The victim was being forced to pretend that it had requested its punishment and that the creditors were only responding generously to that request. Just as an unnamed US officer in the Vietnam War had claimed that a particular town had to be destroyed in order to be saved from the Vietcong, our country’s fiscal waterboarding was celebrated as a sensible way of bringing a lost people back into the fold. In a sense, Greece experienced collectively the same treatment that Britain’s poor receive when they go to claim their benefits at Jobcentres, where they must consent to their humiliation by espousing ‘affirmation’ phrases such as ‘My only limitations are the ones I set for myself.’