Ian Welsh:
No, I’m not being sarcastic. I still have little hope for the US, but I am very heartened by what is happening in Europe. The French actions and now the British students rioting. It is, ironically, even more hopeful that the British government wants to try a student for attempted murder for throwing a fire extinguisher off the roof. Next, they’ll be hanging people for stealing chickens. The massive overreaction and the clear double standard, given the war criminals who ran the British government, none of whom have been prosecuted, is the sort of thing which indicates a loss of legitimacy, a loss of legitimacy which often leads to revolution: peaceful or otherwise.
At this point, my best guess is that when push comes to shove in Europe, the left will actually win in most nations. They aren’t wimps, they are willing to fight, they are willing to clash hard with the cops and they are willing to directly attack the interests of the ruling class. Unlike in the US, where the people willing to risk violence are right wingers, in Europe more are on the left wing side.
The economic collapse of the Eurozone, as multiple nations are forced to beggar themselves to bail out bankers and the rich, is similar to what is happening in the US, what is different is that the people in multiple nations are fighting back. I’m hoping the Irish wake up and tell the Eurocrats to go fuck themselves, that the deal of joining the Euro was “we give up a lot of autonomy for a lot of prosperity” but that if they aren’t getting the prosperity, they want the autonomy back. Multiple nations should sincerely threaten to go off the Euro. At this point they are getting economically crushed by being on it and forced to pay off banker’s losses, without the advantages of having their own currency. Right now they are going to take the economic hit they would take by going off the Euro, so they might as well do it.
Odds that the Euro doesn’t exist in 10 years are now, in my opinion, more than 50%. It is not serving the peripheral nations interests, they are being offered a standard of living roughly equivalent to the 50s. (My Eurocrat friends (you know who you are) will tell me this is unthinkable, and won’t happen. We’ll see.)
The pendulum, in Europe, is swinging away from the right. That’s good news.
