I don't know if we are too late to stop the construction of fascism as the dominant ideology in our own countries, anymore.

Photo by Janne Leimola on Unsplash

The weather this April felt worse than we deserved. It probably wasn't because even T.S. Eliot called it the cruellest month over a hundred years ago. Still, there is a sharp edge to April 2024. It cuts into the skin of our optimism and aches because the absence of political and economic hope makes the rain falling outside feel as bleak as a November downpour.

I can't shake my pessimism or foreboding that the worst of times will shortly become much more so. It's spring, but democracy is buried under a harsh winter of neoliberalism, which won't thaw without the burning flame of a revolution. However what is approaching us on the horizon is not that. Instead, suppression is coming and this time everyone will notice its heavy hand.

Elections in India and the ones soon for Canada, the UK and the USA foretell authoritarianism is the factory default setting of end-stage capitalism. The centre and right of our political spectrums are virtually identical when it comes to privatising state infrastructure including public healthcare. They are on the same page when it comes to the refugee crisis which is to deny its existence or blame it on unscrupulous people smugglers. They are in agreement that societies need fewer Welfare benefits and pretend the cost of living crisis isn't caused by the 1% whose greed knows no limit.

Dread for tomorrow sits in the pit of my stomach because our economies are gearing up for a great big fucking war. Macron talks about it - as do Sunak and Starmer. Biden boasted when he signed off on billions more of American tax dollars being utilised to continue the wars in Ukraine and Israel, that this was a "good day for Peace."

There are reports that Poland and Lativa are prepared to dragoon Ukrainian male refugees of fighting age back to Ukraine at the request of Kyviv. It's only a matter of time before we begin deportation flights of Ukrainian male refugees to fight on the front lines. We are losing that war against Putin because it can't be won. So Western nations will go deeper into it until we have boots on the ground and then a World War is initiated.

The Gaza war is also a war that can't be won. It's not rocket science but anyone with a moral compass can tell you if a nation's Prime Minister is a fascist, then the war waged by that country will be unjust. Benjamin Netanyahu is a fascist, and so if the war against Gaza began with ethical clarity, it became an abhorrent quagmire of barbarity perpetrated by Israel.

Israel's war became the West's war because we have allowed Netanyahu to wage it with impunity despite opposition from the majority of our citizens. Our government's hands are just as bloody as Israel's government, and now civil unrest has come home to roost.

Gaza's annihilation by Israel mobilised the young at universities the way Vietnam did to US campuses in the 1960s. However, this is not 1968 because then the Democratic Party sincerely fought to eradicate poverty despite waging an immoral and evil war in Vietnam. But, in 2024 it has become totally corrupted by the interests of the 1%. We are on the verge of things worse than Kent State, not only in the USA but for all of its allies. 2024 has become the age of suppression and the end of civil liberties. Academics and university students are under arrest in the USA for exercising their right to demonstrate. Journalists are being laid off in their thousands across the main steam news media in every nation in the West.  Fascism is being constructed, here in our countries and I don't know if we are too late to stop it. 

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