In the current global conflict, with Europe at its epicentre, any forecast is a thankless task. Events are moving at an unprecedented speed and usually in defiance of our predictions, based on experience and the logic of a previous world that no longer exists.
While Ukraine was about to become Europe, Europe became Ukraine.
Ukraine has become not only a battleground between the forces of neoliberalism and humanity but also the biggest media construct of our time – a hologram state that uses the latest media technologies to try to convince the world of its reality in order to provide the public opinion desired by planetary elites.
But in recent months and weeks the situation has begun to change. The EU, which contrary to its theoretical aims of existence has become an instrument not of political independence but of total subjugation of European countries to international financial flows, with a new ignorant generation of technocrat managers in power, is no longer even able to pretend that its states are still able to decide anything in the interests of their own citizens.
While Ukraine was about to become Europe, Europe has become Ukraine, but sadly not the peaceful bread country of our memory, but an occupied territory where the invisible hand of mega-corporations like BlackRock, Monsanto and others, whose information is difficult to find on Google (a tool of other corporations) chooses the method of death for millions of people, lost between the trademark logos and national flags.
If our descendants ever learn the whole current kitchen of our dehumanisation, they will ask themselves: how could our culture and history have allowed this to happen? The search for an answer will surely lead to the realisation that while armies or economic leverage used to be the main destructive force of empires, today the latest advances in psychology are taking centre stage, given unlimited entry into any family circle anywhere in the world thanks to television screens. Simultaneously with a general decline in the average level of education, this creates extremely favourable conditions for the manipulation of a desperate population with fewer and fewer social guarantees and more and more urgent real problems. And at the forefront of this dramatic process is Ukraine, which has now become a major laboratory of madness.
But history is fortunately non-linear, and human beings are much more complex and unpredictable, and social processes do not fit into models programmed by economic power. The inhabitants of various European countries are no longer just tired of artificially inflated anti-Russian hysteria and the same news, devoid of any critical analysis or context, but are asking more and more questions about where their countries are heading with blind obedience to the demands of NATO, which has become a straitjacket for any sovereignty.
It is not just the economic problems of the current winter without gas; it is simply that this situation has more clearly and visibly exposed a crisis that has been building up over decades. Just as the coronavirus pandemic that just started a couple of years ago (regardless of the nature of its origins and the rest of this story, which requires a separate analysis) showed the world the failure of the current international humanitarian cooperation mechanisms and national health systems, turned by neoliberalism into private commercial enterprises, so the conflict around Ukraine has demonstrated to European citizens the complete lack of independence of their governments and, more specifically, the inability to continue social development in
Whereas earlier wars waged by the USA and Europe for the same purposes and with similar mechanisms took place away from First World borders and there were islands of independent critical journalism among the mass media, today the situation is fundamentally different. Simultaneously with the transformation of the former allies (who used to bicker, but were only pandered to) – neoliberalism and Nazism – into a single entity, they have a new project manager. The European pseudo-leftists, in the name of NATO and corporate interests, have put a complete dissonance in the mind of the utterly confused Everyman, and put a final end to the future of traditional political parties, which have been transformed from effective political instruments of the last century into masquerades and beauty contests for the promoters of one branch of government or another, who pretend to be leaders of society.
With the cessation of social debate at the top and the intensification of police, economic and cultural repression against all dissenters, the representatives of yesterday’s leading European democracies can no longer criticise the Ukrainian Nazi-neoliberal dictatorship because they differ from it less and less every day. The fact that Western Europe still has more civil and journalistic freedoms than Ukraine is explained not by the democratic convictions of their leaders, but by the greater degree of organisation of European social movements, which are more difficult to ban and suppress than the weak and fragmented leftist parties of Ukraine.
It is interesting, without making predictions, to highlight some trends whose influence will increase in the near future.
I think that fatigue and irritation with Ukrainian issues will continue to grow in different strata of the population in various European countries, which has become not only the main catalyst of the current economic crisis, but has also become too propagandistic a product that does not fit well with the receptivity of the older and middle generation of Europeans brought up on real journalism.
Any attempts by the Ukrainian government to put pressure on European countries, and especially in the form in which it is happening today, will only reinforce this trend. At the same time, the problems associated with the extreme inequality of European economies, and unsolvable within the EU’s neoliberal scenario, will increase. A fundamentally new social force must emerge in response, one that is not linked to discredited political parties and that can unite the discontent of Europeans who do not want to live in banana republics.
Increasing tensions will inevitably lead to a mass realisation that we all need a fundamentally new social model, the development of which would be the creation of a real “image of the future”, not only for domestic national consumption in favour of this or that conjuncture, but also as a project of great universal importance.
In the coming months, I believe, we will witness the emergence of many new phenomena not described by sociologists, and the future will be determined by our ability to respond quickly, in an organised and critical way to the challenge of this train of history that is rushing towards us today.
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