Dark Thoughts

Dark Thoughts
It's been a lovely day today but one that, to me, has turned out to have curious echoes of the circumstances surrounding the song that almost says the same thing: it's a lovely day tomorrow.

There was a heavy storm over Saturday night and rain fell for most of Sunday; so no watering to be done today. I spent the morning pottering and on the computer, did some shopping, played boules and went to the Bar du Pont for the usual pizza this evening. Friends Steve and Jo have their daughter and family staying with them and I asked how they had spent the day. Similarly peacefully and happily it seemed, grandchildren playing in their pool, adults reading books, etc.

All this contrasted bleakly with the news emanating from England, to where I shall return for a week on Thursday. The episodic, dispersed and mindless violence that appears to be going on there seems to have little rhyme or reason behind it and that is worrying. Riots for a reason are understandable, however outlandish or mistaken the reason might be. Riots for apparently no reason bespeak an underlying malaise, in the society; in Shakespeare's words, something rotten. That is not so surprising in view of the economic conditions, particularly for young people, in the country and the same applies, indeed, for most of Europe; but is worrying nonetheless.

Then, at the end of the pizza evening, I was left talking to Alex, a part-time resident of the village who has spent most of his life working in finance in London. He's never exactly a barrel load of laughs but our discussion on the general economic outlook was even more depressing than usual, against a backdrop of stock markets falling all over the western world. I had to agree with him that it is difficult to see how Greece can stay in the euro zone but equally difficult to see how it can opt out of it. So Europe is in the frying pan alongside the UK.

What worries me most in all this is that all these portents point to a repetition of the political conditions that prevailed in the nineteen thirties and led to a huge swing to the political far right and a swathe of fascist movements. True, the riots in England can doubtless be contained and may prove transient. True also, the US and Europe may print large quantities of money or find some other way of achieving a temporary equilibrium. But, and it is a big but, the underlying widespread economic weakness will certainly not go away easily and the thus neither will the potential for fascist movements.

Racial tension is an ever-present potential tinderbox in most of Europe. If, as seems likely later in the year, Germany is called on again to bail out Greece (France is not in a position to do any more without joining the list of failing European economies) what will the political reaction be there? And what will the popular political reaction be to the austerity measures that will almost inevitably affect the rest of Europe over the next few years? It hardly needs saying that riots, whether in the UK or elsewhere, usually lead to general demands for sterner policing and government. The only way out of this that we could find in the nineteen thirties was to have a world war.

Of course, we are nowhere near that now. And the EU has been created in the meantime with a specific goal of avoiding wars in Europe (but not fascist or neo-fascist governments; Hitler's goal, after all, was to unite Europe). Maybe I am just having a bad evening. But it has made me wonder whether my little corner of paradise in Mollans is something of a fool's paradise. It is certainly sheltered from much that is going on in the rest of the world.