Why is the voice of righteous indignation falling on deaf ears?

THE Indignados arrived in Brussels at the weekend.

The few hundred that walked from Spain and France to the EU capital hope to be joined by many more to make their voice heard by the EU leaders at their summit on Monday and Tuesday of next week.

“The indignant” is a strange name for this group of largely young people to give themselves. According to the Oxford dictionary it means “feeling or showing anger or annoyance at what is perceived as unfair treatment”.

That is understandable when in Spain youth unemployment is hitting 40% and their future is being mortgaged to keep a system afloat that has created the situation.

It is a little strange that in other countries a similar sense of outrage has not been demonstrated on the streets of capital cities.

Commentators explain that the Irish people excised their indignation in the general election by giving the then government the greatest thrashing of their history at the polls.

And now the citizens are busy trying to get this weight off their backs while the truly indignant youth — the best educated in the history of the state — flee the country, taking their potential with them.

In Greece indignation is visible on the streets perpetually, but even violent protests have achieved nothing — partly because nobody has come up with an alternative. And partly because cutbacks are just one element in the Greek story. The other is the corruption that has made the current situation so difficult to deal with. But it involves more than Greece. Much of it comes back to the member states and their industries that are now finger-wagging at Greece. Not only have the German and French banks lent without due diligence to the country, but much of that money has been spent on arms manufactured by these two countries and Britain and the USA.

Greece spends a greater share of its GDP on arms than any other EU country, and purchases account for roughly 15% of the entire German arms industry exports. Contributors to the WikiGreeks website make the point that getting the facts out to the public in all the member states is essential, so politicians are forced to take all elements into account and not just spin the easy nationalistic line that gets them re-elected but solves nothing.

But will EU leaders hear the voice of the Indignados when they come to Brussels next week? Very unlikely. A truly big, well organised protest of thousands of people from all over Europe that descended on the Polish city of Wroklaw last month to give their message to the finance ministers failed utterly.

As the enthusiastic workers spilled out of their buses and arranged themselves according to their countries and their jobs, a few kilometres away the finance ministers, central bankers and their advisers were being shepherded onto shiny white buses and whisked away to avoid the masses. Out of sight is out of mind.

And even if the Indignados manage to have their voices heard through the double glazed windows of where the EU leaders are meeting, will they get their message across? Possibly not. For starters, the protesters are being accused of not knowing what they want, making it easy for governments to ignore them. And they are now being labelled as “anti-corporatist” and “communist”, allowing politicians to brush them aside.

Perhaps the truth is that they are protesting in the wrong places and to the wrong people. The American Indignados have taken to Wall Street, acknowledging that power has moved from the governments to wealth managers like Goldman Sachs. But the streets are hardly the right place to take them on.