RE: "History Tells Us What May Happen Next With Brexit and Trump"

   

I planned just to comment on a Facebook sharing of this article but it kind of grew bigger than that.
   This is the article I refer to.

    Right from the start:
"It seems we’re entering another of those stupid seasons humans impose on themselves at fairly regular intervals."

   Let's be straight away clear that the masses, the "mob" are to be blamed, as they are generally stupid and restless! 

   In my view it has always been some ruling class or elite who, driven by greed for more power, led the masses (their tribe or their countrymen) into disasters.
  This article takes populism and the rise of charismatic dictators as the origo from which would spring the first step towards a catastrophic outcome. It fails to point out that the mob in general was always oppressed and/or economically ruined for quite a few years, or decades before they got to a level of frustration that is ripe for charismatic leaders to "herd them". 

   So who is to blame first? Our way of life has been based on different forms of colonialism and slavery for centuries now, and whenever some democratic and liberal country secured a prosperous and peaceful environment for their citizens ten times as many people suffered the consequences in remote lands.    Now it is collapsing on us: the people from those lands are migrating and thus creating competition for the "white guys" for jobs that has been more and more scarce anyway as they'd been outsourced to countries with low taxes, no regulations, and dirt-cheap labour. Double slam: those white guys are competing with each other for quite a while as "The Polish Plumber" is worth a whole page in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by now...

   So again: who is to blame? The frustrated prole or the stockholder of some multinational corporation? 

   Mentioning Mugabe as an obvious point? Blaming the mob for killing the minority "who happened to know how to run farms" and that led to starvation? Is it that simple? Is it not worth looking for many examples in former colonies where the natives took the power back but the money was gone overnight with the fleeing "masters", sometimes even ruining the infrastructure in the last moment so that the World would see the new African nations as mere barbarians who were much better off under (white) control? Yes, Mugabe is a dictator but again: what were the precedents before his rising to power?

   "Brexit — a group of angry people winning a fight — easily inspires other groups of angry people to start a similar fight, empowered with the idea that they may win. That alone can trigger chain reactions."   Yes, I agree, and I agree that we shouldn't speak about Brexit without mentioning Le Pen and Trump or even Putin, but again: it is happening already and maybe our "Archduke Ferdinand moment" will be determined in later history books as some event we have passed already. The question is how will we regard a Third World War in retrospect. It may be a blitzkrieg (especially with nukes) or it may well be a very long process in which case the Arab Spring can be included already. The Russian scenario is just another version, I have the feeling the author is a pro-EU liberal so it is quite obvious he puts forward an option to blame Putin. 

    The EU can break up with rising populism in France, Italy and other countries, and even the NATO can go into fractions, and it can all lead into an Orwellian status quo, just a bit different borders between Oceania and Eurasia. That is just one option, creating even bigger superstates like a cancer spreading even more rapidly in the last stages before it kills the host entirely.

   "What can we do? Well, again, looking back, probably not much. The liberal intellectuals are always in the minority." 

   Yes, this is the last stronghold of the liberal intellectual: meekly resign and go into a huff that when the shit hits the fan they can say they'd been right all the way but nobody listened. Putting themselves always into the minority and protecting another minority by keeping quiet about them is as dangerous as any obvious populist movement and dictator. Even more dangerous as those populist dictators are visible and loud enough to put on some resistance against them while those who are almost never mentioned in the mass media? Only when they throw some money into some humanitarian cause so that they could be labelled as "philanthropist" on Wikipedia? 

   So which another minority do I mean? Well, let's call them simply "The Rich" as the top 1% doesn't sound very accurate. The ultra-rich with the power to force the signatures on legislations and trade agreements while seemingly they have nothing to do with politics, and certainly they got into their wealth legally and in accordance with our meritocratic western values. Blaming them would smell of communism and it's already made sure communism would be ever connected with dictatorship so there'd always be a natural resistance against changing our current form of capitalist system. 

   I agree communism in itself is utopistic and can never be achieved, and I also accept the value of private property. I just don't see the way out of this crisis without re-defining our economics towards a more regulated and balanced system that stops the rich getting richer just per se and the poor getting poorer in a result of a built in flaw that creates always competition and ever cheaper labour. 

   Take a look at our economics in the last 45 years since Pinochet's Chile and you might understand that we are living in a dictatorship ever since! The totalitarian dictatorship of banks and Corpocracy. Failing to mention this in an article that whines about the intellectuals being unable to find a common language with the proles is the last nail in our coffin.

   By the way: I'm an "educated prole" keeping my finger on the pulse of intellectuals (friends and authors I follow) AND the proles as well, being a blue collar worker in Dublin, touching base with the people who keep coming here in hope of a "Promised Land" that never existed...