Howard Epstein

Howard Epstein – POLITICAL MELT-DOWN – IT’S THE ZEITGEIST, FOLKS

By Howard Epstein

Posted on July 11, 2016

Howard Epstein – POLITICAL MELT-DOWN – IT’S THE ZEITGEIST, FOLKS

Political melt-down. Where, oh where to start?

The Brexiting UK, OK? If it were a sinking ship – and it may be, indeed it will be if the collapse of its currency exchange rate with the greenback is any guide (down to a thirty-one year low and still dropping) – we would say that the rats that gnawed their way through the hull, below the waterline, have, within a fortnight, all fled the vessel.

First, Prime Minister Cameron, in a moment of high emotion, did the honorable thing, but at a dishonorable speed, and fell on his sword immediately. Johnson and Gove, who led the Brexit campaign, looked shell-shocked at having won the Referendum. Johnson became, for the first time in his life, quite inarticulate, but was put out of his misery at the prospect of having to lead the country into the unknown, by being knifed in the back by his running-mate, Gove, who thereby rendered himself politically unacceptable to the rest of the governing conservative party. Farage, who had kicked the whole thing off a decade back, decided he wanted to spend more time with the family. Now, Britain has a lame-duck leader, determined to hang on for his swan-song at the G20 summit in September. His greatest fear now, it is reported, is that his party, faced with a simple choice between two women – one is admirable whilst the other is a fantasist – will decide that neither the party nor, only incidentally of course, the country (not to say the rest of the world) can wait that long and accelerate the process. Did someone say that anyone who stands for political office is not fit to hold it? Give that man some recognition. Perhaps a set of Matryoshka nesting dolls from Russia (to which we shall return).

In case the shell-shocked British public did not have enough on its hands, they now have this problem: all those years we were told that Israel was the greatest threat to world peace and it turns out it was Tony Blair! The Chilcott report – cost: £10 million; gestation period: seven years; subject matter: the Second Iraq war of 2003 – published last week, castigated just about every element of the British establishment from the then Prime Minister – knick-named by the Left “B Liar” – down, through the Ministry of Defence, the security agencies and the army top and not-so-top brass.

The baying for the blood of Blair for war crimes (charges that are unlikely to be brought and less likely to be provable) and/or an action for dereliction of duty or malfeasance in a public office (could be successful, and definitely embarrassing and debilitating), for having committed Britain to President “Dubya” Bush prematurely, and for not having tested the evidence as to Saddam Hussein’s WMD more rigorously, has reached fever pitch. The sad thing for Blair is this: few who have the benefit of hindsight are generous enough to acknowledge that there is never any certainty at the outset that what happened in the end inevitably had to happen. For example, no-one was able to extrapolate until relatively recently, from the disastrous US decision to demolish not only the Baath party in Iraq but also the Iraqi army lock, stock and barrel, that that would lead to the birth of Da’esh. It cuts no ice for Blair however.

Still in the UK, the Labour Party, Her Majesty’s Official Opposition, is in danger or the course of complete melt-down, too, with virtually no parliamentary support for its leader. Corbyn, darling of thousands of grass-roots Trotskyites, shows his pure, non-anti-Semitic disposition by declaring that he does not hold British Jews responsible for the actions and omissions of Israel! Well, that’s relief for the Jews in the UK, I am sure.

Unsurprisingly, in this climate, the top British retailers, Tesco (struggling to recover from fraudulent accounting revelations) and Marks & Spencer (no longer to go-to place for the middle classes), barometers of the British economy, are having a tough time. Suddenly, even retail therapy is not enough to uplift British spirits.

In France – the country that feels equipped to dictate to us how we should live (or lose) our lives (by holding and proposing middle-east “peace” conferences, arrogantly keeping out us and the Palestinians) – the Socialist administration of the most-unpopular-ever President, Hollande, has bye-passed the French parliament and forced through the most-unpopular-ever employment law, that when merely a proposal was the cause of months of street protests. This, almost unheard of and rarely used, deployment of a special decree will almost certainly lead to fresh rioting in the streets of Paris and other cities.

In Germany, word has it that (im)migrants are causing almost completely unacknowledged anguish to women and girls with sex attacks (as is the case in Sweden, where the scale of it is thought to be massive and a multiple of what gets reported). Given the numbers of Muslims now living in Germany, what with the Turkish gastarbeiter who are well into their second generation there, and the hundreds of thousands of Syrians invited in last year (and for this) by Chancellor Merkel – not all of whom have turned out to be doctors or dentists apparently – there is trouble in store, and not just for Merkel’s legacy but also for those who would prefer not to see the rise of the neo-Nazis. They should not hold their breath: from Holland (the Netherlands this time) and France, to the eastern EU states, there are strong right-wing pressures that will cause future political upheavals, if not melt-downs.

If the economy of the UK now has a huge question-mark over it, the same symbol hovers over each and every country in the EU too. Will the euro be trashed first by a dysfunctional Greece or by the exasperated exit of the German super-state? The former, and other weak economies of the EU, have for long depressed the value of the euro for the benefit of German exporters, whilst receiving pitifully little assistance from Germany and the other, stronger, EU members. Weak at the knees, the southern and eastern European states will eventually stumble, causing another European fiscal crisis. QE (the vacuous printing of money in exchange for an electronic accounting entry that will one day unleash hyper-inflation) having been indulged in by Europe, along with the USA and the UK, is probably not an option next time. With interest rates on the floor, bang goes another tool. Any other ideas, anyone? The butter is in the pan, the pan is on the hob, the gas is leaking slowly and all it needs for a complete melt-down is a spark. Whenever did things go so well that sparks did not come along every few years. The last, the Credit Crunch, was in 2007 and therefore more than seven (y)ears-of-corn ago. My money is increasingly on the thin cows …

Russia’s Putin is enjoying every minute of this. Of effective opposition, there is none. He enjoyed great cash-flow from the good oil-price years, which he assiduously invested in his military. He has already gobbled up the Crimea and threatens to take more of Ukraine. Do you think they sleep tight in the Baltic states, with their large, restless ethnic-Russian populations, the perfect pretext in waiting for Russian invasion? I see the fat cows of Russia consuming the thin Baltic cows without so much as a burp. But wait! The British have just committed five hundred British troops to Estonia in 2017, and a further 150 will form an “enduring” presence in Poland. That should cause Putin and his vast armies no end of sleepless nights.

Russia may not have the military budget of the US, nor the global reach, but Putin can spot the shrivelling of the power of the West when he sees it (so can I: it looks a lot like the arrogant and aloof Obama cruising towards a star-studded round of lucrative speaking engagements, starting in January 2017, or the Presidency of the UN, about which to strut some more). There can be no more eloquent proof of the Obama/Kerry-inspired and -executed, sad, wrinkled spectacle of the waning of US authority – the death of Pax Americana – in the Middle East than the recent announcement of joint naval and air force exercises in the Mediterranean between Russia and (wait for it) Israel. Israel! Would that be the Israel that many complain is a client state of the US of A? (Russia may be able to swallow up Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia, but I am having difficulty digesting what I am writing, so you may be forgiven for struggling with it too.)

And so we come to the America homeland. With the wanton police shootings last week of defenceless blacks in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and St Paul, Minnesota, and another in Houston, Texas on Saturday morning, and the black sniper’s revenge attack on and killing of five Dallas police officers the previous day, we see poor, neglected, abandoned and blood-spattered America, left to its own devices by a president who put his vanity before the welfare of his (black) constituency.

Just as Nelson Mandela ignored his constituency and the scourge of AIDs amongst black South Africans until it had risen ten-fold, so too did Obama ignore the interests of his people. Two federal laws were required eight years ago, but not even mooted:-

no more police shoot-to-kill unless absolutely necessary, as determined by the evidence of video footage from police uniform-mounted cameras; and
no more morgues with dead African-Americans with bullets in their backs.

Obama failed on both. Time is not only running out for Obama and his legacy. –They are in melt-down. As gun violence interrupts his own lame-duck sunset days, he grimaces and gurns about what he concedes as his greatest failure: gun crime. Offering only more gun control he then, reluctantly I am sure, returns to the golf course and the endless dinner-parties.

Why, my UK, US and French/European readers will be asking themselves, do I show so much contempt for their countries? One reason only: their constant lecturing to us as though they are better at problem-solving than we are. Consider:-

it is the UK that now has the world’s weakest currency, whilst the shekel remains amongst the strongest and most stable in the world;
it is the European project and currency that are structurally and politically threated, while Israel’s economy is still riding high – export-led, despite its unfriendly-to-exporters-currency;
it is everywhere else that the politics are a bad joke (What? The oafish Trump versus the corrupt Clinton as presidential candidates is not a bad joke?), whilst our most pressing political problem is to persuade the (still-not-completely-failing) prime minister Netanyahu that over ten years (in the aggregate) in office is indecent, and unlikely to lead to sufficient dynamism in government. What, for example, is he doing about our poor?

Of course, that is not the only area where we could do better. There is always room for improvement. And let’s face it: the Palestinians are entitled to a dignified solution to their problems. Indeed, I am confident that they could have one just as soon as they have the dignity to stop killing our little girls in their beds and celebrating it. That is the first step on the road to dignity. They should get a life – and leave us and our children to live ours.

There is a wider dimension to the comparative positions of Israel and those who seek to lead it by the nose who-knows-where. Let us return to American gun crime.

The contrast between the Israeli firearms paradigm and that of the USA could not be starker. Americans have this constitutional right: A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed, whilst Israel has a well-regulated militia. In American schools and colleges, pupils and students are three time more likely to be shot to death than in all the schools and colleges of the whole of the rest of the world – in the aggregate. There is a problem with American life – it is called gun crime – that demands they put their own house in order before they tell us how to organize ours.

We have something they don’t: we have a well-regulated militia. It is called the IDF, which has instilled into its boys and men a respect for firearms and an ethos (a peace-loving one) that is served by the gun only in response to war and terrorism. It is all a matter of culture – a proper gun culture.

All the exiting President Obama offers is more gun control (see his January 5, 2016 Executive Actions On Gun Control – only one out of eleven did not speak to increased gun control), although it is plain that gun control alone will never work. It did not stop the rampage killings at Columbine, Virginia Tech or Sandy Hook, and it will not stop those that experience tells us are yet to come.

In my new book, I offer another – and as far as I can tell – novel approach to gun crime. After examining twenty national traumas from the Wall Street Crash to the Credit Crunch, I seek to demonstrate how those traumas have formed a toxic mix with the totemic gun that has resulted in endless violence in American society – and I offer some highly-practical routes to palliatives.

Perhaps it is easier for a non-American, non-academic historian to see the broad and tortured American landscape than for the President of the United States. Perhaps he will buy a copy. Perhaps you will!