When the proletariat decides to rise, empires suddenly fall

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/12/2024 (337 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Once again, I have felt like a squirrel in an avalanche of acorns, trying to decide which ones to pick up and where they should be stored — changing my mind every few minutes about what to write this week.

There has been lots of reaction to the U.S. presidential election. Whether squeals of glee or just squeals, there are more exclamations than analyses. Like some demented Wheel of Fortune episode, the news spins between dire predictions and comical cabinet choices, with our only respite being the brief time before the next puzzle is revealed and the wheel is spun yet again.

Whether or not I think democracy in the U.S. will survive another Trumpian interlude thus depends on whatever nuts happen to show up today. The same goes for our current prospects for a sustainable future, in the aftermath of COP 29 in Baku in Azerbaijan, where logic, sanity and science (once again) were “trumped” by power, greed and oil money.

So, rather than claiming coherence I don’t see myself right now, here are some acorns/thoughts for you to squirrel away yourself and consider:

I grew up in a world where the Soviet Union was as unavoidable as the United States. The Berlin Wall was a staple of old movies and recent escape attempts. I still have games (and novels) that play through the long-anticipated fight between NATO and Warsaw Pact forces, involving the use of tactical nuclear weapons to stop Soviet tanks streaming through the Fulda Gap.

So, when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and then the Soviet Union disappeared, I was incredulous.

One of the key factors in that stunning (and peaceful) disassembly of the Soviet empire was its invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. While comparisons with the U.S. debacle in Vietnam are facile, the 10-year fight in Afghanistan was a futile exercise that cost the Soviet forces 15,000 dead, and many more wounded. It also exposed the cracks in the foundation of the USSR, sowed distrust in its leadership, and enhanced the regional ambitions of traditional territories. The wounded soldiers, and the mothers of the USSR, proved more powerful than anyone might have thought.

Yet, fast forward to Ukraine: Russia has suffered at least 10 times as many dead, so far — and in three years, not 10. Public cracks have already appeared, like the Wagner group’s abortive march on Moscow, undermined by the convenient plane crash (and death) of its leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin.

Where are those wounded soldiers right now, and all the mothers of Russia who have lost (or will lose) a child?

While I don’t foresee regime change happening if that only means swapping one group of kleptocrats for another, empires of the elite have been dispatched in Russia before. I wonder if a revolution is once more brewing from below — and how a return to some new Soviet “union” might transform the fortunes, not only of Russia and Ukraine, but of the world.

That first cluster of acorns made me look again at the U.S. election results. Too much ink has been spilled on where and how Harris lost and Trump won, and why, but there is a missing conversation. One-third of eligible voters cast a ballot for each — but my math leaves another third of those eligible voters, in what was billed as an apocalyptic moment to reshape the U.S., simply staying home.

Had they showed up to vote — either way — it would have been the strongest mandate and most overwhelming result in U.S. electoral history. But they didn’t.

Was Mrs. Robinson right, after all? “Laugh about it, shout about it, when you’ve got to choose. Every way you look at it, you lose.”

So, what happens in the United States when that missing third has had enough, when it gets politically engaged — one way or another? What would politics be like in a post-donkey/elephant America?

Finally, there was the COP 29 conference in Baku — in one of those countries that the collapse of the Soviet Union enabled. For a third year running, the meeting to deal with the greenhouse gas emissions that are frying and drowning our future was explicitly hijacked by the fossil fuel industry and the kleptocrats in charge.

Once again, the majority of the world’s population was effectively excluded from the decision-making process at COP 29. The compensation offered to the global South, which will suffer most from a changing climate generated by development it does not yet have, was insultingly far less than needed.

So, billions of people who just want to feed and protect their families, to live in peace with their neighbour and have some hope for a better tomorrow, are being prodded either to do something very different from anything they have ever done before, or to suffer and die as they are.

As I witnessed in 1989, however, monumental change can happen overnight. Acorns long buried and forgotten can become an unexpected forest of possibilities.

Peter Denton writes from among old oak trees in rural Manitoba.