The Price Of Crushed Hopes And Unheeded Hurts.

The Spring Of Hope: In 1848 the peoples of Europe rose in their millions to revivify the revolutionary demands of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. The crushing of this "European Spring" set in motion the self-destructive philosophical and political movements which culminated, 85 years later, in the appointment of Adolf Hitler as German Chancellor. We must hope that the convulsions of 2016-17 do not signal the beginnings of another such catastrophe.

 

TWO YEARS: 1848 and 1933; are linked by the consequences of political disillusionment and despair. In Germany, the “Year of Revolutions” – 1848 – ended in failure. The fervent hopes of German youth for a unified, liberal and democratic nation were dashed. In the years that followed they would be told that: “Not through speeches and majority decisions will the great questions of the day be decided – that was the great mistake of 1848 and 1849 – but by iron and blood.”
 

Eighty-five years after “the great mistake” of believing in “speeches and majority decisions” had curdled the German intelligentsia’s faith in the rational values of the Enlightenment, the grandson of their disillusionment and despair, Adolf Hitler, was appointed Chancellor of Germany. On 30 January 1933, “iron and blood” ceased to be the effective means of achieving specific national ends, and became ends in themselves. Abandoning the voices of reason for the fiery counsel of political dragons has only one ending – and it is neither happy nor civilised.
 

The year separating June 2016 from June 2017 may yet be similarly identified as the starting-point of a catastrophe every bit as terrible as the one which kicked-off in 1933.
 

It has been a year of incoherency and incomprehension: of primal political screams and contemptuous dismissals. A year in which everything has been demanded and nothing has been conceded. A year of brute force and sophisticated manipulation, in which the champions of both political approaches remained committed only to exploiting the divisions they had created.
 

There will be those who advance the election of Emmanuel Macron as evidence that reason has finally triumphed over passion. That the madness which began with Brexit and descended into the delirium of Trump has, at last, been tranquilised: appropriately, in the home of the Enlightenment – France.
 

But this would be to confuse the shrewdness of Charles De Gaulle, the father of the Fifth French Republic, with a genuinely democratic solution to the still very real problem of organised political irrationality. The run-off presidential election was devised by De Gaulle as the last line of defence against both the residual evil of Vichy fascism and the growing menace of France’s Moscow-oriented Communist Party. A prophylactic against extremism – not a cure.
 

And against the daughter of Vichy, Marine Le Pen, De Gaulle’s constitution has held the line. But that in no way makes Monsieur Macron the positive choice of the French people. He has become their President not on account of the man he is, but on account of the woman he is not. Nor should we be dazzled by the 66%-34% result. Madame Le Pen’s father, in his 2002 run-off against Jacques Chirac, secured barely a fifth of the votes cast. His daughter has lifted that fraction to more than a third. The National Front now calls itself the largest single political force in France.
 

A similar number of Frenchmen either abstained or left their ballot papers blank. Macron owes his “victory” to the votes of two-thirds of two thirds of France. If the supporters of this former investment banker attempt to claim the run-off result as a positive mandate for the neoliberal programme his “En Marche” movement is advancing, then the partisans of irrationality and brute force will advance their own claims – on the nation’s streets.
 

Macron’s task, now, is not to strip French workers of their rights by presidential decree, but to make sure that 2017 does not become the year of unheeded hurts, in the same way that 1848 became the year of crushed hopes. He assured his cheering supporters outside the Louvre that his greatest wish is to bring the French people together. Now that would be a real victory!
 

Because hurts unheeded and hopes crushed do not disappear, they fester and weep, poisoning the blood of a nation’s politics, raising its temperature to fever heat, spawning the hallucinations and delirious ravings of demagogues for whom hurt and hope are meat and drink.
 

We do not know what sort of Europe might have emerged had the “Year of Revolutions” not ended in despair and disillusionment. Had her best and brightest children not, over the next 85 years, convinced themselves that it was possible to go “beyond good and evil” and return unscathed.
 

But the Europe which actually emerged from 1848’s crushed hopes – that we do know.
 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 12 May 2017.

An Assad Victory Is Syria’s (And The World’s) Least-Worst Option

The Spoils Of Victory? Syria 2013. Those who cry "Let justice be done - though the heavens fall!", are seldom to be found living amongst the ruins. The World's options in Syria are rapidly narrowing. It can either allow Assad to restore enough order to make meaningful peace talks possible, or, by increasing arms shipments to the rebels, risk the whole of the Middle East erupting in flames.

 

RIGHT UP UNTIL its actions triggered World War I, hardly anyone in New Zealand gave a damn about Serbia. Until very recently, the same was probably true of our relationship with Syria.

 

Even now, with images of Syria’s gruesome civil war nightly smearing the world’s television screens, I find myself reacting to the rapidly rising body-count with a mixture of pity and frustration. As the angry, anguished faces of the slayers and their victims flash before me, I demand to know what could possibly be worth so much suffering?

 

Freedom?

 

Democracy?

 

Observing the “Arab Spring’s” slow descent into its entirely predictable winter of democratically-sanctioned fanaticism, I impotently admonish the opponents of the Syrian dictator, Bashar Al Assad:

 

“Be careful what you wish for!”

 

Freedom and democracy are probably impossible now, anyway, wished for or not. Too much blood has been spilt and too many homicidal sectarian passions aroused, for the ballot to be seen, miraculously, as an acceptable substitute for the bullet. The time for compromise in Syria was at the very beginning of the conflict – and that moment has passed. Neither side can now afford to rest until all their enemies are dead and absolute victory secured.

 

Of all the potential victors of the Syrian civil war, it is of Bashar Al Assad’s Baathist regime that the world has the least reason to be fearful. For all its faults – and they are legion – Assad’s government is now the only armed force in the country still committed to preserving Syria’s territorial integrity and to its continuance as an independent nation state.

 

Assad’s opponents can no longer credibly commit to either of those objectives. Whether its leaders are willing to acknowledge it or not, the Syrian rebellion has taken on the character of a Saudi and Qatar financed Sunni jihad. Victory for the rebels would dissolve the existing boundaries of the Middle East – thereby unleashing a wider and infinitely more dangerous war into which the whole world could be drawn.

 

By upholding Syria’s rights as a nation-state, China and Russia are, contrary to most Western commentary, making the most useful contribution to the preservation of both the regional and the global peace. It is the United Kingdom and France – both major arms exporters to the leading Sunni monarchies and emirates – that have opted to further inflame the Syrian crisis by bullying the European Union into lifting its ban on selling arms to either side of the conflict.

 

If the UK and France end up putting their thumbs on the strategic scales in Syria, the United States will have no choice but to weigh-in alongside them. This would result not only in the Russian Federation stepping-up its arms shipments to the Syrian Government, but also in the Shia republics of Iran and Iraq increasing the size and capability of their own military and paramilitary contingents (including the Lebanon-based Hezbollah Militia) currently fighting alongside the Syrian armed forces.

 

A fiery crescent of conflict, extending from Iran in the east, to Lebanon (and Israel?) in the west, and threatening all of the states to its immediate north and south, will be the inevitable outcome of any strategy which does not take as its starting point the restoration of the political status quo ante in Syria, the disarming of the rebels, a full amnesty for all of Assad’s opponents, and the drawing-up of a new constitution for the Syrian people – to be guaranteed by all five permanent members of the UN Security Council.

 

Whether they be English, American or Spanish, civil wars only end when one side decisively defeats the other. Unless it is the West’s desire to prolong the agony of the Syrian people indefinitely, its best option is to call upon the Sunni monarchs to cease arming the rebels and allow the Syrian armed forces to re-establish something approximating order.

 

That would be the least-worst-case Syrian scenario. The alternative – an oil-fuelled (and quite possibly nuclear) conflagration devouring the entire Middle East – could hardly avoid setting the whole world on fire.

 

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 21 June 2013.