Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
June 3, 2010
Top historians, social and financial analysts, along with police bodies are all predicting that Europe and America are set to experience a summer of rage, with scenes mirroring the chaos we have seen unfold in Greece in reaction to draconian austerity measures now being imposed by governments in the west.
Although many predicted that last summer would be a period of social unrest, British historian Simon Schama notes that there is usually a lag between economic hardship and the subsequent social fury it engenders.
“Far be it for me to make a dicey situation dicier but you can’t smell the sulphur in the air right now and not think we might be on the threshold of an age of rage,” wrote Schama in his Financial Times column.
Schama forecasts that not just Europe but America too faces “a distinct possibility of a long hot summer of social umbrage,” making comparisons to how rich plutocrats bore the brunt of the common man’s rage during the French Revolution.
A Reuters report echoes similar fears, noting that the level of violence will take a backseat to the amount of coverage it receives on television, and that this will dictate how badly the turmoil affects markets.
“Insurers say they have seen a notable uptick in enquiries about political risk cover — which protects against expropriation, political violence and exchange controls — particularly for Portugal and Spain as they face stringent cuts,” states the report, adding that Britain will also be a flash point for riots due to the new government pushing through the most severe budget cuts since world war two.
Indeed, authorities are already preparing for the fallout if Britain begins to go the way of Greece, with the chairman of the Police Federation recently warning that the country is heading for scenes last witnessed during the economic and social turmoil of the late 1970’s.
“I have real fears we might go back to something like that … history tells us it happens again and again,” Paul McKeever told the federation’s annual conference in Bournemouth, adding that “distress on the streets” was a distinct possibility this summer.
As Chris Marsden outlines in his article, several other prominent voices in the media are also forecasting that tensions could boil over into the streets, particularly if the euro region disintegrates as a result of the collapse of the single currency.
A Deutsche Welle piece on May 26 cautioned that social unrest was “closer today than at any other time since this current financial crisis—the worst since 1929—began.”
The report cites US director of national intelligence, Dennis C. Blair, who said that the riots could lead to “regime-threatening instability,” from which “the United States would not be immune.”
The report also names Portugal, Spain and Italy as being under threat from social discontent, and even goes so far as to claim that the unrest will end in war, quoting Marie-Hélène Caillol, the president of the European Laboratory of Political Anticipation think-tank.
Although analysts say that such discontent would be an organic reaction of the people in response to enforced financial hardship, unemployment and reduced living standards, one has to wonder whether the globalists who engineered the economic crisis are not lying in wait with their pre-ordained solution of world government once the situation gets really bad. There also exists the possibility that the crisis is now so deep that it is even out of their control, which means that no one can now predict the ultimate outcome of the mass social unrest set to hit the streets this summer.