Overthrowing Our Masters and Reversing Sick Societal Trends, Online

ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO, in the middle of World War One, people were predicting the end of western civilization, for what appeared to be good reason. Read "The Wasteland" by T.S. Eliot. Two hundred years ago, in the aftermath of the devastation of the Napoleonic wars, people were doing the same thing. It may well be that you could go back a hundred years in history, over and over again, and keep finding dire warnings of the end of civilization, of the end of the world, of time itself. Now we come to 2017, and this time it may be true. If you keep predicting something long enough, eventually, it comes true. All across Europe there is a right wing, nationalistic, call it a political movement, although it has social and economic features as well, and it has now, horror of all horrors, spread across the Atlantic and is even now infecting the United States of America. Many people are noticing this, and also noticing how alarmingly remindful this movement is to what happened in the nineteen thirties, leading to World War Two. Two of the most prominent symptoms are, of course, Brexit and Trump. A reactionary, backward looking, anti-foreign nationalistic response to globalism and perhaps general cultural diffusion as enhanced by the internet. The world is changing, and people sometimes respond to change by resisting it in anger and fear. Enhanced global communication is here to stay, we might all agree, and we'll have to learn to live with it. Fundamental human equality is a global value which, with mass support, will and must increase economic, political, international, gender, ethnic and racial equality. Both ends of the political spectrum claim to hate autocrats and plutocrats; the conflict may boil down to the rich and powerful versus the poor and excluded. The internet can create billions of pen pals. Imagine the teeming unwashed masses, online, overthrowing their masters, reversing this sick backward looking conservative brand of "populism" which leads to tyranny.(hint: a good place to start might be the overthrow of our modern versions of Napoleon, Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin)