“Then shall stand up in his estate a raiser of taxes…” (Daniel 11:20).

Events in Europe last week—to establish a fiscal union in Europe, strengthening mightily the power of Germany in the process—brought that great prophecy for our time one giant leap forward toward final fulfillment.

As one pundit put it, “The economic crisis in Greece is the most important thing to have happened in Europe since the Balkan wars” (London Review of Books,July 14).

War can be cultural, economic or military in its strategy, but the goal is the same: the conquering of the state that is the object of the aggressor.

Much publicity has been given to the economic sins of Greece, with the blame for its present state of crisis being largely slated home to the Greek people. Yet back in early 2009, when the masses were rioting in the streets of Athens in response to perceived government mishandling of their economy, our editor in chief headlined a leading article in the Trumpet, “Did the Holy Roman Empire Plan the Greek Crisis?” (February 2009). In that article, Gerald Flurry declared, “The Greek government can do little to fix the nation’s economy …. Greece’s fate was, in many ways, sealed seven years ago. In 2001, Greece, as a member of the European Union, adopted the euro. At that point, Greece’s succeeding economic boom and following bust became inevitable.”

Regarding the economic impasse the Greeks had reached two years ago, he continued, “There is no way out—and, according to some analysts, it was designed from the beginning to become that way. Those analysts agree with the brutal facts unfolding in Europe.”

Just what those “brutal facts” are was revealed in Bernard Connolly’s riveting account of the behind-the-scenes imperial strategies of European elites. In his book The Rotten Heart of Europe, Connolly recounts his direct, personal observations of the machinery of the European Monetary Union (emu) in action, its motive and its means. His conclusion, since validated by the EU’s dealings most especially with Greece, is that emu was deliberately created to provoke a financial crisis in Europe as a means for the elites of Europe, specifically Germany, to gain more power over EU member nations.

Greece is the poster boy for the imminent reduction of a number of EU member nations to the ignominy of vassal states, yielding their sovereignty to a singular, centralized imperialist authority. This will involve the virtual handover of control of their economies—in particular the raising of revenue by taxes—to that overarching authority. In the process, the control of major strategic assets—indeed, of whole national economies—will be lost to that authority. This is all happening in direct and specific accordance with Bible prophecy!

Greece’s rapid loss of national sovereignty has been publicized by such elites as eurozone czar Jean-Claude Juncker. Mr. Juncker declared that in return for eurozone finance ministers agreeing to release the most recent bailout funds to Greece, that nation would “pay with a massive loss of its sovereignty” (EUobserver, July 4; emphasis added throughout).

The same source observed:

In return for the €12 billion—the fifth payment from the €110 billion EU-imf loan agreed last year—Greece will have to push through a swathe of privatizations reminiscent of the selling of East German firms in the 1990s after the fall of communism.”The sovereignty of Greece will be massively limited,” Jean-Claude Juncker told Germany’s Focus Magazin in an interview published on Sunday (July 3), just hours after the eurozone ministers reached agreement.”For the upcoming wave of privatization they need a solution modeled on the German Treuhandel,” he said referring to an agency used by Germany to sell off some 14,000 former East German firms, at a huge job and profit loss.

Now Greece is being forced to sell off huge portions of its tangible national assets in an effort to raise €50 billion to offset the massive debt it incurred with the EU bailouts. This sell-off will inevitably include vital strategic assets once deemed crucial to that country’s national security. German bankers and merchants are jostling for the best of the pickings. Is this by pure coincidence?

Look at a map of the crucially strategic Mediterranean Sea. Greece, incorporating the island of Crete, is the southernmost tongue of the European continent, bounded by the Ionian Sea to the west, the Aegean to the east and the Mediterranean to the south. Possession of Greece is most strategic to any European power with imperialist aims. It is a crucial gateway to Eurasia, North Africa and the Middle East. Twice in modern times, during World Wars i and ii, Germany sought to occupy Greece as a strategic milestone in its effort to establish a Teutonic empire. It succeeded in World War ii.

In more recent times, it has been German industrialists who have invaded and plundered Greece, taking advantage of a unique situation that nation faces.

Greece lives under a permanent military threat from its huge neighbor on the Anatolian peninsula, Turkey. Taunting its smaller neighbor just across the crucial Bosporus sea gate, Turkey daily violates Greek airspace with its fighter jets. Tensions between these two nations are made worse by continuing disputes over Greek sovereignty attached to certain islands in the Aegean. To counter Turkey’s aggression, Greece has spent huge amounts on defense budgets—as much as 4.3 percent of gross domestic product, proportionately the highest among the EU nations.

The greatest beneficiary of this defense expenditure has been the German armaments industry, having become the major supplier of defense equipment to Greece.

EU elites’ manipulation of the ongoing tensions between Greece and Turkey to the advantage of the EU’s thriving defense industries cannot be discounted from this equation. As one source observed: “In this volatile game of geopolitics, the bosses of Euro ‘family’ have always been playing the major role in cultivating and manipulating an unguaranteed stability in the area, thus creating market conditions for their influential military industries to flourish. German defense corporations in particular have been major contractors with the Greek (and Turkish) army for more than two decades” (Αντίβαρο, Nov. 29, 2010).

The same source points to huge fraud and corruption in the dealings between German defense corporations and the Greek government. The industrial giant Siemens, used often by the German government as a front for international intelligence operations, has apparently been a major offender: “One of countless scandals in Greece involves millions of euros smuggled under the table by Siemens and siphoned to the leading Greek political parties of New Democracy and pasok as ‘commissions’ or direct bribes for winning certain contracts worth billions. The key person (a Siemens top executive of Greek origin and German citizenship) involved in the plot escaped arrest and trial in Greece and currently shelters in Germany where he is protected by German law” (ibid).

The facts are that Greece’s coffers have been substantially drained into huge profits by German defense industry barons. This includes multibillion-euro contracts for Greece to purchase big-ticket military hardware ranging from tanks to missiles to naval vessels, including submarines.

One of the worst cases of manipulation by German corporatists was the ote debacle. This involved German corporations being granted contracts to upgrade the Greek national telecommunications system. The whole project was financed by Greece, only to see a 30 percent stake in the system sold to a German company through what appears to be dubious procedures. ote is the major power supplier to the Balkan nations.

“All these sum up to hundreds of billions of euros and, under other circumstances, could have been more than enough to balance the Greek budget deficit and even drastically alleviate the external debt.

“One thing is for sure, those billions were added to the profits of German industrialists, bankers and intermediaries” (ibid).

The most recent German invasion of Greece has not been by armed aggression. It has been by a forceful economic strategy.

Having taken huge advantage of the Greek government’s manipulative business practices, Germany is now completing its “grey suit” invasion of Greece by forcing the loss of that country’s national sovereignty, the fire sale of its national assets and what eventually will be the capitulation of the nation to absolute fiscal control by Berlin/Brussels. That is the guaranteed outcome of this so-called temporary default by Greece arranged by Germany and France in collusion with the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, supported by eurozone bankers.

It is now obvious that certain imperialist elites in Germany are gaining confidence as they successfully promote German interests above those of their EU counterparts. On the surface, this would appear to be the opposite of the policy that Berlin, and previously Bonn, stuck to since signing the Treaties of Rome launching the Continent on the road to unification back in 1957. Up till recently it had seemed that Germany always sought to have its interests merge with those of the EU as a whole. But for the past two years, Germany has become more overt in pursuing its own agenda, defying the wishes of other EU member nations. One reason for this is that German elites—who created the euro in order to force weaker economies to become dependent on the stronger—now see that their strategy is working and are moving in for the kill.

EU nations are being thrown into crisis. The folly of emu members sacrificing their own sovereign means of exchange upon the altar of the euro, and thus giving up their right to change interest rates necessary to compensate for cyclical boom and bust trends in their economies, is now clear.

Germany, the strongest European economy by far, now holds the whip when troubled emu member nations raise the begging bowl for bailout funds. Germany sets the rules. Among the winners will be German merchants who seize state assets at knock-down prices (Revelation 18).

The formula we see playing out in Greece day by day will now continue to play out elsewhere in Europe as each emu domino falls.

But why push Greece to default?

It was a natural progression, strategically, for German elites to move south to acquire control of Greece once they had the Balkan Peninsula firmly in their grasp (Daniel 8:9). Yet, whereas Bonn under Helmut Kohl was able to entice nato to seize the Balkan Peninsula on Germany’s behalf by force—with expenses largely paid by the United States and Britain—Greece presented a different challenge. It was a fellow nato member nation. Thus an alternative strategy was brought into play. Germany encouraged massive expenditure by Greece and Turkey on armaments, fomenting the tensions across the Bosporus. This broke the Grecian economy while enriching German industrialists.

Now, with the Greek default, we see once again it’s game, set and match to Germany, just as this magazine has consistently predicted would be the case.

Greece is the latest colony to be added to the Balkans in the grand imperial game of the German elites. Soon Germany will own most of what has any real worth in Greece.

Now, take another look at the map. With the Balkans and Greece firmly in the grasp of EU elites, what should we next look for as their most obvious strategic move? It’s obvious, isn’t it? Move on to Cyprus!

Already, influential high-level Germans are preparing for that very scenario, a fact that we shall bring to light in a future article. It will happen a lot faster in Cyprus than the Balkan and Grecian takeovers.

Then, with Cyprus in the bag, what lies next, within a strategic stone’s throw from Cyprus? The greatest prize of all: Jerusalem!

The prophecy revealing the progressive imperialist moves by the great northern power south and east and onward toward Jerusalem (Daniel 8:9) is now well advanced.

How soon will we see fulfilled that fulcrum prophecy of Luke 21:20—Jerusalem surrounded by armies—upon which so many prophesied end-time events turn, including the greatest of all, the prophesied return of the Word of God to impose peace on Earth?

Germany’s sealing of Greece’s fate last week would seem to indicate we may be a lot closer than we think to that grand prophetic moment!