”

“Massive protests triggered by the police killing of Alexandros Grigoropoulos, a 15-year-old student, expressed young people’s increasing frustration with the prospect of a bleak future.”

Note how the author approves of violence when it is perceived to serve some side of the ideological divide. With friends like these, Greece doesn’t needs enemies.

These issues have nothing to do with the present crisis, which has to be understood in microeconomic terms – the full explanation can be found in @nytimeskrugman’s blog, or in fact by reading any mainstream economist. It is rather straightforward and has to do with the Euro and Greece’s inability to control its monetary policy. That is all there is to it.

Now it seems that both the far right and the far left want to use the present crisis to say that there is something fundamentally wrong with Greece that needs to be dealt with immediately by means of radical change. This misguided focus on long-term structural changes – some of them fully justified but requiring slow hard work, others rather lunatic – is THE reason why Greeks can’t just get along and do what needs to be done.