through europe

I'll be brief  and almost telegraphic, because I have many things to say and little time.

1. Let's have a look at the landscape at the end of the year 2010. The Obama hope has dissolved, and the European crisis has broken out. A new Logic has been installed at the heart of the European life, since the financial crisis of Greece: Angela Merkel, Nicholas Sarkozy and Jean-Claude Trichet resolved that European society has to sacrifice its current levels of life, public school system, its civility, in order to pay the debts accumulated by the financial elite.

What is happening in Rome and in many other Italian cities, what happened in London only few days ago, marks the beginning of the decade. It's going to be a decade of conflict and self-defense of society, against a ruling class that is violent and corrupt, against financial capitalism that is literally starving the social sphere, against mafia, that is using power to embezzle social resources.

In Rome, on December 14th a Parliament of corrupts celebrates the Godfather's victory. In London, on December 9th, a Parliament of liars has ordained the destruction of public education.

The arrest of Julian Assange sounds the death knell for Western democracy. They caught him, they cut off the wires and the funds. But what did this man exactly do? Simply demonstrate the power of the Network. Western authorities, despite their disdain for Chinese Censorship, behave exactly like Hu Jintao as soon as the power of the networks threatens to introduce Glasnost, to suggest any form of transparency or even, perhaps, expose the realities of power.

Like Socrates, Pyrrho of Elis left us no text. 

We know that he lived between the 4^th and 3^rd centuries BC, and that he joined Alexander the Great’s expedition to India. Diogenes Laertius tells that he was a painter at first, that he then heard the lessons of Bryson and had contacts with the Gymnosophists in India.  What we know of his teachings comes from Timon and makes Pyrrho the precursor of Sextus Empiricus, Saturninus and others who between 150 and 250 BC defined themselves as skeptics in the Hellenistic period. 

For years European intellectuals like Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, among many others, have stressed the refrain: “We need to develop an ability of common political decision at the level of the Union.” 

The euro version of the Neoliberal Dogma, namely the Maastricht monetarist engine has been producing effects on social life: reduction of wages, cuts of social spending, but the only seemed to be a Big Leap in the creation of the political Union.