The New Medievalism

(11 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

Japan.

Three US wars-one starting right now, today.

The destruction of the Gulf of Mexico. The eroding of civil liberties, assassination, torture,  drones attacks.

Economic destruction for the poor and middle.  The rise of the banks, and of military interests.  

The war on drugs – which has essentially just created a for profit industry.

Global warming.

Nuclear power. Nuclear weapons.

What do these things have in common?

Governments worldwide have generally become less and less responsive to guidance by their citizens and more and more controlled by an elite over-class.  The revolts in the middle east are certainly symptoms of reaction against that, in nations that have long been dictatorships, but in the larger countries, such as the US, have in fact gotten much worse.  The unified europe has made an attack on Europe’s poor and middle class possible, and even against it’s poorest member states.

Simply put: fewer europeans have more power than ever before-well, since perhaps medieval times. The trend of hundreds of years towards more human rights for more and more Europeans has been checked, stopped, reversed.  

In the US, polls show that the policies of the government are increasingly unpopular, yet they go forward as before.  There is no where to turn, no accountability.  The US has always done some bad things in the world.  But the difference today is that it does the no matter what the public opinion is, with perhaps even less attempts to guide public opinion than ever before-because it doesn’t matter anymore. During even what is now seen as the deeply unpopular Vietnam War – it was in fact popular with many Americans, something the government had to work very hard to cultivate as so many Americans died.

Today though,  despite the unpopularity of US wars (even with few US deaths) , of US nuclear plants, of bank bailouts, the civil liberty erosions, the institutionalization of insurance companies as health care providers, the war on drugs; these will go forward no matter which American party is supposedly in power – because they agree on many things- first and foremost that:

You don’t f’ing count.

Likewise Americans of the left and right largely agree on something as well – the American government cannot be trusted. It could not be trusted about Iraq, Afghanistan, the oil spill, the threat of radiation from Japan, the threats from it’s own plants, or anything else.

The American government is totally out of control. There are no checks and balances in that country anymore.  And Europe may well be on the same path, though the populations there are more likely to fight back.  The control of a higher percentage of all capitol by so very few is a big part of the cause and the (ever spiraling upwards) effect.