EU Update: Financial Collapse, Anti-Semitism, Neo-Fascism Rising

This article of a few days old, but it is fascinating to watch in terms of how the EU is morphing into the exact type of structure and mentality we would anticipate during the Tribulation. We also cannot forget that a financial collapse will be one of the initial hardships experienced to those living on earth during the Tribulation.

Revelation 6 reveals the situation:

"A quart of wheat for a day's wages, and three quarts of barley for a day's wages..." (v6)

One quart of wheat would be enough for only one person and three quarts of barley would barely be enough for a small family. Those are pretty severe consequences in the aftermath of financial collapse - something that doesn't seem very far off.

This article shows just how close the revived Roman Empire of our day - the biblical last days of the Church Age - has come to the structure and mentality we would see during the Tribulation (although we still await the emergence of the 10 kings phase).

Europe On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown

Below are just a few quotes below from this lengthy article - which is really a fascinating read:

A spectre is haunting Europe: the spectre of unemployment. At the latest count, there were almost 25 million people in the member states of the European Union without a job, an increase of two million on the same point in the previous year.

At the same time, openly neo-Nazi parties are on the rise.

In Greece, the Golden Dawn movement shot from nowhere to win 21 seats in the legislature at the May election and 18 in the rerun election a few weeks later, attracting nearly 7 per cent of the popular vote. The party’s flag is black, white and red, like that of the original Nazi Party in Germany, with a swastika-like emblem at the centre (Golden Dawn denies any resemblance and claims that the symbol is a “Greek meander”)

In Hungary, Jobbik, founded in 2003, uses a flag resembling that of the Arrow Cross movement, which was put in power by the German occupiers of Hungary in 1944 and butchered so many thousands of Jews that even the police, who were busy rounding up Jews for deportation to Auschwitz, complained about the dead bodies lying in the streets of Budapest. In the 2010 elections, campaigning under the slogan “Hungary belongs to the Hungarians”, Jobbik shot from nowhere to become the third-largest party nationally, securing 16.67 per cent of the vote.

All this seems disturbingly reminiscent of the previous depression that hit Europe in the 1930s and brought Hitler to power.

Mass unemployment was also a feature of German society in the early 1930s, the graph of Nazi electoral support rising in tandem with the graph of unemployment rates. Nazism, too, blamed the mainstream political parties for the disastrous state of the economy, and its dynam­ism also proved particularly attractive to the young – first-time voters were a large proportion of its supporters at the polls.

Territorial expansionism, economic protectionism, assaults on the rights of minorities, anti-Semitism, paramilitary violence and inflammatory rhetoric were all features of the Nazi Party, as they were of many other fascist parties that sprang up across Europe in the interwar years. They seem to have re-emerged with disturbing suddenness in the early 21st century as economic crisis has hit the continent.

And the conclusion reveals the possible impact of the economic collapse in Europe:

That, roughly, is what happened in Germany in 1930-33. What is happening now is something related but different, a new threat for a new era. It’s not that unemployment leads directly to the rise of fascism. The social crisis that led to the present policies of austerity reaches far wider. Businesses go bankrupt, banks crash, civil servants are sacked, pay is cut, benefits are slashed, public services are shattered. It is not just the young, or the unemployed, who are affected. The whole of society is affected by it. No wonder political extremism is on the rise. Robbing people of hope for their future leads them to search for scapegoats, whether within their own countries or outside. And the hatred that this breeds can all too easily threaten to undermine the foundations of a tolerant and democratic political culture.

The Tribulation is approaching and the entire world is setting the stage. There are a few key events to happen along the way (the battles of Isaiah 17, Ezekiel 38-39 and the gathering up) but the nearness of the Tribulation reveals just how close we are to these other prophetic events.