2011: The Year the Mask Slipped

What a year it’s been...

Right out of the traps, 2011 was a humdinger which ever way you slice and dice it. For The Rusty Wire Service, this was a year of slipping masks.  All over the world, that fragile veneer of legitimacy that props up regimes from the Pacific Rim to the Arctic Circle was being called into question like never before.

And this wasn’t just a phenomenon affecting tin-pot juntas or entrenched despots; to be fair, more than a couple of them found themselves deposed and some are even still alive to tell the tale. (you know who you are, Mr ex-President Laurent Gbagbo of Côte D’Ivoire).

The supposedly stable and ostensibly respectable administrations of the Old World found themselves under increasing pressure as they bowed to the demands of high finance and put the squeeze on their citizens from the bottom up.

Consequently, this year saw protest and unrest spreading its contagion into the rich and safe European Home countries.  And let’s not forget the good old US; where the Occupy Movement had its origins. At this stage, whether the Americans like it or not, they are now part of the Old World. The American Century ended in 1999, we’ve already been in the Tiger Century for over a decade and we’ve still not quite woken up to it.

Economically, 2011 was a car-wreck from the get-go. And the knock-on effects for western society are likely to be felt and remembered for generations to come, but that is perhaps assuming that we are over the worst of this Great Depression 2.0. A very good newspaperman once told me: ‘never assume, because it can make an ass of u and me...’

 Of course, when you look back a little further on the rising tide of bad news that was 2010: the benefits of 20-20 hindsight make much of this last year’s timeline seem rather predictable; at least insofar as these things ever are.

When 2010 ended, few people really foresaw how the self-immolation of a humble and poverty-stricken fruit vendor in Tunisia would somehow form part of a narrative that in December 2011, takes us on a bloodstained road Damascus.

Mohamed Bouazizi, after sustained humiliation at the hands of local police in his native Sidi Bouzid, set himself alight in front of the town’s municipal building after failing to get his grievances heard in mid December 2010. His act of protest cemented a revolt that would ultimately end President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali's 23-year-rule.

By the time he died on 04 January 2011, the proud young fruit vendor’s act of protest was already sparking demonstrations and opposition to regimes across the Arab and North African World.

Egypt’s foment started in January and the second act of this drama is currently unfolding. Mubarak was indeed ousted but it was only ever going to be a matter of time before Egyptians returned to Cairo’s Tahrir Square to demand that the same army restore power to civilian authority.  All across the Middle East, regimes faced serious opposition from a regional populace no longer able to feed themselves and their families.

The Syrian people continue to put their lives on the line to stand in opposition to Assad’s regime and Inchallah, they will prevail this year. President Assad has been welcomed and cultivated by successive Western leaders, who’ve generally taken the old ‘he’s a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch’ attitude to his dynastic pretensions. A predictable Syria is after all crucial to the European diplomatic game of middle-eastern power-broking.

But while the mask of authority was slipping badly in the Middle-east and North Africa, 2011 saw the Old World’s socio-economic model experiencing the kind of severe difficulties that might yet prove deeply structural.  The legitimacy of governments across Europe is being called into serious question.

There have been market-led regime changes this year in Ireland, Greece and Spain as well as the toppling of absurd Italian premier Berlusconi. Civil unrest in England this year reached levels not seen since....well not since the Tories were last in power in the early 80’s as it goes.

The Greek populace remain mutinous and suspicious of their government as do the French and the Spaniards. Britain’s ever-widening wealth gap however continues to mark her out as a favourite prospect for continued civil disorder in 2012. The Occupy Movement’s September inception was a harvest time reminder to the capitalist classes that you reap what you sow.

Russia is, perhaps for the first time since the early 1990s, starting to look a little uncertain. The bitter Moscow winter hasn’t deterred its hardy citizenry uniting in a spirit of comradeship against their blatantly corrupt ruling oligarchs.

Here’s what we thought this time last year when we were sifting through the entrails: “Without even trying to be alarmist, Britain is certainly a lot closer to widespread unrest than most people are prepared to countenance. The evidence is clear: student anger is still unresolved; a deep and festering resentment lingers against the merchant class who have continued to profit throughout this debacle; another huge swathe of the respectable poor are about to dip below the poverty line as interest rate and VAT rises beckon; and one that hasn’t really made anyone’s list: the practical collapse of the UK’s biggest export market (ie Ireland).”

Of course we didn’t see the Libyan situation developing. This was probably due in no small part to the conduct of the British government. 

Throughout their dealings with the Gadaffi regime over the course of both the recent Labour and Coalition administrations, there was very little reason to believe that the regime was anything less than rock steady and there was little to give a contrary impression in the reporting of the mainstream media.  

The involvement of UK armed forces as part of some NATO initiative dressed up as a humanitarian measure, became a source of some concern to those of us who wondered about the wisdom of another costly military adventure at a time when we were closing libraries and firing care staff.

The doubters have been proved wrong as sanity of the market prevails. Even if ‘Democracy’ doesn’t succeed in vast, tribal Libya; as long as the oil ports are kept open for business and the ruling regime owes the west a favour for its NATO dig-out; a prolonged civil war might actually prove a real geopolitical bonus.

That notwithstanding, some of our more vague 2011 predictions did indeed prove prescient; so much so that many of last year’s fingers in the wind remain in this year's ‘watch this space’ section: “Expect that Iran-baiting will continue in the west and Iran will doubtless continue to provide expertise and materiel to Islamic militants engaged in their jihad against the decadent western powers,” is what we said last year. Given that some people are wondering whether or not we are already at war with Iran, this is a story that will run and run.

We couldn’t have predicted the death of the Dear Leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, but that still doesn’t make last year’s assessment any less appropriate for the coming year: “the really worrying thing about North Korea is that, even after 60 years, it still has the same lethal potential to drag the US and China into a shooting war that it had in 1950...”

And of course we should spare a thought for all those Kim Jong Il impersonators who will find themselves out of work now that the Dear Leader has gone to join the May day parade in the sky.

Nor could we have predicted the Japanese Earthquake and Tsunami in March; so let’s hope that this year, we wrongly predict 2012 as the year the Mayans were right.  I’m betting the farm on this not being the year that Yellowstone’s super-volcano takes the half the Northern Hemisphere with it in a super-eruption.

And of course, let’s not forget Africa. Again, shamefully, our sentiments this year can be neatly summed up in last year’s aspiration: “Africa is sadly likely to remain as a disgracefully ignored stain on the conscience of the western world which is now sharing continental exploitation rights with the burgeoning Chinese.”

Go n'eirigh an t'ádh libh go léir an bhliain seo chugainn...

(Best of luck to you all this coming year)