Indy Film Library

Around four years ago, I was discussing the war in Ukraine with an Irish journalist on a balcony in Berlin. I told him that the West miscalculated and that NATO countries could not, in the long run, resolve the contradictions that this confrontation would unleash. Cracks would soon begin to emerge, and that, surely, was part of the calculus. He seemed aghast. He repeated that mantra — apparently mandatory for Western journalists — that Putin hoped for his “full-scale invasion” to succeed in three days, that NATO had now dramatically expanded its border with Russia, and that the West was more united than ever. I told him that we should speak again in a few years. We never did, but I wonder what he would say now. It is breathtaking how deeply Europe has transformed since then. The loss of affordable energy, now exacerbated by the NATO-backed US-Zionist war in Iran, is decimating its industrial base. In Palestine, Europe supported a colonial genocide to the hilt, destroying its political standing on the world stage. With two pillars of its hegemony in tatters, Europe’s final recourse is militarization. It has launched a rearmament drive comparable in scale to that which preceded the First World War, it is actively toying with the apocalyptic danger of nuclear war, it is decimating the social democratic compact to pay for the transition to a war economy, and it is deploying extreme violence against its citizens to secure these policies. European capital is on the back foot, and the objective conditions for fascism’s return to the political center are in place. It is clearer than ever that this crisis is only going to deepen, producing irreparable fractures in the edifice of Western power.