By Paschos Mandravelis
Apart from his usual unconstitutional bravado, US President Donald Trump is doing all sorts of other bizarre things. One of the latest is to introduce military parades to the US, like the ones we do in Greece on every national holiday.
For the first time in the country’s history, tanks will roar through the streets of Washington DC. Not on July 4, which is their Independence Day, but on June 14 to celebrate, as he said, the 250th anniversary of the founding of the US Army.
This is also Trump’s birthday, which is clearly a satanic coincidence. “I think June 14, it’s a very important day,” the eccentric politician told NBC’s Meet the Press in May, without specifying the reason.
Supporters of fiscal discipline say that it is contradictory to cut various programs to reduce the country’s deficit and then throw money at military parades
What is striking – and completely different from our country – is the magnitude of the reactions to this initiative in the US. There are the romantics who say they don’t want their children to get used to the idea of tanks in the streets. Others remember that only dictators held parades on their birthdays: Adolf Hitler on April 20, Joseph Stalin on December 18, Benito Mussolini on July 29, Nicolae Ceausescu, Saddam Hussein, the Kims of North Korea, etc.
Some are more practical and say that the American capital’s roads are already a mess and vehicles such as tanks will make them worse. Others, supporters of fiscal discipline, say that it is contradictory to cut various programs to reduce the country’s deficit and then throw money at military parades. After all, this will cost $45 million.
Another striking difference with us is that at least Americans count how much everything costs. In “rich” Greece, nobody cares about such things. Not even when we had to count every cent. In February 2010, two months before the country signed its first bailout, the then government made a desperate attempt to consolidate state expenses. Among other things, it abolished military parades. Two years later, the then conservative prime minister, Antonis Samaras, brought them back. All flash, no cash.
Countless SYRIZA officials had promised to abolish the costly parades, but fate and former premier Alexis Tsipras had the party partnering with the populist, right-wing Independent Greeks (ANEL). Not only did they not abolish them, not only did they appear proudly on the VIPs platform, but they also had soldiers handing out little nylon flags on Syntagma Square in March 2015.
This “tradition” continues to this day, so our question remains: Ultimately, how much do military parades cost the Greek taxpayer?
Source: Kathimerini