Tobias Stone - History tells us what will happen next with Brexit & Trump
NB: A brilliant evocation of the dystopia we are bent upon imposing upon ourselves. Maybe we will wake up, or maybe not. With semi-moronic sociopaths in charge of governments in many of the most powerful military machines of the globe (including our own), and armies of vigilantes of every possible ideological or religious belief running amuck with self-righteous pride and machismo, there is every likelihood of a generalised war. To these inebriated individuals I can only say - your dreams of glory will turn to dust. Unfortunately many ordinary and innocent persons will also reap what you have sown. Already violence and revenge are on auto-pilot. To those of us who retain the capacity to think - speak up while you may, or the world will pay a heavy price. It's happened once too often. Open your eyes. DS
What can we do? Well, again, looking back, probably not much. The liberal intellectuals are always in the minority... The people who see that open societies, being nice to other people, not being racist, not fighting wars, is a better way to live, they generally end up losing these fights. They don’t fight dirty. They are terrible at appealing to the populace. They are less violent, so end up in prisons, camps, and graves. We need to beware not to become divided (see: Labour party), we need to avoid getting lost in arguing through facts and logic, and counter the populist messages of passion and anger with our own similar messages...
It seems we’re
entering another of those stupid seasons humans impose on themselves at fairly
regular intervals. My background is
archaeology, so also history and anthropology. It leads me to look at big
historical patterns. My theory is that most peoples’ perspective of history is
limited to the experience communicated by their parents and grandparents, so
50–100 years. To go beyond that you have to read, study, and learn to untangle
the propaganda that is inevitable in all telling of history. In a nutshell, at
university I would fail a paper if I didn’t compare at least two, if not three
opposing views on a topic. Taking one telling of events as gospel doesn’t wash
in the comparative analytical method of research that forms the core of British
academia. (I can’t speak for other systems, but they’re definitely not all
alike in this way).
So zooming out, we
humans have a habit of going into phases of mass destruction, generally self
imposed to some extent or another. This
handy list shows all the wars over time. Wars are actually the norm
for humans, but every now and then something big comes along. I am interested
in the Black Death, which devastated Europe. The opening of Boccaccio’s Decameron
describes Florence in the grips of the Plague. It is as beyond
imagination as the Somme, Hiroshima, or the Holocaust. I mean, you quite
literally can’t put yourself there and imagine what it was like. For those in
the midst of the Plague it must have felt like the end of the world.
But a defining feature
of humans is their resilience. To us now it seems obvious that we survived the
Plague, but to people at the time it must have seemed incredible that their
society continued afterwards. Indeed, many takes on the effects of the Black Death
are that it had a positive
impact in the long term. Well summed up here:
“By targeting frail people of all ages, and killing them by the hundreds of
thousands within an extremely short period of time, the Black Death might have
represented a strong force of natural selection and removed the weakest
individuals on a very broad scale within Europe,“ …In addition, the Black
Death significantly changed the social structure of some European regions.
Tragic depopulation created the shortage of working people. This shortage
caused wages to rise. Products prices fell too. Consequently, standards of
living increased. For instance, people started to consume more food of higher
quality.”
But for the people
living through it, as with the World Wars, Soviet Famines, Holocaust, it must
have felt inconceivable that humans could rise up from it. The collapse of the
Roman Empire, Black Death, Spanish Inquisition, Thirty Years War, War of the
Roses, English Civil War… it’s a long list. Events of massive destruction from
which humanity recovered and move on, often in better shape.
At a local level in
time people think things are fine, then things rapidly spiral out of control
until they become unstoppable, and we wreak massive destruction on ourselves.
For the people living in the midst of this it is hard to see happening and hard
to understand. To historians later it all makes sense and we see clearly how
one thing led to another. During the Centenary
of the Battle of the Somme I was struck that it was a direct outcome
of the assassination
of an Austrian Arch Duke in Bosnia. I very much doubt anyone at the
time thought the killing of a minor European royal would lead to the death of
17 million people.
My point is that this
is a cycle. It happens again and again, but as most people only have a 50–100
year historical perspective they don’t see that it’s happening again. As the
events that led to the First World War unfolded, there were a few brilliant
minds who started to warn that something big was wrong, that the web of
treaties across Europe could lead to a war, but they were dismissed as
hysterical, mad, or fools, as is always the way, and as people who worry about
Putin, Brexit, and Trump are dismissed now.
Then after the War to
end all Wars, we went and had another one. Again, for a historian it was quite
predictable. Lead people to feel they have lost control of their country and
destiny, people look for scapegoats, a charismatic leader captures the popular
mood, and singles out that scapegoat. He talks in rhetoric that has no detail,
and drums up anger and hatred. Soon the masses start to move as one, without
any logic driving their actions, and the whole becomes unstoppable.
That was Hitler, but
it was also Mussolini, Stalin, Putin, Mugabe, and so many more. Mugabe is a
very good case in point. He whipped up national anger and hatred towards the
land owning white minority (who happened to know how to run farms), and seized
their land to redistribute to the people, in a great populist move which in the
end unravelled the economy and farming industry and left the people in
possession of land, but starving. See also the famines created by the Soviet
Union, and
the one caused by the Chinese Communists last century in which 20–40
million people died. It seems inconceivable that people could create a
situation in which tens of millions of people die without reason, but we do it
again and again.
But at the time people
don’t realise they’re embarking on a route that will lead to a destruction
period. They think they’re right, they’re cheered on by jeering angry mobs, their
critics are mocked. This cycle, the one we saw for example from the Treaty of
Versaille, to the rise of Hitler, to the Second World War, appears to be
happening again. But as with before, most people cannot see it because:
1. They are only
looking at the present, not the past or future
2. They are only
looking immediately around them, not at how events connect globally
3. Most people don’t
read, think, challenge, or hear opposing views
Trump is doing this in
America. Those of us with some oversight from history can see it happening.
Read this brilliant,
long essay in the New York magazine to understand how Plato described all
this, and it is happening just as he predicted. Trump says he will Make America
Great Again, when in fact America is currently great, according to pretty well
any statistics. He is using passion, anger, and rhetoric in the same way all
his predecessors did — a charismatic narcissist who feeds on the crowd to
become ever stronger, creating a cult around himself. You can blame society,
politicians, the media, for America getting to the point that it’s ready for
Trump, but the bigger historical picture is that history generally plays out
the same way each time someone like him becomes the boss.
On a wider stage, zoom
out some more, Russia is a dictatorship with a charismatic leader using fear
and passion to establish a cult around himself. Turkey is now there too.
Hungary, Poland, Slovakia are heading that way, and across Europe more Trumps
and Putins are waiting in the wings, in
fact funded by Putin, waiting for the popular tide to turn their way.
We should be asking
ourselves what our Archduke Ferdinand moment will be. How will an apparently
small event trigger another period of massive destruction. We see Brexit,
Trump, Putin in isolation. The world does not work that way — all things are
connected and affecting each other. I have pro-Brexit friends who say ‘oh,
you’re going to blame that on Brexit too??’ But they don’t
realise that actually, yes, historians will trace neat lines from apparently
unrelated events back to major political and social shifts like Brexit.
Brexit — a group of
angry people winning a fight — easily inspires other groups of angry people to
start a similar fight, empowered with the idea that they may win. That alone
can trigger chain reactions. A nuclear explosion is not caused by one atom
splitting, but by the impact of the first atom that splits causing multiple
other atoms near it to split, and they in turn causing multiple atoms to split.
The exponential increase in atoms splitting, and their combined energy is the
bomb. That is how World War One started and, ironically how World War Two
ended.
An example of how
Brexit could lead to a nuclear war could be this:
Brexit in the UK
causes Italy or France to have a similar referendum. Le Pen wins an election in
France. Europe now has a fractured EU. The EU, for all its many awful faults,
has prevented a war in Europe for longer than ever before. The EU is also a
major force in suppressing Putin’s military ambitions. European sanctions on
Russia really hit the economy, and helped temper Russia’s attacks on Ukraine
(there is a reason bad guys always want a weaker European Union). Trump wins in
the US. Trump becomes isolationist, which weakens NATO. He has already said
he would not automatically honourNATO commitments in the face of a Russian
attack on the Baltics.
With a fractured EU,
and weakened NATO, Putin, facing an ongoing economic and social crisis in
Russia, needs another foreign distraction around which to rally his people. He
funds far right anti-EU activists in Latvia, who then create a reason for an
uprising of the Russian Latvians in the East of the country (the EU border with
Russia). Russia sends ‘peace keeping forces’ and ‘aid lorries’ into Latvia, as
it did in Georgia, and in Ukraine. He cedes Eastern Latvia as he did Eastern
Ukraine (Crimea has the same population as Latvia, by the way).
A divided Europe, with
the leaders of France, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and others now pro-Russia,
anti-EU, and funded by Putin, overrule calls for sanctions or a military
response. NATO is slow to respond: Trump
does not want America to be involved, and a large part of Europe is
indifferent or blocking any action. Russia, seeing no real resistance to their
actions, move further into Latvia, and then into Eastern Estonia and Lithuania.
The Baltic States declare war on Russia and start to retaliate, as they have
now been invaded so have no choice. Half of Europe sides with them, a few
countries remain neutral, and a few side with Russia. Where does Turkey stand
on this? How does ISIS respond to a new war in Europe? Who uses a nuclear
weapon first?
This is just one Arch
Duke Ferdinand scenario. The number of possible scenarios are infinite due to
the massive complexity of the many moving parts. And of course many of them
lead to nothing happening. But based on history we are due another period of
destruction, and based on history all the indicators are that we are entering
one.
It will come in ways
we can’t see coming, and will spin out of control so fast people won’t be able
to stop it. Historians will look back and make sense of it all and wonder how
we could all have been so naïve. How could I sit in a nice café in London,
writing this, without wanting to run away. How could people read it and make
sarcastic and dismissive comments about how pro-Remain people should stop
whining, and how we shouldn’t blame everything on Brexit. Others will read this
and sneer at me for saying America is in great shape, that Trump is a possible
future Hitler (and yes, Godwin’s Law. But my
comparison is to another narcissistic, charismatic leader fanning flames of
hatred until things spiral out of control). It’s easy to jump to conclusions
that oppose pessimistic predictions based on the weight of history and
learning. Trump won against the other Republicans in debates by countering
their claims by calling them names and dismissing them. It’s an easy route but
the wrong one.
Ignoring and mocking
the experts , as people are doing around Brexit and Trump’s campaign, is
no different to ignoring a doctor who tells you to stop smoking, and then
finding later you’ve developed incurable cancer. A little thing leads to an
unstoppable destruction that could have been prevented if you’d listened and
thought a bit. But people smoke, and people die from it. That is the way of the
human.
So I feel it’s all
inevitable. I don’t know what it will be, but we are entering a bad phase. It
will be unpleasant for those living through it, maybe even will unravel into
being hellish and beyond imagination. Humans will come out the other side,
recover, and move on. The human race will be fine, changed, maybe better. But
for those at the sharp end — for the thousands of Turkish teachers who just got
fired, for the Turkish journalists and lawyers in prison, for the Russian
dissidents in gulags, for people lying wounded in French hospitals after
terrorist attacks, for those yet to fall, this will be their Somme.
What can we do? Well,
again, looking back, probably not much. The liberal intellectuals are always in
the minority. See Clay Shirky’s
Twitter Storm on this point. The people who see that open societies,
being nice to other people, not being racist, not fighting wars, is a better
way to live, they generally end up losing these fights. They don’t fight dirty.
They are terrible at appealing to the populace. They are less violent, so end
up in prisons, camps, and graves. We need to beware not to become divided (see:
Labour party), we need to avoid getting lost in arguing through facts and
logic, and counter the populist messages of passion and anger with our own
similar messages.
We need to understand and use social media. We need to
harness a different fear. Fear of another World War nearly stopped World War 2,
but didn’t. We
need to avoid our own echo chambers. Trump and Putin supporters don’t
read the Guardian, so writing there is just reassuring our friends. We
need to find a way to bridge from our closed groups to other closed groups, try
to cross the ever widening social divides. (Perhaps I’m just
writing this so I can be remembered by history as one of the people who saw it
coming.)
also see
Copenhagen - the play
Militarism and the coming wars
Pugwash Manifesto, July 1955
FORUM: The Military in World HistoryMilitarism and the coming wars
