Yes, the freighted, fraught moment has now almost well and truly arrived, and come 48 hours or so, it'll be all over bar the shouting, and screaming, and stomping etcetera. But I 'speak' facetiously, and without the due moment such an occasion clearly deserves, however it transpires. An occasion, a decision linked with and to everything from the fall of Western or at least so-called European 'civilization' through to the long-feared and anticipated World War Three and its cataclysmic results. Yes indeed, so argue some of the protagonists involved, and seemingly every bit believers of their own hyperbolic spin and imaginative speculation.
And though the same of course accuse their opponents, the Brexiters, of creative largesse equally bordering upon the fanciful and the fantastic, by for example appealing not only to terror-evoking mock-ups of swarming refugee hordes sweeping into and subsuming the British Isles but moreover to feared and loathed historical images of Hitler, Napoleon et al and their unhinged, unashamed and - for a time anyhow - seemingly unstoppable megalomaniacal fantasies of European and ultimately world domination and even subjugation, nevertheless the difference in content and degree - if admittedly not intensity - between the two sides I would suggest is anything but finely-balanced. And so, like the much-maligned Nigel Farage, the newly ridiculed as a mini-UK Trumpesque figure, the endearingly irascible and inimitable Boris Johnson - and their fellow-travellers - I would contend that evocations of the dystopian and even the frighteningly phantasmagoric(al) - *for the lay reader's 'information' (and Yours Truly's often challenged memory as well) '(eliciting or evoking) a fantastic series of illusive images' (et al) - is far more the province thus far of the Bremain brigade than the Brexiters. Inasmuch as 'the end of all things' as Tolkien's Sam Gamgee phrased it, or 'the end of the world' as many others have long described it, by a country mile methinks 'trumps' (again, any similarity to anyone else now living wholly unintended and purely a by-product of an occasionally challenged vocabulary) a tempestuous time in intra-national relations. (According to my longtime and ever trusty (1988 edition of the) Chambers Concise Dictionary.)
But where, oh where - my oh my oh my - does one possibly begin - much less end - in seeking to do justice to this now hugely contentious matter, one which has pretty well continuously dogged the steps, nipped at the heels of each and every pretender to the leadership mantle of the Tory (i.e. Conservative) Party of (the once - but no longer?) Great Britain since the days of their much-loved and equally-loathed but irrespective ever-memorable Margaret Thatcher herself. For who or which political junkie can soon forget the circumstances of the Iron Lady's demise those fateful days in 1990, just as the decades-long Cold War was finally being wrapped up good and proper; indeed just prior to the final and overwhelming episode in that exponentially escalating and accelerating anticlimax in superpower relations - the Fall of Communism in the Soviet Union, the U.S.S.R., and its rapid disintegration into fifteen republics of dramatically differing size, population, geography and economic and military power. Following all so quickly the citizens' uprising in and/or fall/breakup of one after another of what were aptly termed the 'domino nations' of the then Eastern Europe.
From the (11-year? - my guesstimate) nine-ten-and-a-half-*15-year struggle in Poland through the nine-month (actually four-and-a-half-five year) multi-layered often genocidal ethno-national crisis in (Yugoslavia?) through the nine-week (actually four-five days) fall of Czeckoslovakia to the nine-day (actually four-six-eleven month) implosion of Eastern Germany to the nine-hour (in fact eight to twenty-two to twenty-three month) capitulation of Hungary; on through the entire 'pack' of eight Eastern European satellite states including Romania (three to four days, similarly to Czechoslovakia) and Bulgaria (three months); Albania ever being the odd one out, and I'm still a bit unsure of its transition process and timeline.
Toppling just like a series of so many interconnected dominoes 'till they all fell down' as the nursery rhyme goes.
(*'De-communizing' events in Poland evidently began with a Workers Defence Committee being established in 1976, around four years before Lech Walesca's celebrated Solidarity Union showed up on the scene; and of course both Hungary and Czechoslovakia had major uprisings both ruthlessly suppressed back in the 50s and 60s. And as with Poland's pre-Solidarity history, I was also surprised to learn of an uprising of some note in East Germany back in 1953.And even the Soviet Union itself was seemingly no exception to
this trend, effectively taking just four months when things really
started to roll. But that's the point in a very real sense, for as is
far better known internationally vis-a-vis the then Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics than in regards to any of its eight other
'satellite' Communist Bloc states, the process of reform began years
before when Mikhail Gorbachev took the helm, even arguably decades
earlier under the unpredictable regime of Nikita Khruschev.).
So the actual specific number of days, months and years involved in each of these nation's ideological transitions is really a matter of which particular events one focuses upon and therefore is somewhat of a subjective measure per se. (If my memory serves me aright, and it usually does, if admittedly occasionally forgoing me; since I can't presently relocate an excellent Time/Newsweek cover story or three on the same from that time period, I'll have to leave it at that for tonight.)***As it transpires now, I'll admit some degree of challenged status to that acclaimed memory, though due to the rather 'mixed and matched' chronologies I've thus far reviewed, it's really quite open to anyone's interpretation. Suffice it to say, however, that my distinct overall recollection was one of exponentially-accelerating events, and somewhere somehow I recall one particular digit/number, and then was dramatically impressed at the time as I saw how this applied to pretty well each and every one of the nations specified, only the particular 'unit' involved - be it years, months, weeks, days or hours - seemed to progressively shrink as time progressed and as the set of 'domino' nations went from a mere mini-spill or drip to a complete deluge.or rout.
Part Two: So What Did the Iron Lady Have Right, if not the Might to enact/enforce?
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