GUEST POST: H. P. Baxxter’s The Year Ahead

About this time, you will get a deluge of pundits, intellos and columnists giving you their “state of the world in 2016”. So I need to get a word in before they pass round the Koolaid.

This year has been, in a word, a nightmare. The Poet tells us about the blood-dimmed tide and the centre that cannot hold. Well, this is it, my dears. We’re in it.

Let me start right here in microscopic Malta and work my way outwards. 2016 has been the year of the Consummation of the Great Shaft (Il-Haxja l-Kbira, in the vernacular). Corruption is no longer something we do. It’s something that defines us.
Some of you, men and women of good will, were deeply disappointed. Some were even shocked.

Here’s where it pays to be a political agnostic. We jaundiced old cynics knew that it would happen. I certainly did. What is more, I don’t actually care. That’s right. I’ve been saying it for ages: in the final analysis, we are on our own.

You believed your government cared about the human condition. You thought it worked for the common good? You believed, perhaps, that it loved you. Ha ha ha to you!

We’re on our own, my brothers and sisters. Each one of us. Naked, defenceless and alone. This is the post-political age.
There is no trouble big or small, none of life’s tribulations, that can be solved by the overpaid men and women that rule over us. There is no God, at least not a benevolent one, and we’re likely to die alone, childless and unloved.

You believed the postwar fallacy that the future will always be better than the present. Then you believed the postmodern fallacy that the world can be made perfect. The government should make it so and can make it so. I look at the world and I find it hard to believe that anyone still believes this nonsense.

To the South lies an ill-defined but terrifying menace. Ill-defined because in the postmodern narrative, enemies do not exist, and the entire world really actually wants the same thing, which is atheistic liberal libertine free trade, right? Terrifying because enemies actually exist. People actually hate other people and want each other dead. They say it’s ISIS, or so-called Islamic State, or equally so-called Daesh or Daech.

As far as Malta is concerned, the real problem is good old money, isn’t it? ISIS don’t do business. They don’t do free trade. They won’t trade with us. Not in Libya, nor anywhere else. Not in the kind of goods we sell anyway.

To the East, ditto. Except there are no Maltese business concerns in the Levant and Middle East, and therefore nothing to worry about for Maltese businessmen (which means the entire population).

After all, we’ve managed to divert the flow of refugees northwards, haven’t we? Which brings me to Europe, Natural Home of the Maltese as it was once called. Here, the evil menace, we’re told, is populism. Is it? Let me for a moment assume there really is a wave of (so-called) populism. I can’t say I’m surprised. Unlike everyone else (such as all our politicians, domestic and European), they propose radical solutions. They propose the options that no one else will choose. Now they may very well be wrong, but it’s so much better than the self-righteous self-flagellating so-called policies all prefixed with “they are human beings just like us” (Eurocentrism!). Yes, of course they are.

And that is precisely why it is profoundly immoral and evil to encourage a million human beings to undertake a perilous journey, to cross three, four or more sovereign territories, just to get to a continent that cannot provide jobs, housing, schooling and health care for its own.

I’m here to tell you that there is no solution. Some of you call it defeatism. It used to be called fact. Migration into Europe will keep increasing in 2016 and well into the next eight decades, because what it comes down to is demographics. There is no solution, because the only option is the one we cannot choose.

Further east along the globe, lies the real monster. Now be afraid. Be very afraid. For the monster is China. Everyone is so nice to it lest we offend the beast. China is responsible for the Malta’s current government. So for us in Malta, it is personal. China is up to no good. Hasn’t been for a thousand years. In the future, we will be China’s slaves.

On the way to China are the Gulf oligarchies, the most evil, duplicitous scum since the Nazis. Then comes Eurasia, and the Struggle for the Centre of the World.

I am convinced now that it is impossible for democracy to flourish where there is a tradition of subjugation and tyranny. When oil prices fell, and the economic plans of the Central Asian republics were disrupted, the natural reaction was totalitarianism.
Russia, it saddens me to say, is on its way to another cesspit. Poor fellows. History has always dealt them a rotten hand.

In the other hemisphere there is South and Central America, where pink revolutionaries battle it out with right-wing caudillos, all swimming in a sea of corruption, while they pretend to combat the drug cartels thrown in.

Did I say corruption? Then let’s tackle Africa. The colonial legacy, such as it was, has all but evaporated, but the resentment is growing. All of which justifies, say the leaders, institutionalised corruption. Foreign aid, yes – and lots of it. Clean government, no. That’s just for the whites (unless they are in Russia).

Billionaires like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are fond of telling us that their version of capitalism has helped move billions of people out of poverty. How sweet. But how untrue. All I see from where I stand are desperate masses trying to make their way out of Africa into Europe, when they have not given up and accepted Chinese colonial rule instead. I believe it’s called “investment”.

It only remains to touch upon the United States. Between a nylon-haired, billionaire Trump and a devious, billionaire Clinton, the future for the rest of the world looks bleak. Is this the best they can do? And is this the best we can do? Our government here in Malta is absolutely foul in every way. Not a single redeeming feature. But our people are the happiest in the world, according to all polls. And they are confident about the future.

Really? The rich will grow richer and the poor, poorer. No, there is no reason to be optimistic. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets. But not in 2016.