I would like to discuss the ‘dinosaur’ nature of national governments. My elder brother Alistair once told me that if you cut off the tail of a dinosaur, it will take some time before the ‘message’ of pain reaches the brain of dinosaurs (perhaps seconds or minutes?). Without bothering to investigate if science supports this idea, it serves as an apt metaphor for national governments.
Norwegian Dinosaurs
Kristallnacht19 On the night of November 9, 1938, violent anti-Jewish demonstrations broke out across Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia. Violent mobs, spurred by anti-Semitic exhortations from Nazi officials, destroyed hundreds of synagogues, burning or desecrating Jewish religious artefacts along the way. Approximately 7,500 Jewish-owned businesses, homes, and schools were plundered, and 91 Jews were murdered. An additional 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps.
The story above has occurred some four years before the torture and murder of the six-year-old Norwegian girl Doris; this was on the hands of the Nazis (1942) and assisted by the cooperation of the Norwegian government and police. That is, the Jews of Norway had many years warning of what the future could hold.
Russian Dinosaurs
In other words, you don’t need to be Nostradamus to read the future. In this context, we can see that the Russian ‘dinosaur’ is starting to make a move, as of 2022-3. This movement has been evident since 2014, when Russia illegally annexed Crimea. However, the Russian people have been slow to react to the slow movements of ‘the dinosaur’. Thus, those people who haven’t been able to read the obvious signs are now in a panic. At least 200,000 Russians have left the country since the dictator’s draft demand (2022).20
One might ask, “What other ‘dinosaurs’ are making their move?” The obvious answer to this question is China and the US.
Of course, no one can foresee the future with absolute certainty. However, it is fairly certain that future conflicts will be a follow up to the COVID-19 pandemic in that national governments will try to control people to a larger degree. In other words, increased restrictions on freedom of movement, freedom of expression, and so on. That is, the most important democratic rights we enjoy today, which we can trace back to the French and American Revolutions. These include freedom of speech, equality before the law (no one is above the law), and freedom of movement. Thus, there might be a restriction of fundamental democratic rights, which today, are viewed as being ‘universal rights’.21
‘Naughty Students’
In this context, we still have some ‘naughty’ students in the class. We see China, North Korea, Iran, Afghanistan, Russia, and unfortunately too many other countries who proclaim the ‘rights of the bully; that is, the rights of the strongest, a warped kind of Darwinist idea. But the fact is, from my amateur viewpoint, is that ‘the strongest’ are in fact ‘the weakest’. One might argue that I’m falling into the trap of the ‘progression of the human race’. Statistics are often used to assert this idea – regarding the rising well-being of the global population. However, other ‘unseen’ statistics tend to suggest the opposite – that we are heading towards some kind of Biblical Armageddon.
Sources
19 Edited from: https://www.ushmm.org/collections/bibliography/kristallnacht