Вот и лето прошло,
Словно и не бывало.
На пригреве тепло.
Только этого мало.

Все, что сбыться могло,
Мне, как лист пятипалый,
Прямо в руки легло,
Только этого мало.

Понапрасну ни зло,
Ни добро не пропало,
Все горело светло,
Только этого мало.

Жизнь брала под крыло,
Берегла и спасала,
Мне и вправду везло.
Только этого мало.

Листьев не обожгло,
Веток не обломало…
День промыт, как стекло,
Только этого мало.

Арсений Тарковский
1967

Craig Murray:

It takes a lot to get tens of thousands of people to riot. For it to happen simultaneously across several countries points to a supranational underlying cause, as opposed to local grievance at an egregious state injustice. That the temporary collapse of authority and restraint will allow some opportunists to loot is an inevitable concomitant. That does not make theft the cause.

There is a reason that, in every western democracy during the last 20 years, neoliberal politicians have campaigned under the slogans “Hope”, “Change”, or their various synonyms and translations. It is because very highly paid PR consultants have told them that what the people lack, what the people need, what the people desperately crave, is hope and change. Riot and rebellion are acts of extremely high risk which are the resort of the otherwise hopeless.

When I was studying history, a core part of the curriculum was the cross-European revolutionary waves of 1830/1, 1847/8 and 1870/1, against which you can precisely pin dozens of cross-European events including the overthrow of Charles XII, the Hungarian Rebellion and the Paris Commune, and their pale reflections in the UK such as the Great Reform Act and Chartism.

We were, I think, told that these waves of rebellion coincided with poor harvests, which is true. It is only a decade or so ago I learnt that they also coincided precisely with the waves of cholera epidemic which swept across Europe into Central Asia. My point is merely to illustrate that it takes a great deal of pain and hopelessness to force people in the streets to attempt to defy their governments with physical force.

In his short but superb essay on the education protests that sparked rebellion in France, Thomas Piketty includes this devastating passage:

To justify the inadequacy of education funding, and in particular the decrease in spending per student, the government and its supporters argue that France cannot afford to invest more. They are making two reasoning errors. Public debt has indeed risen from 20% of GDP in 1970 to 120% today. But at the same time, private wealth has grown much more dramatically: It has gone from 300% to 600% of GDP, with extreme concentration among the wealthiest financial fortunes. In other words, France’s national wealth – the sum of private and public assets minus private and public debts – has never been so high, not only in absolute terms but also as a percentage of GDP (which itself has never been higher).

In other words, France has never been richer. The problem to solve is simply one of distribution.

Precisely the same is true in the UK. It has never been richer. The problem is of distribution. It is true across the Western world. The living standards and the prospects of betterment for ordinary people are in slow but apparently irreversible decline. This is indeed due to an epidemic sweeping the Western world. It is an epidemic of billionaires.

A Song on the End of the World

On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.

On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.

And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
There will be no other end of the world,
There will be no other end of the world.

—Czesław Miłosz, translated by Anthony Miłosz
Warsaw, 1944

New York Times:

If carried out, the public execution of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan by firing squad set for Dec. 3 would be the first in modern U.S. history.

Many things are changing quickly.

I saw the terrible wrath of the place, saw it obliterate hundreds of thousands of people with names and ethnicity and religion like mine, knew for certain that there were deep ugly cracks in the bedrock of this thing called “the free world.” And yet I believed the cracks could be fixed, that the thing at the core, whatever it was, was salvageable.

Until the fall of 2023. Until the slaughter.

—Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2025), 23.

Leonid Ragozin, Jacobin:

The question that looms largest is whether, by helping Ukraine, the West is promoting its declared values, like democracy and human rights — or simply pursuing an imperialist geopolitical project in which members of the Russian opposition, but more importantly Ukrainians, must be satisfied with the role of useful idiots and cannon fodder while their countries are being destroyed. Does the West really see Putin and his oligarchs as its deadly enemies — or rather as partners in the lucrative and mutually beneficial business of fomenting wars?

Geoffrey Roberts:

What is the alternative for European states to keeping the war going for as long as possible and sustaining the Zelensky administration? The alternative is a negotiated settlement that will be damaging for Ukraine and politically and economically humiliating for European governments. Consequently, European leaders soldier on, hoping against hope that the ultimate outcome will be less severe, that unexpected developments will intervene, and that the United States will re-engage fully.