Not Again, Please...

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I downloaded a copy of the pdf of  "Lose-lose? - The Munich Security Report 2024", and although I've really only scanned it thus far and left it be for a few days as I've had other stuff to attend to, I've just flicked back to the Executive Summary [what does that phrase always sound so pompous to me?] and lit on the depressing fact that what this report demonstrates clearly is precisely what many of us predicted long before the '...zeitenwende...' - the turning point - of the end of the Cold War. Anyone who had lived long enough to have witnessed post-war recovery and relative prosperity for 'normal' people being subsumed by the cancer of the ultra-liberalism of the 1980s, could see that, yes, world Communism was withering on rotten boughs, which was good, but that the real problem was that it was being replaced by something far worse. A world without economic restraint.

The 'End of History' that came with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent domino collapse of the Eastern Bloc, as the Munich Report rightly points out, was a cause for optimism as it appeared on the surface to consign the historical threat of continental or global war to history, to be replaced with a glorious era of global free trade and prosperity for all. The dream was just that: a dream. A mere phantasm. In reality, wars that threatened to de-stabilise entire regions continued yearly, and have done to the present day: currently, and as I mentioned recently, we have a serious deja vu situation around that old sore, Suez, which is at the epicentre of a number of apparently unresolvable conflicts, both physical, and of interests political and economic. There is every chance that the next zeitenwende will be yet another World War, driven, as in The Great War, by the inequality of nations and economies and centred around strategic trade routes. Not a pretty thought...




Comments

  1. Anonymous25 February 2024 at 08:23

    It is definitely NOT a dream mate it's how the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The "American Dream" and the bollocks of you can do "anything that you want to" are just lures for the unwary. When penniless people are loking to make money on shares: they're desperate!
    Joe

    ReplyDelete

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