The table is being set for another world war. The EU election results will hasten us to the slaughter.

It was yesterday or maybe the day before that. But I saw something and it triggered a memory, from long ago to resurface in my imagination.

Photo by Provincial Archives of Alberta on Unsplash

I was walking to find a grocery store that sold affordable food, which is as difficult as Diogenes' search for an honest man in 4th century ancient Greece. During my journey, I found a woman splayed out on the pavement, who, at that moment, had given up on her battle to survive.

Mental illness, intense poverty, loneliness, drug addiction or simple weariness had got the best of her, and so- she lay sprawled out on the pavement, defeated.

She hollered invective at the nearby trees while pissing herself. A few shopping bags with the scant possessions that identified her existence were scattered- near her. When I approached, the woman's anger turned upon me.

I asked if she was alright, "fuck off", was the reply. So, I did because I saw a police car pulling up and knew, for good or ill, they'd deal with her.

There was something familiar to the scene that I witnessed with that woman. It was how society had turned her into a deranged outcast beggar that reminded me of another time in the pre internet era. It was when I was on business in a dusty Russian town that had two industries: producing vodka and the conditions for alcoholism.

There, decades ago in that backwater of Russia, I saw a woman wearing filthy clothes drunk and despairing crawling on her hands and knees. She had no discernible age because living on the streets alters the chronology that marks a person's time on earth. The Russian woman screamed, raged, wept and pleaded for help. People ignored her because they had problems of their own as Russia was imploding with a devalued currency and out of control inflation.

Thirty years ago, I was in that woman's presence for no more than it took me to smoke my cigarette. But during that brief time in her company; it was like getting an undergraduate degree in the consequences of unregulated capitalism.

It was" the special period" in Russia when the economy collapsed after the fall of the Soviet Union and neoliberal western capitalism turned the country into a gangster state of oligarchs, who destroyed the economy and impoverished the people. If you ever wonder how Putin came about it's rather simple the short-sighted self-interest of America's entitled class, produced the conditions for today's Russia.  .

It's like Western Bankers and politicians in the 1990s decided to rewrite the story of Graham Greene's The Third Man and make it Russia's destiny where black market morphine peddler Harry Lime lived happily ever after rather than dying in a gunfight.

You can despise Putin like I do and also comprehend that even if there was regime change the USA doesn't want democracy for Russia- just economic and political subservience. The politics of the West took its mask off when it monetised state infrastructure and sold it to our oligarchs who marooned the vulnerable, the poor, the refugee and the worker to a dog-eat-dog world where wealth determines your survivability. 

We aren't liberal democracies anymore. We have become right-wing anti-immigrant societies that are stratified by an ever-growing wealth inequality. The EU proved that today by the results of their general election. The continent in 2024 is now more right wing than it was in the 1930s. But what is terrifying is that the USA is more right wing than it has ever been which means no one in the west can rebuild a social democratic order.

Europe is in political freefall because neoliberalism is a corrupt system that has impoverished the lives of most citizens. Fascism or centrism under a neoliberal economic model both spell authoritarianism to society. .

The only way for the 1% to maintain control is through authoritarianism and war. This is happening now and not in the distant future. The table is being set for war with Russia and certainly a war of annihilation against migrants

The next world war, like the First World War, will be fought to preserve the interests of the entitled class. I didn't think any of this was possible a few years ago. Now I know we are rushing into it like lambs to the slaughter.

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