I think the Eurozone has a responsibility towards Greece because of the shared currency; the EU surely has a responsibility towards its members. It's disingenuous to take that as a general statement about wealthier and poorer states. Germany and France benefited for years from a Greek market for their exports, but of course all that is forgotten now.

The fact that the Euro central states have essentially imposed a monetary policy of misery and pain on the euro periphery, and used monetary policy as leverage to impose domestic policy on Greece, is essentially a sort of moral debt - Germany created the situation in Greece by forcing the imposition of brutal austerity.

Furthermore, the agreement that the Troika was demanding is utter nonsense. It wouldn't have led to the repayment of debts; it's the same bullshit that's been imposed for five years now, which has not led to the repayment of debts. The Greeks kept eating more and more brutal internal devaluation, which just choked their economy so that the Greek state, even as it raised taxes and cut spending, could never get enough revenue to meet its obligations. Greece has dutifully acquiesced to a savage programme of cost-cutting, doing everything creditors demanded, and they weren't repaid anyway because creditors' demands were stupid and counterproductive. So even from a standpoint of purely doing what is best for creditors, the Troika isn't acting rationally.

The ECB has consistently pursued a monetary policy that was incredibly inflation-shy for years, too, essentially using Germany as its benchmark. This refusal to devalue the Euro has prevented peripheral Euro area countries from having an export-led recovery.

Essentially, the Eurozone (which was supposed to be part of a broader social and political project to ensure long-term peace and growth in Europe) turned out to be an instrument of Franco-German economic imperialism. The human cost of internal devaluation in peripheral Euro states - Greece, Portugal, Latvia, Ireland - is an atrocity in itself; an entire generation of people that has experienced and will continue to experience chronic joblessness, because European elites have latched on to bogus economic theory and acted without a shred of decency.

And Germans want to wash their hands of it, blame those dirty southerners with their profligate ways (ignoring that nobody has been more austere than the Greek government), and act as though they have no responsibility. If that's the case, then we should stop the charade and start calling the neuereichsmark what it is.

It's profoundly disingenuous to say debt relief for Greece would be "a charity programme" or that central Euro states have no responsibility. The Eurozone creates that responsibility. The ECB has a responsibility to set monetary policy at a point where it benefits all member-states, not just Germany, and it has largely failed to do so. The Euro states have a responsibility to other member states in the shared currency area; if Euro states want to dictate domestic Greek policy and sabotage elected Greek governments, they don't get to claim no responsibility for what happens.