Empty Promises, Empty Shelves
This week’s Camino a Ítaca travels back to the 1970’s and some of the parrallels we see happening today. Populist, right wing sociopaths are marching once great nations into the abyss of a #me-me, all for me world. Click over to the original piece published in el HOY or read the English version below. (PDF en castellano abajo)
The recent images coming
out of the United Kingdom take me back to the fuzzy TV images of my 1970’s
childhood. Cars stretching for miles all lined up to try and fill up their
tanks with gas that just wasn’t there. Back then, the cause of the crisis was
external. It took place when the OPEC member states, led by Saudi Arabia,
proclaimed an oil embargo on countries that were perceived as supporting Israel
in the Yom Kippur war. Prices soared over 300% in North America but in the end,
the embargo failed and ended up being self-defeating. Israeli forces did not
withdraw, the countries that were targeted by the embargo refused to change
their positions and perhaps the most longstanding consequences were that the
crisis sparked increased oil exploration, alternative energy research and initiated
a move towards energy conservation.
This conservation can be
seen in the smaller cars that form the long queues in the U.K. They are certainly
no longer the enormous land boats of my North American childhood, but what
really marks the difference between these two crises is the root cause. While
the 70s oil crisis was a multilateral affair involving many different actors
from different continents, the crisis the U.K is currently facing is entirely
self-inflicted. Try as they might to shift the blame elsewhere, there is no one
to blame but themselves.
Brexit was not the result
of foreign interference. While the Trump administration, knowing full well it
would debilitate the U.K and weaken the EU, threw their support behind the slow-motion
suicide, it can’t be said that they or any other foreign state forced the British
to shoot themselves in the foot. They did it to themselves at the polls. The end
result is that a once great nation, the 6th biggest economy of the
world and permanent member of the UN Security Council now finds itself with
bare supermarkets shelves and shuttered up petrol stations.
Brexit was the direct
result of a dangerous ideology. One that exploits the fear of the ‘other’,
scapegoating immigrants and those who do not think like them as the cause of
everyone’s problems. All the while diverting the attention away from their
neoliberal aims of dismantling the social nets across the West and transferring
public wealth into increasingly smaller yet richer hands. It’s a jingoistic
right-wing populism that is eating away at the rotting traditional core of
conservatism across the western world. One which may have lost its poster boy
in power in the U.S, but that is still firmly represented in the U.K by someone
who combs his hair with a balloon, and which has many representatives here in
Spain in the House of Parliament.
This siren song that leads
people to think that their problems are soley caused by someone else may lull
one into a gentle sleep but it certainly won’t fix anything. The British can
try and blame the EU for their misfortunes, the Catalans can accuse the rest of
Spain of robbing them, Extremadura can allege that the fault lies in Madrid and
xenophobes can claim that migrants are stealing nonexistent jobs but the result
always turns out the same. The sooner we stop listening, the better.
