Er, right…we’ll do that then
Isn’t it odd how those fannying about on the world stage always seem somehow to get around a table and sort things out once events start to turn seriously unpleasant? This is what appears to have happened last night in Geneva: when one analyses the ‘accord’ reached, it’s nothing more than the my-people-will-get-in-touch-with-your-people and see how much we disagree about sort of stuff. Meanwhile, a free sovereign nation finds itself lying on the operating table, prior to becoming, probably, the main course at the dinner table.
Those who thought the old failing lessons of humanity have been learned are in for a shock: it’s been a long time coming, but now at last one or two are getting it through their noddles that we’ve been here before….and only a radical change in the way civilisation is structured will ever stop the the power mania. If the Ukraine being wheeled into the carvery gives you the feeling you’ve seen this before, it’s because quite a few of us have.
Homo sapiens is good at drawing straight lines through cultures,and thus turning this week’s solution into next year’s problem. America in the eighteenth century, Africa and Ireland in the nineteenth, and then a long parade in the twentieth: Austro-Hungary, Alsace, the Rhineland, Austria again, Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Iron Curtain, India and Pakistan, Cyprus, Nigeria, Ireland again, Czechoslovakia again, Yugoslavia and now Ukraine. They are all examples of a dual syndrome: the problems that emerge when two cultures rub up against each other, and the consequent need for partition.
Yet despite the irrefutable history learnings this should give us about how to arrange our tribes, the last century has seen the hegemony of multi-culturalism in Britain (to my mind, a disaster on almost every level) and various attempts to create multi-cultural empires – all of which failed: the Third Reich, the USSR, and the European Union.
The only ‘multicultural’ empire that has been a success is the USA, but even there it took a bloody Civil War to achieve it….and continuing social problems with both negroid and Hispanic populations over time. States’ Rights are still a major part of American life, and jealously guarded: most people hate Washington and all it stands for, and remain armed to the teeth because they fear both social violence and standing armies.
The one factor, however, that has seen the US through bad times (even though it obviously faces more now) is that – beyond the black population – the vast majority of families who came to America did so willingly and with enormous gratitude. They didn’t get invaded, they populated a Promised Land. They have a flag that is thus revered by most, a democratic electoral system, and a Dream. The fact that all these have, over time, been pulverised, pissed on and almost completely perverted is not the point: after roughly 1934, these factors made the United States a true Nation until the Vietnam War.
Ever since 1972, Presidential elections have been a matter of one or two percentage points in terms of the result: Vietnam was a divisive war, and the adoption of neoliberalism under Reagan turned the US into two nations. Whichever way you cut it, tribes can only rub along together when there is plenty of room for everyone, and the opportunity to get into the team is equal, based solely on talent. In the West today, it palpably isn’t.
The rise and rise of tribalism since the collapse of the Soviet Union is such an obvious trend, it beggars belief that the goons in Brussels and Moscow – along with all the mercantile globalists – either can’t see it, or are determined to ignore it. Those who see one World increasingly physically joined up are like so many turkeys rushing round the farmyard on December 15th going “globalglobalglobalglobalglobal”. We are seeing – in this, an interregnum in history – that nation States, SupraStates and joined up planetary commerce simply don’t work any more.
Those who see the internet as a further solidification of that awful Levittian myth The Global Village fail to grasp that the Web is, by definition, virtual: it isn’t physical and real, and genuine familarity on it between users from different cultures is impossible.
Three main State bodies – the Russian Federation, the US and the EU are at any rate going to the table in order have their kilo of Ukrainian flesh. I wonder doubtfully if any of these three ‘great’ powers will exist twenty years from now; but there is no question in my mind that the Ukrainian culture will endure. Tribal cultures are real and wired in; mere nationality is increasingly unimportant. Ukraine may well be a mirror on the past, but there’s a crack in it. And in that crack lies the future.
The Slog 