Most people I speak to nowadays are worried about the future. Not that I speak to many, but those I do speak to have varying political viewpoints, and are of widely different ages and levels of education. Most of them disagree with very many of my views. But they are all worried; frightened even. One person told me today: “I am almost always angry now, rancorous even. It’s very uncomfortable, a corrosive state of mind.”
I told her: “As time passes, you will feel more sad than angry. We know there are scum-bags out there, particularly among those in power and those wanting to be in power. That’s how it’s always been and how it will always be.”
I happen to be reading the book “Una historia de España” by Perez-Reverte, which angrily summarises Spain’s inglorious past. I have read it before, but feel a need to read it again, because it mirrors what some of us in the West feel today in the face of our own very inglorious present. I have come to that very point in Spain’s past, as described by him, that seems almost to be about us now. Here is my interpretation of Perez-Reverte’s take:
In the second half of the nineteenth century, there were basically two political parties: the self-serving, often decadent liberals, and the conservatives (headed by a Church fanatically opposed to enlightenment) both equally intent on exploiting and suppressing peasants and the nascent class of industrial workers. (Spain had been a supremely backward country and had had virtually no industry until well into the nineteenth century). Both parties were supported by powerful military factions.
BUT at that very time, books were being written, spread and read, in spite of rigid censorship, by offspring of the burgeoning bourgeoisie. A number of “brave men and women” organised clandestine literacy classes. There were even a couple of revolutions, one in 1854, that were promptly suffocated with mass executions. For the majority, life was bleak, to say the least, suppression was more systematic than it had ever been. But looking back, the author seems to be saying, we see that seeds had been sown that would come to fruition a century later, at the death of Franco.
I think there is no doubt that US supremacy is coming to an end, just as the supremacy of the medieval Spanish oligarchy eventually came to an end. But will the process take another century? Will the Middle East have to wait for a century before it can know peace? Will USA’s distant vassals in Europe have to send their children to fight against Russia and die in the hundreds of thousands to protect the USD?
And what happens after that? Will the climate a hundred years hence accommodate life on this planet? Will the Chinese truly abide by their much vaunted Confucianism? Are there not scum-bags in China as elsewhere. Are we as defenceless against scum-bags as against climate change?
