International Day of Rage

Mr Monks said union barons across Europe were planning a co-ordinated ‘day of action’ against the cuts on 29 September, involving national strikes and protests.

They will call it a historic moment for those in love neo-authoritarian-socialism, a tragedy, the beginning of the end, etc. I call it an inflection point.

Further in the old European spirit of licking the boot that kicks you, all the talk is about the old-fashioned thrill of the goose-step. While some pace hither and fro about the diminution of rights and the creeping dictatorship of the non-internationalists, they are at risk of falling into it for no good reason other than the widespread, shared political views of their do-gooders, luvvies, and activist “caring” types.

Mr Monks, now head of the European TUC, said: ‘I had a discussion with Barroso last Friday about what can be done for Greece, Spain, Portugal and the rest and his message was blunt: “Look, if they do not carry out these austerity packages, these countries could virtually disappear in the way that we know them as democracies. They've got no choice, this is it.”

‘He's very, very worried. He shocked us with an apocalyptic vision of democracies in Europe collapsing because of the state of indebtedness.’

Greece, Spain and Portugal, which only became democracies in the 1970s, are all facing dire problems with their public finances. All three countries have a history of military coups.

All of it caused by caving in to those very same do-gooders, luvvies, and activist “caring” types who always seem to demand an enlargement of entitlements. It’s sort of a “we are all ACORN” type of universe.

However it’s all idiotic. Lethargy is the player with all the momentum. The talk of apocalypse, which I guess means having to drink canned beer, the the kind of thing arrived at in moments of fear and ignorance, while rowing through the middle of the stormy sea.

I’ll believe it when I see the promotion of a ‘national dress’ or a reconstituted form of socially unifying mechanism once codified in martial non-uniform garb, like seeing a lot of the same sloganeered t-shirts, or some “unity color” selected by the now-threadbare Roy G. Biv minus the ones used for Thai, Iranian, and Ukrainian protest movements.

However, if I DID have to place a bet, my guess is that if a charismatic Hitlerian figure is to emerge, it will actually be a TV personality with a New Age or self-help bent to their unspoken narrative. Deepak Chopra for “interim manager”, if you will. What makes the jackboot theme implausible is the lack of actual force nor population of military age to pull it off in the stylish manner that they’re accustomed to.

Other than that, I would expect a real meltdown to take the form of a continent in a sort of localized chaos where a continental government still exists, but all their laws governing their citizens are ignored, and local and regional entities function in the manner of a fragmented array of something that looks an awful lot like the duchies and mini-states of the previous millennium. Pockets of cosmopolitanism (i.e. running water and public transit), form an archipelago laid out on a plane of more rural entities that will provide a wide range of quality of life from prosperous suburban life to ones where outsiders passing through are attacked out of simple paranoia.

Assuming that IS the case, it will some time in the future beyond it, well after a struggle of reconstitution of some kind, be looked back upon with horror, but also a great age of awakening for a revival of the creative arts, the individual will, and perhaps even of faith. An aristocracy will emerge. A lack of funding and of ingenuity will end most any conflict we now know of. One issue crackpots will simply evaporate, and Greek public culture will rationalize its superiority somehow.

Then again, it could really go south, even by the standards of medieval age style fragmented continent. The Greenies could take over.