IT was hard to watch the events of the last few days without a feeling of dark foreboding. The coup attempt in Turkey was no ordinary event. Even in a Third World country, it would have been a spectacular event. How could thousands of military men, including senior officers, hatch a plot of this magnitude without being discovered? And what forces has the failed attempt unleashed, as Erdogan goes on a rampage mercilessly routing out all enemies — perceived and real — emboldened by his success in surviving the plot while shaken by the sheer breadth and audacity of it?
The eclipse of the Kemalist old guard in Turkey has opened the door to a power struggle between two visions of Islamist rule — the AKP vs the Gulenists.
Meanwhile, the two ramshackle conventions in America to choose the next presidential candidate were marred by serious fissures. All but one among former presidents and presidential candidates from the Republican party stayed away from their party convention in Ohio that nominated Donald Trump as the party candidate, a strong rebuke to a party that they feel is no longer theirs. The convention of the Democrats nominated Hillary Clinton over bitter jeering and under the shadow of the leaked emails that showed the party’s highest officers conspiring to stymie the candidacy of Sanders.
This is no longer an election. It is a battle to rescue America from the monsters of its own creation.
Europe is battling its own ghosts, with random killings becoming almost a daily occurrence, and claiming more than 100 lives in less than a fortnight. The perpetrators are found in almost all cases to be young Muslim men with a history of mental disturbance, who have somehow latched on to the headlines of the moment to infuse their personal anguish with geopolitical significance.
What is particularly troubling is that one cannot see any force that stands in the way of the growing right-wing resurgence around the world.
There may or may not be any geopolitical context to the actions of the lone wolf attacks being witnessed in Europe. One thing that comes out from the profile of each of the attackers is that these are lonely young men, with a troubled past, and lives torn by conflict. This is not grounds for empathy — after all thousands if not millions of others share their fate without resorting to such deeds — but it is the closest that we can come to putting their actions in any kind of geopolitical context.
The actions of these individuals are fuelling a further rightward shift in European politics. With both Germany and France — the two countries where the attacks are occurring — due for general elections next year, there is a strong likelihood that right-wing parties could come to power.
If this trend keeps up 2017 could be a grim year indeed. It could see Britain activate Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty and initiate the process of formal withdrawal from the EU. It could see Trump being sworn in as president in January, followed by Le Pen in France in spring. Germany has already seen a 40pc surge in violent crimes with a right-wing political motive, mostly against immigrants. The prospects of a right-wing, xenophobic party coming to power in Germany are a bit more remote than in France, but given the prevailing uncertainties around the future of the EU, the continuing crisis with migrants and refugees, further terror attacks, the battle to restart growth, nobody can say how the future will play out there.
Even in our own neighbourhood, India is in the grips of an extremist-minded government, which is presiding over a brutal crackdown in held Kashmir, treating the area as “a colonial possession” in the words of Partha Chatterjee, a Colombia-based historian, while incidents of mob lynchings of people suspected to be eating or selling beef are growing daily. It’s hard to see how the juggernaut of Hindutva can be stopped there, given that it has only grown since the early 1990s, when the Bharatiya Janata Party formed its first government which didn’t last more than a few days.
What is particularly troubling is that one cannot see any force that stands in the way of the growing right-wing resurgence around the world. For a while, it seemed like there was a leftist revival under way in Latin America during the 2000s, when successive left-wing parties won the polls and ruled briefly in various countries there. But that resurgence was at least partially built on the commodity price boom in the world market, and those governments have all disappeared now leaving behind little more than a mess.
In Europe too, the rise of Syriza in Greece or Podemos in Spain was greeted with much anticipation at first but it became quite clear that neither party could deliver what they have promised.
As hate and xenophobia march across the world, capturing imaginations at the bottom and power at the top, the only obstacle standing in their way is an enfeebled common sense in defence of an embattled status quo. The real change makers now are on the far right. The rest of us are either spectators, or struggling to find the words with which to create a position.
A great consensus appears to be unravelling. It was built on a moral philosophy of individual freedom and material prosperity as top political and policy objectives. The unravelling has set the forces of hate and exclusion on the march, since they alone have the language with which to speak in such chaotic times. There is no coincidence in the timing of all this, coming in the immediate aftermath of the great financial crisis of 2008, which swept away the material underpinnings upon which all political power was built — whether institutional or philosophical.
The battles getting under way in country after country are only going to gather momentum from here onward because the old world is dead, and its certitudes and values with it.
The writer is a member of staff.
Twitter: @khurramhusain
Published in Dawn, July 28th, 2016