The Summer of Fear

Never has anxiety about the future, the undermining of policy, feelings of powerlessness and anger been more widely shared.

London is burning under the combined blows of a fascist crime, desperate youth and the government’s ruthless and dogmatic fiscal restraint. The outraged are marching on Madrid and after Athens, the protesters are better at articulating what they refuse to accept and what they want exactly, but they are also preparing to do the same in Lisbon, Rome, Paris, Brussels…

In a restless and disjointed Europe, only Germany seems to be coming out of it well, acting more and more in its own way with its economic “model,” which is admirable (hard work, social cooperation, innovation, exportation) but unexportable, because the primary engaged market — the super “machine tools” that are the basis of the entire global industrial network — is unrivaled and exclusive to Germany.

As a result of this German exception, Berlin is becoming more and more of a “sore subject” for Europeans, and Chancellor Angela Merkel seems to have abandoned all continental leadership. Slightly nationalist, she is surfing the anti-Greek wave in her country, all while halfheartedly trying to temper it. And she finally says “yes” when we in Brussels implore her 10 times to yield some ground — and a few billion euros — in a desperate attempt to save the Union.

Growth, and above all, faith in the future have largely deserted the West to a slow but seemingly inexorable decline. As a stockholder no longer possessing the resources of its past hegemony, the West consoles itself with all the same emotions of the “old, compassionate rich,” shedding tears and a few sacks of food on the dry and starving Horn of Africa.

Let us note in passing — and without minimizing the suffering of the Somalians subjected for the past two decades to a sort of gang super-war amidst total political chaos (absence of government) — that once again, media intensity is disproportionate to the measurable and objective gravity of the disasters: the Horn of Africa is suffering, but perhaps less than during the great past famines in the same region, those of 1984-85 and 1991-92.

And we aren’t talking about the greatest famines of the last half century, those of China in 1959-61 (over 30 million dead) and of North Korea in 1996 (between 1 and 3 million dead). They took place behind closed doors under the silence of the western media, which was, in fact, rather benevolent towards Mao Zedong in the early 1960s, even while he was starving the Chinese people with limitless cynicism.

In the United States, a far-right group representing 10 percent of the electorate has managed to impose its agenda on the entire Republican Party, which in turn dominates all American politics with its majority in the House of Representatives.

Barack Obama, on the threshold of his last year in office, completes his pathetic transformation from inspired visionary to political eunuch, bound and gagged by the tea party hordes to which he yields 90 percent of the ground, yet always demanding more.

Obama’s re-election nevertheless remains curiously possible, if the Republicans decide to send their craziest people to the 2012 presidential elections. The extremist escalation and freak show seem to be taking over the Republican race. A sick democracy, flooded with money and run dry of ideas.

Despite its arbitrary and somewhat ad hoc nature, and despite the arrogance of the financiers who rediscovered their foolish pride of the pre-2008 period without having been “put back in their place” (when there was a good opportunity to do so three years ago), the mad waltz of the stock markets this summer is an indirect reflection of the political and economic turmoil afflicting Europe and North America.

The current trend is negative and the oracles are now speaking of a new dip in the recession. The preceding decline in 2008 did not have a “purging” effect and did not fix the fundamental problems of western economies: anemic employment and demand, and secondly — but only secondly — debt and deficits. In 2011, to the greatest misery of the unemployed and the needy, debt seems to haunt politicians and the media to the point that they ignore all other issues.