Solstice 2014
The Fimbulwinter of our Discontent
If you look at the world’s political situation, it’s pretty hard to talk about hope. The US is in the final stages of becoming a corporate oligarchy (by definition, a fascist state) and about the only thing to stop it now would be a huge public outcry that managed to terrify the politicians. Is that in the cards? Republicans, riding a wave of voter suppression, gained control of the Senate and strengthened their stranglehold on the House, getting all of 19% of the eligible vote as they did so. A Pew poll this week showed that a majority of Americans are fine with torture as a government instrument. I can’t help but wonder if a similar poll in Germany in 1941 might have shown similar results. Remember, despite his popularity, and the wave of anti-Semitism in Germany, Hitler found it necessary to hide his death camps in Poland and other areas in eastern Europe. Cops, no matter how vicious, murderous and incompetent they are on video, enjoy firm public support. They even demand Americans apologize for showing them as some are.
In 2014, we’re seeing Nazis on the rise in Europe. Even Germany has a movement, disguised well enough to avoid violating German laws against Nazism. Twenty-first century Nazis have Moslems as their scapegoats rather than Jews, but otherwise are the same creatures. Meanwhile, Russia is a nation in crisis, with a sociopath in charge and possessing thousands of nuclear weapons. In the middle East, ISIS and Benjamin Netanyahu compete to see who can be the more murderous and brutal. Mexico teeters on the edge of a violent revolution. Canada and Australia have become puppet states to oil interests.
In the meantime, Obama just caved and signed a bill that strips away most of the remaining regulations on trading and banking, ensuring that the next huge financial crash and resulting Depression is not only inevitable, but will occur sooner rather than later.
We’ve learned that government and corporate monitoring of our lives is not a paranoid delusion, but a very real and immediate problem.
Climate change will continue to intensify, a short epoch some scientists are already referring to as “The Anthropocene Extinction Event”. There’s no avoiding severe climate dislocation at this point; the best we can do is try to avoid extinction.
This is sounding like a Sumer Solstice piece – which, of course, it is in Australia. A friend once asked why I didn’t write special pieces for the opposite time of year. I said it was because the winter solstice was the shortest and darkest day of the year, and from now on, the sun would gradually return and life would spring anew. It’s all about hope. What would I write on the midsummer’s eve? “It’s all downhill from here?”
The winter solstice is a bottoming out. I don’t know if we’ve hit bottom yet, but as any alcoholic can tell you, there is a bottom to hit before things get better. Solstice is the time of the dim, brief afternoon, and the all-too-early dark. It’s similar to the last thing a drunk sees before he either dies, or decides to get better. If we aren’t there yet, we will be soon enough.
If there was no possibility of improvement, no cause for hope, human history might well have ended shortly after Auschwitz was built.
As has happened many times before in human history, events are influenced by a vicious faction, enabled, not by any true support beyond Chomsky’s famous ‘manufactured consent’, but by ignorance and complacency. When things reach the point where ignorance and complacency become unaffordable luxuries, the agendas of the driven and the entitled fall apart with amazing rapidity.
For decades, the Soviet Union was seen as an unassailable bastion of government control, with everyone spied upon, jobs and money and housing tightly controlled, and nobody dared step out of line. Yet when the end came, it came with amazing rapidity and with hardly a shot fired. I remember provoking gales of laughter from some drinking buddies in 1987 by predicting that the Soviet Union would be gone by the end of the century, Russia would be back, and Leningrad would again be called Saint Petersburg. I was right, but even I didn’t dare imagine it would happen just over four years later.
When Germany fell in 1945, it wasn’t just a military defeat. You could hardly find any Germans willing to admit they had ever supported Hitler in any way, shape or form. Allied fears of a large underground resistance movement of unreconstructed Nazis never materialized. In Japan, not only did they abandon the divinity of the Emperor without so much as a backwards glance, but they eagerly embraced western culture. Japan’s government under Prime Minister Abe may be getting more secretive and militaristic, but they aren’t about to bring back the Tenno. Post-war Japan learned overnight they didn’t need a divine emperor, a scripture for the country dating back to 660 BCE.
No matter how inviolate the rule, how set-in-stone the destructive traditions, people and cultures do change when they have to. After seventy years, Communism fell to a fat drunk sitting on a tank. A credo that, just six years earlier, tens of millions of Germans swore to defend with their lives, had essentially no defenders amongst the survivors. Japan in the light of atomic flashes calmly bid sayonara to 2500 years of religious tradition.
No cabal, no government, no church is inviolate. They all live on public sufferance, and public sufferance alone. It doesn’t matter now many guns they have, or if they control the money and the banks, or even if they claim domain over your immortal soul; when they become onerous, the people decide they must go, and they are gone.
It doesn’t happen without cost. In post war Germany and Japan, despite the best efforts of the Americans and other allies, millions died of starvation, exposure, and disease. (Without the Americans and other allies, the toll would have been tens of millions over years, rather than months.) Russia lost nearly ten percent of her population during the horrible decade of plunder capitalism that followed the fall of Communism. Even America, which had a “successful revolution” (i.e., one that didn’t decimate the population) needed a decade to form a stable government.
In many parts of the world, the Solstice marks the beginning of winter. Even as the days grow longer and the sun sails higher in the sky, the coldest and fiercest storms await. Spring will come, but a toll must be paid.
We aren’t going to get out of our current predicament cheaply. We can measure the climb ahead only by how far we’ve fallen, and the greater the fall, the harder the climb. And we’ve fallen a long way.
But spring will come. Even if you don’t live to see it, your children will. This may be the winter of our discontent, but it isn’t our fimbulwinter. Spring will come.
As I finish writing this, it has become full dark outside—early! So very early!
But I know that tomorrow, the sun will set a little bit later. And the day will be a little bit longer, part of a long, arduous road. Spring will come.
Happy Solstice.