I recently saw a clip from a film on Bertrand Russell, the great English philosopher, where he recounts some memories of his childhood. Russell was born in an aristocratic family in 1872 when the British Empire was at its height. Losing his parents early, he was brought up by his grandparents. He talks about his grandfather, a former prime minister, having actually met Napoleon. Speaking of that time, Russell mentions several things that are now unimaginable, to the point of seeming downright bizarre: for instance, children in the wealthier families not being given a share of nice pudding or dessert because these things were ‘not good for them’. This was not to protect them from sugar — they were given equally sugary-sweet dishes — it was just that the best stuff was reserved for the adults. Expanding from this, Russell also speaks of how certain things were taken by the English to be eternally unmoving realities. For instance, it was assumed that the British navy, then the most powerful sea force in the world, would always retain its superiority and, likewise, the British Empire its hegemony across large areas of the globe.

As we know, all sorts of unforeseen things began to nibble away at both navy and Empire: within fifty years of Russell's birth, Britain had lost nearly 900,000 of its young men in a bloody and pointless war, with nearly 1.7 million wounded; within seventy years, the country was fighting for its life against Germany, desperate for the United States of America to bail it out, its Empire under critical attack in North Africa and in East Asia; within a hundred years, most of the British Empire was gone, with Britain reduced to a secondary military power, all but in name under American hegemony. By the time he dies at the age of 97, Russell has lived through all of this, and in the filmed interview (when he’s possibly in his eighties), he succinctly conveys the wonder and the awe that one can feel when witnessing extreme and rapid historical changes.

Travelling through the United Kingdom and Europe this summer, I’ve found myself trying to pull back from my immediate surroundings to try and grasp the macro-reality of what I’m seeing and experiencing. This zooming out, as it were, has been difficult. Revisiting places and environments with which you’re somewhat familiar, it’s easy and comforting to fall into the trap of thinking ‘oh, I know this’ rather than examine what has actually shifted.

Crisis points in history, especially when they come simultaneously from different, sometimes unexpected, directions, often do us one favour even as they turn our lives upside down. They help throw new light on a period we’ve just lived through and clarify that chunk of time. Just as we can see the decline of the British Empire beginning in the late 19th century, we can now see the eighty-year-long posturings and pantomimes of the post-WW2 western European democracies for what they were. Through the admixture of the conflicts in Ukraine and Palestine-Israel with the growing global ecological disasters and the obscene burlesque that is the Donald Trump presidency, several things fall into place vis-à-vis understanding the current contraption of Europe. Post-war, European, Left-liberal politics talked a good game for a few decades but was ultimately found wanting in the face of repeated, unceasing onslaughts from the Right. Democracy, freedom of speech, social welfare, women’s rights, racial equality, economic justice, concern for the environment, checks and balances on the wealthy and the big corporations were all, ultimately, negotiable, even jettisonable, when it came to capturing or retaining power. What has actually remained non-negotiable for the western European powers, through Rightist government or liberal, is that White people are always more important than people of other skin colours and that so-called ‘first world’ economies should always come, well, first, no matter what the cost to the rest of the planet.

This might sound extreme but there is, for instance, no other way to explain the utterly craven capitulation by Tony Blair to George W. Bush's trumped-up Iraq war agenda. Nor can any other explanation fit the reprise of British foreign policy kowtowing to American lunacy, this time by Keir Starmer to Trump over Palestine-Israel.

London in the summer has all the usual suspects: concerts, art shows, a live-wire Test series, barbecues in house gardens, people sunning themselves in the parks and, yet, the ghoul-ghosts of Cameron-Johnson-Sunak, of Austerity, of Brexit and the continuing official support for the rogue Netanyahu regime have gone nowhere. The Starmer government that gave many people such false hope when it came to power has proved as pusillanimous and self-serving as all the previous Tory iterations. As the former human rights lawyer now known as Keir ‘Starver’ continues to abet genocide and deliberate starvation under an Iron Dome of legalese fudge, the UK’s social services continue to be in crisis, the poorest and most vulnerable in the land keep getting hit with funding cuts, the prices are more obscenely high than ever, and the proverbial shark, Nigel Farage, keeps circling the shrinking island of power on which the terrified, beleaguered Labour leadership is trying to mimic its shameful Conservative predecessors.

For many, West Germany and, later, a reunified Germany, offered great hope in terms of what a large, economically powerful democracy at the centre of a union of democracies could bring to the world. For us here in India who have been struggling with the hijacking of our memories and history by fascist charlatans, the example of a nation accepting its responsibility for the worst genocide in history so far, and making sure to teach generations of its children about that crime, offered a hopeful model. This seemed to be in direct contrast with, say, the absence of any teaching about the centuries-long crime of Empire in British schools, or the concerted attempt by the American Right to curtail teaching about slavery in US schools. But now, it’s become clear that the expiation — actually a kind of gradual erasure — of German guilt for the Holocaust is made easier by supporting Israel through thick and thin as it conducts its own ruthless genocide against Palestinians. This, of course, is happening at the same time as the growing popularity of the Hitlerite variant of the Alternative für Deutschland, especially in the east and the south of Germany. Unimaginable as it might have been once, Nazism is making a big comeback and in several parts of the world.

The one thing people used to take for granted in Britain, even during the darkest years of Margaret Thatcher, was freedom of speech and the right to protest. Similarly, the right to gather and protest seemed to be enshrined in German law. This summer, we’ve seen the German police crack down on peaceful supporters of Palestine with a violence worthy of the uniformed henchmen of any despotic regime. Likewise, after fifty years or more of Greenpeace-style disruptive protests, the ‘Starver’ government has done what no Tory government has dared to do — ban a group called Palestine Action for acts such as vandalising arms factories that supply weapons to Israel and spray-painting planes at an air force base. PA has not come close to hurting any human being; numerous laws exist to punish it for property damage and vandalism; and yet, it has been clumped with ISIS and al Qaida as a terrorist organisation. Being a member can get you 14 years in jail; supporting it can put you away for about 3.

As wildfires rage across Spain and southern France, as temperatures hit record highs for yet another year, one can also see hitherto unseen weather patterns emerging in the politics of the continent. How well we in India and the rest of the world manage these changes remains to be seen.