Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/404410
maltatoday, SUNDAY, 26 OCTOBER 2014 Opinion 20 W ell, that's what everyone else is talking about, any way. In most of Europe and great parts of the rest of the world, there is a seething discontent that is so palpable you can almost reach your hand out and touch it. It hangs over entire countries like an ominous storm cloud. In some cases, the storm has already been unleashed: Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, Syria…these are all countries in which what was literally unthinkable only a few years ago, went on to happen with spectacular effect. And in all such cases, the upheaval came as an earth-shattering surprise. Libya is perhaps the best example of how events such as these tend to overtake the political establishment we are all used to in our own, sheltered little countries. European leaders like David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy were still trying to conclude business deals with Gaddafi when the first rumblings of unrest were being heard from the Benghazi direction. It is clear as daylight that none of these prime ministers had any inkling of what was about to happen. Otherwise, Sarkozy might have been less keen to sell nuclear technology to the same man whose overthrow he would later help finance with money and weapons. And the United Nations may have thought twice before feting the Libyan dictator in New York as if he were the darling of the international communit y. It's a little like Mont y Python's version of the Spanish Inquisition: nobody expects a revolution on the scale of the Arab Spring, until it actually erupts under your feet. It is only when blood already soaks the streets and squares of Tripoli and Damascus that all the world 's academics, political commentators, journalists and even prime ministers suddenly scratch their heads and ask themselves: but how on earth did we not see this coming? How is it even possible that something as big as this could take us so completely by surprise? And that is their reaction to revolutions that sweep conveniently distant and remote parts of the world. When it comes to revolutions in their own countries… Ha! The idea is automatically laughed off as an absurdit y. So when people like Russell Brand (pictured above) in the UK (or Beppe Grillo in Italy) suddenly start 'talking about a revolution', right here in the context of Western Europe… the reaction is predictably to laugh the whole idea off as a schoolboy fantasy, and of course to heap scorn and insults on the harbingers of doom. Even Johnny Rotten – who once sang about 'anarchy in the UK' – has now joined the ranks of angry defenders of a political system he himself used to rail against in the 1970s (usually while spitting into the frenzied audience at Sex Pistol concerts). I suppose that's what inevitably happens to punk rockers when they grow up. They forget all about the time when they engaged in class warfare and glorified mob violence, and instead become spokespersons for their own country's political establishment. Any way: I haven't read Russell Brand 's latest book (imaginatively titled 'Revolution'), but I've read enough about it, mostly in the form of scathing criticism, to form an idea of what motivates his current obsession with challenging the system. And I've read enough articles by Brand in the British press to know that he can certainly put a point across. This, for instance, is his view on the democratic system in the UK today: "The only reason to vote is if the vote represents power or change. I don't think it does. I fervently believe that we deserve more from our democratic system than the few Raphael Vassallo Talking about a revolution…