Playlist for Show: Long Waves

Let’s lay the blame for the current upswings in right wing and totalitarian electoral victories where it belongs: at the doorstep of neo-liberal and neo-conservative economics.

We tend not to see the world like this, but the policies of the US, UK, and most all of Europe are responsible for economic migration as well as migration merely to survive and to have a life.

We see this in the rise of fascists and authoritarians in the US, in the election of demagogues such as Trump. Their victories are largely reactions to the social changes at home and abroad birthed by failed policies based on theft, misappropriations of wealth, subversions of democracy, and war to enrich the very few at the top.

Sadly, few noticed this or cared until these same policies were applied at home, in the US, UK and EU, destroying the middle class, siphoning worker’s wages to the top, destroying individual rights in response to terrorism which emerged as a consequence, and creating the influx of migrants into these countries.

Bauman writes: “The modern era has been founded on genocide, and has proceeded through more genocide. Somehow, the shame of yesterday’s massacres proved a poor safeguard against the slaughters of today. The malaise in America was the result of losing in Vietnam, not remorse for victimizing the people.” A genocide of 3 million.

We refuse to see  the genocides, the eternal wars. We are told they keep us safe. They secure democracy globally. They provide a leadership around the world that many people in the first world are already rejecting.

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