Gefira 66: Sapere aude!

The summer holidays are over. The war that Russia wages against NATO in Ukraine shows no signs of coming to an end; Europeans are facing ever-increasing energy prices that threaten to either push them on the brink of starvation, poverty, and unemployment or make them take to the streets and overthrow their governments; the new British government has been formed in which the key positions have been assigned to non-Whites; Queen Elizabeth II has died, a monarch who ruled the United Kingdom for seventy years, a symbol of tradition, honour, duty, Christian faith and patriotism.

In ancient Rome augurs would either cut the entrails of animals out or let birds fly in the hope of uncovering signs predicting the future. We may laugh at those practices and yet. And yet there are signs that portend events. When Pope Benedict XVI resigned, a huge flash of lightning hit the top of the dome of St Peter’s Basilica. It was captured on film. Clearly, the Catholic Church under its successor Pope Francis is becoming increasingly different with emphasis being put on ecology, immigrants and of all the religious things on Pachamama! What is the United Kingdom going to look like under Charles the III? He, too, is obsessed with ecology and climate change. What will the Old Continent look like? What does future hold forth when it comes to the Western world?

The Western world, which is hellbent on weakening and subjugating Russia and China; the Western world, which is hellbent on having its population replaced; the Western world, which has very porous borders and simultaneously fears far-off aggressors; the Western world, which is infiltrated by foreigners day in, day out, and simultaneously claims to be afraid of North Korea or Iran… These are some of the legitimate questions one needs to ask, one wants to know answers to. Does the death of the queen mark an epochal change?

Yugoslavia with its few nations each of which enjoyed a measure of autonomy was held together so long as Marshal Josip Bros Tito was alive. It took very few years after his death for Yugoslavia to disintegrate. The United Kingdom is also made up of autonomous regions – England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland – with separatist tendencies. The deaths of the general secretaries of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union – Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko, who acted as real rulers of the USSR – also heralded the end of an epoch. The British people of all political persuasions may have felt loyalty to the monarch who embodied the best in their culture and tradition: will they want to pledge allegiance to Kwasi Kwarteng, the new chancellor of the exchequer, James Cleverly, the new foreign secretary, and Suella Braverman, the new home secretary?