{"id":9193,"date":"2015-06-18T04:55:40","date_gmt":"2015-06-18T09:55:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=9193"},"modified":"2015-06-18T04:55:40","modified_gmt":"2015-06-18T09:55:40","slug":"an-affirming-flame","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=9193","title":{"rendered":"An Affirming Flame"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3><a href=\"http:\/\/thearchdruidreport.blogspot.ca\/2015\/06\/an-affirming-flame.html\" target=\"_blank\">An Affirming Flame<\/a><\/h3>\n<p>According to an assortment of recent news stories, this Thursday, June 18, is the make-or-break date by which a compromise has to be reached between Greece and the EU if a Greek default, with the ensuing risk of a potential Greek exit from the Eurozone, is to be avoided. If that\u2019s more than just media hype, there\u2019s a tremendous historical irony in the fact.\u00a0\u00a0June 18 is after all the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, where a previous attempt at European political and economic integration came to grief.<\/p>\n<p>Now of course there are plenty of differences between the two events. In 1815 the preferred instrument of integration was raw military force; in 2015, for a variety of reasons, a variety of less overt forms of political and economic pressure have taken the place of Napoleon\u2019s Grande Arm\u00e9e. The events of 1815 were also much further along the curve of defeat than those of 2015.\u00a0\u00a0Waterloo was the end of the road for France\u2019s dream of pan-European empire, while the current struggles over the Greek debt are taking place at a noticeably earlier milepost along the same road. The faceless EU bureaucrats who are filling Napoleon\u2019s role this time around thus won\u2019t be on their way to Elba for some time yet.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhat discords will drive Europe into that artificial unity\u2014only dry or drying sticks can be tied into a bundle\u2014which is the decadence of every civilization?\u201d William Butler Yeats wrote that in 1936. It was a poignant question but also a highly relevant one, since the discords in question were moving rapidly toward explosion as he penned the last pages of\u00a0<em>A Vision<\/em>, where those words appear.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An Affirming Flame According to an assortment of recent news stories, this Thursday, June 18, is the make-or-break date by which a compromise has to be reached between Greece and the EU if a Greek default, with the ensuing risk of a potential Greek exit from the Eurozone, is to be avoided. If that\u2019s more [&hellip;]<\/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":[2,5,6],"tags":[3463,6449,195,200,6451,259,279,281,284,285,1167,1758,6450,6452,862],"class_list":["post-9193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-geopolitics","category-liberty","tag-archdruid-report","tag-battle-of-waterloo","tag-debt","tag-default","tag-economic-integration","tag-empire","tag-eu","tag-europe","tag-european-union","tag-eurozone","tag-greece","tag-john-michael-greer","tag-political-integration","tag-unity","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9193","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=9193"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9193\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9194,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9193\/revisions\/9194"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}