It’s all connected

[bemildred]

Anger and fear drove Brexit just as Donald Trump fans the flames of a disenfranchised America, which as Baton Rouge proves, is as racially and ethnically divided as Europe, which is dealing with mass immigration, an attempted coup in Turkey and seemingly relentless terrorism borne out civil war-torn Syria. Mark MacKinnon reports on the relationship between seemingly unconnected events across the globe

It was just before dawn on the morning of July 15, and I was trying to explain to my six-year-old daughter why – instead of a planned day at the park – I was suddenly heading to the airport to catch a flight to a city called Nice.

“A bad man hurt a lot of people in France,” was the best explanation I could come up with. As I watched her turn the news over in her head, disappointment spreading on her face, I realized it was a sentence I’d uttered three times in 18 months.

Barely 36 hours later, I called her from a sun-baked plaza in the historic old city of Nice. That day in the park would have to be postponed again. Some men with guns had tried to take over the government in Turkey. Instead of coming home, Daddy was flying somewhere else.

More bad men, more people hurt.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/munich-nice-turkey-brexit-trump-its-all-connected/article31084101/

[bemildred]

1. 2016: The Theory Behind a Very Bad Year (and It’s Only Half Over)

Back in the fall of 1989, as the Iron Curtain was crumbling country by country, some friends and I had an idea for a new college history course. It would be called “Europe Since Last Wednesday.”

There are moments in history when time itself seems compressed, when so many shocking and important events crowd together that it becomes almost impossible to keep track of them. Lenin supposedly said “there are decades where nothing happens, and weeks where decades happen.” (The remark, alas, is probably apocryphal.) Long before him, the French writer Chateaubriand quipped that during the quarter-century of the French Revolution and Napoleonic regime, many centuries elapsed. In late 1989, a single three-month period saw the end of communist power in Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania and the fall of the Berlin Wall, as well as the U.S. invasion of Panama, and the Malta summit meeting between Mikhail Gorbachev and U.S. President George H.W. Bush where the two leaders essentially announced that the Cold War had come to an end: many years’ worth of change crammed into a single season.

Are we now living in one of these periods of temporal acceleration? The past few weeks have certainly been vertigo-inducing. On June 23, the British shocked world opinion (and themselves) by voting to leave the European Union. On July 7, five police officers were shot dead in Dallas, prompting fears of widespread unrest in the United States. A week later the Islamic State took credit for the latest massacre to strike the West, a terrorist attack on France’s Bastille Day that killed scores in Nice, and before that event had even started to fade from the media, there was an attempted coup d’état in Turkey. Then came the police shootings in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. All this took place, moreover, against the background of a horrific sectarian war with no end in Syria, heightened tensions between NATO and Russia, and the greatest political upheaval in recent American history, as a populist candidate with no experience in government completed his successful insurrection against the Republican establishment and became the party’s 2016 presidential nominee. Populist authoritarianism is on the rise in many other countries around the world. To recall the famous Chinese curse (as apocryphal as Lenin’s remark), we seem to be living in “interesting times.”

http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/07/20/why-decades-do-happen-in-weeks-brexit-coup-turkey-trump-isis/

[malthaussen]

2. And he doesn't even mention Brazil...

... or Venezuela, if it comes to that, although that's been a bubbling stew for some time.

Okay article, but one thing I don't find is any theory. (Unless the mention of the End Times rationale constitutes a theory). "People are pissed" is not a theory. Nor is "one thing leads to another," especially when one doesn't offer any proof of linkage.

-- Mal

[bemildred]

3. More like an essay really, but I don't expect much from Foreign Policy.

The theory seems to boil down to the observation that in a conducive environment disorder can spread "spontaneously", "one thing leads to another" as you say.

I thought it interesting because it tacitly admits to a problem.

I think when you stress people enough their behavior deteriorates, and I think that's obvious. I don't think more theory than that is required to explain what we see.

[malthaussen]

4. We can conclude a lot of people are stressed.

More than at some other times. I do wonder how much what we're seeing is a result of a large percentage of the rising generation worldwide having a lot of time on their hands, because economic opportunity in their region is non-existent. Toss a few weapons into that mix, stir with inflammatory rhetoric, and you've got a ready-made revolt.

-- Mal

[bemildred]

5. Yep. nt