Drumbeat

Three newspapers are tossed onto my driveway every day around 7:30 in the morning, the Financial Times, New York Times and the LA Times.

I read the Financial Times first, because of its international coverage. I read the others if I have time.

As a result, I have been pushing our staff at Courthouse News to hire more reporters in Europe. Because the signs of instability in the west are coming from many different directions, but to my ears they sound like a distant drumbeat.

As a rail strike ended in Germany, another paralyzing strike started in France. The far-right is on the march to power in Germany and Marine Le Pen, leading the anti-immigrant party in France, although soundly rejected in the last elections, is back and rising in strength. As a dual citizen, I received in my email this week a pitch from a French party even further to the right which pushes as its political centerpiece the “Grand Remplacement” theory which says children of immigrants are swiftly replacing children of the native French.  

While internal strife is heating up within the western nations of Europe, conflict within and among eastern nations of Europe is also heating up. Poland is on a path to constitutional crisis, while Hungary’s leading lawyer, Viktor Orban, is playing the rest of Europe like a puppet.

Meanwhile a war of attrition is going on within Europe with at least 200,000 estimated dead in Ukraine, a nation that borders both Poland and Hungary. At the northern reach of Europe, long neutral countries, Finland and Sweden, have abandoned neutrality and decided to move into the western coalition of armed forces. Finland has already joined, Sweden is waiting on Hungary.

Way out east, North Korea appears to be laying the ideological groundwork for war with South Korea. Which would inevitably suck in U.S. naval forces which would in turn create a surging potential for conflict with China.

But the krytron, the trigger to greater war, is elsewhere.

I read the breaking news as it run across my TV screen last week that three American soldiers had been killed in Jordan, and thought, “We’re going to get into a war.” The result has been a series of missile strikes blowing things up in Yemen, Syria and Iraq, hitting a total of 85 targets in the region.

In Yemen, the Houthis have proven themselves tough as nails and are unlikely to change course because Israel is unlikely to change course. I have, with others, long believed that settlers sow the seeds of war in the region, and now part of the Israeli cabinet wants to OK settlements in Gaza.

So you have a far-right movement gaining power in Europe, heavy political machinations within the old eastern bloc nations, local labor forces creating internal disruption, an ongoing war that has taken 200,000 lives, and with that, a bomb-with-fuse-lit conflagration underway in the Middle East.

The losses in Ukraine made me think of black and white photos taken by my father, who fought in World War II alongside Soviet units. They were shots of the Tiergarten war memorial in Germany.

I found a translation of the memorial’s inscription, recounting the sacrifice of 80,000 Soviet soldiers in the Battle of Berlin. It reminded me of history’s demonstration of the almost limitless capacity of the Russian people for sacrifice and loss.

Add into that witches brew of current world events the force of propaganda. Today nation states can push along already dangerous currents of lunacy moving on social media and the internet. At Courthouse News, for example, our most read stories this week involve guns and voting machines.

Now toss into the mix the rise of the hard right in America. The level of general dissatisfaction with the course of the economy and life in our nation is high, despite a lot of good economic numbers.

There are so many factors at work: the offshoring of jobs, the loss of jobs to automation, rising prices, the images of immigrants walking in large groups across the border, the now-inevitable drift towards that issue becoming a campaign football, the great number of people living outside in parks, along streets, and next to bike paths.

Whipping these elements into a maelstrom of anger is a gifted amateur in the dark art of politics, who will become the centerpiece of our next presidential election, setting his faithful against all the others who will go to vote just to vote against him.

And so from what remains a safe spot, I will go outside in the morning and pick up my papers and read about a world that seems to be slowly gyrating out of control.

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