Tsipras & Penthesilea

The Greeks are a great people- no one denies it. Tsipras has not been in office long and he may well turn out to be a great man at least compared to the insufferable Yanis- who was supposed to be the virile, Mathematical Economist, equivalent of Achilles, having his way with a moribund Malinvaudian model of full employment, much mourned by Europa's peoples, but instead he turned out to be a jeering Thersites making mock of that Penthesilea's post-mortem violation.
If Tsipras really has made the Greeks 'one nation', then Greece can define a Social Minimum and implement it using purely California debt instrument type fiat currency. The E.C.B is dis-intermediated because we are speaking of a purely internal transfer. However, if Greece really was 'one nation' they would have done this long ago. Moreover, there would be no obstacle to fiscal policy harmonization (without which monetary union has a more rocky path). 
Tsipras and Euclid Tsakalotos are merely posing as Communists. Merkel, but for her Christian Faith, would have been the better sort of Communist Party apparatchik. She sees through them because both Christianity and (genuine) Communism privilege the satisfaction of basic needs of the poorest and more vulnerable. So does Judaism- the Mussar (ethical) formula is 'the material needs of the other are my spiritual needs'. But who is the 'other'? The Bible says it is the poor, the down-trodden, the stranger, the one in need.
I must admit, like many non-Greeks, I was taken in by George Papandreou. His academic credentials, his family history, his physical appearance- we thought he would solve Greece's problem more quickly than Spain or Ireland or Portugal. It could have happened. The man is not evil. Just weak. Or, no, not weak in his own person, but weak in his faith in the Greek people's tropism to alethia.
Perhaps, if Greece had had to suffer Communism the way Angela Merkel had to- though, it must be said, because of Tito they got more than a taste of that type of gangsterism- then Papandreou would have had no ancestral Erinyes haunting Syntagmata Square and could have put Greece into Europe on the basis of commitment to a Social Minimum and the same rule-set for all.
This is not 'austerity' it is sacrificing one's ill gotten 'economic rent' for the common good, the European ideal.