Saturday, October 29, 2016

If there is no one person to blame, then blame the entire system.

'Wutburger', in German, means 'angry 'citizen', writes Jochen Bittner, political editor for the weekly news magazine, Die Zeit. There are Wutburgers in every country. In Germany the Alternative fur Deutschland Party did not exist 4 years back. It is anti-establishment, anti-European and anti-globalization and yet 18% of Germans, Wutbergers, would consider voting for it. There was the Brexit in Britain, there is the National Front of Marine Le Pen in France and there is Donald Trump in the US. "Anger is like gasoline. If you use it intelligently and in a controlled manner, you can move the world. That's called progress. Or you just spill it about and ignite it, creating spectacular explosion. That's called arson," he writes. He compares Trump with Martin Luther King Jr. "Sadly, the leaders of today's Wutburgers never grasped the difference between anger driven by righteousness and anger driven by hate," he laments. Why is Trump so bad? Because some women have alleged, without any proof, that he groped them more than 11 years ago. The FBI has tapes which show that Martin Luther King Jr was a serial womaniser, who organised sex orgies. Lot of similarities between a saint and a sinner, isn't there? The French Revolution was an explosion, the Arab Spring was an explosion as was the fall of the Berlin wall, each event born of public anger and without any control. Karl Marx himself did nothing spectacular, like Edmund Hillary or Yuri Gagarin did. It was his idea,"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs," which was so seductive that it has resonance to this day. Donald Trump is merely a man and, even if he wins the presidential election, will be remembered only by historians a decade after his death but ideas live on forever. Martin Luther King Jr's dream of equality was possible because of the Civil War, precipitated by Abraham Lincoln's idea of freedom for all. Slavery is now unthinkable but equality still remains a dream, despite the election of Barack Obama as president. "In Germany, a recent poll showed that only 14% of the citizens trusted politicians," he writes. "If this faith is rattled, democracy loses its basic promise." That has happened in every country. In the past people could blame all their troubles on one person, which led to the guillotine for Louis XVI and the firing squad for Tsar Nicholas and his family. Now responsibility has become diffuse. Politicians, civil servants, business people are all seen to be in cahoots, as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. With no one person to guillotine they blame the entire system. Maybe they are right, maybe the entire system is rotten. 

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