To Aix-en-Provence for a young friend’s wedding to a celebrity DJ in a beautiful tent in an olive grove. A short chat with the beautiful Kate Moss and her hubby, followed by some heavy boozing under the disapproving eyes of my two children and their mother. Aix is a beautiful old town with many parts still unspoiled, but crowded over the weekend. I stayed on my boat in Marseilles and really enjoyed myself because of the kids being around. Fun is fun, but September promises not to be so, what with the euro about to collapse along with Greece and the rest of the PIGS. Papa Hemingway described going broke as ‘slowly at first, then all of a sudden’.
Today the international system is in dangerous turmoil. Politicians, economists and CEOs, in whose hands our fate lies, have all studied at the same universities in the West. They remind me of those wise men who ran the communist system some 30 years ago. They were educated and intelligent people who should have been able to diagnose that their ship was headed for the rocks decades before it crashed. But they didn’t. The reason for their failure to do so was that they had all studied at the same universities and had been taught the same truths, as it were, about the economy. They were dogmatic, and as a result the system fell apart. Not that anyone really mourned it, but the great Greek economist Taki sees the same parallel with the West today.
Sure, it is naive to proclaim the collapse of the European and American system as being imminent, but I have never felt as gloomy about our prospects as I do this minute. Perhaps it’s the hangover from Aix, but what is one to think when looking back one sees only lies, chicanery and greed? Let’s face it. As a very wise man wrote in the FT, France and Germany were the first to breach the 3 per cent rule in 2003, and nothing happened. Then the PIGS went wild, with the leading pork, Greece, telling the biggest porkies and getting away with them in full knowledge of the rest of the EU. In America a somewhat similar charade took place. Also according to the wise man from the FT, the stimulus that was supposed to save the sinking economic ship wound up going to dead people and useless government buildings. Very little went to creating new jobs. In other words, more lies and more waste, with one winner only: special interests.
So what is the solution? According to the great Greek economist, a financial dictatorship of sorts, but no one in Europe or in North America is willing to risk it. When last in London, during a Spectator business dinner and in the presence of both our executive editor and the sainted one, I dared to mention the fact that as the Portuguese and Spanish benevolent dictatorships came to an end during the mid-Seventies, their currencies and balance of payments were among the best in Europe. Ditto the Greek junta, which collapsed in 1974. (There are Greeks today clamouring for the military to return, but that’s a bad joke. The army now is as bureaucratic as any institution in that unfortunate land, and they’d make an even bigger mess.) One female correspondent was shocked, whispering under her breath about fascists in our midst.
Which brings me back to history. The first volume of Spengler’s The Decline of the West appeared in 1918, just as Big Bertha was raining shells on Paris and German armies were poised for success. Soon after, everything collapsed for Germany. Cultural pessimism reigned supreme with figures like Spengler leading it. Thomas Mann himself read The Decline and called it the most important book of the era. He compared the emotional effect it had on him to that of reading Schopenhauer, the pessimist par excellence. Ludwig Wittgenstein was thunderstruck, as were most serious thinkers of the time, except for Max Weber, a clown, according to Taki, for having invented sociology. Not everyone accepted gloom and doom as a way of thinking, and Spengler himself defended his work as one of nationalist resurgence for Germany — and with it the extermination of the corrupt West and the Weimar Republic itself.
Well, we all know how that one ended. The old conservatism of Bismarck and Wilhelmine Germany did not return; rather a new radical right galvanised by the disasters of 1918–19 and inspired by the cultural pessimism of Nietzsche and Spengler came slowly into fashion. This fashion became unfashionable during the first week of May 1945. Today’s politicians could do worse than read up on Spengler instead of their silly red boxes. Most of them, however, were born without the gene of shame. Just look at the lies Sarkozy and the rest of the gang of EU believers have told us in this past decade alone. Observe the corruption of Brussels, the greed and dishonesty of American banks and corporations, the Augean stables which is Washington and the lobbies.
There is, it seems to me, no way out. Structural issues with regard to the EU make it impossible. The markets act accordingly. Fiscal deficits should have brought down the EU long ago, yet the conmen who lead us insist on pressing on. No one will go to jail for this gigantic fraud, just as no one from Goldman Sachs went to jail for betting against the positions that GS had pushed on their customers. As I said, there is no shame except the one I feel with my hangover.
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