The final dissolution

BC Pires -
BC Pires -

THANK GOD IT'S FRIDAY

BC PIRES

AND SO the Hitler comparisons prove to be unfair…to Hitler! More than 80 years later, Ukraine must be the Sudetenland and the warlord must be appeased with innocent blood.

As you cuff down your “cole beeyars” after work today, Ukrainians sit in cold dark subway stations staring into the abyss. Hopelessly outmanned and outgunned soldiers face the onslaught of the best-equipped armies of the most evil man on the planet.

And this unjust and unjustifiable war in Ukraine raises a question that may change our lives forever: can western liberal democracy survive?

In my lifetime, I have watched the power of trade unions all but vanish. Collective bargaining, the only chip workers ever held, existed for barely half a century in all time. Jeff Bezos spends more to persuade workers not to join unions than he would if he gave them all a raise, because unions are an existential threat to capital.

Even within liberal democracy, the power of money has been destructive.

Brick by brick, capital has dismantled the foundation of civilisation, viz, the notion of the deliberate protection of the vulnerable. By relentless propaganda, workers were persuaded that jobs for life were bad, that they should change careers every five years, or as often as they were made redundant and that they should rent the trucks they were hired to drive from companies who classed them as independent contractors. The British National Health Service, the high-water mark of world civilisation, even as you read, is being broken up and sold for parts to American medical gangster outfits.

And, everywhere, the inhuman prosperity of the few has been underwritten by austerity, or the suffering of the many. The English comedian Alexei Sayle summed up austerity in the glorious line that “the global economic crisis of 2008 was caused by there being too many libraries in Wolverhampton.”

And so we race to the New Feudalism.

And the notion prevails that the modern serfs or slavs, those least capable of absorbing the cost of change, should bear the brunt of it.

In my own lifetime, except in Western Europe, I have witnessed the abandonment of the struggle for just societies. As catchphrases go, “dog eat dog” and “for-profit healthcare” have replaced “I am my brother’s keeper” and “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”

And western liberal democracy itself, the best chance any human being alive has ever had, is at risk today in Ukraine. The moment that mad firetrucker should succeed, the other authoritarian giant will be snatching countries it decides are not real.

If debate is reduced to a fistfight, who has a chance against bullies? We could lose democracy itself, and the best chance humanity has ever had of building just societies, in the next few years.

But, in Trinidad, that won’t even be discerned. Most of us cockroaches won’t even think we should put ourselves in fowl business, lest we be pecked.

And, even if we make so bold as to declare ourselves worthy of commenting on world affairs, the Trinidadian penchant for ignoring the fabric of any issue and ripping apart the hem will take centre stage; it probably already has. Up to the very night the tanks rolled over the border, bright people, not idiots, were cackling over the stupidity of we, who didn’t understand Putin would
never invade! Even now, using maps coloured blue, they defend the KGB king kleptocrat and vilify the evil NATO. As if marking a map with a few swastikas in 1938 would justify Hitler's invasion of Poland in 1939.

All of this evil grew from the usual root: the love of money and the accumulation of massive wealth by a handful of men without consciences. Had filthy Russian lucre been left to rot as roubles on the streets of Moscow, we would not be praying for the Ukraine today, or paying for our greed with the lives of children.

But Russian loot was turned into pounds sterling and luxury flats and football clubs in London. And now openly seeks to destroy the only way of life worth living: the notion of one man, one vote (not one man with many guns) and the gradual construction of a better life for our children.

You justify Putin today at your own peril tomorrow. Even if you don’t quite grasp it yet.

BC Pires is obviously a NATO stooge and Yankee apologist. Read the full version of this column on Saturday at www.BCPires.com

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