Thursday, December 12, 2019

A Holiday Nightmare

By Nathaniel Laxer

Boris Johnson has won.

Despite all of the lies, debased vitriol and stomach turning hypocrisy, despite it being a time in the United Kingdom of declining life expectancy, rising poverty and incredible distress, led by an anemic government of liars and cowards, he won.

Won easily too, and historically. This is the first time in modern British political history that a government has increased its majority in its fourth term. Truly dismal.

What can be expected out of this -- rather than a vision of green energy, ending austerity, free college and pharmacare -- is a sprint to the finish line of market policies. The Conservatives will accelerate the neoliberal project and fundamentally shift British society for the worse. Rivers of blood delivered in red little suitcases.

This result of immeasurable disappointment and disaster for many is but a centerpiece of what has been an era of farce and despair. From the rise of Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro and Viktor Orban, among others, to the forward march of the behemoth of climate change; something for which there is little time left and little action taken, only empty suits smiling as pipelines are built.

All while inequality soars to unprecedented levels in modern human history, leaving a scant few unscathed in a maelstrom of misery.

It is no wonder in these circumstances that mental illness globally is on the rise. That, as the writer Mark Fisher put it, "it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism". Things are deeply dire, and there really is very little hope in sight.

Yet mass movements in Chile, Ecuador, Haiti, Iraq, the global climate strikes and the teacher strikes in the US, among many others, give glimpses of another possible world. They stand in contrast to the drums of imperialist war, racial violence and corporate profiteering. An unending cacophony of drone strikes, live streamed mass killings and opioid addictions. A pitch black vision against humanity.

The twin realities of hopelessness and cruelty get to the heart of this result. When threatened, even slightly, capital will respond with ceaseless attacks, with anything from McCarthyist revivals, liberal concern trolling and absurd accusations of bigotry. All amidst cartoonish duplicity  ignored by a media class of useless, vapid stooges for power, cowards who will not be spared from the hell they are creating.

However, as bleak as things are and may seem at times, it is worth remembering that if things were hopeless all of this propaganda and vitriol would be unnecessary. The foundations of this system are built on fault lines and just as in 1789 and 1917 it is impossible to predict earthquakes. Things seem unchangeable, and then they don’t. While it will never be possible to get back all that has been lost by the brutality of our neoliberal system -- the drowned refugees, overdosed homeless, massacred Indigenous peoples, extinct species, and the countless other forgotten dead -- we can change the future, even if the moment seems impossibly far away.

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen", a quote that has been attributed to Lenin.

Our weeks will come, someday.

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