THE REVOLUTION
In this centenary of the beginnings of the Chinese Revolutions, the South China Morning Post ran an article calling for revolution everywhere. It was not an editorial, as that would be newsworthy, but a feature article included probably to prove that press freedom is alive in Hong Kong. But it is interesting to note that quite a lot of people are calling for revolutions, or at least expecting them.
At the moment we have the Middle East and its “Arab spring”, a reference that people under fifty wont get, to the failed Prague Spring of 1968. The reference becomes a minefield of ironies considering that Czechoslovakia was attempting to liberalize its communist regime and create a market economy, not too dissimilar to present day China. How much of a revolution the Arab Spring is, is a mute point. Maybe as Gaddafi himself might have said, it is merely for plunder to prop up ailing western economies.
Speaking of which, one is finding the more alarming predictions that the US is hell bent on a road to bloody uprisings and military dictatorship. It makes one wonder if the present images coming out of Libya are designed to put people off the whole idea. There is something exciting about a revolution and all the hope it entails, but the facts of them are not too palatable. It takes a special kind of oppression to drive people into learning how to operate heavy artillery on pick-up trucks and risk having their heads blown off.
One finds similar predictions for China, though China’s government tends to operate on the assumption that chaos is merely one dissident tweet away so carefully massage all information and thoughts its population are allowed to think. A trip through the peculiar cities of China with their glossy new facades and eerily uncrowded new shopping malls indicates that China’s top down approach likes to keep the riffraff down on the farm and not spitting on the marble floors to spoil the dream. The government would point out that revolution is really too unpleasant and you have to trust that they will get round to sorting out things like the rule of law and corruption. Whether telling the population that most of them believe this will save them is another matter, but it can give one a sense of calm that a trip through the present economic miracle of India cannot achieve.
If anywhere was ripe for bloody revolution one might imagine India was, but somehow, India appears to be in permanent chaotic upheaval and finds it normal. Not that they do not have their enclaves of armed revolutionaries that barely talk to the central government. But India’s chaotic and violent society, given to outbursts of mutual immolation, has a way of seeing itself as harmonious and spiritually pure at heart and therefore whatever happens, happens and it is all in the hands of fate and the government does not really exist anyway.
South America? Africa? Well, South America seems to have gone bankrupt, defaulted on all its debts, and now operates in a strange live within your means bubble that has some predicting Brazil as a major economic player of the future. A quick view of a photograph from space showing the huge dark patch that is Brazil might alert one to the lack of infrastructure, and a penchant for eroding topsoil that may well not sit comfortably with global warming, but who knows? Maybe we will all be dancing the samba one day. And Africa, once a hot bed of nasty brutality, is slightly less nasty and brutish, with some decent holiday retreats, or as local “pirates” would have it, plenty of opportunities for kidnappings. A land that loves nothing better than to print money and declare bankruptcy, also seems immune to the sort of revolution that investment gurus and history students foresee. The middle class of Africa, the usual revolutionary class, thinks cash is for suckers and operate in gold and so have been doing very well thank you. And those educated youths who never got their hands on family money, never had any money to lose. Which brings me to my next point: it is the loss of money, not the lack of it, that tends to push people into writing manifestos calling for armed uprisings. Which does make Europe and the US interesting candidates for rolling out the guillotines. Their middle classes have been truly robbed.
Bill Bonner of the “Daily Reckoning” declares that investors should go long on tear gas, and invest in manufacturers of handcuffs and plate glass windows. For him the “America Empire” is going the way of the Roman Empire and the barbarians are about to ransack the capitol. Others are writing about how a bloody war to preserve the Union will be on the cards. And if not that, at least a lot of big time riots in the various decaying cities will make Survivalists in the hills feel smug and justified. Those deals for “Five Properties for $200,000” in Florida suddenly become less enticing when you suspect that, come the riots, they will go up in flames.
Now I am pretty certain that there are going to be a bunch of riots in the US and given their liking for guns, the National Guards might well come out into the streets to deal with them, much as they did in the 1960’s. Similarly in Europe, where the idea of the Revolution was invented, rioting and big stick responses are par for the course. But if this is the end of Western Civilisation, I cannot help feeling that since Europe managed to bomb and blitz away huge numbers of cities sixty odd years ago, and then ten years later produced the Swinging Sixties, these upheavals are minor tweaks to an ongoing move towards a life style that can cope with long hours on Facebook, dieting, and the dream of plumbers on call. In short, once you’ve jailed, sacked, reformed, and rehabilitated the greedy, the cheeky, and the irresponsible financiers and made it government policy that no child should be without an iPad, we will rumble on with the Chinese Century, and learn Tai Chi. Just don’t stand next to a plate glass window of any computer shops, or have the misfortune of living in a country where objecting to corrupt elites, or political dissent as it is called, gets you thrown in jail rather than on a TV chat show. Those are places where things do get really nasty. I know all this because of my twitter feed.