{"id":14271,"date":"2015-11-11T07:29:28","date_gmt":"2015-11-11T12:29:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=14271"},"modified":"2015-11-11T07:29:28","modified_gmt":"2015-11-11T12:29:28","slug":"tomgram-john-feffer-on-the-verge-of-the-great-unraveling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=14271","title":{"rendered":"Tomgram: John Feffer, On the Verge of the Great Unraveling"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tomgram: John Feffer, On the Verge of the Great Unraveling<\/a><\/h3>\n

The figures are staggering. In what looks like a vast population transfer from a disintegrating Greater Middle East, nearly\u00a0200,000<\/a>\u00a0refugees passed through Austria in September alone. About\u00a0half a million<\/a>\u00a0desperate refugees from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere have arrived\u00a0in Greece since 2015 began (those, that is, who don\u2019t\u00a0die at sea<\/a>), and the numbers are only expected to rise.\u00a0Seven hundred children<\/a>\u00a0a day have been claiming asylum somewhere in Europe (190,000 between January and September 2015). And at least\u00a0three million<\/a>refugees and migrants from the planet\u2019s war and desperation zones are expected to head for Europe in 2016.<\/p>\n

Under the circumstances, I\u2019m sure it won\u2019t surprise you that, once the first upbeat stories about welcoming European crowds had died down, the truncheons and\u00a0water cannons<\/a>\u00a0came out in some parts of the continent and the\u00a0walls<\/a>\u00a0began to go up. Nor, I\u2019m sure, will you be shocked to learn that an anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim fervor is now\u00a0gripping<\/a>\u00a0parts of Europe, while far-right parties are, not coincidentally, on the rise.\u00a0 This is true in\u00a0France<\/a>, where Marine Le Pen\u2019s virulently anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-European-Union National Front is expected to make\u00a0significant gains<\/a>\u00a0in local elections this winter (and Le Pen herself is\u00a0leading<\/a>\u00a0early opinion polls in the race for the presidency), while in \u201ctolerant\u201d Sweden a far-right party with neo-Nazi ties is garnering more than\u00a025%<\/a>\u00a0of the prospective vote in\u00a0opinion polls<\/a>. In Poland, an extreme party wielding anti-refugee rhetoric just\u00a0swept into power<\/a>. And so it goes across\u00a0much of Europe<\/a>\u00a0these days.<\/p>\n

All of this (and more) represents a stunning development that could, sooner or later, reverse the increasingly integrated nature of Europe, raise walls and barriers across the continent, and irreversibly fracture the European Union, while increasing nationalistic fervor and god knows what else. In the United States, in a somewhat more muted way, you can see similar developments in what\u2019s being talked about here as an \u201coutsider\u201d election, but is, in fact, significantly focused on keeping outsiders separated from insiders.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tomgram: John Feffer, On the Verge of the Great Unraveling The figures are staggering. In what looks like a vast population transfer from a disintegrating Greater Middle East, nearly\u00a0200,000\u00a0refugees passed through Austria in September alone. About\u00a0half a million\u00a0desperate refugees from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere have arrived\u00a0in Greece since 2015 began (those, that is, who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,7],"tags":[281,284,10544,10545,10546,4600,6463],"class_list":["post-14271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","category-survival-2","tag-europe","tag-european-union","tag-great-unraveling","tag-john-feffer","tag-middle-east-refugees","tag-migration","tag-tom-dispatch"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14271"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14271\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14272,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14271\/revisions\/14272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}