This is the Summer of Hate

This is the Summer of Hate

By: Erreh Svaia

“It is easy to hate and it is difficult to love. This is how the whole scheme of things works. All good things are difficult to achieve; and bad things are very easy to get.”

Confucius

Who could have thought that Julian Assange, Guccifer2 and Vladimir Putin one day would make obsolete the sublime 80s aesthetics of Netflix series like The Americans, a total favorite of mine, and the company's newest hit Stranger Things, by bringing back to modern life the Cold War era paranoia? Thanks to the supposed cyber infiltration and subtraction of information from the Democratic Party servers (supposedly by the Russians), now you don't need to be in the 80s in order to be afraid of infiltrated spies, or to get financial resources from the government´s secret agencies in order to build secret weapons to fight the commies, although Communism and the USSR are no longer the enemies, it seems that Putin's drive to rebuild the Russian Empire, with one hand in Far Right Populism  (or is it “Putinism”) and the other in terrorism and propaganda (now thanks to WikiLeaks and Assange), it’s a complex scenario that is starting to bring back those high tension charged years, so kids, if you missed the Cold War era, it could all be brought back this summer, which could be renamed in “Summer of Love” style, as the “Summer of Hate”.

Considering the Brexit controversy, which brought a new government in the UK and the anger of Scotland, thanks to the efforts of xenophobes like Nigel Farage and his UKIP, along Machiavellian politicians like Michael Gove and buffoons like Boris Johnson; The rise of truly dangerous Far Right Political Parties in Europe, like Golden Dawn in Greece, like Jobbik in Hungary, like People´s Party Our Slovakia, in…yes, Slovakia, the terrorist menace in the European Union hitting hard France ad starting to tonight penetrate Germany, with attacks also in Turkey, the heated dynamics in the China's Sea, the impossibility of political arrangements in Spain, recently elected President Duterte and his “death squads” in Philippines, Erdogan´s self-coup in Turkey, the ongoing war in Syria, Isis, a complicated Olympic Games in Brazil, a new constitution in a Poland descending into fascism, the Donald Trump designation as the Republican Party nominee and the internal degradation of the GOP, the war between the PRI-Government and the Catholic Church over same sex marriages, and the fact that Russia is looking to get closer to Turkey and Israel in order to create a new counterweight against the West, it seems that the Summer of Hate has the potential to make us live close to the edge (Yes, as the Yes album) this next couple of months, consider that in Mexico, last weekend, more than 100 persons were killed in separated violent events, the rise in gasoline and electricity prices and the inflation rate increases, and if that wasn’t enough, the populist Pope Francis makes a sensationalist declaration about the world being already on war, you bet the Summer of Hate is in, and it is just beginning.

Perhaps the biggest examples of what this Summer of Hate is all about, are Donald Trump and the Islamic State, both of them inflated and taken out of proportion by the press, you have Trump backed by "luminaries" like Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban, Kim Jong Un and David Duke, all of them calling him a "great leader", a select club of people who would love to see Trump in power, in order to see the USA crumbling down, on the other side, there is Isis or the Islamic State, probably backed by Saudi Arabia, Erdogan Recep Tayyip, and welcomed by Putin as a way to cause distress in the Middle East and in Europe (Putin has used terrorism a couple of times before in order to increase his power and popularity), as the Islamic State loses strength, Putin, Erdogan and Syrian dictator Basher Al Assad keep using them to extort the EU, to clean Syria of civil rebels, while Erdogan uses them also to extort the West, and to mask his attacks against the Kurds, all these while Donald Trump accuses November elections of being already rigged in order for him to loose, as we know there is a minority who are captivated by Trump, but none else, as this man exemplifies what hate and ignorance are all about, they say love conquers all, I I have no doubt that some how, we eill find the way out of this mess, but is going to get a little bit ugly before it finally starts getting better.