Broke It

Yesterday voters of the United Kingdom may well have done what Hitler could not do: they set the UK on a path of destruction.  Who would have believed that it would end with conscious self-destruction.

 Until this day it was possible to believe that the referendum that started the bloody process of taking Great Britain out of the European Union had been an aberration, a combination of misunderstanding, apathy and sinister manipulation. But it appears this time the voters went into this with no doubt of what they were voting for.

They voted to retain as their Prime Minister their very own blond monster, the British Trump, Boris Johnson. Like Trump’s Republicans, the Conservative Party abased itself to serve him. Remember that Johnson literally threw out of the party those members of Parliament who dissented from his orders. This totalitarian act should have been met with institutional censure and his removal, but the Conservative Party swallowed it, and now they are owners of Johnson’s ongoing evil.

The effects of this vote may take some time to see, but eventually the UK will likely suffer enormous economic and political consequences, that will probably ripple through western Europe and around the world. Scotland is almost certain to secede, and Northern Ireland is more likely to rejoin the Republic of Ireland or become completely independent than it is to remain in the UK.  That is, if Brexit turns out to be real and not just the politically popular marquee on an illusion.

If the world is to address its greatest threats—most of them related to the climate emergency-- it will need to be more united, not less. Most importantly, it will need a common body of laws to keep its conflicts from becoming self-destructive. This is a big step in the wrong direction.

It can only shake any confidence that the US will right its own course in its 2020 elections. Right now the Republican Party is, without dissent, shamelessly and consciously defying the Constitution that is the most sacred of America's body of rules, that embodies the principles that are the very backbone of the nation. And it looks increasingly like they will get away with it, and enhance their chances of retaining the White House and continuing the country’s current path to totalitarian self-destruction.

The US and the UK survived Hitler because they had extraordinary leaders in FDR and Churchill. There was no such leader to oppose Boris Johnson in the UK, and it is beginning to look like there may not be one in the US to successfully oppose Trump.  Some pundits point out that a (slight) majority of UK citizens wants to stay in the European Union, but they keep losing elections.  Let's hope that's not prophetic in our case as well.