Romania seems about to follow Hungary, Italy, and Slovakia in electing far-right leaders. George Simion, a right-wing nationalist opposed to providing military support for Ukraine and a Eurosceptic, came top in the first round of voting in the presidential election, with 40%, and is now the hot favourite.
Their solutions are always the same, shout loudest and offer simplistic ideas (usually aligned with Kremlin talking points) aimed at a gullible electorate through targeted social media ads.
In 1995, when the web was in its infancy and nobody had heard of Facebook or Twitter, the American scientist Carl Sagan in his book, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, wrote:
“Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”
Mankind is an age dominated by science and reason. Yet most people can't understand the former and aren't equipped to do the latter. Hence, as Sagan also said, if we are not able to be sceptical (even cynical I would say) about politicians, then, "we’re up for grabs for the next charlatan, political or religious, who comes ambling along.” Trump is the man he must have had in mind.
We are on the slide back to a darker, more unstable period where might is right, powerful nations do what they can and weaker ones suffer what they must. The whole postwar settlement is coming to an end.
After 1945, the allies - led principally by the USA and Britain - helped to make the modern era that we have lived under for 80 years, by creating bulwarks against the conditions that had brought about two world wars in less than a quarter of a century. The World Bank (1944), the International Monetary Fund (1945), the United Nations (1945), the International Court of Justice (1945), the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade known as GATT (1947), the World Health Organisation (1948), the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation NATO (1949), the European Coal & Steel Community or ECSC (1951), all came into being in the immediate postwar period, built with US money and idealism
All of these bodies were intended to promote the peaceful resolution of international conflicts, to guarantee human rights, to regulate global trade, to provide security and avoid upheavals in the financial system. They are all still in existence (GATT gave us the WTO and the ECSC developed into the EU) and in the main, have worked pretty well.
Nations were no longer able to to act alone, in their own narrow interests with the potential for a return to might is right, trade malpractice, armed conflict, and so on.
These global bodies have created obligations on member nations. In turn, national legislatures have passed laws to embody human rights into domestic law, strengthen democratic accountability, and protect the public, employees, investors, consumers, and the environment to improve the planet and our quality of life.
The result was an ever-growing thicket of laws and regulations that hemmed in political activities in Western democracies, particularly related to human rights, the regulation of new technology, health and safety, and global challenges, which have inevitably become ever more constrained, regulated, and legalistic. The right blames this for their inability to provide radical solutions.
What we are seeing now is all of that going into reverse. The UN has been an ineffective talking shop for some time, but Brexit was the first real sign that the international order was really breaking down, followed by the election of Trump. The US has pulled out of the ICJ and the WHO. Trump is talking about quitting NATO. Project 2025 explicitly wants the USA to “withdraw from both the World Bank and the IMF” Tory politicians and Nigel Farage openly call for us to leave the ECHR.
If we are not careful, we will be back to where we were in the interwar period, where nationalism led to WWII.
But this was the reason for the laws in the first place. We know how Hitler and Stalin solved problems and nobody should want a return to that era, yet apparently many do. This is where the lies, disinformation and social media campaigns come in. Nothing else works in persuading people to vote against their own interests.,
I have no doubt that Farage and the rest of his “fruitcakes, loonies, and closet racists” in the ten local authorities that he now controls, will soon be faced with the same dilemma as Trump in Washington. Simple solutions are almost always either unworkable, impossible or wildly unpopular in practice in the modern world. This is where authoritarianism comes in. People must be forced to accept the new solutions, or else.
Who or what is behind it? It appears to be an unholy alliance between Russia and extremely wealthy Westerners, mainly Americans, whose sole objective is to become wealthier still.
I leave you with another quote by another scientist, Albert Einstein:
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
Let us hope he's wrong.
