Fascism-Nazism are pan-European ideologies, let's not kid ourselves, and Greece could not be
left out of this phenomenon. Fascism has remained dormant for 35 odd years, simply because the
Greek elites squandered billions of many on populist policies and handouts. When your belly is
full, you can always claim to be a patriot and a socialist.
It is ironic that Golden Dawn venerate the Nazis considering how badly they treated the
Greeks during the war. Along with the rest of their ignorance they obviously know nothing about
history.
It is the same in Ukraine. It all depends whose history you have been taught.
Real anger and the correct cause, the globalised banks that take money from the poor and
give to the rich. If only they could drop the racism. Or is that being exaggerated because they
are anti-banking.
The words Fascism is thrown about a lot at the moment when it should be reserved for the true
fascists that are in government across the western world.
As Mussolini said Fascism is the coming together of corporations and the state.
The key characteristics of the SOCIOECONOMIC system of a suzerainty are hierarchy, polarization and exploitation. This enables
the Global Financial Syndicate to drive PRIVATE CONTROL by privatization, extracting profits and increasing its power. Without
this system it can't survive, capture new entities and increase its power.
In analyzing any situation one need to understand the POWER DYNAMICS. This enables one to understand the hierarchy of religions,
nations, corporations, elites,...There seems to be a well defined playbook that is being followed to expand the global power.
However, now it seems to be failing?
Is this a good chart of the
POWER PLAYERS
driving U$A's and international developments?
(Solid lines refer to funding and dashed lines refer to mostly ideological connections)
Are there better charts and overview of the power players?
If one were to view Israel from an imperialist lens then it is a beachhead in the Middle East of the Financial Empire like
the Colony of Virginia (1606). The IMPERIALIST goal is to create a Middle East Union (MEU), similar to the United States and the
EU. Israel will be the financial, technological, military and trading hub of the ME? It will drive decimation of states to steal
the region's land, oil gas and natural resources, so they can be priced in the Empire's currency.
What were the strategies and tactics used by the Imperialist settlers to steal land from the Native Americans? Wasn't (freedom
of) religion one of the dimensions? How was the LAND stolen from natives of America? Weren't treaties made in bad faith? "In 1830,
US Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, forcing many indigenous peoples east of the Mississippi from their lands."
Ayn Rand framed
it as ... to the graduating Class Of U$A's military academy at West Point
Which of the past patterns of stealing land and getting rid of the natives are being repeated by Israel? We're watching a tragedy
and living through an epoch in the history of humanity.
One more thing... MECHANISM of power & control expansions to capture resources and control points...
Is this a good overview of what happened in
Ukraine? It discusses various power players,
plans and ploys.
"Anyone who does not understand contemporary history as a chain of decisions and events and instead always takes only the end
link of a long chain into account – will not understand anything at all."
"We must cultivate among the Ukrainians a people whose consciousness is altered to such an extent, that they begin to hate
everything Russian". -- Who said this & why?
The Dollar Empire is working towards neutralizing Russia through short term concessions. Russia has defined redlines and demanded
no interferences with Nord Stream 2, Belarus, Syria & Ukraine (implementation of the Minsk agreement). Also, no NATO membership
for Ukraine and Georgia. Russia wants to develop Iran and Turkey as regional powers, and be the third power to that of the U$A
and China. It will be interesting to see what happens next.
"Our race is the Master Race. We are divine gods on this planet. We are as different from
the inferior races as they are from insects. In fact, compared to our race, other races are
beasts and animals, cattle at best. Other races are considered as human excrement. Our
destiny is to rule over the inferior races. Our earthly kingdom will be ruled by our leader
with a rod of iron. The masses will lick our feet and serve us as our slaves." -- Menachem
Begin (Israeli Prime Minister, 1977-1983)
The legal case was set in motion after a citizen filed a complaint against Zelensky for
delivering a speech in Russian at an IT-themed forum in Kiev in May 2019. The person asked the
Supreme Court to rule that Zelensky had broken the law by not using Ukrainian – the
country's sole official language, according to the constitution – while exercising his
presidential duties.
Zelensky is a native Russian-speaker, from the industrial city of Krivoy Rog, and like most
Ukrainians of his generation, outside of the West of the country, he would have had little
exposure to the native tongue as a child.
The court initially dismissed the claim, but an appeal was then launched. On Friday, the
Supreme Court's Grand Chamber ruled that "the president of Ukraine must use the state
language [Ukrainian] when carrying out his official duties."
However, the court clarified that the president is only subject to legal liability for
actions undertaken "when carrying out his constitutional duties." In other cases, it
only constitutes a "political" responsibility. The case was therefore closed, as "the
plaintiff's claims are not subject to consideration in the administrative procedure."
In 2019, the parliament adopted a bill that made the use of Ukrainian mandatory by state
officials and in the public sphere. The bill was signed into law by the outgoing president,
Petro Poroshenko, when Zelensky was still president-elect. At the time, many observers felt
Poroshenko made the move to make life difficult for the incoming leader, given his preference
for the use of Russian.
The
Guardian
a few days ago carried a
very
strange piece
[which has since been removed] under the heading "Stamps celebrating Ukrainian resistance in
pictures." The first image displayed a stamp bearing the name of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).
The UPA was, without any shadow of a doubt, responsible for the slaughter of at least 200,000 Polish civilians; they
liquidated whole Polish communities in Volhynia and Galicia, including the women and children. The current Polish
government, which is as anti-Russian and pro-NATO as they come, nevertheless has
declared
this
a genocide.
It certainly was an extremely brutal ethnic cleansing. There is no doubt either that at times between 1942 and 1944
the UPA collaborated with the Nazis and collaborated in the destruction of Jews and Gypsies. It is simplistic to
describe the UPA as fascist or an extension of the Nazi regime; at times they fought the Nazis, though they
collaborated more often.
There is a real sense in which they operated at the level of medieval peasants, simply seizing local opportunities to
exterminate rural populations and seize their land and assets, be they Polish, Jew or Gypsy. But on balance any
reasonable person would have to conclude that the UPA was an utterly deplorable phenomenon. To publish a celebration
of it, disguised as a graphic art piece, without any of this context, is no more defensible than a display of Nazi
art with no context.
In fact,
The Guardian's
very
brief text was still worse than no context.
"Ukrainian photographer Oleksandr Kosmach collects 20th-century stamps issued by Ukrainian groups in exile during
the Soviet era.
Artists and exiles around the world would use stamps to communicate the horrors of Soviet oppression. "These
stamps show us the ideas and values of these people, who they really were and what they were fighting for,"
Kosmach says."
That is so misleadingly partial as a description of the art glorifying the UPA movement as to be deeply
reprehensible. It does however fit with the anything -- goes stoking of Russophobia, which is the mainstay of
government and media discourse at the moment.
The nationalist right should embrace police defunding. Let communities police themselves.
Peter Turchin's studies show that our polarization has reached catastrophic levels. The
immiseration of the working and middle classes is 5 decades old and shows no sign of
abating.
Plus we hate each other. De-platforming and firing for tiny, frivolous reasons will continue.
The (second) American experiment is crashing, and the decline looks irremediable. Look at the
streets.
The Great Society experiment is a failure. 80% of black Americans believe that race relations
are worse today than in 1960.
If self-policing doesn't work (it probably won't), at least it will pave the way for peaceful
separations based on "irreconcilable differences." Communities will develop a sense of
sovereignty. A key aspect of state power is the exercise of legitimate coercion.
In any event, we do not have to kneel. "Is life so sweet and peace so dear "
That's what people really want, justice. They want to see Floyd's killer prosecuted,
convicted and put behind bars.
That's not justice, that is revenge. Justice would be a thorough examination of the facts
of the matter and any mitigating factors that would lead a jury of the accused cops' peers to
an appropriate verdict, which might also be acquittal.
As for the economy, the current fantasy-land painted by our leaders reminds me of the
StayCations and FunEmployment of 2009-2010, including madam Pelosi's quip that we should all
be free to be artists on someone else's dime. Instead, over time, we got more barristas and
wait-staff jobs, more despair, and more opioid deaths.
Russiagate. Impeachment scam. Planned demic. Obamagate. And now white lives don't matter. All
these things are really the same thing.
It's the globalist war of control to defeat the nationalists.
In America, it means war on God, family, and love of America. We've been bombarded with
this war for decades, but now Trump has brought the war out into the open. The good news is
that the left is now at peak irrationality, and the tide is turning. They've used up all the
kitchen sinks to throw at Trump, and now he's stronger than ever. No love lost for Trump on
my part, but who in their right minds can vote for Biden now? It's Nixon '68 all over
again.
Excellent, Mr. Unz. British, American and Jewish elites need to be isolated, they are
obviously an enemy of the whole human race. Ethno Nationalism for all peoples of the world,
protected by all peoples of the world, is the most sensible solution. Isolate the warmongers,
secret societies and criminal's. No more war's and heal the earth. It's up to us.
The article is mostly junk. But it contains some important insights into the rise of Trympism (aka "national neoliberalism") --
nationalist oligarchy. Including the following " the governments that have emerged from the new populist moment are, to date, not
actually pursuing policies that are economically populist."
The real threat to liberal democracy isn't authoritarianism -- it's nationalist oligarchy. Here's how American foreign policy should
change. The real threat to liberal democracy isn't authoritarianism -- it's nationalist oligarchy. Here's how American foreign policy
should change.
Notable quotes:
"... Fascism: A Warning ..."
"... Can it Happen Here? Authoritarianism in America ..."
"... the governments that have emerged from the new populist moment are, to date, not actually pursuing policies that are economically populist. ..."
"... The better and more useful way to view these regimes -- and the threat to democracy emerging at home and abroad because of them -- is as nationalist oligarchies. Oligarchy means rule by a small number of rich people. In an oligarchy, wealthy elites seek to preserve and extend their wealth and power. In his definitive book titled Oligarchy ..."
"... Oligarchies remain in power through two strategies: first, using divide-and-conquer tactics to ensure that a majority doesn't coalesce, and second, by rigging the political system to make it harder for any emerging majority to overthrow them. ..."
"... Rigging the system is, in some ways, a more obvious tactic. It means changing the legal rules of the game or shaping the political marketplace to preserve power. Voting restrictions and suppression, gerrymandering, and manipulation of the media are examples. The common theme is that they insulate the minority in power from democracy; they prevent the population from kicking the rulers out through ordinary political means. ..."
"... Classical Greek Oligarchy ..."
"... Framing today's threat as nationalist oligarchy not only clarifies the challenge but also makes clear how democracy is different -- and what democracy requires. Democracy means more than elections, an independent judiciary, a free press, and various constitutional norms. For democracy to persist, there must also be relative economic equality. If society is deeply unequal economically, the wealthy will dominate politics and transform democracy into an oligarchy. And there must be some degree of social solidarity because, as Lincoln put it, "A house divided against itself cannot stand." ..."
"... We see a number of disturbing signs the United States is breaking down along these dimensions. ..."
"... The view that money is speech under the First Amendment has unleashed wealthy individuals and corporations to spend as much as they want to influence politics. The "doom loop of oligarchy," as Ezra Klein has called it, is an obvious consequence: The wealthy use their money to influence politics and rig policy to increase their wealth, which in turn increases their capacity to influence politics. Meanwhile, we're increasingly divided into like-minded enclaves, and the result is an ever-more toxic degree of partisanship. ..."
"... The Counterinsurgent's Constitution: Law in the Age of Small Wars ..."
"... The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens our Republic ..."
Ever since the 2016 election, foreign policy commentators and practitioners have been engaged in a series of soul-searching exercises
to understand the great transformations taking place in the world -- and to articulate a framework appropriate to the challenges
of our time. Some have looked backwards, arguing that the liberal international order is collapsing, while others question whether
it ever existed. Another group seems to hope the current messiness is simply a blip and that foreign policy will return to normalcy
after it passes. Perhaps the most prominent group has identified today's great threat as the rise of authoritarianism, autocracy,
and illiberal democracy. They fear that constitutional democracy is receding as norms are broken and institutions are under siege.
Unfortunately, this approach misunderstands the nature of the current crisis. The challenge we face today is not one of authoritarianism,
as so many seem inclined to believe, but of nationalist oligarchy. This form of government feeds populism to the people, delivers
special privileges to the rich and well-connected, and rigs politics to sustain its regime.
... ... ..
Authoritarianism or What?
Across the political spectrum, commentators and scholars have identified -- and warned of -- the global rise of autocracies and
authoritarian governments. They cite Russia, Hungary, the Philippines, and Turkey, among others. Distinguished commentators are increasingly
worried. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright recently published a book called Fascism: A Warning . Cass Sunstein
gathered a variety of scholars for a collection titled, Can it Happen Here? Authoritarianism in America .
The authoritarian lens is familiar from the heroic narrative of democracy defeating autocracies in the twentieth century. But
as a framework for understanding today's central geopolitical challenges, it is far too narrow. This is mainly because those who
are worried about the rise of authoritarianism and the crisis of democracy are insufficiently focused on economics. Their emphasis
is almost exclusively political and constitutional -- free speech, voting rights, equal treatment for minorities, independent courts,
and the like. But politics and economics cannot be dissociated from each other, and neither are autonomous from social and cultural
factors. Statesmen and philosophers used to call this "political economy." Political economy looks at economic and political relationships
in concert, and it is attentive to how power is exercised. If authoritarianism is the future, there must be a story of its political
economy -- how it uses politics and economics to gain and hold power. Yet the rise-of-authoritarianism theorists have less to say
about these dynamics.
To be sure, many commentators have discussed populist movements throughout Europe and America, and there has been no shortage
of debate on the extent to which a generation of widening economic inequality has been a contributing factor in their rise. But whatever
the causes of popular discontent, the policy preferences of the people, and the bloviating rhetoric of leaders, the governments
that have emerged from the new populist moment are, to date, not actually pursuing policies that are economically populist.
The better and more useful way to view these regimes -- and the threat to democracy emerging at home and abroad because of
them -- is as nationalist oligarchies. Oligarchy means rule by a small number of rich people. In an oligarchy, wealthy elites seek
to preserve and extend their wealth and power. In his definitive book titled Oligarchy , Jeffrey Winters calls it "wealth
defense." Elites engage in "property defense," protecting what they already have, and "income defense," preserving and extending
their ability to hoard more. Importantly, oligarchy as a governing strategy accounts for both politics and economics. Oligarchs use
economic power to gain and hold political power and, in turn, use politics to expand their economic power.
Those who worry about the rise of authoritarianism and fear the crisis of democracy are insufficiently focused on economics.
The trouble for oligarchs is that their regime involves rule by a small number of wealthy elites. In even a nominally
democratic society, and most countries around the world today are at least that, it should be possible for the much larger majority
to overthrow the oligarchy with either the ballot or the bullet. So how can oligarchy persist? This is where both nationalism and
authoritarianism come into play. Oligarchies remain in power through two strategies: first, using divide-and-conquer tactics
to ensure that a majority doesn't coalesce, and second, by rigging the political system to make it harder for any emerging majority
to overthrow them.
The divide-and-conquer strategy is an old one, and it works through a combination of coercion and co-optation. Nationalism --
whether statist, ethnic, religious, or racial -- serves both functions. It aligns a portion of ordinary people with the ruling oligarchy,
mobilizing them to support the regime and sacrifice for it. At the same time, it divides society, ensuring that the nationalism-inspired
will not join forces with everyone else to overthrow the oligarchs. We thus see fearmongering about minorities and immigrants, and
claims that the country belongs only to its "true" people, whom the leaders represent. Activating these emotional, cultural, and
political identities makes it harder for citizens in the country to unite across these divides and challenge the regime.
Rigging the system is, in some ways, a more obvious tactic. It means changing the legal rules of the game or shaping the political
marketplace to preserve power. Voting restrictions and suppression, gerrymandering, and manipulation of the media are examples. The
common theme is that they insulate the minority in power from democracy; they prevent the population from kicking the rulers out
through ordinary political means. Tactics like these are not new. They have existed, as Matthew Simonton shows in his book
Classical Greek Oligarchy , since at least the time of Pericles and Plato. The consequence, then as now, is that nationalist
oligarchies can continue to deliver economic policies to benefit the wealthy and well-connected.
It is worth noting that even the generation that waged war against fascism in Europe understood that the challenge to democracy
in their time was not just political, but economic and social as well. They believed that the rise of Nazism was tied to the concentration
of economic power in Germany, and that cartels and monopolies not only cooperated with and served the Nazi state, but helped its
rise and later sustained it. As New York Congressman Emanuel Celler, one of the authors of the Anti-Merger Act of 1950, said, quoting
a report filed by Secretary of War Kenneth Royall, "Germany under the Nazi set-up built up a great series of industrial monopolies
in steel, rubber, coal and other materials. The monopolies soon got control of Germany, brought Hitler to power, and forced virtually
the whole world into war." After World War II, Marshall Plan experts not only rebuilt Europe but also exported aggressive American
antitrust and competition laws to the continent because they believed political democracy was impossible without economic democracy.
Framing today's threat as nationalist oligarchy not only clarifies the challenge but also makes clear how democracy is different
-- and what democracy requires. Democracy means more than elections, an independent judiciary, a free press, and various constitutional
norms. For democracy to persist, there must also be relative economic equality. If society is deeply unequal economically, the wealthy
will dominate politics and transform democracy into an oligarchy. And there must be some degree of social solidarity because, as
Lincoln put it, "A house divided against itself cannot stand."
We see a number of disturbing signs the United States is breaking down along these dimensions. Electoral losers in places
like North Carolina seek to entrench their power rather than accept defeat. The view that money is speech under the First Amendment
has unleashed wealthy individuals and corporations to spend as much as they want to influence politics. The "doom loop of oligarchy,"
as Ezra Klein has called it, is an obvious consequence: The wealthy use their money to influence politics and rig policy to increase
their wealth, which in turn increases their capacity to influence politics. Meanwhile, we're increasingly divided into like-minded
enclaves, and the result is an ever-more toxic degree of partisanship.
Addressing our domestic economic and social crises is critical to defending democracy, and a grand strategy for America's future
must incorporate both domestic and foreign policy. But while many have recognized that reviving America's middle class and re-stitching
our social fabric are essential to saving democracy, less attention has been paid to how American foreign policy should be reformed
in order to defend democracy from the threat of nationalist oligarchy.
The Varieties of Nationalist Oligarchy
Just as there are many variations on liberal democracy -- the Swedish model, the French model, the American model -- there
are many varieties of nationalist oligarchy. The story is different in every country, but the elements of nationalist oligarchy
are trending all over the world.
... ... ...
... the European Union funds Hungary's oligarchy, as Orbán draws on EU money to fund about 60 percent of the state projects
that support "the new Fidesz-linked business elite." Nor do Orbán and his allies do much to hide the country's crony capitalist
model. András Lánczi, president of a Fidesz-affiliated think tank, has boldly stated that "if something is done in the national
interest, then it is not corruption." "The new capitalist ruling class," one Hungarian banker comments, "make their money from
the government."
The commentator Jan-Werner Müller captures Orbán's Hungary this way: "Power is secured through wide-ranging control of the
judiciary and the media; behind much talk of protecting hard-pressed families from multinational corporations, there is crony
capitalism, in which one has to be on the right side politically to get ahead economically."
Crony capitalism, coupled with resurgent nationalism and central government control, is also an issue in China. While some
commentators have emphasized "state capitalism" -- when government has a significant ownership stake in companies -- this phenomenon
is not to be confused with crony capitalism. Some countries with state capitalism, like Norway, are widely seen as extremely non-corrupt
and, indeed, are often held up as models of democracy. State capitalism itself is thus not necessarily a problem. Crony capitalism,
in contrast, is an "instrumental union between capitalists and politicians designed to allow the former to acquire wealth, legally
or otherwise, and the latter to seek and retain power." This is the key difference between state capitalism and oligarchy.
... ... ...
Ganesh Sitaraman is a professor of law
and Chancellor's faculty fellow at Vanderbilt Law School, and the author of The Counterinsurgent's Constitution: Law in the
Age of Small Wars and The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens our Republic
.
I'm finding it hard to think of examples where the formerly norm-giving group becomes derided or humiliated.
You can probably try to look at the situation in (now independent) republics of the former USSR. Simplifying previously oppressed
group, given a lucky chance, most often strive for dominance and oppression of other groups including and especially former dominant
group. This is an eternal damnation of ethno/cultural nationalism.
And not only it (look at Mutual Help and The State in Shantytowns.) In them ethnic comminutes often own protection markets,
offer services that hire people and replace the state, pay off gang leaders. they also provide some community support for particular
ethnic group, enforce the rules of trade within themselves, etc. In GB the abuse of children by ethnic gangs was sickening (
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/sep/30/abuse-children-asian-communities
)
In many cases of ethnic/cultural nationalism this looks more like a competition for resources with the smoke screen of noble
intentions/human rights/past oppression/ humiliations/etc
Or you can look at the language policy in the USA and the actual situation in some areas/institutions of Florida and California
and how English speakers feel in those areas/institutions. Or in some areas of Quebec in Canada.
That actually suggests another meaning of famous Randolph Bourne quote " War is the health of the state " (said in the midst
of the First World War.) It bring the unity unachievable in peace time or by any other methods, albeit temporarily (from Ch 14.
Howard Zinn book A People's History of the United States ):
the governments flourished, patriotism bloomed, class struggle was stilled, and young men died in frightful numbers on the
battlefields-often for a hundred yards of land, a line of trenches.
In the United States, not yet in the war, there was worry about the health of the state. Socialism was growing. The IWW
seemed to be everywhere. Class conflict was intense. In the summer of 1916, during a Preparedness Day parade in San Francisco,
a bomb exploded, killing nine people; two local radicals, Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, were arrested and would spend twenty
years in prison. Shortly after that Senator James Wadsworth of New York suggested compulsory military training for all males
to avert the danger that "these people of ours shall be divided into classes." Rather: "We must let our young men know that
they owe some responsibility to this country."
The supreme fulfillment of that responsibility was taking place in Europe. Ten million were to die on the battlefield; 20
million were to die of hunger and disease related to the war. And no one since that day has been able to show that the war
brought any gain for humanity that would be worth one human life. The rhetoric of the socialists, that it was an "imperialist
war," now seems moderate and hardly arguable. The advanced capitalist countries of Europe were fighting over boundaries, colonies,
spheres of influence; they were competing for Alsace-Lorraine, the Balkans, Africa, the Middle East.
Neo-McCarthyism now serves a somewhat similar purpose in the USA. Among other thing (like absolving Hillary from her fiasco
to "deux ex machine" trick instead of real reason -- the crisis and rejection of neoliberalism by the sizable strata of the USA
population) it is an attempt to unify the nation after 2016.
"... In 2017, a woman working with frontline families told me why she didn't want reintegration. 'These [the population of rebel-held
Donbass] are people with a minimum level of human development, people raised by their TVs. Okay, so we live together, then what? We're
trying to build a completely new society.' ..."
"... And there once again you have it – one of the primary causes of the war in Ukraine: the contempt with which the post-Maidan
government and its activist supporters regard a significant portion of their fellow citizens, the 'sick trash' of Donbass with their
'minimum level of human development'. ..."
I'd never heard of the Euro-Atlantic Security Leadership Group (EASLG) until today, even though it turns out that one of its members
has the office next door to mine. Its
website says that
it seeks to respond to the challenge of East-West tensions by convening 'former and current officials and experts from a group of
Euro-Atlantic states and the European union to test ideas and develop proposals for improving security in areas of existential common
interest'. It hopes thereby to 'generate trust through dialogue.'
It's hard to object to any of this, but its latest
statement , entitled 'Twelve Steps Toward Greater Security in Ukraine and the Euro-Atlantic Region', doesn't inspire a lot of
confidence. The 'twelve steps' the EASLG proposes to improve security in Eastern Ukraine are generally pretty uninspiring, being
largely of the 'set up a working group to explore' variety, or of such a vaguely aspirational nature as to be almost worthless (e.g.
'Advance reconstruction of Donbas An essential first step is to conduct a credible needs assessment for the Donbas region to inform
a strategy for its social-economic recovery.' Sounds nice, but in reality doesn't amount to a hill of beans).
For the most part, these proposals attempt to treat the symptoms of the war in Ukraine without addressing the root causes. In
a sense, that's fine, as symptoms need treating, but it's sticking plaster when the patient needs some invasive surgery. At the end
of its statement, though, the EASLG does go one step further with 'Step 12: Launch a new national dialogue about identity', saying:
A new, inclusive national dialogue across Ukraine is desirable and could be launched as soon as possible. Efforts should be
made to engage with perspectives from Ukraine's neighbors, especially Poland, Hungary, and Russia. This dialogue should address
themes of history and national memory, language, identity, and minority experience. It should include tolerance and respect for
ethnic and religious minorities in order to increase engagement, inclusiveness, and social cohesion.
This is admirably trendy and woke, but in the Ukrainian context somewhat explosive, as it implicitly challenges the identity politics
of the post-Maidan regime. Unsurprisingly, it's gone down like a lead balloon in Kiev. The notorious website Mirotvorets even
went so far as to add former
German ambassador Wolfgang Ischinger to its blacklist of enemies of Ukraine for having had the temerity to sign the EASLG statement
and thus 'taking part in Russia's propaganda events aimed against Ukraine.' Katherine Quinn-Judge of the International Crisis Group
commented on Twitter, 'As the idea of dialogue
becomes more mainstream, backlash to the concept grows fiercer.' 'In Ukraine, prominent pro-Western politicians, civic activists,
and media, have called Step 12 "a provocation" and "dangerous",' she added
Quinn-Judge comes across as generally sympathetic to the Ukrainian narrative about the war in Donbass, endorsing the idea that
it's largely a product of 'Russian aggression'. But she also recognizes that the war has an internal, social dimension which the
Ukrainian government and its elite-level supporters refuse to acknowledge. Consequently, they also reject any sort of dialogue, either
with Russia or with the rebels in Donbass. As Quinn-Judge notes in another Tweet:
An advisor to one of Ukraine's most powerful pol[itician]s told us recently of his concern about talk of dialogue in international
and domestic circles. 'We have all long ago agreed among ourselves. We need to return our territory, and then work with that sick
– sick – population.'
This isn't an isolated example. Quinn-Judge follows up with a couple more similar statements:
Social resentments underpin some opposition to disengagement, for example. An activist in [government-controlled] Shchastye
told me recently that she feared disengagement and the reopening of the bridge linking the isolated town to [rebel-held] Luhansk:
'I don't want all that trash coming over here.'
In 2017, a woman working with frontline families told me why she didn't want reintegration. 'These [the population of rebel-held
Donbass] are people with a minimum level of human development, people raised by their TVs. Okay, so we live together, then what?
We're trying to build a completely new society.'
And there once again you have it – one of the primary causes of the war in Ukraine: the contempt with which the post-Maidan
government and its activist supporters regard a significant portion of their fellow citizens, the 'sick trash' of Donbass with their
'minimum level of human development'. You can fiddle with treating Donbass' symptoms as much as you like, ŕ la EASLG,
but unless you tackle this fundamental problem, the disease will keep on ravaging the subject for a long time to come. In due course,
I suggest, the only realistic cure will be to remove the patient entirely from the cause of infection.
All that you have described above is very sad, but not very surprising – which is itself very sad. I think Patrick Armstrong is
right that a lot of the reason Ukraine is not and has never been a functional polity is because much if not most of the population
cannot accept that the right side won WWII.
Contempt and loathing towards the Donbass is a pretty popular feeling amongst Ukrainian svidomy. E.g., one of the two regular
pro-Ukrainian commenters on my blog.
To his credit, he supports severing the Donbass from Ukraine (as one would a gangrenous limb – his metaphor) as opposed to
trying to claw it back. Which is an internally consistent position.
Same guy who doesn't consider Yanukovych as having been overthrown under coup like circumstances, while downplaying Poland's
past subjugation of Rus territory.
In Part I and II we saw how much truth is there in Herr Karlin's claim of being a model of the rrrracially purrrre Rrrrrrrussian
plus some personal views.
Part III (this one) gives a peek into his cultural and upbringing limits, which "qualify" him as an expert of all things Russian,
who speaks on behalf of the People and the Country.
" I left when I was six, in 1994 , so I'm not really the best person to ask this question of – it should probably be directed
to my parents, or even better, the Russian government at the time which had for all intents and purposes ceased paying academics
their salaries.
I went to California for higher education and because its beaches and mountains made for a nice change from the bleakness of
Lancashire.
I returned to Russia because if I like Putler so much, why don't I go back there? Okay, less flippancy. I am Russian, I
do not feel like a foreigner here, I like living in Moscow, added bonus is that I get much higher quality of life for the buck
than in California ."
"I never went to school, don't have any experience with writing in Russian, and have been overexposed to Anglo culture ,
so yes, it's no surprise that my texts will sound strange."
The Russian branch of Carnegie Endowment did a piece on this issue. It mostly fits your ideas, but the author suggests it was
a compromise, short-term solution – what steps can be taken right now, without crossing red lines of either side – but compromise
is unwelcome among both parties. The official Russian reaction was quite cold too.
Upon a quick perusal of the website of the org at issue, Alexey Arbatov and Susan Eisenhower have some kind of affiliation
with it, thus maybe explaining the compromise approach you mention.
This matter brings to mind Trump saying one thing during his presidential bid – only to then bring in people in key positions
who don't agree with what he campaigned on.
In terms of credentials and name status, the likes of Rand Paul, Tulsi Gabbard, Stephen Cohen and Jim Jatras, are needed in
Trump's admin for the purpose of having a more balanced foreign policy approach that conforms with US interests (not to be necessarily
confused with what neocons and neolibs favor).
Instead, Trump has been top heavy with geopolitical thinking opposites. He possibly thought that having them in would take
some of the criticism away from him.
The arguably ideal admin has both sides of an issue well represented, with the president intelligently deciding what's best.
On the BBC and on other media there are films of Ukrainians attacking a bus with people evacuated from China. These people
even wanted to burn down the hospital where the peoplew were taken (along with other unrelated patients)
This is a sign of a degraded society – attacking people who may or may not be ill!!!
Ukraine will eventually break up
The nationalist agenda is just degrading the society.
-The economy is failing
-People who can, are leaving
-The elected government has no control over the violent people who take to the streets
It's clear Zelensky is a puppet no different to Poroshenko – this destroys the idea that democracy is a good thing.
It's very sad that the EU and the Americans under Obama – empowered these decisive elements and then blame Russia.
Crimea did the right thing leaving Ukraine – Donbass hopefully will follow.
"And there once again you have it – one of the primary causes of the war in Ukraine: the contempt with which the post-Maidan
government and its activist supporters regard a significant portion of their fellow citizens, the 'sick trash' of Donbass"
[ ]
Only them?
[ ]
Yesterday marks yet another milestone on the Ukrainian glorious шлях перемог and long and arduous return to the Family
of the European Nations. The Civil Society ™ of the Ukraine rose as one in the mighty CoronavirusMaidan, against the jackbooted
goons of the crypto-Napoleon (and agent of Putin) Zelensky. Best people from Poltava oblast' (whose ancestors without doubt, welcomed
Swedish Euro-integrators in 1709) and, most important of all, from the Best (Western) Ukrajina, who 6 years ago made the Revolution
of Dignity in Kiev the reality and whom pan Poroshenko called the best part of the Nation, said their firm "Геть вiд Москви!"
to their fellow Ukrainian citizens, evacuated from Wuhan province in China
The Net is choke full of vivid, memorable videos, showing that 6 years after Maidan, the Ukraine now constitute a unified,
эдiна та соборна country. You all, no doubt, already watched these clips, where a brave middle-aged gentleman from the
Western Ukraine, racially pure Ukr, proves his mental acuity by deducing, that crypto-tyrant (and "не лох") Zelensky wants to
settle evacuees in his pristine oblast out of vengeance, because the Best Ukrajina didn't vote for him during the election. Or
a clip about a brave woman from Poltava oblast, suggesting to relocate the Trojan-horse "fellow countrymen" to Chernobol's Zone.
Or even the witty comments and suggestions by the paragons of the Ukrainian Civil Society, " волонтэры ":
Shy and conscientious members of the Ukrainian (national!) intelligentsia had their instincts aligned rrrrrright. When they
learned about that their hospital will be the one receiving the evacuees from Wuhan, the entire medical personell of that Poltava
oblast medical facility rose to their feet and sang "Shenya vmerla". Democracy and localism proved once again the strongest suit
of the pro-European Ukraine, with Ternopol's oblast regional council voting to accept the official statement to the crypto-tyrant
Zelensky, which calls attempts to place evacuees on their Holy land "an act of Genocide of the Ukrainian People" (c)
That's absolutely "normal", predictable reaction of the "racially pure Ukrainians" to their own fellow citizens. Now, Professor,
are you insisting on seeking or even expecting "compromise" with them ? What to do, if after all these years, there is
no such thing as the united Ukrainian political nation?
"Ukraine's democracy is flourishing like never before due to the tireless efforts of grassroots, pro-democracy, civil-society
groups. Many Ukrainians say their country is now firmly set on an irreversible, pro-Western trajectory. Moreover, the country
has also undertaken a top-to-bottom cultural, economic, and political divorce from its former Soviet overlord.
Today, Ukraine is a democratic success story in the making, despite Russia's best efforts to the contrary."
– Nolan Peterson, a former special operations pilot and a combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, is The Daily Signal's foreign
correspondent based in Ukraine
Search
Feb 15, 2020
3
Fascism in Ukraine: the conspiracy of silence
Kit Knightly
Joseph Altham
The rise of the far right in Ukraine is one of the most disturbing trends in 21st century Europe. But it's a
story you rarely get to read about in the British press.
These days, the mainstream media does not have much to say about Ukraine. And when Ukraine is
mentioned, the main focus tends to be on Ukraine as it relates to the latest American political scandal, rather than
on Ukraine itself. Six years ago, the revolt in Kyiv put Ukraine at the top of the news agenda, but now the papers
have gone quiet.
This lack of interest in Ukraine is surprising, because Ukraine has some big stories that you would expert
journalists to be reporting. The country has been going through a violent upheaval, and the fighting in Ukraine's
eastern region still continues.
Supposedly, the reason for all the bloodshed was to secure Ukraine's European future? So how's that project going
today? Not well. Ukraine is still a long way from full membership of the European Union, and remains one of Europe's
poorest countries.
The ruins of Donetsk airport, December 2014 (Photo: Wikipedia)
Clearly, Ukraine is not working out. Of course, the nationalist uprising in Kyiv did achieve one of its core
objectives: the termination of the old partnership with Moscow. But the uprising also aimed to end corruption in
Ukraine and curb the power of the oligarchs. On both counts, Ukraine's political elite has performed badly. Ukraine's
corruption rating is still poor, while Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine's current president, was helped into power by the
influential billionaire, Ihor Kolomoisky.
All in all, Ukraine's "bright future" seems further away than ever, and the biggest losers from Ukraine's
pro-Western course have been the Ukrainian people. But the Western press long ago settled on the story that Vladimir
Putin is the big bully, and Ukraine has been cast in the role of his victim.
Because Vladimir Putin is labelled as the bad guy, and criticism of the Ukrainian government is thought to serve
his agenda, Ukraine has become a no-go area. The powers that be don't want to admit how bad things are inside
Ukraine, so The Guardian's "fearless investigative journalists" don't get to write about it.
Mikhail Bulgakov. During his lifetime, his work was censored by the Soviets. In 2014, the new Ukrainian government
banned a TV dramatization of his novel, The White Guard. (Photo: Wikipedia)
Instead, the truth is being swept under the carpet. And the truth is that the nationalist forces that took control
of Ukraine are bringing shame on their country. Ukraine has given way to crude nationalistic resentment, to the
extent of vandalizing Soviet war memorials and banning books, TV dramas and films. And in its search for new national
heroes to replace the Soviet heroes it is rejecting, Ukraine is glorifying the most despicable characters from its
fascist past.
The Lviv pogrom, 1941 (Photo: Wikipedia)
The historical background is complicated. In the 1930s, Ukraine was oppressed by the Bolsheviks and millions died
of famine. Then, during World War II, the German invasion of the USSR gave Ukrainian nationalists the opportunity to
push for independence, in an uneasy alliance with Nazi Germany. By collaborating with Nazi Germany, the Ukrainian
nationalists hoped that they would be rewarded with their own Ukrainian state.
As Ukraine fashions a new identity for itself, Ukrainians have been seeking inspiration from Stepan Bandera, Roman
Shukhevych and the other Nazi collaborators who piggy-backed on German military victories to advance the Ukrainian
nationalist cause.
Torchlit procession of Ukrainian nationalists (Photo: Wikipedia)
The trouble is that these Ukrainian nationalists, who proclaimed statehood in Lviv in 1941, were committed to more
than just a tactical alliance with Nazi Germany. Their organization sympathized with Nazi ideas, too.
The Nazis regarded Jews, Poles and Russians as subhuman, and so did Stepan Bandera. The Ukrainian nationalists
massacred Poles, perpetrated pogroms and were willing participants in the Holocaust. They even had their own division
in the SS, the SS Galicia.
A photo of Stepan Bandera displayed during the Maidan uprising, January 2014 (Photo: Wikipedia)
The dark side of Ukraine's wartime history has become a point of reference for the new, post-Maidan regime. As
monuments to Soviet commanders are demolished, new monuments to Ukrainian fascists are going up.
The Ukrainian government has designated 1st January, Stepan Bandera's birthday, as a national holiday. Statues of
Bandera and Shukhevych have appeared in many cities, and streets are being named after war criminals.
Ultranationalist organizations are invited to schools to give children a "patriotic" education. Nazi symbols are
openly displayed at concerts and football matches, and antisemitic literature is sold on market stalls.
Meanwhile, monuments commemorating the Holocaust have been desecrated, and synagogues have been attacked.
"Death to the Yids": graffiti beside a synagogue in Odessa. The sign is a Wolfsangel, a common Nazi symbol.
(Photo: Wikipedia)
Old poisons are rising to the surface. The figures openly praised by Ukrainian leaders are the scoundrels and
fanatics who threw in their lot with Hitler. The new Ukraine is obsessed with its own national grievances, but it
shows little respect for any of the non-Ukrainian victims of history. With its sickly blend of romanticism and
self-pity, Ukraine is now a breeding ground for racism and extremism. But this is something the Western press is not
yet ready to admit.
Instead, the press has been colluding in a conspiracy of silence and shutting its eyes to the danger. By putting
up statues of fascists from the past, Ukraine is giving a green light to fascism today.
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Hey according to two faced Shifty Schiff Ukraine is "fighting the Russians so we don't have to". I mean
another "great ally" like Israel who has been selling them arms hand over first despite the fact that the
Ukrainians are truly "antisemitic" who unlike American "antisemites" that are always bellyaching about
Israel's genocidal policies Ukrainians excel in their antisemitism by burning down synagogs and
threatening the Jewish population er I mean offer them a one way train excursion all expenses paid.
I
mean what greater "ally" does Israel need to convince more Jews to come the "promised land"and kill a few
Palestinians and steal their land. I mean things haven't been as good since ol' Uncle 'Dolph signed the
Transfer Agreement.
Aside from a some occasional burbling about antisemitism by NuttenYahoo like the Americans they
continue to sell them arms so they can launch genocidal campaigns against Dombass and other ethnic
Russian areas that aren't as Ukofriendly as Washington and Tel Aviv using their reconstituted Bandera
Brigade AKA SS Galicia of inveterate Iron Guard. I mean these guys aren't just a bunch Neo-nazis skin
heads but qualify as the real animal.
Thanks to Obama, Nuland and Clinton with the help of Soros deep pockets to fund color revolutions whom
if you remember according to 60 Minute interview a ways back reveled in turning over Jewish property and
Jews to the tender mercies of the 3rd Reich. I mean what a guy.
Well the reason you probably haven't heard anything is because the American government is just too
modest about show casing yet another example of bringing "freedom and democracy" to the benighted who
haven't experienced the joys of austerity, privatization and giving all their money to help those poor
needy kleptocrats who are just millionaires and are striving to be another Jeff Bezos.
Loverat
,
Ukraine is almost identical to the rise of fascism in 1990s Croatia. I wonder when the Pope will visit
and grant saint hood to these appalling monsters.
Jen
,
It must be said that the western parts of Ukraine, where the Ukrainian ultranationalist movement arose
under people like Stepan Bandera, Roman Shukhevych and Yuri Stetsko, were actually under Polish rule and
were subjected to forced Polonisation under an increasingly nationalist and fascist Polish government
during the 1920s and 1930s. This explains why ethnic Polish people were fair game for torture and
lynching by Ukrainian followers of Bandera & Co during Nazi rule in the 1940s. Western Ukraine mostly
escaped the famines that affected Soviet Ukraine and other parts of the USSR in the 1930s.
...In point of fact, of course, the zionist program to get lebensraum by liquidation or
enslaving the Semitic native populations is telling, definitive.
... ... ...
(The Quakers say "tell the truth and shame the devil"... With the idea implied that truth
saying is a duty under god, whatever it costs. The Quakers used to be significant in US
history, but like CPUSA, are under reliable and useful control as agents of X. (ask Ruth
Paine, of the curator group for Oswald operation))
Where Judis is on more solid ground, it seems to me, is in his reminder that liberals should
not be too dismissive of nationalism, since nationalism, "by itself, is neither good nor evil,
liberal nor conservative."
You wouldn't know it from the way the term is tossed about in
popular discourse, but as a historical matter this is more or less incontestable: The
nationalism of Donald Trump is only one of many varieties.
It's not the nationalism that
emerged amidst the French Revolution, as part of an attempt to make sense of the revolutionary
doctrine of popular sovereignty. Neither is it the anti-colonial nationalism marshaled to
support a range of twentieth-century independence movements. Nor is it rooted in philosophical
ruminations on the identity-shaping role played by language, or culture, or history -- any one
of which could be associated with a range of thinkers who would be appalled by the MAGA-hat
crowd.
Recognizing nationalism's protean nature is, in fact, a first step toward what might be a
productive exercise for anybody hoping to revitalize the left at this moment in history. Assume
that, at least over the short and medium term, the current global system of bordered
nation-states is not going to disappear (even if it is undergoing transformation). And assume
that, for many people, everyday thought and behavior will adhere to (largely unconscious)
scripts that serve to locate them in particular settings, communities, associations, and so
on.
Given these realities, what kind of collective self-understandings would it be useful
to promote? American history doesn't lack for precedents; there are left-nationalist themes in
texts like the Gettysburg Address, in FDR's 1936 nomination speech (the one featuring his
denunciation of "economic royalists"), and in Martin Luther King Jr.'s metaphor of a
promissory note .
Samuel H. Beer, one of the twentieth century's leading scholars of
American politics, once described the great moments of American reform as responses to
crises of
nationhood : "[T]he crisis of sectionalism, culminating in the Civil War; the crisis of
industrialism, culminating in the Great Depression and the New Deal; and the crisis of racism,
which continues to rack our country."
In Beer's view, these moments of active reform
counteracted destructive centrifugal forces; they made the nation "
more of a nation ." This emphasis on "making" a nation through
politics is a good reminder that nations were not found, but invented; they are not immune to
political refashioning. And if they're unlikely to disappear anytime soon, it might be a good
idea to start thinking about which kinds we can live with.
The US depends upon continuation of the dollar as the world's reserve currency. Were
that to be lost the US likely would descend into chaos without end. When the USSR came
apart it was eventually able to downsize into the Russian state. We don't have that here;
there is no core ethnicity with it's own territory left anymore, it's just a jumble. For
the US it's a matter of survival.
Possession of a core ethnicity doesn't invariably guarantee stability or even constitute a
nation and I don't believe this is why Russia survives as a nation today. Russia itself is a
country with a great many nationalities, and there are almost as many Asian as European faces
in the country. Furthermore, the Ukraine was part of the USSR, has what you term a core
ethnicity, and yet has descended into chaos without end since the collapse of the USSR.
Clearly, a nation consists of something other than ethnic identity, language or even
religion.
The 19th century French historian Ernest Renan in a famous lecture at the time "What is a
Nation" stated: "A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle A nation is therefore a
large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has made in the
past and of those that one is prepared to make in the future. It presupposes a past; it is
summarized, however, in the present by a tangible fact, namely, consent, the clearly
expressed desire to continue a common life .
"Man is a slave neither of his race nor his language, nor of his religion, nor of the
course of rivers nor of the direction taken by mountain chains. A large aggregate of men,
healthy in mind and warm of heart, creates the kind of moral conscience which we call a
nation."
A nation is an organic entity not dependent on a common language, religion or bounded by
geography. Whether or not a nation or nations survive the collapse of the American Empire
will depend on the willingness of the people to live together with a shared collective memory
of the past. Renan makes the point that national traumas are more unifying than national
triumphs. The chaos that will surely follow the Empire's collapse will become part of the
shared trauma, out of which a new nation or nations will arise, if the people so will.
"I see you have successfully internalized The Cuck's Credo."
I won;t speak to the explication of what nationhood is as described. But clearly skin
color is not a cohesive enough glue. The white colonists comprised of varying ethnic cultures
went to war against whites in great britain. And by all indications of history the whites in
Europe spent more than 1800 years killing each other in country and out --
So any claim that whiteness is a cohesive glue or embodies a cohesive glue cementing
nationality is thoroughly rejected by history. That anyone contends it against the evidence
is peculiar.
@Daniel.I Oh, are you ever missing the point. What Renan wrote elsewhere, "that which
makes a nation is the willingness of its members to live together," (ce qui fait une nation
c'est la volunté de ses membres de vivre ensemble) cuts both ways. It not only expains
why Russia successfully transitioned the fall of the USSR, while the Ukraine has not yet: the
Russians chose to live together. It also explains why nationalists like you continue to
choose by your own volition to identify as American despite your pissing and moaning. You and
the Russians and the Ukrainians are making your own volitional choices about the nation you
choose to be a member of. Those choices multiplied by the millions of inhabitants demonstrate
how this is an organic process. Furthermore, Renan wrote well before the current idea of
globalism had developed any traction, and he is writing from observation of history as a
historian. He had no globalist agenda to promote. I have read quite a lot of what the hard
right nationalists have had to say in their comments on the Unz Review, and frankly, the
arguments are unconvincing. I would suggest reading the Renan lecture I posted the link to,
it clears up the mess and shows a third way between you and the globalists, the way of how
things really come down. It shows reality.
So any claim that whiteness is a cohesive glue or embodies a cohesive glue cementing
nationality is thoroughly rejected by history. That anyone contends it against the evidence
is peculiar.
No matter what the core identity of a society, there will be at least episodic internal
violence. But that doesn't mean that people don't need identity.
What identity, in your view, should the people focusing on whiteness as symbolic of their
sense of belonging, be adopting?
It's obvious that being "an American" is becoming less and less psychologically
satisfying. So what is the answer?
@EliteCommInc. You have no idea how satisfying it is to watch the Anglo – after
having forced liberalism down the throat of everyone else – finding himself on the
receiving end of it.
@Polemos The nation in Renan's thinking transcends consideration of the one and the many
through a kind of political metaphysic: the nation is spiritual, the nation is a
mystery. The national myth of shared trauma creates a past while organic human volition
results in a spiritual recognition of both the individual and others as participants in this
mystery, this nation, this Gestalt . Charles de Gaulle touched this in his benediction
"vive la France eternelle," as did Ronald Reagan with the metaphor from the Gospels, "a city
on a hill."
@Daniel.I I get the general use by Americans to use "liberal" for what the rest of the
Anglophone countries would probably call "left wing" (although I think Americans also say
"neo liberalism" mraning something quite different). But I struggle to understand what you
mean by "liberalism". Derived from which lot of Anglos? Thrust down throats by which lot of
Anglos? I would like to learn more from you about the ideology or philosophy or political
movement you are referring to.
As a prompt to leap out of a narrowly based view I note that the main conservative right
of centre party which often forms Australian governments is the Liberal Party.
@Weston Waroda "A nation is an organic entity not dependent on a common language,
religion or bounded by geography."
Is it to say that the German, the English, the Swede, the Polish, the Norwegians, the
Danes, the Czech, the Slovak, the Italian, the Greek, the Hungarian, the Romanian, the
Bulgarian, the Portuguese, the Irish, the various nations that emerged from the former
Yugoslavia or the USSR are not organic entities but only the Belgian are? Is it to say that
African states with borders drawn across ethnicities by colonial powers are nations? Today's
France is proof of the contrary to your statement and Renan's theory. You are the one
disconnected from reality as your idea of what constitutes a nation is a pure abstract
disproven by empirical evidence.
Renan makes the point that national traumas are more unifying than national
triumphs.
It's interesting that the places that the Empire has been unable to control are often
ex-Communist (Russia, China, Eastern Europe) which experienced national trauma, but were also
outside of the Zio-Glob Empire in its critical post 1945 growth period (the map of US
overseas bases).
Also, Imperial institutions like NATO are looking irrelevant. European leaders may well
wonder why they're necessary. In 1945, the US was the world's leading industrial economy/
international creditor with a legitimate reserve currency – now not so much –
with the US clinging onto power using violence, threats and sanctions and generally
alienating everyone.
Israel is a very successful example of a strongly ethnocentric state that has its endless
internal squabbles between the various groups within that identity, but yet remain fairly
united against potential threats from outsiders (i.e., the"others"). This most definitely
applies to the critical matter of immigration.
Wisely, they do not easily accept immigrants, except those who are proven to be of their
own ilk, and they are currently exploring, via internal public dialog, whether their already
relatively stringent standards are not restrictive enough. (See here: https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/6-out-of-7-immigrants-to-Israel-not-Jewish-611842
)
They know they will be internally weakened, displaced, and ultimately, replaced if they do
otherwise. They 'see the writing on the wall'.
Jews are not stupid people. It would seem equally wise for the US, Canada, and the
European states to emulate their example, preserving their shared heritages and
commonalities, which provide strength and unity in the face of adversities and against
foreign enemies, both abroad and domestically.
What is sauce for the (jewish) goose is sauce for the (goyim) ganders .
Canada has a reputation for
being a relatively progressive state with universal, single-payer health care, various other social
benefits, and strict gun laws, similar to many European countries but quite unlike the United States.
It has managed to stay out of some American wars, for example, Vietnam and Iraq, portrayed itself as a
neutral "peace keeper", pursuing a so-called policy of "multilateralism" and attempting from time to
time to keep a little independent distance from the United States.
Behind this veneer of
respectability lies a not so attractive reality of elite inattention to the defence of Canadian
independence from the United States and intolerance toward the political and syndicalist left. Police
repression against communist and left-wing unionists and other dissidents after World War I was
widespread. Strong support for appeasement of Nazi Germany, overt or covert sympathy for fascism,
especially in Québec, and hatred of the Soviet Union were widespread in Canada during the 1930s. The
Liberal prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, hobnobbed with Nazi notables including Adolf
Hitler, and thought that his British counterpart Neville Chamberlain had not gone far enough in
appeasing Hitlerite Germany. Mackenzie King and many others of the Canadian elite saw communism as a
greater threat to Canada than fascism. As in Europe, the Canadian elite -- Liberal or Conservative did
not matter -- was worried by the Spanish civil war (1936-1939). In Québec French public opinion under the
influence of the Catholic Church hoped for fascist victory and the eradication of communism. In 1937 a
Papal encyclical whipped up the Red Scare amongst French Canadian Catholics. Rejection of Soviet
offers of collective security against Hitler was the obverse side of appeasement. The fear of victory
over Nazi Germany in alliance with the USSR was greater than the fear of defeat against fascism. Such
thoughts were either openly expressed over dinner at the local gentleman's club or kept more discrete
by people who did not want to reveal the extent of their sympathy for fascism.
The Liberal prime minister,
William Lyon Mackenzie King, hobnobbed with Nazi notables including Adolf Hitler, and thought that his
British counterpart Neville Chamberlain had not gone far enough in appeasing Hitlerite Germany
Even after the Nazi invasion of
the USSR in June 1941, and the formation of the Grand Alliance against the Axis, there was strong
reticence amongst the governing elite in Canada toward the Soviet Union. It was a shotgun marriage, a
momentary arrangement with an undesirable partner, necessitated by the over-riding threat of the Nazi
Wehrmacht. "If Hitler invaded Hell," Winston Churchill famously remarked, "I would make at least a
favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons." Once Hitler was beaten, however, it would
be back to business as usual. The Grand Alliance was a "truce", as some of my students have proposed
to me, in a longer cold war between the west and the USSR. This struggle began in November 1917 when
the
Bolsheviks
seized power
in Petrograd; it resumed after 1945 when the "truce", or if you like, the Grand
Alliance, came to a sudden end.
This was no more evident than
in Canada where elite hatred of communism was a homegrown commodity and not simply an American
imitation. So it should hardly be a surprise that after 1945 the Canadian government -- Mackenzie King
was still prime minister -- should open its doors to the immigration of approximately 34,000 "displaced
persons", including thousands of
Ukrainian
fascists and Nazi collaborators
, responsible for heinous war crimes in the Ukraine and Poland.
These were
veterans
of
the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the Waffen SS Galicia and the Organisation of Ukrainian
Nationalists (OUN), all collaborators of Nazi Germany during World War II.
Chrystia Freeland,
the current Canadian minister for external affairs
The most notorious of the Nazi
collaborators who immigrated to Canada was
Mykhailo
Chomiak
, a mid-level Nazi operative in Poland, who came under US protection at the end of the war
and eventually made his way to Canada where he settled in Alberta. Had he been captured by the Red
Army, he would quite likely have been hanged for collaboration with the enemy. In Canada however he
prospered as a farmer. His grand-daughter is the "Ukrainian-Canadian" Chrystia Freeland, the present
minister for external affairs. She is a well-known Russophobe,
persona non grata
in the
Russian Federation, who long claimed her grandfather was a "victim" of World War II. Her claims to
this effect have been demonstrated to be
untrue
by
the Australian born journalist
John
Helmer
, amongst many others.
In 1940 the Liberal government
facilitated the creation of the
Canadian
Ukrainian Congress (UCC)
, one of many organisations used to fight or marginalise the left in
Canada, in this case amongst Canadian Ukrainians. The UCC is still around and appears to dominate the
Ukrainian-Canadian
community
. Approximately 1.4 million people living in Canada claim full or partial Ukrainian
descent though generally the latter. Most "Ukrainian-Canadians" were born in Canada; well more than
half live in the western provinces. The vast majority has certainly never set foot in the Ukraine. It
is this constituency on which the UCC depends to pursue its political agenda in Ottawa.
The Canadian Ukrainian
Congress (UCC) president Paul Grod
After the coup d'état in Kiev
in February 2014 the UCC lobbied the then Conservative government under Stephen Harper to support the
Ukrainian "regime change" operation which had been conducted by the United States and European Union.
The UCC president, Paul Grod, took the lead in obtaining various advantages from the Harper
government, including arms for the putschist regime in Kiev. It survives only through massive EU and
US direct or indirect financial/political support and through armed backing from fascist militias who
repress dissent by force and intimidation. Mr. Grod claims that Russia is pursuing a policy of
"aggression" against the Ukraine. If that were true, the putschists in Kiev would have long ago
disappeared. The
Harper
government
allowed fund raising for
Pravyi Sektor
, a Ukrainian fascist paramilitary
group, through two organisations in Canada including the UCC, and even accorded "charitable status" to
one of them to facilitate their fund raising and arms buying. Harper also sent military "advisors" to
train Ukrainian forces, the backbone of which are fascist militias. The Trudeau government has
continued that policy. "Canada should prepare for Russian attempts to destabilize its democracy,"
according
to Minister Freeland
: "Ukraine is a very important partner to Canada and we will continue to
support its efforts for democracy and economic growth." For a regime that celebrates violence and
anti-Russian racism, represses political opposition, burns books, and outlaws the Russian language,
"democracy" is an Orwellian portrayal of actual realities in the Ukraine. Nevertheless, late last year
the Canadian government approved the sale of arms to Kiev and a so-called
Magnitsky
law
imposing sanctions on Russian nationals.
The
Harper
government
allowed fund raising for
Pravyi Sektor
, a Ukrainian fascist paramilitary group
There is no political
opposition in the House of Commons to these policies. Even the New Democratic Party (NDP), that burnt
out shell of Canadian social democracy, supported the Harper government, at the behest of Mr. Grod, a
Ukrainian lobbyist who knows his way around Ottawa. In 2015 the UCC put a list of questions to party
leaders, one of which was the following: "Does your party support listing the Luhansk People's
Republic and the Donetsk People's Republic as terrorist organizations?" The Lugansk and Donetsk
republics are of course anti-fascist resistance movements that emerged in reaction to the violent coup
d'état in Kiev. They are most certainly
not
"terrorist" organisations, although they are
subjected to daily bombardments against civilian areas by Kiev putschist forces. Nevertheless, the
then NDP leader, Thomas Mulcair, who would have agreed to almost anything to win power, answered in
the affirmative. This must have been a moment of dismay for Canadians who still harboured illusions
about the NDP as a progressive alternative to the Liberal and Conservative parties. How could it
support a US/EU installed putschist regime which governs by intimidation and violence? In fact, it was
a Conservative electoral strategy to obtain the votes of people of Ukrainian and East European descent
by backing putschist Kiev and denouncing Russia. Mulcair was trying to outflank Harper on his right,
but that did not work for he himself was outflanked on his left.
Some Canadians harboured
illusions about the NDP as a progressive alternative to the Liberal and Conservative parties
In the 2015 federal elections
the Liberals under Justin Trudeau, outwitted poor Mr. Mulcair and won the elections. The NDP suffered
heavy electoral losses. Mulcair looked like someone who had made a Faustian bargain for nothing in
return, and he lost a bid to remain as party leader. The Liberals campaigned on re-establishing better
relations with the Russian Federation, but that promise did not hold up. The minister for external
affairs, Stéphane Dion, tried to move forward on that line, but appears to have been stabbed in the
back by Mr. Trudeau, with Ms. Freeland guiding his hand in the fatal blow. In early 2017
Dion
was sacked
and Freeland replaced him. That was the end of the Liberal promise to improve relations
with the Russian government. Since then, under Freeland, Russian-Canadian relations have worsened.
The influential Mr. Grod
appears to keep the Canadian government in his hip pocket. There are photographs of him side by side
with Mr. Harper and then with Mr. Trudeau, with Ms. Freeland on his left. Mr. Grod has been a great
success in backing putschist Kiev. Last summer Mr. Trudeau even issued a traditional Ukrainian fascist
salute,
"SlavaUkraini!"
,
to celebrate the anniversary of Ukrainian independence. The prime minister is a great believer in
identity politics.
The influential Mr. Grod
appears to keep the Canadian government in his hip pocket
The latest gesture of the
Canadian government is to approve $1.4 million as a three year grant to promote a "Holodomor National
Awareness Tour". Ukrainian "nationalists" summon up the memory of the "Holodomor", a famine in the
Ukraine in 1932-1933, deliberately launched by Stalin, they say, in order to emphasise their
victimisation by Russia. According to the latest Stalin biographer, Steven Kotkin, there was indeed a
famine in the USSR that affected various parts of the country, the Ukraine amongst other regions.
Kazakhstan, not the Ukraine suffered most. Between five and seven million people died. Ten millions
starved. "Nonetheless, the famine was not intentional. It resulted from Stalin's policies of forced
collectivization ,"Kotkin writes, himself no advocate of the Soviet Union. Compulsion, peasant
rebellion, bungling, mismanagement, drought, locust infestations, not targeting ethnicities, led to
the catastrophe. "Similarly, there was no 'Ukrainian' famine," according to Kotkin, "the famine was
[a] Soviet[-wide disaster]" (
Stalin
,
2017, vol. 2, pp. 127-29). So the Liberal government is spending public funds to perpetuate a
politically motivated myth to drum up hatred of Russia and to support putschist Kiev.
Identity politics and
Canadian multiculturalism are now invoked to defend Ukrainian fascism celebrated in the streets of
Kiev with torchlight parades and fascist symbols, remembering and celebrating Nazi collaborators and
collaboration during World War II
The Canadian government also
recently renewed funding for a detachment of 200 "advisors" to train Ukrainian militias, along with
twenty-three
million dollars
-- it is true a pittance by
American
standards
-- for "non-lethal" military aid, justified by Ms. Freeland to defend Ukrainian
"democracy". Truly, we live in a dystopian world where reality is turned on its head. Fascism is
democracy; resistance to fascism is terrorism. Identity politics and Canadian multiculturalism are now
invoked to defend Ukrainian fascism celebrated in the streets of Kiev with torchlight parades and
fascist symbols, remembering and celebrating Nazi collaborators and collaboration during World War II.
"
Any country sending representatives to Russia's celebration of the 70th anniversary of their
victory against Adolf Hitler,"
warned
putschist Kiev
in April 2015, "will be blacklisted by Ukraine."
"The further a society drifts
from the truth," George Orwell once said, "the more it will hate those that speak it." Well, here is
one truth that Mr. Trudeau and Ms. Freeland will not want to hear, hate it or not: 42,000 Canadian
soldiers, not to mention 27 million Soviet citizens, died during the war against the Axis. Memories
must be fading, for now we have come to this pass, where our government is supporting a violent,
racist regime in Kiev directly descended from that very enemy against which Canada and its allies
fought during World War II.
The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture
Foundation.
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Canada
Chrystia Freeland
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Michael Jabara Carley
March 9, 2018 |
History
Why Canada Defends Ukrainian Fascism
Canada has a reputation
for being a relatively progressive state with universal, single-payer health care, various other
social benefits, and strict gun laws, similar to many European countries but quite unlike the
United States. It has managed to stay out of some American wars, for example, Vietnam and Iraq,
portrayed itself as a neutral "peace keeper", pursuing a so-called policy of "multilateralism"
and attempting from time to time to keep a little independent distance from the United States.
Behind this veneer of
respectability lies a not so attractive reality of elite inattention to the defence of Canadian
independence from the United States and intolerance toward the political and syndicalist left.
Police repression against communist and left-wing unionists and other dissidents after World War
I was widespread. Strong support for appeasement of Nazi Germany, overt or covert sympathy for
fascism, especially in Québec, and hatred of the Soviet Union were widespread in Canada during
the 1930s. The Liberal prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, hobnobbed with Nazi notables
including Adolf Hitler, and thought that his British counterpart Neville Chamberlain had not
gone far enough in appeasing Hitlerite Germany. Mackenzie King and many others of the Canadian
elite saw communism as a greater threat to Canada than fascism. As in Europe, the Canadian
elite -- Liberal or Conservative did not matter -- was worried by the Spanish civil war (1936-1939).
In Québec French public opinion under the influence of the Catholic Church hoped for fascist
victory and the eradication of communism. In 1937 a Papal encyclical whipped up the Red Scare
amongst French Canadian Catholics. Rejection of Soviet offers of collective security against
Hitler was the obverse side of appeasement. The fear of victory over Nazi Germany in alliance
with the USSR was greater than the fear of defeat against fascism. Such thoughts were either
openly expressed over dinner at the local gentleman's club or kept more discrete by people who
did not want to reveal the extent of their sympathy for fascism.
The Liberal prime
minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, hobnobbed with Nazi notables including Adolf Hitler, and
thought that his British counterpart Neville Chamberlain had not gone far enough in appeasing
Hitlerite Germany
Even after the Nazi
invasion of the USSR in June 1941, and the formation of the Grand Alliance against the Axis,
there was strong reticence amongst the governing elite in Canada toward the Soviet Union. It was
a shotgun marriage, a momentary arrangement with an undesirable partner, necessitated by the
over-riding threat of the Nazi Wehrmacht. "If Hitler invaded Hell," Winston Churchill famously
remarked, "I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons."
Once Hitler was beaten, however, it would be back to business as usual. The Grand Alliance was a
"truce", as some of my students have proposed to me, in a longer cold war between the west and
the USSR. This struggle began in November 1917 when the
Bolsheviks
seized power
in Petrograd; it resumed after 1945 when the "truce", or if you like, the Grand
Alliance, came to a sudden end.
This was no more evident
than in Canada where elite hatred of communism was a homegrown commodity and not simply an
American imitation. So it should hardly be a surprise that after 1945 the Canadian
government -- Mackenzie King was still prime minister -- should open its doors to the immigration of
approximately 34,000 "displaced persons", including thousands of
Ukrainian
fascists and Nazi collaborators
, responsible for heinous war crimes in the Ukraine and
Poland. These were
veterans
of
the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the Waffen SS Galicia and the Organisation of Ukrainian
Nationalists (OUN), all collaborators of Nazi Germany during World War II.
Chrystia Freeland,
the current Canadian minister for external affairs
The most notorious of the
Nazi collaborators who immigrated to Canada was
Mykhailo
Chomiak
, a mid-level Nazi operative in Poland, who came under US protection at the end of
the war and eventually made his way to Canada where he settled in Alberta. Had he been captured
by the Red Army, he would quite likely have been hanged for collaboration with the enemy. In
Canada however he prospered as a farmer. His grand-daughter is the "Ukrainian-Canadian" Chrystia
Freeland, the present minister for external affairs. She is a well-known Russophobe,
persona
non grata
in the Russian Federation, who long claimed her grandfather was a "victim" of
World War II. Her claims to this effect have been demonstrated to be
untrue
by
the Australian born journalist
John
Helmer
, amongst many others.
In 1940 the Liberal
government facilitated the creation of the
Canadian
Ukrainian Congress (UCC)
, one of many organisations used to fight or marginalise the left in
Canada, in this case amongst Canadian Ukrainians. The UCC is still around and appears to
dominate the
Ukrainian-Canadian
community
. Approximately 1.4 million people living in Canada claim full or partial Ukrainian
descent though generally the latter. Most "Ukrainian-Canadians" were born in Canada; well more
than half live in the western provinces. The vast majority has certainly never set foot in the
Ukraine. It is this constituency on which the UCC depends to pursue its political agenda in
Ottawa.
The Canadian
Ukrainian Congress (UCC) president Paul Grod
After the coup d'état in
Kiev in February 2014 the UCC lobbied the then Conservative government under Stephen Harper to
support the Ukrainian "regime change" operation which had been conducted by the United States
and European Union. The UCC president, Paul Grod, took the lead in obtaining various advantages
from the Harper government, including arms for the putschist regime in Kiev. It survives only
through massive EU and US direct or indirect financial/political support and through armed
backing from fascist militias who repress dissent by force and intimidation. Mr. Grod claims
that Russia is pursuing a policy of "aggression" against the Ukraine. If that were true, the
putschists in Kiev would have long ago disappeared. The
Harper
government
allowed fund raising for
Pravyi Sektor
, a Ukrainian fascist paramilitary
group, through two organisations in Canada including the UCC, and even accorded "charitable
status" to one of them to facilitate their fund raising and arms buying. Harper also sent
military "advisors" to train Ukrainian forces, the backbone of which are fascist militias. The
Trudeau government has continued that policy. "Canada should prepare for Russian attempts to
destabilize its democracy,"
according
to Minister Freeland
: "Ukraine is a very important partner to Canada and we will continue to
support its efforts for democracy and economic growth." For a regime that celebrates violence
and anti-Russian racism, represses political opposition, burns books, and outlaws the Russian
language, "democracy" is an Orwellian portrayal of actual realities in the Ukraine.
Nevertheless, late last year the Canadian government approved the sale of arms to Kiev and a
so-called
Magnitsky
law
imposing sanctions on Russian nationals.
The
Harper
government
allowed fund raising for
Pravyi Sektor
, a Ukrainian fascist paramilitary
group
There is no political
opposition in the House of Commons to these policies. Even the New Democratic Party (NDP), that
burnt out shell of Canadian social democracy, supported the Harper government, at the behest of
Mr. Grod, a Ukrainian lobbyist who knows his way around Ottawa. In 2015 the UCC put a list of
questions to party leaders, one of which was the following: "Does your party support listing the
Luhansk People's Republic and the Donetsk People's Republic as terrorist organizations?" The
Lugansk and Donetsk republics are of course anti-fascist resistance movements that emerged in
reaction to the violent coup d'état in Kiev. They are most certainly
not
"terrorist"
organisations, although they are subjected to daily bombardments against civilian areas by Kiev
putschist forces. Nevertheless, the then NDP leader, Thomas Mulcair, who would have agreed to
almost anything to win power, answered in the affirmative. This must have been a moment of
dismay for Canadians who still harboured illusions about the NDP as a progressive alternative to
the Liberal and Conservative parties. How could it support a US/EU installed putschist regime
which governs by intimidation and violence? In fact, it was a Conservative electoral strategy to
obtain the votes of people of Ukrainian and East European descent by backing putschist Kiev and
denouncing Russia. Mulcair was trying to outflank Harper on his right, but that did not work for
he himself was outflanked on his left.
Some Canadians
harboured illusions about the NDP as a progressive alternative to the Liberal and Conservative
parties
In the 2015 federal
elections the Liberals under Justin Trudeau, outwitted poor Mr. Mulcair and won the elections.
The NDP suffered heavy electoral losses. Mulcair looked like someone who had made a Faustian
bargain for nothing in return, and he lost a bid to remain as party leader. The Liberals
campaigned on re-establishing better relations with the Russian Federation, but that promise did
not hold up. The minister for external affairs, Stéphane Dion, tried to move forward on that
line, but appears to have been stabbed in the back by Mr. Trudeau, with Ms. Freeland guiding his
hand in the fatal blow. In early 2017
Dion
was sacked
and Freeland replaced him. That was the end of the Liberal promise to improve
relations with the Russian government. Since then, under Freeland, Russian-Canadian relations
have worsened.
The influential Mr. Grod
appears to keep the Canadian government in his hip pocket. There are photographs of him side by
side with Mr. Harper and then with Mr. Trudeau, with Ms. Freeland on his left. Mr. Grod has been
a great success in backing putschist Kiev. Last summer Mr. Trudeau even issued a traditional
Ukrainian fascist salute,
"SlavaUkraini!"
,
to celebrate the anniversary of Ukrainian independence. The prime minister is a great believer
in identity politics.
The influential Mr.
Grod appears to keep the Canadian government in his hip pocket
The latest gesture of the
Canadian government is to approve $1.4 million as a three year grant to promote a "Holodomor
National Awareness Tour". Ukrainian "nationalists" summon up the memory of the "Holodomor", a
famine in the Ukraine in 1932-1933, deliberately launched by Stalin, they say, in order to
emphasise their victimisation by Russia. According to the latest Stalin biographer, Steven
Kotkin, there was indeed a famine in the USSR that affected various parts of the country, the
Ukraine amongst other regions. Kazakhstan, not the Ukraine suffered most. Between five and seven
million people died. Ten millions starved. "Nonetheless, the famine was not intentional. It
resulted from Stalin's policies of forced collectivization ,"Kotkin writes, himself no advocate
of the Soviet Union. Compulsion, peasant rebellion, bungling, mismanagement, drought, locust
infestations, not targeting ethnicities, led to the catastrophe. "Similarly, there was no
'Ukrainian' famine," according to Kotkin, "the famine was [a] Soviet[-wide disaster]" (
Stalin
,
2017, vol. 2, pp. 127-29). So the Liberal government is spending public funds to perpetuate a
politically motivated myth to drum up hatred of Russia and to support putschist Kiev.
Identity politics and
Canadian multiculturalism are now invoked to defend Ukrainian fascism celebrated in the streets
of Kiev with torchlight parades and fascist symbols, remembering and celebrating Nazi
collaborators and collaboration during World War II
The Canadian government
also recently renewed funding for a detachment of 200 "advisors" to train Ukrainian militias,
along with
twenty-three
million dollars
-- it is true a pittance by
American
standards
-- for "non-lethal" military aid, justified by Ms. Freeland to defend Ukrainian
"democracy". Truly, we live in a dystopian world where reality is turned on its head. Fascism is
democracy; resistance to fascism is terrorism. Identity politics and Canadian multiculturalism
are now invoked to defend Ukrainian fascism celebrated in the streets of Kiev with torchlight
parades and fascist symbols, remembering and celebrating Nazi collaborators and collaboration
during World War II. "
Any country sending representatives to Russia's celebration of the
70th anniversary of their victory against Adolf Hitler,"
warned
putschist Kiev
in April 2015, "will be blacklisted by Ukraine."
The desire by people to see themselves as a national community – even if many of the
bonds binding them together are fictional – is one of the most powerful forces in the
world
Patrick Cockburn | @indyworld |
Nationalism in different shapes and forms is powerfully transforming the politics of the
British Isles, a development that gathered pace over the last five years and culminated in the
general election this month.
National identities and the relationship between England, Scotland and Ireland are changing
more radically than at any time over the last century. It is worth looking at the British
archipelago as a whole on this issue because of the closely-meshed political relationship of
its constituent nations. Some of these developments are highly visible such as the rise of the
Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) to permanent political dominance in Scotland in the three
general elections since the independence referendum in 2014.
Other changes are important but little commented on, such as the enhanced national
independence and political influence of the Republic of Ireland over the British Isles as a
continuing member of the EU as the UK leaves. Dublin's greater leverage when backed by the
other 26 EU states was repeatedly demonstrated, often to the surprise and dismay of London, in
the course of the negotiations in Brussels over the terms of the British withdrawal.
Northern Ireland saw more nationalist than unionist MPs elected in the general election for
the first time since 1921. This is important because it is a further sign of the political
impact of demographic change whereby Catholics/nationalists become the new majority and the
Protestants/unionists the minority. The contemptuous ease with which Boris Johnson abandoned
his ultra-unionist pledges to the DUP and accepted a customs border in the Irish Sea separating
Northern Ireland from the rest of Britain shows how little loyalty the Conservatives feel
towards the northern unionists and their distinct and abrasive brand of British
nationalism.
These developments affecting four of the main national communities inhabiting the British
Isles – Irish, nationalists and unionists in Northern Ireland, Scots – are easy to
track. Welsh nationalism is a lesser force. Much more difficult to trace and explain is the
rise of English nationalism because it is much more inchoate than these other types of
nationalism, has no programme, and is directly represented by no political party – though
the Conservative Party has moved in that direction.
The driving force behind Brexit was always a certain type of English nationalism which did
not lose its power to persuade despite being incoherent and little understood by its critics
and supporters alike. In some respects, it deployed the rhetoric of any national community
seeking self-determination. The famous Brexiteer slogan "take back control" is not that
different in its implications from Sinn Fein – "Ourselves Alone" – though neither
movement would relish the analogy.
The great power of the pro-Brexit movement, never really taken on board by its opponents,
was to blame the very real sense of disempowerment and social grievances felt by a large part
of the English population on Brussels and the EU. This may have been scapegoating on a
grandiose scale, but nationalist movements the world over have targeted some foreign body
abroad or national minority at home as the source of their ills. I asked one former Leave
councillor – one of the few people I met who changed their mind on the issue after the
referendum in 2016 – why people living in her deprived ward held the EU responsible for
their poverty. Her reply cut through many more sophisticated explanations: "I suppose that it
is always easier to blame Johnny Foreigner."
Applying life lessons to the pursuit of national happiness The Tories won't get far once
progressives join forces 22,000 EU nationals have left NHS since Brexit vote, figures show This
crude summary of the motives of many Leave voters has truth in it, but it is a mistake to
caricature English nationalism as simply a toxic blend of xenophobia, racism, imperial
nostalgia and overheated war memories. In the three years since the referendum the very act of
voting for Brexit became part of many people's national identity, a desire to break free,
kicking back against an overmighty bureaucracy and repelling attempts by the beneficiaries of
globalisation to reverse a democratic vote.
The political left in most countries is bad at dealing with nationalism and the pursuit of
self-determination. It sees these as a diversion from identifying and attacking the real
perpetrators of social and economic injustice. It views nationalists as mistakenly or malignly
aiming at the wrong target – usually foreigners – and letting the domestic ones off
the hook.
The desire by people to see themselves as a national community – even if many of the
bonds binding them together are fictional – is one of the most powerful forces in the
world. It can only be ignored at great political cost, as the Labour Party has just found out
to its cost for the fifth time (two referendums and three elections). What Labour should have
done was early on take over the slogan "take back control" and seek to show that they were
better able to deliver this than the Conservatives or the Brexit Party. There is no compelling
reason why achieving such national demands should be a monopoly of the right. But in 2016, 2017
and 2019 Labour made the same mistake of trying to wriggle around Brexit as the prime issue
facing the English nation without taking a firm position, an evasion that discredited it with
both Remainers and Leavers.
Curiously, the political establishment made much the same mistake as Labour in
underestimating and misunderstanding the nature of English nationalism. Up to the financial
crisis of 2008 globalisation had been sold as a beneficial and inevitable historic process.
Nationalism was old hat and national loyalties were supposedly on the wane. To the British
political class, the EU obviously enhanced the political and economic strength of its national
members. As beneficiaries of the status quo, they were blind to the fact that much of the
country had failed to gain from these good things and felt marginalised and forgotten.
The advocates of supra-national organisations since the mediaeval papacy have been making
such arguments and have usually been perplexed why they fail to stick. They fail to understand
the strength of nationalism or religion in providing a sense of communal solidarity, even if it
is based on dreams and illusions, that provides a vehicle for deeply felt needs and grievances.
Arguments based on simple profit and loss usually lose out against such rivals.
Minervo , 1 day ago
Bigger by far are two forces which really do have control over our country -- the
international NATO warmongers but even more so, the international banksters of the finance
industry.
Why no 'leftist' campaign to Take Back Control of our money? Gordon Brown baled out the
banks when they should have gone bankrupt and been nationalised.
Blair is forever tainted with his ill-fated Attack on Iraq. Surely New Liberals or
Democrats or Socialists would want to lock down on that fiasco?
The Nationalism of taking back control could be a leftist project too.
"The life of the individual is a constant struggle, and not merely a metaphorical one,
against want or boredom, but also an actual struggle against other people. He discovers
adversaries everywhere, lives in continual conflict and dies with sword in hand."
Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Suffering of the World
Although Nietzsche seems to be the philosopher of choice for many on the Dissident Right,
I've always had a soft spot for Arthur Schopenhauer. His cantankerous philosophical pessimism
has always struck a chord with my own temperament, and for many years I've found his
quasi-Buddhist and highly compassionate conceptualisation of suffering to be strangely
comforting. That life is a struggle involving endless adversaries and competitors also forms an
aspect of Schopenhauer's philosophy, and this continues to be significant in shaping my
political and philosophical outlook. Certainly, it goes without saying that adversaries have
never been in short supply for members of the Dissident Right. They are arrayed before us now,
emerging from all points of the political spectrum, and often even from within our own ranks.
Dissident right political philosophies, more than any other, appear destined to be mired in
continual conflict, and I often find it difficult to shake the dark impression that one day I
will die, metaphorical sword in hand, with every battle raging but far from won. For this
reason, I sometimes permit myself the relief of optimism (a form of cowardice to both
Schopenhauer and Spengler), and part of this is the attempt to find allies where formerly one
may have seen only foes. This brings me to the subject matter of this essay -- recent
developments on the Left which appear to suggest the emergence of an anti-globalist,
anti-immigration, and anti-Zionist/anti-Semitic politics.
Swedish Communists Wake Up
Just days ago, Sputnik
reported on the fact that almost half of the members of the Communist Party in Malmö,
Sweden, are resigning. They plan to establish a new workers' party that no longer features
multiculturalism, LGBT interests, and climate change as key policy goals. Nils Littorin, one of
the defectors,
told a local newspaper that today's Left has become part of the elite and has come to
"dismiss the views of the working class as alien and problematic." Littorin suggested that the
Left "is going through a prolonged identity crisis" and that his group, instead, intends to
stick to the original values, such as class politics. Littorin adds "[The Left] don't
understand why so many workers don't think that multiculturalism, the LGBT movement and Greta
Thunberg are something fantastic, but instead believe we are in the 1930s' Germany and that
workers who vote [right-wing] Sweden Democrats have been infected by some Nazi sickness." In a
piece of simple insight previously rare on the Left, he argues that the rise in right-wing
votes for people like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are in fact due to "widespread
dissatisfaction with liberal economic migration that leads to low-wage competition and the
ghettoisation of communities, a development that only benefits major companies." Rather than
being beneficial to working class Whites, Littorin condemns a "chaotic" immigration policy that
has led to "cultural clashes, segregation and exclusion due to an uncontrolled influx from
parts of the world characterised by honour culture and clan mentalities."
Littorin continues to talk sense when it comes to the LGBT agenda. He explains that LGBT
issues and the climate movement are merely "state ideologies" that are "rammed down people's
throats". Littorin adds that phenomena like these happen at the expense of real issues, such as
poverty, homelessness, and income equality: "Pride, for instance, has been reduced to dealing
with sexual orientation. We believe that human dignity is primarily about having a job and
having pension insurance that means that you are not forced to live on crumbs when you are
old."
As well as prioritising jobs and pensions over the flamboyant celebration of buggery,
Littorin and his colleagues have pledged to abandon the name and ethos of Communism, describing
it as a
word drawn to the dirt, a nasty word today, and not entirely undeservedly. In communist
parties, there is this risk of elitism, self-indulgence, and a belief that a certain
avant-garde should lead a working class that does not know its own best interests, instead of
asking people what they want. 20th-century Communism died with the Soviet Union, it has never
been successfully updated for the 21st century but has been stuck in 100-year-old books.
Curiously, events in Malmö have been mirrored somewhat in broader Swedish Left
politics, with Markus Allard, the leader of the left-wing Örebro Party, expressing
similar
thoughts in an op-ed titled "Socialists don't belong to the left," accusing the mainstream
left of completely abandoning
its base , switching from the working class to "parasitic grant-grabbing layers within the
middle class."
British Socialists Reinvent Themselves
Almost simultaneously, an identical process is occurring in Britain with George Galloway 's announcement of a
new Workers
Party of Britain . At the time of its launch Galloway described the party as "hard Brexit
and hard labour," and added: "If you're a liberal who thinks it's Left if you're still pining
for the EU, if you think shouting "racist," "homophobic," "transphobic" at everybody who
doesn't agree with you is the way forward, we're probably not for you." Galloway's pro-Brexit
stance is rooted in his
belief that the modern British Left "have no vision for an alternative to rampant
neoliberalism and a deindustrialised, finance-led, low wage economy, they calculate the best
way to make this work is within the EU." He argues that the cosmopolitan leadership of the
Labour Party in particular "think we are some kind of uncivilised tribe, painting our faces
blue, and only able to vote in a right-wing government," a view he finds "not only deeply
insulting, but also self-defeating and overly optimistic about the EU." On immigration,
Galloway argues that there is "nothing left-wing about unlimited mass immigration. It
decapitates the countries from which the immigrants leave, and drives down wages in those where
they arrive. The wealthy benefit from it, as they can afford cheap labor for their companies,
or cheap au-pairs, cheap baristas, cheap plumbers. But the working class suffers."
Galloway has also stressed that his new party will strongly pursue anti-Israel politics, and
is fully committed to opposing the IHRA definition of antisemitism.
Galloway and the Workers Party of Britain have also taken a stand against the more extreme
forms of LGBT indoctrination, particularly the mass promotion of transgenderism. Galloway, who
has previously been attacked by a
self-styled "trans anarchist" while giving a speech, is here following the lead of the
pro-Brexit Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) which recently published
Identity Politics and the Transgender Trend: Where is LGBT ideology taking us and Why does
it matter? In this text, and other articles on the party's website, including this
very interesting speech denouncing transgender ideology as anti-materialist and
anti-scientific, the argument is made that
Biological differentiation between male and female is a real thing . It doesn't
just exist in humanity, it exists in many species throughout the natural world. Sexual
reproduction is a natural biological process that has persisted in nature due to the
diversity it engenders; it is a phenomenon encountered in the natural world. And let's not
forget how this debate impinged upon us. We've been following this ideological trend, and
encountering identity politics (idpol) among supporters and candidates for membership of our
party, and amongst people we've been working with for at least four or five years. Because
idpol has become a fashion in that period. And it is a fashion; it is a trend. And it
suddenly -- from being very marginal to certain academic institutions in the 1970s -- became
mainstream globally worldwide; it was actively promoted. Not promoted by communists, not by
socialists, but picked up on and accepted by many of them, because they are led by, and they
blindly followed, bourgeoise society down this dead-end. There is a group of self-proclaimed
'socialists' who are not actually any longer fighting against our oppression, they're
fighting against reality!
The Left in Crisis?
None of these developments are entirely surprising and, in fact, the argument could be made
that they are the inevitable side effect of what Nils Littorin termed the Left's prolonged
"identity crisis." The endorsement and promotion of multiculturalism and its sex-politics
corollaries never did make much sense within the framework of rational critiques of capitalism,
and the tension between the nominal desire for working class solidarity and divisive
pseudo-Marxian doctrines (e.g. Whiteness Studies) designed to mobilise imported ethnic factions
against the largest section of the working class (blue-collar Whites) was always destined to
bring about significant stress fractures when Leftist fortunes began to decline.
And decline they have. Of course, we have to set aside rampant ideological and cultural
success. Figures and cliques operating under the banner of social equality and eternal progress
continue to hold the reins of power in government, academia, and the mass media. But the Left
is without question currently subject to a period of political decline. It's losing votes, and
more important, it's fast losing hearts and minds. I should also add that they aren't losing
them to right-wing ideas, but to the hollow shells of right-wing ideas (Free Enterprise! Build
the Wall!) and to the charismatic globalist play-actors who promote-these ideas like salesmen
selling used cars or aftershave. White working-class people are voting for free enterprise
without hesitation while Jewish
vulture capitalism operates with impunity under that very banner, destroying their towns,
exporting their jobs, and repossessing their homes. The same people vote for a wall they'll
never get -- and would never really solve the problems resulting from capitalism or ensure a
majority White future. And they do it not because of concern about identity or racial destiny,
but in the same way one might decide to install CCTV in a grocery store -- the ever-elusive
Wall will never be built so long as it represents nothing more than the aspiration to protect
mere inventory. The hollow men of the pseudo-Right-wing offer flimsy placebos, and yet the
political Left, supposedly the historical repository of hard materialism, can't seem to
compete.
There's been a scramble to blame the situation on
a lack of charismatic leaders , disunity, a lack of attractive policies, and even the idea
that the European Left made the
fatal mistake of trying to meet the Right on its own turf by "flirting with closed-border
nationalism or neoliberalism." But the real reason is surely the fact the Left has consistently
alienated and browbeat working class Whites, while slowly revealing itself to be an elite-run
clique of cosmopolitans, who are living the high life while waxing lyrical about oppressions
that are rarely real and often imaginary, and in any case never affect them personally. Added
to this is the fact Leftist ideology has become so convoluted and contorted, with the
square-peg doctrine of Marx endlessly forced into new and increasingly abstract circular and
triangular holes, resulting in Marxist interpretations of such ephemera as graffiti, pop music,
and drag queens, all of which strike the average blue-collar worker as a steaming pile of
effeminate middle-class navel-gazing. All this plays out as young yet dithering social justice
warriors, jobless and senseless, search for oppression like an old lady with dementia searches
for a purse she hasn't owned in 20 years. As the pundits split hairs, I look on, and it occurs
to me rather simply that right now the pseudo-Left-wing liars aren't quite as good as the
pseudo-Right-wing liars.
Are These Rebels Potential Allies?
When I was around 11 years old, my mother made a new friend, a Scottish woman in her 30s,
who always struck me as very strange. It was her eyes. I didn't know at first what
schizophrenia was, though I would soon find out. One day she arrived at our house and,
recognising her, I opened the door and welcomed her in. I called to my mother, who was
upstairs, and made small talk with the Scottish woman, who, standing still and staring right at
me, seemed perfectly cheerful and articulate. She asked about how I was doing at school, and we
talked a little bit about science, which she seemed to know a lot about. It was only after a
few minutes that I noticed the smell and deduced that the woman had fouled herself. By the time
my mother arrived, the Scottish woman had descended into a stream-of-consciousness gibberish
that culminated in her attempting unsuccessfully to retrieve a knife from the kitchen before
running from the property. She'd simply stopped taking her medication. We later discovered she
was found by police that night, dancing and weeping with bare, bloody feet in a nearby
graveyard, wearing nothing but a nightgown and proclaiming to the dead that she was God,
distraught at the death of the crucified son.
The episode has remained with me now for over two decades, shaping my perceptions of
reality, relationships, and trust. Here it suffices only to remark that the insane talk sense
at times, even as their psyche shatters. And if we dig deeply enough into the statements of
these moderately "awakened" Leftists, do we yet see signs of madness? A look again at the
statement from the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), along with some reading
between the lines, suggests something decidedly off . Yes, "biological differentiation
between male and female is a real thing." Of course it is. But so is biological differentiation
between races, and yet here our erstwhile British hardcore materialists, currently led by a
full-blooded ethnic Indian named Harpal Brar , decide to fight against reality.
On that note, we should add that Brar's daughter, Joti Brar, has been announced as George
Galloway's deputy leader at the "hard Brexit and hard labour" Worker's Party of Britain.
Galloway, it's worth adding, has been married four times, with three marriages to non-Whites
(Palestinian Amineh Abu-Zayyad in 1994, Lebanese Rima Husseini in 2007, and ethnic Indonesian
Putri Gayatri Pertiwi in 2012). So for all his protestations of being against mass migration,
one gets the distinct impression that Galloway is a committed multiculturalist and that his
party will be internationalist in every meaningful sense of the term.
If there is any hope for some sanity in this camp of frustrated Leftists it is for the
simple reason that these small new pockets of reason are for the most part free of Jewish
influence and all the intellectual distortions such influence entails. In a 2018 essay titled "
On
"Leftist Anti-Semitism": Past and Present ," I considered the gradual shift of Jews away
from the hard Left due to growing anti-Zionism, and their growing confinement in centrist
neoliberalism:
Jewish blindness to their privileges, genuine or feigned, is of course one major cause for
the undeniable friction between Jews and the modern Left. It was perhaps inevitable that
foolish but earnest egalitarians on the Left would come to the slow realization that their
'comrades of the Jewish faith' were in fact not only elitists, but an elite of a very special
sort. The simultaneous preaching of open borders/common property and 'the land of the Jewish
people' was always going to strike a discordant note among the wearers of sweaty Che Guevara
t-shirts, especially when accompanied so very often by the cacophony of Israeli gunfire and
the screams of bloodied Palestinian children. Mass migration, that well-crafted toxin
coursing through the highways and rail lines of Europe, has proven just as difficult to
manage. Great waves of human detritus wash upon Western shores, bringing raw and passionate
grievances even from the frontiers of Israel. These are people whose eyes have seen behind
the veil, and who sit only with great discomfort alongside the kin of the IDF in league with
the Western political Left -- the only common ground being a shared desire to dispossess the
hated White man. For these reasons, the Left could well become a cold house for Jews without
becoming authentically, systematically, or traditionally anti-Semitic. One might therefore
expect Jews to regroup away from the radical left, occupying a political space best described
as staunchly centrist -- a centrism that leans left only to pursue multiculturalism and other
destructive 'egalitarian' social policies, and leans right only in order to obtain elite
protections and privileges [domestically for the Jewish community, internationally for
Israel]. A centrism based, in that old familiar formula, on 'what is best for Jews.'
As seen in the recent clash between Jews and the UK's Labour Party, the political relocation
of Jews to a kind of amorphous and opportunistic centrism will bring them into direct conflict
with those on the hard Left who not only pursue anti-Zionist politics but also object to
manifestations of raw Jewish power like the mass adoption of the IHRA definition of
anti-Semitism and the economic abuses of politically ambiguous (neither Left nor Right, but
Jewish) oligarchs like Paul Singer. As such, and together with their natural aversion to being
part of the Right, Jews will increasingly find it difficult to define themselves politically as
anything other than Jews, leading to the increased visibility of their activities and interests
-- something witnessed in the unprecedented step of Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis openly calling
for British Jews to move against Jeremy Corbyn. This increased visibility can only be a good
thing for those concerned with Jewish influence, and who have been frustrated in previous
periods by Jewish influence masquerading in various political guises.
A potential opportunity, imperfect but perhaps feasible, may therefore be arising whereby
White interests could be subliminally or even publicly defended through savvy, nominally
hard-Left activism against mass migration (on economic rather than racial grounds), against
Israel and international Zionist influence, against some aspects of PC culture, and against the
capitalist excesses of the Jewish vulture funds. It goes without saying that Leftist activists
don't receive anywhere near the same level of social, professional, or legal punishment for
their activism as those on the Right, especially the dissident Right. I don't think I'm too
wide of the mark in suggesting that an anti-immigration agitator with "Workers Party of
Britain" plastered over his social media is less likely to lose his job than someone with
public National Front affiliations. It may therefore be worth serious consideration by young
activists as to whether they might want to cultivate a kind of "Leftist" mask to defend White
interests in much the same way as Jews in the past have adopted various convenient political
masks while concealing deeper ethnic interests. I am suggesting a combination of infiltration
and masquerade. What matters most is the private motivation and the potential benefits of the
ultimate goal -- White interests and objectives serving them.
There are, of course, also dangers in supporting such movements. I am not suggesting the
investment of serious time and money in these groups, since the risk is great that the majority
of their members are committed to a politics that is ultimately antagonistic and destructive to
our own ultimate goals. There is also huge potential for betrayal on many of the issues where
we might have common ground -- immigration, LGBT madness, PC culture -- and I find it difficult
to shake off the impression that these developments bear the mark of a temporary despair and
are designed to dupe blue-collar Whites into voting Left once more.
Still, 2020 may open up a new front in the war, and as the New Year approaches, I'll silence
my inner Schopenhauer and toast to that.
Boris Johnson seems to be a step in this direction, many of the policies he has openly stated
would have been almost unthinkable for a Conservative PM previously, things like amnesty for
illegal immigrants, vast amounts of public spending, he has even stated an intention to
nationalise things like train operators.
Boris is seen as very much right wing by most people in the UK, but if you look at his
policies he could easily be described as a sort of left wing nationalist, especially in terms
of his social policies. In terms of actual policy there is increasingly little difference
between the Conservatives and Labour, the differentiation has become about abstract things
like self-proclaimed patriotism and the level of pandering to Zionism.
WN-types such as the author of this article tend to focus so heavily on immigration as an
issue. So here's a link to a long piece I published a couple of years ago proposing a
solution to the American version of the problem, though I'm not sure how applicable it would
be to Britain:
@Ron Unz I think, Mr. Unz, you highlight peaceful coexistence, at the same time many
still pine for a separate nation of exclusively white Christians. While it's a lost cause at
this point, it doesn't stop the WN types – a set that is difficult to exclude myself
from – from imagining a different reality and the National policies that would
accompany that. Is a grand bargain possible? It gives me pause.
It's extremely surprising to me that Andrew Joyce, in his analysis of left/right potential
cooperation for the benefit of the nation and its legacy population, would fail to mention or
bring up the French Equality and Reconciliation movement of Alain Soral. Here is a movement
with meaty ideas, and more importantly, results. For what ideas drive the Yellow Vest
protests if not the very concepts that Joyce points out in this article, expressed so well by
Soral and so many of the white French protesters? Soral, originally a Marxist who
subsequently joined the National Front (now the National Rally), has a number of useful and
accurate slogans. He is a brilliant analyst and an articulate commentator; unfortunately, his
videos and activism is limited to the French language. "The Left for the worker, The Right
for morality." Isn't this similar to Joyce's argument that the Left is losing members who are
rejecting the identity politics, gender bender, climate change distraction issue driven
narrative that is driving the Left today? Of course in France Soral is labeled a Rightist
Antisemite, as he is not shy about calling out the stranglehold that CRIF holds over French
politics and how this has warped foreign policy in the interests of apartheid Israel. When I
watch some of his videos and commentary, I wonder why we don't have a similar figure and
movement in the US.
Your basic question seems to be: What holds a country together? Especially, a large
country--- such as France/Germany/the UK/the USA/the USSR/China---that comprises many
disparate regions and ethnicities? What differentiates such a country from an empire?
So in the USSR seems like a case can be or is being made that the Party is what held the
union together, as an overarching organization that incorporated leaders into its structure.
Perhaps I am wrong in that inference as to what you or someone else is saying.
Seems like the queen's speech shows her effort to point out why it might be better for the
UK to stick together: ability to deliver better outcomes to all members of the
country/society.
The queen does seem to draw a certain line in her speech as to newcomers to the society
who wish to become part of it. Only those with specific skills to contribute to those already
here will be welcome. She doesn't specify that others are not welcome, but she certainly
seems to imply it. And, quite rightly, IMO.
"A botched assassination attempt against Ukrainian politician and businessman Vyacheslav
Sobolev has resulted in the death of his three-year-old son, Alexander.
"While Sobolev and his wife were leaving his high-end restaurant "Mario" in Kiev this past
Sunday, right-wing thugs opened fire on Sobolev's Range Rover, missing him but hitting his
son who was seated in the back of the vehicle. The three-year-old died on the way to the
hospital.
"Police later apprehended two men who had fled the scene in a black Lexus sedan, Oleksiy
Semenov, 19, and Andrei Lavrega, 20. Both are veterans of the war in Donbass in eastern
Ukraine where they served as members of the fascist Right Sector's paramilitary formation
until June of this year.
"The Right Sector was instrumental in the US- and EU-backed, fascist-led coup in February
2014 that toppled the Yanukovitch government and replaced it with a pro-Western and
anti-Russian regime. Since then, the Right Sector has been among the far-right forces that
have been heavily involved in the war against Russian-backed separatists in East Ukraine.
"As is usual when members of neo-Nazi groups carry out political attacks, the Right Sector
and their former battalion commander fraudulently attempted to distance themselves from
Lavrega and Semenov, claiming they had lost contact with them since they left Ukraine's armed
forces in June. These claims are not credible.
"Lavrega, who has been identified as the principal shooter in the killing, has been a
member of the Right Sector for at least half a decade. He had participated in the Maidan
movement of 2014 as a member of the Right Sector and perfected his shooting skills as a
sniper killing separatist soldiers in eastern Ukraine. According to his Right Sector
battalion commander, Andrei Herhert, Lavrega -- also known as "Quiet" -- was "one of the best
snipers in the war" and "very ideological."
"As a thanks for his service to the right-wing Kiev government, Lavrega received a
military decoration from former President Petro Poroshenko for "courage" just last year, in
October of 2018." ..........
"Whoever is ultimately responsible for ordering this political assassination and the
murder of the three-year-old boy, it is clear that the same far-right forces that were
instrumental in the coup in February 2014 and the civil war are now being employed to carry
out political assassinations by the Ukrainian oligarchy.
"Since the 2014 coup, the number of targeted political assassinations by right-wing
neo-Nazi groups like C14 and the Right Sector has skyrocketed. At least 15 people have been
murdered in such hit jobs by the far right since 2014. Among them was the well-known
Belarusian journalist Pavel Sheremet and the politician Kateryna Handziuk, who was killed in
a horrific acid attack by right-wing thugs last year.
"In virtually all these cases, the perpetrators have been protected from serious legal
prosecution. One of the murderers of Handziuk received a barely three-year prison sentence. A
critical role in shielding the neo-Nazis is played by Ukraine's Ministry of Internal Affairs'
Arsen Avakov, who controls the country's police force and possesses well-known ties to
Ukraine's most notorious fascist militia, the Azov Battalion.
"Avakov is one of the few members of the previous Poroshenko government that have remained
in the current Cabinet of Ministers under President Volodmyr Zelensky. He was recently
praised by former US ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch while testifying before the
House of Representatives regarding the Trump impeachment investigation (see also: "The
impeachment crisis and American imperialism").
"President Zelensky, who was elected in April this year on the basis of promises that he
would bring an end to the widely despised civil war in eastern Ukraine that has claimed the
lives of over 13,000 people, has maintained a conspicuous silence on this latest political
assassination attempt by the far right. Instead, the day after the murder, he posted a
message on Facebook to honor two Ukrainian soldiers who were killed while fighting in eastern
Ukraine this past weekend."
The rest of the story can be found at the WSWS https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/12/07/ukra-d06.html
The Right Sector links with the former US Ambassador-Democratic heroine- are topical.
Thank you for that insight. I cannot see how Zelensky will manage the Nazi Ukrainians
short of a virtual civil war against one western district. The USA will foment a major
insurrection to destroy him if he does a deal with Gazprom. Your suggestion as to where those
issues are discussed would be welcome.
A User #72
Thank you and well said. The eurocentric kabuki does mesmerise the information providers.
I too seek escape from that dominance and spent a good time today researching the Power of
Siberia implications and issues of South America. The global assault on all things African is
a matter of deep despair for me and I feel totally powerless to reverse the relentless
assault on their world.
From the utopian "Yankeedom" to the conservative "Greater Appalachia" and liberal "Left Coast," looking at these
cultures sheds an interesting light on America's political and cultural divides.
"The country has been arguing about a lot of fundamental things lately including state roles and individual liberty,"
Woodard, a Maine native who won the
2012 George Polk Award
for investigative reporting, told Business Insider. "[But] in order to have any productive
conversation on these issues," he added, "you need to know where you come from."
Woodard also believes the nation is likely to become more polarized, even though America is becoming a more diverse
place every day. He says this is because people are "self-sorting."
"People choose to move to places where they identify with the values," Woodard says. "Red minorities go south and blue
minorities go north to be in the majority. This is why blue states are getting bluer and red states are getting redder and
the middle is getting smaller."
Here's how Woodard describes each nation:
Matthew Speiser contributed to a previous version of this article.
Yankeedom values education, and members are comfortable with government
regulation.
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<img src="https://image.businessinsider.com/59b2be5c45e2381d008b5876?width=600&format=jpeg&auto=webp" />
debra
millet/Shutterstock
>
Encompassing the entire Northeast north of New York City and spreading through Michigan, Wisconsin, and
Minnesota, Yankeedom values education, intellectual achievement, communal empowerment, and citizen
participation in government as a shield against tyranny. Yankees are comfortable with government regulation.
Woodard notes that Yankees have a "Utopian streak." The area was settled by radical Calvinists.
New Netherland in the New York area has a "materialistic" culture.
<
<img src="https://image.businessinsider.com/5de800e9fd9db247a976a267?width=600&format=jpeg&auto=webp" />
Ryan
DeBerardinis/Shutterstock
>
A highly commercial culture, New Netherland is "materialistic, with a profound tolerance for ethnic and
religious diversity and an unflinching commitment to the freedom of inquiry and conscience," according to
Woodard. It is a natural ally with Yankeedom and encompasses New York City and northern New Jersey. The area
was settled by the Dutch.
The Midlands, largely located in the Midwest, opposes government regulation.
<
<img src="https://image.businessinsider.com/5de80a7ffd9db23e5a1dd0f7?width=600&format=jpeg&auto=webp" />
Matt Rourke / AP
>
Settled by English Quakers, The Midlands are a welcoming middle-class society that spawned the culture of
the "American Heartland." Political opinion is moderate, and government regulation is frowned upon. Woodard
calls the ethnically diverse Midlands "America's great swing region." Within the Midlands are parts of New
Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska.
Tidewater started as a feudal society that embraced slavery.
<
<img src="https://image.businessinsider.com/5d60177b00ef2b6aa56bf1e1?width=600&format=jpeg&auto=webp" />
Shutterstock
>
Tidewater was built by the young English gentry in the area around the Chesapeake Bay and North Carolina.
Starting as a feudal society that embraced slavery, the region places a high value on respect for authority and
tradition. Woodard notes that Tidewater is in decline, partly because "it has been eaten away by the expanding
federal halos around D.C. and Norfolk."
Greater Appalachia encompasses parts of Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, and
Texas.
<
<img src="https://image.businessinsider.com/5de80db9fd9db252bf4b2083?width=600&format=jpeg&auto=webp" />
Michael Hickey/Getty
Images
>
Colonized by settlers from the war-ravaged borderlands of Northern Ireland, northern England, and the
Scottish lowlands, Greater Appalachia is stereotyped as the land of hillbillies and rednecks. Woodard says
Appalachia values personal sovereignty and individual liberty and is "intensely suspicious of lowland
aristocrats and Yankee social engineers alike." It sides with the Deep South to counter the influence of
federal government. Within Greater Appalachia are parts of Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, Arkansas,
Missouri, Oklahoma, Indiana, Illinois, and Texas.
Deep South adopts a rigid social structure and opposition to government
regulation.
<
<img src="https://image.businessinsider.com/5de80dfcfd9db2413c3a5eea?width=600&format=jpeg&auto=webp" />
Dave Martin/Getty
Images
>
The Deep South was established by English slave lords from Barbados and was styled as a West Indies-style
slave society, Woodard notes. It has a very rigid social structure and fights against government regulation
that threatens individual liberty. Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Texas, Georgia, and South Carolina are all
part of the Deep South.
El Norte has a dominant Hispanic culture.
<
<img src="https://image.businessinsider.com/5de80748fd9db24dc40f4fe2?width=600&format=jpeg&auto=webp" />
David McNew/Reuters
>
Composed of the borderlands of the Spanish-American empire, El Norte is "a place apart" from the rest of
America, according to Woodard. Hispanic culture dominates in the area, and the region values independence,
self-sufficiency, and hard work above all else. Parts of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California are in El
Norte.
The Left Coast, located in coastal California, is a lot like Yankeedom and
Greater Appalachia.
<
<img src="https://image.businessinsider.com/5de8079efd9db239ec1a8f34?width=600&format=jpeg&auto=webp" />
California has permanently moved up its presidential primary from June to March.
Mario Anzuoni/Reuters
>
Colonized by New Englanders and Appalachian Midwesterners, the Left Coast is a hybrid of "Yankee utopianism
and Appalachian self-expression and exploration," Woodard says, adding that it is the staunchest ally of
Yankeedom. Coastal California, Oregon, and Washington are in the Left Coast.
The Far West spans states in the central US including Montana, Wyoming, and
Utah.
<
<img src="https://image.businessinsider.com/5de80e54fd9db2417a02be09?width=600&format=jpeg&auto=webp" />
Scott Olson/Getty
Images
>
The conservative west. Developed through large investment in industry, yet where inhabitants continue to
"resent" the Eastern interests that initially controlled that investment. The Far West spans several states,
including Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, Nebraska, Kansas, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, North Dakota,
South Dakota, Washington, Oregon, and California.
New France inhabitants are comfortable with government involvement in the
economy.
<
<img src="https://image.businessinsider.com/5de8086cfd9db24eb80e8128?width=600&format=jpeg&auto=webp" />
Max Becherer/AP
>
A pocket of liberalism nestled in the Deep South, its people are consensus driven, tolerant, and comfortable
with government involvement in the economy. Woodard says New France is among the most liberal places in North
America. New France is focused around New Orleans in Louisiana as well as the Canadian province of Quebec.
First Nation, most of whose people live in the northern part of the country, is
made up of Native Americans.
<
<img src="https://image.businessinsider.com/5de808bdfd9db23afd1df6e8?width=600&format=jpeg&auto=webp" />
Protesters demonstrate against the Energy Transfer Partners' Dakota Access oil pipeline near the Standing
Rock Sioux reservation in Cannon Ball, North Dakota, U.S. September 9, 2016.
REUTERS/Andrew Cullen
>
White supremacy is an incredibly insincere distraction that tries to erase the histories of
White, Black, and Red peoples.
"Many White people seem to have forgotten what happened to them."
Some say the white supremacy ideology comes from pride. Some say it comes from a belief that
one's culture is superior. Some say it comes from hatred. I never believed these things are the
primary reason because I always sensed a deep loss in the heart of countless white people, some
deep emptiness and fear. Though, admitting to this emptiness is another matter.
James Baldwin wrote about American racism beyond the lines designed to separate us, saying
of white supremacy: "The root of the white man's hatred is terror. A bottomless and nameless
terror..."
It's said that anger is a secondary emotion. Hatred is anger. Racism is hatred. Hatred is
anger. Anger is a secondary emotion, beneath it lies something else.
After talking with many White American friends about the real origins of white supremacy, I
found there was always a certain limit beyond which they refused to go. This had nothing to do
with any hatred toward "the other" and everything to do with a chasm of pain they could not
bear to speak of -- not even for a few minutes could they speak of what has been seeping out of
the wound for so long. It is hard to speak of buried trauma. One wonders what might get stirred
up in that uncovering. Beyond wondering, there is healing, and the certainty that the truth
will set you free. We can be free in this life, you in your body, me in mine, together. To heal
the history we carry, let's allow the past and future to benefit from the courage of the
present.
There were Massacres, But No One Ever Says Their Names
The massacres in Europe lasted at least 500 years. Public tortures. Inquisitions. Generation
after generation of entire communities forced to watch their family, friends, and neighbors
terrorized and killed in front of them.
The ideology of white supremacy as we know it came at the end of this specific period of
history during which immense traumas occurred simultaneously: the mass killing and public
torture of women, the brutal assault against common people, the 'thought-police' Inquisition
committees, the terror from which one could almost not escape, and the enslavement of White
people throughout the region. This all happened in the centuries before the transatlantic slave
trade.
When you get to that part of the origin of white supremacy, and the deal that was
subsequently made with one's oppressor -- that deal being the ridiculous 'white supremacy' idea
and the target of the terror shifting to others -- the conversation often drops dead. Silence,
a few words here and there. Change the topic. Avoid that pain. This is the point beyond which
few have been willing to go.
The Details of the Time
Many have wondered how White people came up with the brutal tortures they imposed on Native
and African people in 'the Americas.' A look into history shows that many of the same tactics
were used on White people during the genocide against them.
The Inquistioners also targeted hair in Europe, especially towards women, which was used
against Native and African people in the Americas. The crimes they committed in this regard are
barely utterable.
The amount of whipping in Europe begs to be mentioned because of its relevance to American
history.
White people were intimately familiar with being enchained themselves, necks in iron,
shackled in rows together, taken on ships here and there, sold in markets -- for centuries.
They were also enslaved throughout the region during the same period as African people, likely
side by side, during the Arabic and Viking slave trades that preceded the transatlantic
one.
In Europe those days, the people who escaped slavery were certainly not free. They were
lynched, burned in public executions, tortured at length in public, and hunted down – by
the millions.
Many White people seem to have no memory of this history.
"Whites were enslaved during the Arabic and Viking slave trades that preceded the
transatlantic one."
The kind of torture documented in a book in 1860 by Pressel of a woman in Prossneck, Germany
is a small glimpse into the genocide. Anyone is advised to skip the following quoted list
describing the torture. It is reprinted simply to acknowledge what was going on and to whom, by
whom, and the lies upholding it, etc.
"Verbatim report of the first days of torture of a woman accused of witchcraft at
Prossneck, Germany, in 1629.
1. The hangman bound the hands, cut her hair, and placed her on the ladder. He threw alcohol
over her head and set fire to it so as to burn her hair to the roots.
2. He placed strips of sulphur under her arms and around her back and set fire to them.
3. He tied her hands behind her back and pulled her up to the ceiling.
4. He left her hanging there from three to four hours, while the torturer went to
breakfast.
5. On his return, he threw alcohol on her back and set fire to it.
6. He attached very heavy weights on her body and drew her up again to the ceiling. After
that he put her back on the ladder and placed a very rough plank full of sharp points against
her body.
7. Then he squeezed her thumbs and big toe in the vise, and he trussed her arms with a stick,
and in this position kept her hanging about a quarter of an hour, until she would faint away
several times.
8. Then he squeezed the calves and the legs in the vise, always alternating the torture with
questioning.
9. Then he whipped her with a rawhide whip to cause blood to flow out over her shift.
10. Once again, he placed her thumbs and big toes in the vise, and left her in this agony on
the torture stool from 10:00 a.m. till 1:00 p.m., while the hangman and the court officials
went out to get a bite to eat. In the afternoon a functionary came who disapproved this
pitiless procedure. But then they whipped her again in a frightful manner. This concluded the
first day of torture. The next day they start all over again, but without pushing things
quite as far as the day before.
-Wilhelm Pressel, Hexen and Hexenmeister (1860)"
Historian and scholar, Silvia Federici, says of the historical amnesia regarding this
period:
"That the victims, in Europe, were mostly peasant women may account for the historians'
past indifference towards this genocide, an indifference that has bordered on complicity,
since the elimination of the witches from the pages of history has contributed to
trivializing their physical elimination at the stake, suggesting that it was a phenomenon of
minor significance, if not a matter of folklore."
She also explores the emergence of Capitalism during the genocide against these women.
Supremacy Was Never The Question. It's Just a Mask
The lie that Black people are somehow inferior was a distraction that masked -- and nearly
erased -- the reality that 'white supremacy' ideology as we know it came at the end of this
brutal period in Europe. But it wasn't "about color" in Europe. There they were given a
different reason. In Europe they were killed for heresy, "any belief or theory that is strongly
at variance with established beliefs or customs." The Inquisition of that age has been
described as a court and the tormenters focused on getting 'confessions.' Their barbarity is
astounding.
The lie that Black people are somehow inferior was also another layer of the brutality that
grew as it moved on from Europe to Africa and the Americas. Psychological warfare, aimed at
distraction and destruction.
If it wasn't "about color" in Europe, then it was never about color at all. 'White
supremacy' is an incredibly insincere distraction that tries to erase the histories of White,
Black, and Red peoples. As a result, many White people seem to have forgotten what happened to
them, while many African and Native people have had to fight within their hearts regarding
their own inherent value. Who benefits from this?
Who was it that concocted this very strange 'white supremacist' idea: the White people who
had been brutalized for so long, or the powers-that-be(making the terror)? Who was it calling
People of Color savages, too natural, strangely spiritual and they should all be studying
Christianity? Who wrote that script to be repeated? It's obvious who wrote it. And it's obvious
who accepted this new ideology under duress.
Some White people tout white supremacy, and the clear truth is – they are more than
encouraged to. But to speak of these massacres and the deal one subsequently made with one's
oppressor? Well, there's a deep-seated fear there, few people will speak of it. That's not
healing. That's an imposed silence.
Who imposed that silence? When did it start?
What Kind of Deal, What Kind of Battle?
If the people living in the ghettos and reservations of America, who have been so long
mistreated, were today offered a deal that some "less than" people had just arrived and would
be put on the lowest rung, and they were offered a deal – free land and houses, a bunch
of free money, honey flattery, a much easier life, a few steps up the rung, a permanent raise,
and silence as to any mistreatment of these new "less thans" – who among the people would
take that deal? And who would not?
This, to me, is pointing to the heart of the battle. It's not skin tone, it's the battle of
the heart.
Race Conversations
James Baldwin spoke passionately about race in America, searing images unto a nation trying
to plaster itself in tv imagery that avoided the questions almost altogether. Baldwin never
tried currying favors from the class oppressing the people. He spoke searing words to the heart
of corrupted authority out of the desire for profound change.
Profound change. Not – you stay in your corner and gripe, and I'll stay in my corner
and gripe, and we'll yell at each other from our abysses when our own people ain't even doing
that well, and Those are not positive racial relations. They are not positive human
relations.
There are so many different people acting within a People. Those who hate, those who blame,
those ashamed, those who raise children to be healthy adults, those striving trying to find a
way, those who hold fast to the medicine they are here to protect. There are many people acting
within a People.
We are not really so different as we seem, our different cultures like different clothing on
the body of our lives. Do you judge me for mine? Right or wrong, good or evil, from a glance
even? We are not really so different, but America draws lines so dense between our communities
that we often conjecture about each other from afar. Why do we accept these terms of
engagement?
In many pockets of America, race conversations have moved into a state of mutual enrichment,
merging worlds even if only for a moment. The possibilities are endless for what could happen
in the healing of race in America.
No Disrespect
This is not written as any kind of acceptance of the idea of white supremacy, which is
blatantly ridiculous and untrue. It is not written as any excuse about the violence and
degradation that flows from this philosophy. It is written to look more closely at the
ideology's true origins and authors.
We now understand how trauma affects communities, and how it can manifest in future
generations if it isn't addressed. How do we work together to heal the pain we've all been
forced to endure by these powers-that-be-making(the terror)? How do we heal when some of us
turned into perpetrators in our own communities and beyond? How do we change our circumstances
when a brutal system tries to erase all our histories and replaces them with lies?
The cycles of pain unleashed on each other within our communities and between them "is
enough to make prophets and angels weep," as Baldwin said. Where does the pain end and the
beauty begin?
We can heal through changing and challenging ourselves one by one and then giving to each
other. We can heal through respect. We can heal through understanding each other's worth and
striving to lessen each other's pain. We can battle to unify beyond all arbitrary borders and
change the reality of this nation ourselves. We can heal through becoming clear about the
future we want with each other and letting nothing dissuade us from attaining it, no matter
what happens on the journey to get there.
Who will write the future story of race on this planet? Who will educate us about who we are
and our potential? The-powers-that-be(making the terror)? Or will we ourselves write a
different story?
Chelli Stanley is an independent journalist, environmentalist, Buddhist, common
person, of African, Japanese, and European descent born in Mexico. Has traveled widely, doesn't
watch tv, wants freedom. Can be contacted at [email protected]
white supremacy
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Homeland Security Dept. Affirms Threat of White Supremacy
After Years of Prodding https://nyti.ms/2oTNJmQ
NYT - Zolan Kanno-Youngs - October 1
WASHINGTON -- The Department of Homeland Security is beginning to address white
supremacist terrorism as a primary security threat, breaking with a decade of flagging
attention after bigoted mass shooters from New Zealand to Texas took the lives of nearly 100
people in the last six months.
In a little-noticed strategy document (*) published last month to guide law enforcement on
emerging threats and in recent public appearances by Kevin K. McAleenan, the acting secretary
of homeland security, the department is trying to project a new vigilance about violent white
nationalism, beating back criticism that the agency has spent a decade playing down the
issue.
"I would like to take this opportunity to be direct and unambiguous in addressing a major
issue of our time. In our modern age, the continuation of racially based violent extremism,
particularly violent white supremacy, is an abhorrent affront to the nation," Mr. McAleenan
said during an address last month, describing white nationalism as one of the most dangerous
threats to the United States.
The department's new stance contrasts that of President Trump, who has repeatedly
dismissed white supremacy as an insignificant fringe movement. But beyond words and
documents, many officials trying to combat the threat throughout the country remain skeptical
that the full weight of federal law enforcement is finally being used to give bigoted
domestic terrorism the attention it deserves. ...
* (Could be this.)
DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY STRATEGIC FRAMEWORK
FOR COUNTERING TERRORISM AND TARGETED VIOLENCE
"... The conservative movement's unwholesome obsession with Israel is not an entirely organic obsession to be sure. There is a whole lot of dark kosher oligarch money lurking behind the neoconservative cause, Christian Zionism, and the Reagan/Zioboomer battalion ..."
"... there is something awfully peculiar, almost disturbing about the old guard's infatuation with Israel. I mean, why are American boomers so concerned about the Jewish state and its survival? How exactly does a tiny apartheidesque ethnostate half-way around the world affect their everyday lives? Are they simply mind-slaves to a mainstream media dominated by powerful Jews and powerful Jewish interest groups? Is this all really about scripture as Christian radio likes to contend? Or is there something else afoot here? Well, in short, there is. ..."
"... White Westerners, white Americans in particular, are a thoroughly vassalized, deracinated people. We aren't allowed to celebrate our own race's host of historic accomplishments anymore. That would be racist. We aren't allowed to put our own people first either, as all other peoples do. That would likewise be racist. White Western peoples aren't even allowed to have nations of our own any longer, nations which exist to advance our interests, and which are populated by and overseen by people like us, who share our interests and our attitudes. That also would be, you guessed it, racist. Our very existence is increasingly little more than an unfortunate, racist obstacle to a brighter, more diverse future, in the eyes of the Cultural Marxist sociopaths who rule the Western World. Needless to say, most white Americans would rather be dead than racist, and so we are naturally, quite literally dying as a result. ..."
"... The white American psyche has been tamed, broken as it were. Ziocucking is a symptom of that psychic injury. ..."
"... White Americans can not, they must not, stake claim to an identity or a future of their own, so they have essentially committed themselves to another people's identity and future instead of their own. ..."
"... Actually, Donald Trump's electoral victory is at least partially attributable to a very similar psychological phenomenon. White Americans, who have largely lost the self-confidence to stand behind their traditions and convictions, still had the gumption to vote for a man who possesses in oodles and cringy oodles, the self-same self-confidence they lack. White Americans are thus engaged in an almost unstated, indirect, vicarious defiance of Cultural Marxism via Trump/Trumpism, a tangible, albeit somewhat incoherent, symbol of open revolt against Western elites. The repressed group will of whites is longing for an authentic medium of civilizational expression, but can only find two-bit demagoguery and Israel worship. The weather is not fair in the white, Western mind. ..."
"... After all, the birthrates of Jews in Israel are at well above replacement level . Israelis are optimistic about the future. As whites in the West fall on their proverbial sword to atone for their racist past, Jews in Israel are thriving. ..."
"... that unwholesome obsession will not dissipate until whites reclaim their own history, rediscover their roots, learn to take their own side, and demand a place in the planet's future (yes, I said demand , ..."
"... Until whites have a story and a spirit of their own, they will only, and can only, live through the identities and triumphs of other races. And perhaps most critically, they will continue to be a ghost people on the march to extinction. ..."
The conservative movement's unwholesome obsession with Israel is not an entirely organic
obsession to be sure. There is a whole lot of dark kosher oligarch money lurking behind the
neoconservative cause, Christian Zionism, and the Reagan/Zioboomer battalion. Nevertheless,
whether organic or not, the boomer generation's excessive regard for Israel is today authentic
and undeniable. A strong fealty to Israel is deeply entrenched amongst boomer-generation
conservatives. Indeed, when it comes to defending Israel and its conduct, many of these types
are like samurais on meth. They don't seem to care at all if their entire state or city should
devolve into a semi-anarchic New Somalia, but god forbid some Somali congresswoman should
lambaste the sacred Jewish state. That simply can't be countenanced here in the land of the
free!
Mind you, this article is not meant to constitute a polemic against Israel, or Jewish
ethnopolitics for that matter. The BDS movement is just as wrongheaded as Ziocuckoldry, in my
humble opinion. Although there is much wrong with Israel, there is plenty right with it as
well. Despite what the modern left may believe, there is nothing inherently illegitimate about
a state like Israel, one rooted in history, in genes, in religion, and in race. States built
around a shared ethnicity or a shared religion (or, as in Israel's case, an ample helping of
both) are generally more stable and successful than diverse societies erected upon propositions
most people and peoples don't really accept, or leftist values that have ideological quicksand
for their foundations.
With that said, there is something awfully peculiar, almost disturbing about the old guard's infatuation with Israel. I
mean, why are American boomers so concerned about the Jewish state and its survival? How exactly does a tiny apartheidesque ethnostate half-way around the world
affect their everyday lives? Are they simply mind-slaves to a mainstream media dominated by
powerful Jews and powerful Jewish interest groups? Is this all really about scripture as
Christian radio likes to contend? Or is there something else afoot here? Well, in short, there
is.
White Westerners, white Americans in particular, are a thoroughly vassalized, deracinated
people. We aren't allowed to celebrate our own race's host of historic accomplishments anymore.
That would be racist. We aren't allowed to put our own people first either, as all other
peoples do. That would likewise be racist. White Western peoples aren't even allowed to have
nations of our own any longer, nations which exist to advance our interests, and which are
populated by and overseen by people like us, who share our interests and our attitudes. That
also would be, you guessed it, racist. Our very existence is increasingly little more than an
unfortunate, racist obstacle to a brighter, more diverse future, in the eyes of the Cultural
Marxist sociopaths who rule the Western World. Needless to say, most white Americans would
rather be dead than racist, and so we are naturally, quite literally dying as a result.
The white American psyche has been tamed, broken as it were. Ziocucking is a symptom of that
psychic injury. Because white boomers possess no group/tribal identity any longer, or
collective will, or sense of race pride, or civilizational prospects, because they have been enserfed by a viciously anti-white Cultural Marxist overclass, they have opted to live
vicariously through another race. White Americans can not, they must not, stake claim to an
identity or a future of their own, so they have essentially committed themselves to another
people's identity and future instead of their own. Indeed, just as the cuckold doesn't
merely permit another man to penetrate his wife, but actually takes a kind of perverse pleasure
in the pleasure of that other man, in large measure by fetishizing his dominance and sexual
prowess, the Ziocuck likewise doesn't merely allow his civilization to be debased, he takes an
equally perverse pleasure in the triumphs of other peoples and nations, and by so doing
imagines, mistakenly of course, that America itself is still as free and proud a nation as
those foreign nations he fetishizes.
Actually, Donald Trump's electoral victory is at least partially attributable to a very
similar psychological phenomenon. White Americans, who have largely lost the self-confidence to
stand behind their traditions and convictions, still had the gumption to vote for a man who
possesses in oodles and cringy oodles, the self-same self-confidence they lack. White Americans
are thus engaged in an almost unstated, indirect, vicarious defiance of Cultural Marxism via
Trump/Trumpism, a tangible, albeit somewhat incoherent, symbol of open revolt against Western
elites. The repressed group will of whites is longing for an authentic medium of civilizational
expression, but can only find two-bit demagoguery and Israel worship. The weather is not fair
in the white, Western mind.
Through this sordid, vicarious identitarianism, threats to Jewish lives become threats to
their own white lives. Jewish interests become tantamount to their own interests. It is a sad
sight to behold anyhow, a people with no sense of dignity or shame, too cowed by political
correctness to stand up for their own group interests, too brainwashed to love themselves, too
reprogrammed to be themselves, idolizing alien peoples. Nevertheless, the need for belonging in
place, time, and history, and for collective purpose, doesn't just go away because Western
elites say being white signifies nothing but "hate". As white civilization aborts and hedonizes
itself into extinction, as whites practice suicidal altruism and absolute racial denialism,
atomized white individuals seek out other histories, other stories, other peoples to attach
themselves to and project themselves onto.
White Americans have thus foolishly come to see their own destiny as inseparable from the
destiny of a people whose destiny they don't really share.
After all, the birthrates of Jews in Israel are at well above replacement level .
Israelis are optimistic
about the future. As whites in the West fall on their proverbial sword to atone for their
racist past, Jews in Israel are thriving.
As whites in America suffer from various epidemics of despair , their fellow white
Americans seem more interested in the imaginary plight of Israelis who can't stop winning
military skirmishes, embarrassing their Arab enemies, and unlawfully acquiring land and
resources in the Levant. The actual, visceral plight of their own people seems almost an
afterthought to most white Americans. The whole affair is frankly bizarre and shameful.
This peculiar psychological phenomenon of vicarious identitarianism is at least partially
responsible for the Zioboomer's undying devotion to Israel. Furthermore, that unwholesome
obsession will not dissipate until whites reclaim their own history, rediscover their roots,
learn to take their own side, and demand a place in the planet's future (yes, I said
demand , since the white race's many enemies have no intention of saving a place for
them or willingly handing them a say in that future). Until whites have a story and a spirit of
their own, they will only, and can only, live through the identities and triumphs of other
races. And perhaps most critically, they will continue to be a ghost people on the march to
extinction.
A related phenomenon is Russia-cucking. White American conservatives who have seen through
Jewish bullshit often seem to conclude that the racial predicament in America is hopeless, so
they switch to Russia-cucking. Being pro-Russia is obviously more sensible than being
pro-Israel, but it's nationalism by proxy all the same.
Seeing that both the Canadian ambassador to Banderastan and his boss the Canadian Foreign
Minister having family histories rooted in western Ukraine / Banderastan Ground Zero –
Waschuk's father and Freeland's maternal grandmother both from Ivano-Frankivsk – what
thoughts are we expected to have on Waschuk's participation and Freeland's approval for him
to attend other than that cliche: "Birds of a feather flock together?"
Ivano-Frankivsk; formerly Stanyslaviv, Stanislau, or Stanisławów. Became part of
the UkSSR within the USSR as per the shifting of the pre-WWII Eastern Polish frontier (set by
the Treaty of Versailles, 1919, but ignored by Poland) westwards and the transference of the
Habsburg Austro-Hungarian Empire's Kronland of Galitsia, capital Krakow and
administrative language Polish and not German as in other Kronländer , with the
exception of Hungarian in the Hungarian part of the dual Hapsburg Empire.
Religion: Roman Catholic or Greek Uniate, depending whether you are a Polish Pan or a
Ruthenian peasant shitkicker.
Built in the mid-17th century as a fortress of the Polish Potocki family,
Stanisławów was annexed to the Habsburg Empire during the First Partition of
Poland in 1772, after which it became the property of the State within the Austrian
Empire.
The fortress was slowly transformed into one of the most prominent cities at the foothills
of the Carpathian Mountains. After World War I, for several months, it served as a temporary
capital of the West Ukrainian People's Republic.
Galitsia, as Porky Poroshenko said, is the essence of Banderastan the Ukraine.
"Higher Justice is always done Once again, using humanistic principles, I address the
enemies of the Ukraine: 'Surrender to Ukrainian law enforcement! Voluntarily go to Ukrainian
prisons and don't leave them! Because God's punishment will inevitably come! Glory to the
nation! Death to enemies!'" -- Dmitry Yarosh, commenting on his Facebook page on the
murder of a DPR militiaman in Mariupol.
What can be said about this? A day has already passed since this extremist statement
was made, but no human rights organisation or international observer has reacted. The murder
of a DPR militiaman in Mariupol is obviously on the hands of nationalist battalions, but this
case, like many others, will be registered as unsolved or fabricated. The fact of the
exemplary punishment of people who supported the creation of the People's Republics testifies
to the true attitude of Kiev towards the residents of Donbass. That is why Zelensky is
against amnesty and wants elections after the People's Militia lays down their arms. As soon
as the UAF come here, objectionable persons will be simply slashed and killed, and Yarosh
only confirms this
I'll say it again, the world's great democracies don't have a problem with little
nazis and extremists. After all, they can be put back in their boxes when time is due,
just as they did with Adolf Hitler and just as they did with ISIS in Syria.
You wonder how many times these countries go around this bush of backing 'small groups'
that they then 'lose control of' leading to a much larger conflagration.
Accidental? Unintended? Repetitive? You won't have the great and good democratic
institutions or the representatives of the great free press publicizing cause and
effect much at all. What a bunch of Britneys!
As I understand it if a scope equipped assault automatic weapon can be targeted at point A to
point B, its versatility enables it to operate the other way 'round..from B to A.
And as regards the "crimes" in the Ukraine that he mentions, I should not imagine that
amongst those he includes the very recent and public murder of a Mariupol "Vatnik" and the
praise for which crime the murderer/s has/have very publicly received in Banderastan.
The clipped paragraph in Boyes' Times article above reads:
Now we're at it again. Thirty-five Ukrainians, including a film director and two dozen
hapless sailors, were this month traded for some hardnut separatists including Vladimir
Tsemakh, the commander of a Russian-backed unit in Donetsk which shot down the civilian MH17
airliner in 2014.
Plenty of Dutch and Australian relatives of the victims of that Malaysian Airlines
flight are unhappy that Tsemakh is
Perhaps it seems to Trump that Putin is the lever that will raise his moral weight and
authority. Perhaps he seems to him to be a useful partner in times of extreme global
confusion and volatility. It is possible that, in the opinion of the American president, a
rapprochement with Putin will strengthen his reputation in the world, and will by no means
will look like a fatal retreat. However, the principle should be that relations with Russia
cannot return to normal, as long as it keeps the Crimea, cynically taken away from the
Ukraine five years ago.
The Kremlin will try to fool the new and inexperienced president of the Ukraine, hoping
that Western leaders will put pressure on him and forget a lot. However, the country where
Sergey Skripal and his daughter were poisoned right before everyone's eyes should not
silently watch this rehabilitation.
[back translation from the Russian]
Hear him, hear him, I say!
Let's hear it again for Great Britain!!!!
Those British are no fools and know full well what those damned Russkies are up to!
"... Rickards had previously worked for the CIA (possibly still does – who knows?) but now seems to be a free-wheeling business executive, writer and strategic analyst. He tends to circulate outside of the usual middle-ranking semi-elite circles preferring to consort with the less observable, higher-ranking coteries of the inner-party. Moreover, he has nothing but disdain for the run-of-the-mill talking heads to be found (in abundance) in the media and academia – the outer-party. ..."
"... History is the first casualty of media micro-second attention span. An army of pseudo-savants saturate the airways to explain that tariffs are bad, trade wars hurt growth and mercantilism are a throwback to the 17th century. These sentiments come from mainstream liberals and conservatives and tag-along journalists trained in the orthodoxy of so-called free-trade and the false if comforting belief that trade deficits are the flipside of capital surpluses. So, what is the problem? The problem is that perpetual trade deficits have put the United States on a path to a crisis of the US$."[ 1 ] ..."
"... Obama, both Bushes, and Bill Clinton were globalists, defined as those willing to trade-off or compromise US interests for the sake of a stronger global community even conservative hawks like Reagan and JFK were firmly in the globalist camp, as they relied on NATO, the UN and the IMF to pursue their cold war goals. ..."
"... LBJ's administration contrived to conduct the Vietnam War as well as an expensive social programme, simultaneously. A guns plus butter economy. (The original version of the Guns versus butter argument was given in a speech on January 17, 1936, in Nazi Germany. The then Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels stated: "We can do without butter, but, despite all our love of peace, not without arms." ) ..."
"... Globally, the leading manufacturer of auto-vehicles is Volkswagen followed by Toyota. GM are 4th and Ford are 8th of ten. Hardly market leaders anymore, but Rickards apportions the blame to 'unfair practices' by foreign manufacturers and argues instead for tariffs. The same goes for other trade partners. Fact that the United States has to a large extent been deindustrialised was a political choice of its own making. ..."
"... There were a number of advantages which accrued to the dollar contingent on the ending of gold convertibility which Eichengreen listed these in his book. But the principle one was making the surplus nations of the world pay for America's wars with an unconvertible currency. Instead of being paid for in gold, or at least a gold-backed currency the world produced goods and services for a piece of green paper backed by nothing. ..."
"... This was to be expected quite simply because at bottom Rickards is a sophist much in the tradition of Protagoras, Gorgias and Thrasymachus "I say that justice is nothing other than the advantage of the stronger" [ 12 ] ..."
"... A view which Rickards would certainly endorse. Beneath the Upper Manhattan, polished chic, there resides a ruthless Cold Warrior. The further one digs into the book, the more this becomes apparent. ..."
"... Many of us are aware of the problems of the USD but few are able to so succinctly explain why and connect the dots to expose the true picture. The bottom line is that the lifespan of the USD as king is almost over ..."
"... The US has been exposed, and so well said, as a predator nation .There must be a reason why China and Russia are buying up as much gold as their economy will permit .The exchange medium used for trade since time immemorial . ..."
"... The Wall Street ethos has always been 'kill or be killed' where bears eat, and bulls eat, but pigs get slaughtered! The problem with today's market & stock valuations is that they are as hyperinflated as Real Estate Commercial & Residential sectors are which leaves no wiggle room for price discovery until there is a system wide crash that mean reverts the valuations back to a realistic price. ..."
"... All that is happening now is that Trump is trying to solve his country's intractable economic and financial problems by looting the rest of the planet. This is not a new development, but Trump is at least refreshingly honest in his public pronouncements. ..."
"... The Nazi Empire imposed tribute on its conquests in identical fashion. Send us your industrial output, agricultural produce and raw materials. In return we'll give you a big credit balance at the Reichsbank. ..."
"... The current (real) military budget is $1,134 billion, around 60% higher than the fictitious figure that is normally touted. ..."
"... Gold could form some kind of basis for exchange in a collapse setting. Other desirable barter items would be alcohol, cigarettes, basic drugs like aspirin and paracetamol, electrical batteries, fuel and similar goods. Maybe ammunition as well. Goods were priced in cigarettes in postwar Germany. ..."
"... Bismarck is normally credited with the choice between Guns and Butter. Goebbels was suggesting that Guns will bring Butter. ..."
"... The crime in all this is in the pursuit of money -- ultimately a wholly artificial concept -- we're wasting immense amounts of resources and human potential, spreading misery and despoliation all over the planet and generally behaving like really awful global citizens. We can and must do better. ..."
"... American exceptionalism, for example, takes it for granted that we in the West are good, and therefore the East must become more like us. But we are logically, and morally, obliged to look at this from the opposite perspective too: What if the Chinese take it for granted that they are good, and therefore the West must become more like them? ..."
"... American parasitism writ large over the last half century has amply signified to the entire world that 'manifest destiny' was merely a ruse to foist American hegemony onto all sovereign nations at the behest of an out-of-control American Oligopoly that was power-tripping post WW2 & drunk on the souls of the poor sots all over the entire world with their power hungry warmongering Military Industrial Complex. ..."
"... Its not "American". We just happen to be the chosen host for this part of history. Before us it was the British Empire that was top dog. ..."
"... You have made the common mistake of asserting that it is America, instead of those who govern (the USA and its pundits) that have engineered the problems you point out. ..."
"... To condense this lengthy essay: This ship is sinking. ..."
"Aftermath" is the latest addition to three previous publications by Rickards, Currency Wars (2011), The Death of Money (2014),
The Road to Ruin (2016). Together, with the present offering (Aftermath, 2019), the author uses the analogy of the Four Horsemen
of the Apocalypse to illustrate the themes of his four books. The latest book is thematic in its approach to the events which have
taken place in the world in general and the United States in particular during this period.
HIGH SOCIETY
Rickards had previously worked for the CIA (possibly still does – who knows?) but now seems to be a free-wheeling business executive,
writer and strategic analyst. He tends to circulate outside of the usual middle-ranking semi-elite circles preferring to consort
with the less observable, higher-ranking coteries of the inner-party. Moreover, he has nothing but disdain for the run-of-the-mill
talking heads to be found (in abundance) in the media and academia – the outer-party.
His observations of this social stratum are unapologetic and caustic:
History is the first casualty of media micro-second attention span. An army of pseudo-savants saturate the airways to explain
that tariffs are bad, trade wars hurt growth and mercantilism are a throwback to the 17th century. These sentiments come from
mainstream liberals and conservatives and tag-along journalists trained in the orthodoxy of so-called free-trade and the false
if comforting belief that trade deficits are the flipside of capital surpluses. So, what is the problem? The problem is that perpetual
trade deficits have put the United States on a path to a crisis of the US$."[
1 ]
As is apparent, his contempt is palpable.
It should be said that much of his writing and theorising is at times occasioned by a high level of sophistication, alas sadly
lacking in most of his contemporaries. But for all his refinement and eloquence that doesn't stop him being, from Off Guardian's
perspective (and mine), on the other side – the side of the Anglo-Zionist empire.
THE GREAT BETRAYAL
Throughout this book and previous books there runs a familiar leitmotif; a sense of betrayal by the present dominant section of
the US elite. This is not by any means an unusual political phenomenon and bears comparison with the stab-in-the-back myth – a notion
doing the rounds in Germany circa 1918.
It held that the German Army did not lose World War I on the battlefield but it was 'traitors' on the home front, especially the
traitorous republicans who overthrew the Hohenzollern monarchy in the German Revolution of 1918–19.
This precedent loosely corresponds to Rickards' belief in the perfidy of the current leadership of the US and his vitriol is directed
against this globalist faction who are firmly ensconced in both Democrat and Republican parties and whom, he argues, have sold the
pass in terms of America's strategic interests. He writes:
Obama, both Bushes, and Bill Clinton were globalists, defined as those willing to trade-off or compromise US interests for
the sake of a stronger global community even conservative hawks like Reagan and JFK were firmly in the globalist camp, as they
relied on NATO, the UN and the IMF to pursue their cold war goals.
However, all was not lost. As a result of
the Presidential election of 2016 when Donald Trump was sworn in on 17 January 2017 as the strongest nationalist since Theodore
Roosevelt. For the first time in 100 years a committed nationalist was sitting in the Oval Office." [
2 ]
The event was obviously political grist to Rickards' mill.
However, precisely how this liberation of the US from the domestic globalists' stranglehold was to be brought about wasn't made
clear, and in fact is barely touched upon by Rickards.
Trump, for all his bombast and promises to Make America Great Again (MAGA), and pursue a radical foreign policy of withdrawal
from globalist wars of choice and military adventurism, has been conspicuous by its absence.
Moreover, from the outset he has been beset by the ancien regime of neo-conservatives and neo-liberals – Bolton, Pompeo and Pence
– entrenched in key US institutions, as well as various think-tanks and media who are still doggedly set upon the realization of
neo-con foreign policy goals.
It seems odd that Rickards doesn't see fit to comment on this important development given that Trumps' campaign promises have
disappeared almost without trace since he entered the Oval Office.
IT'S THE ECONOMY STUPID
Rickards is on firmer ground, however, when dissecting the 8th wonder of the world – US economic policy. The US sovereign debt
(i.e., the debt of the Federal Government) to GDP is now at a record, this is unprecedented for a peacetime administration.
In addition, it is also worth noting the magnitude of US private debt and unfunded future liabilities, pensions, Medicaid, social
security and so forth.
This would include household debt, student debt, financial debt, corporate debt, and municipal debt. Add this to sovereign debt
and you get a figure roughly 5 times US sovereign debt, and even this is regarded as being a conservative figure according to many
– see David Stockman, John Mauldin et al).
According to Rickards, the present situation has been largely the result of excess spending by both Democratic and Republican
administrations. The spending has either been on 'Defence' – a Republican favourite – or social like L.B. Johnson's 'Great Society'
programme – a Democratic favourite.
LBJ's administration contrived to conduct the Vietnam War as well as an expensive social programme, simultaneously. A guns plus
butter economy. (The original version of the Guns versus butter argument was given in a speech on January 17, 1936, in Nazi Germany.
The then Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels stated: "We can do without butter, but, despite all our love of peace, not without
arms." )
LBJ's guns-and-butter policies were enacted in the late sixties at the height of the Vietnam war and the Tet Offensive. The utopian
attempt to have the best of both worlds brought LBJ's administration to an end; more importantly, perhaps it was also the beginning
of the process which brought down the curtain on the post WW2 economic world order established at the Bretton Woods conference in
1944.
Because the costs of the Vietnam war were superimposed on the economy not far effectively from full employment, the US domestic
sector was severely destabilised.
Instead of taxing the nation to pay for the war, the government engaged in the more acceptable practice of deficit financing
Vietnam showed that neither the United States nor any other democratic nation can ever again afford the foreign exchange costs
of conventional warfare, although the periphery was still kept in line by American military initiatives most recently in Yugoslavia
and Afghanistan.
The lesson in the long term is that peace will be maintained only by governments refusing to finance the military and other
excesses of the increasingly indebted imperial power." [
3 ]
The figure for the US sovereign debt – began to rise relentlessly from the 1980s onwards approaching wartime levels by the time
of the 2008 blowout.
It has been estimated by some economic theorists that any sovereign Debt-to-GDP figure greater than 60% represents a tripwire
whereby governments should act to rein in government expenditures.
The EU Maastricht criteria, for example, stipulated that EU Debt-to-GDP should not go over 60% except in certain circumstances
and an annual budgetary deficit should not be more than 3%.
That is a pretty tight monetary and fiscal policy EU style, but not to be outdone the spendthrift US was to go on a wild binge
in both fiscal and monetary terms the result of which is a now an unpayable mountain of debt. This gives an indication of how far
US economic policymaking has drifted away from any viable economic strategy.
Rickards fulminates:
To see how America came to this pretty pass we, one needs to review almost 40 years of fiscal policy under Presidents Reagan,
Bush 1, Clinton, Bush 2, Obama and Trump from the period 1981-2019." [
4 ]
Under Reagan in 1981 US Debt-to-GDP ratio was 32.5%. The President was gung-ho for tax cuts and big spending increases, particularly
'defence' spending. This trend was continued under the tutelage of the Bushes and Clinton, and Debt-to-GDP ratio rose to 56.4% when
Bush Jr, took office and had risen to 82% by the time he left.
The Obama years saw the Debt-to-GDP rise to 100%. The diagram below 2009 debt-to-GDP was 82.3% This figure has risen inexorably
to over 100% in 2018. Yep, here we have the dreaded law of Diminishing returns. Every new dollar of input gives you 90 cents of output.
The above diagram illustrates the growth of debt vis-ŕ-vis National Income (GDP) since the 2008 blowout. Debt has been growing
progressively faster than National Income.
The US economy, like the US shale oil industry, has become a Ponzi scheme in all but name. The Fed's issuance of new debt to pay
off existing debt signals the key moment of the Minsky crisis.[
5 ]
There doesn't appear to be any viable way out this predicament short of a straight default. But Rickards argues that 'the United
States will never default on its debt because the Fed can simply print the money and to pay it off.' This will involve an engineered
inflation to wipe out the debt. But in fact, inflation is the default, a default by the back door. Getting paid in worthless currency
is in essence no different than not getting paid at all.
NO EXIT
As for solutions to a crisis which has seemingly reached the point of no return, all that Rickards can offer is a Japanese scenario
of low or zero growth punctuated by recession for the United States and by implication for the rest of the world. The United States
had its first long decade from 2007 to 2017 and is now into its second decade.
This growth pattern will persist absent of inflationary breakout which the Fed seems powerless to ignite in the short run;
a war; or severe depression perhaps caused by a new financial crisis.[
6 ]
Not much of a prospect for the average family then. But Rickards does give some useful advice to his more opulent readers on how
they should diversify their assets.
There are apparently "luxury bombproof bunkers built in former missile silos and expansive estates in New Zealand loaded with
rations and good wines."
Really? At this point one wonders if Mr Rickards is being serious or just smug.
SOCIAL IMMOBILITY AND THE RISE OF OLIGARCHY
The social and economic impact on levels of inequality in both the US and globally have been extremely deleterious and seem set
to continue. Inequality in income and wealth – a phenomenon identified and outlined by Thomas Piketty – is resulting in societies
which more and more resemble feudal economic and social structures rather than textbook capitalism. Social class is hardening into
social caste and rates of social mobility are decelerating at an alarming rate.
The liberal notion that the individual is the author of his/her own destiny has become a very dubious proposition when the drawbridges
of advantage, birth and preferment are drawn up. Moreover, high levels of income/wealth are not conducive to growth since the new
aristocracy owns most of the wealth/income which is hoarded rather than spent on investment and/or consumption. Stagnation, idled
capital and rent extraction becomes the economic norm.
Inequality is common in college admissions where the wealthy and connected continue to send their sons and daughters to elite schools
while the middle-class are restrained by sky-high tuitions and the burden of student loans.
It's true in the housing market where the rich picked up mansions on the cheap in foreclosure sales whilst the middle-class were
frozen in mortgage negative equity.
It's true in health care, where the rich could afford all the insurance they needed while the middle class were handicapped by
unemployment and the loss of job-related benefits. These disparities also affected the adult children of the middle-class. There
are no gold-plated benefits packages in the gig society
Research shows that fewer than 50% of all children aged 30 today earn more than their parents did at the same age. This 50% figure
compares with 60% who earned more in 1971, and 80% who earned more in 1950.
The American dream of each generation earning more than the prior generation is collapsing before our eyes The middle class is
getting poorer on a relative basis and lagging further behind the rich whose incomes absorb an increasing share of total GDP The
manner in which the rich become rich is variable.
It could be due to a number of unrelated factors Problems arise in the way that the rich stay rich become richer and pass on wealth
to their children and grandchildren." [
7 ]
It is a matter of common knowledge that the traditional techniques of preserving and creating wealth have been long established
in law, customs, education and socialization; these traditional methods being practised over decades, if not centuries, have produced
a system of elite self-recruitment, one moreover which endures through time.
Many of the richest US citizens – e.g., Buffet, Bezos, Zuckerberg – pay minimal tax demands. Much of the wealth of the richest
Americans is never taxed because they hold onto real estate and stocks and pass them onto their beneficiaries tax-free. This is one
of a perfectly legal method of avoiding tax; there are many more too numerous to cite which include various other examples of tax
avoidance/evasion.
Levels of income and wealth inequality within states are usually measured by what is called the Gini Co-efficient. This measure
is a commonly used measure of income inequality that condenses the entire income distribution for a country into a single number
between 0 and 1 or 0% to 100%: the higher the number, the greater the degree of inequality. A rough estimate of inequality is a figure
above 40%.
The United States and China are in the low forties, surrounded by underdeveloped and developing states such as The Democratic
Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Burundi and El Salvador. At the other end of the spectrum are Sweden, Norway and Iceland.
In this connection the by now well-known study carried out by two American academics at Princeton University Prof Martin Gilens
and North western University Prof Benjamin Page argue that the US is dominated by a rich and powerful elite.
Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial
independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent
influence."
In plain English: the wealthy few move policy, while the average American has little power.
The two professors came to this conclusion after reviewing answers to 1,779 survey questions asked between 1981 and 2002 on public
policy issues. They broke the responses down by income level, and then determined how often certain income levels and organised interest
groups saw their policy preferences enacted.
Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association
and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organisations
and a small number of affluent Americans, then America's claims to be a democratic society are seriously threatened."
In summation, both gentlemen concluded that in essence the US was an oligarchy not a properly functioning democracy. All very
true but somewhat self-evident.
Rickards regards the present situation as being irreversible. He does not present any alternative to this trend other than some
vague hopes that the 'nationalist' President in the Oval Office will turn things around – MAGA in fact.
The golden age of post WW2 capitalism ended when Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard in August 1971, which was in effect
a default by the US. Holders of surplus dollars in Europe who were no longer able to swap these dollars for gold but were merely
presented with other US$s with which they had to purchase US Treasurys (Bonds) debts which were never going to be repaid. In the
age of fiat currencies Europe and various other holders of US Treasuries were in fact subsidizing the United States.
POOR LITTLE AMERICA
At this point the book becomes one long whinge about how hard done-by America has been and how the rest of the world has taken
advantage of this benign gentle giant. This rather bizarre belief calls for further analysis. The US pays some of the bill for NATO
whilst European nations pay insufficient amounts for the 'defence' of their countries.
It should be pointed out, however, that in terms of military hardware the NATO alliance is standardized to American specifications.
This means large-scale purchasing of US war materiel which is a gift bonus to the US armaments industry.
Then Germany has the nerve to buy Russian gas transported to Europe via Nordstream 2 which is cheaper and more reliable than US
Liquified Natural Gas (LNG), when in fact they should be buying more expensive and less reliable US LNG. Apparently, Germany ought
really to be subsidising the US shale oil Ponzi racket. Bad, ungrateful Germany.
Then comes the incessant carping regarding trade policy and trade deals. The US in its speed to become a cool, post-modern, financialised
economy apparently forgot about the importance of production. In the automobile industry the once dominant US triad of General Motors,
Ford and Chrysler are no longer in the vanguard and Japan, with South Korea catching up, is now the leading country in the export
of auto vehicles, a position which the US once held. It was the Japanese auto industry which pioneered production methods including
just-in-time deliveries and lean production (Toyota). Was anyone stopping the Americans from innovating?
In rank order. Figures quoted in Global Shift – Peter Dicken.
Globally, the leading manufacturer of auto-vehicles is Volkswagen followed by Toyota. GM are 4th and Ford are 8th of ten.
Hardly market leaders anymore, but Rickards apportions the blame to 'unfair practices' by foreign manufacturers and argues instead
for tariffs. The same goes for other trade partners. Fact that the United States has to a large extent been deindustrialised was
a political choice of its own making.
If the US has lost ground in the competition for trade on world markets that is because of its own insular provincialism and hubris,
not foreign competitive malpractice. Moreover, much of its productive industry which remains has been outsourced to low cost venues
such as China. The US more than anyone should know that its competitors are simply using the same policies that it itself used during
the 19th century to break British trade hegemony.
It has been the same story with agriculture. Trade liberalization (this must rank as the greatest misnomer of trade theory) and
trade treaties have been an example of the blatant unfairness of such agreements. During the Uruguay round of 'talks' (1982-2000):
the United States pushed other countries to open up their markets to areas of 'our' (i.e. the US's) strength, but resisted, successfully
so, to efforts to make us reciprocate.
Construction and maritime services, the areas of advantage of many developing countries were not included in the new agreement.
Worse still, financial services liberalization was arguably even harmful to some developing countries: as large international (read
American) banks squelched local competitors denying them the funds they garnered would be channelled to the international firms with
which they felt comfortable, not the small and medium-sized local firms
As foreign banks took over the banking systems of like Argentina and Mexico worries about small and medium sized firms within
these countries being starved of funds have been repeatedly voiced.
Whether these concerns are valid or not, whether they are exaggerated or not, is not the issue: the issue is that countries should
have the right to make these decisions themselves, as the United States did in its own country during its formative years; but under
the new international rules that America had pushed, countries were being deprived of that right.
Suffice it to say that agriculture has always been a flagrant example of the double standards inherent in the US trade liberalization
agenda. Although we insisted that other countries reduce their barriers to our products and eliminate the subsidies for which those
products competed against ours, the United States kept barriers for the goods produced by the developing countries, and the US continued
massive subsidies to its own produce. [
8 ] EXORBITANT PRIVILEGE
Oh, I almost forgot: the imperial tribute that the world pays to the hegemon; aka the reserve status of the dollar. The role of
the US dollar in the world's political economy gives it advantages which the rest of the dollar surplus-states are dragooned into
accepting. In the late sixties early seventies, the US was on the verge of technical bankruptcy due to its spending profligacy at
home and military adventurism in Indochina. It had three choices of how to deal with this acute problem.
[The] 3 courses open to the US government on the collapse of the Gold Pool in London in 1968 were: immediately pull out of
the war in South-East Asia and cut back overseas and domestic military expenditure to allow the dollar to firm again on world
markets; to continue the war paying for its foreign exchange costs with further outflows of Fort Knox gold; or to induce the Europeans
and other payments surplus areas to continue to accumulate surplus dollars and dollar equivalents (US Treasuries) not convertible
into gold." [ 9 ]
Of course, it was option three that appealed and Nixon in his television broadcast was to announce a 'temporary' suspension of
gold sales by the US to its overseas 'partners'.
The date in question, 15 August 1971, marked the end of one epoch and the beginning of another. The temporary suspension soon
morphed into a permanent one and a global fiat currency regime based on the dollar came into being. This represented a culmination
of a situation in which the US manipulation of the dollar was termed the 'Exorbitant Privilege' by the senior French politician Valery
Giscard d'Estaing. And privilege it was.
The central political fact is that the dollar standard places the direction of the world monetary policy in the hands of a
single country which thereby acquires great influence over the economic destiny of others. It is one thing to sacrifice sovereignty
in the interests of interdependence; it is quite another when the relationship is one-way.
The difference is that between the EEC(EU) and a colonial empire. The brute fact is that the acceptance of a dollar standard
necessarily implies a degree of asymmetry in power which, although it actually existed in the early post-war years, had vanished
by the time that the world sliding into a reluctant dollar standard." [
10 ]
There were a number of advantages which accrued to the dollar contingent on the ending of gold convertibility which Eichengreen
listed these in his book. But the principle one was making the surplus nations of the world pay for America's wars with an unconvertible
currency. Instead of being paid for in gold, or at least a gold-backed currency the world produced goods and services for a piece
of green paper backed by nothing.
Quite a clever little racket when you think about it.
Better still is the way that the two biggest surplus nations, Japan and China, have been the US's main creditors, bankrolling
the US by buying its Treasuries. This had another intended, or perhaps unintended effect: long term interest rates on US bonds came
down (since bond prices and bond interest rates move in opposite directions) and enabled the property bubble to expand until the
inevitable blow-out in 2008.
In mafia terms the US dollar has been a 'made' currency enjoying a set of privileges and protection which it did not earn but
foisted upon others. This is a unique dispensation which is enjoyed by the US to which the rest of the world is excluded.
However, it is in the nature of things that privileges will ultimately get abused. In pushing its luck to the point of abuse the
US should be aware that initial signs are that the world is sloughing off the US dollar. As it proceeds in that direction, the US
currency will lose its position as the global reserve asset. Holders of trillions of dollar-denominated assets will become sellers
eventuating in a collapse of the currency.
The US economy lives like a parasite off its partners in the global system, with virtually no savings of its own. The World
produces whilst North America consumes. The advantage of the US is that of a predator whose advantage is covered, by what others
agree, or are forced, to contribute.
Washington uses various means to make up for its deficiencies: for example, repeated violations of the principles of liberalism,
arms exports, and the hunting-down of oil super-profits (which involves the periodic felling of producers; one of the real motives
behind the wars in Iraq and Central Asia).
But the fact is that the bulk of the American deficit is covered by capital inputs from Europe and Japan, China and the South,
rich oil-producing countries and comprador classes from all regions, including the poorest, in the third world, to which should
be added the debt-service levy that is imposed on nearly every country in the periphery of the global system. The US superpower
depends from day to day on the flow of capital which sustains its economy and society. The vulnerability of the United States
represents a serious danger to Washington's project." [
11 ]
In light of the above we may conclude that – in spite of the irritating name-dropping – Rickards' books are interesting well written
and well-argued; per contra they are very light on facts which have been left deliberately unexamined as well as counter-narratives
which have also been ignored.
This was to be expected quite simply because at bottom Rickards is a sophist much in the tradition of Protagoras, Gorgias
and Thrasymachus "I say that justice is nothing other than the advantage of the stronger" [
12 ]
A view which Rickards would certainly endorse. Beneath the Upper Manhattan, polished chic, there resides a ruthless Cold Warrior.
The further one digs into the book, the more this becomes apparent.
NOTES:-
[1] Rickards – Aftermath – page.21
[2] Ibid., – page.65
[3] Michael Hudson – Super Imperialism – pp.298/99, 32.
[4] Rickards – Ibid. – page.66
[5] Hyman Minsky's theories about debt accumulation received revived attention in the media during the subprime mortgage crisis
of the late 2000s. The New Yorker has labelled it "the Minsky Moment". Minsky argued that a key mechanism that pushes an economy
towards a crisis is the accumulation of debt by the non-government sector. He identified three types of borrowers that contribute
to the accumulation of insolvent debt: hedge borrowers, speculative borrowers, and Ponzi borrowers.
The "hedge borrower" can make debt payments (covering interest and principal) from current cash flows from investments. For
the "speculative borrower", the cash flow from investments can service the debt, i.e., cover the interest due, but the borrower
must regularly roll over, or re-borrow, the principal. The "Ponzi borrower" (named for Charles Ponzi, see also Ponzi scheme) borrows
based on the belief that the appreciation of the value of the asset will be sufficient to refinance the debt but could not make
sufficient payments on interest or principal with the cash flow from investments; only the appreciating asset value can keep the
Ponzi borrower afloat.
[6] Rickards – Ibid., page.85
[7] Rickards – Ibid., page.239
[8] Joseph Stiglitz – The Roaring 90s – pp.206/207
[9] Gold Pool 1968. The price of one troy ounce of gold was pegged to US$35. The larger the gap, known as the gold window,
between free market gold price and the foreign exchange rate, the more tempting it was for nations to deal with internal economic
crises by buying gold at the Bretton Woods price and selling it in the gold markets. It couldn't last and it didn't.
[10] Michael Hudson – Ibid. – p.309
[11] Barry Eichengreen – Exorbitant Privilege – passim.
Frank Lee left school at age 15 without any qualifications,
but gained degrees from both New College Oxford and the London School of Economics (it's a long story). He spent many years as a
lecturer in politics and economics, and in the Civil Service, before retirement. He lives in Sutton with his wife and little dog.
Guy
Excellent article by Frank Lee. Many of us are aware of the problems of the USD but few are able to so succinctly explain
why and connect the dots to expose the true picture. The bottom line is that the lifespan of the USD as king is almost over
.There will not be any rabbit pulled out of the hat to make America great again.That is a feel good cliché used to further
induce the population to go back to sleep.
The US has been exposed, and so well said, as a predator nation .There must be a reason why China and Russia are buying
up as much gold as their economy will permit .The exchange medium used for trade since time immemorial .
FoodBowl
Measuring 'National Debt as a Portion of the US Economy' is for economics classes and for newspapers to publish. The Criminal
Elites look at things differently. They measure the National Debt as a Portion of the 'FEROCIOUS BOMBING POWER the US Possess'.
Also, 'Spreading Chaos Capabilities' is added to the Bombing Power.
From this point of view, they see enormous assets, and the debts becomes less worrying as they see less urgency to deal with
this ever growing liabilities.
Fair dinkum
No analysis required because it's always been the same. The few exploit the many. This has fed the cancers of psychopathy, messiah
complexes and endless wars.
We are rushing towards the midnight sun.
MASTER OF UNIVE
The Wall Street ethos has always been 'kill or be killed' where bears eat, and bulls eat, but pigs get slaughtered! The problem
with today's market & stock valuations is that they are as hyperinflated as Real Estate Commercial & Residential sectors are which
leaves no wiggle room for price discovery until there is a system wide crash that mean reverts the valuations back to a realistic
price.
Warren Buffett is currently sitting on $55 billion in cash so that he does not get destroyed on the upcoming systemic wide
crash. Buffett has never pulled this kind of bread from the table in his lifetime whilst waiting for a systemic crash & the inevitable
fat tail blowout that is poised to rip the face off of the USA & EU as their eyeballs get ripped out too.
Ripping a face off & ripping eyeballs out is day trader speak for kicking counterparties in the groin for the deal. The French
Revolution was all about teaching the financial elite predator class of monetary control freaks who the boss really is when the
gravy train slows during Financial Winter.
And if they can't take the heat they should get out of the kitchen!
RW
mark
All that is happening now is that Trump is trying to solve his country's intractable economic and financial problems by looting
the rest of the planet. This is not a new development, but Trump is at least refreshingly honest in his public pronouncements.
It has always been thus.
The Roman Empire imposed tribute on its subjects. You have to send us so much grain, cattle, so many slaves, so much timber
for shipbuilding, so much precious metal and base metal, so many wild beasts for our circuses. In return we won't kill you.
The Nazi Empire imposed tribute on its conquests in identical fashion. Send us your industrial output, agricultural
produce and raw materials. In return we'll give you a big credit balance at the Reichsbank.
Uncle Sugar says send me your BMWs, fine wines, electronic gadgets, oil and minerals. In return I'll give you some worthless
little pieces of green paper you can exchange for worthless IOUs called Treasury Bills.
The current (real) military budget is $1,134 billion, around 60% higher than the fictitious figure that is normally touted.
The trade deficit is $900 billion. The budget deficit $1,175 billion, over 20% of the overall budget.
America is borrowing around $4 billion a day from the rest of the world. Uncle Sam is the biggest scrounger, parasite, leech,
bludger, and panhandler in the history of the planet.
The official national debt of $22.5 trillion understates the true position by a factor of over ten. Every US man, woman, child,
and babe in arms is in hock to the tune of over $700,000.
The global economy is about to crash, yet again (because it's never really recovered from the 2008 crash)'. Answers on a postcard,
please (and one that doesn't involve giving the banksters eye-watering amounts of money).
Frank Lodge
Without reading the book in question, this seems like an thoroughly sound and incisive review. Just one thing, "cometh" takes
a singular subject.
BigB
Rickards attitude is famously: "Buy gold" to which he creates a fear porn scenario around the coming recession. His solution:
"Buy gold". Not, lets look at the conditions that are causing the underlying boom and bust business cycles and find a solution
that works for humanity. His solution: "Buy gold" which the likes of he and the others who are driving the business cyclical waves
of mutilation have already done to hedge their portfolios. Fuck Ricards. I have no time for those who wish to profit from the
overfinancial immiseration of humanity. And you know where you can stick your gold.
Good luck to anyone who produces gold in an actual collapse scenario. So you need to buy guns and bodyguards for self-protection
if you buy gold...
mark
Gold could form some kind of basis for exchange in a collapse setting. Other desirable barter items would be alcohol, cigarettes,
basic drugs like aspirin and paracetamol, electrical batteries, fuel and similar goods. Maybe ammunition as well. Goods were priced
in cigarettes in postwar Germany.
Gold would probably be of use. Gemstones, jewellery, would not. 99.9% of people are unable to distinguish a real diamond from
a piece of glass.
bevin
"he original version of the Guns versus butter argument was given in a speech on January 17, 1936, in Nazi Germany." Not for the
first time Wikipedia is wrong here. Bismarck is normally credited with the choice between Guns and Butter. Goebbels was suggesting
that Guns will bring Butter.
Martin Usher
Its nice to see this in a book but its really common knowledge. The only thing I'd dispute is this notion of an 'elite', there
is no such thing, its just greed holding the reins -- its like a mass FOMO, nobody's willing to take the long view because it
might mean they'll miss out on what they can grab right now.
The danger we face from this is that if a large enough economic bloc runs by more rational rules then its going to eventually
cream us economically. This forces us to destroy it. This is what's at the bottom of our problems with China. The USSR wasn't
strong or well organized enough to pose a real threat to us so it could be taken down primarily by economic means. The Chinese
learned their lesson from the Russian experience and 'played nice' which they built their country up -- we all heard the commentariat
from a few years ago about them 'not really being communists any more'. Now they're in a position to look us in the eye so we've
got to confront them, to take them down. (You'll notice that one of the conditions that will end the trade war is the 'liberalizing
of capital markets' -- that is, we need to take over their banking system and currency.) If -- when -- this fails then the only
recourse would be actual war.
The crime in all this is in the pursuit of money -- ultimately a wholly artificial concept -- we're wasting immense amounts
of resources and human potential, spreading misery and despoliation all over the planet and generally behaving like really awful
global citizens. We can and must do better.
wardropper
And we certainly must stop talking about "taking down" the Chinese, and instead actually try to understand where they come from,
with their roots in a far more ancient civilized society than ours.
American exceptionalism, for example, takes it for granted that we in the West are good, and therefore the East must become
more like us. But we are logically, and morally, obliged to look at this from the opposite perspective too: What if the Chinese
take it for granted that they are good, and therefore the West must become more like them?
I have been to China, and found the people there to consist of the same mixtures of honest, good, nondescript, sinister and
deplorable as we have here at home.
They also share exactly the same fundamental problem as we do: Their politicians and their people, like ours, are two entirely
separate things. Of course the origins of Chinese, or Russian, society are different from ours, but that is no reason to despise
them. Our origins are often pretty despicable too.
Antonym
The Chinese people are as materialistic or spiritual as any; it is the local deep state (CPC) totalitarian culture that needs
to change.
Robbobbobin
"The crime in all this is in the pursuit of money -- [w]e can and must do better."
Three thousand years?
He that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with silver; nor he that loveth abundance with increase: this is also vanity.
–Ecclesiastes 5:10
Two thousand years?
For the love of money is the root of all evil –1 Timothy 6:10
Surely the Anti Deceased Equine Distress Society has lobbied some sort of statute of limitations onto the books by now?
MASTER OF UNIVE
American parasitism writ large over the last half century has amply signified to the entire world that 'manifest destiny'
was merely a ruse to foist American hegemony onto all sovereign nations at the behest of an out-of-control American Oligopoly
that was power-tripping post WW2 & drunk on the souls of the poor sots all over the entire world with their power hungry warmongering
Military Industrial Complex.
Proof of their combined ignorance with respect to Cybernetics & Systems Theory was their willingness to follow the likes of
the Vietnam War architects that assumed incorrectly that they could impose a closed-looped cybernetic control system over world
finance & mercantilism throughout the entire world at the behest of academic failures like Macnamera who would not know a 'closed-looped
cybernetic' from an open-looped cybernetic if his life & legacy depended on it.
Simply put, American printing presses at the privately owned Federal Reserve cannot even remotely help or assist in anymore
financial profligacy for the Neoconservative or Neoliberal camps of the cerebrally sclerotic & Early Onset Dementia riddled, &
uneducated, financial buffoons that emanated out of the now defunct Chicago School headed up by Strauss et al. in the 60s & 70s.
All the macroeconomic indicators over the last two decades have clearly indicated that the Greenspan era of asset inflation
was nothing more than the undoing of Federal Reserve Chair Paul Volcker's hard won success during his tenure pre-Greenspan 'Maestro'
halcyon days of animal spirits run amok.
In brief, the United States of America can eat my shorts as it is solely responsible for manufacturing a finance control system
& requisite money pump fraud that is nothing more than a worldwide Ponzi scheme to defraud the entire world of disposable income
& discretionary income gain so that all gains accrue to the rentier class of speculative investors like Warren Buffett & Bob Paulson.
Bottom line is that Warren Buffett will have to purchase all the new automobiles, trucks, houses, mansions, cottages, farms,
cites, towns, railroads, roads, & precious metals as the emerging markets & first world markets all decouple just as Professor
Emeritus Benoit Mandelbrot hypothesized they would just before he died.
Go ahead, America, print the fake fiat greenbacks to infinity in vain hope of extricating yourselves from the intractable financial
muck & mire you are most assuredly going to find yourselves in this approaching October 2019.
Go ahead, Punk, make my day!
Are you feeling lucky, Punk?
RW
Martin Usher
Its not "American". We just happen to be the chosen host for this part of history. Before us it was the British Empire that
was top dog.
Money has no particular loyalty to a country. In pre-WW1 Europe the bourgeois were all intermarried, connected primarily by
wealth and power regardless of their nominal nationality, our present equivalent are similarly connected. Just like WW1 when the
chips are down we -- the ordinary people -- will be sacrificed on the alter of patriotism while they'll survive and prosper.
MASTER OF UNIVE
March 10th 2008 around 11:00am Bear Stearns time New York shitty was the virtual end of American hegemony worldwide forever more
into the obvious future of Macroeconomics & Macroprudential Policy as an ongoing concern. Debt-to-GDP of all sovereign Western
imperialist nations is intractably North of any semblance of sustainability vis-a-vis Finance worldwide or within Emerging Economies
or First World Developed Economies.
Intractable debt limits were broached when Nixon declared the bankruptcy of the Bretton Woods infrastructure of gold backed
USA Reserve Currency Status and then opted in ignorance for the petro-dollar bait & switch fiat USD Finance capture worldwide
which has now come home to roost across the rust belt of the heartland USA, and in places that were once bastions of manufacturing
for the middle class USA blue collar worker such as Detroit or Chicago. Today the business model of the USA is transnationalist
whereby places across the USA are not even remotely financed into that transnationalist Wall Street model of Finance that is wholly
parasitic to the point of crashing mainstreet USA across all sectors of the Service Sector Industries that were supposed to be
replacing the long lost USA Manufacturing Base that was offshored to the Third World sovereigns that would temporarly increase
profit margins for the transnationalist class of corporate parasites run amok to collectively destroy all life on Planet Earth
for centuries to come if we are lucky.
RW
martin
You have made the common mistake of asserting that it is America, instead of those who govern (the USA and its pundits)
that have engineered the problems you point out.
Why would the two parties in congress (Article II followers) and the two fellows with the Article II power, continue to [expand
the debt in fake, made up and useless expenses], unless they were controlled by external forces?
Maybe bankers and their high powered corporations are finding they can no longer easily dupe Americans into delivering their
resources into the pockets of the wealthy. Maybe the American people have drawn the line, no more, will they produce for the IMF,
world bank?
Maybe Americans have decided to refuse the tax burdens imposed to retire the fed debt? Maybe foreign nations have denied the
banks and their corporations access to their resources as a means to pay the USA debt? Maybe script has been recognized as a false
capital in-capable of ruling the world? Maybe organized criminals have taken up positions in the western governments and used
those positions to force on the governed many things? Maybe burdening the USA with debt is part of the plan to bankrupt America?
<==but why should the banks bankrupt America, why has access to education been limited, why has the USA spied on Americans? Why
have the governed Americans been denied access to the USA? Has the USA retired Americans from productive jobs, in order to accelerate
the demise of America? The USA has made Americans into debtors obligated to pay bankers in the form of taxes to be collected by
the USA and remitted to the bankers. <= just as is now occurring in Britain, Greece, France, and other places. Privatization,
monopolization and conversion from public to private franchising and ownership have served as the transforming agents that have
made the elite so wealthy.
Economic Zionism. as opposed to government regulated capitalism, condones no competition, allows no prisoners and either
takes or destroys all likely competitive elements (persons, corporations, or nations) Economic Zionism demands the government
that governs (as in USA governance over Americans) assist in rendering Americans broke. Is it because until Americans are broke,
the EZ bandits are hampered? Is scooping resources into private, monopoly powered, already wealthy hands, the goodies to be had
the goal? Maybe the USA is a privatizing agent instead of a benefactor serving Americans?
In USA governed America, there is much very-productive farm land, millions of tons of minerals, many productive seaports, and
tons and tons of money making monopolies (patents, copyrights, royalties, government franchised goodies, lucrative government
contracts, and plenty of government services and resources) to be privatized for profit. The goodies are located in thousands
of acres of rich farmland, the major ports and services attached thereto, and embedded within little domestic American companies
which the USA debt will eventually burden into bankruptcy. After all "scalping a bankruptcy" is historically a speciality of economic
zionism.
MASTER OF UNIVE
In 1994 JPMorgan management & traders went on a little holiday in Miami to concoct the Global Ponzi of debt & risk associated
with loans into what is known today as the Financialization Process whereby bank risk would be shuffled off of investment bank
balance sheets and onto those speculators that wanted to purchase all that risk involved in the bank portfolios en masse because
they knew how to offload that risk to unsuspecting greater fools that were always certain to come knocking in a climate of upward
growth and yield curve convexity. But the chink in their financial alchemy was obviously debt limits and the ability to track
the risk to the system as a whole given that all transactions in the derivatives world are dark & unregulated due to the helmsmen
like the Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson who previous to being nominated as Treasury Secretary was in fact the top man at Goldman
Sachs where he raked in approximately a smooth billion before traversing the revolving door between the Whore House & Goldman
Sachs New York shitty offices.
Casino Banking morphed into Late Stage Ponzi Capitalism when Bob Paulson wanted more Residential Mortgage Backed Security issuance
and pressured Goldman Sachs into providing more issuance via NINJA loans & Liar Loans after 05 when the Wall Street speculators
had to go bottom feeding for loan issuance in order to meet investor demand & apatite for their unhinged Gordon Gecko greed.
'Maestro' Greenspan emphasized his 'flaw' in his macroeconomic model of the world when the investor greed broached fat tails
on the order of a 10% crash of the power laws of distributions of loan issuance. Greenspan never assumed that the Financialization
Process would exceed a default scenario greater than 5-7% of no-performing loans in the subprime issuance tranche.
American exceptionalism via Henry Paulson USA Treasury Secretary 08 is what rendered American Late Stage Ponzi Capitalism wholly
defunct going forward into 2020 & beyond with a permanent lower bound CB Interest Rate Regime & specter of WW3 hot conflagration.
My money is on the pinko Commie bastards this time round the sovereign insolvency loop of domestic misery USA.
WELCOME to the New World Disorder!
RW
nottheonly1
To condense this lengthy essay: This ship is sinking.
This would include household debt, student debt, financial debt, corporate debt, and municipal debt. Add this to sovereign
debt and you get a figure roughly 5 times US sovereign debt, and even this is regarded as being a conservative figure according
to many
One – at least on this side of the screen – cannot but think that all this is by design. The cart is driven intentionally off
the cliff. To start off with a clean slate? Where the wealthy still have their wealth, but the suckers are depending on hand-outs?
An old proverb alledges that: To borrow brings sorrow.
To which only those who make loads of money from lending will disagree. Where are the solutions? No solutions, just listicles
as to how bad it all is? Sure, the West is reminiscent of the HMS Titanic – with the slight difference of the hole made by the
iceberg (debt) extending over the whole length of the ship. It is listing beyond dancing.
Well, I am willing to tell a secret (that isn't one anymore for quite some time):
Outlaw/prohibit Interest .
Prohibit capital gains . Or tax them with 99%.
Prevent under all circumstances a continuation of Performanceless Profits .
Make them punishable with prison time of no less than half of the age at which they were perpetrated. You're 30? You're going
in for 15. You're 65? Easy math.
Fact is, that there are solutions galore to save our souls. Problem is, those whose lives are depending on them, don't demand
them to be implemented. And why would the wealthy tax non-payers like Bezos et al want to change their 'winning team'? That is
a well known no-no. The only solution the masses of the little people can hope for is 'Force Majeur' that works to their benefit.
Shall we wait for that to happen?
"... Palestinians are:- "beasts walking on two legs" (Begin), "drugged cockroaches in a bottle" (Eitan), "hungry crocodiles" (Barak), who "must be crushed like grasshoppers" (Shamir). ..."
"... We have fringe racist groups in the UK and US and elsewhere. But the KKK in the US just get drunk and burn a few crosses now and again. They are totally irrelevant. If they supplied ALL the heads of state, Begin, Shamir, Sharon, Barak, Netanyahu, ALL the heads of the armed forces, ALL the religious leaders, and the media in the country, anyone with two brain cells to rub together would have to acknowledge there is a difference. ..."
"... You can't criticise ANY of these people because it "offends" AIPAC, the Board of Deputies, the Friends of Israel, and "hurts their feelings." You are not allowed to call them out without incurring unprecedented draconian penalties unless you have first solved world hunger, global warming, criticised every other nation on the planet, and obtained a written permit from the Board of Deputies specifying exactly what terms and language you are authorised to use. ..."
"... Why obsess about Talmudistan? Because it is the tail that wags the dog. It exercises a complete stranglehold over the politics and foreign policy of the US and its satellites like the UK. It incites endless wars which those countries are expected to prosecute on its behalf. ..."
mark
I'll give you some "truly horrible expressions of bigotry." Palestinians are:- "beasts walking on two legs" (Begin), "drugged cockroaches in a bottle" (Eitan), "hungry crocodiles" (Barak),
who "must be crushed like grasshoppers" (Shamir).
Truly horrible racist stuff. 8 -4 Reply Aug 22, 2019 1:39 AM Reader
Mandy Miller
What is it with you Mark, that you keep just bringing up the same four or six quotes from the most bigoted Jews you can find who
are mostly dead? I am curious what you think it proves about anything?
Sure there are lunatics and there are racists and some of both are Jews, just as some are not Jews. Taking the words of the
racist Jews and using that to fire up your own racist hate of all Jews, even those like me who think Begin was a one-eyed
lunatic, is a waste of your life and breeds nothing but more hate. I hope God grants you peace in your heart, Mark.
mark
These are not four random annoying saloon bar bores blowing off steam after one too many. They are three successive prime ministers
and the head of the armed forces. Four typical political and military leaders. You could say the same about any other political
and military figures. Or religious figures like the Chief Rabbi. This is normal and routine. There is a great deal that is far
worse, like "Justice" Minister Shaked, who called for all Palestinian mothers to be murdered so that no Palestinian children could
be born. Or a national newspaper called The Times of Israel openly advocating the extermination of the Palestinian people at concentration
camps in the desert, "When Genocide Is Justified." Or two leading rabbis calling for the murder of all Palestinian children.
Imagine that Cameron, or May, or Johnson, called Jews cockroaches or grasshoppers, let alone calling for Jews to be murdered.
And every leading UK politician and military figure had done the same as a matter of routine for decades. Imagine the outrage.
Rightly so.
I would never call Jews cockroaches. But ALL these Zionist figures ROUTINELY speak of Palestinians in these terms. This is
completely normal. And nobody so much as raises an eyebrow. It is perfectly okay for the Chosen Folk to do this.
That is the point. It would be of benefit to the world if there was a little peace in the hearts of these people as well.
Mandy Miller
I didn't say they were insignificant I said they were regarded by most sensible Jews that I know as lunatics.
Begin did not speak for most Jews while he was alive and certainly doesn't now he's dead. I'm sure he liked to think he did,
but why believe that racist schmuck? Ditto for Binyamin, who is as stupid and racist as he is crazy.
Like I said you might as well quote Hitler or Goebbels as being representative of today's Germany or claim they speak for all
gentiles everywhere unless individuals specifically state otherwise. I was born a Jew, my kids were born Jews, we didn't volunteer
to join! We should not need to officially repudiate Zionism or the crazy ravings of our leaders past or present in order to be
assumed good people, any more than you, Mark, should have to repudiate Nazism or Mr Churchill's racism or mr Johnson's anti-Russian
schtick to be considered a good person.
I would like to see a good study of Zionism here, I support the Palestinians in their struggle as again do many many Jews of
my acquaintance (though, sadly not all I will admit). But do you not see how alienating and hurtful it is to see comments such
as "the chosen people did 9/11", or (as was talked about a short while back) "Hebrews have a tendency toward pedophilia"? Please!
Have a little respect is all. Talk about the evils of Zionism but don't conflate that with Judaism or with everyone lucky or unlucky
enough to be born a Jew!
And all that oy vey goy stuff you do feels quite hurtful also, I am just curious what you think it brings to the conversation
by way of enlightenment, communication and brotherly love, Mark? It just looks like you are hating on Jewishness in the same way
those Nazi images of guys with hook noses etcetera did. It feels nasty. What does it achieve? Would it be a nice and helpful gesture
to at least drop all that?
mark
We have fringe racist groups in the UK and US and elsewhere. But the KKK in the US just get drunk and burn a few crosses now
and again. They are totally irrelevant. If they supplied ALL the heads of state, Begin, Shamir, Sharon, Barak, Netanyahu, ALL
the heads of the armed forces, ALL the religious leaders, and the media in the country, anyone with two brain cells to rub together
would have to acknowledge there is a difference.
You can't criticise ANY of these people because it "offends" AIPAC, the Board of Deputies, the Friends of Israel, and "hurts
their feelings." You are not allowed to call them out without incurring unprecedented draconian penalties unless you have first
solved world hunger, global warming, criticised every other nation on the planet, and obtained a written permit from the Board
of Deputies specifying exactly what terms and language you are authorised to use.
Why obsess about Talmudistan? Because it is the tail that wags the dog. It exercises a complete stranglehold over the politics
and foreign policy of the US and its satellites like the UK. It incites endless wars which those countries are expected to prosecute
on its behalf. It destabilises the entire planet causing indescribable suffering and human misery. It expects and receives
a free pass to commit genocide and possess a huge illegal arsenal of WMD it constantly threatens to use. It extorts unimaginable
amounts of tribute from other countries. It commits terrorist atrocities like 9/11 with complete impunity. Its endless intrigues
and subversion poison the whole public space in entire countries. The smear campaign against Corbyn and the Epstein organisation
are just two fairly trivial recent examples. Politicians and ordinary people are not required to swear loyalty oaths to Botswana
or Bolivia on pain of instant dismissal. That is the difference.
A bit of kvetching about all the above seems a little bit justified under the circumstances.
Mandy Miller
Ok, Mark, I understand that you think Israel is a bigger racist problem than the UK and all the NATO non-democracies, and I can
agree with you about that. Israel is for me and many (not all) of my family and friends a place of terrible evil and shame. I
hate that the suffering of so many Jews under the Nazis has been turned into an excuse to impose more suffering on other innocent
people simply because of their race. So, let's agree Israel is indefensible in its treatment of the Palestinians and in its appalling
foreign policy. Just awful.
My question is, how helpful is it to express those facts in racial terms? Why do you use these words that only have the effect
of turning people away from you and closing down there receptiveness?
Ok, what I'm saying is, if you try to tell the average non-political nice well meaning Jewish person or liberal, of which my
sister is a good example (both) that Israel is the aggressor nation in so many instances and if you tell them about the terrible
plight of the Palestinian people it will be hard for you to get them to listen even if you don't use words that make you sound
like a racist. But as soon as you start throwing around words such as Talmudistan and "chosen folk" and mockery of Yiddish with
your "oy vey goy" routine, you are giving them a route to the exit door., which is what they want. You are giving them permission
to ignore you! They can say "oh what a racist", and just leave the building.
So, my question is, why use that language? What good is it doing you that makes it worthwhile to lose so much credibility among
people you could perhaps convert if you approached it differently?
I guess my question is, what does this aggressive use of offensive terms do for you that you hold on to it to the point of
undoing any good you could do? Why not just say "Israel"? Why terms such as goy and chosen folk and language that can sound soooo
racist and threatening?
I believe you Mark that you don't entertain real racist thoughts, but can you communicate with me why you use that language
that makes it sound as if you do? Maybe you don't realize it but to a Jew it feels like a slap across the face. It triggers centuries
of dormant fears of persecution. I have to try hard to put that aside and approach you without fear or anger. So I'm asking you,
as a gesture toward understanding, to please not use those terms in our conversation? And maybe you might find you don't need
that armour, or comfort blanket or whatever it is to you. Maybe you will find your message, which as put above is something I
can get on board with, gets across more clearly.
Can we take that step, Mark? I am asking with peace and love in my heart.
"The other significant force in the Ukraine is the West Ukrainian (Galician) Nazi
death-squads and mobs."
Where are death camps for the Jews? Where are racial laws that expel non-Ukrainians? Where
is the propaganda of eugenics and healthy lifestyle? Where are construction projects bringing
in jobs, and state-subsidized recreation tours?
Ukraine is a Jew-driven shithole that has nothing to do with National Socialism. They
don't even honour the sacrifice of the SS Galizien.
"but what they are genuinely fantasizing about is the territory, and only the territory.
As for the 2 million-plus virulently anti-Nazi people currently living on these lands, they
simply want them either dead or expelled)."
A lie. Currently, more than a half of those "expelled" have migrated inside Ukraine. A
stark contrast to Croatia where the Serbs were driven out of the country, and their land
given to Croats.
Again, Ukraine is suicidal and full of civic nationalism, nothing about it is
blood-based.
"They and their Polish supporters want Russia to break apart in numerous small state-lets
which they (or, in their delusional dreams, the Chinese) could dominate."
Why do you consider this as a negative for the Russian people? The current Russian state
is in its death throes as much as the US and France – the ethnic Russians are dying
out, fleeing and being replaced. Any alternative might prove out more hopeful.
"In contrast, the LDNR forces seem to be doing pretty well, and their morale appears to be
as strong as ever (which is unsurprising since their military ethos is based in 1000 years of
Russian military history)."
I have to remind you that the Donbass was colonized far more recently than Ukraine –
in the 18-19th centuries. What "ancient" traditions?
"but Novorussia also is a never healing wound in the side of Nazi-occupied Ukraine"
The Donbass has never been part of Novorussia which is to the west, from Dniepropetrovsk
to Odessa. Admittedly, Novorussia's colonists were mostly from Ukraine – it is clearly
seen on the language maps.
"The problem with this slogan is that there is simply no way the (relatively small)
Galician population can ever succeed in permanently defeating their much bigger (and,
frankly, much smarter) Jewish, Polish or Russian neighbors."
Khmelnitsky managed to do just that – 100k dead Jews. And he's on the Ukrainian
currency. Too bad modern "Nazi" Ukrainians have elected a Jew President. This is not the
Khmelnitsky uprising, this is Kiev under the Khazar Khaganate before Oleg came from the
North.
Thursday, July 4, 2019"Loyalty to the Nation All the Time, Loyalty to the
Government When it Deserves It." Mark Twain wrote an essay back in 1905 called "The Czar's
Soliloquy" ( North American Review, Vol. 180.No. DLXXX). The essay was
triggered by a sentence in the London Times , reporting: "After the Czar's morning bath
it is his habit to meditate an hour before dressing himself." Twain imagined that the Czar,
standing naked in front of a mirror, was for a few moments honest with himself about the
injustices and cruelties that he had allowed and perpetrated, and hoped for a better future.
Imagining the Czar's words to himself, Twain wrote:
There are twenty-five million families in Russia. There is a man-child at every mother's
knee. If these were twenty-five million patriotic mothers, they would teach these
man-children daily, saying : "Remember this, take it to heart, live by it, die for it if
necessary: that our patriotism is medieval, outworn, obsolete; that the modern patriotism,
the true patriotism, the only rational patriotism, is loyalty to the Nation all the time,
loyalty to the Government when it deserves it.
On the Fourth of July in particular, it makes me sad to run into people whose
patriotism ebbs and flows according to what political party occupies the White House. There
ought to be a large and real line between support of whoever who is in government at a
particular time, and a broader patriotism. A country is a mixture of people, ideals, geography,
history, cultures, and more. It should be possible to love your country, whether your feelings
about the government are positive, negative, neutral, ambivalent, or don't-give-a-damn.
Pretty superficial article, but some points are interesting. Especially the fact that the collapse of neoliberalism
like collapse of Bolshevism is connected with its inability to raise the standard of living of population in major Western
countries, despite looting of the USSR and Middle eastern countries since 1991. Spoils of victory in the Cold War never got to
common people. All was appropriated by greedy "New Class" of neoliberal oligarchs.
The same was true with Bolshevism in the USSR. The communist ideology was dead after WWII when it became clear that
"proletariat" is not a new class destined to take over and the "iron law of oligarchy" was discovered. Collapse happened
in 45 years since the end of WWII. Neoliberal ideology was dead in 2008. It would be interesting to see if neoliberalism
as a social system survives past 2050.
The level of degeneration of the USA elite probably exceeds the level of degeneration of Nomenklatura even now.
Notable quotes:
"... A big reason why liberal democracies in Europe have remained relatively stable since WWII is that most Europeans have had hope that their lives will improve. A big reason why the radical vote has recently been on the rise in several European countries is that part of the electorate has lost this hope. People are increasingly worried that not only their own lives but also the lives of their children will not improve and that the playing field is not level. ..."
"... As a result, the traditional liberal package of external liberalisation and internal redistribution has lost its appeal with the electorate, conceding ground to the alternative package of the radical right that consists of external protectionism and internal liberalisation ..."
"... Mr Mody said the bottom half of German society has not seen any increase in real incomes in a generation. ..."
"... The reforms pushed seven million people into part-time 'mini-jobs' paying €450 (£399) a month. It lead to corrosive "pauperisation". This remains the case even though the economy is humming and surging exports have pushed the current account surplus to 8.5pc of GDP." ..."
"... "British referendum on EU membership can be explained to a remarkable extent as a vote against globalisation much more than immigration " ..."
"... As an FYI to the author immigration is just the flip side of the same coin. Why were immigrants migrating? Often it's because they can no longer make a living where they left. Why? Often globalization impacts. ..."
"... The laws of biology and physics and whatever else say that the host that is being parasitised upon, cannot support the endless growth of the parasites attached upon it. The unfortunate host will eventually die. ..."
"... "negative effects of globalisation: foreign competition, factory closures, persistent unemployment, stagnating purchasing power, deteriorating infrastructures and public services" ..."
"... he ruling elites have broken away from the people. The obvious problem is the gap between the interests of the elites and the overwhelming majority of the people. ..."
"... One of the things we must do in Russia is never to forget that the purpose of the operation and existence of any government is to create a stable, normal, safe and predictable life for the people and to work towards a better future. ..."
"... "If you're not willing to kill everybody who has a different idea than yourself, you cannot have Frederick Hayek's free market. You cannot have Alan Greenspan or the Chicago School, you cannot have the economic freedom that is freedom for the rentiers and the FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) sector to reduce the rest of the economy to serfdom." ~ Michael Hudson ..."
"... I'm surprised more people don't vote for neo-fascist parties like the Golden Dawn. Ordinary liberal politics has completely failed them. ..."
The more a local economy has been negatively affected by the two shocks, the more its
electors have shifted towards the radical right and its policy packages. These packages
typically combine the retrenchment against international openness and the liberalisation of the
internal market and more convincingly address the demand for protection by an electorate that,
after the austerity following the Crisis, no longer trusts alternatives based on more liberal
stances on foreign relations and the parallel promise of a stronger welfare state.
A big reason why liberal democracies in Europe have remained relatively stable since WWII is
that most Europeans have had hope that their lives will improve. A big reason why the radical
vote has recently been on the rise in several European countries is that part of the electorate
has lost this hope. People are increasingly worried that not only their own lives but also the
lives of their children will not improve and that the playing field is not level.
On the one hand, despite some progress in curtailing 'tax havens' in recent years, there has
never been as much wealth in tax havens as there is today (Zucman 2015). This is seen as unfair
because, if public goods and services (including those required to help the transition to a
'green economy') have to be provided in the regions where such hidden wealth comes from, lost
tax revenues have to be compensated for by higher taxes on law-abiding households.
On the other hand, fairness is also undermined by dwindling social mobility. In the last
decades, social mobility has slowed down across large parts of the industrialised world (OECD
2018), both within and between generations. Social mobility varies greatly across regions
within countries, correlates positively with economic activity, education, and social capital,
and negatively with inequality (Güell at al. 2018). Renewed migration from the South to
the North of Europe after the Crisis (Van Mol and de Valk 2016) is a testimony of the widening
relative lack of opportunities in the places that have suffered the most from competition from
low-wage countries.
Concluding Remarks
Globalisation has come accompanied by the Great Convergence between countries around the
world but also the Great Divergence between regions within several industrialised countries.
The same holds within the EU. In recent years, redistributive policies have had only a very
limited impact in terms of reversing growing regional inequality.
As a result, the traditional
liberal package of external liberalisation and internal redistribution has lost its appeal with
the electorate, conceding ground to the alternative package of the radical right that consists
of external protectionism and internal liberalisation.
This is both inefficient and unlikely to
lead to more regional convergence. What the political and policy debate in Europe is arguably
missing is a clearer focus on two of the main underlying causes of peoples' growing distrust in
national and international institutions: fiscal fairness and social mobility.
Right. It would be better to say "the traditional New Deal liberal package " has not lost
its appeal, it was killed off bit by bit starting with NAFTA. From a 2016 Thomas Frank essay
in Salon:
That appeal to [educated credentialed] class unity gives a hint of what Clintonism was
all about. To owners and shareholders, who would see labor costs go down as they took
advantage of unorganized Mexican labor and lax Mexican environmental enforcement, NAFTA held
fantastic promise. To American workers, it threatened to send their power, and hence their
wages, straight down the chute. To the mass of the professional-managerial class, people who
weren't directly threatened by the treaty, holding an opinion on NAFTA was a matter of
deferring to the correct experts -- economists in this case, 283 of whom had signed a
statement declaring the treaty "will be a net positive for the United States, both in terms
of employment creation and overall economic growth."
The predictions of people who opposed the agreement turned out to be far closer to what
eventually came to pass than did the rosy scenarios of those 283 economists and the
victorious President Clinton. NAFTA was supposed to encourage U.S. exports to Mexico; the
opposite is what happened, and in a huge way. NAFTA was supposed to increase employment in
the U.S.; a study from 2010 counts almost 700,000 jobs lost in America thanks to the treaty.
And, as feared, the agreement gave one class in America enormous leverage over the other:
employers now routinely threaten to move their operations to Mexico if their workers
organize. A surprisingly large number of them -- far more than in the pre-NAFTA days -- have
actually made good on the threat.
Twenty years later, the broader class divide over the subject persists as well.
According to a 2014 survey of attitudes toward NAFTA after two decades, public opinion
remains split. But among people with professional degrees -- which is to say, the liberal
class -- the positive view remains the default. Knowing that free-trade treaties are always
for the best -- even when they empirically are not -- seems to have become for the
well-graduated a badge of belonging.
The only internal redistribution that's happened in the past 25 – 30 yearsis from
the bottom 80% to the top 10% and especially to the top 1/10th of 1 %.
Not hard to imagine why the current internal redistribution model has lost its appeal with
the electorate.
I think there are two different globalizations that people are responding to.
1. Their jobs go away to somewhere in the globe that has lower wages, lower labor
protections, and lower environmental protections. So their community largely stays the same
but with dwindling job prospects and people slowly moving away.
2. The world comes to their community where they see immigrants (legal, illegal, refugees)
coming in and are willing to work harder for less, as well as having different appearance,
languages, religion, and customs. North America has always had this as we are built on
immigration. Europe is much more focused on terroire. If somebody or something has only been
there for a century, they are new.
If you combine both in a community, you have lit a stick of dynamite as the locals feel
trapped with no way out. Then you get Brexit and Trump. In the US, many jobs were sent
overseas and so new people coming in are viewed as competitors and agents of change instead
of just new hired help. The same happened in Britain. In mainland Europe with less inequality
and more job protection, it is more of just being overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of
newcomers in a society that does not prize that at all.
I saw the warning signs when Golden Dawn appeared in Greece
The liberals said it was just a one off, as they always do, until it isn't.
How did successful Germany turn into a country where extremism would flourish?
The Hartz IV reforms created the economic hardship that causes extremism to flourish.
"Germany is turning to soft nationalism. People on low incomes are voting against authority
because the consensus on equality and justice has broken down. It is the same pattern across
Europe," said Ashoka Mody, a former bail-out chief for the International Monetary Fund in
Europe.
Mr Mody said the bottom half of German society has not seen any increase in real
incomes in a generation. The Hartz IV reforms in 2003 and 2004 made it easier to fire
workers, leading to wage compression as companies threatened to move plants to Eastern
Europe.
The reforms pushed seven million people into part-time 'mini-jobs' paying €450
(£399) a month. It lead to corrosive "pauperisation". This remains the case even though
the economy is humming and surging exports have pushed the current account surplus to 8.5pc
of GDP."
This is a successful European country, imagine what the others look like.
"British referendum on EU membership can be explained to a remarkable extent as a vote
against globalisation much more than immigration "
As an FYI to the author immigration is just the flip side of the same coin. Why were
immigrants migrating? Often it's because they can no longer make a living where they left.
Why? Often globalization impacts.
Another recap about that really just mourns the lack of trust in the establishment, with
no answers. More "I can't believe people are sick to death of experts of dubious skills but
networking "
What it is just admitted that a system that can only work great for 20% of any given
population if they are born in the right region with the right last name just simply not work
except as an exercise in extraction?
And about the EU as if it could never be taken over by bigger authoritatians than the ones
already populating it.
Then see how much those who think it is some forever bastion of liberalism over sovereignity
likes it .
"Another recap about that really just mourns the lack of trust in the establishment,
with no answers."
Usually it involves replacing the establishment or creating an internal threat to
reinstate compliance in the establish (Strauss and Howe).
Strategies for initiate the former may be impossible in this era where the deep state can
read your thoughts through digital media so you would like it would trend to the latter.
Mmmmm, yes, migration, globalisation and such like.
But, unregulated migration into an established environment, say a country, say, UK, on one
hand furthers profits to those benefiting from low labour wages (mainly, friends of people
working for governments), but on the other leads to creation of parallel societies, where the
incoming population brings along the society they strived to escape from. The Don calls these
sh***hole societies. Why bring the f***ing thing here, why not leave it where you escaped
from.
But the real betrayal of the native population happens when all those unregulated migrants
are afforded immediate right to social security, full access to NHS and other aspects of
state support, services that they have not paid one penny in support before accessing that
particular government funded trough. And then the parasitic growth of their "family and
extended family" comes along under the banner of "human rights".
This is the damnation of the whole of Western Civilisation which had been hollowed out
from within by the most devious layer of parasitic growth, the government apparatus. The
people we pay for under the auspices that they are doing some work for us, are enforcing
things that treat the income generators, the tax paying society as serfs whose primary
function in life is to support the parasites (immigrants) and parasite enablers
(government).
The laws of biology and physics and whatever else say that the host that is being
parasitised upon, cannot support the endless growth of the parasites attached upon it. The
unfortunate host will eventually die.
Understanding of this concept is most certainly within mental capabilities of all those
employed as the "governing classes " that we are paying for through our taxes.
Until such time when legislation is enacted that each and every individual member of
"government classes " is made to pay, on an indemnity basis, through financial damages,
forced labour, organs stripping or custodial penalties, for every penny (or cent, sorry,
yanks), of damage they inflict on us taxpayers, we are all just barking.
This piece does an admirable job conflating globalisation and the ills caused by the
neoliberal capture of social democratic parties/leaders. Did people just happen to lose hope,
or were they actively betrayed? We are left to guess.
"negative effects of globalisation: foreign competition, factory closures, persistent
unemployment, stagnating purchasing power, deteriorating infrastructures and public
services"
Note that these ills could also be laid at the feet of the austerity movement, and the
elimination/privatisation of National Industrial Policy, both cornerstones of the neoliberal
infestation.
Not only is globalization not new, all of the issues that come with it are old news.
All of it.
Part of the problem is that the global economic order is still in service to the same old
same old. They have to rebrand every so often to keep the comfortable even more comfortable.
Those tasked with keeping the comfortable more comfortable have to present this crap as "new
ideas" for their own careerism or actually do not realize they haven't espoused a new idea in
500 years.
Putin's recent interview with Financial Times editor offers a clear-eyed perspective on
our changing global structure:
"What is happening in the West? What is the reason for the Trump phenomenon, as you said,
in the US? What is happening in Europe as well? The ruling elites have broken away from the
people. The obvious problem is the gap between the interests of the elites and the
overwhelming majority of the people.
Of course, we must always bear this in mind. One of the things we must do in Russia is
never to forget that the purpose of the operation and existence of any government is to
create a stable, normal, safe and predictable life for the people and to work towards a
better future.
You know, it seems to me that purely liberal or purely traditional ideas have never
existed. Probably, they did once exist in the history of humankind, but everything very
quickly ends in a deadlock if there is no diversity. Everything starts to become extreme one
way or another.
Various ideas and various opinions should have a chance to exist and manifest themselves,
but at the same time interests of the general public, those millions of people and their
lives, should never be forgotten. This is something that should not be overlooked.
Then, it seems to me, we would be able to avoid major political upheavals and troubles.
This applies to the liberal idea as well. It does not mean (I think, this is ceasing to be a
dominating factor) that it must be immediately destroyed. This point of view, this position
should also be treated with respect.
They cannot simply dictate anything to anyone just like they have been attempting to do
over the recent decades. Diktat can be seen everywhere: both in the media and in real life.
It is deemed unbecoming even to mention some topics. But why?
For this reason, I am not a fan of quickly shutting, tying, closing, disbanding
everything, arresting everybody or dispersing everybody. Of course, not. The liberal idea
cannot be destroyed either; it has the right to exist and it should even be supported in some
things. But you should not think that it has the right to be the absolute dominating factor.
That is the point. Please." ~ Vladmir Putin
He's talking about the end of neoliberalism, the economic fascism that has gripped the
world for over 40 years:
"If you're not willing to kill everybody who has a different idea than yourself, you
cannot have Frederick Hayek's free market. You cannot have Alan Greenspan or the Chicago
School, you cannot have the economic freedom that is freedom for the rentiers and the FIRE
(finance, insurance, real estate) sector to reduce the rest of the economy to serfdom." ~
Michael Hudson
Let's get back to using fiscal policy for public purpose again, to granting nations their
right to self-determination and stopping the latest desperate neoliberal attempt to change
international norms by installing fascist dictators (while pretending they are different) in
order to move the world backwards to a time when "efforts to institutionalize standards of
human and civil rights were seen as impingements on sovereignty, back to the days when no one
gave a second thought to oppressed peoples."
Very interesting article, and even more interesting conversation! There is a type of
argument that very accurately points out some ills that need addressing, and then goes on to
spout venom on the only system that might be able to address those ills.
It may be that the
governing classes are making life easy for themselves. How to address that is the hard and
difficult issue. Most of the protection of the small people comes from government.
Healthcare, schools, roads, water etc.(I'm in scandinavia).
If the government crumbles, the
small people have to leave. The most dreadful tyranny is better than a failed state with
warring factions.
The only viable way forward is to somehow improve the system while it is
(still) running. But this discussion I do not see anywhere.
If the discussion does not
happen, there will not be any suggestions for improvement, so everything stays the same.
Change is inevitable – it what state it will catch us is the important thing. A cashier
at a Catalonian family vineyard told me the future is local and global: the next level from
Catalonia will be EU. What are the steps needed to go there?
Same old, Same old. Government is self-corrupting and is loath to change. People had
enough July fourth 1776.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty
and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted
among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever
any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to
alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such
principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to
effect their Safety and Happiness."
FWIW: The fireworks we watch every Fourth of July holiday are symbolic!!!!
The cashier seems to be envisioning a neoliberal paradise where the nation-state no longer
exists. But who, then, collects the taxes that will pay for infrastructure, healthcare,
education, public housing, and unemployment insurance? The European Parliament?
Will Germans
and Finns be willing to pay high taxes in order to pay for those services for Greeks and
Spaniards?
Look at the unemployment rate in Greece the Germans would simply say that the
Greeks are lazy parasites and don't want to work (rather than understand that the economic
conditions don't allow for job creation), and they would vote for MEPs that vote to cut taxes
and welfare programs.
But maybe this was the plan all along you create this neoliberal paradise, and slowly but
surely, people will dismantle all but the bare bones of the welfare state.
I believe that one of the fundamental flaws in the logic behind the EU is this assumption
of mobility. Proponents of the EU imagine society to be how it is described in economics
textbooks: a bunch of individual actors seeking to maximize their incomes that don't seem to
exist in any geographic context. The reality is that people are born into families and
communities that speak a language. Most of them probably don't want to just pack up all of
their things, relocate, and leave their family and home behind every time they get a new job.
People throughout history have always had a very strong connection to the land on which they
were raised and the society into which they were brought up; more accurately, for most of
human history, this formed the entire existence, the entire universe, of most people
(excluding certain oppressed groups, such as slaves or the conquered).
Human beings are not able to move as freely as capital. While euros in Greece can be sent
to and used instantly in Germany, it is not so easy for a Greek person to leave the society
that their ancestors have lived in for thousands of years and move to a new country with a
new culture and language. For privileged people that get to travel, this doesn't sound so
bad, but for someone whose family has lived in the same place for centuries and never learned
to speak another language, this experience would be extremely difficult. For many people over
the age of 25, it might not even be a life worth living.
In the past, economic difficulties would lead to a depreciation of a nation's currency and
inflation. But within the current structure of the Eurozone, it results in deflation as euros
escape to the core countries (mainly Germany) and unemployment. Southern Europeans are
expected to leave everything they have ever known behind and move to the countries where
there is work, like Germany or Holland. Maybe for a well-educated worldly 18 year old, that's
not so bad, but what about a newly laid-off working class 35 year-old with a wife and kids
and no college degree? He's supposed to just pick up his family and leave his parents and
relatives behind, learn German, and spend the rest of his life and Germany? His kids now have
to be German? Would he even be able to get a job there, anyway? Doing what? And how is he
supposed to stop this from happening, how is he supposed to organize politically to keep jobs
at home? The Greek government can hardly do anything because the IMF, ECB, and European
Commission (all unelected officials) call the shots and don't give them any fiscal breathing
room (and we saw what happened the last time voters tried to assert their autonomy in the
bailout deal referendum), and the European Parliament doesn't have a serious budget to
actually do anything.
I'm surprised more people don't vote for neo-fascist parties like the
Golden Dawn. Ordinary liberal politics has completely failed them.
"... The term multi-cultural is propaganda, the shift from "nation" to "culture" is used to atomise the perception of belonging that nation implies, into becoming one amongst many under the authority of state, which at this point has usually become an impersonal law and structure from which a bureaucratic elite govern and thrive off of private enterprise, where before a feudal lordship profited by taking a share of personal endeavour. The extremes might be Frankfurt school vs serfdom, with various combinations of philosophy in-between. ..."
"... The economic zionism you describe is via knowledge of finance, monetary theory, trade, weaknesses in society, political reality and more. It uses international realities as a tool. Where before international banking was a measure of trust in the clearing of accounts, this left room for manipulation, and the ability to pressure by holding control of that accounting. ..."
"... And although immigrants should feel free to speak their language at home and even in society, they will have to accept that the language of the law, commerce, education and civil authority is that of the host nation and it is up to them to learn it or at least learn how to work with or around it. ..."
"Nationality, is a named object, programmed by propaganda."
Nationality in the formal sense, derives from two or more feudal monopolies defining their
differences and according a separate recognition to the other, usually including geographical
markers. The extension of personal identity to national identity is product of the
recognition of belonging to one specific feudal hierarchy. This might be natural or imposed,
the theme of nation literally implies the environment or peoples one is born into.
The term multi-cultural is propaganda, the shift from "nation" to "culture" is used to
atomise the perception of belonging that nation implies, into becoming one amongst many under
the authority of state, which at this point has usually become an impersonal law and
structure from which a bureaucratic elite govern and thrive off of private enterprise, where
before a feudal lordship profited by taking a share of personal endeavour. The extremes might
be Frankfurt school vs serfdom, with various combinations of philosophy in-between.
The evolution of the above has been observed to occur by financial means, but is itself
also an ideology. The capitalist side to this ranges from the granting of favours (as per
permission to reside) through to fractional lending backed only by national debt (spending).
The taxation that must still occur to provide a sense of connectedness to real economy, and
hence to provide a sense of value to the currency, punishes the established and functional
society. The sum when mispent goes towards recruiting new nationals, and on paying the elite
bureaucracy for their pet projects. The old hierarchy tends to maintain much control the
private financial sphere, and works with the state by granting it a certain legitimacy, as
well as receiving positions, contracts and favours.
The economic zionism you describe is via knowledge of finance, monetary theory, trade,
weaknesses in society, political reality and more. It uses international realities as a tool.
Where before international banking was a measure of trust in the clearing of accounts, this
left room for manipulation, and the ability to pressure by holding control of that
accounting. The reality though is that nations (leaders) became weak or corrupted,
decided on grand enterprise they could not repay, and so broke trust in the old order by
resorting to or accepting manipulation of accounts (for example ending the original European
Monetary Union of the 19th century), and eventually resorting to war amongst themselves where
outward conquest was no longer profitable enough.
Were, or are they, clients of monopolies though ? Well no, because it is an illusion that
anyone holds monopoly of finance or money. However they did commit themselves to a system
without which they would then be left weak, where they would lose public honour and respect
if they did not produce a result of some kind. The resulting corruption between various sides
became a feature of national policy, a kind of symbiosis at elite levels. "Multiculturalism"
helps hide that reality, as well as serving in terms of having population with weakened
identity at their disposal.
The only monopoly states are truly client to is that of the use of force.
On a more social side, there are corners of the world where various cultures exist well
side by side, and where interaction is positive. This even within the boundaries of one
country. However it is not that country that makes that work, the different cultures tend to
hold a deeper respect and understanding for one another, but if you look you will find that
they do keep to themselves voluntarily, and simply reside next to each other peacefully. They
don't call themselves multiculti or anything. I expect multiculturalism theoretically could
exist, but because it is so artificial a concept, it seems more like an ersatz for loss of
own culture, so being sad cheap and empty once trying to celebrate it returns to common day
to day reality.
You are right about the correct form being a society that knows itself, that naturally
governs and watches over itself. This is often criticised as simplistic or idealised, and the
reason for that is that those who seek more centralised control only have the view of putting
down vast law as scripture and then forcefully imposing it, they love complexity so as to be
those that clarify it. If we live outside of that the rules, and life, are much simpler, and
fortunately most people have an innate understanding of right and wrong somewhere. The local
culture explains or represents the true form of interaction, so if that becomes confused, so
does society, and strife and unhappiness results.
Here is an interesting and very readable explanation on monetary theory, it gives a quite
clear explanation of how finance actually works in social and political terms
"Multiculturalism" is a loaded term: if it is used to mean different styles of food, music
and dress, then I am all for it. But it does not mean that the host nation should accept
misogyny, homophobia, honor killings or other "traditional values" that immigrants bring
along.
And although immigrants should feel free to speak their language at home and even in
society, they will have to accept that the language of the law, commerce, education and civil
authority is that of the host nation and it is up to them to learn it or at least learn how
to work with or around it.
'Christian Zionism' is the direct fruit of Anglo-Saxon Puritanism broadly understood. Over its
life, it has manifested itself in many ways. The beliefs were so powerful even before the
Puritan revolution that groups of English Dissenter/Low Church Protestants existed that taught
that the original natives of Britain, barbarians in every sense, had been uplifted by the
arrival of the 10 Lost Tribes of Israel – this was taught to prove that the English had
Hebrew blood and so were the Chosen Race, which meant that Anglophone Protestantism (Low
Church) was the true faith.
By the dawn of the Victorian age, standard Brit WASP Judaizing had become secular and had
discovered that Arabs are also Semites linguistically and culturally. That allowed many of the
Brit WASP Elites to adopt Arabs and/or Mohammedanism as their pet Semite to elevate over the
vast majority of British Isles natives that they despised.
The religiously pro-Jewish original focus of the culture produced by the Judaizing heresy
that was Anglo-Saxon Puritanism was still alive and very powerful at the dawn of the 20th
century. That is how the Oxford UP came to publish the Scofield Study Bible.
Churches across the South were remarkably free of any taint of overt Judaizing in the WASP
vein until well after WW2. The growth was slow but steady until after the Reagan years, when it
exploded. I have seen no signs of a regression in the 21st century.
You also are way off about the economic notions held by rural Evangelicals in the South.
"... Just recently, John Judis, undisguisedly a political commentator of the Left, made an important argument in favor of nationalism. "Nationalist sentiment," he writes in his book The Nationalist Revival , "is an essential ingredient of a democracy, which is based on the assumptions of a common identity, and of a welfare state, which is based on the acceptance by citizens of their financial responsibility for people whom they may not know at all, and who may have widely different backgrounds from theirs." ..."
"... Of course, nationalism can be "the basis of social generosity or of bigoted exclusion." It is therefore important, according to Judis, that enlightened state leaders push nationalism in the proper direction. ..."
"... The presence of Daniel Pipes and other neoconservatives at this gathering also suggests that at least some of the panelists will be offering two approved concepts of nationalism: propositional nationhood for the United States and solidarity with Israeli nationalism. In both cases, however, the nationalism being advocated ends up tied to an aggressive foreign policy. ..."
"... The nationalist label has now fallen into the hands of the neocon establishment, which has managed to identify it with international meddling and a creedal nation. In other words, it's been appropriated by those who already wielded power. ..."
"... But what makes American nationalism even more unpalatable now than when Robert Nisbet famously denounced it in The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America is its rhetorical availability. It serves different agendas, depending on which power bloc appeals to it. ..."
"... Until recently, nationalism had portentous associations for much of the political class. It signified, rightly or wrongly, ethnocentricity and dislike for outsiders. Now that's all changing. Those in power have tamed the concept and are recycling it for their own purposes. Stay tuned. ..."
Just recently, John Judis, undisguisedly a political commentator of the Left, made an
important argument in favor of nationalism. "Nationalist sentiment," he writes in his book
The Nationalist Revival , "is an
essential ingredient of a democracy, which is based on the assumptions of a common identity,
and of a welfare state, which is based on the acceptance by citizens of their financial
responsibility for people whom they may not know at all, and who may have widely different
backgrounds from theirs."
Of course, nationalism can be "the basis of social generosity or of bigoted exclusion."
It is therefore important, according to Judis, that enlightened state leaders push nationalism
in the proper direction.
Judis points out that while "globalism" is a force that nationalists understandably oppose,
"internationalism" need not clash with nationalist sentiment. In a op-ed
in TheNew York Times last October, Judis praised his kind of nationalism as
being beneficial to a successful and growing welfare state and a happier world. It can
also be, he said, a stepping stone that leads beyond itself to international cooperation
.
For those who study European socialism, it is clear that Judis is reprising the position of
French sociologist Pierre
Bordieu , who argued for decades that a socialist regime must create some kind of social
glue to hold its subjects together. Judis is now transferring Bordieu's view to the American
political scene.
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Now, a conference on "conservative nationalism," which will take place in Washington in July , may be
pushing a "nationalism" that is at least as adaptable as Judis's.
One featured speaker , Claire Lehmann, the founder of Quillette, will be talking about how
nationalism "is
the antidote to racism." Presumably the more inclusive the operative term, the less likely
will be the Left's attack on those wielding it.
The presence of Daniel Pipes and other neoconservatives at this gathering also suggests
that at least some of the panelists will be offering two approved concepts of nationalism:
propositional nationhood for the United States and solidarity with Israeli nationalism. In both
cases, however, the nationalism being advocated ends up tied to an aggressive foreign
policy.
Nationalism, in any case, means different things for different peoples. It doesn't hold the
same meaning for Estonians or Hungarians, who belong to ethnic, historic communities, as it
does for a pluralistic country with hundreds of millions of people and a constantly expanding
immigrant population.
In the latest issue of the Rassemblement National monthlyL'Incorrect ,
Steve Bannon speaks of the natural fit between European nationalism and the nationalist
movement that he has been promoting in the United States. Both these ideologies, Bannon says,
derive from the same national principle. In an interview with me in the same publication, I
treated Bannon's contention as wishful thinking. The United States has become too diverse and
too culturally disunited to fit a traditional national model. Our use of nationalism will
likely lead to something less quaint and less organic but more explosive than what comes from
the Baltic nationalists or Viktor Orbán.
The nationalist label has now fallen into the hands of the neocon establishment, which
has managed to identify it with international meddling and a creedal nation. In other words,
it's been appropriated by those who already wielded power.
The same protean label is also likely to wander onto the Left, given the nontraditional and
very pliable nature of our "nationalism." John Judis may in fact be the harbinger of a new
American Left that celebrates nationalism, provided that Left is allowed to define that term
for the rest of us. Indeed, it may be possible to frame LGBT rights and reparations for blacks
as "nationalist" issues. Nationalism also need not hinder us from letting in lots of
undocumented immigrants who are only trying to join our team and learn our values.
Men and women of the interwar Right, down to such later figures as Russell Kirk and Robert
Nisbet, were understandably critical of American nationalism. They identified it with social
engineering and centralized government and preferred localism and regionalism to any
justification for an expansionist administrative state.
But what makes American nationalism even more unpalatable now than when Robert Nisbet
famously denounced it in The Present Age:
Progress and Anarchy in Modern America is its rhetorical availability. It serves
different agendas, depending on which power bloc appeals to it. The hope once entertained
by Pat Buchanan that a nationalist cause would help slow down immigration and preserve
America's traditional moral and cultural identity has not worked out as planned. Those who
control our politics and culture determine the meaning of terms, which is as true of
nationalism as it is of other political labels like "freedom" and "equality."
Until recently, nationalism had portentous associations for much of the political class.
It signified, rightly or wrongly, ethnocentricity and dislike for outsiders. Now that's all
changing. Those in power have tamed the concept and are recycling it for their own purposes.
Stay tuned.
Paul Gottfried is Raffensperger Professor of Humanities Emeritus at
Elizabethtown College, where he taught for 25 years. He is a Guggenheim recipient and a Yale
Ph.D. He is the author of 13 books, most recently Fascism: Career of a Concept and Revisions and Dissents .
Looks like firms like 23andMe opened
the can of worms... Use of genetics to substantiate racist stereotypes
For almost two decades, Farber and his colleagues have advocated for this immigrant
community in the face of what they see as targeted discrimination. In cases of marriage, Farber
acts as a type of rabbinical lawyer, pulling together documentation and making a case for his
clients in front of a board of rabbinical judges. He fears that DNA testing will place even
more power in the hands of the Rabbinate and further marginalize the Russian speaking
community. "It's as if the rabbis have become technocrats," he told me. "They are using
genetics to give validity to their discriminatory practices."
Despite public outrage and
protests in central Tel Aviv, the Rabbinate have not indicated any intention of ending DNA
testing, and reports continue to circulate in the Israeli media of how the test is being used.
One woman allegedly had to ask her mother and aunt for
genetic material to prove that she was not adopted. Another man was asked to have his
grandmother, sick with dementia, take
a test.
Boris Shindler, a political activist and active member of the Russian speaking community,
told me that he believes that the full extent of the practice remains unknown, because many of
those who have been tested are unwilling to share their stories publicly out of a sense of
shame. "I was approached by someone who was married in a Jewish ceremony maybe 15, 20 years
ago, who recently received an official demand saying if you want to continue to be Jewish, we'd
like you to do a DNA test," Shindler said. "They said if she doesn't do it then she has to sign
papers saying she is not Jewish. But she is too humiliated to go to the press with this."
What offends Shindler most is that the technique is being used to single out his community,
which he sees as part of a broader stigmatization of Russian speaking immigrants in Israeli
society as unassimilated outsiders and second-class citizens. "It is sad because in the Soviet
Union we were persecuted for being Jewish and now in Israel we're being discriminated against
for not being Jewish enough," he said.
As well as being deeply humiliating, Shindler told me that there is confusion around what
being genetically Jewish means. "How do they decide when someone becomes Jewish," he asked. "If
I have 51% Jewish DNA does that mean I'm Jewish, but if I'm 49% I'm not?"
"... By putting Mr. Biden forward as the establishment presidential candidate, the Democrats affirm that they see themselves well-served by reactionary illiberalism. Otherwise, their rhetorical rejections of white nationalism and xenophobia could be supported by robust critiques of their own policies of the last four decades and a well-considered political program to counter their consequences could be put forward. But Mr. Biden is the antithesis of both. ..."
Two related tendencies have sown confusion over the crisis of liberalism that continues to
unfold across the U.S. and Europe. On the one hand, the forces of the political right are
ascendant. Right-wing leaders are being elected as an apparent rebuke of the serial failures of
neoliberalism. On the other, the will of the polity is increasingly irrelevant to the
formulation and concerns of nominally public policies.
In the U.S., the political establishment continues to put forward candidates which its
functionaries appear to believe can best perpetuate this illusion of democracy. Befuddlement at
the rise of reactionary forces is met with an increasingly strident insistence that there is
nothing to react against, that all is well if people would only shut up and follow the
directions of their betters.
Despite the conspicuous failures of the existing order here and abroad -- a series of
murderous vanity wars intermingled with economic crises of increasing scale and scope, the
seemingly unstoppable trajectory toward full-blown environmental crisis, nuclear weapons that
serve as background psychic violence and political economy that is organized to milk the polity
dry at every opportunity, the political powers-that-be seek to perpetuate this radically
dysfunctional status quo.
In this environment, the rise of illiberal, reactionary forces seems not only predictable,
but to be the ugly cousin of the neoliberal resolve that all is well. Adding insult to injury
is the insistence that the neoliberal order, the bi-partisan governance that fronts for the
oligarchs, bears no responsibility for the consequences of four decades of neoliberal rule. It
is the polity's unwillingness to comport with the dictates of rule by and for the oligarchs
that is the point of contestation, goes the chide.
An entire functionary class that smiled and nodded approvingly when Bill Clinton
launched his 1992 presidential bid at Stone Mountain, Georgia, birthplace of the twentieth
century KKK, while standing in front of neatly ordered black prisoners, is mystified by the
re-emergence of white nationalism. And while the Clinton / Biden
1994 Crime Bill wasn't exactly a white nationalist manifesto, it inflicted more racially
targeted human misery than the late twentieth century Klan ever could have hoped for.
If enacting punitive measures against the poor is separable from the full throated and
bi-partisan endorsement of the quasi-market -- heads, the rich win, tails, everyone else loses,
economics of neoliberalism, where is the evidence? And how, precisely, does this con recover
from the panicked giveaways of 2009 when the '
runway was foamed ' with the lives and livelihoods of tens of millions of working people
and poor to prevent oligarchs from losing their fifth yacht or their seventh vacation home?
The alternative to the vile misdirection of xenophobia would be for the oligarchs and their
servants in the political class to confess that their faux-market economics -- trade agreements that created the
asymmetry of mobile capital and immobilized labor, was a tragic mistake that displaced millions
of workers for the benefit of the oligarchs. With honest accounting of what happened and who is
responsible 'off the table,' xenophobia appears to be the preferred tactic of the
oligarchs.
The farce of Democratic Party functionaries shouting 'racist' at the thoroughly predictable
fruit of their labors has subsided with the political ascendance of Joe Biden to complicate the
line between white nationalism and liberal loathing of the audience it helped create. The
neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville were / are white nationalists. But what does this make
professional-class liberals who supported the Clinton / Biden 1994 'Crime' Bill under feigned
ignorance of its racial subtext?
The sub-textual connotation of the term 'dog whistle' behind the Crime Bill doesn't do
justice to the social violence of its facts. The subject-object relation of the political
panderer to his / her audience carries with it the moral formulation 1) we agree that overt
racism is objectionable because 2) if it weren't, we wouldn't be opaque expressing it. But how
is this not to assert that race represents a real, as opposed to manufactured, line of
division, something akin to the white nationalist's premise of its essential character?
The dog-whistle is, to the extent that there is an audience for it in the terms given,
politically motivated misdirection. The speaker won't be explicit if the audience is clear as
to the true meaning of what is being said. But isn't this even more insidious than the
straightforward (if ontologically implausible) claim of essential difference by race? The
rhetorical layer of 'crime' gives a social logic to a host of punitive consequences. With the
Crime Bill, the Clintons and Joe Biden grievously harmed the lives of hundreds of thousands, if
not millions, of human beings.
There is, of course, a long history behind this relation of law and racial repression. Law,
the legislative, judicial, policing and penal functions, was used to maintain the institution
of slavery and later, following the Civil War, to recreate its broad contours for purposes of
economic taking. Convict leasing, Black Codes, Jim Crow and mass incarceration are part of an
historical trajectory. However, to the point made by Adolph Reed, degree matters -- current
conditions aren't analogous to those of the Jim Crow South or slavery.
But with this history behind it, what legitimate basis is there for the sub-textual use of a
relation of race to criminality? As the patriarch of modern political marketing, did Bill
Clinton really believe that there was no racial subtext to his vile stunt at Stone Mountain?
More pointedly, through promoting the compound storyline of race and crime, how is Mr. Clinton
not promoting a slightly more complex, and insidious, version of white nationalist
'difference?' Alternatively, if crime has a social basis, why would proposed solutions be
punitive rather than restorative?
All of this could be ancient history if it didn't exist at the center of current travails.
Without an accounting of the failures of liberalism, these compound storylines from history
provide the rhetorical core of contemporary politics. It is hardly coincidental that Joe Biden
is 1) a dedicated corporatist, 2) a long-time purveyor of racist tropes, 3) the Democrats
latest, if improbable, hope for restoration of the neoliberal order.
Joe Biden opposed the racial integration of public schools. He wrote most of the Clinton's
1994 Crime Bill. He was an enthusiastic proponent of NAFTA. He joined the Clintons to support
George W. Bush's catastrophic war against Iraq. And he supported the TPP (Trans-Pacific
Partnership) until the very end. He authored many, if not most, of the policies of modern
liberalism / neoliberalism that are being contested.
By putting Mr. Biden forward as the establishment presidential candidate, the Democrats
affirm that they see themselves well-served by reactionary illiberalism. Otherwise, their
rhetorical rejections of white nationalism and xenophobia could be supported by robust
critiques of their own policies of the last four decades and a well-considered political
program to counter their consequences could be put forward. But Mr. Biden is the antithesis of
both.
The Democrats co-invented identity politics to defer blame for the consequences of their
policies. If they cared about combatting racism and xenophobia, none of the Democratic Party
establishment would be considered for public office. The rhetorical distinction between dog
whistles and white nationalism begs the question of what objective dog whistles are intended to
convey. These aren't precisely the same. Dog whistles are more insidious in that they include
compound storylines (e.g. race and criminality) that are more onerous to disentangle.
White nationalism is frightening for its direct ties to the history of racialized violence.
However, the scientific racism that served as the 'natural' basis for alleged racial difference
used by the Nazis was an American invention. Its proponents were the professional class of the
late nineteenth and early twentieth century. And the intersection of these two tendencies, the
brutal, barely reflexive racial loathing of the Stone Mountain KKK and the educated, liberal
use of racist subtexts to facilitate 'respectable' racism amongst the modern professional
class, is the apparent point of Bill Clinton's 1992 photo op.
At what point is politics about leading rather than manipulating people via a shared
vocabulary? Phrased differently, how is this shared vocabulary not tied to consensus around the
logic it represents? So-and-so understands the logic of racism well enough to convey it through
coded language and still chooses to perpetuate it for political gain. Why not give his audience
the benefit of the doubt and use this understanding to challenge the logic?
The broader backdrop of an ascendant political right in Europe emerges from a similar
unwillingness / inability of European liberals / neoliberals to atone for the consequences of
their policies and develop alternative political programs. Xenophobia is portrayed as arising
from the shadows of twentieth-century European history as a moral failing of the polity rather
than the manufactured, and predictable, political crisis that it is.
As with the American refugee 'crisis' arising from U.S. military interventions in Central
America, the refugee crisis across Europe is the product of American / NATO led military
incursions in the region as well as economic dislocations emerging from the structure of the EU
(European Union). One reason why George H.W. Bush decided against occupying Iraq after the
first Gulf War was for fear of destabilizing the region. This fear was realized when George W.
Bush, with widespread support from the Democratic Party establishment, launched the U.S. war
and occupation of Iraq.
Furthermore, as has been addressed ad infinitum over the last decade, through the creation
of the EU, member nations exchanged fiscal sovereignty for membership in a trading bloc. When
crisis struck, the inability of member nations to respond with fiscal stimulus meant that
'externally' imposed austerity was the only alternative. This flawed structure supported the
interests of some member nations (Germany) against those of the European periphery. This
institutionalized class warfare, carried out under the cover of fiscal probity, has led to
widespread questioning of the nature and purpose of the liberal institutions the EU
represents.
Across the U.S. and Europe cottage industries have arisen proclaiming critiques of the EU,
globalism and liberalism / neoliberalism to be the work of nascent fascists and neo-fascists.
While historical parallels exist, missing is analysis of the parallel failures (then and now)
of neoliberal policies as well as a social accounting for the consequences of these
failures.
More pointedly, such claims require historical parsing that lacks a cohesive logic outside
of political posturing. American slavery and genocide against the indigenous population
constituted the initial conditions of American industrial success going into the early
twentieth century. Considered in combination with the scientific racism of eugenics,
contemporaneous American imperial endeavors and oligarchic control over the U.S. economy going
into the Great Depression, the Nazi political program looked
remarkably similar to the American program .
Additionally, the genesis of racialized violence in economic relations has been materially
misrepresented in current accounts of the rise of European fascism. This history is given
substance in Howard Zinn's
A People's History of the United States . Mr. Zinn provides evidence of race being
knowingly used by capitalists to divert attention away inconvenient class interests. This
history places the modern Democrat's use of identity politics in a different light. Dog
whistles and identity politics are premised in pre-existing and concrete racial divisions.
In contrast to white nationalism, these divisions can have a social basis, rather than in
'nature.' This would seem to make racial identity more malleable, and therefore more amenable
to being resolved. But as establishment Democrats demonstrated through their use of dog
whistles and racialized policies, rhetorical compounding can put a superficially respectable
face on racialized violence. The professional class can respond to 'crime' without considering
its history as a strategy of racialized economic taking, its genesis in capitalist class
relations, or the violence inherent in policing and incarceration.
The Democrat's apparent strategic confusion in putting Joe Biden forward as the
establishment candidate should put an end to identity politics as more than cover for the class
interests that the Democrats represent. The studied ignorance embedded in the question: 'If we
broke up the big banks tomorrow would that end racism' is oblivious to the relationship between
Bill Clinton's neoliberal programs and his racially targeted public policies. Given the
historical use of racial division as a tool of class control, the correct answer is yes,
breaking up the big banks would be a step toward ending racism.
None of this is to pick on the Democrats per se. Republicans have long fostered / aligned
with white nationalism. But again, given the historical genesis of the idea of race, what this
suggests is that both political parties serve the interests of capital. Moral distinctions
between pandering to white nationalists and the use of dog whistles and racially targeted
public policies depend on parsing history in ways that the political elevation of Joe Biden
calls into question.
The bitter rhetorical battle over the use, or even the theoretical coherence, of identity
politics, has had no apparent impact on the Western political establishment's march into the
abyss. A quick bet is that part of the political calculus behind the elevation of Mr. Biden is
that he wouldn't hesitate to use dog whistles, racially divisive language and xenophobia if he
thought it would help him win the election. The conceit that such would only be a tactic was
belied when Bill Clinton used it to craft punitive policies like ending welfare and the Crime
Bill.
The West, led by liberal / neoliberal establishments, is in a terrible way. As recent
European elections demonstrate, the rise of hard-right governments has followed serial public
disappointment with their liberal / neoliberal predecessors. Far from being irrational
rejection of functioning liberalism, it is the inability of liberals to accept and address the
consequences of their own mal-governance that is leading the move rightward.
Bill Clinton's answer to Reaganism was to triangulate Reaganite policies from the right. Joe
Biden is a product of this same time, place and ethos. Whomever the Democrat's choice for
president ends up being, without a fundamental redistribution of political power, the outcome
will be the same -- a long march into the political abyss.
"Those who advocate Multiculturalism seem to have lost an important instinct towards
group -- and thus genetic -- preservation. Once a society, as a whole, espouses
Multiculturalism as a dominant ideology then the society is acting against its own genetic
interests and will ultimately destroy itself."
Ed Dutton
Watching his incredibly entertaining Jolly Heretic You Tube channel, it's easy to
forget that Ed Dutton is also an extremely serious, and increasingly prolific, researcher,
author, and scientist. The recent publication by Arktos of Dutton's Race Differences in
Ethnocentrism follows closely in the wake of Dutton's At Our Wits' End: Why We're
Becoming Less Intelligent and What it Means for the Future (2018), How to Judge People
by What They Look Like (2018), J. Phillipe Rushton: A Life History Perspective
(2018), and The Silent Rape Epidemic: How The Finns Were Groomed to Love Their Abusers
(2019). In Race Differences in Ethnocentrism, Dutton, who has collaborated with Richard
Lynn on a number of occasions, builds impressively on the work of the latter and has offered,
in this text, one of the most informative, formidable, pressing, intriguing, and poignant
monographs I've read in years.
ORDER IT NOW
Dutton's book is a work of science underscored by an inescapable sense of social and
political urgency, and has been explicitly prompted into being by the need to address two
questions "particularly salient during a period of mass migration": 'Why are some races more
ethnocentric than others?' and, most urgently of all, 'Why are Europeans currently so low in
ethnocentrism?' In attempting to answer these questions, Dutton has designed a book that is
accessible to readers possessing even the most modest scientific knowledge, without
compromising on academic rigor or the use of necessary scientific language. The text is
helpfully replete with explanatory commentary and useful rhetorical illustrations, and its
opening four chapters are dedicated exclusively to placing the study in context and exploring
the nature of the research itself. This is a book that can, and should, be read by
everyone.
In the brief first chapter, Dutton explains ethnocentrism or group pride as taking two main
forms. The first, positive ethnocentrism, involves "taking pride in your ethnic group or nation
and being prepared to make sacrifices for the good of it." Negative ethnocentrism, on the other
hand, "refers to being prejudiced against and hostile to members of other ethnic groups."
Typically, a highly ethnocentric person or group will demonstrate both positive and negative
ethnocentrism, although it is very common for people and groups to be high in one aspect of
ethnocentrism but not in the other. It is also apparent that some countries and ethnic groups
are very high in both forms of ethnocentrism while others are extremely low in the same. The
author sets out to explore how and why such variations and differences have occurred, and are
still fluctuating. This is clearly a piece of very novel research. Dutton remarks that "there
exists no systematic attempt to understand why different ethnic groups may vary in the extent
to which they are ethnocentric." Dutton's foundation is built on a deep reading of existing
literature on the origins and nature of ethnocentrism, pioneered to some extent by R. A. LeVine
and D. T. Campbell in the 1970s, and built upon most recently by Australia's Boris Bizumic.
These scholars advanced the argument that ethnocentrism was primarily the result of conflict.
Another highly relevant theory in the study of ethnocentrism has been the concept of 'inclusive
fitness,' which argues that ethnocentrism provides a method for indirectly passing on one's
genes.
Dutton closes his introductory chapter by providing an interesting overview of historical
observations of differences in ethnocentrism. During the so-called 'Age of Discovery,'
Europeans encountered large numbers of different and distant tribes, and many remarked on the
reception they received from these groups. Some, such as the natives of Hawaii and the Inuit
were noted as being extremely friendly, while the negrito tribes of the Andaman Islands, near
India, remain notoriously hostile to outsiders, shoot arrows at passing aircraft, and kill
intruding foreigners, including
an American missionary in November 2018 . The Japanese appear throughout history to have
combined a moderate level of negative ethnocentrism with very high levels of positive
ethnocentrism, resulting in a society typified by high levels of social harmony and in-group
co-operation, and willing sacrifice for the nation in times of war. By contrast, the
Yąnomamö tribe of Venezuela are very high in negative ethnocentrism but very low in
positive ethnocentrism, resulting in a society riddled with lawlessness, extreme violence, poor
social harmony, and an inability to form stable social structures of any kind. Differences in
general levels of ethnocentrism are important because, as Dutton points out, those societies
most welcoming of outsiders were subsequently colonized and fundamentally and permanently
changed by migration. Meanwhile, those societies that displayed extreme hostility to outsiders
have remained almost intact, and remain unchanged even centuries after the European 'Age of
Discovery.'
In the second chapter, Dutton answers the question 'What is 'Race'?' Although many of our
readers will be familiar with most of the material presented in this chapter, it is
nevertheless a very well-presented defense of the concept of race and its unabashed employment
as a scientific system for categorizing and studying humans. In Dutton's presentation, 'race'
is employed to refer to what in the animal kingdom would be a subspecies: a breeding population
separated from another of the same species long enough to be noticeably evolved to a different
environment but not long enough to be unable to have fertile offspring with the other group.
After discussing the processes through which different races or subspecies evolve, Dutton
offers a summary of historical taxonomies of race, before finally answering a number of
criticisms of the concept of race. In the third chapter, and following much the same framework,
Dutton sets out to answer the question, 'What is Intelligence?' Here Dutton answers a number of
criticisms of the concept of intelligence, particularly as they relate to Blacks, before moving
to a discussion of race differences in intelligence. The debt to Richard Lynn's research is
quite clear in this chapter, but Dutton presents past findings with style, conviction, and
novel context, meaning that familiar elements such as Cold Winters Theory are worth getting to
grips with once more.
The fascinating fourth chapter is where the study begins in earnest, and answers the
question 'What Are 'Ethnocentrism' and 'Ethnicity'?' It goes without saying that both terms
have entered, if not dominated, the lexicon of White advocacy, and I found it very refreshing
to become more familiar with the scientific basis for them. Dutton, referring to the work of
Bizumic, notes that the term 'ethnocentrism' was coined by the Polish sociologist Ludwig
Gumplowicz (1838–1909) before entering English with the work of the American economist
William Sumner (1840–1910). In order to better explain the nature of ethnocentrism,
Dutton lays out various lexical definitions of ethnicity and discusses competing schools of
thought in relation to the origins of ethnicity. The division between scholars of ethnicity can
be broadly discussed in terms of two camps: 'Primordialists,' and 'Constructivists' or
'Subjectivists.' Primordialists, representing an older school of thought, assert that ethnic
groups are extremely ancient and are ultimately based around common ancestry. Supporting this
position, Dutton, borrowing from Frank Salter, points out that genetic data shows that ethnic
groups really are distinct genetic clusters. Constructivists, on the other hand, assert that
ethnic identities are merely a product of culture and environment, and are therefore arbitrary
and subject to change. The author spends a great deal of time dissecting the arguments of the
Constructivists and, for me personally, one of the great pleasures of Race Differences in
Ethnocentrism is reading as Dutton prods and teases and the manifold weaknesses in the
Constructivist position.
The author closes the chapter with an extended discussion of the sociobiological origins of
ethnic identity, before providing a summary of proffered causes for ethnocentrism. These
include threat and conflict, psychodynamic theory as advanced by Freud, terror management (a
variation on the theme of threat and conflict), self-aggrandizement theories (ethnocentrism
boosts in-group self-esteem), Marxist theory (ethnocentrism is a tactic employed by one group
in order to gain power over, and exploit, another group), social dominance theory
(ethnocentrism as a side-effect of certain types of personality), socialization explanations
(children learn to be ethnocentric), and the sociobiological model (ethnocentrism is a product
of evolution and adaptation). Dutton argues convincingly that only the sociobiological model
offers answers which explain group behavior in both animals and humans, arguing that
"ethnocentrism is most parsimoniously understood via a partly biological theory wherein the
ethnic group is a kind of extended family."
In the fifth chapter, Dutton surveys recent evidence for the sociobiological model of
ethnocentrism and ethnicity. At the core of the chapter is J. Philippe Rushton's ' Genetic
Similarity Theory ,' which is treated with respect but also caution by the author, who
insists that "it does not fully explain all manifestations of ethnocentrism and, accordingly,
it needs to be nuanced and carefully developed." Put simply, ' Genetic Similarity Theory
' is the idea that animals will instinctively behave more pro-socially to those who share more
of their genes, and that ethnic groups, which are essentially extended families, will
demonstrate the same inclination towards the genetically similar in the form of ethnic
nepotism. It is this inclination to support the genetically similar that paves the way for
'inclusive fitness' -- indirectly passing on at least some of one's genes by supporting kin --
and thus provides some explanation for the origins of altruism. Rushton provided a great deal
of research strongly indicating that humans very much tend to marry, befriend, and otherwise
associate with those who are genetically similar to them, and this is succinctly explored. Some
controversy surrounds the issue of whether or not ' Genetic Similarity Theory ' is
applicable to circles beyond genealogical kin, and Dutton explores the work of Frank Salter in
support of the idea that it is indeed applicable. The only criticism of the concept that Dutton
concedes is that 'Genetic Similarity Theory' does not fully explain variations in ethnocentrism
and therefore does not appear to attribute sufficient weight to environmental factors,
especially external threats to the interests of the ethny -- a factor that has demonstrably
inflamed ethnocentrism throughout human history. Dutton also suggests that fluctuations in
ethnocentrism may also be rooted in the dynamics of human personality, both as humans age, and
as far as personality is influenced by 'Life History Strategy.'
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The sixth chapter, 'Ethnocentrism, Personality Traits and Computer Modelling,' focuses in
detail on the issue of personality. Dutton explains that "we have to examine the concept of an
'ethnocentric personality' because there are race differences in modal personality. So, if
there is an 'ethnocentric personality,' then this would neatly explain why race differences in
ethnocentrism exist." Dutton ultimately dismisses the idea of an 'ethnocentric personality,'
particularly the work of Adorno on prejudice, as having very little relevance to meaningful
research on ethnocentrism. He concludes rather that it seems very likely that "ethnocentrism is
not the by-product of a series of partly heritable personality traits." Instead, "ethnocentrism
is a human universal and is significantly genetic, in the sense that propensity to genetic
similarity is partly genetic." The chapter then moves to the concept of 'group selection,'
during which is it explained and demonstrated that ethnocentric groups are more likely to win
the battle of group selection. "The more ethnocentric group should always triumph in battles of
group selection. This would mean that, all else being equal, races that were compelled, by the
nature of their environment, to combat other groups (by being internally cooperative by
externally hostile) would be more ethnocentric." Computer modelling of such battles has
demonstrated conclusively that ethnocentric strategies will always triumph, leading Dutton to
conclude that universalist humanitarianism is ultimately a losing strategy, "unable to sustain
high levels of in-group cooperation." Humanitarian groups invariably "waste their precious
reproductive potential helping out free riders who give them nothing in return."
In Chapter 7, one of the best and most provocative in the book, Dutton explores the genetics
of ethnocentrism. Dutton takes as his starting point the high level of positive and negative
ethnocentrism among Northeast Asians, and attempts to find candidate genes that may play a role
in producing this situation. Building on research suggesting that oxytocin may contribute to
in-group bias by motivating in-group favouritism and, to a lesser extent, out-group hostility,
Dutton points to scholarly findings that Northeast Asians disproportionately possess ("much
higher than Europeans") genes identified with fear of social exclusion and higher oxytocin
levels (A118G – OPRM1). Further research has indicated that the serotonin transporter
gene polymorphism (5-HTTLPR) combines with environmental factors to shape in-group bias. Dutton
cites studies showing that "70–80 percent of an East Asian sample carried the short form
of this gene, that is to say the form that makes you more ethnocentric. Only 40–45
percent of Europeans in the sample carried the short form of the gene. Indeed, it was found
that across twenty-nine nations, the more collectivist a culture was the more likely it was to
have the short form as the prevalent allele in the population." Dutton adds that his own work
found such correlations to be weak, and he is reluctant to attribute ethnocentrism to small
numbers of specific genes. He instead finishes the chapter with the suggestion that specific
genes such as these may play a small role, but only in conjunction with Life History Theory --
for example, he provides data suggesting that populations with Slow Life History strategies
(typified by higher intelligence, delayed gratification, and higher investment in children) are
likely to be higher in positive ethnocentrism.
In Chapter 8, Dutton presents data on race differences in ethnocentrism, and he then
explores the impact of cousin marriage and religion on ethnocentrism. The chapter opens with a
very interesting discussion of racial dating preferences derived from the OKCupid dating site.
The data suggest that, at least in sexual terms, White women were the most ethnocentric group,
overwhelmingly preferring to date men from their own ethnic group. By contrast, most non-White
groups seemed to have a preference for dating Whites. Dutton explains that this data cannot be
meaningfully employed in the study of ethnocentrism because the fact non-Whites want to have
sex with Whites merely means that "Whites have value." He continues: "this does not, of course,
mean that black people would be necessarily more inclined to lay down their lives for white
people, show preference for white interests over those of their own race, vote for whites over
members of their own race or any other behaviour of that kind that might be regarded as low in
ethnocentrism." Dutton instead utilizes the 'World Values Survey' as a more reliable indicator
of ethnocentric feeling, and finds that East Asians are among the most ethnocentric
populations. At this stage, the author returns to Genetic Similarity Theory, pointing out that
the East Asian gene pool is much smaller than the European gene pool -- in other words, two
random Japanese men will be more closely related than two random English men. This is important
because
any act of ethnic altruism by the Japanese man would have a greater payoff in terms of
inclusive fitness than would precisely the same act by an Englishman. As such, we would
expect higher levels of positive ethnocentrism among Northeast Asians than among Europeans.
By the same token, were a Japanese person to be confronted by a foreigner, this would
potentially damage his genetic interests to a greater extent than would be the case if a
European, from a larger gene pool, was confronted by a foreigner.
Genetic Similarity Theory, as outlined above, is particularly salient in Dutton's discussion
of ethnocentrism among Arabs and South Asians, populations with high levels of cousin marriage.
Arabs and South Asians are more ethnocentric than Europeans but, unlike East Asians, the nature
of Arab and South Asian ethnocentrism tends more towards negative ethnocentrism -- something
Dutton links to relatively lower average intelligence. Consanguineous marriage, itself a
response to a stressful and/or conflict-riven ecology and a means of developing a functioning
society in populations with Fast Life History strategies, will accelerate and deepen negative
ethnocentrism.
This phenomenon is deepened further by high levels of religiosity, which, Dutton argues, has
been demonstrated as boosting both positive and negative ethnocentrism. Among the aspects of
religion that contribute to ethnocentrism and group selection, Dutton cites high levels of
fertility, matrimony, physical punishment of children, bodily mutilation, honor killing,
martyrdom, celibacy, and intense violence or enmity directed at non-believers. I found Dutton's
work here to be especially interesting, though I was left with some significant questions about
the nature of modern Christianity, something disappointingly absent from Dutton's text despite
his rich background in the study of Christian fundamentalists. Why is modern Christianity so
entirely lacking in ability to promote any kind of ethnocentrism? My own instinct is that it
has something to do with the development and spread of the belief in a "personal Jesus," a
largely nineteenth-century American innovation, rather than the older belief in folding oneself
into a community of believers under a more distant and overarching God of nations. But this
would require an essay, or several, to fully articulate, rather than an aside in a book review.
It should suffice to state here that more detail or illustration from Dutton in this regard
would have been most welcome.
Dutton spends several pages discussing Jewish ethnocentrism, and is appreciative of the work
of Kevin MacDonald in this area. Jews are clearly very high in positive ethnocentrism, as
demonstrated by very high levels of in-group philanthropy, belief in themselves as members of a
Chosen People with a special world-historical destiny, and the prolific production of
self-congratulatory and apologetic literature about themselves that is frequently accompanied
by a widespread refusal to make any concessions on negative aspects of the history of the
ethnic group. Jews have also distinguished themselves throughout history with very high levels
of negative ethnocentrism, including their genocides of other peoples (real or imagined) in
their religious texts, very negative portrayals of non-Jews in their religious commentaries,
frequent outbursts against Greek cultural influence in the Classical period, exploitative
economic relationships with Europeans since at least the Carolingian dynasty, the preference
for suicide over conversion in the Medieval period, high levels of culturally disruptive
behaviors among host populations in the modern period, and most recently their extraordinarily
hostile treatment of the Palestinians. This can be partly explained, as Dutton points out, by
the highly consanguineous nature of the Jews. For example, "it has been found that the world's
10 million Ashkenazi Jews are all descended from about 350 Ashkenazi Jews who found themselves
in Eastern Europe about the year 1400." High levels of inbreeding have led to the noted
prevalence of several genetic disorders among the Jews, including Tay-Sachs Disease, Gaucher's
Disease, and Riley-Day Syndrome. Dutton argues that Jews would have been more ethnocentric than
Europeans from the earliest stages of their settlement in Europe, and that this ethnocentrism
would have been deepened even further over historical time, in successive cycles, by their
continued breeding within a small gene pool (intensifying the impact of Genetic Similarity
Theory) and their presence in a high stress environment typified by periodic outbursts of
reactive persecution (resulting in "harsh selection" for the most ethnocentric Jews). Dutton
then discusses the findings of one study carried out by developmental psychologists, in which
it was found that Israeli infants displayed unusually intense fear reactions in response to
strangers when compared with North German infants. Whereas the North German infants had
relatively minor reactions to strangers, the Israeli infants became "inconsolably upset."
The author brings his eighth chapter to a close with a discussion of low ethnocentrism among
Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans. Low ethnocentrism among Africans is explained briefly via
their very pronounced r -strategy, resulting in low rates of consanguineous marriage and
a much broader gene
pool and genetic diversity . On the other hand, Europeans, argues Dutton, occupy a
'Goldilocks Zone' of very low ethnocentrism because they are less K -selected than East
Asians, have a larger gene pool, and their environment is less harsh, leading to lower levels
of group selection. There appears to be a position on the r – K spectrum,
lower than East Asian K strategies, where cousin marriage is selected for (boosting
ethnocentrism) and this position is occupied by Arabs and South Asians rather than Whites, who
instead occupy a position below East Asians but above Arabs and South Asians. The trade-off for
this relatively weakened position of Europeans is that for a population with moderate-to-high
intelligence, "low ethnocentrism would permit a greater ability to trade and pool resources and
so, ultimately, the creation of an extremely large coalition with a very large gene pool. This
group would be more likely than a smaller group to produce geniuses."
Dutton thus argues that, in a sense, some level of selection took place for low
ethnocentrism in Europeans -- a "genius" group evolutionary strategy. Dutton argues that groups
with high levels of genius but low levels of ethnocentrism will triumph over groups with high
levels of ethnocentrism but low levels of genius so long as certain conditions are met. The
most important condition is that the genius group should maintain a basic level of
ethnocentrism. Should this base level decline or collapse, the genius strategy would fail and
highly ethnocentric groups would eventually dominate. European ethnocentrism has clearly been
stronger in the past than it is at present, a fact the author very capably discusses within the
framework of broader fluctuations in ecology (especially the advent of the industrial
revolution) and ongoing evolutions in race itself.
In Chapter 9, Dutton explores in detail several variables that may impact ethnocentrism at
individual and group level. Highly stressful situations in which survival is at risk have been
shown to boost ethnocentrism, and researchers have found that playing violent video games is
even sufficient to increase aggression to perceived out-groups. Mortality salience, or the fear
of death, has also been shown to lead people to believe in a way which is highly defensive of
their in-group. Although Dutton does not explore the theme in any great depth, I was moved to
reflect on how anti-stress Western civilization has become during the last 60 or so years, not
only in terms of industrialization, radically lowered infant mortality, and medical advances
(all of which Dutton explores), but also in the extraordinary emphasis placed by modern culture
on individual transient pleasures and prolonging youth (and therefore delaying or avoiding
confronting death). Decadence, which is what such a culture essentially decays into, is
therefore obstructive or oppositional to the development of ethnocentrism, and 'weaponized
decadence' therefore strikes me as a particularly useful strategy that could be employed by a
highly ethnocentric group with significant cultural influence in a host society with
pre-existing moderate-to-low levels of ethnocentrism -- a way of pushing a stronger "genius
evolutionary strategist" into a fatally lower level of ethnocentrism and thus, ultimately, into
defeat and destruction. Other variables impacting upon levels of ethnocentrism, and discussed
by Dutton, include age, gender, pregnancy, intelligence and education, and ethnic
diversity.
ORDER IT NOW
I found the last of these the most salient. Dutton, following from Vanhanen and Salter,
argues that multi-ethnic societies are much less capable of successfully defending themselves
against incursion from outsiders. This is for three key interrelated reasons. The first is
lower levels of trust, as sapped confidence in one's group leads to radically fewer sacrifices
on behalf of the group. The second is that a multi-ethnic society will be able to draw on
significantly lower reserves of positive ethnocentrism. The third is that ethnic minorities
will tend to support immigration, essentially acting as a fifth column; allies to the outsiders
engaged in incursion. So much for the "diversity is our greatest strength" mantra.
In the penultimate chapter, Dutton makes the argument that the industrial revolution and its
consequences have been a disaster for European ethnocentrism. Industrialization has
significantly reduced human ecological stress in the West, and has accelerated the decline of
European religion -- one of the key supports for an already low level of European
ethnocentrism. Advances in medicine and developments in the welfare state have led to wholesale
dysgenic impacts such as the extraordinary rise in numbers of people with moderate to severe
genetic disorders (26 percent increase in hemophilia, 22 percent increase in cystic fibrosis,
and a 300 percent increase in phenylketonuria). The author posits that the increased
proliferation of unhealthy mutations has further precipitated the decline of healthy instincts
rooted in healthy genes that promoted survival (on a related note, it is interesting that those
identified as ethnocentric score very highly in
disgust sensitivity -- a trait associated with disease avoidance ). Dutton and some of his
colleagues have come to describe such negative mutations as "spiteful mutations" which "cause
people to act against their own genetic interests." He continues:
If [carriers of 'spiteful genes'] influence society, they can persuade even non-carriers
of these 'spiteful' genes to act in self-destructive ways and they can undermine structures
-- such as religion -- which help to promote group interests. Woodley of Menie et al. call
this 'social epistasis.' As a consequence, modern (liberal) religion and ideology -- far from
being an indirect means of genetic preservation -- would in fact reflect a sick society's
growing desire to destroy itself. An obvious example can be seen in the ideology of
Multiculturalism and Political Correctness.
In Dutton's reading of our present situation then, the worst of our traitors are in fact
what perhaps Nietzsche was referring to when he condemned "the botched and the bungled" --
malformed and maladapted offspring eager for self-destruction, and dragging the healthy down
with them.
The final, brief, chapter of Race Differences in Ethnocentrism offers a neat summary
of the findings and central arguments of the book before ending on a warning and offering some
meagre light at the end of the tunnel. The warning is clear:
Europe is increasingly allowing into its borders people who are extremely high in
ethnocentrism as predicted by their high levels of religiousness, low median age, their
practice of cousin marriage, low average intelligence, and (likely) low mutational load. We
have noted that the ethnocentric strategy will, eventually, tend to dominate all other
strategies in the battle for group survival. Alternate strategies can also work, such as the
development of large and highly inventive coalitions, but these cannot last if they promote
ideologies which are actively to the detriment of their genetic interests, as it happening
with Political Correctness, which actively promotes an effective destruction of European
people.
And yet this may be a night that is necessary before the dawn, as Europeans are once more
plunged into a cleaning cauldron of harsh, selective conditions:
We are now living under these conditions. But it will be the collapse of [European]
civilisation and power that will likely lead, many years hence, to their becoming more
ethnocentric once again.
It is the humbling, unenviable, and largely thankless task of websites like The
Occidental Observer
obwandiyag says: May 24, 2019
at 2:37 am GMT Oh, positive ethnocentrism is all well and good. It's just that you have
to ignore how rotten the actual individual members of your own group that you actually know
are. Then, it's pride all the way! Read More • Replies: @Endgame
Napoleon , @Anon ,
@Parsnipitous
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Colin Wright says:
• WebsiteMay 24,
2019 at 3:23 am GMT • 100 Words ' By contrast, the Yąnomamö tribe of
Venezuela are very high in negative ethnocentrism but very low in positive ethnocentrism,
resulting in a society riddled with lawlessness, extreme violence, poor social harmony, and
an inability to form stable social structures of any kind.'
It would be a cruder version of Israel, then. Read More • Replies: @AaronB
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At least in the short term, this would seem questionable.
At one extreme, consider the US from 1780 to about 1970. By very willingly accepting and
incorporating newcomers, it increased in size roughly fifty-fold, and grew to be the most
powerful state in the world. Our subsequent history demonstrates that it's possible to have
too much of a good thing, but
At the other extreme, consider Jews -- a group very assiduously devoted to preserving
its group identity, and not at all interested in absorbing outsiders. Over the last
century, roughly a third have been exterminated, another third are rapidly being
assimilated in the US notwithstanding their efforts at self-preservation, and the last
third have decided the course of wisdom is to pack themselves into a strip of semi-desert
and attack all their neighbors without actually crushing any of them.
Whatever the failings of the strategy of the US, it's far from demonstrated that the
opposite course makes for an improvement. Read More • Replies: @Wally
, @notanon2
, @RobRich
, @John
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Ron
Unz says: May 24,
2019 at 4:01 am GMT • 200 Words Well, most of the article was pretty interesting.
But I'm quite skeptical about this claim:
Dutton instead utilizes the 'World Values Survey' as a more reliable indicator of
ethnocentric feeling, and finds that East Asians are among the most ethnocentric
populations.
This doesn't really make any sense. Until the last hundred years or so, I'd guess that
something like 99% of Han Chinese had almost never even *seen* a non-Han during their
entire lives, and that was also true for almost all of their ancestors for many, many
centuries. Probably the same for Japanese and Koreans.
But if you and almost all of your ancestors have lived all of their lives in a nearly
100% ethnically-pure social environment, how would any tendencies toward ethnocentricity
ever evolve or be maintained? Wouldn't they be about as useful as wings on a gopher?
In support of this theoretical framework, isn't it an empirical fact that China has
always been one of the most "absorptive" nations in the world, with some of the lowest
barriers to ethnic intermarriage and assimilation? That's why the Chinese have absorbed so
many other groups over the millennia, including all the groups that conquered them.
Moreover, there's that famous dictate by Confucius that foreigners who come to China and
act like Chinese should be considered Chinese. Indeed, I think you could make a reasonable
case that China is the world's oldest "Propositional Nation." Read More • Agree:
Godfree Roberts ,
Mr.
XYZ • Replies: @Thulean
Friend , @micheal8
, @AaronB
, @notanon2
, @Anon
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Colin Wright says:
• WebsiteMay 24,
2019 at 4:03 am GMT • 100 Words ' "it has been found that the world's 10
million Ashkenazi Jews are all descended from about 350 Ashkenazi Jews who found themselves
in Eastern Europe about the year 1400." '
Given the large Jewish populations expelled from Britain, France, and the German states
in previous centuries, this statement seems almost fantastically improbable. Surely there
were more than 350 Ashkenazim in Eastern Europe in 1400, and surely more than 350 of them
contributed to the genes of the modern population of Ashkenazim. This leaves aside the
visible resemblance of German Jews to Gentile Germans, of Polish Jews to Gentile Poles, etc
-- and the implications of that. Read More • Replies: @Ron
Unz , @Johnny
Rottenborough , @notanon2
, @Anon
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' "it has been found that the world's 10 million Ashkenazi Jews are all descended from
about 350 Ashkenazi Jews who found themselves in Eastern Europe about the year 1400."
'
Given the large Jewish populations expelled from Britain, France, and the German
states in previous centuries, this statement seems almost fantastically improbable.
I'm not up on the latest genetic research, but it does sound a little garbled
From what I recall seeing a decade or so ago, almost European Jews are descended from
the offspring of a few hundred Middle Eastern males and Northern Italian females who lived
around 500-800 AD (the date was disputed and it's also fuzzy in my memory).
However, by the time the Jews established themselves in Eastern Europe, perhaps around
1000 AD or later, there were probably some tens of thousands of them.
So maybe new scientific findings have updated the history or (more likely) the writer is
getting the two different foundation events mixed up. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc.
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Endgame Napoleon
says: May 24, 2019
at 4:42 am GMT@obwandiyag
Glorifying other groups doesn't help to purify your own group, either. Humans are "all too
human," as the man said. Where is BatMan when you need him? He is enjoying himself in Gotham
& Gomorra. Read More • LOL: Tusk Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc.
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Anon [932] • Disclaimer says: May 24,
2019 at 5:42 am GMT@obwandiyag
Ignoring that is harder for some groups who are lousy with rotten members (nearly everyone).
Other groups merely have to deal with an unavoidable standard deviation that is part of the
human condition. Those groups invented advanced prison systems, long ago, along with the rest
of advanced civilization. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This
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Anon [932] • Disclaimer says: May
24, 2019 at 5:52 am GMT • 200 Words Ethnocentrism is about two things:
psychological health and political protection.
That humans require identity and belonging, things that by definition require barriers,
isn't debatable in terms of their salubrious effects on the individual's mental health.
Humans require political protection from other groups. Humans without political or other
protection that arises from the in-group traditionally had de facto or actual slave status
in the presence of other groups. The same is true today.
Slavers, with slaver religions, push for an end to out-group ethnocentrism for their
desired slaves because it eradicates that group's ability to politically or physically
defend themselves in an effective manner. Due to lack of effective in-group
cooperation.
Those resisting slavery should always work to build a deep and single ethnic culture and
the genetic in-group that it incubates over time.
Once this is formed, political power will follow via the deep in-group cooperation that
this genetically and culturally deeply linked group encourages.
Self-protection, independence, and self determination are all attainable thereafter. All
which are correctly seen as fundamental Human Rights.
Those that fail to cooperate effectively enough, even when allowed their ethnocentrism,
will continue to be controlled by out-groups. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More...
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A model based on the genetic sequencing of 128 Ashkenazi Jews concludes that today's
Ashkenazim descend from the fusion of European and Middle-Eastern Jews during the
medieval era, between 600 to 800 years ago.
The math also indicates that today's sprawling community of Ashkenazi Jews -- there
are more than 10 million around the world -- derived from just 350 people or so.
Read More • Replies: @res ,
@Colin
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How would one go about ranking groups, organizations, individuals, social networks and
publications by intensity or degrees of ethnocentrism?
Could one use automated methods to produce and update these rankings in real time by
tracking and mining social media and all media in general?
One obvious approach: count up the number of times an agent mentions its ethnic
identity, issues, problems, enemies, etc. in its communications.
Questions that would be interesting to answer: which are the most ethnocentric groups in
contemporary American politics? In contemporary European politics? In contemporary global
politics?
Which are the most significant and strategic ethnic conflicts in contemporary global
politics? Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All
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One issue here is that the effective population size may be (much) less than the census
population size at any given time. This page gives some reasons for that: http://www.uwyo.edu/dbmcd/molmark/lect07/lect7.html
It would be good to hear from a real population geneticist about this. This graphic from
the first link above seems to indicate much larger effective population sizes than the
other two links. Note that AJ = Ashkenazi Jewish and FL = Flemish.
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A model based on the genetic sequencing of 128 Ashkenazi Jews concludes that today's
Ashkenazim descend from the fusion of European and Middle-Eastern Jews during the medieval
era, between 600 to 800 years ago.
The math also indicates that today's sprawling community of Ashkenazi Jews -- there
are more than 10 million around the world -- derived from just 350 people or so.'
Then either (a) Haaretz inaccurately reported the results of the research, or (b)
the research itself was flawed.
Enough historical data exists so that we effectively know all Ashkenazim were not
descended solely from 350 ancestors living between 600 and 800 years ago.
If I announced that a genetic study showed that all whites currently living in America
were descended from four hundred Irishmen present in New York City in 1860, would you
believe it?
since most of us don't clearly understand genetics or how research into it is conducted,
there's a tendency to accept any stated result as certain truth, handed down at Mount
Sinai.
Actually, I suspect -- and some of the results proferred imply -- it's no more certain
than anything else. Read More • Disagree: Ron Unz Reply
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A bunch of dumbasses start being punished for their idiocy, forcing them to adapt and
become smart. Then they strut around the world like they own the place, but then relax,
become cucked and then regress to the start. At that point another group is on it's rise,
or it's a dark age until the same group starts over Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc.
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Dutton then discusses the findings of one study carried out by developmental
psychologists, in which it was found that Israeli infants displayed unusually intense
fear reactions in response to strangers when compared with North German infants. Whereas
the North German infants had relatively minor reactions to strangers, the Israeli infants
became "inconsolably upset."
Interesting.
By the way, a very good review &, as far as I can tell, an intriguing book. Read
More • Agree: Thulean Friend ,
anon19 • Replies:
@AaronB
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isn't it an empirical fact that China has always been one of the most "absorptive"
nations in the world, with some of the lowest barriers to ethnic intermarriage and
assimilation? That's why the Chinese have absorbed so many other groups over the
millennia, including all the groups that conquered them.
These foreigners have been Mongolians, Manchu etc. People who are closely related kin.
It's like various tribes of Europe absorbing each other and forming greater nations.
It's qualitively different when you talk about people who look radically different from
you, because that implies the genetic distance is also far greater. There is no reason to
assume that North East Asians are on par with Northern Europeans in their low
ethnocentrism, though it is likely lower than many assume since intermarriage rate with
Whites is quite high (but only really with Whites. Whereas Whites mix with a lot of
groups). Read More • Replies: @Ron
Unz , @david
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anon19 says: May 27,
2019 at 4:44 am GMT All races, except for brainwashed-by-Jews, unorganized whites are
extremely ethnocentric. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display
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Cyrano says: May 27,
2019 at 5:03 am GMT • 200 Words I don't think I buy this theory about low European
ethnocentricity at all. I think it's all the rich degenerate elites who are to blame for
the "decline" in ethnocentricity.
The rich degenerates think that being rich is their ethnicity – and the only one
worth defending – not some genetic similarity with the great unwashed whom they
despise.
That's why they invented that most humane of all altruisms – multiculturalism
– because it defends their ethnicity based on money, to hell with genetically based
ethnicity.
I think that ordinary Europeans are as ethnocentric as they always were, someone else is
expanding their ethnic acceptance against their will in order to preserve their financial
ethnocentricity.
And first of all why blame the Europeans – like they were the ones who invented
multiculturalism? If European civilization is going to collapse – it's not going to
happen in Europe first – it's going to happen in the birthplace of multiculturalism.
Read More • Replies: @Wizard of
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, @Anon
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These foreigners have been Mongolians, Manchu etc. People who are closely related kin.
It's like various tribes of Europe absorbing each other and forming greater nations.
It's qualitively different when you talk about people who look radically different
from you, because that implies the genetic distance is also far greater.
At least with regard to China, I just don't think that's correct
As far as I know, Westerners who've moved to China and taken up Chinese wives and
Chinese customs have been absorbed as easily as other Asians.
And here's a notable historical example. For various reasons, Jews have traditionally
been exceptionally resistant to absorption into local populations, remaining as a distinct
group sometimes after thousands of years of living within a particular host population. But
China absorbed its Jews long ago, being just about the only documented case that easily
comes to mind. Read More • Replies: @jeff
stryker , @Wizard of
Oz , @Thulean
Friend , @j2 ,
@Anon ,
@AaronB
, @Anon
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at least in sexual terms, White women were the most ethnocentric group, overwhelmingly
preferring to date men from their own ethnic group.
So many Unzers BTFO here Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter
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Wizard of Oz says:
May 27, 2019
at 5:37 am GMT • 100 Words @Cyrano
Aren't you mistaken in attributing multiculturalism to the rich? Certainly they don't
participate in it as perhaps you imply when you say that being rich is their ethnicity. Mark
Zuckerberg and his wife are perhaps typical , and, I would suggest, not people of different
cultures but from one which is not that of the rich but of the upper middle class educated.
Perhaps you are suggesting that people like that underrate the importance of differences in
culture that isn't actually part of their experience and therefore rather softheadedly say
"each to his own" in libertarian style without understanding what they are thereby
encouraging amongst the lower classes. Could you spell out your case please? Read More •
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Ashkenazi Jews appear to be 40-50% Italian according to DNA tests on the female
side.
Which means at some point following the diaspora from Judea in Roman times there was a
massive degree of intermarriage between Jewish men and Roman women prior to the fall of
Rome.
Also, considering that Jews trace their origins through their mothers, one would think
that they would all consider themselves Italians.
So they Jews had to absorb non-Jews into their gene pool at some point.
As for Westerners assimilating into Chinese culture, this is relatively commonplace. A
small number of Portuguese live in Macau and of course there are more recent examples. Read
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Wizard of Oz says:
May 27, 2019
at 6:05 am GMT • 300 Words @Ron Unz
I have hardly even a vague knowledge of China's absorption of Jews (and haven't, I confess,
asked Google an obvious, let alone probing, question). But what you say raises the question
of how much more impressed with Chinese culture, custom and governance the Jews in China were
than the Jews elsewhere. Dark Ages Europe (and the ME) with Christian mobs destroying ancient
art and learning may not have looked good compared with Tang or Sung dynasty China (though I
invite someone to tell me about differences within China in those times). Alternatively one
might ask whether the Jews in Europe were only clinging to Judaism through desperately strict
reliance on the/a Talmud which helped maintain separation whereas the Jews in China may have
been free of that limiting influence. Compare indeed the rapidity with which Jews in America,
not least, I believe, the poor of Eastern Europe, began to assimilate at least in so far as
intermarriage implies assimilation. To that plenty of grouches would no doubt point to Jewish
corruption of what the grouches would like to think of as the culture they were assimilating
with (whereas I am more a "Jewish Century" interpreter) but my emphasis would tend to be
rather on the division and, for a time, arrested development, of American Jewry by the
creation of Israel and its drawing on people's need for tribalism and at least equal need to
have an object or ideal beyond themselves. (Isn't being a good American enough? Well, hardly,
when you are a prosperous part of the one superpower .). I suspect assimilation is going to
win. Read More • Replies: @jeff
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Ghali says: May 27,
2019 at 6:06 am GMT Dutton's book has NO science. It is a fabricated lie that relies on
racism and prejudice. Multicultural societies are the opposite of monocluturals; they are
rich in diversity and culture. Just like monoagriculture, monocultural societies are empty of
all the organic ingredients. Read More • Disagree: Robert Dolan •
Replies: @Anon
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Westerners who've moved to China and taken up Chinese wives and Chinese customs have
been absorbed as easily as other Asians.
What percentage are they of the total population? 0.01%? Hardly relevant as an
example.
China absorbed its Jews long ago, being just about the only documented case that
easily comes to mind.
Jews in China were always an extremely small minority, several orders of magnitudes
lower than in leading Western countries as a percentage of the population. Harder to build
buffers in such an environment. Also, I would take issue with your characterisation of Jews
as unable to assimilate. Non-Orthodox Jews in the US have an intermarriage rate of 72%. The
rabbis are constantly reminding us of the 'silent holocaust'. Read More Reply
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Why is modern Christianity so entirely lacking in ability to promote any kind of
ethnocentrism?
50+ years of sustained media attack.
the only defense against television is a television station of your own. Read More Reply
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notanon2 says: May 27,
2019 at 7:02 am GMT@Colin
Wright with Jews very concentrated in urban areas i would have thought the Black Death
could have caused a bottleneck like that (as the plague didn't reach Poland for some
reason).
map of spread of black death
note big gap in Poland Read More • Replies: @Republic
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At least in the short term, this would seem questionable.
the simulations used to study this set a level playing field so it won't be true in all
real world situations. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This
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j2 says:
May 27,
2019 at 8:10 am GMT • 400 Words @Ron
Unz Ron, the claim, when correctly understood, is correct also concerning China.
Chinese are especially negative towards Blacks, anybody with dark skin color. (They think
Blacks smell bad.) They appreciate white skin color. They avoid tanning and use whitening
creams. Yes, they absorb Whites, including Jews, but they are ethnocentric towards other
peoples.
I have this kind of a small theory why this is so. Consider a trait, like intelligence,
being not a product of additive gene alleles, but by a combination of favorable alleles of
several genes. We can assume the combinations are mostly two gene combinations. Assume a
population has two alleles of each two genes (A,a and B,b) with A,a and B,b being each of
50% frequency, and one combination AB raises the trait. Thus, 1/4 of the population has AB.
Mixing this population with a population with two other alleles for these genes, D,d and
E,e, produces a population where the trait increasing combinations, AB and DE, occur in 1/8
of the population. Thus, the average of the trait decreases from mixing.
From this one can conclude that populations with a large number of alleles increasing
the trait has a lower average on the trait, like IQ in Sub Saharan Africa. In SSA genetic
diversity is high and thus there are many alleles of all genes. While in East Asia genetic
diversity is lower than in Europe and the IQ trait is higher. Indeed, if we plot genetic
diversity against average IQ we should get more or less a Piffer plot, a straight line.
This would come from a PGS being not additive but a combination of pairs of two (or more)
IQ genes. To support this idea, notice that additive positive alleles should make a sweep
and become fixed and the variance at the both ends of the trait should be small because the
distribution converges to normal. But this is not so, we do not have populations with
average IQ of 150, while we have very tall or very short dog races produced by selection.
It indicates that the height trait is additive but IQ is not additive.
From this idea it follows that ethnocentrism is higher in populations with low genetic
diversity, average values of traits are higher in populations with low genetic diversity
(as natural selection cannot act if diversity is high: descendants too seldom inherit the
trait of the parents). It would follow that East Asians are ethnocentric, have a higher IQ
and low diversity. They would still like to mix with people possessing the trait they
admire (white skin), so it is not a contradiction. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc.
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RobRich says: •
WebsiteMay 27, 2019
at 8:36 am GMT • 100 Words @Colin
Wright Good point. As libertarians point out the US grew 30-fold with relatively open
borders then tripled that with variations of the current more restrictive but open to
extended family/high achievers (Have a close relative, great invention or a million bucks to
invest in the US? To the head of the line! Otherwise take a number, BTW the waiting list is
100 years long–good luck!) still pretty open compared to most countries. By 1970 is was
near a 100-fold, not 50-fold, growth, so your case is even better. Read More Reply
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Some, such as the natives of Hawaii and the Inuit were noted as being extremely
friendly,
Didn't Capt.Cook get killed and eaten by those "friendly," natives of Hawaii? Read More
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micheal8 says: May 27, 2019
at 12:32 pm GMT • 100 Words @Ron Unz
There are lots of apocryphal data saying many things about the Chinese over history.
Of course, in the US of 330 million people at least 46.6 million are foreign born (by far the
highest number of any country, according to Wikipedia).
China has a population of a billion or so, but less than a million foreign born. This despite
the dramatic improvement in their culture and economics.
So over 14% of the US population are foreign born vs 0.1% of Chinese. One can argue as to the
basis for this difference, but almost all nations are restrictive on accepting immigrants,
unless they provide value.
Would seem the Chinese are similar to the Japanese (who are now absorbing more foreigners due
to a shortage of young workers), who will not tolerate big changes in their society or mores
unless brought about internally. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter
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Catiline says: May 27, 2019
at 12:36 pm GMT Andrew Joyce are you back on Twitter? Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc.
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While coming from a similarly ancient civilization I suspect Jews found less ability to
trade or profit in China than Europe which is why less of them gravitated there than to
Europe.
Jews did not really make much of an impact in India either.
I suspect that because money-lending was never a crime in China or India, there was not
much of living in either of those countries for Jews compared to Europe where they
thrived.
Jews in America arrived as Edison was inventing the film camera and industrialization
required many lawyers, bankers and so on. China never needed these. Read More •
Replies: @Wizard of
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david fields says:
May 27,
2019 at 12:56 pm GMT • 200 Words @Thulean
Friend I tend to agree with Unz, that Chinese are quite open to mixing with and/or
assimilating other ethnic groups. Apart from the well-known examples of Manchus and
Mongols, a large community of Jews migrated to China during the Middle Ages and settled in
Kaifeng, China where they gradually and non-violently assimilated. If one observes the
behavior of Chinese-Americans in the U.S., a large plurality if not a majority marry
Caucasians within one or two generations, usually with little opposition from their
families.
For a literary work that touches on of this Chinese cultural trait, I refer readers to
James McKenna's excellent novel, "The Sandpebbles", which was based on his experience in
the U.S. Navy in China in the 1920s. At that time was not unusual for retiring navy
enlisted men to settle down in China, often with a Chinese woman. To paraphrase a line from
the novel, 'For the Chinese, it's quite natural for a foreigner to become a Chinese'. Read
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Ethnocentrism is not a directly selected for thing – it is unfortunate that HBD
promoters no longer understand second-order effects.
To HBD people, every trait is a simplistic directly selected for thing, not a second or
third order effect of some other trait.
This is a sign of the declining intelligence of our times, this inability to think
complexly.
Anyways, ethnocentrism is a second order effect of egoism – you love yourself, you
love your group. Your group is just a version of yourself.
An ethnocentric society is also a highly competitive and stratified by status one
internally, because it is a society with a high level of egoism – when whites were
ethnocentric, it was the same way with them. And it's the same way in other ethnocentric
societies like China.
The reason whites went from being an intensely ethnocentric group to not being one in
the space of less than a century has nothing to do with genetics, of course, but because
they lost the egocentric perspective – partly as a result of loss of religion, which
inculcated positive self image (one is in a relationship with God), and partly as a result
of the so called objectivity and neutrality required by science, which makes you lose touch
with your natural self love.
If whites ever become ethnocentric again, there will have to be a general rise in
competitiveness also.
Of course, the picture is not one dimensional, and is balanced out by warmth,
camaraderie, and brotherhood. Israelis are fiercely competitive with each other but also
extremely brotherly and helpful to anyone in need.
And whites will be the same way if they become ethnocentric again – but let there
be no illusions about the bad side as well. Read More • Replies: @jeff
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Anon [282] • Disclaimer says: May
27, 2019 at 2:28 pm GMT • 100 Words @Ron
Unz It all depends if the other group is thought to be *higher* or *lower* , higher and
lower meaning what they quite universally mean in human business.
See how well a vast number of races are absorbed in China
(Corollary 1: a group seeing itself as *above* all others will avoid intermixing with
every other group).
I don't venture into saying this is wrong this is right these are better those are
worse. Behind the surface, everyone agrees to the rules of the game. Read More Reply
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AaronB says: May 27,
2019 at 2:53 pm GMT • 100 Words @Ron
Unz Individual Jewish communities, especially in extremely remote locations without
connections to the rest of the world, have disappeared. That's not at all unusual. And Jews
have been assimilating into gentile populations throughout history.
Plus, the Jews of Kaifeng have not entirely disappeared.
But I agree with your point that Chinese can and do assimilate racial outsiders –
all ethnocentric groups do. There are Chinese and Indian looking Jews in Israel, and of
course conversion to Judaism is a very real thing.
I cannot think of any ethnocentric group that isn't prepared to assimilate racial
outsiders in the right numbers, provided they demonstrate commitment to the culture –
skin in the game – and aren't numerous enough to rapidly alter the racial character.
Read More • Replies: @jeff
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We do see a detente in politics. Jews and Irish-Americans initially distrusted and
disliked one another. Southern Democrats, who produced Clinton and Carter, obviously
harbored anti-Jewish feelings (The word anti-Semite refers more to Arabs).
However, Irish-Americans and Jews and Southerners worked together in the Democrat party.
Without the Jewish vote, Clinton would never have been elected (He was undone by his
involvement with one, however).
In this sense, ethnocentrism was replaced by politics.
As for the white identity in America, it was always based upon a value system. Whites
were from all corners of Europe and never bound by blood but by a sense of political and
moral identity.
Once this was gone, whites had no cultural anchor. Asians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and
Italian-Americans to a lesser extent always had a cultural anchor of sorts. White
Americans, for whatever reason, did not seem to. When drugs swept through America,
encouraged by Jews (As well as by Irish-Americans like Timothy Leary and Charles Manson of
course) they ravaged whites and not Jews. BEASTIE BOYS were the first "whiggers" but Jews
never sought to imitate them. Ron Jeremy and Sarah Silverman and Al Goldstein all espoused
sexual freedom and promiscuity but the out-of-wedlock birth rate never soared among
Jews.
Similarly, Asians-Americans and Hindus and Muslims have not really be affected by the
media like whites.
These are only a few of the reasons. But I agree with you that science (Rationalism and
passivity) somehow eroded belief systems essential to European-Americans. Read More •
Replies: @John
Gruskos , @AaronB
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In a number of societies Jews did not particularly thrive. For example, in Calcutta the
Iraqi Jews failed completely and most moved to Israel simply in order to survive
economically (Not due to persecution).
I knew Jews in Kerala personally and they had fared slightly better by intermarrying
with Brahmin women to become the so-called St. Thomas Christians.
But Jews have come and gone from several major civilizations without making a great
impact.
European Jews were, you remember, just that. Sometime after the Diaspora they
intermarried with Roman women at a time when Rome was in the late stages of its glory and
the Askenazi Jews as a race began and subsequently found themselves in the Rhineland as
this rose in prominence.
Jews probably NEVER fared as well in Spain or India or China or Persia as they did in
Europe. Why?
This is debatable. Read More • Replies: @AaronB
, @notanon2
, @Anon
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By very willingly accepting and incorporating newcomers, it increased in size roughly
fifty-fold, and grew to be the most powerful state in the world.
Wrong!
Most of the increase was due to high birth rate among old stock Americans, which was in
turn due to affordable family formation (low land prices / high wages).
The highest % increases ever recorded in the decennial census occurred 1790-1830, during
a period of very low immigration levels.
America would have become the world's greatest economic and military power, even if the
total number of immigrants from 1780 to 1970 had been precisely 0. Read More • Agree:
Ron
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for whatever reason . . . somehow eroded belief systems essential to
European-Americans
Read Culture of Critique .
American (aka real American, aka un-hyphenated American, aka old-stock American, aka
White American) ethnocentrism was deliberately attacked and destroyed by a series of Jewish
intellectual and political movements, with the intention of facilitating the group
interests of Jews.
The education system, news media and entertainment industry are all viscerally hostile
to American ethnocentrism, but supportive of the ethnocentrism of diaspora peoples living
among the Americans, especially the Jews. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This
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Wizard of Oz says:
May 27,
2019 at 3:45 pm GMT • 100 Words @jeff
stryker It may be pedantically logical to say so, but I think what you are effectually
doing is to deny significance to what Ron said by saying there weren't really very many of
them (because of lack of opportunity for exercosing their particular skills).
As to your last paragraph, what bearing do you think it has on the assimilation, past,
present and future, in America. It could be said that the value added by lawyers and
bankers in industrialising America was very different from the activities in Eastern Europe
which, with or without justice, aroused antagonism. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc.
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AaronB says: May 27,
2019 at 4:07 pm GMT • 300 Words @jeff
stryker I'm not sure about that. I believe the Iraqi Jews who traded in India were very
successful, and Iraqi Jews in Israel have a good reputation. I believe the extremely
wealthy British Sasoon family were Iraqi Jews who made their fortune in the India trade.
Interestingly, Iraqi Jews took over many Indian dishes like curry and mango chutney
(known as amba in Israel, and put on schwarma).
The Syrian and Persian Jewish community were also very successful, and Jews had a Golden
Age in Spain.
You are correct though that nowhere did the Jews achieve the same level of prominence as
in post 18th century Europe – and the reason is obviously the European Enlightenment,
which enshrined the rule of Reason and destroyed healthy traditions that allowed Europeans
to compete against Jews.
Before this period, Jewish success in Europe was on par with their performance in Syria
or Persia – successful, but nothing amazing.
And yes, Ashkenazi Jews are indeed actually 50% European (90% and up on the mothers
side), Italian, to be specific, with northern European admixture.
There is a surprising number of Hasidic Jews who look Aryan – tall, blond, and
blue eyed. And if you stroll through the Hasidic areas of Brooklyn you will see lots of
blond kids with blue eyes and pale skin. But there are lots of darker Med types as
well.
The truth is that each Jewish community mixed heavily with the local population –
very heavily – and Jews are anything but a pure ethnic group.
There is an ethnic core, to be sure – but what really shapes them and unites them
is the culture and religion. That's what it takes to make a people and nation. Read More
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AaronB says: May 27,
2019 at 4:19 pm GMT • 300 Words @jeff
stryker This isn't quite true. I grew up in the modern orthodox community in Brooklyn
in the 90s, and heavy drug use was extremely widespread even among kippa wearing religious
Jews, and indeed all sorts of dysfunction including wild parties and sex. It was truly wild
times – today's kids are so much tamer all across America.
Perhaps it wasn't as bad as in the white community today, and the drugs were different
but not always, but Jews are not magically insulated from social trends.
However, most of these guys that I knew are married with kids and jobs today –
Jewish culture, with its traditions, social cohesiveness, and general rejection of abstract
Enlightenment culture, provided a level of protection and resilience that deracinated and
de-culturalized whites do not have, tragically.
These are only a few of the reasons. But I agree with you that science (Rationalism
and passivity) somehow eroded belief systems essential to European-Americans.
This really key to understanding what's going on with whites, and you understand this
because you live in Asia, and can see a more organic culture first hand.
The solution is simple but very daring and bold – simply relax the role of
rational and abstract thought in life, and an organic culture based on intuition and
different ways of engaging with the world will begin to spontaneously regenerate itself
among whites.
Simply acknowledge human powerlessness and dependence on God.
But this is extremely difficult to do for people addicted to ego and control, and
probably a real collapse is needed before they are willing to accept the help of a higher
power. Read More • Replies: @jeff
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Grace Poole says:
May 27,
2019 at 5:02 pm GMT • 200 Words I listened closely to several of Dutton's videos
-- he's gifted and highly knowledgeable; it would be great to see Dutton & E Michael
Jones at a grand conference, UNZpac USA.
re his, Why do the Irish have a low IQ? (93 compared to British 100)
Among other things, he argues that
a. it takes intelligence to migrate
b. the Potato famine induced massive migration; -- the best Irishmen left Ireland
At the same time, I'm trying to get some work done on a house, and in my region, only
Hispanics/Latinos do this work. I'd hire an English-speaking tradesman if I could find
same, but I can't.
The painter, electrician and wannabe carpenters working on my property do not speak
English and understand only rudimentary English; they neither read nor write -- preparing a
prioritized list for their use is pointless. They possess a certain group canniness -- the
painter suggests the electrician, etc., and they are diligent about their work. But
Honduras is not experiencing a brain-drain based on these men.
So I wonder if Dutton got it wrong in some fundamental way: Was the Potato famine
pursued and prolonged by the British precisely to drive cheap labor to Anglo-America, and /
or to pursue the Talmudic dictum, Kill all the best gentiles?
That is pretty close to what we are slowly slowly discovering happened to the German
(and Italian -- thanks, Guido Preparata) people and nation.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/TFqCiJOpWhk?feature=oembed @notanon2
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AaronB says: May 27,
2019 at 5:05 pm GMT • 100 Words @Bardon
Kaldian Presumably, those Israeli children are seeing racially similar people. So the
response was not to different race people, but to strangers.
Secondly, Israeli culture is no doubt quite different, closely at war with a neighboring
people and subject to periodic terrorist attacks, and infants are conditioned differently
at an early age.
This does not say anything about genetic differences. Read More Reply
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Jews probably NEVER fared as well in Spain or India or China or Persia as they did in
Europe. Why?
nepotism is one aspect of ethnocentrism.
if group A is more nepotistic than group B then they gain an advantage in small scale
competition (e.g. business) .
Jews in India/China etc hit a wall cos their competitors was the same as them –
this is the thing, Jewish nepotism isn't unusual, most peoples are like that, WEIRD peoples
are the odd ones out.
(this is why they're starting to get out-competed in the US particularly by Indians)
nb ethnocentrism operates at different scales – in peacetime most "ethnic"
competition is very small scale i.e. two extended families competing over a business
opportunity. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide
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But if you and almost all of your ancestors have lived all of their lives in a nearly
100% ethnically-pure social environment, how would any tendencies toward ethnocentricity
ever evolve or be maintained? Wouldn't they be about as useful as wings on a gopher?
But most people across the world lived like this, so the whole genetic ethnocentrism or
non ethnocentrism thing seems like it doesn't really make sense. Most Swedish people
probably never saw a non European, and most Anatolian Turks probably never saw a non Turk,
and most Omani Arabs likewise.
Only a very few groups would have had the chance, for relatively short periods, to live
in cosmopolitan cities are areas with clear racial fault lines.
Ethmocentrism is surely a second-order effect and an acquired cultural trait. It also
doesn't make sense that Europeans went from being intensely ethnocentric to very little in
the space of a century. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This
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anonymous [145] • Disclaimer says: May
27, 2019 at 5:14 pm GMT • 200 Words It is not a race/ethnicity specific thing; it
is an in-group thing. It is also very much tied to cultural unity.
Why is modern Christianity so entirely lacking in ability to promote any kind of
ethnocentrism?
Europeans lost faith in Christianity after WW2. In 1945, Europe was in ruins with
millions dead, after having fought yet another war that supposedly nobody ever wanted.
People turned inwards and reflected on the past 500 years of European history. There were
numerous wars between Christian states and between Christians and non-Christians. There was
the age of exploration, slavery, colonialism, conquistadors, etc. Christianity itself was
not necessarily blamed, but it didn't need to be; it was just enough that it was associated
with the entire time period. And in 1945, whether rightly or wrongly, these associations
were overwhelmingly negative. Christianity has remained in Europe, of course, but these
days certain aspects are emphasized ("love thy neighbor", "turn the other cheek") over
others. Even secular Europeans still retain certain Christian values which are then
conveniently incorporated into their acceptance of mass immigration.
In comparison, Christianity in the US still retains an aspect of being a force for local
unity in a way that has been lost in Europe. Recent American conflicts have usually been
subtly framed as being a triumph of Christian America over atheist commies or Muslims. Of
course, I am sure that it is just a coincidence that this exists to the benefit of a
certain tribe. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All
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I don't think I buy this theory about low European ethnocentricity at all. I think
it's all the rich degenerate elites who are to blame for the "decline" in
ethnocentricity.
my understanding of ethnocentricity is although it's always there, unless people are
under a direct threat it is a relatively weak force except at the scale where people are
most related e.g. extended family, clan etc and to be a big factor at higher scales it
needs cultural reinforcement.
in the past western elites promoted that cultural reinforcement whereas now they do the
opposite.
so i think euros did gradually get less ethnocentric but it was disguised because the
elites compensated for it artificially with patriotic cultural reinforcement and then when
the elites suddenly stopped (from WW1 onwards) the underlying low ethnocentricity remained.
Read More • Replies: @Cyrano
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re his, Why do the Irish have a low IQ? (93 compared to British 100)
based on personal experience i both believe and disbelieve this data.
one of the things you notice if you ever work in areas with lots of blue collar
immigrants is the kids are taller and smarter than the parents even if they're marrying
other immigrants from the same place.
keyword: same?
i worked construction (a long time ago) with people from rural Ireland so yeah i can see
where the 93 figure comes from but at the same time I worked with the kids or grand kids of
same and they were "normal" so i think there's a rural inbreeding effect which is being
missed – not inbreeding in the sense of actively marrying close cousins but a long
term effect of people in the same valley marrying each other for so many centuries they're
all effectively close cousins and all it takes to get rid of negative homozygous effects is
marrying someone from the next valley.
i think there's potentially big jumps in average IQ between rural and urban for this
reason and differences in average IQ between genetically similar populations may often be
the result of differences in the ratio of urban : rural : mountain rural. Read More Reply
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Anon [421] • Disclaimer says: May
27, 2019 at 5:41 pm GMT@Colin
Wright English:
"a language is a dialect with an army and navy"
Yiddish:
"a shprakh iz a dyalekt mit an armey aum yam – flot
German:
Eine Sprache ist ein Dialekt mit einer Armee und einer Marine
A comparison of three Germanic languages; where's the supposed Slavic? Read More Reply
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Cyrano says: May 27,
2019 at 5:51 pm GMT • 300 Words @Wizard of
Oz Multiculturalism was invented in lieu of real Socialism – in order to avoid
it. They even borrowed the main mantra from socialism – "We are all equal".
Socialism is about equality, not capitalism. When you hear capitalist talk about
equality you have to know that there is some kind of scam involved.
The whole idea of multiculturalism stinks of Nazi Germany influence. They were the first
to use the term "socialism" for propaganda purposes and the same thing is with the
multiculturalism – it was created for purely propaganda purposes to portray the west
as progressive and liberal – in order to prevent demand for social improvements.
What makes things funnier is that both the Nazis and present day "democracies" were
sworn enemies of socialism – as being the "evil" system, yet when they want to fake
humanization of their system, they borrow elements from socialism. Is than irony or
what?
They are obviously lying about socialism being the "evil" system, because with their
actions they admit that the only way capitalism can progress – is toward socialism.
Now, I am not advocating conversion towards total socialism – that has been tried
– it didn't quite work out. But the improvements that need to be made in capitalism
have to be borrowed from socialism – the only other option is to borrow from
feudalism and that's not going to work either.
"Real" socialism advocated equality among nations and among people within a nation
– provided they stayed where they are. The modern Frankenstein of socialism that they
created in the West with chopped up body parts of socialism, misaligned them and breathed
into the monster the holy spirit of capitalism and they expected it to work.
How can you achieve "equality" by bringing hordes from the 3rd world when you haven't
achieved equality among the original, native born population? But that's the whole point
– isn't it – to pretend that you are striving for some kind of equality,
because you don't want the native born population to move one inch closer to being equal
with the rich elites. Read More • Replies: @notanon2
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if you and almost all of your ancestors have lived all of their lives in a nearly 100%
ethnically-pure social environment, how would any tendencies toward ethnocentricity ever
evolve or be maintained?
i think people are assuming the "ethno" part of ethnocentricity developed at and for the
ethnic group scale whereas i think it mostly came into being at the clan or extended family
level.
those evolved traits can then be culturally reinforced to operate at the ethnic group
level depending on various factors
– inclination of elites to promote that cultural reinforcement
– how actually related the group is at the group level
– peace or war Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread
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Cyrano says: May 27,
2019 at 6:13 pm GMT • 100 Words @notanon2
So what are you saying, that in order to strengthen ethnic bonds, they should organize
pow-wows? Ethnic bonds are as strong as ever in Europe.
The rich elites are ruining societies in order to preserve their personal wealth.
If they want to test how strong are the ethnic ties, why not one single country which is
now under threat of multiculturalism has organized a referendum on immigration? Then you'll
find out how strong the ethnic bonds are.
But I guess "democracy" was only designed to let you choose which clown from the deep
state you want to entertain you in the next 4 years. You were never asked for opinion on
things that really matter.
Every western country should organize "Brexit" style referendum on such a crucial issue
which threatens the survival of the state – immigration. Read More • Replies:
@notanon2
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Multiculturalism was invented in lieu of real Socialism
the multicult was invented cos slavery was abolished and Emma Lazarus' family needed a
new source of cheap labor. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This
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That is the general area where The Pale of Settlement was established hundred of years
later by the Jews Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread
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So what are you saying, that in order to strengthen ethnic bonds, they should organize
pow-wows?
the elites used to actively promote patriotism to reinforce ethnocentricity but now they
promote anti-nationalism.
Ethnic bonds are as strong as ever in Europe.
they're still strong in south and east Europe but less so in NW Europe.
The rich elites are ruining societies in order to preserve their personal wealth.
yes partly that but also partly an anti-nationalist reaction to the world wars because
Europeans developed technology that made war dysgenic even for the winners.
If they want to test how strong are the ethnic ties, why not one single country which
is now under threat of multiculturalism has organized a referendum on immigration? Then
you'll find out how strong the ethnic bonds are.
imo the level of overt ethocentricity displayed by a population will be a combination
of
– baseline level
– the level of elite reinforcement (or not)
– the level of external threat
so yes even with a low baseline and the elites actively suppressing the normal reaction
to being replaced in your own homeland, being replaced is clearly enough of a threat to get
people to vote against it in a referendum but so far not enough to force politicians to put
it to a referendum.
so far all most people do is move away. this may change when there's nowhere left to
run. Read More • Replies: @Vianney
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Vianney says: May 27,
2019 at 8:48 pm GMT • 100 Words @notanon2
The trials by NY Jewish lawyers of Alt Right protesters in Charlottesville COULD serve as a
referendum if a few, or better yet, a group or Law School summoned the cajones to argue on
the side of American heritage.
It's Thomas Jefferson's city, fer chrissake, that is being reduced to "remember Munich"
status.
No mere happenstance.
Is there no one left in Charlottesville with enough pride to snatch up and raise high
the American flag rather than the blue 6-star? Read More • Replies: @notanon2
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notanon2 says: May 27, 2019
at 9:12 pm GMT@Vianney
given the education system only went fully anti-white c. 10 years ago the people who
understand what is happening and have (or will have) the skills to fight back in the courts
are probably still in college or only recently left. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc.
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Anon [427] • Disclaimer says: May
27, 2019 at 10:16 pm GMT • 300 Words @Ron
Unz Chinese have lived in Southeast Asia since the 1800's, yet in virtually all SEA
countries, they remain distinct as an ethnic group, rarely intermarry with non-Chinese.
Growing up as an ethnic Chinese minority in Malaysia, I was taught to believe that the
Chinese were the superior race, compared to the lazy, low IQ Malays or Indians.
Since immigrating to the US in my teens in the 80's, I have watched with alarm how much
immigration from mainland China has grown in the US in the last 2 decades. My mixed race
kids tell me the Chinese kids in school tell them their mainland Chinese parents always
tell them "China #1!", and they wonder why their parents moved to the US (the answer:
because they are all corrupt and need to get out with their ill gotten gains before they
get thrown in jail). Chinese ethnocentrism is real and it is ugly.
However, as with all generalization, there are always exceptions and I am one such. I've
grown to despise my own tribe over the last 4 decades. I see how the Chinese behave the
world over, whether they are the majority or minority, they are greedy, selfish, dishonest,
rude, loud, clannish and have excessive ethnic pride, which causes many to completely lack
introspection. They are also a filthy tribe who does not take care of their environment,
their yard, and lack any kind of civic mindedness. The Cantonese are an especially
obnoxious tribe among the Chinese, absolutely abominable.
I think fewer Chinese is a good thing for the world. My tribe needs to die out, either
through childlessness or intermarriage. The world will be a better place. Read More Reply
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mcohen says: May 27,
2019 at 10:30 pm GMT • 100 Words "Those who advocate Multiculturalism seem to have
lost an important instinct towards group -- and thus genetic -- preservation. Once a
society, as a whole, espouses Multiculturalism as a dominant ideology then the society is
acting against its own genetic interests and will ultimately destroy itself."
Ed Dutton
Bullshit.inbreeding leads to retardation and genetic diseases
As defined
inbreed
/ɪnˈbriːd/
verb
gerund or present participle: inbreeding
breed from closely related people or animals, especially over many generations.
"persistent inbreeding has produced an unusually high frequency of sufferers from this
disease" Read More • Replies: @anon
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the grand wazoo says:
May 27, 2019
at 10:33 pm GMT • 100 Words @david
fields I doubt the Chinese, or Asians in general are quick to assimilate by marriage. How
many mixed couples, i.e. Asian/White, Asian/Black, do we see. Not many and closer to none,
even here in liberal metro LA. I was at a party in Palos Verdes, Ca. the other day. There
were a number of Asian couples present, but not 1 mixed. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc.
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Anon [427] • Disclaimer says: May
27, 2019 at 10:38 pm GMT • 200 Words @Cyrano
Lack of ethnocentrism in whites is almost entirely caused by the last 5 decades of
relentless Jewish brainwashing and browbeating through their control of the media and the
education establishment. Jews have beaten white guilts into the white psyche to the point
where whites are either afraid to express their true feelings or are completely brainwashed
into believing in their own evilness. It's a real shame as Northern Europeans especially
from Germany and Scandinavia are probably the best race: intelligent, industrious, and
quite possibly the only truly honest people on earth.
European countries are the most beautiful places on earth not because they are the
richest -- many Europeans actually live quite modestly by American standards, they live in
small apartments or homes and don't make that much money compared to many upper middle
class professionals in the US, but they take care of their environments. They build
beautiful homes, grow beautiful gardens and yards, keep their environments clean and tidy,
and obey the law. It makes their societies look rich by comparison.
People in other parts of the world need to take a page from the Northern Europeans and
take better care of their environments. Beautiful places put people in better moods, and
make them want to be better people, e.g. more honest and law abiding. Read More •
Replies: @Cyrano
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anon [297] • Disclaimer says: May 27,
2019 at 10:46 pm GMT@mcohen I
agree, therefore all Jews should be forced to interbreed exclusively with Nigerians to solve
their severe inbreeding problem. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter
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For various reasons, Jews have traditionally been exceptionally resistant to
absorption into local populations, remaining as a distinct group sometimes after
thousands of years of living within a particular host population.
Throughout ancient Europe, Jews were not allowed to own land and were often despised as
the money lenders throughout the diaspora. I don't know how hard it would've been for the
Jews to ditch Judaism, adopt Christianity, intermarry and completely assimilate with the
native Europeans, but at least the Spaniards had tried to get them to do that, to no avail.
I can only surmise that the Jewish religion is a very strong religion that keeps the Jews
believing out of fear or a strong sense of kinship.
However, many Jews in the US have become secular, yet continue to identify as Jews.
Perhaps this is because membership has its privileges, Jews help out other Jews in
business, academia, politics etc. But lately I'm thinking it has a lot to do with Israel.
There seems to be more and more "Holocaust Museums" being built all over the west. Who is
building them? Nearly 80m died in WWII, yet all we ever hear about are the 6m. Israel
depends on support from the diaspora to survive, esp. those in the US, both financially and
politically, so they continue to fan up the Holocaust to keep Jews loyal to the tribe, even
as the influence of Judaism wanes. As such, as long as Israel is still around, Jews will
never fully assimilate to whichever country they live in, because Israel wouldn't let them.
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Anon [427] • Disclaimer says: May
27, 2019 at 11:05 pm GMT@Ghali
Multicultural societies are all failed societies, dysfunctional, chaotic, dog-eat-dog,
every man for himself, everybody hates everybody. Just look at Malaysia or Brazil.
The US is turning into Brazil x 10, with nukes. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc.
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Parsnipitous says:
May 27, 2019
at 11:07 pm GMT@obwandiyag
You're such an idiot, Obi Wan. I don't mind the leftist/antiracist bent, but you're making
such poor arguments. What is your connection here? You getting paid? Read More Reply
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Cyrano says: May 27,
2019 at 11:20 pm GMT • 100 Words @Anon
Here we go about the Jews again. Can we leave them out of at least one conversation?
Ethnocentrism is "losing strength" today because it's actively suppressed by the elites.
They do this by equating ethnocentrism with racism and accusing only the deplorables of
being racists, while they – the rich degenerates are so above it.
The elites implemented multiculturalism because it's the cheapest form of "socialism".
Cheapest for them – it didn't cost them a penny, in the long run Multiculturalism is
going to be the most expensive and destructive form of phony socialism for each country
that embraced it. Read More • Replies: @Time to
Wake Up , @Vianney
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Jews probably NEVER fared as well in Spain or India or China or Persia as they did in
Europe. Why?
Jews did well in Europe because the native Europeans are honest and easy to rip off. The
dishonest always make the honest look stupid by comparison.
But the Spaniards, Indians, Chinese, Persians are as dishonest and unscrupulous as the
Jews, so they have no advantage over these groups. Read More • Replies: @jeff
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Time to Wake Up says:
May 27, 2019
at 11:58 pm GMT@Cyrano
Yep, the (((elites))) wanted multiculturalism. When every group is an outgroup, (((they)))
will no longer stick out as the only outgroup and be easily called out for all their
treacheries. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide
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Vianney says: May 28,
2019 at 12:23 am GMT • 100 Words @Cyrano
Jewish-designed, intended and enforced brain washing -- they, themselves, call it
psychological warfare, is an historical fact and a present reality.
There may be other groups or causal factors responsible for breakdown of
ethnocentricism, but Jewish ideology and praxis ranks at or near the top of the list.
It's foolish and self-destructive to ignore an accurate diagnosis out of fear of
'offending the Jew.' That is a Jewish defense mechanism. A soldier does not refrain from
dispatching an adversary just because the adversary calls him names. Read More Reply
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Agathocles says:
May 28,
2019 at 12:25 am GMT • 300 Words We should recognise that within Europe there is
significant disparities in levels of ethno-centrism. For example, the Greek belief in the
superiority of its culture compared to others (somewhat of a proxy of ethno-centrism) is
through the roof compared to northern and western Europe.
Despite being one of history's most important trading people, being in a part of the
world which is not isolated and also having been colonised by Muslim Turks for 400 or so
years, Greeks have retained remarkable consistency in their genetic composition with only
relatively small intrusions of Slavic ancestry primarily in Macedonia and some Levantine
intrusions in Cyprus.
The key to ethnocentricity, which is not addressed by many, is a strong and stable
family structure as ethnicity is largely passed on by genes and family education. Of
course, state education is also critical. And Greeks again show some of the healthiest
signs in the developed world on this front. Children born out of wedlock in the two
Hellenic states of Greece and Cyprus are very low.
Of course, even the Greek family is not immune to modern lifestyle-related diseases as
witnessed by the low birthrate.
As for state education, although the Greek state has sometimes been disorganised,
wherever Greeks go, they establish two things first: a church and school often with the
support of the Greek state. Both institutions are key vehicles for the perpetuation of
ethno-centric values Read More • Replies: @utu
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utu
says: May 28, 2019
at 12:44 am GMT@Agathocles
And Greeks have been ranked with the highest in Europe anti-Semitism index by ADL. Read More
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Similarly Chinese cannot get over on Koreans or Japanese like they can on Southeast
Asians. Why? Because they have the same characteristics as Chinese.
Makes sense the Jews fared less well in Southern Europe getting over on wary and shrewd
Sicilians or Spanish. Read More • Replies: @AaronB
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But I agree with your general point – Jewish dominance after the Enlightenment is
only because northern Europeans made themselves vulnerable to group competition.
This is undoubtedly correct. Read More • Replies: @jeff
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Jews had their Abbie Hoffmans (A real charmer who once doled out advice on how crash Bar
Mitzvah's in STEAL THIS BOOK) and their whiggers (BEASTIE BOYS made EMINEM look positively
sophisticated) and their sexual degenerates (Goldstein, Ron Jeremy, Sarah Silverman).
But Jews never regarded these people as examples of any kind. They merely regarded them
as degenerates who HAPPENED to be Jewish.
Similarly, crack cocaine's popularity affected Jews in the boroughs of New York as well.
But statistically less.
As for wild teenage behavior among whites or Jews, this seemed to reach a peak in the
post-70's period of FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH and by 1983 dissipated during the Reagan
Revolution.
When one watches the original KARATE KID today their first thought is "where are the
police? Where's the principal?" Read More • Replies: @AaronB
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AaronB says: May 28,
2019 at 1:32 am GMT@jeff
stryker I have always despised the Beastie Boys, I can tell you that. Utterly talentless,
vulgar, hacks. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide
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Spain is ostensibly easy to explain. There was less animosity between Muslims and Jews
at that time than between Muslims and Catholics, provided the Jews paid their taxes. Same
as the Maghreb. Which the Catholics were aware of and so expelled the Jews along with the
Muslims.
In addition to the Enlightenment is the European class system, from which Jews were
relatively free.
Whereas in Southern Europe, trade had existed in Rome for a long time. There was also
the issue of usury.
"... In July 2017 Strache and his right hand man Johann Gudenus, who is also the big number in the FPOe, get invited for dinner to a rented villa on Ibiza, the Spanish tourist island in the Mediterranean. They are told that the daughter of a Russian billionaire plans large investments in Austria. It was said that she would like to help his party. The alleged daughter of the Russian billionaire, who is actually also Austrian, and her "friend" serve an expensive dinner. Alcohol flows freely. The pair offers a large party donation but asks for returns in form of mark ups on public contracts. ..."
"... Unknown to Strache the villa is professionally bugged with many hidden cameras and microphones. ..."
"... The right-wing parties will use the case to boost their legitimacy. ..."
"... Strache was obviously set up by some intelligence services, probably a German one with a British assist. The original aim was likely to blackmail him. But during the meeting on Ibiza Strache promised and did nothing illegal. Looking for potential support for his party is not a sin. Neither is discussing investments in Austria with a "daughter of a Russian oligarch." Some boosting while drunk is hardly a reason to go to jail. When the incident provided too little material to claim that Strache is corrupt, the video was held back until the right moment to politically assassinate him with the largest potential damage to his party. That moment was thought to be now. ..."
"... The massive economic shock following the banking collapse of 2007–8 is the direct cause of the crisis of confidence which is affecting almost all the institutions of western representative democracy. The banking collapse was not a natural event, like a tsunami. It was a direct result of man-made systems and artifices which permitted wealth to be generated and hoarded primarily through multiple financial transactions rather than by the actual production and sale of concrete goods, and which then disproportionately funnelled wealth to those engaged in the mechanics of the transactions. ..."
"... The political assassination of Christian Strache is unjust. What was done during the 2007-8 banking crisis was utterly corrupt and also unjust. Instead of going to jail the bankers were rewarded with extreme amounts of money for their assault on the well being of the people. The public was then told that it must starve through austerity to make up for the loss of money. ..."
During the last days a right wing politician in Austria was taken down by using an elaborate sting. Until Friday Heinz-Christian
Strache was leader of the far right (but not fascist) Freedom Party of Austria (FPOe) and the Vice Chancellor of the country. On
Friday morning two German papers, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung and Der Spiegelpublished
(German)
reports (English) about an old video that was made to take Strache down.
The FPOe has good connections with United Russia, the party of the Russian President Putin, and to other right-wing parties in
east Europe. It's pro-Russian position has led to verbal attacks on and defamation of the party from NATO supporting and neoliberal
circles.
In July 2017 Strache and his right hand man Johann Gudenus, who is also the big number in the FPOe, get invited for dinner to
a rented villa on Ibiza, the Spanish tourist island in the Mediterranean. They are told that the daughter of a Russian billionaire
plans large investments in Austria. It was said that she would like to help his party. The alleged daughter of the Russian billionaire,
who is actually also Austrian, and her "friend" serve an expensive dinner. Alcohol flows freely. The pair offers a large party donation
but asks for returns in form of mark ups on public contracts.
Unknown to Strache the villa is professionally bugged with many hidden cameras and microphones.
A scene from the video. Source: Der Falter (vid,
German)
During the six hour long party several schemes get proposed by the "Russian" and are discussed. Strache rejects most of them.
He insists several times that everything they plan or do must be legal and conform to the law. He says that a large donation could
probably be funneled through an endowment that would then support his party. It is a gray area under Austrian party financing laws.
They also discuss if the "Russian" could buy the Kronen Zeitung , Austria's powerful tabloid, and use it to prop up his party.
The evening goes on with several bottles of vodka on the table. Starche gets a bit drunk and boosts in front of the "oligarch
daughter" about all his connections to rich and powerful people. He does not actually have these.
Strache says that, in exchange for help for his party, the "Russian" could get public contracts for highway building and repair.
Currently most of such contracts in Austria go to the large Austrian company, STRABAG, that is owned by a neoliberal billionaire
who opposes the FPOe. At that time Strache was not yet in the government and had no way to decide about such contracts.
At one point Strache seems to understand that the whole thing is a setup. But his right hand man calms him down and vouches
for the "Russian". The sting ends with Strache and his companion leaving the place. The never again see the "Russian" and her co-plotter.
Nothing they talked about will ever come to fruition.
Three month later Strache and his party win more than 20% in the Austrian election and form a coalition government with the
conservative party OeVP led by Chancellor Sebastian Kurz. Even while the FPOe controls several ministries, it does not achieve much
politically. It lacks a real program and the government's policies are mostly run by the conservatives.
Nearly two years after the evening on Ibiza, ten days before the European parliament election in which Strache's party is predicted
to achieve good results, a video of the evening on Ibiza is handed to two German papers which are known to be have strong transatlanticist
leanings and have previously been used for other shady 'leaks'. The papers do not hesitate to take part in the plot and publish extensive
reports about the video.
After the reports appeared Strache immediately
stepped down and the conservatives
ended the coalition with his party. Austria will now have new elections.
On Bloomberg Leonid Bershidsky
opines
on the case:
Strache's discussion with the Russian oligarch's fake niece shows a propensity for dirty dealing that has nothing to do with idealistic
nationalism. Nationalist populists often agitate against entrenched, corrupt elites and pledge to drain various swamps. In the
videos, however, Strache and Gudenus behave like true swamp creatures, savoring rumors of drug and sex scandals in Austrian politics
and discussing how to create an authoritarian media machine like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban's.
I do not believe that the people who voted for the FPOe (and similar parties in other countries) will subscribe to that view.
The politics of the main stream parties in Austria have for decades been notoriously corrupt. Compared to them Strache and his party
are astonishingly clean. In the video he insists several times that everything must stay within the legal realm. Whenever the "Russian"
puts forward a likely illegal scheme, Starche emphatically rejects it.
Bershidsky continues:
Strache, as one of the few nationalist populists in government in the European Union's wealthier member states, was an important
member of the movement Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini has been trying to cobble together ahead of the European Parliament
election that will take place next week. On Saturday, he was supposed to attend a Salvini-led rally in Milan with other like-minded
politicians from across Europe. Instead, he was in Vienna apologizing to his wife and to Kurz and protesting pitifully that he'd
been the victim of a "political assassination" -- a poisonous rain on the Italian right-winger's parade.
...
This leaves the European far right in disarray and plays into the hands of centrist and leftist forces ahead of next week's election.
Salvini's unifying effort has been thoroughly undermined, ...
This is also a misreading of the case. The right-wing parties will use the case to boost their legitimacy.
Strache was obviously set up by some intelligence services, probably a German one with a British assist. The original aim was
likely to blackmail him. But during the meeting on Ibiza Strache promised and did nothing illegal. Looking for potential support
for his party is not a sin. Neither is discussing investments in Austria with a "daughter of a Russian oligarch." Some boosting while
drunk is hardly a reason to go to jail. When the incident provided too little material to claim that Strache is corrupt, the video
was held back until the right moment to politically assassinate him with the largest potential damage to his party. That moment was
thought to be now.
But that Strache stepped down after the sudden media assault only makes him more convincing. The right-wing all over Europe will
see him as a martyr who was politically assassinated because he worked for their cause. The issue will increase the right-wingers
hate against the 'liberal' establishment. It will further motivate them: "They attack us because we are right and winning." The new
far-right block Natteo Salvini
will setup in the European Parliament will likely receive a record share of votes.
Establishment writers notoriously misinterpret the new right wing parties and their followers. This stand-offish sentence in the
Spiegel story about Strache's party demonstrates the problem:
In the last election, the party drew significant support from the working class, in part because of his ability to simplify even
the most complicated of issues and play the common man, even in his role as vice chancellor.
The implicit thesis, that the working class is too dumb to understand the "most complicated of issues", is not only incredibly
snobbish but utterly false. The working class understands very well what the establishment parties have done to it and continue to
do. The increasing vote share of the far-right is a direct consequence of the behavior of the neoliberal center and of the lack of
real left alternatives.
Last week, before the Strache video appeared, Craig Murray
put his finger on the wound:
The massive economic shock following the banking collapse of 2007–8 is the direct cause of the crisis of confidence which is affecting
almost all the institutions of western representative democracy. The banking collapse was not a natural event, like a tsunami.
It was a direct result of man-made systems and artifices which permitted wealth to be generated and hoarded primarily through
multiple financial transactions rather than by the actual production and sale of concrete goods, and which then disproportionately
funnelled wealth to those engaged in the mechanics of the transactions.
...
The rejection of the political class manifests itself in different ways and has been diverted down a number of entirely blind
alleys giving unfulfilled promise of a fresh start – Brexit, Trump, Macron. As the vote share of the established political parties
– and public engagement with established political institutions – falls everywhere, the chattering classes deride the political
symptoms of status quo rejection by the people as "populism". It is not populism to make sophisticated arguments that undermine
the received political wisdom and take on the entire weight of established media opinion.
If one wants to take down the far right one has to do so with arguments and good politics for the working class. Most people,
especially working class people, have a strong sense for justice. The political assassination of Christian Strache is unjust. What
was done during the 2007-8 banking crisis was utterly corrupt and also unjust. Instead of going to jail the bankers were rewarded
with extreme amounts of money for their assault on the well being of the people. The public was then told that it must starve through
austerity to make up for the loss of money.
While I consider myself to be a strong leftist who opposes the right wherever possible, I believe to understand why people vote
for Strache's FBOe and similar parties. When one talks to these people issues of injustice and inequality always come up. The new
'populist' parties at least claim to fight against the injustice done to the common men. Unlike most of the establishment parties
they seem to be still mostly clean and not yet corrupted.
In the early 1990s Strache actually flirted with violent fascists but he rejected their way. While he has far-right opinions,
he and his like are no danger to our societies. If we can not accept that Strache and his followers have some legitimate causes,
we will soon find us confronted with way more extreme people. The neoliberal establishment seems to do its best to achieve that.
Posted by b on May 19, 2019 at 01:10 PM |
Permalink
It seems as if British Jewish pressure groups have achieved their goal: anti-Semitism is now
a mass movement in the UK. The rabid Zionist
Algemeiner reports that "Antisemitism and virulent Israel-hatred were rife on Saturday at a
pro-Palestinian demonstration in London."
The Jewish press seems to be upset by a pro-Palestinian march that assembled at the offices
of the BBC, not too far from a synagogue. I guess that the rationale is simple: once London is
dotted with synagogues, human rights enthusiasts will be pushed out of the city. They will have
to gather somewhere out of the green belt.
Jewish outlets complain that participants brandished 'antisemitic badges and placards,' such
as "Israel provokes anti-Semitism." I am puzzled. Is this really an anti-Semitic statement? If
anything, it is an attempt to identify the cause of anti-Semitism.
Jewish outlets are also upset by images of the Star of David crossed with a swastika. To
start with, those who equate Israel with Nazi Germany actually contemplate the memory of the
Holocaust and are by no means 'deniers.' I guess that the time is ripe for Zionists and
supporters of Israel to accept that in consideration of the ongoing Israeli racist crime in
Palestine, the Star of David has become a symbol of evil in the eyes of many.
The Jewish press is upset by the slogan "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free"
that calls for Israel's destruction. I would actually expect Jews who seem to be upset by the
Hitlerian concept of an 'Aryans-only state' to accept that the concept of a 'Jews-only state'
is equally disturbing.' They should support Israel becoming 'a state of its citizens' and
accept that sooner or later this state will evolve into Palestine, from the river to the
sea.
The Jewish press is totally irritated by Jewish Voice for Labour's Secretary Glyn Secker,
who claimed that pro-Israel Labour officials were a "fifth column" in the party and asked,
"What on earth are Jews doing in the gutter with these rats?" I would remind my readers that
Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL) is itself a Jewish racist exclusive
political body that wouldn't accept non-Jews into its ranks. I have wondered more than once how
it is possible that the anti-racist Jeremy Corbyn is willing to be associated with such a body.
However, in his statement (if quoted correctly by the Jewish press), secretary Glyn Secker
actually expresses the most disturbing tribal supremacist view. He looks down at a bunch of
labour MPs whom he labels 'rats' and call for his Jewish brethren to disassociate from these
low creatures. Glyn, in practice, sustains the Jew/Goy binary divide. He should actually
receive the Kosher weekly award rather than be abused by the Zionist league.
But we can be reassured. Campaign Against Antisemitism has already confirmed that they are
"reviewing the evidence that we gathered today. Where crimes have been committed, we will work
with the authorities to ensure that there are arrests and prosecutions."
ORDER IT NOW
The facts on the ground are undeniable. The more Jewish bodies campaign against
anti-Semitism the more opposition to Jewish politics is detected. The relentless Zionist
campaign against Corbyn didn't hurt him, as he is still leading in most
national election polls . Branding Nigel Farage as an
anti-Semite didn't touch the man whose party is
polling higher than the Tories and Labour combined in the coming European Parliament
election. One way to look at it is to argue that Brits are not moved by the Jewish
anti-Semitism hysteria. Another way to look at it is to conclude that Brits are actually
grossly disturbed by the anti-Semitism frenzy. Being hated by the Zionist lobby has become a
badge of honour, an entry ticket to Britain's political premiership.
The facts on the ground are undeniable. The more Jewish bodies campaign against
anti-Semitism the more opposition to Jewish politics is detected. The relentless Zionist
campaign against Corbyn didn't hurt him, as he is still leading in most national election
polls.
In contrast to the 1960's Israel is starting to look unfashionable. Young people feel
embarrassed to be associated with Jewish activism and Zionism.
Being unfashionable is a very serious state of affairs. Many failing businesses will
testify to this. You do all the tried and tested stuff, and it just doesn't work.
@Grace
Poole Why is a Jewish only state disturbing? It is surrounded by 32 Apartheid muslim only
countries.
Could I move to Iran?
If Israel becomes a theocracy not a democracy, who cares. Look at the neighborhood.
If not Jewish only then what a Jihad state like the rest of the Arab world?
Give Israel the razor blade.
All you dog noses who claim the Jews made a banquet from the holocaust. Just look at the meal
the Arabs made from those original 750,000 refugees created by the State of Israel founding
war.
Cry me a river. They have an entire UN agency devoted to their every need, and status to 3rd
and 4th generation children of the originals not living in the country, who have citizenship
else where, How does that add up to the 5 million diaspora pals.
It is all such a game to see Israel go down mostly thru jealously that the Jews came from the
ashes of near by extension to create the best country over there.
I would pay each one of the Pals 2 million to move to Jordan from the West Bank, and Gaza
to the Sinai with joint ownership with Egypt. But that is a good idea and would solve the
problem. No one wants to solve the problem they just want to see the Jews go down. Gilad
licks his lips over it.
@Fran
Taubman "There's always kind of a calming feeling I tell folks when I think of the
Holocaust, and the tragedy of the Holocaust, and the fact that it was my ancestors --
Palestinians -- who lost their land and some lost their lives, their livelihood, their human
dignity, their existence in many ways, have been wiped out, and some people's passports,"
said Tlaib.
"And just all of it was in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews, post-the
Holocaust, post-the tragedy and the horrific persecution of Jews across the world at that
time. And I love the fact that it was my ancestors that provided that, right, in many ways.
But they did it in a way that took their human dignity away and it was forced on them."
Because Jews hold the establishment of Israel to be a prerequisite for the destruction of
all other nations in a final world war, which the Jews seem intent on instigating with Islam.
Zohar Shemot 32a.
After which Israel is slated to be the only remaining national power (everyone else being
destroyed).
Do not forget your books. We don't.
Why is a non-Jewish European-only State disturbing to you and other Jews?
You have your own state but refuse the same to others. You are not Europeans (Brits,
Germans, etc) as these were originally ethnic-racial categories before you interfered. Yet
you claim them your yourselves as well, and in doing so deny everyone else an exclusive
identity.
Jews only allow themselves an exclusive identity, because your "god" (the writing of Jews)
only gave Judea a nation. Correct?
Asking moronic questions at this point, which everyone knows the answer to, is insulting.
You people are not innocent, are not dumb, and you know precisely why people are hostile to
your mass genocidal, supremacist tribe.
I would pay each one of the Pals 2 million to move to Jordan from the West Bank, and
Gaza to the Sinai with joint ownership with Egypt. But that is a good idea and would solve
the problem.
At a cost of $9 trillion. Who is going to pay?
Realistically, offer $100,000 per person, or $450 billion total. Double that to include
the diaspora Pals, and close the refugee camps. If the resettlement took place over a decade,
it would cost $90 billion a year, which could come from the US Defense budget. The latter
could be wound down over the same decade, as it would no longer be needed to fight wars on
behalf of Israel. Israel would get land and peace; Palestinians would be well compensated;
and the USA would be relieved of its duty as a Middle-Eastern warmonger. Everybody wins.
What's not to like?
However, to gain approval for the plan in the USA, it would be necessary to show that the
expenditure is both worthwhile and an improvement over the status quo . This would
mean explaining what the status quo actually is; and how and why it has come about.
Unfortunately, this information is so inflammatory that it can never be publicly
discussed.
I don't think this is true. A few years back, Daniel Finkelstein of the (London) Times
characterised British anti-semitism as "background noise".
The pro-Palestinian demonstrations are the "exception that proves the rule". Their support
has two cores: radical Muslims, and political activists on the Left. Neither is a mass
movement.
The British Left tends to support people who have the most "victim points". Rightly or
wrongly, they believe that Palestinians have a lot of victim points and, as the Holocaust
moves from living memory into history, that Israelis and diaspora Jews have very few.
Furthermore, the Left particularly seeks ogres who are white and Western. Paradoxically,
they dislike Israel because Israelis are similar to Britons, not because they are different.
In contrast, massacres by Saddam Hussein, ISIS, or Rwandans never attracted much opprobrium
from the Left. The idea of holding people to a lower moral standard, the less they look or
sound like oneself, is obviously racist; but it is followed by people who genuinely believe
that they are the least racist people on earth.
@nicholas
nicola I hope the collective Ummah looks at:
Somalia
All of Africa
China
Myamar
All of Arabia
Slave labor in Libya
Women's rights in the Islamic world
Genital mutilation
beheadings
The entire muslim population in Israel has quadrupled since 1948. I guess the slaughtering
of Muslims is not going so well.
You are deranged and delusional.
Jews demand their own exclusive state (subsidized by goyim), the privilege to cleanse
their sacred (and expanding) Jews-Only territory of native gentiles, and the right to travel
(and live) among the goyim as they see fit.
And don't you dare complain about these privileges. That's anti-Semitism!
And then there's the matter of speech.
Jews not only enjoy top tier access to the MSM (since they've conspired to buy up most of
it for the undisclosed purpose of advancing pan-Zionist hegemony) but they actively and
openly form teams, lobbies and NGOs to limit the right and opportunity of others to speak
freely and assemble lawfully for the purpose of expressing their own political
grievances.
Resistance and resentment to the entrenched double-standards that favor Jews, and
state-sponsored lawlessness that empowers Israel, is routinely decried as anti-Jewish
'bigotry'. It is also mislabeled as 'anti-Semitism'. This keeps the opposition weak and
off-balance.
How very clever. How very diabolical.
Why not call 'anti-Semitism what it is?
So-called 'anti-Semitism' is simply anti-Jewishness (or counter-Jewisness). It is merely
an attitude.
Depending upon the circumstances, this attitude might be right or it may be wrong. But
'anti-Semitism' is all about Jews, their behavior, and their impact on non-Jews. Why not
focus on this inescapable fact?
And since 'anti-Semitism' is not about 'Semites' at all, the very term itself is something
of a canard.
On the other hand, organized Jewry is truly powerful. Sometimes it does real damage.
Sometimes it does real harm. Sometimes it destroys. Why can't we talk about it openly?
Calling morally-grounded opposition to the real damage and real harm done by Jews
'anti-Semitism' is a calculated libel.
On the other hand, identifying and castigating organized Jewry for its various sins is
vital, courageous, and healthy. So do the right thing.
When I was much younger and in Graduate School I hosted three British students who were on a
summer sabbatical at the medical college I was attending.
There was no particular reason that the Jews in America came up over beers, many beers
(Texans and the British like beer equally well). But they told me that there was and
expression among common British about Jews, and, no it's not that the only good Jew is a dead
Jew.
It was that "antisemitism is when one hates the Jews more than is absolutely
necessary".
"Jewish outlets complain that participants brandished 'antisemitic badges and placards,' such
as "Israel provokes anti-Semitism." I am puzzled. Is this really an anti-Semitic statement?
If anything, it is an attempt to identify the cause of anti-Semitism."
Yep, absolutely true.
It's not their religion about which folks object. It's not their race, if you want to call
it a race.
IT'S THEIR
BEHAVIOR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Wrong. At the time, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, was a supporter
and ally of Hitler. When the two met, al-Husseini told Hitler that they shared the same
enemies: "the English, the Jews, and the Communists." The two went on to scheme about how
best to set upon and destroy the Jews of the Middle East. What's more, the Arabs regularly
massacred Jews in Mandatory Palestine.
Lies are the lifeblood of anti-Semitism, and there's a purpose to Tlaib's false history.
It serves to bolster the lie that the Jews waged war on a friendly and welcoming people,
stole their land, and condemned them to ruin. Anti-Semitism depends on lies because its
very motive is to hide the truth of one's own failings and lay blame on the Jews. The
history of anti-Semitism is, in a sense, a history of wicked fabrications: From Jewish
deicide, to the blood libel, to the claims of Jewish sorcery, to The Protocols of the
Elders of Zion, to the idea that Jews were tipped off about 9/11, to the claim that Jews
push the U.S. into wars, to the outrage over Jews supposedly buying politicians, to lies
about Israel's founding.
Tlaib and Omar are exemplars of this tradition, peddlers of anti-Semitic folktales. In
addition to spouting revisionist history, Tlaib has accused America's Israel-supporters of
dual loyalty. Omar has done that and more, claiming that Israel has hypnotized the world
into not seeing the evil it perpetrates, and stating that America's pro-Israel policies are
simply purchased by those who support the Jewish state.
It is a very powerful and accurate expression to say that Israel is "unfashionable" –
it is also true that most young people today feel no connection to the holocaust – when
Rashida uses the word "comforting" to refer to her people's sacrifice for the Jews, I feel
that the customary Zionist response to call these expressions "canards" will also be seen as
an unfashionable response. Thank God for brave people like Tlaid and Omar who express
distaste for the unfashionable and vulgar behavior of Israel and Zionists. Omar and Tlaib
have already emboldened millions of others who share their ambivalence and horror, when they
read about the Israel colonist settlers and their brutality to the Palestinians they displace
.
It is surrounded by 32 Apartheid muslim only countries.
Not so. Lebanon, Syria, and even Egypt have Christian minorities that have been protected
over the years. Jordan has a few, but not many. Iraq, prior to Israel's proxy war on Saddam
had plenty of Christians, including Tariq Aziz, one of Saddam's ministers.. Palestine has/had
Christians that were killed by Israelis in the same way Muslims were.
Could I move to Iran?
I don't know, I'm not in charge of the Iranian immigration policy. Why not ask the Jews
who are members of the Majles? You know, the legislative body with seats reserved for Jews
and other minorities.
Like most Zionists, you seem to ignore the part where T.E. Lawrence got the go ahead from
the British government to promise Arabs, which included Palestine, freedom from the Ottomans
and self rule, in exchange for a revolt against them. That promise was never kept. The
philo-Semite mass murderer Churchill is alleged to have organized Lawrence's
assassination. http://www.criminalelement.com/the-murder-of-lawrence-of-arabia-tony-hays/
The new millennium has seen a marked increase in parties and movements which appeal to racial
and ethnic nationalism. What's behind it? I have an idea.
Economic globalization could be a factor, as multinational corporations have shifted
operations and production around the globe, to places where labor is cheaper and there's less
official concern for public well-being. That's meant the loss of skilled-labor jobs in a
number of countries with relatively high wages and state regulation in the name of public
interest. There's doubtless anger that such jobs have been lost to Mexicans, Chinese,
Filipinos, and people of other nations. But there's also evidence that this racial-ethnic
anger is local and less abstract. Something else has triggered highly authoritarian
Conservatives, I think.
The studies of Conservatives and authoritarians which I've cited in previous essays [
here
and here ]
suggested that these individuals are more sensitive to, and more alarmed by, conditions which
present them with uncertainty. Any change from the status quo will do that. Consequently, any
perceived deviation from the traditional order, with its established culture and hierarchies,
will cause them to band together and fight for the status quo ante.
It's my hypothesis that, in many nations around the world, the 21st Century brought with
it the increased presence and upward mobility of populations which Conservative/authoritarian
citizens considered non-traditional and lower status. Conservative/authoritarian citizens
would have viewed these social changes as threats to their traditional cultures and
hierarchies, and they would have taken political actions intended to conserve or restore
their traditional orders [e.g., to "Make America Great Again"].
Between 2000 and 2015, estimated global
migration increased from about 173 million migrants to 244 million migrants, a jump of
41% (if I did the math correctly). Here are the top 10 countries to which they migrated:
The Alarming Rise of Ukraine's Neo-Nazi MPs Since the 2014 "Pro-democracy Revolution"
By Shane Quinn
Global Research, April 26, 2019 Region: Europe Theme: History In-depth Report:
UKRAINE
REPORT
Less than two years ago, the Ukraine's parliament (Verkhovna Rada) voted to outlaw the St
George's Ribbon, an emblem often worn to commemorate those who liberated the Soviet Union from
Hitler's rule. Up to seven million Ukrainian infantrymen comprised part of the Red Army during
their struggle against Nazi Germany, as Hitler was finally broken in the east.
By winter 1943, the once apparently indestructible Wehrmacht was spinning on its tail, their
officers with their heads turning about westward, as they gradually retreated towards the
German frontiers. Come the spring of 1945, about 2.5 million dead Ukrainian soldiers lay strewn
across central and eastern Europe, many of their bodies never to be recovered.
The decision by an increasingly far-right Ukrainian parliament to ban remembrance symbols
which commemorate those who fought against the Third Reich is, therefore, a desecration of
their memory. It is an attempt to wash over that awful suffering the Ukrainian state endured
during the Nazi occupation, with Hitler outlining plans to turn the country into a servile
colony of Germanic dominion.
Over elapsing time from the February 2014 US-instituted "pro-democracy revolution", an ever
expanding group of neo-Nazis has been elected to office. Notable amid these menacing figures is
the far-right military commander Yuriy Bereza (image on the right), an MP since November 2014
who was elected under the title "People's Deputy of Ukraine".
Bereza is a member of fascist-infiltrated party, People's Front, which counts among its
prominent MPs the neo-Nazi Andriy Parubiy , Chairman of the Ukrainian parliament since April
2016. In the early 1990s, Parubiy co-founded the far-right Social-National Party of Ukraine
with fellow extremist Oleh Tyahnybok, that later became known as the Svoboda (Freedom)
party.
When, in May 2017, a few of the Ukraine's conscientious MPs objected to moves in banning the
St George's Ribbon, Bereza roared down from his parliamentary seat that he would like to "grab
a machine gun and shoot those bast*rds". Bereza cuts an intimidating figure. He is a tall man
routinely clad in full army fatigues, with tightly-cropped hair, broad shoulders and stern
expression.
In December 2018, Bereza punched in the face Nestor Shufrych , an MP with the centre-left
party For Life, after the latter removed a poster from the parliamentary podium which accused
wealthy Ukrainian politician, Viktor Medvedchuk (image on the left), of being a Kremlin
"agent". Medvedchuk is said to be an associate of Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Bereza is familiar with the use of arms. Since April 2014, he has held the position of
Dnipro Battalion leader: A fascist-linked unit which has fought Moscow-backed separatists in
eastern Ukrainian regions such as the Donetsk Oblast, an area which rests directly upon
Russia's south-western border, and is a mere 400 miles from Volgograd (Stalingrad). The Dnipro
Battalion is subordinated to the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, which among other
things implements state policy.
Bereza and his regiment were involved in fighting during the autumn 2014 Battle of Ilovaisk,
ending in decisive victory for the Moscow-supported Donetsk People's Republic.
Bereza's cause has drawn sympathy and backing from commercial media outlets like the Los
Angeles Times, which
wrote how his unit "survived on grass and rainwater as they braved five days of incessant
sniper fire". The LA Times also quotes Bereza and, despite a heightened risk of nuclear war,
the newspaper calls for increased funding to be granted to the far-right battalions.
Over Christmas 2014, Bereza's regiment was accused of war crimes by human rights groups,
such as the deliberate starvation of Ukrainian civilians. His battalion has received more than
$10 million of financial support from billionaire businessman Ihor Kolomoyskyi . There are
photographs of the oligarch shaking hands amiably with Bereza in spring 2014.
Kolomoyskyi has provided critical support too for Volodymyr Zelensky , the Ukraine's
president-elect, by guaranteeing him widespread exposure on television networks that the tycoon
owns. Kolomoyskyi is one of the most powerful and affluent Ukrainians in the world. His
corporate influence extends from the Caucasus of Eurasia to the Appalachian mountains of North
America.
In a plot befitting a Hollywood film noir, Kolomoyskyi is presently under investigation by
the FBI regarding claims of "ordering contract killings" and "financial crimes", including
money laundering and embezzlement. In 2016, Kolomoyskyi was accused of defrauding the Ukraine's
largest bank (PrivatBank) of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Also that year a criminal case was opened in Russia against Kolomoyskyi, purporting that he
had organized the killings of civilians. He has been compelled to deny other allegations in the
past relating to bribery and abduction.
Kolomoyskyi, who lived in the US for a period and retains vast business interests in states
like Ohio and West Virginia, moved to Israel last September – which may well complicate a
potential extradition to America, as he also possesses part Israeli citizenship.
Kolomoyskyi has bankrolled other far-right regiments fighting in eastern Ukraine, such as
the Azov, Aidar and Donbas battalions. These armed groups have been cited by human rights
activists for committing an array of offences, including war crimes – which have gone
unpunished – like torture, abductions, possible executions, unlawful detention, sexual
assault, etc.
An alarming number of neo-Nazis have indeed been elected to office in the Ukrainian
parliament. Over the past five years of what the Washington Post calls "fledgling democracy",
the following fascist figures have all enjoyed work as Ukrainian MPs, and they each comprise
past and current members of the neo-Nazi Svoboda party: Oleh Tyahnybok, Ihor Mosiychuk, Oleh
Osukhovskyi, Yuriy Bublyk, Oleksandr Marchenko, Oleh Makhnitskyi, Andriy Ilyenko, Ruslan
Koshulynskyi, Mykhailo Holovko, Yuriy Levchenko, Igor Miroshnychenko, Pavlo Kyrylenko and
Eduard Leonov.
The above's presence in the corridors of power has been almost undocumented in mass media
reporting. There are other fascists receiving continued employment in the Ukrainian parliament
– like Andriy Biletsky , co-founder of the now defunct white supremacist Social-National
Assembly. Since late 2016, MP Biletsky has held the leadership of National Corps, a far-right
party. This organization is reported to be expanding steadily with Biletsky saying
last month that,
"we see how successful our movement is Ukraine is tired of the chaos, it needs new people
who will protect the country".
Source: Euronews
For over two years from May 2014 Biletsky commanded the Azov Battalion, which enjoyed tacit
Western support whilst fighting Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine. Azov Battalion
soldiers can be seen in photographs giving Nazi salutes, while flanked with swastikas and other
symbols based on SS insignia.
More far-right individuals are holding seats like Andrey Artemenko, a Canadian citizen and
MP since November 2014, who claims to be a "neo-conservative" and has membership of the
fascist-led Radical Party. The Radical Party leader and MP is far-right extremist Oleh Lyashko
, whose militant activities in the east of Ukraine were condemned by human rights
organizations, in which he was described as "one particularly errant MP". Lyashko has been
accused in preceding months of corruption relating to "illicit enrichment", which he
denies.
Among the Radical Party MPs is the briefly above-mentioned Ihor Mosiychuk, a neo-Nazi who is
a past member of both the Svoboda party and Social-National Assembly. Mosiychuk, sworn to
office in November 2014, is also a journalist and editor-in-chief of the hardline newspaper
Vechirnaya Vasilkov.
Serhiy Melnychuk , former leader of the Aidar Battalion, is likewise a Radical Party MP, as
he has been since November 2014. Melnychuk is currently under investigation over allegations
regarding a false assets declaration, while he has previously been the subject of multiple
legal cases and accused of abduction. Melnychuk was stripped of his parliamentary immunity in
June 2015.
There are further far-right Ukrainian MPs embedded in seemingly respectable parties like the
People's Front. Among them is Ihor Lapin, a multi-decorated militant commander who comprised
part of the Aidar Battalion, which draped Nazi-style insignia over its armoured vehicles.
Holding membership of the People's Front too is the aforementioned Parubiy, who has enjoyed
trips to America and Canada, and is acquainted with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg .
The far-right military figure, Mykhailo Havryliuk , is himself a People's Front member and MP,
with Yuriy Bereza as stated also claiming a position in that party.
There are in addition fascists posing as "independents" in parliament such as Volodymyr
Parasyuk, a former soldier in the Dnipro Battalion, commanded by Bereza. Parasyuk is a past
member of the neo-Nazi party, Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists. He was elected in November
2014, and still enjoys a place as MP more than four years on. Parasyuk has a reputation for
physically assaulting people he does not like, including cowardly attacks on statesman
Oleksandr Vilkul and security chief Vasyl Hrytsak, kicking the latter in the head while he was
seated.
Boryslav Bereza is a separate extreme right-wing independent MP, and was elected in November
2014; he is a former spokesperson for Right Sector, a fascist party, and despite his surname he
is no relation to Yuriy Bereza.
Boryslav Bereza is an open admirer of the Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera , speaking warmly
of his "three classic principles" in interviews. Moreover, in December 2014 Boryslav Bereza
acknowledged that during the fighting in eastern Ukraine, Right Sector provided important
assistance for Biletsky's notorious Azov Battalion.
MP Dmytro Yarosh , the one-time head of Right Sector, is yet another neo-Nazi who in the
past was placed on Interpol's international wanted list, acceding to the Kremlin's request.
Since late 2014, Yarosh constitutes a Ukrainian MP, and for many years he has been leader of
the Tryzub (Trident) paramilitary group, whose full title is the Stepan Bandera All-Ukrainian
Organization.
In Western establishment dialogue – pertaining to regimes they support – the
terms "neo-Nazi" and "fascist" have been virtually erased from official records and reporting.
These unequivocal labels are instead replaced with descriptions like "ultra-conservative",
"nationalist" and "maverick". The latter ambiguous words blur the lines of neo-Nazism and
fascism, sowing seeds of doubt and confusion in the reader's mind. A fascist now becomes an
ultra-conservative or nationalist.
There are other post "revolution" MPs who have been part of fascist regiments, like Nadiya
Savchenko, an Iraq War veteran and former instructor in the Aidar Battalion. Savchenko is a
far-right extremist, and had been held in a Ukrainian jail for over a year until her unexpected
release last week – after being suspected of planning a terrorist attack on the Ukrainian
parliament building, and intending to overthrow the government. Savchenko still faces trial
regarding these claims, and prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko said her departure from prison suggests
that the country's court apparatus is "gravely ill".
In June 2014, Savchenko was arrested by Russian authorities, placed on trial, and after long
deliberation was charged in March 2016 with complicity in the killing of two state journalists.
President Petro Poroshenko championed Savchenko's cause, describing her as "a symbol of the
struggle for Ukraine"; and in March 2015 he awarded her the title "Hero of Ukraine", the
highest honour that can be bestowed upon a Ukrainian citizen.
Semen Semenchenko , the far-right Donbas Battalion commander, was sworn in as a Ukrainian MP
in November 2014. Semenchenko's election to parliament came weeks after his regiment was
accused by a UN monitoring mission of executing war crimes on Ukrainian civilians, such as
torture, beatings and sexual assault.
In September 2014, Semenchenko had arrived in Washington where he met Congress and Pentagon
representatives. That same month he publicly called for US military backing, and enjoyed
further visits to America later that year, while he is himself an admirer of Israel. In June
2017, an appeal was expounded against Semenchenko by former Donbas Battalion soldiers, who
wanted an investigation conducted after accusing him of criminal acts.
In December 2018, Semenchenko was detained in Tbilisi, Georgia and suspected of "illegal
possession and acquisition of arms". He was not arrested due to having a diplomatic passport,
and thereafter travelled by airplane to an unknown destination.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email
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Shane Quinn obtained an honors journalism degree. He is interested in writing primarily
on foreign affairs, having been inspired by authors like Noam Chomsky. He is a frequent
contributor to Global Research.
Even people on the fringe of the Jewish Israeli society, the Russian Israelis, were all for
Jewish nationalism and against socialism and Arabs. This is really silly. They are hardly
considered Jews, to begin with. The Ministry of Interior plans to check them for DNA and
whether they are Jewish at all.
The Russians are weak economically, and their participation in the national discourse is
minimal. There is not a single Russian on the national Israeli TV channels.
They have a party of their own, the party of Mr Lieberman. However, the main demands of Mr
Lieberman are (1) to bring the death penalty upon Arabs, (2) to bomb and invade Gaza, and (3)
to make Mr Lieberman the Minister of Defence. And the Russian Israelis voted for him – or
for Mr Netanyahu – anyway.
Israelis of Oriental origins who inhabit poor peripheral towns are similar to Russians. They
also vote for Netanyahu and for his nationalist right-wing party, Likud. They are proud they
vote against the Ashkenazi Blue-and-White Party, though all leaders of Likud are Ashkenazi
Jews.
Is there a chance to change things in Israel, with such a Parliament? Well, yes. A military
defeat can change minds, like it did in many countries many times. Otherwise, it is hard to
imagine what would cause Netanyahu to change his course in view of the US support, Saudi
friendship, Syrian weakness, and good election results. He is not for resolving conflicts, he
is for managing conflict, and he is doing that well.
Russia's Putin plays ball with Bibi, too. Perhaps he does not like Bibi's relentless attacks
on Syria, perhaps his heart goes for Palestinians, but he is a cautious statesman, and he does
not want to antagonise the man who can mobilise American Jews into an action against Russia.
There are enough American Jews against Russia and against Putin as things are; Putin does not
need more. Besides, the Israeli opposition is not keen on Putin; they are lining up with the US
Democrats and with Brussels Europeans. They called for direct intervention in Syria on the side
of 'moderate rebels', while Netanyahu had kept Israel out of Syrian War and did not obstruct
Putin's Syrian campaign.
Will Netanyahu annex the whole of the West Bank, as he said during the election campaign?
Probably not; as nothing will be obtained by such an act but making apartheid visible. Instead,
he is likely to annex every place where Jews live in the West Bank, turning the territory of
Palestine into a slug-eaten cabbage leaf. He also may annex Area C, a bigger part of
Palestinian territory presently under Israeli military control and Palestinian civilian
administration. The Jewish settlers demand it, for, they say, Palestinians damage the
contiguity of the Jewish settlements.
The Jewish religious parties came out stronger in the new parliament. They also enjoy a very
high natural growth with families of 5 to 8 children average. They are not eager to compete on
the labour market, and prefer to be paid for studying Talmud and having kids. While it may
annoy some Israelis, in my view, it is an internal issue of little interest or importance for
anybody outside the Jewish milieu.
Is there a possible solution for the conflict? It is definitely not the Deal of the Century
of Mr Jared Kushner, some yet undefined arrangement usually done with smoke and mirrors.
Probably One Democratic State, where Jews and non-Jews are equal, is the only possible
solution, as the place is too small to divide but large enough to share.
As people were forming up to stage this year's March 8 rally for women's rights in Kiev, a
group of about three dozen young men, clad in dark clothes, started harassing the marchers by
tearing off their lapel pins and ripping away their placards.
Some of the men tried to pull away a banner from Mariya Dmytriyeva, a well-known spokeswoman
for feminist causes. She resisted. "Woman, why are you so nervous?" they jeered at her.
Fortunately, she says, police intervened and separated them.
It's a familiar scene in Ukraine these days, where radical ultra-rightists are an
increasingly threatening presence on the streets. "I think that overall these groups are very
insignificant in size. But they are very radical and very loud," Ms. Dmytriyeva says. "If they
can get away with attacking us like that, it shows there is something dangerous there."
Though few in number overall, far-right groups operate with a high degree of impunity in
Ukrainian society, allowing them to harass and attack minorities and human rights advocates
without repercussions. Some worry that such groups, given their anti-democratic ideals,
paramilitary discipline, and freedom to operate, could have an outsize influence should Ukraine
return to political instability. Though the ultra-rightists were given much latitude due to
their help protecting the Maidan Revolution and the fledgling government that followed, now
they highlight a key weakness of the current system.
"During the Maidan there was a context that was comfortable for [the radical right]. During
the war [with rebels in the east], it was very comfortable," says Vyacheslav Likhachev, a
historian and expert on Ukraine's right-wing movements. "Today we do not have a context in
which a small minority, with street fighting skills, have the means to create instability. But
in case there is instability, they are a very dangerous factor."
Operating with
impunity
Ukraine's far-right groups, some of which include armed veterans of the war in Donbas, are
an extremely controversial topic. And despite considerable stabilization in Ukrainian society
over the past five years, the danger they pose appears to be growing.
Just a couple of days after the March 8 rally, scores of far-right activists belonging to
the new National Corps party attacked the motorcade of President Petro Poroshenko in the
Ukrainian city of Cherkasy,
injuring 19 police officers . In the past year, far-right organizations have carried out
over two dozen violent assaults on women's groups, LGBT activists, and Roma encampments that
have left many injured and at least one person dead. It is very rare,
activists say , that police intervene as they did in Ms. Dmytriyeva's case, much less bring
the attackers to justice.
Analysts say the strength of these groups derives mainly from the weakness of Ukraine's
post-Maidan state, or rather its reluctance to enforce law and order when it comes to the
depredations of radical rightists. That may be in part due to the role ultra-right fighters
played during the Maidan revolt against former President Viktor Yanukovych, as organized
defenders of the protest encampment and sometimes initiators of violence against
police.
Even more important is their status as war heroes who formed private battalions and
rushed to the front in 2014 to battle separatist rebels at a time when the Ukrainian Army was
in serious disarray. As a result they enjoy connections with authorities, and a level of social
respectability, that would probably not be the case otherwise.
It's important to point out that despite their high public visibility and the apparent
impunity with which they act on the streets, the far-right groups do not appear to represent
any social upsurge of radical nationalism. Indeed, a joint candidate put forward by five of
Ukraine's leading ultra-rightist groups in the March 31 first round of Ukrainian presidential
elections, Ruslan Koshulynskyi, won less than 2% of the votes.
Rather, the fear among many here is that if Ukraine's weak state institutions should again
suffer any sort of breakdown, these highly organized, disciplined, armed, violence-prone,
and ideologically determined groups might punch far above their weight in determining a
political outcome.
'We are not democrats'
Instability is a prospect that may not be far from the surface in post-Maidan Ukraine. The
Right Sector, a militant ultra-nationalist group that played a very prominent role during the
Maidan uprising, has since consolidated itself as a political party with an armed wing and a
youth movement. It may not be the largest right-wing movement in Ukraine, but it has maintained
its revolutionary sense of purpose and complete rejection of the existing order.
"We are not democrats. We participate in elections only because they are a step to
revolution," says Artyom Skoropadskiy, press spokesman of the Right Sector party. "We want to
change the whole system. New people, new order, new rules in the state system of Ukraine. We
oppose Russia, and we are against Ukraine joining the European Union and NATO. We want Ukraine
to be a self-sufficient, independent state."
The Right Sector backed Mr. Koshulynskyi's presidential bid simply because it offered an
opportunity for political agitation, he says, and the vote tally is of secondary interest.
"Our organization is designed to take power. If circumstances warrant, that could happen by
nondemocratic methods. Believe me, we are very capable of acting in extreme situations," he
adds. "At the Maidan we had only 300 activists, and look what we did. In fact, if you consider
that there was never more than 1 million people participating in the Maidan altogether, out of
a population of 42 million, it shows how things really work. The active minority always leads
the passive majority. Scenarios change, and we are ready. Our purpose is to save Ukraine."
The Right Sector, and other militant street groups such as C-14 and the newly created
National Corps, already pose a real and present danger to vulnerable groups of the population,
such as gay and transgender people, women's activists, Roma, as well as any dissidents who
might, rightly or wrongly,
be viewed as "pro-Russian."
Ulyana Movchan, director of Insight, a nongovernmental group that provides legal services
and other support to LGBT groups, says that people who do not belong to these vulnerable groups
of the population should wake up and be more concerned about what is happening.
"The problem is that these right-wing activists are armed; they have combat experience.
They are organized into illegal military groups," she says. "They are trying to control the
streets and maybe, in future, political life as well. We do not know what they might do. They
don't just pose a personal danger to certain activists, they are a threat to the whole
society."
Giving too much leeway to nationalists?
Many Ukrainian analysts argue that these new rightist groups are not "nationalist," but
rather racist, intolerant, and extreme social conservatives. But it may be a problem that more
mainstream Ukrainian nationalists, such as the Svoboda party – which does not participate
in street violence – tend to make heroes of 20th-century "fighters for Ukrainian
independence." Those include Stepan Bandera, whose fascist ideology, collaboration with the
Nazis, and participation in
wartime ethnic cleansing against Poles and Jews makes him and those like him poor role
models for modern Europe-bound Ukraine.
The Ukrainian parliament has passed legislation making it illegal to deny the hero status of
Mr. Bandera. In Kiev, a major boulevard was recently renamed "Bandera Prospekt." It should be
no surprise that groups like the Right Sector model themselves on such World War II-era
Ukrainian nationalist fighters.
"We are a Ukrainian nationalist group, in the image of Stepan Bandera," says Mr.
Skoropadskiy.
Tensions over these historical issues are real enough, especially in the more Russified
eastern Ukraine – where everyone's grandfather served in the Red Army – and they
may be part of the explanation for the very high first round vote for Volodymyr Zelenskiy, a
Russian-speaker from eastern Ukraine who plays down nationalist themes.
"During the past five years the government made more steps [to legitimize figures like Mr.
Bandera] than much of society is willing to accept," says Mr. Likhachev. "Most of society feels
we don't need Lenin or Bandera. But you can't really mobilize people politically with these
issues. There has been no big public movement against it."
More significant is the strong attraction these new radical right groups seem to exercise
over Ukrainian youth. They articulate a cause. They have slick promotional materials and
maintain a big infrastructure of sports clubs, training camps, and regular activities.
"I see how many young people want to be part of a movement," says Ms. Movchan. "It's kind of
fashionable these days to join something, and here they are with all kinds of tools of
recruitment, such as fight clubs, training grounds, and parades. They bring out the worst
emotions, like homophobia and racism, to channel their aggression. I wish we could broaden our
own audience to show young people there are other ways to be active, like fighting for human
rights."
Interesting but very controversial. Jewish people do possess business acumen and are more oriented toward money success. Just
look what happened in the USSR after its dissolution and Yeltsin privatization. Most "oligarchs" turned to be Jewish ;-)
Also the achievement of Jewish people in science should be be underestimated. This nation gave world a lot of top
physicists mathematicians and philosophers.
Notable quotes:
"... Even the Saudi Monarchy's occasional outbursts against Israel do not inhibit it from engaging in large-scale financial transactions with the Jewish banking elite on Wall Street and City of London and from forming covert alliances with Israeli intelligence in order to overthrow secular pro-Palestinian Arab regimes – as has happened in Libya, Iraq and Syria. They have both benefited from the massive ethnic cleansing of the highly educated minority Christian populations of secular Iraq and Syria. ..."
"... Fake anti-Semitism is most recently seen in the launching of series of anti-Semitic 'threats' by ethno-centric Jews to create hysteria, serves many purposes following the recent rise of populism in Europe and the election of the American President Donald Trump who had promised to withdraw the US from wars in the Middle East. First, it secures widespread support from North American and European regimes, especially when Israel is criticized throughout the world and at the United Nations for its war crimes in occupied Palestine. ..."
"... It is almost certain that the US FBI had identified the perpetrator of these acts as they uncovered the sophisticated operation based in Israel. The FBI would have demanded Israeli police arrest 'the culprit' and shut down the operation. Israeli police staged their own 'fake' investigation and concluded that the complex cloaked cyber operations 'were the work of a shy nineteen year old with dyslexia' – clearly another example of the Jewish genius. ..."
"... A review of the top 10 US multi-billionaires finds four who are identified as 'Jews': Mark Zuckerberg with $56 billion, Larry Ellison with $52.2 billion, Michael Bloomberg with $47.5 billion and Sergey Brin $39.4 billion. In other words 40% of the super-richest Americans are 'Jews' while 60% are non-Jews. Among the top ten in the US, billionaire Jews with a total of $195.1 billion are collectively less rich than the top billionaire Gentiles who own $282.7 billion. ..."
"... All the high-tech computer and financial billionaires are just assumed by the tribalists to view themselves as 'Jewish geniuses' even though they may have learned and borrowed ideas and knowledge from their non-Jewish partners and mentors in Silicon Valley or Wall Street. ..."
Ethno-religious (ER) beliefs and practices have been harmless when individuals or
groups linked to those practices have limited influence over the state and economy. In contrast,
when such groups exercise a disproportionately powerful influence over the state and economy, they
dominate and exploit majorities while forming closed self-replicating networks.
Examples of powerful ethno-centric regimes in the 1930's are well known for their brutality and
devastating consequences. These include the white Christians in the US, Germany and the European
colonial settlement regimes in Rhodesia, South Africa, India and Indonesia, as well as the Japanese
imperialists in Asia.
In the post-colonial or neo-colonial era, ethno-centrism has taken the form of virulent anti-Islamic
hysteria resulting in predatory Western regimes embarking on wars and military occupations in the
Middle East.
The rise of Judeo-centrism, as an economic and political force, occurred in the last half of
the 20th century. The Jewish-Zionist seizure, occupation and ethnic cleansing of historic Palestine
and their rising economic and political influence within the United States has created a formidable
power bloc with significant implications for world peace.
The rise of Jewish ethnocentrism (JE) has confounded its proponents as well as its adversaries;
Zionists and anti-Semites alike are surprised by the scope and depth of JE.
Advocates and adversaries, of all persuasions, conflate the power of what they call 'the Jews',
for their own purposes. Advocates find proof of 'Jewish genius' in every prestigious position and
attribute it to their own unique culture, heredity and scholarship, rather than the result of a greater
social-cultural context. The anti-Semites, for their part, attribute all the world's nefarious dealings
and diabolic plots to 'the Jews'. This creates a strange duality of illusions about the exceptionalism
of a minority group.
In this paper I will focus on demystifying the myths buttressing the power of contemporary Judeo-centric
ideology, belief and organizational influence. There is little point in focusing on anti-Semitism,
which has no impact on the economy and the exercise of state power with the possible exception of
Saudi Arabia. Even the Saudi Monarchy's occasional outbursts against Israel do not inhibit it from
engaging in large-scale financial transactions with the Jewish banking elite on Wall Street and City
of London and from forming covert alliances with Israeli intelligence in order to overthrow secular
pro-Palestinian Arab regimes – as has happened in Libya, Iraq and Syria. They have both benefited
from the massive ethnic cleansing of the highly educated minority Christian populations of secular
Iraq and Syria.
Fake Anti-Semitism: Operational Weapon of the Ethno-Centric Jews
Fake anti-Semitism is most recently seen in the launching of series of anti-Semitic 'threats'
by ethno-centric Jews to create hysteria, serves many purposes following the recent rise of populism
in Europe and the election of the American President Donald Trump who had promised to withdraw the
US from wars in the Middle East. First, it secures widespread support from North American and European
regimes, especially when Israel is criticized throughout the world and at the United Nations for
its war crimes in occupied Palestine. Widespread fake anti-Semitic attacks divert attention to Judeo-ethno
centrists and validate their claims to be the first among the history's victims. Second, widely publicized
'fake' acts of anti-Semitism arouse the ethnocentric foot soldiers and increase rich donor contributions
to the illegal Jewish settlements and the Israeli military. Third, 'fake anti-Semitism' is used to
threaten, repress and outlaw any organizations and individuals who criticize Israel and the influence
of Jewish ethnocentric organizations in their home countries.
How many 'anti-Semitic' acts are staged is uncertain: On March 23, 2017, an Israeli-American
man was arrested in Israel for sending hundreds of fake anti-Semitic threats to Jewish institutions
and schools in four European countries and nine US states. Such threats led to the emergency grounding
of two US airlines and the panicked evacuation of countless schools and cultural centers. This man
used a sophisticated system of cloaking accounts to appear to originate in other countries. Despite
his high skills at cyber-terrorism, Israeli authorities preposterously described him as a 'teenager
with a learning disability'. The Israeli-American cyber-terrorist's arrest made the 'back-pages'
news in the US for one day while his (and others') fake threats continued to make international headlines
for weeks.
These scores of fake anti-Semitic bomb threats were cited by the major ethnocentric leaders in
the US to pressure the US President and hundreds of Congressional leaders, University Presidents,
etc. to mindlessly echo their clamor for greater police state investigations against critics of Israel
and to offer special 'protection' for potential 'Jewish victims'. Moves to outlaw criticism of Israel
as 'anti-Semitism' and a 'hate crime' increased.
Not surprisingly the leading Jewish organizations never backed down or called on the US government
to investigate the source of the fake anti-Semitic threats: that is Israeli-American Zionists, who
carry both nations' passports and can enter and exit with total ease and enjoy immunity from extradition.
It is almost certain that the US FBI had identified the perpetrator of these acts as they uncovered
the sophisticated operation based in Israel. The FBI would have demanded Israeli police arrest 'the
culprit' and shut down the operation. Israeli police staged their own 'fake' investigation and concluded
that the complex cloaked cyber operations 'were the work of a shy nineteen year old with dyslexia'
– clearly another example of the Jewish genius.
It is more likely that the hundreds of false-anti-Semitic
threats were part of an Israeli state operation identified by the FBI who 'diplomatically' pressured
Tel Aviv to cut out the monkey business. The news report of the lone-wolf teenager in Israel allowed
the Israeli intelligence to cover-up their role. Once the Israelis passed off the unbelievable tale
of a brilliant, if troubled, young 'lone wolf', the entire US mass media buried the story forever.
In due time the so-called perpetrator will be released, amply rewarded and his identity re-cycled.
In the meantime the US government, as well as several European governments, was forced to allocate
tens of millions of dollars to provide extra security to Jewish institutions in the wake of these
fake threats.
Jewish Power: The Top 25 American Multi-Billionaires
In February 2017, Forbes magazine compiled a list of the world's billionaires, including a country-by-country
account. The top five countries with multi-billionaires among its citizens are: the US with 565,
China with 319, Germany with 114, India with 101, and Russia with 96. Moreover, since 2016 the net
worth of the multi-billionaires grew 18% to $7.67 trillion dollars.
While the US has the greatest number of billionaires, China is fast catching up.
Despite China's advances, the US remains the center of world capitalism with the greatest concentration
of wealth, as well as the greatest and growing inequalities. One reasonably can argue that who controls
US wealth controls the world.
'Jews' among the Top 25 Multi-Billionaires in the US
A review of the top 10 US multi-billionaires finds four who are identified as 'Jews': Mark Zuckerberg
with $56 billion, Larry Ellison with $52.2 billion, Michael Bloomberg with $47.5 billion and Sergey
Brin $39.4 billion. In other words 40% of the super-richest Americans are 'Jews' while 60% are non-Jews.
Among the top ten in the US, billionaire Jews with a total of $195.1 billion are collectively less
rich than the top billionaire Gentiles who own $282.7 billion.
Of the top 25 multi-billionaires in the US, 11 of the 25 are Jews. In other words 'the Jews'
represent 44% of the top 25 biggest billionaires – outnumbered by Gentiles but catching up.
Analysis of the 'Richest Jews'
We place 'Jews' in quotation marks because this is a doubtful signifier – more useful to both
Zionist fanatics and anti-Semitic polemicists. Most are not 'practicing' or are completely disinterested
in tribal religions. Nevertheless, half of secular Jews in the US are active supporters of Israel
or involved in Fifth Column Israeli 'front groups'.
In other words, about half of the richest 'Jews' do not consider themselves to be religiously
or ethnically 'Jewish'. Super rich Jews are divided regarding their ethnic loyalties between the
US and Israel.
Moreover what is murkier, many of the richest so-called 'Jews' were born to 'mixed marriages'.
Strictly religious Jews do not recognize the children of such marriages as Jews because their mothers
are not Jewish. The omnivorous Zionists, on the other hand, classify all of them as Jews on the basis
of their actual or potential contribution to the State of Israel. In other words, the Zionist classification
of 'Jews' becomes arbitrary, politicized and dependent on organizational affiliation. Religious practice
and ethno-cultural purity are less important.
Judeo-Centrism and the Intrinsic Superiority Fallacy
Among the many zealous advocates of the Judeo-centric world, the most tiresome are those who
claim they represent the product of superior genetics, culture and heritage – unique and intrinsic
to Jews.
For many centuries most Jews were illiterate believers of religious tribal myths, taught by anti-scientific
rabbis, who closed off the ghettos from the accomplishments of higher culture and forbade integration
or mixed marriages. The high priests punished and expelled any Jews who were influenced by the surrounding
Hellenistic, Romanized, Arabic, Renaissance and Rationalists cultures, like the great Spinoza.
In other words, Jews who had rejected Jewish law, the Scriptures and the Torah were expelled
as apostates. But these 'apostates' were most open to the modern ideas of science. Jews greatly benefited
from the emancipatory laws and opportunities following the French Revolution. Under Napoleon, Jews
became citizens and were free to advance in science, the arts and finance by attending secular universities
away from the primitive, superstitious Rabbi-controlled ghetto 'schools'.
The dramatic growth of intellectual excellence among Jews in the 19th century was a result of
their ceasing to be Jews in the traditional closed religious sense. Did they suddenly switch on their
'genius genes' or invent a fake history or religion, as the ethno-centrist would have us believe?
It seems far more likely that they took great advantage of the opportunities opened to them with
major social and political developments in the greater society. As they assimilated and integrated
in secular traditions, they ceased to be Jews in the tribal religious sense. Their scientific, medical
and financial success came from learning, absorbing and exchanging scientific ideas, high culture
and conservative, liberal and socialist ideas with the larger progressive non-Jewish society.
It is no coincidence that 'great Jewish achievers' like the totally secular Albert Einstein were
educated in German universities by German professors and drew on scientific knowledge by German and
non-Jewish scholars. His intellectual development was due to his free association with the great
scientists and scholars of Germany and Europe, not closeted away in some ethno-tribal commune.
The Jews who remained embedded in the Polish, Lithuanian and Russian ghettos, under the reign
of the leading Rabbis, remained illiterate, poor and backward. Most of the claims of 'superior' cultural
heritage or traditions are the creation of a mythical folk history serving ethno-national supremacists.
The Myth of the Contemporary Genius
The modern ethnocentric ideologues ignore the 'dilution of Jewishness' in their celebratory identification
with successful 'Jews'.
Many of the best thinkers, writers, scientists and political leaders were conversos (Christian
converts), or integrated European secular nationalists, socialists, monarchists, bankers and professionals.
Some remained 'reformed Jews' or later transformed into secular Zionists: nationalists who despised
non-Europeans as inferior and couldn't even conceive of Arab Palestine as their 'homeland'. It wasn't
until the 20th century that Zionism was in part 'Judacized'. Early Zionists looked at various locations
for a homeland, including Argentina and parts of Africa and Russia.
These ethno-chauvinist ideologues lay claim to all brilliant individuals, no matter how tenuous
as examples of 'Jewish genius'. Even those personally opposed Jewish ethno-religious beliefs and
indifferent to tribal loyalties end up being claimed as examples of the 'Jewish genius'. Once some
'matrilineal link' could be found, their success and brilliance was tied to the mystical lineage,
no matter how tenuous.
This bizarre practice became even more commonplace following the Jewish military conquest and
brutal ethnic cleansing of Palestine, with the military, political and financial backing of non-Jewish
Europe and the United States. With myths and inflated ideas of unique virtue and brilliance, Israel
was established as a racist apartheid state. A new militant, ethnocentric Judaism converted Israel and its overseas backers into an ethno-ideological
international power with religious trappings, based on the myth of its 'exceptionalism'. To maintain this myth, the personal histories of all prominent 'Israel Firsters' were sanitized
and scrubbed of anti-social and destructive behavior.
All Jewish billionaires were to be portrayed as uniquely philanthropic, while the exploits of
Jewish billionaire swindlers (Bernie Madoff, Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky) were not to be mentioned
in polite company. The conquests of billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, rapist-procurer head of
the IMF Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Governor Elliot Spitzer, Congressman Anthony Weiner and other similar
perverts quietly slithered off the edge of the planet although all had once been hailed as examples
of 'ethnocentric genius'.
Major Jewish political donors to US-UK-French electoral parties were hailed while their work
on behalf of Israel was naturally assumed but not discussed. The dizzying shifts between open adulation
and selective whitewash served to reinforce the illusion of superiority. Anyone, Jew or Gentile,
bold enough to point out the obvious hypocrisy would be immediately censored as 'self-hating' (Jew)
or 'anti-Semite' (Gentile).
Return to the Beginning: Judeo-Centric Power
As mentioned above, Jews represent a substantial minority among the top multi-billionaires, but
they are still a minority. Below the top level of wealth are the single digit billionaires and triple
and double digit multi-millionaires; here the proportion of 'Jews' increases. These 'less-than-super-billionaires'
are among the most active and the biggest financial and political supporters of the ethno centric
ideology and tribal cohesion.
Los Angeles-based Israeli-American billionaire Haim Saban contributed tens of millions of dollars
to support of the Jewish state's occupation of Palestine and brutal colonial land grabbing 'settlers'.
His wealth is largely based on his 'genius' in pushing culturally vacuous Japanese cartoons (Mighty
Morphing Power Rangers) on the nation's children. He is the primary donor to the Democratic Party
pushing Israel's agenda – his number one priority as an American citizen.
The lesser 'foot soldiers' of the Zionist power structure are the millionaires and affluent professionals,
dentists, stockbrokers, lawyers, doctors and impresarios. The middle and lower levels of wealth and
power are a diverse group – mostly ethno-religious and secular, but very self-identified ethno-Jews.
A minority is totally secular or converted to non-Jewish religions (especially Buddhism, Christianity)
Despite the constant drumbeat of ethnocentric identity, an increasing number of young US 'Jews'
do not identify with Judaism or Israel. Their influence however is minimal.
The wealthy ethno-religious and secular ethnic Jews may or may not constitute a numerical majority
but they are the best organized, most political and most adamant in their claims to 'speak for and
represent the Jewish community' as a whole, especially during waves of (fake) 'anti-Semitism'!
The many former-Jews, anti-tribal Jews and 'non-Jewish' Jews are no match for the ethnocentric
political apparatus controlled by the chauvinists.
When the tribalists appropriate the glory of a secular non-Jewish Jewish scientist or major 'prize
winner' they claim his or her tribal affiliation in order to impress the 'goys' and to seduce younger
more skeptical Jews about the advantages of ethno-chauvinism.
All the high-tech computer and financial billionaires are just assumed by the tribalists to view
themselves as 'Jewish geniuses' even though they may have learned and borrowed ideas and knowledge
from their non-Jewish partners and mentors in Silicon Valley or Wall Street.
Upward mobility within academia, government and business circles is automatically assumed by
the tribalists to be a reward for superior merit – 'Jewish genius' – rather than nepotism or connections.
Tribal networks and 'understandings' play a powerful unspoken role in career success and immunity
from the consequences of failure, incompetence or dishonesty.
Multi-billionaires and multi-millionaires prospered because they entered establish lucrative
fields or made their career choices highly profitable.
Early on, many powerful Gentile bankers provided entry for talented Jews to succeed. This is
despite revisionist history bemoaning the exclusion of US Jews on Wall Street and their degrading
denial of membership in select WASP country clubs. These myths of brutal oppression on Wall Street
or Long Island yacht clubs have empowered generations of American Jews to assume the role of spokespersons
for the oppressed everywhere. The expression 'crying all the way to the bank' comes to mind.
By the last quarter of the 20th century and especially in the 21st century, deindustrialization
and the shift to financialization in the US economy increased the power and privilege of a disproportionate
number of multi-billionaire/millionaire Jews. This seismic shift has coincided with the pervasive
impoverishment of the marginalized working class in the former 'rust belt' and central parts of the
country and the incredible concentration of national wealth at the top 1%. This is a demographic
shift and ethno-class apartheid of huge, but unstudied, significance.
The most important political question is not how many Jews are super-wealthy but what proportion
of them are influential political donors and active in the Democratic or Republican Parties in order
to intervene on behalf of clan, tribe and motherland (Israel). Majorities among Jews are not crucial
– most are not politically active. What is decisive is the percentage of all the super-wealthy who
are politically active, organized and contribute substantially to influence and control the mass
media to promote their ethno-centric ideology and punish critics.
Conclusion
Overt and covert Jewish supremacists have embroidered a fake history and legacy of exceptional
intelligence ignoring the context of advanced non-Jewish science and cultures, which preceded and
later provided Jews with opportunities for education and wealth.
The danger inherent in all ethno-centric tribes is that they work to dominate majority populations
by creating systems of assigning superiority and inferiority. They then use these to justify growing
inequalities of wealth, education and political power!
Historically favored minorities tend to overreach and, like the eyeless Sampson, bring down the
Temple on everyone. Power corrupts and absolute ethno-chauvinist power corrupts absolutely. Intelligent
Jews of principle are abandoning
You could help yourself by learning the real history ..I suggest the foremost historian on
the subject Thomas Thompson and his ' History of Arabia'. Jerusalem was not founded by Jews,
i.e. adherents of the Jewish religion. It was founded between 3000 BCE and 2600 BCE by a West
Semitic people or possibly the Canaanites, the common ancestors of Palestinians, Lebanese,
many Syrians and Jordanians, and many Jews. But when it was founded Jews did not
exist.
Jerusalem was founded in honor of the ancient god Shalem. It does not mean City of
Peace but rather 'built-up place of Shalem." The "Jewish people" were not building Jerusalem
3000 years ago, i.e. 1000 BCE. First of all, it is not clear when exactly Judaism as a
religion centered on the worship of the one God took firm form. It appears to have been a
late development since no evidence of worship of anything but ordinary Canaanite deities has
been found in archeological sites through 1000 BCE. There was no invasion of geographical
Palestine from Egypt by former slaves in the 1200s BCE. The pyramids had been built much
earlier and had not used slave labor. The chronicle of the events of the reign of Ramses II
on the wall in Luxor does not know about any major slave revolts or flights by same into the
Sinai peninsula. Egyptian sources never heard of Moses or the 10 plagues & etc. Jews and
Judaism emerged from a certain social class of Canaanites over a period of centuries inside
Palestine. Jerusalem not only was not being built by the likely then non-existent "Jewish
people" in 1000 BCE, but Jerusalem probably was not even inhabited at that point in history.
Jerusalem appears to have been abandoned between 1000 BCE and 900 BCE, the traditional dates
for the united kingdom under David and Solomon. So Jerusalem was not 'the city of David,'
since there was no city when he is said to have lived. No sign of magnificent palaces or
great states has been found in the archeology of this period, and the Assyrian tablets, which
recorded even minor events throughout the Middle East, such as the actions of Arab queens,
don't know about any great kingdom of David and Solomon in geographical Palestine. Since
archeology does not show the existence of a Jewish kingdom or kingdoms in the so-called First
Temple Period, it is not clear when exactly the Jewish people would have ruled Jerusalem
except for the Hasmonean Kingdom. The Assyrians conquered Jerusalem in 722. The Babylonians
took it in 597 and ruled it until they were themselves conquered in 539 BCE by the
Achaemenids of ancient Iran, who ruled Jerusalem until Alexander the Great took the Levant in
the 330s BCE. Alexander's descendants, the Ptolemies ruled Jerusalem until 198 when
Alexander's other descendants, the Seleucids, took the city. With the Maccabean Revolt in 168
BCE, the Jewish Hasmonean kingdom did rule Jerusalem until 37 BCE, though Antigonus II
Mattathias, the last Hasmonean, only took over Jerusalem with the help of the Parthian
dynasty in 40 BCE. Herod ruled 37 BCE until the Romans conquered what they called Palestine
in 6 CE (CE= 'Common Era' or what Christians call AD). The Romans and then the Eastern Roman
Empire of Byzantium ruled Jerusalem from 6 CE until 614 CE when the Iranian Sasanian Empire
Conquered it, ruling until 629 CE when the Byzantines took it back.
A. The Muslims, who ruled it and built it over 1191 years.
B. The Egyptians, who ruled it as a vassal state for several hundred years in the second
millennium BCE.
C. The Italians, who ruled it about 444 years until the fall of the Roman Empire in 450
CE.
D. The Iranians, who ruled it for 205 years under the Achaemenids, for three years under the
Parthians (insofar as the last Hasmonean was actually their vassal), and for 15 years under
the Sasanids.
E. The Greeks, who ruled it for over 160 years if we count the Ptolemys and Seleucids as
Greek. If we count them as Egyptians and Syrians, that would increase the Egyptian claim and
introduce a Syrian one.
F. The successor states to the Byzantines, which could be either Greece or Turkey, who ruled
it 188 years, though if we consider the heir to be Greece and add in the time the Hellenistic
Greek dynasties ruled it, that would give Greece nearly 350 years as ruler of Jerusalem.
G. There is an Iraqi claim to Jerusalem based on the Assyrian and Babylonian conquests, as
well as perhaps the rule of the Ayyubids (Saladin's dynasty), who were Kurds from Iraq.
I understand what you are saying, Jilles, but let's be accurate, shall we?
The Jews have ZERO right to "return" to Palestine one cannot go back to a place one never
left in the first place.
The story that the Romans expelled the Jews from Palestine 2000 years ago is FALSE.
See Israeli historian Shlomo Sand( the invention of the Jewish people).
At any rate, even had the story been true – and it is NOT – the notion of
modern Jews laying claim to the land 2000 years later is truly bizarre.
In short, today's Palestinians and their ancestors have been living continuously between
the River and the Sea for about 9,000 years."
Exactly.
In the preface of his book "Ten myths about Israel", Israeli historian Ilan Pappe,
writes:
Were the Jews indeed the original inhabitants of Palestine who deserved to be
supported in every way possible in their "return" to their "homeland"? The myth insists
that the Jews who arrived in 1882 were the descendants of the Jews expelled by the Romans
around 70 CE. The counterargument questions this genealogical connection. Quite a hefty
scholarly effort has shown that the Jews of Roman Palestine remained on the land and were
first converted to Christianity and then to Islam. Who these Jews were is still an open
question -- maybe the Khazars who converted to Judaism in the ninth century; or maybe the
mixture of races across a millennium precludes any answer to such a question.
In a recent thought-provoking article
Gideon Levy, probably one of the last genuine Israeli voices for peace, claims that "It is
not Netanyahu who is responsible for Israeli 'racism, extreme nationalism, divisiveness,
incitement, hatred, anxiety and corruption.'" Behind Netanyahu, Levy says, there's a nation of
voters and other elected officials that aren't very different from their leader.
"Simply put, the people are the problem There are those who have hated Arabs long before
Netanyahu. There are those who despise blacks, detest foreigners, exploit the weak and look
down their noses at the whole world – and not because of Netanyahu. There are those who
believe they are the chosen people and therefore deserve everything."
Levy reaffirms the observation that I have been pushing for two decades. The problem with Israel is
not of a political
kind . The conflict with the Palestinians or the Arabs is not of a political nature as some
delusional characters within the Palestinian solidarity movement have been proclaiming for
years. Israel defines itself as the Jewish state. In order to grasp Israel, its politics, its
policies and the intrusive nature of its lobby, we must understand the nature of
Jewishness. We must learn to define the differences between Jews (the people), Judaism
(the religion) and Jewishness (the ideology). We have to understand how those terms are related
to each other and how they influence Israeli and Jewish politics globally.
Levy writes that "there are those who think that after the Holocaust, they are permitted to
do anything. There are those who believe that Israel is tops in the world in every field, that
international law doesn't apply to it, and that no one can tell it what to do. There are those
who think Israelis are victims – always victims, the only victims – and that the
whole world is against us. There are those who are convinced that Israel is allowed to do
anything, simply because it can."
In order to understand what Levy is referring to we must dig into the core of Jewish
identification and once and for all grasp the notion of Jewish choseness. Levy contends that
"racism and xenophobia are deeply entrenched here, far more deeply than any Netanyahu The
apartheid did not start with him and will not end with his departure; it probably won't even be
dented. One of the most racist nations in the world cannot complain about its prime minister's
racism." Netanyahu as such, is not the disease. He is a mere symptom.
ORDER IT NOW
The devastating news is that neither the Israeli 'Left' nor the Jewish so-called 'anti'
Zionist league are any less racist than their Zionist foes. The Israeli Left pushes for a 'two
state solution.' It crudely ignores the Palestinian cause i.e. the Right of Return. The Israeli
Left advocates segregation and ghettoization; not exactly the universal message of harmony one
would expect from 'leftists.' Disturbingly, the Diaspora Jewish 'anti' Zionist Left is even
more racially exclusive than the Israeli Right. As I have explored many times in the past,
Corbyn's 'favourite Jewish political group namely, Jewish Voice for Labour
(JVL) is a racially exclusive political cell. It wouldn't allow gentiles into its Jews-only
club. Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) is no better. It will happily take donations from Goyim but
will never allow those Goyim to become its board members.
Levy proclaims that "Netanyahu is the best thing to ever happen to Israeli politics –
you can dump everything on him." But in his most astute observation, which has been explored
before by Uri Avnery (may he rest in peace) and yours truly, Levy continues, "It would be great
if some local Nelson Mandela would arise, a brave leader with vision who would change the
country's basic values and lead a revolution. But no such person has been born here, and it's
doubtful he ever will be."
Levy points at the core of the Zionist failure. If early Zionism was a promise to civilise
the diaspora Jew by means of 'homecoming,' Israel happened to do the complete opposite. Not
much is left out of the Zionist promise to make the Jews 'people like all other people': as
Israel is about to perpetrate another colossal war crime in Gaza, we have to admit that we are
dealing with an institutionally racist and dangerous identity like no other.
Another good one Atzmon. I thinks it's hard for people to grasp outside of Israel the
connection you speak of between the religion, the people, and the ideology. Its underreported
for obvious reasons in the media, plus the control the Israel lobby and its donors the
Adelsons, Sabans, and Singers have in the US on what people hear about Israel and its
citizens. All you hear is it's a democracy among hostile states that hate it because of
freedom or democracy or whatever propaganda speak the mouth peace for Israel/Zionism media
uses. You never hear about Israel's and its citizens actions that cause it just the eternal
victim status they have been awarded.
Violent Islam is the Disease, Resistance Leaders are the Symptom
The author makes a good point. Netanyahu is not unique:
– Modi resists violent Islam in Kashmir.
– Jinping resists violent Islam in Xinjiang.
– Orban resists violent Islam in Hungary.
– Trump resists violent Islam in the U.S.
– Netanyhau resists violent Islam in Israel.
And, there are more cases not in the list above
Islam views all non-Muslims as infidels. Violent Islam wages Jihad until the infidels are
killed, converted, or willingly submit as Dhimmi slaves. Until Islam changes, Resistance
leaders will continue to protect their people. Perhaps the collapse of the Iranian government
and its funding of terrorism will open the door to that change.
______
Israel started as a far left venture where the people lived in true communist shared
estates know as Kibbutz. Seventy years of resisting violent Islam has changed the people into
a practical group that will do what is necessary to stay alive.
The upcoming election makes no difference in Israeli survival strategy. Netanyahu's only
serious competitor, Benny Gantz, openly states he will fight Iran's violent Islamic expansion
in Lebanon & Syria (Iranian Hezbollah) and in Gaza (Iranian Hamas).
First:
Yes, do let's differentiate between Jews, judaism and jewishness (lest anyone be accused of
criticizing "Jews the people," which is something only an anti-semite or a self-hating Jew
might do, isn't it?).
The Jews are the people, judaism is their deeply inculcated worldview and ethos, and
jewishness is their inherently logical behavior.
Or the Jews are the computer, judaism is its operating system and jewishness its
applications.
Or the Jews are the rice, while judaism and jewishness are the white on rice.
Second:
The zionism did NOT fail to deliver its promise to make the Jews "people like other people."
It is Atzmon who fails to understand that the Jews' definition of "people" ("nations") is
based on the very Jewish worldview of the model: irrationally hateful, brutal, greedy,
covetous, and ruthless "winners." I would say zionism succeeded remarkably well, but it had
eager students to start with.
Mr. Atzmon has painted himself in a corner on this otherwise tough editorial. But let's
give him some credit. Gilad's taken a hell of a lotta heat for his rough and penetrating
criticisms of the Zionist colony and its endless deceptions. And he (generally) pulls no
punches.
But when all is said and done, and all the hairs are split, and all the (overdue) debates
are finally finished (and we can somehow separate the 'racist' Jews from the good,
'humanitarian' Jews) we are nevertheless left with a core Jewish identity that puts God's
Chosen People forever and eternally above the rest of humanity. God says so!
Basically, the problem is that Jewishness and 'Jewish supremacism' are pretty much one and
the same.
@A123
"Israel started as a far left venture Seventy years of resisting violent Islam has changed
the people into a practical group that will do what is necessary to stay alive."
I wonder why the Palestinians employ violence ? Of course, the State of Israel was born out
of terrorism (King David hotel, multiple assassinations etc) & ethnic cleansing (ie Nakba
). And yes, the Palestinians were also violent.
As for Israel's "survival" -- that's been a none issue since the late 70's, at a minimum.
Israel with its 100's of nuclear weapons & it's US body guard has NO survival issues.
It's all the poor bastards around them who have survival problems : (Syria, Lebanon, Gaza,
Iran, Libya etc)
Typical brain dead Hasbara nonsense. Orban resists third world immigration, which I
support, the problem is about mass non white immigration not Islam. The ultimate problem is
the jew, it is they that push for mass immigration and miscegenation the most.
And the rest of this article just goes on and on about how evil , Israel, Israelis are ,
and as to how they are self-justified and unified in being so. And this is a Jew writing
this.
Wow. What is the world to do? Doesn't seem to be any other option or solution, except a
trip to Wannsee.
@A123
Dancing Isreaeli said to the cops:" We are not your problem . Arabs are "
This guy is shouting at China India Russia and at the God : Israel is not the problem Its
these Muslims.
Question is this : will these guys be allowed on the graves of the 911 victims strewn all
across the world- Germany Soviet Russia, Poland, American rust belt, WW1 and 2 British
cemeteries?
When did they say something that turned out to be true?
Having said that, the world would be a better place if they ended up destroying elite run
US UK . Yes they would cut the branch on which they are sitting . But they would jump the
ship just before taht happening
You know Albert Sasson whow as knighted , who married in Riothchilds family, whose grand
son / nephew or another Sasson – by name Amery gave us the Balfour in part . He was
thrown out of Iraq court for corruption He made it to Raj's India and planted the seed of
opium That soon ate up all the available fertile lands of north India . The opium made him
rich made India poor corrupted British Raj and led to Chinese deprivations rebellion and to
communism
@neutral
Regardless, Jews (definition as provided and all three facets) are the most coherent group
globally. They can muster the most coordination, the strongest drive, the detachment and
loyalty, add as needed,
Since everyone here on unz likes thinking in bursts, to the matter. That makes for
success. No reason to whine about for the loosing party, the WASP, traditional US elites. If
some other group has ambitions, it should acquire that type of quality identity.
Islam is a poor enemy, as Jews see them as target practice, so should other entities
maybe.
Western European descend Whites, and the ambition of enlightenment, (for one, all
individuals across ethnic and religious lines being equals), should stow their ambitions of
principle until they are in charge. That will require appropriating the same acerbic mindset
of the Jew, and not whine publicly about the teacher. White elites have sold out, they are
burdened by a commoner population that far exceeds any asset value. To disconnect their base,
also made them hostages of Jew elites.
From the point of view of the Euro-descend commoner, non-Jew, unpriviledged, as long as
they see themselves as genuine and belonging to the system, the US, and not the trash they
are treated as, as long as the non-Jewish middle classes continue their egocentric quest for
scraps, they deserve the Gaza they are converted into. No Jew should be blamed for pushing an
outsider into demise. The tactics are in the open for grabs, Whites (non-Latino, non-Jew)
have only themselves to blame for their demise.
Mitchell A. Orenstein
Authoritarian nationalists such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán win support not only by attacking
immigrants, but also by delivering economic policies that benefit the poor and middle class. Western analysts and,
more important, Western leaders need to learn this lesson before it's too late.
On March 20, the European People's Party, the conservative bloc
in the European Parliament, will decide whether to expel Hungary's ruling party, Fidesz. The EPP has been slow to
censure Fidesz and Hungary's autocratic prime minister, Viktor Orbán, for its assault on democracy and rule of
law. Yet, Orbán's Western critics have been equally slow to understand the social and economic policies that
underpin his popularity.
Consider the
bold set of
family policies
that Orbán announced on February 10. So far, the verdict in the West on these policies, which
are aimed at addressing the country's low fertility rate and further reducing immigration, has been thunderously
negative and all but blind to their effectiveness in entrenching Orbán's support among Hungarian voters.
Western analysts fail to recognize that authoritarian
nationalists such as Orbán win support not only by attacking immigrants, but also by delivering economic policies
that benefit average people. Mainstream political parties in the West need to learn this economic lesson fast if
they want to compete against their own populist challengers.
Orbán is keen to connect his nationalist message to generous
and popular social policies, while encouraging Hungarian women and families to have more children. Hungary's
current fertility rate of
1.45 children per
female
is below replacement rate. And its population has been shrinking since 1989, mirroring declines in
other former communist countries that used to provide extensive social support to families.
The plan's centerpiece is a lifetime exemption from personal
income tax for women who bear and raise four or more children (Orbán and his wife have five). This and other
policies in the new package will have a real impact on all families in Hungary. Women under 40 who marry for the
first time and have worked for at least three years will be eligible for a $36,000 "childbearing" loan at a
discounted rate, which will be forgiven as they have children. Larger families can apply for an $9,000 government
grant toward the purchase of a seven-seat automobile. Grandparents taking care of children will be eligible for
leave from work and benefits. And the government will create 21,000 new subsidized childcare places.
Leading Western media, analysts, and politicians have been
almost universally critical of the plan, thereby falling right into Orbán's trap.
The Economist
, a
longtime advocate of the free-market economic policies that have impoverished many in Eastern Europe while
producing great wealth for a few and higher living standards for a middle-class
minority
,
predictably criticized
Orbán's plan for being too expensive. The new measures are "unlikely to give birth to a
baby boom" and could "swell an economy that is close to overheating, and inflate house prices."
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Journalist Adam Taylor echoed these sentiments in
The
Washington Post
,
arguing that
Orbán's policies will "barely move the needle on birthrate and may represent a poor return on
investment." We have heard this same Western critique for decades: helping people is too expensive and does not
work, paying for houses will only make them pricier, and it's better to rely on markets than on public policies.
But Orbán's critics ignore the examples of Poland and Russia,
which also have implemented natalist policies in recent years. Russia's fertility rate is up to 1.75 children per
female, from a low of 1.17 in 1999, partly owing to a
grant program
for new parents. Poland, too, has achieved higher birth rates since 2015 after introducing the
massive
Family 500+ initiative
, which enables parents to pay for school supplies, clothes, and vacations. Both schemes
were criticized as being too expensive, but Poland's public deficit has
fallen
, not risen. Rather,
these policies have stimulated economic growth while dramatically
reducing child poverty
and increasing
school enrollment.
Although free-market attacks on bold new social programs are no
surprise, some of the sharpest criticism of Orbán's policies has come from the left. Progressives strongly dislike
the fact that many of his proposals target women in a way that seems to advance a conservative, pro-family agenda.
To
The Guardian
's Afua Hirsch,
for example
, "the idea that assistance for those in poverty is conditional on obedient reproduction is verging
on the dystopian." Similarly, Princeton professor Kim Lane Scheppele, interviewed on
Public Radio
International
,
warned
that, "Women are going to bear the burden of Orbán's failed economic policies." And Swedish Social
Affairs Minister Annika Strandhäll
said
that, "This kind of policy will harm the autonomy for which women have struggled for decades."
These analysts are right that Orbán's policies are designed to
encourage women to marry, buy houses, bear more children, and stay in Hungary. But their criticism misses the mark
in important ways. Overall, these proposals are not coercive. Nor do they seek to keep women barefoot and
homebound. Instead, Orbán's plan is designed to help women manage their work-life balance. For that, it should be
celebrated, not excoriated.
Consider the lifetime income-tax exemption for women with four
or more children. The primary beneficiaries of this program will be women who work, because those with no income
will gain no advantage. In two-parent families where both partners have similar or equal earning potential, it may
make sense for the woman to work tax-free, or run the family business, while the man stays at home with the
children.
Likewise, giving grandparents childrearing benefits helps women
to enter the labor force. So does subsidized childcare. And although the new loan programs do encourage women to
have children, they also may enable them to buy a home. In short, these policies provide state support for women's
unpaid labor.
Like it or not, some of Europe's boldest new social-policy
initiatives are coming from its most illiberal governments. The negative reactions of mainstream opinion leaders
in the West show how unprepared they are to do battle with Orbán and others for voters' hearts and minds. The
populist right is pressing the rhetoric and policies of social democracy into the service of authoritarian
nationalism. If the West cannot see or understand the appeal of this, it will be unable to fight back.
Why would only blacks object to existence of these monuments? What about the purported
victors of that war? They could have objected but did not. The people attacking these
monuments are effectively declaring that they want a civil war, as I see it.
Icons of outstanding accomplishment seem nearly always to be about war.. and the political
figures that made the Oligarchs filthy rich prosecuting a war that killed millions. The more
dead, the bigger the statute.
Where are the monuments to Watson and Crick, Newton, the persons that discovered penicillin,
the engines that convert energy from one form to a more usable other form or statutes of the
persons that founded our great universities or the persons that discovered how to capture
electricity and make available in every household?
Few icons to those that have made the quality of our lives better are ever produced,
Why?
Probably because the war mongers would have none of that.. Oligarchs own 90% of the press,
the media, and
means of communicating their wars, no damn invention that makes life better for the
displicibles is going to get into the way of profit making wars that fund so much of Economic
Zionism.
Consider the recent invention at the U of Australia where hard work discovered 2,200
different places in the world, where a combination of sunlight and wind energy can produce
and store sufficient energy to supply 24/7 all the energy the entire world needs on the power
grid. Not a word of it in the media. Soon I expect to see a monument to the shock and awe
bastards?
This is from 2015. Not much changed... But relevant for Venezuela. So what will happen with Venesuellians if
the color revolution suceeed, is easy to predict using Ukrainian example
Notable quotes:
"... Ukraine, what a mess. As though it was ever about the people. It was a grab for resources, 19-century style. But with 21st-century stakes. You can see what the West is after when you look at the US-Ukraine Business Council. ..."
"... Meanwhile last night & this morning, just to distract the people of what is going on in the West, Kiev launched a massive shelling over Donetsk and other places in Donbass using weapons forbbiden by the Minsk agreements, including Tor missiles, one of which fell at a railway station but didn't explode... it was defused by emergency workers but the proof is there if you care to see... it was thesecond biggest attack since the cease fire... ..."
"... This is the IMF hired guns now going after the very people who helped the Wall Street IMF shysters in the illegitimate coup and the set up of the illegitimate Kiev junta, a mix of half Ukrainian and non-Ukrainian mongrels. ..."
"... Furthermore, instead of bringing in the people who helped overthrow Janukovich into the government fold, the IMF is placing it's foreign collaborators in ministerial positions by making them instant Ukrainian citizens, while keeping the right wing, without whose help the coup would not have succeeded, out of government and slowly trying to eliminate them with their private foreign mercenary force. ..."
"... Madame "F*ck the EU Nuland from the US state department bordello, a devout Zionist, enticed these supposed Ukrainian NAZIs to help her in her dirty deeds, no doubt with promises of power sharing. ..."
"... She no doubt got her position not by intelligence but by connections. More than 6000 Ukrainians, human beings, innocent men women and children, have died in madame Nuland's engineered coup, putting her in league with her mentor, Henry Kissinger, aka the butcher of Vietnam. ..."
"... The Ukrainian sub-saharan African minimum wage is now being accompanied by Somali-style politics. ..."
"... The BBC are bravely sticking to their decision not to report this story. Congratulations are in order for such dedication. The graun protected its readership from this confusing information for 24 hours and then caved to the temptation to report news. Too bad. ..."
"... Can we officially congratulate Nuland for a crappy job and also for providing Putin with all the tools he needed to bring back Ukraine under his wing. False flag operations for American private interests must stop now. They are immoral, unethical and only bring death and destruction to otherwise stable societies. The UN should have a say. ..."
"... Neither Azov nor Right Sector want peace. On 3 July 4,000 men from these units protested in Kiev, calling for resumption of the war against the eastern provinces. They favour ethnic cleansing. ..."
"... The west would not have dialogue with Russia because it was not what Washington wanted. Washington wanted to push a wedge between Russia and EU at any cost even 6500 lives and unfortunately they succeeded ..."
"... The Right Sector does not exist, or if it does, it has been created by Moscow. The crisis in Greece is also the work of Russian agents. The ISIS is financed and trained by Putin. Ebola was cooked up in a laboratory in Saint Petersburg. Look for the Russian! ..."
"... this is what happens when you play with fire: you get burned. Using Neo-Nazi's to implement Nato expansionist policies was always a very bad idea. It's just a shame it is not people like Victoria 'fuck the EU' Nuland who will have to suffer the blowback consequences- it is the poor Ukrainian people. This is not that different to what has happened in Libya- where Islamic extremists were used as a proxy force to oust Gaddafi. ..."
"... the jihadists in Ukraine are the integral part of Iraqization of Ukraine. The lovers of Nuland's cookies are still in denial that Ukraine was destined by the US plutocrats to become a sacrificial lamb in a fight to preserve the US dollar hegemony. ..."
"... Why, don't you know? They infiltrated Ukraine, the CIA (and NATO and the EU somehow) created Maidan, their agents killed the protesters, then they overthrew a legitimate government and installed a neo-nazi one, proceeded to instigate a brutal oppression against Russian speakers, then started a war against the peaceful Eastern Ukrainians and their innocent friends in the Kremlin, etc etc. Ignorant question that, by now you should know the narrative! ..."
"... The BBC investigative reported earlier this year that a section of Maidan protesters deliberately started shooting the police. This story was also reported in the Guardian. Google and you will easily find it. The BBC also reported that the Prosecutors Office in Kiev was forbidden by Rada officials from investigating Maiden shooters. ..."
"... have you ever studied geography? If yes, you should remember the proximity of Ukraine to Russia (next door) and the proximity of Ukraine to the US (thousands miles away). Also, have you heard about the CIA Director Brennan and his covert visit to Kiev on the eve of the beginning of the civil war in Ukraine? This could give you an informed hint about the causes of the war. Plus you may be interested to learn about Mrs. Nuland-Kagan (Ms. Nudelman), her cookies, and her foul language. She is, by the way, a student of Dick Cheney. If you were born before 2000, you might know his name and his role in the Iraq catastrophe. Mrs. Nuland-Kagan (and the family of Kagans she belongs to) finds particular pleasure in creating military conflicts around the globe. It is not for nothing that the current situation in Ukraine is called Iraqization of Eastern Europe. ..."
"... This newspaper and other western media documented the armed members of far right groups on Maidan. One BBC journalist was actually shot at by a Svoboda sniper, operating from Hotel Ukraina - the video is still on the BBC website. ..."
"... As predicted the real civil war in Ukraine is still to happen. The split between the east and the ordinary Ukrainian was largely manufactured ..."
"... "When the Guardian claims to be a fearless champion of investigative journalism - as it is, in some areas - why did it obey the dictats of the US neocon media machine which rules all Western mainstream media over the Ukrainian land grab, instead of telling the truth, at that time?" ..."
"... in time Ukrainians will regard Maidan's aftermath as most of them view the Orange Revolution -- with regret and cynicism. ..."
"... Of course the Guardian doesn't like to explain that 'Right Sector' are genuine fascists - by their own admission! These fascists, who wear Nazi insignia, were the people who overthrew the elected government of Ukraine in the US / EU-supported coup - which the Guardianistas and other PC-brainwashed duly cheered on as a supposed triumph of democracy. Since that glorious US-financed and EU-backed coup, wholly illegal under international law, Ukraine's economy has collapsed, as has Ukrainians' living standards. ..."
The Georgian authorities have asked Interpol to put a Red notice on Mikheil Saakashvili as the
request to Ukraine to return him for trial in Georgia was refused.
ww3orbust PrinceEdward 13 Jul 2015 20:22
That does not detract from the fact that the Ukrainian cabinet has been chosen by the US state
department. Natives of the US, Georgia and Lithuania were hastily granted Ukrainian citizenship
in order to maintain an iron grip on Ukraine, while accusing Putin of appointing majors or governors
- in his capacity as head of state?
ww3orbust 13 Jul 2015 20:16
Amazing, nothing at all mentioned by the BBC. It does not fit in to their narrative to see the
country descend into a new stage of anarchy, between the people who murdered police and protesters
on Maidan square, and the US state department installed cabinet. Presumably if Right Sector refuse
to disarm and continue torturing civilians and murdering police, the BBC will continue to ignore
it and focus instead on its Russo-phobic narrative, while accusing Russia of propaganda with the
self-righteous piety that only the BBC are capable of. Or god forbid, more stories about what
colour stool our future king has produced this week.
The thing is, Ukraine is unique in allowing their Nazi thugs to be armed and have some semi-official
status. Everywhere else (including Russia), governments are looking to constrain the activities
of Nazis and prosecute them where possible.
jgbg Pwedropackman 13 Jul 2015 18:26
If it was not for the right sector, Ukraine would still be one united nation.
Them and Svoboda. If it had just been Orange Revolution II, with a simple change of Jewish
oligarchs in charge, there might have been some complaints but little more. It is the Russian-hating
far right that has brought about the violence and everything that has happened since.
PrinceEdward GreatMountainEagle 13 Jul 2015 18:22
Last I heard, Ukraine owes China billions for undelivered Grain.
HollyOldDog gimmeshoes 13 Jul 2015 18:11
But the Euro Maidan press is just an Ukrainian rag that invents stories to support its corrupt
government in Kiev.
jgbg PrinceEdward 13 Jul 2015 17:54
I forget the article, but in the comments I mentioned that multiple Georgians were being
appointed to high level positions by Kiev, and some Russophobe called me a liar.
Not a few days later, Shakashvilli was appointed governor of Odessa. An ex-president of another
country, as governor of a province in another one! Apparently, none of the millions upon millions
of Ukrainians were qualified for the job.
Sakashvilli's former Minister of Internal Affairs in Georgia, Eka Zguladze, is First Deputy
Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine. Of course, the Georgian people removed these chumps from
power the first chance they got but the Ukrainian electorate haven't had any say in the appointments
of foreigners in their country.
Well ... when it comes to Ukraine, the need to stock up on popcorn. This bloody and unpredictable
plot is not even in the "Game of Thrones." And this is only the middle of the second season.
Today Speaker of the "RS" Andrew Sharaskin, said: Sports Complex in Mukachevo where the shooting
occurred, was used as the base of the separatists DNR.
- A place 1,000 kilometers from Donetsk! But it's a great excuse to murder the guard in the café
and wounded police officers.
I think tomorrow will say that there have seen Russian Army tanks and Putin - 100%
"Ukraine is part of Europe" - the slogans of the Maidan in action...
Pravyi Sektor were not wrong. However, you cannot have armed groups cleaning up corruption
outside the law...that only works in Gotham City.
Right Sector weren't trying to clean up corruption, they were simply trying to muscle in on
the cigarette smuggling business. If Right Sector cared about crime and public order, they wouldn't
be driving around, armed to the teeth, in vehicles stolen in the EU. (In the video linked in the
article, all of their vehicles have foreign number plates. At least one of those vehicles is on
the Czech police stolen vehicle database:
http://zpravy.idnes.cz/pravy-sektor-mel-v-mukacevu-auta-s-ceskymi-spz-fqj-/zahranicni.aspx?c=A150713_102110_zahranicni_jj)
The EU and the US have stated on many occasions that there are "No Right Wing Nationalists" operating
in Ukraine and its simply propaganda by Putin.
So there shouldn't be anything to worry about should there ?
Stas Ustymenko hfakos 13 Jul 2015 15:15
Yes, yes. You seem to tolerate Medvedchuk and Baloga mafias way better, for years.
Transcarpathian Region is the most corrupt in all of Ukraine (which is quite a fit). What we see
here is a gang war in fatigues.
tanyushka Jeff1000 13 Jul 2015 15:14
sorry i posted the same above... i was just to hasty.. sorry again...
in the main picture of the same article it's interesting to notice the age of most of the conscripted
soldiers... they are in their 30's, theirs 40's and even in their 50's... it's forced conscription,
they are not volunteers... while all the DPR & LPR soldiers are real volunteers...
an uncle, the father of a cousin, was conscripted in Kherson... my cousin had to run away to South
American to say with an aunt to avoid conscription... many men are doing it in Ukraine nowadays...
not because they are cowards but because they don't want to kill their brothers & sisters for
the benefit of the oligarchs and their NATO masters (and mistresses...)
did you know that all the conscripts have to pay for their own uniforms and other stuff, while
in the National Guard and the oligarchs batallions everything is top quality and for free... including
bulletproof vests and other implements courtesy of NATO
Demi Boone 13 Jul 2015 15:13
Well finally they reveal themselves. These Ukraine Nationalists are the people who instigated
the anarchy and shootings at Maidan and used it as an excuse to wrongfully drive out an elected
President and in the chaos that followed bring in a coup Government which represents only West-Ukraine
and suppress' East-Ukraine. You are looking at the face of the real Maidan and not the dream that
a lot of people have tried to paint it to be.
Stas Ustymenko MartinArvay 13 Jul 2015 15:11
Many Right Sector members are indeed patriots. But it looks like the organisation itself is,
sadly, much more useful for providing thugs for hire than "justice".
BMWAlbert PrinceEdward 13 Jul 2015 14:20
But seriously, the naval base is probably the reason, it is too important for some interests
to have a less-reliable (Ukrainian) in charge, this is a job only for the most trusted poodles.
If things had gone differently, the tie-eatimng chap would have been appointed Mayor of Sebastopol.
BMWAlbert PrinceEdward 13 Jul 2015 14:15
There appears to be a Quisling-shortage in Ukraine at present.
Stas Ustymenko obscurant 13 Jul 2015 13:32
More accurately, Kolomoyskiy is Ukrainian oligarch. Who happens to be ethnically, culturally
and, by all accounts, religiously, a Jew.
Stas Ustymenko Kaiama 13 Jul 2015 13:24
Ukrainian Volunteer Corps of the Right Sector fighting in Donbass is two battalions. How is
this a "key organization"? They are a well-known brand and fought bravely on some occasions, but
the wider org is way too eager to brandish arms outside of combat or training. They will be reigned
in, one way or another, and soon.
GameOverManGameOver Jeff1000 13 Jul 2015 12:02
Shh shh shh. This news does not exist yet in the western media, therefore it's nothing but
Russian propaganda.
Jeff1000 13 Jul 2015 11:54
It gets worse - soldiers from the UA are now refusing to follow orders in protest against the
total anarchy sweeping the chain of command, and their lack of rest and equipment.
Tensions have been rising between the government and the Right Sector militia that has
helped it fight pro-Russian separatists in the east of the country.
Finally, the Guardian decided to report the actual new after satisfying itself with ample discussion
of the quality of Russian cheeses. Right sector "helped" to fight "separatists"? Really? Does
Alec Luhn know that there are currently two (!) RS battalions at the front and 19 (!) inside Ukraine?
They are some warriors. Now they are occupying themselves fighting as criminals they are for the
control of contraband.
At the ATO zone, they help consists of plundering, murdering and raping the local population.
They enter a village, take everything of value from houses and then blow them up. They rape women
and girls as young as 10 years old. They've been doing this for more than a year, and we've been
telling you that for more than a year. But apparently in the fight against "pro-Russian separatists"
everything is good. These crimes are so widespread, even the Ukrainian "government" is worried
this will eventually becomes impossible to deny. Some battalions such as Shakhtersk and Aidar
have been officially accused of crimes and ompletely or partially reformed.
Examples: http://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/EUR50/040/2014/en/ http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=bfb_1413804655
Ukraine, what a mess. As though it was ever about the people. It was a grab for resources,
19-century style. But with 21st-century stakes. You can see what the West is after when you look
at the US-Ukraine Business Council. It bring NATO, Monsanto and the Heritage Foundation under
one roof:
You'd be surprised, but I like Bandera (controversial as he was) way more than I trust some
people who wrap themselves in his red-and-black Rebel banner. Yarosh included. Banderite rebellion
ended 60 years ago. Its major goal was establishing a "united, free Ukrainian state"; by contrast,
stated ultimate goals of the Right Sector are way murkier; I'm not sure even most of the movement's
members are clear on what these are.
With present actions, Right Sector has a huge image problem in the West. If it will come to all-out
conflict, no doubt the West will back Poroshenko government over a loose confederation of armed
dudes linked by the thin thread of 30ies ideology (suspect even then). And the West will be right.
Stas Ustymenko Nik2 13 Jul 2015 11:03
Methinks you're way overselling a thug turf war as "major political event. Truth is, the region
has been long in the hands of organized crime. The previous regime incorporated and controlled
almost all organized crime in the country, hence no visible conflict. Now, individual players
try to use temporary uncertainty to their advantage.
Right Sector claims they were trying to fight
the smuggling, but this doesn't sound plausible. The word is, what's behind the events is struggle
for control over lucrative smuggling between two individuals (who are both "businessmen" and "politicians",
members of Parliament). Both are old-school players, formerly affiliated with Yanukovitch party.
One just was savvy enough to buy himself some muscle under Right Sector banner. Right Sector will
either have to straighten out its fighters (which it may not be able to do) or disappear as a
political player. I fail to see how people see anything "neo-Nazi" in this gang shootout.
PaddyCannuck Cavirac 13 Jul 2015 10:21
Nobody here is an apologist for Stalin, who was a brutal and cruel despot, and the deportations
of the Crimean Tatars were quite indefensible. However, a few observations might lend some perspective.
1. Crimea has been invaded and settled by an almost endless succession of peoples over the
millennia. The Crimean Tatars (who are of Turkic origin) were by no means the first, nor indeed
the last, and cannot in any meaningful sense be regarded as the indigenous people of Crimea.
2. The Crimean Tatars scarcely endeared themselves to the Russians, launching numerous raids,
devastating many towns, including the burning of Moscow in 1571, and sending hundreds of thousands,
if not millions of Russians into slavery in the Ottoman Empire.
3. The deportations took place in 1942 - 1943 against the backdrop of World War II, when a lot
of bad stuff happened, including -
4. The American (and also Canadian) citizens of Japanese ethnicity who had their property confiscated
and were likewise shipped off to camps. Their treatment, if anything, was worse.
Sevastopol, Pearl Harbor. What's the difference? What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
Meanwhile last night & this morning, just to distract the people of what is going on in the West,
Kiev launched a massive shelling over Donetsk and other places in Donbass using weapons forbbiden
by the Minsk agreements, including Tor missiles, one of which fell at a railway station but didn't
explode... it was defused by emergency workers but the proof is there if you care to see... it
was thesecond biggest attack since the cease fire...
Nik2 6i9vern 13 Jul 2015 09:53
Not exactly. By now, BBC has made good coverage of these events in Ukrainian and Russian languages,
but not in English. It looks like BBC considers that Western public does not deserve the politically
sad truth about armed clashes between "champions of Maidan Revolution" and "new democratic authorities,
fighting corruption". Western public should not be in doubt about present-day "pro-European" Ukraine.
And "The Guardian" still has only one article on the issue that could be a turning point in Ukrainian
politics. This is propaganda, not informing about or analyzing really serious political events.
VictorWhisky 13 Jul 2015 09:51
This is the IMF hired guns now going after the very people who helped the Wall Street IMF shysters
in the illegitimate coup and the set up of the illegitimate Kiev junta, a mix of half Ukrainian
and non-Ukrainian mongrels.
Furthermore, instead of bringing in the people who helped overthrow Janukovich into the government fold, the IMF is placing it's foreign collaborators in ministerial
positions by making them instant Ukrainian citizens, while keeping the right wing, without whose
help the coup would not have succeeded, out of government and slowly trying to eliminate them
with their private foreign mercenary force.
Madame "F*ck the EU Nuland from the US state department
bordello, a devout Zionist, enticed these supposed Ukrainian NAZIs to help her in her dirty deeds,
no doubt with promises of power sharing.
So madame Nuland was perfectly willing to get in bed
with the Ukrainian NAZI devils (her Jewish friend should be proud) and when the dirty deed was
done, she is now turning against Ukrainian nationalists in the attempt to have outside forces
in control of Ukraine. Madame Nuland is not as intelligent or capable as portrayed, because if
she was, she would have known Ukraine has a very delicate and very complicated political structure
and history with nearly half the country speaking Russian and more loyal to the Russians than
to the US.
An intelligent person familiar with Ukrainian history would know any attempt of placing
a US stooge in Kiev would certainly result in a civil war.
She no doubt got her position not by
intelligence but by connections. More than 6000 Ukrainians, human beings, innocent men women and
children, have died in madame Nuland's engineered coup, putting her in league with her mentor,
Henry Kissinger, aka the butcher of Vietnam. That intelligent idiot's policies resulted in the
death of 3 million Vietnamese and 50,000 young Americans. Does madame Nuland intend to sacrifice
that many Ukrainians to prove her ultimate stupidity?
Jeremn Luminaire 13 Jul 2015 09:51
The conscripts didn't want to shoot their fellow Ukrainians. The nationalists don't believe
the people in the east are their fellow Ukrainians.
Because they were lovely guys, evidently, and their "popularity" has nothing to do with armed
thugs beating you up if you say anything against them (or the state prosecuting you for denying
or questioning their heroism).
Jeremn jezzam 13 Jul 2015 09:35
Ukrainian media, reporting Ukrainian government official:
12 police dead in two days, 180 wounded with gunshot wounds.
Still Kremlin lies?
Jeff1000 13 Jul 2015 09:30
Thank God Ukraine is finally free and democratic. The old autocratic regime actually had the
gall to make running street battles illegal - but those dark days are in the past. In the liberated
Ukraine you are free spend the dollar a day you get paid on a bullet proof vest so the rampant
Nazi street gangs don't kill you.
Jeremn SHappens 13 Jul 2015 09:26
You'd be surprised, there are Bandera-lovers in the UK too. There's a Bandera museum. And there
is this lot, teaching Christian values to children. And telling them that Bandera was a hero.
Future Right Sector supporters being crafted as we type.
6i9vern 13 Jul 2015 09:24
The Ukrainian sub-saharan African minimum wage is now being accompanied by Somali-style politics. Luckily, the Russians have liberated Crimea so piracy on the high seas isn't an option for
the Ukrainians.
6i9vern 13 Jul 2015 09:18
Apparently, UAVs generously supplied to Ukrainians by the Canadian taxpayers are being put
to good use smuggling cigarettes into Slovakia.
6i9vern 13 Jul 2015 09:12
The BBC are bravely sticking to their decision not to report this story. Congratulations are
in order for such dedication.
The graun protected its readership from this confusing information for 24 hours and then caved
to the temptation to report news. Too bad.
aucontraire2 13 Jul 2015 08:36
Can we officially congratulate Nuland for a crappy job and also for providing Putin with
all the tools he needed to bring back Ukraine under his wing.
False flag operations for American private interests must stop now. They are immoral, unethical
and only bring death and destruction to otherwise stable societies. The UN should have a
say.
SomersetApples 13 Jul 2015 08:25
The country is bankrupt; the Kiev putschists are selling off the country's assets to their
New York allies, the oligarchs and Nazis are at war against each other and the illegal putschist
government and now toilet mouth Nuland is back on the scene. Looks like a scene form Dante's Inferno.
todaywefight Polvilho 13 Jul 2015 07:54
Which Russian invasion will this be the of he approximately 987 mentioned by Poroshenko and
our man Yatz...or are you referring to the people of the AUTONOMOUS REPUBLIC OF CRIMEA's (yes
that was what was called after the 1994 referendum) massive wishes to (like Donbass) go against
a government who illegally dismissed an elected president a wish that was reflected on a referendum
which was allowed by their constitution 18(7)
Bosula Scepticbladderballs 13 Jul 2015 07:38
Yes. Most of the protesters are good people who just want a better deal in life.
monteverdi1610 13 Jul 2015 06:54
Remember all those CIF threads when those of us who pointed to the neo-Nazis in Ukraine were
immediately called ' Putinbots ' ?
PS/ Apologies would be the order of the day , perhaps ?
Sturney 13 Jul 2015 06:49
Apparently this conflict is over. Temporarily over. Anyway in ever-contracting economy, in
a Mariana trench between Russia and EU, in the most totalitarian country in history, such conflicts
will continue. Since Nuland tossed yeast in the outhouse nobody can stop fermentation of sh*t.
Help yourself with some beer and shrimps. I am looking forward when these masses splash out to
EU, preferably to Poland. Must be fun to watch. (Lipspalm)
Justin Obisesan 13 Jul 2015 06:33
In the run-up to the Euro 2012 football tournament, jointly hosted by Poland and Ukraine, I
remember how the media in this country worked themselves into a frenzy harping on about the presence
of violent neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine. After the removal of Mr Yanukovych from office, the same
media organisations changed their tune by describing any talk of neo- Nazis in Ukraine as "Russian
propaganda". The Western media coverage of the Ukrainian crises has been so blatantly pro-Kiev
and anti-Donbass that their claims of impartiality and objectivity cannot be taken seriously anymore.
Jeremn jgbg 13 Jul 2015 06:16
It is fine when they are shooting at Donetsk, but not so good when they use the same tactics
in western Ukraine.
Azov are the same, violent neo-Nazi thugs given authority, and this article notes that PrivatBank
is the bank that services requests for donations to the Azov funds, using J P Morgan as intermidiary.
Neither Azov nor Right Sector want peace. On 3 July 4,000 men from these units protested in
Kiev, calling for resumption of the war against the eastern provinces.
They favour ethnic cleansing.
Jeremn William Fraser 13 Jul 2015 06:10
The people who support Bandera are in western Ukraine. They are the ones who say Stalin starved
the Ukrainian people.
Trouble is, in the 1930s, western Ukraine belonged to Poland.
It was the Russians, eastern Ukrainians and other Soviet people who starved, not the western
Ukrainians.
Kefirfan 13 Jul 2015 06:02
Good, good. Let the democracy flow through you...
Pwedropackman SHappens 13 Jul 2015 05:53
It will be interesting to see which side the US and Canada will support. Probably Poroshenko
and the Oligarchs because the Right Sector is not so happy about the ongoing sales of Ukraine
infrastructure to US corporates.
SHappens 13 Jul 2015 05:14
Harpers' babies are out manifesting, supporting the good guys:
"Supporters of Ukraine's Right Sector extremist group rallied in Ottawa Sunday amid the
radicals' ongoing standoff with police in western Ukraine."
The rally outside the Ukrainian embassy was organized by the Right Sector's representative
office in the Canadian capital, 112 Ukraine TV channel reported, citing the Facebook account of
the so-called Ukrainian Volunteer Corps.
careforukraine 13 Jul 2015 05:09
I wonder how long it will be before the us denounces nazi's in ukraine?
Kind of seems like we have seen this all before.
Almost like how ISIS were just freedom fighters that needed our support until ?.....
Well we all know what happened there.
Pwedropackman 13 Jul 2015 05:04
If it was not for the right sector, Ukraine would still be one united nation.
GameOverManGameOver Chris Gilmore 13 Jul 2015 04:41
Yes, I agree, they do wreck the economy. That was my point. Russia want's strong economies
to do business with, not broken economies that only ask for financial aid.
Like I said, no evidence of Russian troops in Donbass and South Ossetia asked for the presence
of Russian troops to deter the Georgian government from trying another invasion.
And organisations like CIS are meant to expand economic ties. Just like the EU I suppose. They
function in pretty much the same way with everyone getting a chance to lead. So I don't know why
that should be a bad thing. Since the EU is not interested in admitting Russia why can't Russia
go to other organisations?
VladimirM Dmitriy Grebenyuk 13 Jul 2015 04:26
It's a poisonous sarcasm, I think. But I've heard that RS accuse the Ukrainian government of
being pro-Putin as the government accuse them of being Russian agents. Surreal a bit.
stewfen FOHP46 13 Jul 2015 04:24
The west would not have dialogue with Russia because it was not what Washington wanted. Washington
wanted to push a wedge between Russia and EU at any cost even 6500 lives and unfortunately they
succeeded
GameOverManGameOver Chris Gilmore 13 Jul 2015 03:54
I'll admit that frozen conflicts could be useful to Russia. But only from a security point
of view. And why not, exactly? NATO is Russia's biggest threat, so it would make sense for the
government to want to avoid it expanding any further. I understand your misgivings since you're
speaking from the position that NATO should expand to deter Russi I mean 'Iran', but surely you
understand that Russia wanting to prevent that makes logical sense? Sure, it's at someone else's
expense but let's not pretend that big countries doing something at someone else's expense is
a new and revolutionary concept reserved only to Russia. And the Georgian conflict dates back
to the very early 90's.
From an economic point of view though, no sense at all. Frozen conflicts usually bring economic
barriers. Believe it or not Russia's priority isn't expansion, but the economy. And trade with
it's neighbours is an important element of the Russian economy. It's very hard to trade with areas
that are in the middle of a frozen conflict. So in that sense the last thing Russia would want
are profitable areas in a frozen conflict around it's borders hampering it's economic growth.
And none of this has anything to do with Marioupol.
Debreceni 13 Jul 2015 03:38
The Right Sector does not exist, or if it does, it has been created by Moscow. The crisis in
Greece is also the work of Russian agents. The ISIS is financed and trained by Putin. Ebola was
cooked up in a laboratory in Saint Petersburg. Look for the Russian!
Kaiama PrinceEdward 13 Jul 2015 02:50
We don't know if PS were also doing it as well or just poking their noses into someone else's
business. Who started it? I doubt the correct answer will ever be known. Two unsavoury groups
arguing about an illegal business. The problem is that the MP is an MP whereas PS is a national
organisation.
It's never the US....it's never the West.....
(you know, to balance things) : )
todaywefight 13 Jul 2015 01:53
If any one on the other side, the dark side, ever thought that these lot will hold hands with
any one, lay down their arms and sing Kumbaya, uou are either utterly naive or willfully ignorant.
Apparently, these lot have 23 battalions, armed to their teeth, the added bonus for the Privy
Sektor is that , due to expedience and cowardice , they have just made legal and incorporated
into the Ukrainian army, Kyiv is in a highway to nowhere.
Incidentally, unlike the maidan demonstrations which essentially were only in Kyiv there are
demonstrations in more than a dozen cities, and have established dozen of check points already
and Yarosh a member of the VT. have clearly instructed them to fight if necessary.
GameOverManGameOver Omniscience 13 Jul 2015 01:35
So? Yes there are nationalists in Russia, just like everywhere else. You get a gold star for
googling. Shall I get some articles with European and American nationalists to parade around to
make a vague point? If you want I can get you an article of Lithuanians dressed up as the Waffen
SS parading around Vilnius. That's Lithuania the EU and Nato member. Funny how EU principles disappear
when it's one of their own violating them.
You seem to be missing the point entirely. While all countries have their nationalists, those
nationalists are a very small minority, have no power, have no popular support, have no seats
in government, usually derided by the majority of the population and they certainly aren't armed
to the teeth roaming around the country killing, torturing and kidnapping people with the blessing
of their government
HollyOldDog Joe way 13 Jul 2015 00:09
The Right Sector were / are Ukrains Storm Troopers who have had more advanced training by the
Americans. If the Right Sector turn on the Kiev Government they will be difficult to defeat, and
who knows if the civilian population of Ukraine may join in the 'fun' by ousting the current unpopular
Ukrainian government.
sorrentina 12 Jul 2015 23:35
this is what happens when you play with fire: you get burned. Using Neo-Nazi's to implement
Nato expansionist policies was always a very bad idea. It's just a shame it is not people like
Victoria 'fuck the EU' Nuland who will have to suffer the blowback consequences- it is the poor
Ukrainian people. This is not that different to what has happened in Libya- where Islamic extremists
were used as a proxy force to oust Gaddafi.
annamarinja jgbg 12 Jul 2015 23:31
The threshold has been guessed impatiently by the US neocons (while the provocateur Higgins/
Bellingcat fed the gullible the fairy tales about Russian army in Ukraine). The US needs desperately
a real civil war in Ukraine, the Ukrainians be damned. Just look what the US-sponsored "democracy
on the march" has produced in the Middle East. Expect the same bloody results in eastern Europe.
annamarinja obscurant 12 Jul 2015 23:25
perhaps you do not realize that your insults are more appropriate towards the poor Ukrainians
that have been left destitute by the cooky-carrying foreigners and their puppets in Kiev. The
Ukrainian gold reserve has disappeared... meanwhile, the US Congress has shamed the US State Dept
for collaborating with Ukrainian neo-nazis. Stay tuned. But do not expect to hear real news from
your beloved Faux News.
annamarinja quorkquork 12 Jul 2015 23:14
the jihadists in Ukraine are the integral part of Iraqization of Ukraine. The lovers of Nuland's
cookies are still in denial that Ukraine was destined by the US plutocrats to become a sacrificial
lamb in a fight to preserve the US dollar hegemony.
Bud Peart 12 Jul 2015 22:59
Well we always knew it would end this way. With a stalemate in the war with the East the Right
wing paramilitaries and private oligarch militias (whom the west funded and trained) have gone
completely feral and are now in fighting directly with whats left of the Ukrainian National Army.
This is pretty much the rode to another breakaway in Galacia which would effectively end the Ukraine
as a functional state.
The government should move as fast as possible to get a decent federal structure (copy switzerland)
in place before the whole of the West goes into revolt as well.
DelOrtoyVerga LostJohnny 12 Jul 2015 22:38
That is what you get when you put fascists in your government.
I rather reword it to
That is what you get when you enable and rely on thugish pseudo-fascist radical para-military
groups to impose order by force and violence against dissident segments of your own population
(which is armed to the teeth probably by Russia)
Bosula Scepticbladderballs 12 Jul 2015 22:37
What do you think it is?
There were several people identified directly or indirectly in this BBC story whose stories should
have been formally pursued by legal authorities in Kiev.
If you lived in the West you would understand that we call these references as possible 'leads'
- you follow these 'leads' and see where they take you. That is what Western police do.
The story says that Kiev didn't want to follow up any of these points. Why? What harm could this
do?
You state that you do not understand the point that this BBC journalist was making. But I have
in a fair way tried to to explain the point that the BBC was making.
This story caused quite a stir went it came out - and the BBC chose to stick with it and support
their British reporter. In an edited and shorter form the story is still on the BBC - the editing
is also acknowledged by the BBC.
Do you think the BBC should have blocked or not published this investigative piece?
If so - why?
And why hasn't Kiev followed up these issues?
Have I addressed your point yet?
HollyOldDog Scepticbladderballs 12 Jul 2015 21:34
I am just watching a program recorded earlier. Hiroshima: The Aftermath. I have got past the
part when the Japanese 'survivors' had to drink from the pools of Black Rain ( highly radioactive)
and watched the part when American Army Tourists visited the city to take a few photos ( no medical
help though) while gawking at the gooks. In fact the Japanese civilians recieved no medical assistance
at all from the Americans. The commentator just said that they were just there to study the effects
of nuclear radiation on a civilian population. These nuclear bombs were just dropped on Japan
to save One Day of the surrender of the Japanese forces.
The next documtary I will watch another day is the sinking of the Tirpitz by the RAF using
Tallboy bombs. At least this had a useful pupose in helping to stop the destruction of the North
Atlantic convoys, sending aid to Russia. That aid along with the rebuilding of the Soviet Armies
helped the Soviet Union to destroy the invading Nazi forces and provided a Second Front to the
Western Allies to invade Normandy. A lot of good can be achieved when the East and West work together
- maybe avoiding the worst effects of Global Warming but the Americans only seem to want to spend
Trillions $ building more powerful nuclear weapons. Is this all that America has now, an Arms
Industry - I can see it now, cooling the planet with a Nuclear Winter.
HollyOldDog Scepticbladderballs 12 Jul 2015 20:33
The USA caused the chaos in Ukraine so they must pay the billions of $ to fix it then leave
Ukraine alone.
6i9vern 12 Jul 2015 20:29
One of the amusing features of the Soviet media was the long silences it maintained on possibly
embarrassing breaking news until it became clear what the Party Line was.
Eventually, a memo would go out from Mikhail Suslov's office to various media outlets and the
silence would be broken.
At least everyone knew exactly how that system worked. What is happening with the British media
is much more murky.
The beeb/graun seem to be the Pravda/Izvestia, whilst the torygraph is a sort of Trybuna Ludu
- ie real news very occasionally appears in it.
6i9vern 12 Jul 2015 20:08
So, after a mere 24 hours the Graun ran a story on Mukachevo. The Torygraph actually had the
nerve to run the AFP wire report more or less straight away.
The BBC are still keeping shtum.
The Beeb/Graun complex have well and truly had the frighteners put on them.
PrinceEdward Kaiama 12 Jul 2015 20:07
There's no doubt. I agree that the MP was probably running cigarettes, but also Right Sektor
was going to muscle in.
If you asked somebody 3 years ago if Ukraine would be rocked by armed bands with RPGs and Light
Machine Guns fighting in towns, they would have thought you were crazy.
This isn't Russia, this is the Ultranats/Neo-Nazis.
PrinceEdward obscurant 12 Jul 2015 20:05
Right, it's the people in Donbass who bury 14th SS Division veterans with full honors, push
for full pensions to surviving Hiwi and SS Collaborators... not those in Lvov. Uh huh.
BMWAlbert 12 Jul 2015 20:04
11 months of investigations by the newKiev regime, attempting to implicate the the prior one
for the murder of about 100 people in Kiev early last year was unsuccessful. There may be better
candidates here.
fragglerokk ploughmanlunch 12 Jul 2015 19:55
It always amazes me that the far right never learn from history. The politicians and oligarchs
always use them as muscle to ensure coup success then murder/assasinate the leaders to make sure
they dont get any ideas about power themselves. Surprised its taken so long in ukraine but then
the govt is barely hanging onto power and the IMF loans have turned to a trickle so trouble will
always be brewing, perhaps theyve left it too long this time. Nobody will be shedding any tears
for the Nazis and Banderistas.
Why, don't you know? They infiltrated Ukraine, the CIA (and NATO and the EU somehow) created
Maidan, their agents killed the protesters, then they overthrew a legitimate government and installed
a neo-nazi one, proceeded to instigate a brutal oppression against Russian speakers, then started
a war against the peaceful Eastern Ukrainians and their innocent friends in the Kremlin, etc etc.
Ignorant question that, by now you should know the narrative!
Kaiama gimmeshoes 12 Jul 2015 19:53
If you think Pryvi Sektor want to "clean up" then yes, but not in the way you imagine - they
just want the business for themselves.
Geordiemartin 12 Jul 2015 19:51
I am reminded of AJP Taylor premise that Eastern Europe has historically had either German
domination or Russian protection.
The way that the Ukrainian government had treated their own Eastern compatriots leaves little
reason to believe they would be welcome back into the fold and gives people of Donbass no reason
to want to rejoin the rest of the country.
If government is making an effort to reign in the likes of Right sector it is a move in the
right direction but much much more will be needed to establish any trust.
Some Guy yataki 12 Jul 2015 19:45
just because they are nazis doesnt mean they are happy about doing any of this... now. look
at greece and the debacle that has unfolded over the past week has been . the west ukraine wanted
to be part of the euro zone and wanted some of that ecb bail out money. now they are not even
sure if they could skip out on the bill and know they are fighting for nothing . russia gave them
14 bil dollars . the west after the coup only gave the 1 bil
Andor2001 Kaiama 12 Jul 2015 19:44
According to the eyewitnesses the RS shot a guard when he refused to summon the commanding
officer. It was the beginning of the fight.
Andor2001 yataki 12 Jul 2015 19:41
Remember Shakespeare "Othello"? Moor has done his job, Moor has to go..
The neo-Nazis have outlived their usefulness.
Bosula caaps02 12 Jul 2015 19:39
The BBC investigative reported earlier this year that a section of Maidan protesters deliberately
started shooting the police. This story was also reported in the Guardian. Google and you will
easily find it.
The BBC also reported that the Prosecutors Office in Kiev was forbidden by Rada officials from
investigating Maiden shooters.
Maybe the BBC is telling us a lie? The BBC investigation is worth a read - then you can make up
your own mind.
Bosula William Fraser 12 Jul 2015 19:29
Kazakhstan had the highest percentage of deaths from Stalin's policies in this period when
he prevented the nomad herders moving from the mountains to the planes to take advantage of the
benefits of seasons and weather.
Stalin forced the nomads to stay in one area and they perished in the cold of the mountains or
the heat of the summer plains (whichever zone they were forced to stay in).
Some of my family is Ukrainian and some recognise that Stalin's policies weren't specifically
aimed at Ukrainians - the people of Kazakhstan suffered the most (as a percentage of population).
Either way, there is no genetic difference between Slavs or Russian or Ukrainian origin in Ukraine
or Russia - they are all genetically the same people.
This information should be better taught in Ukraine.
The problem is that it would undermine the holy grail story of right wing nationalism in Ukraine.
It's been one of the biggest mistakes ( although Ukraine's military started in a desperately
poor condition ) , to allow militia groups to get so powerful. Right sector should not have arms
and guns... The national Ukraine military should, If members of Right sector want to fight , they
should leave Right sector and join the army.
This was and will happen if they don't disband such armed groups.
annamarinja silvaback 12 Jul 2015 18:18
have you ever studied geography? If yes, you should remember the proximity of Ukraine to Russia
(next door) and the proximity of Ukraine to the US (thousands miles away). Also, have you heard
about the CIA Director Brennan and his covert visit to Kiev on the eve of the beginning of the
civil war in Ukraine? This could give you an informed hint about the causes of the war. Plus you
may be interested to learn about Mrs. Nuland-Kagan (Ms. Nudelman), her cookies, and her foul language.
She is, by the way, a student of Dick Cheney. If you were born before 2000, you might know his
name and his role in the Iraq catastrophe. Mrs. Nuland-Kagan (and the family of Kagans she belongs
to) finds particular pleasure in creating military conflicts around the globe. It is not for nothing
that the current situation in Ukraine is called Iraqization of Eastern Europe.
Bev Linington JJRichardson 12 Jul 2015 18:10
Ukrainians shot down the plane. East, West does not matter as they were all Ukrainians before
the government overthrow. Leaders of the new government could not look past some Ukrainian citizens
ethnicity, instead of standing together united, they decided to oppress which lead to the referendum
in Crimea and the rise of separatists in the East.
jgbg Chirographer 12 Jul 2015 17:53
And for the Pro-Russian posters the newsflash is that could also describe the situation
inside the Donbass.
It certainly describes the situation in Donbass where Right Sector or the volunteer battalions
are in charge. In Dnepropetrovsk, Right Sector would simply turn up at some factory or other business
and order the owner to sign document transferring the enterprise to them. In other cases, they
have kidnapped businessmen for ransom. Some people have simply disappeared under such circumstances.
The Ukrainian National Guard simply break into homes left empty by people fleeing the war and
steal the contents. Such was the scale of looting, the Ukrainian postal service have now refused
to ship electrical goods out of the ATO area unless the senders have the original boxes and receipts.
jgbg AlfredHerring 12 Jul 2015 17:45
Maybe Kiev just needs to bomb them some more.
Putin promised to protect the Russian speaking people in Ukraine - but he hasn't really done
that. His government has indicated that they would not allow Kiev to simply overrun or obliterate
the people of Donbass. Quite where their threshold of actual intervention lies is anyone's guess.
The "pro-Russian" government that you refer to was only elected because it promised to sign
the EU trade agreement. It then reneged on that promise...
Yanukovych's government was elected the previous one was useless and corrupt.
Yanukovych wanted to postpone the decision to sign for six months, while he attempted to extract
more from both the EU and Russia. Under Poroshenko, the implementation of the EU Association Agreement
has been delayed for 15 months, as the governments of Ukraine, the EU and Russia all recognised
that Russian trade (with the favourable terms which Ukraine enjoys) are vitail to Ukraine's economic
recovery. Expect that postponement to be extended.
.... severely and brutally curtailing freedom of speech and concentrating all power in the
hands of Yanukovich's little clan...
As opposed to sending the military to shell the crap out of those who objected to an elected
government being removed by a few thousand nationalists in Kiev.
There was no "coup".
An agreement had been signed at the end of February 2014, which would see elections in September
2014. The far right immediately moved to remove the government (as Right Sector had promised on
camera in December 2013). None of the few mechanisms for replacing the president listed in the
Ukrainian constitution have been followed - that makes it a coup.
The Maidan protesters were not armed
This newspaper and other western media documented the armed members of far right groups on
Maidan. One BBC journalist was actually shot at by a Svoboda sniper, operating from Hotel Ukraina
- the video is still on the BBC website.
....the interim government that was put in place by the parliament in late February and
the government that was elected in May and Oct. of 2014 were and are not fascist.
The interim government included several ministers from Svoboda, formerly the Socialist Nationalist
Party of Ukraine. These were the first Nazi ministers in a European government since Franco's
Spanish government that ended in the 1970's. In a 2013 resolution, the EU parliament had indicated
that no Ukrainian government should include members of Svoboda or other far right parties.
pushkinsideburn vr13vr 12 Jul 2015 16:45
There has been a marked change in rhetoric over the last few weeks. Even CiF on Ukraine articles
seems to attract less trolls (with a few notable exceptions on this article - though they feel
more like squad trolls than the first team). Hopefully a sign of deescalation or perhaps just
a temporary lull before the MH17 anniversary this week?
pushkinsideburn calum1 12 Jul 2015 16:38
His other comments should have been the clue that arithmetic, like independent critical thinking,
is beyond him.
normankirk 12 Jul 2015 16:19
Right sector were the first to declare they wouldn't abide by the Minsk 2 peace agreement.Nevertheless,
Dmitry Yarosh, their leader is adviser to Ukraine's Chief of staff. Given that he only received
about 130,000 votes in the last election, he has a disproportionate amount of power.
As predicted the real civil war in Ukraine is still to happen. The split between the east and
the ordinary Ukrainian was largely manufactured . In the long term no body would be able to live
with the right sector or more precisely the right sector cant share a bed with anyone else.
sashasmirnoff RicardoJ 12 Jul 2015 15:44
"When the Guardian claims to be a fearless champion of investigative journalism - as
it is, in some areas - why did it obey the dictats of the US neocon media machine which rules
all Western mainstream media over the Ukrainian land grab, instead of telling the truth, at
that time?"
This may be why:
"The CIA owns everyone of any significance in the major media." - former CIA Director William
Colby
Alexander_the_Great 12 Jul 2015 15:43
This was so, so predictable. The Right Sector were the main violent group during the coup in
2014 - in fact they were the ones to bring the first guns to the square following their storming
of a military warehouse in west Ukraine a few days before the coup. It was this factor that forced
the Police to arm themselves in preparation.
Being the vanguard of the illegal coup, they then provided a useful tool of manipulation for
the illegal Kiev government to oppress any opposition, intimidate journalists who spoke the truth
and lead the war against the legally-elected ELECTED governments of Donetsk and Lugansk.
Having failed in the war against the east, western leaders have signalled the right sector
has now outlived its usefulness and has become an embarrassment to Kiev and their western backers.
The Right Sector meanwhile, feel betrayed by the establishment in Kiev. They have 19 battalions
of fighters and they wont go away thats for sure. I think one can expect this getting more violent
in the coming months.
SHappens jezzam 12 Jul 2015 15:40
Putin is a Fascist dictator.
Putin is not a dictator. He is a statist, authoritarian-inclined hybrid regime ruler that possesses
some democratic elements and space for opposition groups.
He has moderate nationalist tendencies in foreign affairs; his goal is a secure a strong Russia.
He is a patriot and has a charismatic authority. Russians stay behind him.
ploughmanlunch samuel glover 12 Jul 2015 15:31
'this notion that absolutely everything Kiev does follows some master script drawn up
in DC and Brussels is simplistic and tiresome'
Agreed.
As is everything is Russia's fault.
ConradLodziak 12 Jul 2015 15:26
This is just the latest in a string of conflicts involving the right sector, as reported by
RT, Russian media and until recently many Ukrainian outlets. The problem, of course, is that Porostinko
has given 'official' status to the right sector. Blow back time for him.
CIAbot007 William Fraser 12 Jul 2015 15:06
Yes, Russia (USSR) from the USSR foundation had been forcing people of the then territory of
Ukraine to identify themselves as Ukrainians under the process of rootisation - Ukrainization,
then gave to Ukraine Donbass and left side Dniepr and Odessa, Herson and Nikolaev, and then decided
to ethnically cleane them.. It doesn't make sense, does it? Oh, wait, sense is not your domain.
annamarinja William Fraser 12 Jul 2015 15:05
let me help you with arithmetics: 72 years ago Europe was inflamed with the WWII.
There was a considerable number of Ukrainians that collaborated with Hitler' nazis:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/14th_Waffen_Grenadier_Division_of_the_SS_(1st_Galician)
In short, your government finds it is OK to glorify the perpetrators of genocide in Europe during
the WWII.
Nik2 12 Jul 2015 15:04
These tragic events, when YESTERDAY, on Saturday afternoon, several civilians were unintentionally
wounded in gun battles in previously peaceful town near the Hungary and Slovakia borders, vividly
exposes Western propaganda. Though mass media in Ukraine and Russia are full of reports about
this from the start, The Guardian managed to give first information exactly 1 day later, and BBC
was still keeping silence a few minutes ago. Since both sides are allies of the West (the Right
Sector fighters were the core of the Maidan protesters at the later stages, and Poroshenko regime
is presumably "democratic"), the Western media preferred to ignore the events that are so politically
uncomfortable. Who are "good guys" to be praised? In fact, this may be the start of nationalists'
revolt against Ukrainian authorities, and politically it is very important moment that can fundamentally
change Ukrainian politics. But the West decides to be silent ...
annamarinja William Fraser 12 Jul 2015 14:59
Do your history book tell you that the Holodomor was a multiethnic endeavor? That the Ukrainians
were among the victims and perpetrators and that the whole huge country had suffered the insanely
cruel policies of multiethnic bolsheviks? The Holodomor was almost a century ago, whereas the
Odessa massacre and the bombardments of civilian population in east Ukraine by the neo-nazi thugs
(sent by Kiev), has been going during last year and half. Perhaps you have followed Mr. Brennan
and Mrs. Nuland-Kagan too obediently.
foolisholdman zonzonel 12 Jul 2015 14:58
zonzonel
Oops, the presumably fascist govt. is fighting a fascist group.
What is a poor troll to do these days??
Antiukrainian copywriting just got more difficult, perhaps a raise is needed? Just sayin.
What's your problem? Never heard of Fascist groups fighting each other? Never heard of the
"Night of the Long Knives"? Fascists have no principles to unite them. They believe in Uebermenschen
and of course they all think that either they themselves or their leader is The Ueberuebermensch.
Anyone who disagrees is an enemy no matter how Fascist he may be.
samuel glover ploughmanlunch 12 Jul 2015 14:55
Y'know, I'm no fan of the Russophobic hysteria that dominates English-language media. I've
been to Ukraine several times over the last 15 years or so, and I'm sorry to say that I think
that in time Ukrainians will regard Maidan's aftermath as most of them view the Orange Revolution
-- with regret and cynicism.
That said, this notion that everything, absolutely everything Kiev does follows some master
script drawn up in DC and Brussels is simplistic and tiresome. Most post-revolution regimes purge
one end or the other of the current ideological wings. Kiev has already tangled with the oligarch
and militia patron Igor Kolomoisky. So perhaps this is another predictable factional struggle.
Or maybe, as another comment speculates, this is a feud over cigarette tax revenue.
In any case, Ukraine is a complex place going through an **extremely** complex time. it's too
soon to tell what the Lviv skirmish means, and **far** too soon to lay it all on nefarious puppetmasters.
TheTruthAnytime ADTaylor 12 Jul 2015 14:49
The only thing that makes me reconsider is their service to their country,...
Is the CIA their country? So far they've only seemed to serve the interests of American businesspeople,
not Ukrainian interests. Also, murdering eastern Ukrainians cannot really be considered such a
great service to Ukraine, can it?
annamarinja ID075732 12 Jul 2015 14:44
Maidan was indeed a popular apprising, but it was utilized by the US strategists for their
geopolitical games. The Ukrainians are going to learn hard way that the US have never had any
interest in well-being of the "locals" and that the ongoing civil war was designed in order to
create a festering wound on a border with the Russia. The Iraqization of Ukraine was envisioned
by the neocons as a tool to break both Russia and Ukraine. The sooner Ukrainians come to a peaceful
solution uniting the whole Ukraine (for example, to federalization), the better for the general
population (but not for the thieving oligarchs).
vr13vr 12 Jul 2015 14:38
"Couple of hundred Right Sector supporters demonstrated in Kiev?" Come on! Over the last week,
there have been enough of videos of thousands of people in fatigues trying to block access to
government buildings and shouting rather aggressive demands. The entire battalions of "National
Guard." This is much bigger than just 100 people on a peaceful rally. Ukraine might be heading
towards Maidan 3.0.
ID075732 12 Jul 2015 14:26
The situation in Ukraine has been unravelling for months and this news broke on Friday evening.
The Minsk II cease fire has not been honoured by Poroshenko, who has not managed to effect
any of the pledges he signed up to. The right sector who rejected the cease-fire from the start
are now refusing the rule of their post coup president in Kiev.
Time for Victoria Nuland to break out the cookies? Or maybe it's too late for that now. The
country formerly know as Ukraine is turning out to be another outstanding success of American
post -imperial foreign policy.
Meanwhile in UFA the BRIC's economic forum is drawing to a close, with representatives from
the developing world and no reporting of the aspirations being discussed there of over 60% of
the world's population. It's been a major success, but if you want to learn about it, you will
have to turn to other media sources - those usually reported as Russian propaganda channels or
Putin's apologists.
The same people who have been reporting on the deteriorating situation in Kiev since the February
coup. Or as Washington likes to call it a popular up rising.
'The only thing that makes me reconsider is their service to their country'
Don't get me wrong. I detest the fascist militias and their evil deeds.
However, despite their callousness, brutality and stupidity, they have been the most effective
fighting force for Kiev ( more sensible Ukrainians have been rather more reluctant to kill their
fellow countrymen ).
Deluded ? Yes. Cowardly ? No.
Even more reprehensible, in my opinion are the calculating and unprincipled Kiev Government
that have attempted to bully a region of the Ukraine that had expressed legitimate reservations,
using those far right battalions, but accepting no responsibility for the carnage that they carried
out.
mario n 12 Jul 2015 12:52
I think it's time Europe spoke up about dangers of Ukrainian nationalism. 72 years ago Ukrainian
fascists committed one of the most hideous and brutal acts of genocide in the human history. Details
are so horrifying it is beyond imagination. Sadly not many people remembers that, because it is
not politically correct to say bad things about Ukraine. Today mass murderers are hailed as national
heroes and private battalions and ultranationalist groups armed to the teeth terrorise not only
Donbas but now different parts of the country like Zakarpattia where there is strong Hungarian,
Russian and Romanian minority.
How many massacres and acts of genocide Europe needs before it learns to act firmly?
SHappens 12 Jul 2015 12:49
Kiev has allowed nationalist groups including Right Sector to operate despite allegations
by groups like Amnesty International, that Right Sector has tortured civilian prisoners.
You know what, you dont play with fire or you will get burnt. It was written on the wall that
these Bandera apologists would eventually turn to the hand that fed them. I wonder how Kiev will
manage to blame the russians now.
RicardoJ 12 Jul 2015 12:33
Of course the Guardian doesn't like to explain that 'Right Sector' are genuine fascists - by
their own admission! These fascists, who wear Nazi insignia, were the people who overthrew the elected government
of Ukraine in the US / EU-supported coup - which the Guardianistas and other PC-brainwashed duly
cheered on as a supposed triumph of democracy. Since that glorious US-financed and EU-backed coup, wholly illegal under international law,
Ukraine's economy has collapsed, as has Ukrainians' living standards.
The US neocons are losing interest in their attempted land grab of Ukraine - and the EU cretins
who backed the coup, thinking it would be a nice juicy further territorial acquisition for the
EU, are desperately looking the other way, now that both the US and EU realize that Ukraine is
a financial black hole.
When the Guardian claims to be a fearless champion of investigative journalism - as it is,
in some areas - why did it obey the dictats of the US neocon media machine which rules all Western
mainstream media over the Ukrainian land grab, instead of telling the truth, at that time?
jgbg 12 Jul 2015 12:15
The move came after a gunfight broke out on Saturday, when about 20 Right Sector gunmen
arrived at a sports complex controlled by MP Mikhail Lano. They had been trying to stop the
traffic of cigarettes and other contraband, a spokesman for the group said.
Put another way, one group of gangsters tried to muscle in on the cigarette smuggling operation
of another group of gangsters. Smuggling cigarettes into nearby EU countries is extremely lucrative. Here's some video of some of the events:
Note the registration plates driven by both Right Sector and the other gangsters i.e. not Ukrainian.
In all likelihood, these cars are all stolen. Right Sector and fighters from "volunteer battalions" have become accustomed to muscling in
on other people's activities (legal or not) in Donbass. This sort of thuggery is routine when
these folk come to town. It is only when since they have continued such activities on their home
turf in west and central Ukraine that the authorities have taken any notice.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made a formal electoral pact for the upcoming
April election with the Otzma Yehudit (literally, "Jewish Power") party which has as its policy
the expulsion of all non-Jews from Israel, and whose leaders have said that "Christians are
'blood sucking vampires' who should be expelled from Israel."
News of the alliance was carried in the media aimed directly at Jews, such as the
Times of Israel , but has been completely suppressed in the Jewish lobby controlled media
in Europe and America -- because there, the Jewish lobby always pushes "non-racialism" as its
official policy for non-Jews.
According to the
Times of Israel
, Netanyahu has reached a deal with the Jewish Home Party to grant that "national-religious
party" a pair of ministerial posts after April's elections in exchange for it merging with the
Otzma Yehudit party, whose name in Hebrew literally translates as "Jewish Power."
The Times of Israel reported that the Jewish Home party earlier agreed to run in the
April elections jointly with the "National Union," party, which "has come under increasing
pressure from Netanyahu to make an alliance with Otzma Yehudit and Eli Yishai's Yachad, arguing
that a failure on those smaller parties' part to clear the electoral threshold could deprive
his Likud of enough potential partners to form a ruling coalition."
"... Is this political nationalism a viable way of resisting neoliberalism today? Can it gainsay the primacy of economic rationality and the culture of narcissist consumerism, and restore meaning to the political question concerning the common good? Or has nationalism irreversibly become an ethnic, separatist project? It is not easy to say. So far, we have witnessed one kind of response to the social insecurities generated by the global spread of neoliberalism. This is a return to ethnicity and religion as havens of safety and security. ..."
Nationalism was an emancipatory political project during the anti-colonial struggles of the
second half of the 20th century. It was not tribalist or communalist.
According to Eric Hobsbawm in Nations and Nationalism since 1780, its aim was to extend the
size of the social, cultural and political group. It was not to restrict it or to separate it
from others. Nationalism was a political programme divorced from ethnicity.
Is this political nationalism a viable way of resisting neoliberalism today? Can it gainsay
the primacy of economic rationality and the culture of narcissist consumerism, and restore
meaning to the political question concerning the common good? Or has nationalism irreversibly become an ethnic, separatist project? It is not easy to say. So far, we have witnessed one kind of response to the social
insecurities generated by the global spread of neoliberalism. This is a return to ethnicity and
religion as havens of safety and security.
When society fails us owing to job insecurity, and, concomitantly, with regard to housing
and healthcare, one tends to fall back on one's ethnicity or religious identity as an ultimate
guarantee.
Moreover, nationalism as a political programme depends on the idea of the state. It holds
that a group defined as a "nation" has the right to form a territorial state and exercise
sovereign power over it. But given the decline of the state, there are reasons to think that
political nationalism has withdrawn as a real possibility.
By the "decline of the state" I do not mean that it no longer exists. The state has never
been more present in the private life of individuals. It regulates the relations between men
and women. It regulates their birth and death, the rearing of children, the health of
individuals and so forth. The state is, today, ubiquitous.
What some people mean by the "decline of the state" is that, with the existence of
transnational corporations, it is no longer the most important site of the reproduction of
capital. The state has become managerial. Its function is to manage obstacles to liberalisation
and free trade.
Perhaps that is one of the challenges of the 21st century. How is a "nation" possible, a
"national community" that is not defined by ethnicity, on the one hand, and, on the other, that
forsakes the desire to exercise sovereign power in general and, in particular, over a
territorial state?
The university is perhaps the place where such a community can begin to be thought.
Rafael Winkler is an associate professor in the philosophy department at the University
of Johannesburg
Interestingly, the BAK Shalom group, which you called far-left, is one of the most
fanatical pro-Israel lobby groups in Germany. In my opinion, being a supporter of Israel
automatically means being far-right.
"... Trumpism's Contradictions and American Jews, and Islamophobia ..."
"... "I do not stop repeating it to French Jews. Not only is the National Front not your enemy, but it is without a doubt the best shield to protect you. It stands at your side for the defense of our freedoms of thought and of religion against the only real enemy, Islamist fundamentalism." ..."
"... Is Antisemitism on the rise? ..."
"... Anti-Semitism among Liberals and Conservatives ..."
"... Evangelical Christians: Friends of Israel, Enemies of secular American-Jews? ..."
"... What would happen to Jews in America and the relationship with Israel if they lost support from evangelical Christians? ..."
As it becomes increasingly apparent that the populist billionaire business "Messiah" behind
the mask of the "Trumpism" cult is merely in power to "Make America Great Again" by
transferring even more wealth from the lower and middle classes to the top 1% of wealthiest
Americans, the politics of rightwing extremism will intensify and even greater sociopolitical
division is inevitable. Billionaires and millionaires behind rightwing populism represent a
desperate effort to save the privileges that capitalists enjoy by driving a segment of society
ideologically and politically to the extreme right even if this entails embracing even more
austere police state methods, especially surveillance, than currently exist.
The Justice Department under Trump introduced harsher measures for petty crimes, loosening
any safety net protections of minorities from police abuse, while easing up on regulations
affecting white collar crime. Along with racism, xenophobia, homophobia, and misogyny,
anti-Semitism is in the broader mix that characterizes a segment of Trump supporters that the
Republican Party mobilizes. For the Republican Party to continue catering to the establishment
while claiming to be anti-establishment, populism is a useful vehicle as it breaks the
solidarity of the working class by advancing the policies of social discrimination.
The neoliberal establishment would have achieved the same goals of capital concentration
with a Democrat president in power. This was the case under both Bill Clinton and Barak Obama
catering to a different popular base distinguished by traditional Democrat identity politics
– feminists, gay rights, and greater integration of minorities into the capitalist
mainstream. While Republican rhetoric and policies project false hope to rightwing elements
from Reagan Democrats, Evangelicals to neo-Nazis that the social contract will be anti-elite
and focused on the white majority feeling threatened by identity politics, Democrats remain
focused on reviving the old Cold War with Russia and catering to Wall Street, while promoting
cultural and lifestyle issues with a greater commitment to balance the welfare state with
corporate welfare. Ironically, Democrat identity politics is actually just as divisive because
it refuses to address issues along structural lines, thus leaving many among the masses to be
duped by the promises of populist rhetoric.
Trumpism's Contradictions and American Jews, and Islamophobia
Although anti-Semitism has a long and ugly history, no minority group in US history has
suffered greater discrimination and institutionalized racism than African-Americans. The white
Anglo-Saxon majority has historically categorized ethnic immigrants in a hierarchy based on
skin color, ethnic origin, and religion. American Jews were not exempt from ethnocentrism,
remaining a favorite target of the KKK among other rightwing groups. Because class in some
cases transcends ethnicity, race and religion, Jews that became capitalists or moved into
middle class professions benefited from assimilation into the institutional mainstream much
more than those of the same faith in the lower middle class and working class.
By the early 21 st century, American Jews were well integrated into the
mainstream, reflecting society's diversity ideologically, politically, and socioeconomically.
From 2000 until 2016, Jewish voting patterns indicate that between two-thirds and three-fourths
supported the Democrat presidential candidates. Although these percentages are very similar to
Hispanic Catholic voting trends, stereotypes deeply ingrained in society remain just below the
thin façade of political correctness where saying the right thing in public is the only
thing that matters. Many within the rightwing populist movement accept the stereotypes that
Jews are in control of everything from Wall Street to the media, the political arena, higher
education, and the entertainment industry.
Interestingly, it never even occurs to anti-Semites to ask why so many of the elites are
Anglo-Saxon Protestant. This is indicative that American racists believe it is natural to be
Anglo-Saxon protestant and be among the elites because national identity rests with this
category of people since the republic was founded. While it is true that Jews are in every
sector of society, just as are Christians, a larger percentage of Jews is integrated into the
capitalist class in comparison to other minorities especially blacks and Hispanics. However, it
is blatantly false that Jews control the entire institutional structure and use it to advance
some amorphous "Jewish agenda", as neo-Nazi and other conspiracy theorists propagate. On the
contrary, throughout European and US history Jews have proved more loyal and more conformist to
the institutional structure than any other minority.
Conspiracy theories about Jewish control of the institutional structure are the basis of
anti-Semitism that has declined since the interwar era as much in the US as in Western Europe,
though the same does not hold true for Eastern Europe. With the rise of populism in American
politics during the presidential campaign of 2016, anti-Semitism assumed the spotlight once
again, despite the fact that Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner is Jewish with business and
personal connections to Israel. Moreover, top administration officials in control of financial,
economic and trade policy are also Jewish linked to Wall Street and specifically the
multinational financial syndicate Goldman Sachs.
While it is true that all US presidents cater to Wall Street, and all presidents since
Ronald Reagan have relied on former Goldman Sachs executives who have been invariably Jewish to
conduct fiscal, economic, trade and foreign policy, it is especially noteworthy that Trump has
long-standing links to Jewish billionaires. This in itself would not be unusual except that his
has been using populist anti-big business, anti-elite rhetoric to appeal to populist elements
among them neo-Nazis, KKK, and other varieties of racists and anti-Semites. The glaring
contradiction that cannot be reconciled is that Trumpism symbolizes and emboldens ethnocentrism
while the administration includes millionaire and billionaire American Jews who are in the
awkward position of accepting rightwing populism so that they can advance neoliberal
policies.
It is hardly surprising that some emboldened Trump supporters have engaged in anti-Semitic
activities, assuming that their leader really represents the extremist white Christian masses
rather than the multi-ethnic, including Jewish, capitalist elites. In March 2017, prominent
Jewish-American groups demanded that Trump denounce anti-Semitism in light of a rise in
documented incidents in different parts of the country. The corporate media exposed this issue,
but like Jewish organization the media did not frame it in its larger context of rightwing
populism where anti-Semitism is but one of many aspects of racism. Trump's refusal to accept
responsibility for his brand of populism giving rise to anti-Semitism was revealing and
somewhat shocking to all people embracing pluralism but especially to Jews who assumed he would
be friendlier because his daughter is married to Kushner.
Trump had no choice but to reject the suggestion that Trumpism entails anti-Semitism.
Admitting that Trumpism leads to anti-Semitism would have forced the president to accept that
his ideological/political movement is politically and culturally racist at its core and that
his administration is driven by the politics of exclusion rather than integration in a
pluralistic society. Even more alarming, the entire Republican establishment with few
exceptions refused to denounce the racist core of Trumpism, thus demonstrating that the party
clings to the rightwing populist base even when some within that base are neo-Nazis.
Contrary to how the media and many analysts who focused on the cult of personality see
Trumpism, this phenomenon did not fall to earth from space. It has deep roots in both parties,
but especially in the Republican Party going as far back as the 1920s. Despite "Trumpism" as an
integral part of the Republican Party and American society, anti-Semitism has actually remained
relatively low in comparison with Western Europe and especially Eastern Europe where it is only
exceeded by Islamic countries. Of course, opinion polls and hate crime reports cannot possibly
measure with any degree of accuracy the level of anti-Semitism across society. People conceal
their attitudes toward Jews as they do toward Muslims and blacks because in a pluralistic
society where political correctness takes precedence overt racism is unacceptable –
politically incorrect and bad for business given that the American consumer base is
multi-ethnic.
Some analysts were encouraged that anti-Semitism has been on the decline in the last two
decades because of the rise of Islamophobia, a form of religious discrimination that spiked
after the Iranian Revolution and assumed astronomical proportions after 9/11. However, the rise
of rightwing populism, which includes Christians driven by prejudice against other faiths, has
emboldened anti-Semitism as much in the US and across Europe in the past two decades when the
neoliberal elites celebrated the triumph of globalization. Neoliberalism is the catalyst in the
rise of globalization, the rise of rightwing populism and the rise of Islamophobia in the last
two decades.
Combined with a persistently anti-Islam bias in the media that has been reinforcing
Islamophobia and the rise of rightwing populism aimed at Islam in general and Muslim immigrants
specifically, the war on terror has been a catalytic factor in the change of mass attitudes
from anti-Semitism to Islamophobia. The fact that Israel has been pursuing apartheid policies
toward Palestinians and pursuing a militarist approach to foreign policy has worked in its
favor when it comes to attracting mainstream conservative and Cold War liberal elements across
the US and Western Europe, thus transferring the historic focus of prejudice from Jews to
Muslims.
France's National Front under Marine Le Pen is a good example of a political party that has
been focusing more on the Muslim enemy where all bourgeois political parties also focused
rather than clinging to anti-Semitism that carries a political and social stigma. In an
interview in June 2014, she stated: "I do not stop repeating it to French Jews. Not only is
the National Front not your enemy, but it is without a doubt the best shield to protect you. It
stands at your side for the defense of our freedoms of thought and of religion against the only
real enemy, Islamist fundamentalism."
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/04/marine-le-pen-national-front-jews-muslims/523302/
Ironically, the rising tide of populism across Western and Eastern Europe as well as Trump's
America has reinvigorated racists of all sorts, despite the official policies of governments to
support Israeli apartheid policies and militarism while keeping Islamophobia in the forefront
of the political dialogue. The fact that the US claims to support the war on terror while
remaining a major arms supplier to countries like Saudi Arabia where most jihadists have
originated and where the regime has been supplying jihadist rebels with weapons in both Syria
and Yemen does not seem to register any more with liberals than with conservatives. While the
US and EU arms manufacturers make billions in profits selling weapons to countries with a
history of supporting jihadists, the Western media and governments continue to promote the myth
about strengthening national security against Islamic terrorism, thus promoting Islamophobia
and xenophobia.
Although anti-Semitism has deep roots throughout the Western World as does Islamophobia,
many Christians learned anti-Semitism from their families while they learned about Islamophobia
from mainstream media and politicians since the Iranian Revolution. Overt or subtle hiding
behind political correctness, religious prejudice is convenient for opportunistic bourgeois
politicians, for the media and pundits when there are serious structural problems in the
economy as in 2008 great recession. Racists default the rise in unemployment, stagnant wages,
and political polarization following 2008 to Jewish elites and immigrant workers rather than
the political economy predicated on socioeconomic inequality and political marginalization.
The neoliberal system that creates greater socioeconomic inequality thrives on racism,
anti-Semitism and Islamophobia because it distracts focus from the root causes of structural
problems in society. Rightwing populism in the US and Europe finds a popular response from
angry middle class and working class that are unable to discern the structural inequality that
the political economy creates. Blaming Jews, Arabs, Hispanics, Blacks, and other minorities
because the system does not integrate the "native majority" into the upward trajectory of the
mainstream is simple and convenient because it also fulfills an emotional need to vent. Adolph
Hitler's belief that people need someone to hate rather than abstract systems and institutions
beyond their comprehension works just as well today as it did in the turbulent 1930s.
Is Antisemitism on the rise?
In January 2017 there were 40 to 68 bomb threats (depending on the source) against Jewish
community centers in 27 states, with Jewish cemeteries the most well publicized targets. When
we consider that the number of anti-Semitic incidents on college campuses in 2015 were twice as
many as in 2014, it appears that anti-Semitism had been rising under the Obama administration
pursuing neoliberal policies. Statistics from public opinion polls indicate that anti-Semitic
incidents rose immediately after Trump won the presidency, something that hardly surprised many
critics who had been warning that such is the price of appealing to extreme rightwing elements
for political support.
FBI statistics on hate crimes indicate that there have not been significant changes since
the presidential election of 2012, but threats against Jewish centers and Jewish journalists
did experience a spike in threats once Trump won the election. It is noteworthy that the
reporting of anti-Semitic incidents is more accurate and prevalent than the reporting of
racial, ethnic, or religious prejudice of other groups that the media routinely overlooks both
at the local but especially the national level. Hate crimes motivated by religion have targeted
Jews and Muslims since Trump's election, although Islamophobia spiked sharply since 9/11 and it
is under-reported in comparison with anti-Semitic incidents. While institutional anti-Semitism
is very low partly because of the cordial US-Israeli ties but also because Jews are more
thoroughly integrated in society, the same is not the case for institutional racism aimed at
Muslims and blacks.
Because Trump won with a populist appeal, it was inevitable that xenophobia aimed at Muslims
and Latin Americans as main targets, racism, sexism, homophobia, and chauvinism as main
cultural traits would become even more acceptable driven by the politics of division. In very
subtle ways, rightwing news organizations that have been supporting Trump have been promoting
social discrimination; some daring to cross the line to attack Jews backing liberal causes and
the Democrat Party. Although anti-Semitism finds no expression in public policy as does
Islamophobia, America's ideological orientation has become so rightwing than the Democrats find
it necessary to attack the Republican president by reviving Cold War anti-Russia propaganda.
Instead of remaining focused on specific allegations of corruption, collusion, money
laundering, and above all Republican policies that worsen inequality and weaken the middle
class and workers, Democrats committed to neoliberal policies are just as guilty as Republicans
for avoiding the key issue of social justice.
Anti-Semitism among Liberals and Conservatives
Anti-Semitism is subtle even among those liberal elements that cling to political
correctness often used to conceal real intentions. Leftist critics of Israel are driven by the
apartheid conditions and Israel's militarist approach to foreign policy and by the neoliberal
orientation of the entire Western World that the Israeli business and political elites support.
Critics are concerned that the Israeli government, not people, has come a very long way in
emulating the Third Reich's racism when it comes to treatment of Palestinians. This does not
mean that all leftists are free of anti-Semitism and they are not using Israel's horrific
policies to justify racism. Because it is true that anti-Zionism can lead to legitimizing
anti-Semitism, it is essential to denounce any form of discrimination and differentiate between
government policy and ethnic or religious prejudice. Labeling any critic of Israeli anti-Semite
merely for supporting peace in the Middle East is propaganda and a sign of using the pretext of
anti-Semitism to suppress dissent.
Rightwing elements are more comfortable in anti-Semitism because it is an integral part of
their ideological orientation. Besides the KKK, neo-Nazi groups and some new elements that
emerged with the explosion of rightwing media, anti-Semitism as an integral part of the
ideological rightwing has historical roots among Christian business and political elites that
looked the other way during the 1930s when the Third Reich was systematically persecuting Jews.
Anti-Semitism from the right has found expression from a number of social media outlets where
the white nationalist ALT-RIGHT among others has increased their anti-Semitic attacks with hate
speech. The anti-Defamation League reported 2.6 million tweets aimed at Jewish journalists in
12 months, summer 2015 to summer 2016. Although Trump does not use anti-Semitic rhetoric and he
has long-standing ties to Jewish millionaires and billionaires, many of his working class
Christian supporters assume he is talking about Jews in the liberal "fake" media when he speaks
of 'enemies of the people'.
https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/adl-task-force-issues-report-detailing-widespread-anti-semitic-harassment-of
As the latest layer building on existing ones of American rightwing populism, Trumpism is
indicative of an ideological, political and cultural orientation, but also a reflection of
one's values as well as aspirations and illusions about what a populist regime led by a Messiah
businessman can deliver to its middle and working class base. Deeply imbedded in Trumpism is
anti-Semitism from the extreme right that has gained legitimacy because Trump is president, no
matter his ties to Jewish business elites. While the liberal left as represented by Senator
Bernie Sanders, the son of Jewish immigrants, has also criticized the financial and media
elites that include Jews, there is hardly a comparison between the Sanders movement to pursue
social justice for all people and the politics of hate and division that Trump and his
Republican propagandists promoted.
Evangelical Christians: Friends of Israel, Enemies of secular American-Jews?
Ever since the preeminence of neoconservatives in the Reagan decade of the eighties, there
has been a strange alliance between American Jews and Evangelicals. Besides their common
distaste for Muslims, their common Cold War militarist foreign policy and their common
conservative social values that brought these two groups closer together they seem like natural
allies, using religious dogmatism to justify imperialist foreign policies and social
inequality. Evangelicals have consistently remained in a military-solution mode when it came to
foreign policy hotspots and viewed Israel as defender of the Christian West against the Muslims
becoming radicalized after the Iranian Revolution of 1979.
The alliance between American Jews and Evangelicals began showing cracks in the presidential
elections of 2008 and 2012, but especially in 2016 when many Jews backed Hillary Clinton while
Evangelicals sided with Trump who promised them Reagan-style social and judicial conservatism,
along with jobs and economic nationalism intended to "make American great again", partly
implying the integration of white Christians into the mainstream from which they had been
excluded under the neoliberal regime of Bill Clinton and Obama. Besides the Evangelicals vote
for Trump and the American secular Jews largely backing Clinton in 2016, the rift between
Evangelicals and Jews was evident in the "liberal" vs. the populist rightwing media wars over
the Trump administration's policies and personalities such as Steve Bannon, former Goldman
Sachs banker and Breitbart news executive and no stranger to racism, white nationalism, and
anti-Semitism.
Israeli neoliberal and militarist elites continue to hope that they can have Evangelicals
supporting Israel, just as they supported Trump win the election. The Israeli-Evangelical
alliance appears on firm ground, but it is becoming increasingly problematic because Trumpism
not only entails xenophobia, ethnocentrism and nationalism, but anti-Semitism among many of its
voters, even some younger Evangelicals. The Republicans and the rightwing media have tried to
identify liberal Jews as the enemy, but such rhetoric only reinforces anti-Semitism.
Evangelicals and rightwing media have hammered at the close identification of the Democrats
with Jewish billionaires like George Soros famous for his support of liberal causes. This
association has reinforced anti-Semitism among the rightwing populists, largely because the
rightwing media and politicians keep at it.
Ironically, the same criticism of Jewish billionaires and their liberal causes is also made
across much of Europe, especially in Eastern Europe where the commitment to diversity and
pluralism is a pale imitation of what exists in Scandinavian countries. The same criticism is
never leveled against liberal Anglo-Saxon billionaires like Warren Buffet or others, projecting
the impression that Jewish money somehow corrupts the political process more than Protestant
money. The obvious hypocrisy on the part of right wingers including Evangelicals regarding
Jewish money vs. Protestant money influencing the political arena extends to Israel treated as
a friendly militarist state while Muslim militarist states are deserving of condemnation.
What would happen to Jews in America and the relationship with Israel if they lost
support from evangelical Christians?
Neoliberals from the Clinton and neoconservative leftovers from the Reagan decade have
cultivated close ties between American Evangelicals and Israel but the relationship is showing
signs of deterioration largely because the younger Evangelicals question the wisdom of
one-sided US foreign policy. Although public opinion polls indicate that American Jews largely
mistrust Evangelicals, Evangelical organizations remain committed to support of Israel as a
frontline state against the Arabs and radical Islam. This ideological commitment is largely
based on money pouring into Evangelical churches and their affiliate NGOs that are tools of
recruitment and indoctrination. The highly organized Evangelical groups using the media,
educational centers and Christian media remain a political force that helped to elect Trump
while keeping the populist wing of the Republican Party strong.
The irony of Evangelical support for Israel is that some of its members are anti-Semitic.
Ever since the Reagan administration, rightwing Christian fundamentalist elements, which
American Jews and the Israeli lobby have been trying to mobilize, are not just anti-Muslim but
some are anti-Semitic as well. While the war on terror shifted the focus of American
Evangelicals to the imminent Muslim threat as they understand it, this does not mean that
anti-Semitism disappeared. On the contrary, as socioeconomic conditions deteriorate, and as a
segment of the population perceives that Jewish elites from Wall Street to media and Hollywood
are to partly blame for the elusive American Dream not trickling down to the masses,
anti-Semitism will rise and support for Israel will diminish. Trump's 'America First' economic
nationalism and slashing foreign aid as part of neo-isolationism will eventually impact Israel,
especially as the administration will drive budgetary deficits and the public debt to record
levels because of corporate tax cuts and more corporate welfare at the expense of health and
social programs.
Regardless of who is in the White House, the US will always support Israel diplomatically
because both political parties have done so since 1948 and they will continue to do so for many
reasons. This is not only because of the very powerful Israeli lobby, but also the fact that
Israel serves the convenient role of perpetuating destabilization in the Middle East that helps
the defense industry of the US. Despite the apartheid conditions toward the Palestinians,
Israel will remain a key US ally even if younger Evangelicals question US support and even if a
segment of the rightwing Republican popular base becomes more anti-Semitic.
Conclusion
The political correctness rhetoric of liberals and conservatives alike notwithstanding, the
socioeconomic effects of neoliberal policies on society gives rise to ultra-rightwing
ideological and political movements. Through the media, the political and socioeconomic elites
help to indoctrinate and mobilize the masses into the rightwing camp using it as the popular
base of the Republican Party that caters to Wall Street, as much as the Democrats use identity
politics to mobilize their popular base while also catering to Wall Street. Given that the
two-party system represents the interests of the same elites despite ideological and political
affiliations among the elites, the masses merely follow instead of breaking away to create a
class-based grassroots movement that would bring social justice through systemic change.
Rightwing populism becomes the grassroots movement and its followers are convinced that it is
the vehicle to the fulfillment of the social contract; an illusion that conservative
politicians, media and pundits constantly reinforce.
Mobilizing the remnants of the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party, Trumpism gained
momentum because neoliberal policies exacerbated socioeconomic polarization under Obama.
Although Trumpism will fade away along with Trump at some point, its imprint on society will
remain as did that of Reaganism that helped to bring a segment of the population father to the
rightwing ideological domain where discrimination assumes an unspoken legitimacy just below the
surface of political correctness. The rightwing orientation of society as an integral part of
deradicalization of the masses is essential to maintaining the political economy of inequality,
although it comes at the cost of the absence of social justice and social discrimination.
The bourgeois value system is based on individualism, but bourgeois institutions and
policies have historically promoted discrimination on the basis of group identity disregarding
the merits of the individual. Like all forms of prejudice rooted in ignorance, fear and social
conditioning, anti-Semitism is no different. It is futile to assume that anti-Semitism can be
mitigated in isolation of all other forms of prejudice separate from the larger issue of a
socially just society. All social, economic and political indicators point not to greater
social discrimination and prejudice in a society where the mass concentration of wealth at the
expense of the middle and working classes has resulted in the search for enemies to blame,
whether Muslims, Jews, Mexicans, etc.
As the US slowly creeps down the road of more authoritarianism and a surveillance state,
becoming less tolerant of differences and diversity amid its inevitable decline as the world's
preeminent economic power, it will have a much weaker middle class and a working class with
lower living standards. A segment of the population whose identity rests with the flag and the
cross will become more open to the idea of a police militarized state that enforces conformity
through constant surveillance and stricter laws that punish petty criminals while allowing the
legalized corporate thieves to enjoy a privileged status in society.
In the absence of embracing human rights and social justice there cannot possibly be an end
to anti-Semitism any more than any other form of prejudice. If the political economy feed a
culture of prejudice because it has an interest in maintaining the institutional structure,
then it is hardly surprising that prejudice would be widespread. Under neoliberalism thriving
under Trumpist populism, various forms of prejudice will manifest themselves once the promise
of "Make America Great Again" never filters down to the masses.
Jon V. Kofas , Ph.D. – Retired university professor of history – author of ten
academic books and two dozens scholarly articles. Specializing in International Political
economy, Kofas has taught courses and written on US diplomatic history, and the roles of the
World Bank and IMF in the world.
In these times, the real political debate is centered around the issues of migration and
national identity. It's what Brexit was all about. It's the reason the one thing all Trump
supporters really want him to do, is to build the wall. It would be an international symbol
of our longing for and right to nationhood a billion dollar monument to nationalism and a
trigger for nationalist revival.
This is why the forces of globalism will throw everything at stopping it's construction.
If Trump leaves office and that wall is not built, his presidency will have been for
naught.
"... now, playing catch-up, the US is employing the crudest of methods: tariffs & military bullying (& God help us all, kidnapping). ..."
"... Copley implies that cohesive societies that seek victory over all other societies can't have it, because a cohesive society must have enemies, invented or carefully preserved if necessary. Perhaps that's what the Russia affair is about. If so, its not working. ..."
"... Poor General Kelly, one of the generals who let 911 happen, is probably going to be promoted to Bechtel. I say poor because he's only worth about $5 Million, which is a low figure for the super rich who own the military industrial complex. ..."
"... my take is that we are in the end game of imperialism. the western empire is in terminal decline and there will be more empires. from the evidence Russia and China, having learned the lessons of a few thousand years of experience are not seeking for empires. ..."
"... War is Good for Business and Organized Crime. Afghanistan's Multibillion Dollar Opium Trade. Rising Heroin Addiction in the US Afghanistan's opium economy is a multibillion dollar operation which has a direct impact on the surge of heroin addiction in the US. ..."
"... Place this against the U.S. – NSA – on record for what seems to be global surveillance having tapped the phones of U.S. European allies heads of states like Angela Merkel -among other things- with it's budget of $80 billion per year. Similar amount to the total Russian defense budget. Then there is the CIA and other "three letter organizations" in the U.S. and similar operations in the U.K. I think this is David against Goliath struggle and the latter is doing most of the beating. ..."
"... This madness is driving Russia into coalition with China and creating all sorts of totally unnecessary tensions. Forcing them to avoid the US dollar and so forth. How any of this supports western interests, or the interests of U.S. or U.K. citizens is a great misery. One thing is certain – this is self-destruction policy for the U.S. in the long run. This is what happens when the lunatics take over the asylum. ..."
"... Thankfully Vladimir Putin seems to be extremely capable and stable person – not likely to fall into temptation of hitting back with horrible consequences for world peace. ..."
"... Navarro appears to have the full support of Silicon Valley, Boeing and our other high tech exporters. On the other side is Wall Street and possibly British interests. For all of the hullabaloo about Trump violating the law against private citizens conducting foreign diplomacy when he was President-elect, the Wall Street crowd appears to have transgressed much further: ..."
Most recently, a dissident economist and failed California politician named Peter Navarro has parlayed his hostility toward China
into the role of key architect of Donald Trump's "trade war" against Beijing. Like his Russian counterpart Alexander Dugin, Navarro
is another in a long line of intellectuals whose embrace of geopolitics changed the trajectory of his career.
Raised by a single mom who worked secretarial jobs to rent one-bedroomapartments where he slept on the couch, Navarro went to
college at Tufts on a scholarship and earned a doctorate in economics from Harvard. Despite that Ivy League degree, he remained an
angry outsider, denouncing the special interests "stealing America"
in his first book and later, as a business professor at the University of California-Irvine, branding San Diego developers "punks
in pinstripes." A passionate environmentalist, in 1992 Navarro plunged into politics as a Democratic candidate for the mayor of San
Diego, denouncing his opponent's husband as a convicted drug-money launderer and losing when he smirked as she wept during their
televised debate.
For the next 10 years, Navarro fought losing campaigns for everything from city council to Congress. He detailed his crushing
defeat for a seat in the House of Representatives in a tell-all
book , San Diego Confidential,
that dished out disdain for that duplicitous "sell out" Bill Clinton, dumb "blue-collar detritus" voters, and just about everybody
else as well.
Following his last losing campaign for city council, Navarro spent a decade churning out books attacking a new enemy: China. His
first "shock and awe" jeremiad
in 2006 told horror stories about that country's foreign trade; five years later, Death By China was filled with
torrid tales of "bone-crushing, cancer-causing, flammable, poisonous, and otherwise lethal products" from that land. In 2015,
a third book turned to geopolitics, complete with carefully drawn maps and respectful references to Captain Mahan, to offer an
analysis of how China's
military was pursuing a relentless strategy of "anti-access, area denial" to challenge the U.S. Navy's control over the Western Pacific.
To check China, the Pentagon then had two competing strategies -- "Air-Sea Battle," in which China's satellites were to be blinded,
knocking out its missiles, and "Offshore Control," in which China's entire coastline was to be blockaded by mining six maritime choke
points from Japan to Singapore. Both, Navarro claimed, were fatally flawed. Given that, Navarro's third book and a companion
film (
endorsed by one Donald Trump) asked: What should the United
States do to check Beijing's aggression and its rise as a global power? Since all U.S. imports from China, Navarro suggested, were
"helping to finance a Chinese military buildup," the only realistic solution was "the imposition of countervailing tariffs to offset
China's unfair trade practices."
Just a year after reaching that controversial conclusion, Navarro joined the Trump election campaign as a policy adviser and then,
after the November victory, became a junior member of the White House economic team. As a protectionist in an administration initially
dominated by globalists, he would be excluded from high-level meetings and,
according toTime Magazine , "required to copy chief
economic adviser Gary Cohn on all his emails." By February 2018, however, Cohn was on his way out and Navarro had become assistant
to the president, with his new trade office now the co-equal of the National Economic Council.
As the chief defender of Trump's
belief that "trade wars
are good and easy to win," Navarro has finally realized his own geopolitical dream of attempting to check China with tariffs. In
March, the president slapped
heavy ones on Chinese steel imports and, just a few weeks later,
promised to impose more of them on $50 billion of imports. When those started in July, China's leaders
retaliated against what
they called "typical trade bullying," imposing similar duties on American goods. Despite a
warning from the Federal
Reserve chairman that "trade tensions could pose serious risks to the U.S. and global economy," with Navarro at his elbow,
Trump escalated in September,
adding tariffs on an additional $200 billion in Chinese goods and threatening another $267 billion worth if China dared retaliate.
Nonetheless, Beijing hit
back, this time on just $60 billion in goods since 95% of all U.S. imports had already been covered.
Then something truly surprising happened. In September, the U.S. trade deficit with
China
ballooned to $305 billion for the year, driven by an 8% surge in Chinese imports -- a clear sign that Navarro's bold geopolitical
vision of beating Beijing into submission with tariffs had collided big time with the complexities of world trade. Whether this tariff
dispute will fizzle out inconsequentially or escalate into a full-blown trade war, wreaking havoc on global supply chains and the
world economy, none of us can yet know, particularly that would-be geopolitical grandmaster Peter Navarro.
The Desire to be Grandmaster of the Universe
Though such experts usually dazzle the public and the powerful alike with erudition and boldness of vision, their geopolitical
moves often have troubling long-term consequences. Mahan's plans for Pacific dominion through offshore bases created a strategic
conundrum that plagued American defense policy for a half-century. Brzezinski's geopolitical lunge at the Soviet Union's soft Central
Asian underbelly helped unleash radical Islam. Today, Alexander Dugin's use of geopolitics to revive Russia's dominion over Eurasia
has placed Moscow on a volatile collision course with Europe and the United States. Simultaneously, Peter Navarro's bold gambit to
contain China's military and economic push into the Pacific with a trade war could, if it persists, produce untold complications
for our globalized economy.
No matter how deeply flawed such geopolitical visions may ultimately prove to be, their brief moments as official policy have
regularly shaped the destiny of nations and of empires in unpredictable, unplanned, and often dangerous ways. And no matter how this
current round of geopolitical gambits plays out, we can be reasonably certain that, in the not-too-distant future, another would-be
grandmaster will embrace this seductive concept to guide his bold bid for global power.
Alfred W. McCoy, a
TomDispatch
regular , is the Harrington professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of The Politics of
Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade , the now-classic book which probed the conjuncture of illicit narcotics and covert
operations over 50 years, and the recently published
In the Shadows of the American Century:
The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power ( Dispatch Books).
Dugin, regardless of what minor success he had ten years ago, is not influential in the Kremlin. He did not orchestrate Russia's
absorption of Crimea. Simple strategic needs demanded that Crimea be absorbed, and a flawless Russian execution of an ambitious
plan won the day.
Peter Navarro is correct w/r/t China. Our trading relationship with China has been a disaster for our economy (to which I mean
our ability to have an economy absent financial shenanigans) and USG has effectively funded China's rise. There is no strategic
benefit to offshoring productive capacity. I don't really care if Navarro has failed at other tasks in his life. He is correct
on this one.
we can be reasonably certain that, in the not-too-distant future, another would-be grandmaster will embrace this seductive
concept to guide his bold bid for global power.
Damn! Sounds just like me. Anyway, the US has made a lot of mistakes. It transferred much of its manufacturing base to China
and much of its technology. The Chinese see a chance to break away from the US economically and in technology.
The US invested in China's future. China invested in its future. Which is why China has a future.
Seeing geography as a decisive factor in the course of human history can be construed as a bleak view of the world, which
is why it is disliked in some intellectual circles. It suggests that nature is more powerful than man, and that we can only
go so far in determining our own fate.
Splitting the globe into ten distinct regions, former Sky News Diplomatic Editor Tim Marshall redresses our techno-centric
view of the world and suggests that our key political driver continues to be our physical geography. Beginning with Russia
(and its bewildering eleven time-zones), we are treated to an illuminating, border-by-border disassembly of what makes the
world what it is; why, for instance, China and India will never fall into conflict (the Himalayas), or why the Ukraine is such
a tactical jewel in the crown. With its panoptic view over our circumstance, Prisoners of Geography makes a compelling case
around how the physical framework of the world itself has defined our history. It's one of those books that prompts real reflection
and one that on publication absolutely grasped the imagination of our customers, ensuring it as a guaranteed entrant to our
2016 Paperbacks of the Year.
'One of the best books about geopolitics you could imagine: reading it is like having a light shone on your understanding.'
– Nicholas Lezard,
"There is no strategic benefit to offshoring productive capacity. "
Quite right. However – that horse has long bolted. And now, playing catch-up, the US is employing the crudest of methods:
tariffs & military bullying (& God help us all, kidnapping).
Unfortunately, circumstances demand a radical & imaginative response & even harder, a realisation that the horse has
bolted.
Now that you're here, you should read the Saker more. I'll pose this question though, If Russia and China are hell bent on
imperial expansion, why don't they show any interest in Mongolia? Fertile land, rich mineral resources, a tiny population incapable
of resistance it would be a no brainier. The reason they don't is because they are not imperial powers. Also, is empire a good
thing? In every historical example it has followed the same pattern and failed. Civilisations however endure through the ages.
" Vladimir Putin seeks to shatter the Western alliance with cyberwar " was where I noted this essayist is a fool and stopped
reading. Russians! Russians! Russians everywhere!
But since then has gone on to muse how it might be extended. My argument is that the Empire does not serve the American people
and is leading to the destruction of the republic and the American people. The sooner it ends the better, and if Trump can speed
up its demise, then he is our guy.
A very interesting article, for me, but, I suppose, for quite other reasons than most here expect. The essence of interest
is in the last two paragraphs.
In the first of these two those men are mentioned who by geopolitical ideas caused world wide disasters. If they did, I do not
know. The question 'did Napoleon make history or did history make Napoleon' still is a difficult one among historians, and will
remain difficult, is my idea. The man not mentioned in this paragraph is Hitler.
Then we get the ominous last paragraph, someone grabbing world wide power for geopolitical reasons, a great menace.
The essence of good propaganda is not telling lies, but telling just half truths. Not mentioned is that the area that now is
Germany for maybe hundreds of years could not feed the population, had to import food. In order to be able to import one must
export, a country with not enough agricultural production naturally must export industrial products, to fabricate these one needs
raw materials.
Not for nothing both WWI and WWII had geopolitical causes, German economic expansion to the SW and E, economic expansion that
threatened, in the British view, the autarcic British empire.
The implication of the last paragraph for me is clear, beware of the next Hitler. If the author has someone in mind who will
unleash the last world war is not clear to me.
Copley implies that cohesive societies that seek victory over all other societies can't have it, because a cohesive society
must have enemies, invented or carefully preserved if necessary. Perhaps that's what the Russia affair is about. If so, its not
working.
It's like the Federal German republic trying 90 year old people who were drafted as teenagers to be concentration camp guards
in late WW II, when the Reich was scraping through the bottom of the manpower barrel, or like the British digging up Cromwell's
bones (see Wikipedia, "Oliver Cromwell", section: "Death and posthumous execution"). Not convincing.
Alfred McCoy isn't the exact polar opposite of Bill Kristol who is wrong about everything , but McCoy does have a pretty
good track record of being mostly correct about the issues he covers, nevertheless, he still reads like an opinion column. He
also seems bonded by how he sees the American empire being some sort of force of benevolence when it acts and reacts in the same
manner as any other empire that's come and gone – and of course he loathes the idea of the next empire simply by default(they'll
brag about freedom too Alfred). And of course, in the realm of geopolitics, he never really mentions the bastard child; which
leaves a gaping hole in his analysis.
My guess is McCoy's basically on the right track. Not exactly, but he'll get you out of the woods.
For the past decade, he has been a forceful advocate for Russian expansionism
It gets a bit boring reading about how aggressive Putin is and how he wants to reconquer all the territories that were voluntarily
given up by his predecessors. How exactly would Russia benefit by reaquiring the Baltic States or Poland? These countries are
on life-support. Poland get $20bn annually in direct and indirect subsidies from the EU. As for Ukraine, what possible benefit
to Russia would it be to have an extra 35 million people who are broke. Ukrainians today spend half their income on food and that
other half on heat – and that in a country with a very cold winter.
Let's not forget that there would not have been a "Berlin Crisis" if Stalin had not given parts of Berlin to the USA, the UK
and France. Can you imagine the USA doing something similar? This whole article is a real let down. I am disappointed. I guess
every barrel has to have a rotten apple or two.
I would add that in my life, Henry Kissinger was the other supreme geopolitical theorist who attempted to establish a multipolar
geopolitics over a bipolar one. Keep in mind that it was he who essentially argued that China must be recognized in order to blunt
the USSR. Nixon thus became the one who opened China to the US, so that in theory the world was to be divided into the Russia
pole; the China pole; the American/NATO pole, and the "Third World" pole. With a dash of Mahan added to the mix, all would be
balanced and stable, or so Kissinger argued. Hmmmm, maybe not!
Are you for real? Have you looked at where these two respective areas are geographically? Hell, their borders aren't even adjacent.
As for China's interest in Tibet: what was once's part of the Empire will always be part of the Empire. Tibets been part of
the empire twice now, first under Genghis' Yuan Dynasty and again during under the Qing. That simple fact means from now until
the sun goes supernova, for China to be considered unified, Tibet must be a part of it. No ifs or buts.
That's not to mention the strategic considerations of occupying the high ground vis a vis the sub-continentals as well as the
area being the source of several great rivers. You'd have to be a madman to give that kind of advantage up.
@Anon Ghandi was of the opinion that the people of India, forgot the number, 100 million or more ?, served 400.000 rich Britons.
The Roman empire, I'd say 1% rich, 99% poor.
The tsarist empire, not much better.
The German empire again the exception, nowhere else at the end of the 19th century were common people in comparable living conditions.
The EU empire, EP members tax free incomes of some € 200.000 a year, plus an extravagant pension system.
Verhofstadt, additional income, not tax free, of at least € 450.000 a year.
Declarations, Schulz has been accused of spending € 700.000 in a year, among other things he liked a glass of wine.
When it suits their purpose, writers on economics–I won't call them Economists–praise the tiger-like speed and agility with
which Capitalism responds to the vagaries of pressures and demands that arise in world markets. But when they're engaging in public
relations we get this:
"Despite a warning from the Federal Reserve chairman that " trade tensions could pose serious risks to the U.S. and global
economy ," .. Whether this tariff dispute will fizzle out inconsequentially or escalate into a full-blown trade war, wreaking
havoc on global supply chains and the world economy
which throw a protective cloak over a poor, picked-upon capitalism which is, apparently, incapable of getting out of its own
way.
Disappointing read. No, there is nothing to suggest that Dugin has any influence on Putin. No, there is no Russian cyberwar.
Putin's aims are Russia's recovery from the disasters of communism (a road to a blind alley as he has called it) and defending
Russia against NATO's expansion, colour revolutions and numerous false accusations.
Beijing is the place to look today for big strategic thinking.
@Puzzled reasons would be the last. Because the Europeans would find of other sources and shut out Russia as being an unreliable
business partner. Moreover, Russia is now the largest exporter of wheat and is developing export levels of production in soybeans
and pork. You can't sell to countries that you have wrecked militarily.
It's the U.S., not Russia that is playing the 800 pound Global Cop Gorilla with its war-mongering, economic warfare and global
subversion.
Like Puzzled, when I read that stupid, irrational line by Alfred McCoy, I simply stopped reading. Because nobody that dense
about obvious geo-political reality deserves to be read.
Disappointing read. No, there is nothing to suggest that Dugin has any influence on Putin.
No kidding. This is what happens when you get your Russian news from the Times and the Beeb. I mean, if Dugin were such a Kremlin
favorite, how could he have lost his job at Moscow State University? You'd think he could just pick up the phone, call 'Uncle
Vova', and get his job back!
Of course Putin is a Eurasianist, but that's not because Dugin told him to be one. It's because every Russian ruler has been
a Eurasianist for centuries now. Why? Just look at a map: Russia is located in Eurasia. Would we therefore expect the Russians
to be Pan-Africanists or something else? Naturally they're going to be Eurasianists. They learned long ago that if they don't
dominate Eurasia, somebody else will -- and that will cause security problems for Russia. I can't say I hold that against them.
It's not as though the US would take kindly to some foreign empire coming on over to the Western Hemisphere and setting up shop,
say, in Latin America. In fact, just consider how Washington reacted when the Soviets concluded an alliance with Cuba. There was
no talk about the 'sovereignty of small nations' coming from the wallscreen then!
What financial shenanigans? And how has the US effectively funded China's rise? And how do tariffs destroy China ? (tariffs
are like shooting yourself in the foot)
The cause for poverty is located at the Pentagon because they own the national debt! When if ever will the Joint Chiefs be
put on trial for these treasonous Wars and lost trillions?
December 24, 2013 The Worldwide Network of US Military Bases
The US Military has bases in 63 countries. Adding to the bases inside U.S. territory, the total land area occupied by US military
bases domestically within the US and internationally is of the order of 2,202,735 hectares, which makes the *Pentagon* one of
the *largest* landowners worldwide.
Dec 21, 2013 Black Budget: US govt clueless about missing Pentagon $trillions
The Pentagon has secured a 630 billion dollar budget for next year, even though it's failed to even account for the money it's
received since 1996. A whopping 8.5 trillion dollars of taxpayer cash have gone to defence programmes – none of which has been
audited.
@Ilyana_Rozumova between other countries and with its own colonies. As the Dutch comparative advantage was frozen out, their
military aggression declined with it. America sitting on its hands while China becomes a giant Hong Kong and countries all over
Eurasia fall under its sway would by likely to lead to a very nasty war that America would loose and loose badly. It is better
to try now to stop China growing that big and dangerous by declining to trade with them under conditions that will inevitably
make them grow too large to fight. Will trade barriers to China work well enough? Probably not because they are past the lift
off stage now (Carter did too good a job), but it is worth a try.
There is opportunity for an American renaissance and really the only practical solution for its people – that is to swiftly
and decidedly push its pathetic government aside – and begin rapidly re-educating, re-training, re-tooling, and re-building a
next-generation manufacturing base.
Everything about this CIA agent's history lesson sounds fake. The blood sucking military runs the White House. ISIS or ISIL
or whatever the CIA calls itself today poses no threat. Poor General Kelly, one of the generals who let 911 happen, is probably
going to be promoted to Bechtel. I say poor because he's only worth about $5 Million, which is a low figure for the super rich
who own the military industrial complex.
@Sean ised an efficient military staff, efficient in planning. The Prussian army was the first to make extensive use of railways,
first time after the French 1870 attack. Very capable people, Germans. Red Army use of railways even in 1941 was a mess.
The GB preparations for the occupation of neutral Norway in April 1940, also a mess.
Pity quoted book is in German and with gothic letters, Ludendorff shows with extensive map material how the Germans in WWI fought
a two front, sometimes even three front war. Just possible through detailed transport planning.
Erich Ludendorff, 'Meine Kriegserinnerungen 1914 = 1918′, Berlin, 1918
As I said before, rhetorics such as 'USG has effectively funded China's rise' are just over-exaggeration if not BS. Facts:
–Foreign investments only constitute a small % of Chinese domestic investment,
–The majority of foreign Investment in china are NOT from US.
–Total investment in China in recent years amount to $trillions per year
If one cares to examine the major industrial sectors in China , like hi-speed rail, steel, photovoltaic panels, electricity,
energy,.. automobiles Only in the auto sector the americans have a sizable role because the yanks want market access.
we can be reasonably certain that, in the not-too-distant future, another would-be grandmaster will embrace this seductive
concept to guide his bold bid for global power.
my take is that we are in the end game of imperialism. the western empire is in terminal decline and there will be more
empires. from the evidence Russia and China, having learned the lessons of a few thousand years of experience are not seeking
for empires.
empires, traditional ones, are now altogether too costly, especially approaching their end. the world wont tolerate that anymore.
the credit empire is working so far but the people have cottoned on to that. to end global banking power simply take over the
banks, and recuse all debt for they were fraudulently accrued.
all banking will then by need be worker co-ops able to deal with all the financial services required by society..no conglomerates
required
the capitalists will probably try a desperate military gambit to try maintain their empire but that wont work. they are already
outgunned unless they decide to take the world down with them.
but I don't think we will have to worry about such trade 'grandmasters' farting around with the world for too much longer.
the end of imperialism will make such work redundant
and if the democracy does not replace capitalism and the elite wins, it's a Brave New World we looking at. Brilliant geneticist
bent on engineering humans. brilliant mind controllers, psychiatrists and such would be useful job qualifications to have, not
trade specialist.
Brave New World also makes the trade 'genius' redundant
December 31, 2018 War is Good for Business and Organized Crime. Afghanistan's Multibillion Dollar Opium Trade. Rising Heroin
Addiction in the US Afghanistan's opium economy is a multibillion dollar operation which has a direct impact on the surge of heroin
addiction in the US.
It's always fun to read articles and history. This article was fun and perhaps thought provoking. But at least some parts of
it make no sense to me.
Take for example the "heartland" theory. Yes it probably made sense over a century ago when strategist -always looking in the
rear view mirror- judged the situation based on the Roman empire or Napoleons conquest. And their thoughts grounded in traditional
territorial wars.
Today with nuclear weapons, fast long range missiles and in very different economic reality, I don't think the "Heartland"
is the key to control the world, Eurasia, Europe or indeed anything else than possibly the "Heartland" it self. Control from the
Heartland over nuclear France or the U.K?
Annexing small part of land on your own borders whose inhabitants overwhelmingly welcome you with open arms, like Russians
did in Crimea, is totally different from conquering unwilling, hostile neighbors. The latter is extremely costly and difficult
exercise with just about zero upside but gaping black hole on the downside. Remember Afghanistan or Iraq or Vietnam? So the former
isn't indication of the latter!
I dont't see anything that supports the theory the Russians are playing by the book of the Heartland theory. In current political
situation it's outlandish idea. Perhaps the idea is to paint Russia's leaders as lunatics?
Yes the Russians are probably engaged in cyber-war. They seem to have the Russian troll farm in St. Petersburg – as reported
by European media it's amateur operation costing perhaps few million dollars per year with 80 people from the unemployment list's
hammering on laptops working shifts creating and nurturing social media accounts. No experts in politics or advanced computing
in sight, no supercomputers, artificial intelligence. Like I said, amateur operation hardly indicating state-sponsored efforts.
Place this against the U.S. – NSA – on record for what seems to be global surveillance having tapped the phones of U.S.
European allies heads of states like Angela Merkel -among other things- with it's budget of $80 billion per year. Similar amount
to the total Russian defense budget. Then there is the CIA and other "three letter organizations" in the U.S. and similar operations
in the U.K. I think this is David against Goliath struggle and the latter is doing most of the beating.
The press? R.T and few other outlets versus the western MSM who has in recent years acted like a pack of rabid dogs against
Russia. Investigative journalism into international affairs is replaced by publishing official statements and "analysis" from
"experts". This is war propaganda – nothing less. And the Russians are playing desperate defense most days.
This madness is driving Russia into coalition with China and creating all sorts of totally unnecessary tensions. Forcing
them to avoid the US dollar and so forth. How any of this supports western interests, or the interests of U.S. or U.K. citizens
is a great misery. One thing is certain – this is self-destruction policy for the U.S. in the long run. This is what happens when
the lunatics take over the asylum.
Thankfully Vladimir Putin seems to be extremely capable and stable person – not likely to fall into temptation of hitting
back with horrible consequences for world peace.
It was a nice history essay, but there isn't much of a logical relationship between Mahan, Haushofer, et al. and the present
trade confrontation.
Navarro appears to have the full support of Silicon Valley, Boeing and our other high tech exporters. On the other side
is Wall Street and possibly British interests. For all of the hullabaloo about Trump violating the law against private citizens
conducting foreign diplomacy when he was President-elect, the Wall Street crowd appears to have transgressed much further:
It seems the New York banks would gladly trade the SV engineering jobs for a bigger share of the China banking business,
a la the Cleveland and Detroit auto industry jobs of the past.
A possible break with Britain is something even bigger to watch, as their involvement in China is even more finance-related.
@Anon ng, which far exceeded direct investments into China by any other country.
If we take a look at the Santander report on Hong Kong FDI, most of it seems to come from the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman
Islands (both offshore banking locations, with the funds coming from who knows where) and the UK.
"... Israel fears Iran, is my idea. Norman Finkelstein once stated that Israeli Jews do not see how there ever can be peace with the Palestinians 'after all we did to them'. Not all Jews are idiots. Forgot in which book I read that in the thirties a Zionist reached Palestine, and saw that this was not the 'land without people for people without land'. He stated 'this is a crime'. ..."
Israel fears Iran, is my idea. Norman Finkelstein once stated that Israeli Jews do not see
how there ever can be peace with the Palestinians 'after all we did to them'. Not all Jews
are idiots. Forgot in which book I read that in the thirties a Zionist reached Palestine, and
saw that this was not the 'land without people for people without land'. He stated 'this is a
crime'.
The destruction and destabilization of the ME, an Israeli plan, as far as I know.
In 1921 and later years there was the enormous population exchange, without any financial
compensation, between Turkey and Greece. To this day tensions exist between the two
countries.
Iran is one of the oldest civilizations. Twice, one might say even three time, the west
overthrew Iranian democracy. Iran knows of course quite well that the VS brought Saddam to
power so that he could subjugate Iran, that had rid itself of the USA puppet shah. Iran also
of course knows quite well Jewish power in the USA, Bush' s promise to AIPAC to destroy Iraq.
Will those leading Iran now ever trust the USA or Israel ?
So that Netanyahu and USA Jewry now are in complete panic, who had expected it to be
otherwise ? Uri Avnery wrote 'the only language zionists understand is power. Is there a
problem, use power, if it does not help, use more power, if that also fails, use even more
power'.
There has never been any serious negotiation between Israel and its neighbors, or with the
Palestinians. About the Oslo negotiations a book appeared in Israel with the title 'How we
fooled the Palestinians'? Sharon answered any Arab League peace proposal with force, Jenin,
one of them, if my recollection is correct. There always was the idea of overwhelming more
military power, and of USA support.
Kissinger saved Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur war by flying over hundreds of the newest
USA anti tank weapons, wire guided, TOW. What will the USA do in case Israel is attacked ? Is
Netanyahu crazy enough to provoke an attack ?
This morning I woke up to two news reports in my mailbox that indicated two things to
me:
Bigotry against Jews can no more nor less be distinguished from bigotry against any other
group of people or religion. Sectarianism by any other name is sectarianism.
The insistence on making bigotry against Jews (in its sense of sectarianism) a separate
or unique class of discrimination or hatred altogether, one that is given a special term and
that involves controversial and
false definitions, is designed to play into the hands of Zionists and neo-Nazis.
Zionist desperation to criminalize anti-Zionist criticism of Israel by legalizing false
definitions of anti-Semitism is a measure of how far the term "anti-Semitism" has traveled as a
misnomer.
The conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism is a bit of rhetorical sleight-of-hand
that depends on treating Israel as the embodiment of the Jewish people everywhere. Certainly,
some criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic, but it's entirely possible to oppose Jewish
ethno-nationalism without being a bigot. Indeed, it's increasingly absurd to treat the Israeli
state as a stand-in for Jews writ large, given the way the current Israeli government has
aligned itself with far-right European movements that have anti-Semitic roots.
The second news item comes from the Lobby Watch of the Electronic Intifada,
in which Asa Winstanley, an investigative reporter,
writes :
A new European Union declaration could make it harder to criticize Israel as a racist state
without being dubbed an anti-Semite.
The declaration asks all EU
governments to "endorse the non-legally binding working definition of anti-Semitism employed by
the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance."
The move, passed by EU member states' home affairs ministers, has already been condemned by
a number of Israeli
and French academics .
The term "anti-Semitism" to refer to animus against all Jews is a misnomer. By all accounts,
it was coined or
popularized by Friedrich Wilhelm Adolph Marr in 1879, a radical writer and politician,
described in the title of his first biography
as "The Patriarch of Anti-Semitism" and founder of the first "Anti-Semitic League", which he
formed in order to agitate against Jewish emancipation in Germany. "Anti-Semitism", as Marr
coined it, referred specifically to the anti-Jewish campaigns in central Europe at that time,
and not to bigotry or hatred against all Jews, as the term today connotes.
As is well known by now, the building of Palestine in the form of Israel did, in fact,
depend, and continues to depend in large part, on the good will of the Jews "outside," many as
Norman H. Finkelstein writes in American Jewish History, deriving renewed pride in their
religion and their connections to Israel with each Israeli military victory.
The irony/tragedy is that Israeli governments throughout history, including now with the
Trump
/Bannon merger, work with anti-Semites to promote Jewish immigration to Israel. Zionist
collaboration with Nazis is also
documented. Nevertheless, anti-Semitism should not be taking center stage either in arguments
against Palestinians or in pro-Palestine arguments.
Israel is using a misnomer (the term "anti-Semitism" as animus against all Jews) in order to
further its cause among Jews worldwide and among Western governments guilty of past bigotry
against Jews in their midst.
Does animus toward Jews because they are Jews exist? Yes. Is this animus special or unique
in what FiratHacıahmetoğlu
calls "the darker side of western modernity (colonisation, domination, poverty, misery,
inequities, injustices, commodification, and dispensability of human life)" or in Western Dark
Ages?
Of course, not.
Zionism is a political movement, not "a belief", as expressed in the following
definition :
Zionism is the belief that the Jewish nation, the exiles of the Kingdom of Judea that was
conquered by Rome in the year 70 CE, have a right to reclaim their homeland.
Jewish suffering, like the suffering of those subjected to bigotry anywhere, is the result
of conditions of society and ought to be addressed by fixing society through an increase in
political power for disenfranchised groups of people, wherever bigotry exists, thus aiding all
the oppressed -- as, in fact, many Jews in the U.S. have done.
In the early days of Zionism, the Jews who believed that Jewish suffering in Europe is
impossible to remedy within their societies (through socialism, for example) because of their
lack of political rights and the economic structure imposed on Jews at the time and those who
opted for a struggle to separate as a tribe through the acquisition of territory, any
territory, outside their countries, represent what Zionism really is as a political movement,
which is now oppressing a fourth generation of indigenous Palestinians in their own
homeland.
The way I see it, it is time to recognize "anti-Semitism" as the misnomer it is, in order
for us to be able to envision Palestinian emancipation and, indeed, all human emancipation, as
universal and just.
Note: The above content was first published (7 Dec 2018) as my
answer on Quora to the question "Is anti-Semitism a special kind of bigotry? What is the
history of the term?".
Rima Najjar is a former professor (now retired) at Al-Quds University,
Palestine
An interesting distinction: "nationalism is patriotism in its irritated state, or that nationalism recruits the patriotic
sentiment to accomplish something in a fit of anger." But he might be mixing nationalism, far right nationalism, and
fascism. It is fascism that emerges out of feeling of nation/country being humiliated, oppressed, fall into economic
despair... It tries to mobilize nation on changing the situation as a united whole -- in this sense fascism
rejects individualism and "human rights".
BTW there were quite numerous far right movements in the USA history.
The current emergence of nationalist movements is a reaction on the crisis of neoliberalism as an ideology (since 2008). So nationalism
might be a defense reaction of societies when the dominant ideology (in our case neoliberalism) collapses. It is a temporary and defensive
reaction. As the author notes: "Foreign aggression and the onset of war will reliably generate nationalist moods and responses. "
The key question here is when a nation "deserves" a sovereign state, and when it would be better off by being a part of a larger
("imperial state" if we understand empire as conglomerate of multiple nations). As it involved economics, some choices can be bad,
even devastating for people's wellbeing.
Notable quotes:
"... Macron is not the first to try to make a hard, fast, and rhetorically pungent distinction between nationalism and patriotism. Orwell attempted to do the same in a famous essay . He wrote that patriotism is "devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally." ..."
"... In the end, Orwell gives a rather unsatisfying account in which all the mental and moral vices of self-interest and self-regard are transmuted and supercharged by their absorption into a nationalistic "we." Nationalists in his account hold their nations supreme, thereby encouraging themselves to traduce any other people or nation. For Orwell, the patriot prefers this to that . The nationalist privileges us over them . For us, everything, to others nothing. ..."
"... In his recent book, The Virtue of Nationalism , Yoram Hazony makes a different contrast. His work is not primarily concerned with the moral status or self-deception of individuals, but with the organization of geopolitics. For him the contrast is between nationalism and imperialism. ..."
"... Orwell is tempted to believe the nationalist thinks his nation is best in all things, but much of nationalist rhetoric throughout Europe is a rhetoric of envy or arousal. Nationalists sometimes boast about their nations, but in many circumstances they express despair about their countries; they want to excite their people to achieve more, to take themselves as seriously as some rival national actor takes itself. ..."
"... Instead, nationalism is an eruptive feature of politics. It grows out of the normal sentiments of national loyalty, like a pustule or a fever. It could even be said that nationalism is patriotism in its irritated state, or that nationalism recruits the patriotic sentiment to accomplish something in a fit of anger. ..."
"... National loyalty attaches us to a place, and to the people who share in its life. Destroying national loyalty would almost certainly bring about the return of loyalties based on creed and blood. ..."
"... One of the outstanding features of nationalist political movements, the thing that almost always strikes observers about them, is their irritated or aroused character. And it is precisely this that strikes non-nationalists as signaling danger. ..."
"... nationalist movements are teeming with powerful emotions: betrayal, anger, aggression. ..."
"... Nationalist politics tends to be opportunist; it takes other political ideas, philosophies, and forms of mobilization in hand and discards them. Nationalists throughout the 20th century adopted Communism or capitalism to acquire the patronage or weapons to throw off imperial rule, or stick it to a neighbor, for example. ..."
"... The reemergence of nationalist politics in America and abroad requires us to ask those simple questions. What is bothering them? Do they have a point? What do they want to do about it? Would it be just? In broad strokes I intend to take those questions up. ..."
"... What the vast majority of people apparently fail to realize is that the United states is an empire which by definition is a group of states or countries containing diverse ethnic and cultural identities. ..."
"... The break-up of the Soviet Union can be blamed in part for failing to establish a strong national identity ..."
"... Greenfeld describes it as "civic nationalism" to differentiate it from the ethnic, anti-liberal "nationalism" later adopted by Russia and Germany. ..."
"... Identifying "the people" as a linguistic-cultural entity with or without borders set the stage for the bloody conflicts that were fought over borders for these groups, and the discrimination and ethnic cleansing for those who didn't belong to the dominant linguistic-cultural group, to say nothing of what needed to be done about members of the dominant group who lived outside its borders. ..."
"... Also, in the late 16th century during what is now called the Wars of Religions (but which they called Civil Wars) in continental Europe, people moved from Monarchists to Republicans and back, depending of whether they were Catholics or Protestants, but mostly depending of the position of strength in which they were at the time... ..."
"... "Modern Conservatives" have a vested interest in muddying the debate, so that it does not become clear that "conservatism" is not linked to specific political or economical models, and more importantly it is not true that the Founding Fathers were all absolutist libertarian free traders... ;-) ..."
"... What, exactly, are our children inheriting? Press 2 for Spanish. ..."
"... And let us not forget neocons. ..."
"... You should be out there carving an empire for yourself, showing your supremacy and spreading the seeds of your "culture" over uncharted territories and untamed tribes... ;-) ..."
"... I think the obvious irritant lending support to Nationalist sentiments is the non benign aspects of Globalism. ..."
What is nationalism? The word is suddenly and surprisingly important when talking about the times we live in. But we seem to be
working without a shared definition.
"You know what I am? I'm a nationalist," Donald Trump said in an October rally in Houston.
French president Emmanuel Macron slapped back at a commemoration ceremony for World War I in France. "Nationalism is a betrayal
of patriotism," he said. "By saying 'our interests first, who cares about the others,' we erase what a nation holds dearest, what
gives it life, what makes it great and what is essential: its moral values."
Macron is not the first to try to make a hard, fast, and rhetorically pungent distinction between nationalism and patriotism.
Orwell attempted to do the same in a
famous essay . He wrote that patriotism is "devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to
be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally."
On the other hand, "The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the
nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality."
In the end, Orwell gives a rather unsatisfying account in which all the mental and moral vices of self-interest and self-regard
are transmuted and supercharged by their absorption into a nationalistic "we." Nationalists in his account hold their nations supreme,
thereby encouraging themselves to traduce any other people or nation. For Orwell, the patriot prefers this to that . The nationalist
privileges us over them . For us, everything, to others nothing.
In his recent book, The Virtue of Nationalism , Yoram Hazony makes a different contrast. His work is not primarily concerned with
the moral status or self-deception of individuals, but with the organization of geopolitics. For him the contrast is between nationalism
and imperialism. For Hazony, it is the nationalist who respects spontaneous order and pluralism. Imperialists run roughshod over
these, trampling local life for the benefit of the imperial center.
A border will rein in the ambition of the nationalist, whereas the imperial character rebels against limits. A century ago, in
what he called the days of "clashing and crashing Empires," the Irish nationalist Eoin MacNeil felt similarly. For him, the development
of a nation -- any nation -- had in it "the actuality or the potentiality of some great gift to the common good of mankind."
It's difficult to find a consistent definition of nationalism from its critics, meanwhile. Sometimes nationalism is dismissed
as the love of dirt, or mysticism about language. Other times it's the love of DNA.
In the critics' defense, though, the way nationalism has expressed itself in different nations and different times can be maddeningly
diverse. Orwell is tempted to believe the nationalist thinks his nation is best in all things, but much of nationalist rhetoric throughout
Europe is a rhetoric of envy or arousal. Nationalists sometimes boast about their nations, but in many circumstances they express
despair about their countries; they want to excite their people to achieve more, to take themselves as seriously as some rival national
actor takes itself.
I'd like to propose a different way of thinking about the question. When we use the vocabulary of political philosophies, we recognize
that we are talking about things that differ along more than one axis. Take Communism, liberalism, and conservatism: The first is
a theory of history and power. The second is a political framework built upon rights. The final disclaims the word "ideology" and
has been traditionally defined as a set of dispositions toward a political and civilizational inheritance.
I would like to sidestep Hazony's championing of nationalism as a system for organizing political order globally, a theory that
my colleague Jonah Goldberg is tempted to call "nationism."
My proposal is that nationalism as a political phenomenon is not a philosophy or science, though it may take either of those in
hand. It isn't an account of history. Instead, nationalism is an eruptive feature of politics. It grows out of the normal sentiments
of national loyalty, like a pustule or a fever. It could even be said that nationalism is patriotism in its irritated state, or that
nationalism recruits the patriotic sentiment to accomplish something in a fit of anger.
In normal or propitious circumstances, national loyalty is the peaceful form of life that exists among people who share a defined
territory and endeavor to live under the laws of that territory together. National loyalty attaches us to a place, and to the people
who share in its life. Destroying national loyalty would almost certainly bring about the return of loyalties based on creed and
blood.
One of the outstanding features of nationalist political movements, the thing that almost always strikes observers about them,
is their irritated or aroused character. And it is precisely this that strikes non-nationalists as signaling danger. Republican democracies
should be characterized by deliberation. Conservatives distrust swells of passion. Liberals want an order of voluntary rights. But
nationalist movements are teeming with powerful emotions: betrayal, anger, aggression.
Therefore, I contend, like a fever, nationalism can be curative or fatal. And, like fevers, it can come and go depending on the
nation's internal health or the external circumstances a nation finds itself in. Foreign aggression and the onset of war will reliably
generate nationalist moods and responses. But cultural change can do it too. Maybe a national language falls into sharp and sudden
decline under pressure from a more powerful lingua franca. Even something as simple or common as rapid urbanization can be felt to
agitate upon a people's loyalties, and may generate a cultural response for preserving certain rural traditions and folkways. And
of course, sometimes nationalism is excited by the possibility of some new possession coming into view, the opportunity to recover
or acquire territory or humiliate a historic rival. The variety of irritants explains the variety of nationalisms.
You tend to find a lot of nationalism where there are persistent or large irritants to the normally peaceful sense of national
loyalty. Think of western Ukraine, where the local language and political prerogatives have endured the powerful irritant of Moscow's
power and influence in its region, and even in its territory. You find a great deal of nationalism in Northern Ireland, where a lineage
of religious differences signals dueling loyalties to the United Kingdom and to Ireland.
Until recently you didn't find a lot of political nationalism in the United States, because it is a prosperous nation with unparalleled
independence of action. But we are familiar with bursts of nationalism nonetheless -- for example, at times when European powers
threatened the U.S. in the early days of the Republic, during the Civil War and its aftermath, and especially during World War I,
which coincided with the tail end of a great wave of migration into the country.
If nationalist political movements are national loyalties in this aroused state, then we must judge them on a case-by-case basis.
When non-nationalists notice the irritated and irritable character of nationalism, often the very next thing they say is, "Well,
they have a point." You would judge a nationalist movement the way you would judge any man or group of men in an agitated state.
Do you have a right to be angry about this matter? What do you intend to do about it? How do you intend to do it?
We all do this almost instinctively. We understand that there are massive differences among nationalist projects. In order to
assert his young nation's place on the world stage, John Quincy Adams sought to found a national university. We may judge that one
way, whereas we judge Andrew Jackson's Indian-removal policy very differently. In Europe, we might cheer on the ambition of the Irish
Parliamentary party to establish a home-rule parliament in Dublin. That was a nationalist project, but so was the German policy of
seeking lebensraum through the racial annihilation of the Jews and the enslavement of Poland, which we judge as perhaps the most
wicked cause in human history. We might cheer the reestablishment of a Polish nation after World War I, but deplore some of the expansionist
wars it immediately embarked upon.
Nationalist politics tends to be opportunist; it takes other political ideas, philosophies, and forms of mobilization in hand
and discards them. Nationalists throughout the 20th century adopted Communism or capitalism to acquire the patronage or weapons to
throw off imperial rule, or stick it to a neighbor, for example.
The reemergence of nationalist politics in America and abroad requires us to ask those simple questions. What is bothering them?
Do they have a point? What do they want to do about it? Would it be just? In broad strokes I intend to take those questions up.
Kontraindicated 2 days ago
There is much discussion below as to the meaning of the term "nationalism" below. In the minds of many, it seems to be a relatively
benign term.
However, even recently we have seen extremely violent episodes break out that appear to be associated with some sort of flavour
of "nationalism", however it's defined.
In the former Yugoslavia, Tito tried to create a new "nation" that would have a common identity by breaking up the "nations"
that had previously existed on the same territory. This involved the forced relocation of various groups of Serbs and Croats (and,
to a lesser extent, Bosnians) who would now all live together in peace and harmony. However, when the political structures fell,
the people fell back into their old groups and immediately began fighting each other. The end result was an incredibly bloody
and vicious civil war and the ultimate re-establishment of Nations/Countries that mapped more closely to the ethnic/cultural/race
divisions that the people involved in the conflict were concerned with. Ultimately, they (as individuals) decided which team they
wanted to belong to and, as long as the "nation" agreed, they became part of that "nation".
Similar scenarios have played out across Africa and the Middle East (which was artificially set up for a century's worth of
conflict by Europeans in 1919).
All of which is mildly interesting, but it's not really related to the reason that this topic is coming up in NRO. The reason
that we are discussing this is that Macron spent a considerable amount of time during the Armistice Ceremony decrying "Nationalism"
(which, if we treat the term in the Yugoslavian context, likely did play a significant role in two World Wars) and Fox and Friends
were then able to teach Donald Trump a new word - after which he declared himself a "Nationalist".
So rather than beating ourselves up over semantics, would it not be better instead to debate two questions?:
Does "Nationalism" represent a growing force within enough countries that it represents a significant threat to the current
world order?
Does whatever Donald Trump thinks "Nationalism" means pose a threat to America's current place in the world and is it driving
the US away from its leadership role? (will "America First" lead to "America Isolated and Alone?")
Jean_Christophe_Jouffrey 2 days ago
Dear Kontraindicated,
First, your last question is already answered, in the WTO, the EU, China, Canada, Mexico have raised a complaint against the
falsified use of "national security" by Trump to justify tariffs. If the USA decided then to leave the WTO, because Trump's personal
honor would be stained, (without forgetting that the US Congress should have already protested that these tariffs were illegal
in the first place) this will be another occasion to show that it is indeed "America Isolated and Alone"... Trump could have allied
himself with the EU, Canada, etc. against some of the unfair practices of China, instead he got two of the biggest trading block
in the world (including its two territorial neighbors) to ally themselves against the USA.
What a way of winning Donnie! ;-)
Then, let's go back to the question of the meaning of Nationalism.
There are two aspects:
What is the real meaning of nationalism compared to patriotism, when we remove all the fake ideological recent additions
to these terms? (and I have answered at length on this in my other comments) And this meaning is not necessarily nefarious. It
becomes a problem when one claims that each Nation must have one "sovereign" State (in the sense of country), and there should
be only one such Nation per country.
What is the meaning which is actually meant by Trump? And it is clear that he means it the way that it was whispered to
him, which is "One Nation, One and only One State; One State, One and only One Nation"...
It is no longer "e pluribus unum", but "e uno unum" (one from one), which is slightly less ambitious and certainly less of
a reason to get up in the morning and do something productive (but then there is a lot of opportunity for "Executive Time" and
playing golf)... ;-)
Leroy 2 days ago
"Out of many, one." ONE. Get it through your head. ONE. If you are MANY, you ARE Yugoslavia. And that doesn't end well.
TitoPerdue 2 days ago
I try to imagine my parents being informed that they must now accustom themselves to white people being turned into a minority.
Would have been stunned, my folks, who first arrived in 1771.
My folks: "But what did we do wrong!"
Me: "You've been too successful and must now be punished."
My folks: "What's wrong with being successful!"
Me: "It's racist. Ask Jonah Goldberg. You know how much the Jews despise ethnocentrism."
Gaurus 3 days ago
This is a useful take on the subject. There is a big Tower of Babel problem with this word as it seems to mean different things
to different people, and different nations also define it differently.
This language barrier is why Macron's criticism of the President should be taken with a grain of salt. The left's myopic/robotic
attempts to unilaterally define this word on their terms is reprehensible, just like so many of their other attempts at PC authoritarianism
aka thought control which is pushed by the national media.
What the vast majority of people apparently fail to realize is that the United states is an empire which by definition
is a group of states or countries containing diverse ethnic and cultural identities.
You must at some point come to ask yourself, "what keeps these diverse groups contained in the U.S. from fracturing, dividing,
and falling apart?" The answer is nationalism/national identity. It is the keystone or glue that binds these diverse ethnic and
cultural groups together. Anyone or anything that tugs or tears at nationalism therefore is altogether a bad thing for the country
and will sow division and strife that was not previously there. Ultimately civil war could result if those seeking to divide the
country for political gain go too far and the left ignorantly seems all-in on doing this.
Applying recent trends in politics using this as a backdrop, one can see how pro-globalists wouldn't care to attack nationalism
as they are by definition against the very concept of a nation-state and want top bring back good old feudalism, but this time
on a global scale. For comparison Russia is another example of an empire that is aware It needs to fuel nationalist sentiment
to hold itself together. The EU is an emerging empire that is conflicted with what this means. The break-up of the Soviet Union
can be blamed in part for failing to establish a strong national identity.
Plymouth mtng, PA 3 days ago
Well said! This truth is exemplified by the evidentiary and documented history that the Founding Fathers and Jackson, Lincoln,
and Grant and the whole of 19th century America used the language of Liberty and Patriot to define the American Republic.
Leroy 3 days ago
I just learned something new. I thought that ethnicity was the same as race. It isn't. Ethnicity: "the fact or state
of belonging to a social group that has a common national or cultural tradition." By that definition, we're all in an ethnic
group, and we can belong to smaller ethnic groups as well.
If Americans don't become nationalists, understand that we share common interests and goals, it won't matter how much we love
our country, because it will be unrecognizable.
Jean_Christophe_Jouffrey 3 days ago
Dear Leroy,
I happen to think that "race" does not exist, but we know that in the USA when people say "ethnic" they mean "race"... ;-)
I remember 30 years ago, at the hairdresser in London, picking up a copy of the tabloid "The Sun", and reading a sentence where
"ethnic" was used to mean "foreigner with a darker complexion"... (something like "the three men were ethnic") ;-)
Once more "ethnic" means "national", nothing more nothing less: "ethnos" is the Greek translation of "natio". These are words
which have been used for a few thousand years, and we have to understand what they really meant and what they really mean now,
and to remove from them the "ideological" additions.
The definition which you give shows such ideological addition, by adding "cultural" and "tradition". By definition a "nation",
as the same traditions and therefore the same "culture": they are just redundant in this definition.
An ethnic group is a nation. So yes, you are in an ethnic group, and you can "define" smaller and smaller ethnic groups within
the bigger one (the "tribes"). So in Gaul, there were many different "nations", who were Gauls, but had a great diversity between
them (just read a few pages of Cćsar).
But at some point when there are many ethnic groups within you country (and this is how a country like France was made by the
addition of regions with varying ethnic backgrounds and the migration/invasion of many other ethnic groups), at some point the
only unity is in the country, the "patria", this is there that you find the common interests and goals.
So you see in France the difference going from Nation to the Country, because in the early middle ages the king was called
"King of the French" Rex Francorum, (there were many other nations recognized on the French territory) and in the later part of
the Middle Ages, he was called "King of France", Rex Franciae.
But because the word "nation" is important, and people would not let it go, there has been a tendency to use it to mean "country",
as when we speak of the National Anthem, but this is by a shifting of its original sense.
When we want to oppose nationalism and patriotism, we need to go back to the original technical meaning, not invent a new one.
PS: the reason why "ethnic" and "race" are not the same thing, and we saw it with "Pocahontas" controversy (I mentioned it
then), it is because a nation can "adopt" somebody who was not genetically related to them. They shall still be fully part of
the nation... but their genetic material shall be different.
Leroy 3 days ago
I know you enjoy history, but the meaning of words can shift. I'll go with the meaning of the word Nation that the founders
meant when they founded this nation. Nations are sovereign, make laws and control territory. A group of people, who share a culture,
but who do not control territory is not a nation.
Hub312 3 days ago ( Edited )
Whoever wants a clear-headed understanding of nationalism, I suggest you read the world's foremost scholar on nationalism,
Liah Greenfeld's "Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity" and Pierre Manent's concise but rich "Democracy Without Nations?".
Nationalism is really just another word for modernity and democracy. . It arose in England at the end of the 17th and the 18th
centuries as the liberal answer to the question: if the people are sovereign, who are "the people" that we are now calling the
nation? Answer: those who live within the borders controlled by the sovereign. The nation state is our home and our protection
and we're all in it together regardless of language, culture, etc. This was the essentially liberal idea that was adopted and
adapted by the French. This was the form adopted by Americans too. Greenfeld describes it as "civic nationalism" to differentiate
it from the ethnic, anti-liberal "nationalism" later adopted by Russia and Germany.
It is the Russians, followed by the Germans and other central Europeans who followed their lead that gave nationalism a bad
name. Identifying "the people" as a linguistic-cultural entity with or without borders set the stage for the bloody conflicts
that were fought over borders for these groups, and the discrimination and ethnic cleansing for those who didn't belong to the
dominant linguistic-cultural group, to say nothing of what needed to be done about members of the dominant group who lived outside
its borders.
Empires and nations based on racial and ethnic identity have bloody borders, since it is impossible to draw any border anywhere
in the world that includes all members of the dominant group and excludes or oppresses all members of other groups.
Are they both called nationalisms? Yes. But they couldn't be farther apart.
Jean_Christophe_Jouffrey 3 days ago
Dear Hub312,
the word that is missing in your comment is "country". "if the people are sovereign, who are "the people" that we are
now calling the nation?... etc."
I am interested to see in which English author of the end of the 17th century you find the expression of "sovereign people"
or the "people are sovereign". Do you have some primary sources? I do not find it in Locke, but perhaps I am looking in the wrong
place.
And in the UK, in the 18th and 19th century, and still now, it is clear that English, Welsh, Irish and Scots are different
nations in the same "country"... Today, in Rugby the 6 nations championship takes place actually between four countries.
In the Middle Ages it is clear that the "supreme power" "summa potestas" comes God, and after this it is a question of open
debate whether it is invested directly in the King, or through the people who then may elect a king, or decide on a Republic.
And I find in the Renaissance of the 16th and early 17th century, many proponents of a summa potestas that belongs to the people,
which gives incidentally rise to the possibility of removing from power bad kings, but they happen to be Spanish and Catholics:
Francisco Suarez, Juan de Mariana and Roberto Bellarmino... worse, they are all Jesuits... ;-), and they claim that the supreme
power comes from the consent of the governed, and they were all dead by 1630... So that's it when it comes to the notion of people's
sovereignty "arising" in England in the late 17th century... It was up and awake already.
I cannot find "souveraineté" as a word (which is different from having a "sovereign"), before Jean Bodin (16th century) (but
you perhaps have better sources than mine), then I can direct you to many discussions about the nature and origin of "souveraineté"
in French in the 16th and 17th century.
Rousseau (mid-18th century) is famous for ascribing sovereignty to the people, but he was not English (although he was Protestant),
nor French, but he is also the inspiration for the "dictatorship of the people", and the Terror.
Rousseau is part of the Social Contract school, to which is usually adjoined his predecessors Hobbes and Locke, but there is
no doubt that Hobbes is a partisan of absolute monarchy, and again I fail to see in Locke a direct notion of people's sovereignty:
when he speaks of civil sovereigns he speaks of the "magistrates" who rule. But I am certain that you shall direct me to the proper
place in Locke, which currently escapes me.
The thing is that the "consent of the people" or even the "sovereignty of the people", or the "social contract" does not mean
that they are individually free afterwards... they may actually live under an absolute monarchy and still have "consented" to
it, or under a dictatorship of the people (socialist), or a national dictatorship, or a mixture of both... ;-)
Jean_Christophe_Jouffrey 3 days ago
Of course, as I read again what I wrote, I made the most silly of blunders: Bellarmino was Italian, not Spanish... this invalidates
all that I have ever written.. ;-)
Jean_Christophe_Jouffrey 3 days ago
Also, in the late 16th century during what is now called the Wars of Religions (but which they called Civil Wars) in
continental Europe, people moved from Monarchists to Republicans and back, depending of whether they were Catholics or
Protestants, but mostly depending of the position of strength in which they were at the time... There is a very interesting literature regarding the nature
and origin of the supreme power, and whether the people must have absolute obedience to the the sovereign civil power (whatever
shape it has). Of course none of this has to do with 17th century England, except that the same questions where asked and answered
their own way in the English Civil War (which was a religious war), when the Round-Heads decided to chop that of their King, whose
shape they did not like. ;-)
Bellarmino wrote against James I when he tried to sustain is absolute divine right to rule.
All of this to say that these questions were raised long before the Glorious Revolution. ;-)
Jean_Christophe_Jouffrey 2 days ago
Dear Hub312,
well, why would I read a secondary source book, if it does not know the primary sources which I know?
If this book describes nothing more than what you described (i.e. England, end of the 17th century, etc.), which is refuted
by the sources that I know, why would I waste time reading it? it could not edify me, if it does not add to what I know.
Hub312 4 hours ago ( Edited )
...and you would love the Manent book, written from a very European liberal perspective, which is brief and very concise.
Jean_Christophe_Jouffrey 3 days ago
Dear Michael Brendan Dougherty,
I have a revolutionary proposal: instead of investing words with supposed meanings in order to be able to say that we approve
of them or not (which in English is called begging the question), why don't we simply use the etymological meaning of the word?
;-)
It's easy, "national" means precisely the same thing as "ethnic": one is Latin, the other is Greek. You know what ethnicity
is a euphemism for in the US: "race". A "nation" does not need to have borders to be a nation, the "barbarian nations" of late
Antiquity early Middle Ages were roving nations. This is why also initially German nationalism i the 19th and early 20th century
was expansive: it meant to "unify" the German nation in one country. This is why Irish, Scottish or Welsh nationalism is divisive
and restrictive, it is meant to separate the English (seen as invaders) from the local version of a Celtic nation.
The "Patria" is the Land of the fathers: this is the "country", the "land".
The one is "Blood", the other is "Soil", you see that each can be assigned bad meaning or good meaning, if one wants to.
Behind this you have the age old conflicts between Cain and Abel, between the roving pastor, and the settled farmer.
Both Nation and Patria can be a limit within which to stay, or a limit to expand: so one can be an "imperialist" or not, whether
one is a patriot or a nationalist. Because even a patriot, may require more land, to ensure the safety of the one that he has,
his own version of "lebensraum".
These two notions are also linked to the "jus sanguinis" (right of blood) and the "jus soli" (right of soil/land) question
regarding citizenship.
In countries which have official separate notions of citizenship and nationality (in the former USSR for instance), citizenship
is clearly ascribed to the country, and nationality is clearly ascribed to ethnicity: so one can be a Russian national, citizen
of Kazakhstan.
It is the notion of the Nation-State (which is comparatively recent), which tends to make believe that for each identifiable
"Nation" there must be one identifiable "Country" (a sovereign state). It is the geographical difficulty if not impossibility
of this which lead to the political upheavals in the 19th and 20th centuries. It was trying to merge Nationalism and Patriotism
that created the problems.
In some cases when supposed "nations" wanted to be unified within one country, there was the notion of "Pan-somethingism",
Pan-Germanism, Pan-Slavism, etc., and/or Nations wanted to become independent: so you had the fights for the unification of Italy,
Germany, the independence of Poland, Greece, etc., within the 19th century. And then there were all these places were the population
was too mixed to make any such separation easy: the Balkans, the remnants of the Turkish Empire (a perfect example together with
the Persian Empire (for those who read Xenophon), why "Imperialism" does not mean "centralization"), remnants of "German" populations
in "Slavic" countries, etc. You know what followed.
So both nationalism and patriotism can have a good or a bad meaning, depending of how one intends to use them.
For instance the notion of a "Europe of Nations" is what helped secure the Good Friday Agreement, because another way of saying
it is a "Europe of Regions", where Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Basques, Bretons (of little Brittany), etc., have a possibility of
recognition, without necessarily breaking up "countries".
So you are right there is much more than one axis of meaning, and it is important that one opposes the right terms, and this
is the responsibility of what used to be called the "publicists", those who speak of the Res Publica, what we now call "pundits":
but in the USA none are more adept at using the wrong formulations than the "modern conservative" pundits. Why? well, "modern
conservative" says it all... because you are partly right conservatism is about "a set of dispositions toward a political and
civilizational inheritance", and "modern conservatism" is therefore an oxymoron. ;-)
And this is why "Modern Conservatism" became such an easy prey for the Alt-Right Anarchists: because they are not grounded
in an actual "tradition", but like all the "progressives" (which they are), they have to reinvent for themselves a new beginning...
in the 1950s, they said, now that there is National Review, we shall become "real" conservatives, "modern conservatives", before
us, they were not really conservatives... ;-)
But you cannot be a real conservative if you have to identify a date for the birth of your movement.
"Modern Conservatives" have a vested interest in muddying the debate, so that it does not become clear that "conservatism"
is not linked to specific political or economical models, and more importantly it is not true that the Founding Fathers were all
absolutist libertarian free traders... ;-)
So Conservatism is not the opposite of Liberalism, it is the opposite of Progressivism. Imperialism is indeed about expansion
of power, but it is not necessarily about "centralization", as many empires not only have left the "local life" untouched, but
this "local life" disappeared when a supposedly more "liberal" power took over...
Therefore I do beg American publicists, especially those of the conservative variety writing in NRO, stop begging the question
when you falsely "define" terms, so that they align with what you deem to be good or bad; be instead a real conservative, go back
to the etymology and the actual meaning of the words, see how they were used initially, not only in the last 50 or even 100 years...
because then you are using "progressive" definitions, and you keep repeating that "progressives" always change the meaning of
the words to suit their purpose... You are right on that one. ;-)
Leroy 3 days ago
Conservatism "has been traditionally defined as a set of dispositions toward a political and civilizational inheritance"?
That can't be true. We all know that conservatism now means free trade, where American workers are replaced by Chinese slave
labor. We know that conservatism means an insatiable desire for foreign migrants, adding millions of campesino's to our economy
every year. Most of all, we know that conservatism stands for foreign imperialist wars and globalist profits.
What, exactly, are our children inheriting? Press 2 for Spanish.
Jean_Christophe_Jouffrey 3 days ago
Dear Leroy,
I agree with you that US Conservatives are Progressives by another name. see my main comment here. ;-)
TitoPerdue 2 days ago
Indeed. And let us not forget neocons.
Jean_Christophe_Jouffrey 2 days ago
Dear TitoPerdue,
given that the Founding Fathers were already progressives, who for you committed the original sin of believing that "all men
are created equal", why do you still live in that den of iniquity that is the USA?
You should be out there carving an empire for yourself, showing your supremacy and spreading the seeds of your "culture" over
uncharted territories and untamed tribes... ;-)
I hear that there are still some fairly inaccessible places in Papua-New-Guinea... ;-)
Perfect place to show your supremacy, or end up in the cooking pot. For once your philosophy of life would become true: eat
or be eaten! ;-)
hawkesappraisal 3 days ago
I agree. "Nationalism" is a charged but nebulous word, but it describes something that is clearly important in spite of the
obscurity of its meaning. So the struggle to come up with coherent definitions is worthwhile. The current Nationalism is probably
best defined by, Progressives saying "America sucks!" and the Right responding, "No it doesn't! America is Awesome!"
freedom1 3 days ago ( Edited )
Thoughtful piece. I think the obvious irritant lending support to Nationalist sentiments is the non benign aspects of Globalism.
Marxism is a brilliant sui generis philosophy of history. The attending political
position was a heartfelt reaction to the immiseration of the working classes of Europe.
There were many similar ideologies to Marxism in political viewpoint, but Marxism is
outstandingly intellectually interesting.
Marx is not differentiated from other (Gentile) socialists by his politics but by his
genius. I doubt his part Jewishness had much to do with that.
Jews have made up a huge proportion of decent economists from all economic
perspectives.
Meanwhile, Ayn Rand was an highly eccentric writer of romantic fiction that lucidly
captured the snivelling, resentment fueled scumbags who make up the denizens of the
swamp.
Pychoanalysis – (((Freud)
Freud's psychoanalysis might be flawed but his work constitutes a truly great body of
literature and the invention of a new and important subject. He is one of the greatest
thinkers of all time.
USSR – (((Lenin))), (((Trotsky)
Lenin wasn't Jewish. Trotsky was. Lenin was in charge, while Trotsky ended up murdered
while in ignominious exile.
SJW/open society/antifa movements – (((Soros))) and other forture 400
(((billionaires)))
I'm not sure how you think antifa and billionaires are best buddies but Jews are obviously
a minority among billionaires.
Soros is deranged. There are plenty of bad people in every group. There are more maniac
progressive types among Jews. The explanations are mundane.
Big tech censorship – (((ADL))), (((SPLC))), (((Zuckerberg))), (((Brin)))
Again, Jews are a small minority of those enacting big tech censorship. Indeed, America
remains one of human history's least censored societies. That doesn't make it good but you
need get some perspective before you go all crazy.
Hollywood and other pop culture entertainment – easily all senior positions at the
very least 50% jewish
Nonsense. And a lot of that stuff is pretty good.
The jew really is to blame, which is also why they are so hell bent on censoring and
jailing people for stating these blatant truths.
Lenin wasn't Jewish. Trotsky was. Lenin was in charge, while Trotsky ended up murdered
while in ignominious exile.
apparently Lenin was part jewish and had disdain for white people, ethnic Russians
Trotsky was the racist he accused others of being – he wanted to fill Russia with
what he called "white n1ggers" presumably to ruled by jews like himself – what right a
5% has to rule the rest of the country? It would be like Chinese ruling the U.S.
Again, Jews are a small minority of those enacting big tech censorship.
really? (((Facebook))), (((Google))), and (((SPLC))) and (((ADL))) are the so called
"safety advisors" so no leftist or jew should ever have to stumble upon the truth on those
sites
also, why do you thnk BitChute lost access to PayPal and Stripe? why do think Paul Nehlen
suddenly had trouble with his upstream suppliers for the business he manages? its because
jews behind the scenes collude against and punish any competitiors or anyone speaking out
about jews – this is what they do
Indeed, America remains one of human history's least censored societies.
no thanks to the jews, who have pulled this "hate speech" crap already in Canada, UK,
Australia, and Europe. They are the reason those countries don't have Free Speech and they're
coming for Free Speech here in the U.S. too – because (((their))) feelings are more
important than your rights
The overwhelming majority of Jews are not Semites (peoples from the Middle East). Most Jews'
points of origin are in Europe.
My family (mother's side) German Jews – not a Semite in the bunch. Mostly blond
haired & blue eyes.
There is real resistance to those, who attempt to clarify this vital point. Ron Unz, this
is your website, and these are some of your topics. Why fear to tread? Why fear the truth?
You've come so far. Come all the way into the light.
Most Jews come from – – – Read Arthur Koestler's "The Thirteenth
Tribe" as a start for your education and a cure for your being brainwashed.
Have received some threatening emails, and despite all the political views this Anarchist
has, the threats have ALL been in response to my analysis of just who are, and are not
Semites. Unz, and Commentators, I need no help here. I fear not, and cannot live forever.
Orwell's 1984 , explains in detail the use of false language and false History as
the KEY tools in repressing Humanity, and Humanity's Liberty.
The misidentification of just who Semites are is a powerful weapon in the hands of the
Zionist Land Thieves and their American, British, & French puppets. The Jewish claim
to Semitism goes in tandem with their insistence on their right to exterminate
Palestinians and occupy their land, and later, the Zionist Oligarchs will continue to
occupy all the Middle East "eretz Israel," and concurrently, they will occupy and control
(with the weapons of financial/banking and physical terror), the peoples of this planet.
It is no wonder Gilad Atzmon has it all wrong. Look for no help here.
Jews have not been the only recipients of the Brutality that humans often inflict on one
another. And Jews have not been specially singled out, over Serbians, Russians, Chinese,
Armenians, Native Americans, Iraqis, Syrians, Vietnamese, Indonesians (1965), Yemenis,
Libyans, Afghanis, Africans (slavery and neo colonizing of their nations), and dozens
more.
Jews belong (yes, they, with all the rest of Earth's people, belong). Jews belong in
America, and Europe, where they may reside in happiness and freedom with all the other
peoples, and, if they wish, they may visit their newly Freed and Happy Palestinian friends,
(and host them in their European and American homes) – as well.
We American Patriots , we will host all, in our Restored American Republic.
And America's finest statesman, Dr. Ron Paul , will become our First Constitutional
President – since John F. Kennedy.
The Living Dream, and do not Fear.
Durruti for the Anarchist Collective
West Bank Settler and American Patriot, by Gilad
Atzmon - The Unz Review
@wayfarer
The USA is full of Jewish billionaires. Why on earth does Israel need any blood money from
the hard-pressed taxpayers when they could supply their home away from home with all the
extra money it needs, if indeed it needs any at all? If you are wondering about one of the
main causes of US anti-Semitism, look no further than the billions our AIPAC-controlled
traitorous Congress gives to that apartheid state every year.
West Bank Settler and American Patriot, by Gilad Atzmon - The Unz Review
What a pleasure to find Gilad Atzmon here at UNZ. And as usual, Mr. Atzmon delivers fresh
insights and bold perspectives.
I am grateful that Gilad is examining as well as talking to hyper-Zionists living in
Pennsylvania. This is revealing. I appreciate Yonatan Stern's willingness to address Atzmon's
questions.
I was similarly impressed–unexpectedly so–when I met the late Rabbi Meir
Kahane, who I briefly interviewed for a televised TV debate I produced ('Why Terrorism?') in
1986. Former US Congressman, Pete McCloskey (R-CA), took the opposing side in this exchange
concerning the future of Palestine/Israel as well as US policies there. In my opinion, Kahane
won the debate (though not on its merits).
Rabbi Kahane was an unabashed separatist (like most devout Jews) and he famously declared
(somewhat prematurely) that Israel's native gentiles ('Palestinians') had no future in a
Jewish State.
Kahane believed that all these resentful, recalcitrant Arabs should be kicked out of
Israel. He was unabashedly pro-separation. From a Zionist point of view, Kahane offered a
violent though practical long-term solution. Multiculturalism is inherently problematic and
destabilizing. It is also incompatible with Jewish nationalism. But Kahane made Jewish
liberals blush. As a result, he was declared a 'racist' by establishment Jews; even though
Judaism is, at its core, race-driven.
Please keep in mind that during this era (Carter through Clinton) the endless Mideast
'peace process' was still underway with all the hype, fanfare, and false hopes.
The 'peace process' ended up being a road to nowhere–full of highfalutin awards,
accords, meetings, 'confidence-building measures' and an endless array of Jewish advisors,
pro-Israel committees, donors and 'experts'. Kahane knew that it was doomed from the
start.
Nevertheless, Jews from nearly every 'mainstream' political faction world-wide derided
Kahane's straightforward and 'racist' solutions, even though his prophetic advice now mirrors
today's Israeli policies. Meir Kahane was simply ahead of his time. He was also far too
candid for his liberal cousins to own up to.
A few years after Kahane's televised debate with McCloskey, he was assassinated in
NYC.
In any event, it is undeniable that blood/ancestry is at the heart of Judaism. The Law of
Return tells us so. Religiosity on the other hand has become somewhat incidental to
Jewishness. A committed, ethnic Jew (but an atheistic one) such as Allen Dershowitz, for
instance, is as 'Jewish' as any orthodox rabbi. Identity and ancestry is what matters.
Thus I appreciate Stern's criticism of his Jewish cousins who have saddled America with
top-down 'liberalism', a movement that's functioned as a court-ordered Trojan Horse inside
America.
Like his Jewish cousins however, Stern's still a bit of a fraud–since he relies on
double-standards, special privileges, and ancestral grievances to justify his unique
collection of rights as a land-grabbing Zionist.
Stern hypocritically derides non-violent whites in Charlottesville who want the same
rights for themselves in America as Jews get in Israel: to preserve their culture,
traditions, racial lineage, and majority status. These are core Zionist values. But Stern
would deny them to any and all American whites.
Stern is also disinclined to express any gratitude to his duplicitous, liberal cousins for
their decades-long, pro-Jewish activism. Yet Stern is beneficiary of their subterfuge. Jewish
activism helps explain why Jews have risen in America while others–such as the white,
working-class men in Charlottesville–have fallen.
US Liberalism (with plenty of help from Zionist Jews) coercively integrated America
racially (but not in Israel), opened our borders to all (but not in Israel) and erected a
towering wall between 'church and state' (but not in Israel).
These tricks have been good for the Jews, which includes Stern. He can now wear his
yarmulke proudly and not get laughed at–or punched (since its a 'hate crime'
today).
Liberal and 'secular' Jews also helped orchestrate Washington's de facto marriage to the
State of Israel. This has also empowered Stern. And to the delight of most Jews (both left
and right) the US has been largely de-Christianized over the past sixty years. This is more
smart work by Jewish jurists, lawyers, and academics–many with close ties to the
'liberal' ACLU.
As a beneficiary of all this, Stern should thank his liberal cousins for this political
black magic. Yet he pretends to object.
Stern is at least correct when he acknowledges that 'progressive' Jews have damaged the
West and that they are still doing so.
How long jews can maintain their political power, not just in the USA, but in the whole
west, I have no idea, there is not much that points to an important change soon.
This, of course, is the $64,000 question. Rather than us Dumb Goyim speculating
about it, why not listen to what a political insider had to say about this issue back in
2001?
His name is Dr. Stephen Steinlight. And although Ron Unz has characterized him as "some
totally obscure Zionist activist" he was was for more than five years Director of National
Affairs (domestic policy) at the American Zionist Committee. If that doesn't qualify him
as an "insider," I don't know what does.
Excerpts from The Zionist Stake in America's Changing Demography: Reconsidering a
Misguided Immigration Policy :
Facing Up to the Gradual Demise of Zionist Political Power
Not that it is the case that our disproportionate political power (pound for pound the
greatest of any ethnic/cultural group in America) will erode all at once, or even quickly.
We will be able to hang on to it for perhaps a decade or two longer. Unless and until
the triumph of campaign finance reform is complete , an extremely unlikely scenario,
the great material wealth of the Zionist community will continue to give it significant
advantages. We will continue to court and be courted by key figures in Congress. That power
is exerted within the political system from the local to national levels through soft
money, and especially the provision of out-of-state funds to candidates sympathetic to
Israel , a high wall of church/state separation, and social liberalism combined with
selective conservatism on criminal justice and welfare issues.
Zionist voter participation also remains legendary; it is among the highest in the
nation. Incredible as it sounds, in the recent presidential election more Jews voted in Los
Angeles than Latinos. But should the naturalization of resident aliens begin to move more
quickly in the next few years, a virtual certainty -- and it should -- then it is only a
matter of time before the electoral power of Latinos, as well as that of others, overwhelms
us.
All of this notwithstanding, in the short term, a number of factors will continue to
play into our hands, even amid the unprecedented wave of continuous immigration. The very
scale of the current immigration and its great diversity paradoxically constitutes at least
a temporary political asset. While we remain comparatively coherent as a voting bloc, the
new mostly non-European immigrants are fractured into a great many distinct, often
competing groups, many with no love for each other. This is also true of the many new
immigrants from rival sides in the ongoing Balkan wars, as it is for the growing south
Asian population from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. They have miles and miles to go
before they overcome historical hatreds, put aside current enmities and forgive recent
enormities, especially Pakistani brutality in the nascent Bangladesh. Queens is no
melting pot!
For perhaps another generation, an optimistic forecast, the Zionist community is thus in
a position where it will be able to divide and conquer and enter into selective coalitions
that support our agendas. But the day will surely come when an effective Asian-American
alliance will actually bring Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, Koreans, Vietnamese,
and the rest closer together. And the enormously complex and as yet significantly divided
Latinos will also eventually achieve a more effective political federation. The fact is
that the term "Asian American" has only recently come into common parlance among younger
Asians (it is still rejected by older folks), while "Latinos" or "Hispanics" often do not
think of themselves as part of a multinational ethnic bloc but primarily as Mexicans,
Cubans, or Puerto Ricans.
Even with these caveats, an era of astoundingly disproportionate Zionist legislative
representation may already have peaked. It is unlikely we will ever see many more U.S.
Senates with 10 Zionist members. And although had Al Gore been allowed by the Supreme Court
to assume office, a Jew would have been one heartbeat away from the presidency, it may be
we'll never get that close again. With the changes in view, how long do we actually
believe that nearly 80 percent of the entire foreign aid budget of the United States will
go to Israel?
If Steinlight was obscure or not, I do not know.
What struck me in one of his articles is how he sees the holocaust story as essential to Zionist power in the USA.
Also in that article he wondered if at some point in time Jews might be driven out of the
USA, 'but, there is always the life boat Israel'.
That Israel will collapse the minute Zionist power in the USA [eventually] ends, he seems unable to see
this.
About your quote, it seems to have been written before it became clear to the world that
western power is diminishing.
So even if Zionist power over the West remains, Zionist power in the world is diminishing
too.
NATO, EU, Pentagon, neocons, whatever, may still want war with Russia, my idea is that on the other
hand that more and more people see this intention, and are absolutely against.
While western influence is receding, Assad still is there, Russia has bases in Syria, Erdogan, on what side is he ?; and so on and so forth.
The battle cry 'no more war for Israel' exists for a long time in the USA. And I interpret discussions on
this side of the Atlantic about increasing anti-Semitism as the acknowledgement of the fact that more and more people
on this side begin to criticize Zionists, especially with regard to Palestinians.
"... Last month, an unsealed FBI indictment of four American white supremacists from the Rise Above Movement (RAM) declared that the defendants had trained with Ukraine's Azov Battalion, a neo-Nazi militia officially incorporated into the country's national guard. The training took place after the white supremacist gang participated in violent riots in Huntington Beach and Berkeley, California and Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017. ..."
"... Let's not forget that the illegal coup in Ukraine and ensuing civil war was pushed by Obama/Hillary. It was HRC who promoted Dick Cheney's chief foreign adviser, Victoria Nuland, to Secretary of European Affairs, and it was Nuland who was caught on tape discussing how to "midwife this thing" in Ukraine. ..."
US-Funded Neo-Nazis in Ukraine Mentor US White Supremacists November 17, 2018 •
43 Comments
Short-sighted U.S. foreign policy that backs jihadists in the Middle East and neo-Nazis in
Ukraine is once again blowing back on the United States, as Max Blumenthal explains.
FBI: Azov Battalion Trained Rise Above Movement
Last month, an unsealed
FBI indictment of four American white supremacists from the Rise Above Movement (RAM)
declared that the defendants had trained with Ukraine's Azov Battalion, a neo-Nazi militia
officially incorporated into the country's national guard. The training took place after the
white supremacist gang participated in violent riots in Huntington Beach and Berkeley,
California and Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017.
The indictment stated that the Azov Battalion "is believed to have participated in training
and radicalizing United States-based white supremacy organizations."
After a wave of racist violence across America that culminated in the massacre of twelve
Jewish worshippers at a Pittsburgh synagogue, the revelation that violent white supremacists
have been traveling abroad for training and ideological indoctrination with a well-armed
neo-Nazi militia should cause extreme alarm.
Not only are white supremacists from across the West flocking to Ukraine to learn from the
combat experience of their fascist brothers-in-arms, they are doing so openly -- chronicling
their experiences on social media before they bring their lessons back home. But U.S. law
enforcement has done nothing so far to restrict the flow of right-wing American extremists to
Azov's bases.
There is one likely explanation for the U.S. government's hands-off approach to Azov
recruitment: the extremist militia is fighting pro-Russian separatists as a front-line proxy of
Washington. In fact, the United States has directly armed the Azov Battalion, forking over
anti-tank rocket launchers and even sending a team of Army officers to meet in the field with
Azov commanders in 2017.
Though Congress
passed legislation this year forbidding military aid to Azov on the grounds of its white
supremacist ideology, the Trump administration's authorization of $200 million in offensive
weaponry and aid to the Ukrainian military makes it likely new stores of weapons will wind up
the extremist regiment's hands. When queried by
reporters about evidence of American military training of Azov personnel, multiple U.S. army
spokespersons admitted there was no mechanism in place to prevent that from
happening.
... ... ...
Hide Behind , November 18, 2018 at 6:55 pm
Strange people that live in US, those that live under belife of free speech and
expression, and yet there are literally thousands of examples where those of opposing view
points that try and present them in public are met with disruptive behaviors, banning from
presentations of opposing ideology from speaking at Colleges and University campus, and
removal and witholding of tenure to those who question edicts of correct speech and lets
admit it anything that questions support of Israel the State.
And condoling of violent behavior by groups in US , crosses religious, political Partys,
Anarchist, and now a liber storm trooper style ANTIFA that is beginning to better equip
themselve tha. just pipes, knives, and clubs into having numbers armed with the Leftist hate
most guns.
We have ultra right Trump supportive Militia that actively said they would revolt if Trump
was defeated and now if he is impeached.
The largest and most virulent part of the southern state militia are of Christian Zionist,
and some militias signature patches have Star of David upon them and the cross
You think that the October massacre marks a culmination? That is naive: it is undoubtedly
not an end point and part of a crescendo building for decades. Meanwhile, the professional
Right keeps denouncing the Democrats for anti-Semitism, which is frequently simply criticism
of Israel and has nothing whatever to do with attacks on persons or property. Your article
reminds us that these psychopathic attacks are coming from a particular branch of the "White
Right" which has been talking upon Satanic Judaism and killing Jews–and targeting
synagogues–for quite a while.
Zenobia van Dongen , November 18, 2018 at 5:21 pm
Fascinating article by Max Blumenthal.
Max Blumenthal rightly denounces Italy's fascist Casa Pound party but fails to report that
Casa Pound is on excellent terms with Hezbollah, as reported by the Italian daily Repubblica
in 2015.
According to Repubblica, the European Parliament declared Hezbollah a terrorist group on 10
March 2005.
On 26 September 2015 a convention called "Mediterranean Solidarity", "the first international
convention of solidarity [among] identities" was held in Rome attended by Rima Fakhri, member
of Hezbollah's politburo and Sayyed Ammar Al Moussaw, responsible for Hezbollah's
international relations, as well as by top Casa Pound leaders like Alberto Palladino, who was
seen in the Donbass during fighting between Russia and the Ukraine, Franco Nerozzi, who was
convicted of international terrorism in Verona after taking part in a failed coup detat on
the Comoros islands, Casa Pound leader Giovanni Feola, and Luca Bertoni, representing the
Lombardy-Russia Association, who always accompanies Matteo Salvini, leader of the far-right
Lega, on his trips to Moscow.
"Italian right-wingers have consolidated relations with the most fundamentalist and militant
Islamic groups. In 2013 the City of Rome refused permission to the Syrian Uodai Soso Ramadan,
also invited to the congress, to hold a pro-Assad demonstration. At the time he was staying
at CasaPound."
The article on the neo-Nazi presence in Ukraine is very interesting. I am a white
working-class white separatist with some longtime following. Even though this article had
both lies, truths and maybes. It was well done. However, when it says there is no other side
in the US with another view, you are wrong. I have experienced the attempted and sometimes
successful penetration of the right wing by CIA types for many years and gotten rid of 2
serious penetrations in years past.
I have warned those that listen not to involve themselves
in the Ukraine situation. In fact, don't travel to other countries. Where you do not really
know the score and may be fighting on the wrong side anyway.
I am aware that anything the
State Department involves itself in is totally suspect and probably criminal. Even if you
don't acknowledge it there are other factions that are pretty much out of the right wing, but
are still very strongly White separatists . In fact, my politics have moved to the left on
several important issues. It would appear to me that the powers that be are attempting to
design a right wing alleged neo-Nazi movement somewhat patterned some what after ISIS.It is
obvious Blumenthal's article has a lot of truth in it, but his mindset tends to get in the
way . When he uses the old dog whistles like Trump when labeling people. Tom Metzger
Geo , November 18, 2018 at 6:36 pm
Curious why you are a White Separatist? Is there any logical reason because the best I can
gather from the many separatist commenters that have littered threads like these over the
years is that they're too fragile to get by in an ethically equal society. It seems that
they're greatest problem is that others have rights now so it's harder for these White
Separatists to succeed seeing as how they must do so on merit instead of birthright.
Be curious to find out if there is any justification for ethnic separatism other than
petty whining because of some mythical birthright you feel you're being denied?
rosemerry , November 18, 2018 at 1:56 pm
Notice that they admit the connection goes back at least to 2014. We never hear much about
the overthrow of the new pro-Russian government in Ukraine after the Russians had worked for
four years with the pro-Western lot. Only when Nuland/Yats and co interfered did the new
"government" with its Nazi links become powerful with the help of the EU and of course USA.
The whole continuing insistence on Russia being an enemy has no basis in reason or sense. To
support Ukraine now just because it is fanatically against Russia after decades of
cooperation in the USSR is not justified by any possible link with "national security of the
USA" or of Europe.
See this video of Obama's ambassador to Ukraine Pyatt going to visit training base in
western Ukraine where Nazis brought into the then newly formed National Guard are still being
trained by US Army Special Forces from Fort Carson, Colorado . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxeZFS9hTUg
Patrick Lucius , November 18, 2018 at 12:01 pm
Let's not forget that the illegal coup in Ukraine and ensuing civil war was pushed by
Obama/Hillary. It was HRC who promoted Dick Cheney's chief foreign adviser, Victoria Nuland,
to Secretary of European Affairs, and it was Nuland who was caught on tape discussing how to
"midwife this thing" in Ukraine.
Nuland is wife of chief neocon Richard Kagan, founder of
PNAC. This essentially restarted the cold war between Russia and America. Obama tarnished his
presidency primarily by working with Clinton, including the destruction of Libya. Where were
the Democrats to object to such shenanigans? I don't know where they were, but I do know
where they are now–charging Trump with colluding with the Russians. I thought it was
fascinating that Trump, when he secured the Republican nomination, insisted that the
Republicans remove from their platform the promise of military aid to Western Ukraine, to
fight the pro-Russian eastern Ukrainians. Where were the Democrats to applaud this anti-war
mongering? I know where I, as a Democrat was–I was leaving the party and becoming a
Trump supporter.
Martin - Swedish citizen , November 18, 2018 at 2:30 pm
Thanks, these are important points, is about the neocons.
On our smaller Swedish scale ,
I was similarly disgusted with the support by the once much more ethical Social Democratic
Party for the US- and EU-supported coup in Kiev.
lucius , November 18, 2018 at 7:58 pm
Lots of room for disgust In America, the traditional Democrats and Republicans both are
backing the neocons' stance with just about no questioning or examination. It seems to be a
tribal thing, or some sort of group response, like geese in flight, or buffalo running off a
cliff
Thank you for providing a platform for Max Blumenthal's reporting.
Wayne Mclaughlin , November 18, 2018 at 10:35 am
Very good article except for the line " .. Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the
failure of the EU and NATO to prevent it ." I always take issue with that representation
because it implies an aggressive and forceful action by Russia when in fact Crimea seceded
from Ukraine after the western backed and illegal coup of the democratically elected
government.
Skip Scott , November 18, 2018 at 2:11 pm
One of the definitions of annexation is "the adding of new territory". I believe this is
the way the word is being used in this article. It has come to mean "forceful acquisition" to
many folks, and this leads to confusion. To those of us who know a little history, maybe a
better word would have "rejoining", since Crimea was part of Russia until the early 1950's.
When Khrushchev gave it to Ukraine it was still part of the USSR, so it was really no more
than a gesture. The Russian naval base in Sevastopol has been there since the 1700's.
Martin - Swedish citizen , November 18, 2018 at 2:25 pm
Very good point!
Wording is important, and accepting the word annexation without clarification may be a step
towards buying the lie.
It must be a terrible feeling to know you can't compete with people that you believe are
inferior. Nice to have some fellow losers to commiserate with, I suppose.
Is there anything you won't do in your rabid efforts to dominate the planet?
Of course, when you think about it, these Ukrainian thugs are no worse than other outfits
America heavily supports, from the mercenaries of Syria and the government of Saudi Arabia to
the King of Bahrain and the government of Israel.
A couple of these last – Israel, Saudi Arabia – kill more innocent civilians
than any terrorist organization could dream of doing.
And no one says a thing.
mike k , November 18, 2018 at 8:27 am
Max Blumenthal does a valuable service shining a light into the dark places of Nazi
Fascism in the US. Anyone who thinks these groups are too small to be important, should
recall how small the movement that gave us Hitler was in it's beginnings.
mike k , November 18, 2018 at 8:16 am
Pro Nazi sentiment has never died in the US Oligarchy. The CIA is essentially a fascist
organization pretending to be protectors of democracy. Worship of violence and
authoritarianism is endemic to the American Spirit. All the better for being the world's
greatest bully, pretending to be the guardians of the highest values. Those in high places
here are the evil scum of the universe.
(Thanks for the new font! So much better.)
John A , November 18, 2018 at 7:57 am
The US is now funding a schism in the Orthodox church between Ukraine and Russia. The evil
of the US knows no bounds.
rosemerry , November 18, 2018 at 2:01 pm
Of course, "good ole Americans" like Mike Pence claim to be Christians, and many other US
Christians blame the Russian Orthodox church for not being as modern as they are and ready to
accept LGBTQ..
Realist , November 18, 2018 at 4:14 am
Not surprising that some Americans think that racial bigotry is okie dokie when both
political parties in Washington, especially the one that bases its platform on membership in
certain favored identity groups, practice it routinely against anyone or anything Russian or
Iranian. They have a few other fall guys as well, but those are the two blamed for everything
these days.
No question but that Ukraine is one of the most ethnically prejudiced and fascist regimes
on the planet, though that doesn't seem to bother Washington, as long as they are
frenetically Russophobic. Neither does Israel's rampant anti-Arab, anti-Persian and
anti-Muslim Zionism bother the bigots in DC in the slightest.
Yet they get into a lather when the small nations of Eastern Europe, especially those in
the Visegrad countries (plus Austria, Slovenia and Croatia) constituting most of the
Intermarium that the author alluded to, which happen to have both small populations and low
birthrates, reasonably fear that their native populations will be swamped out within a couple
of generations if they are forced by the EU to take in significant numbers of Islamic
migrants from the lands thrown into turmoil by the U.S.-instigated wars throughout the Middle
East and North Africa. Hungary's Viktor Orban is vilified in the West as some sort of new
Hitler (must be Putin's twin brother) for implementing on a much smaller scale what Donald
Trump is trying to institutionalise in the enormously larger United States.
Rather than force all these sociological "side effects" to its catastrophic wars on its
putative "allies," perhaps Washington should finally see the light and do the right thing by
winding down the carnage and aiding the resettlement and rebuilding of the war-torn countries
by their displaced citizens. But they won't–they have overtly refused, at least until
none of America's debts can be paid with devalued petrodollars, because that would let Russia
off the hook, whom Washington wants to see crushed as badly as der Fuehrer did–I think
it's trying to complete his mission. Plus the glorious new war against Iran would have to be
cancelled. They used to say, "all roads lead to Rome." They oughta re-write that for the
modern world as, "all strife traces from Washington."
mike k , November 18, 2018 at 8:19 am
Excellent comments Realist.
Joe Tedesky , November 18, 2018 at 10:55 am
Like our 'Big Pharma Over Medicated Society' we in the West would rather beat the hell out
of the symptom rather than cure the cause, is our American hegemonic trademark. Similar to
tightening the screw so tight the fragile glass begins to crack so you fix it with a hammer.
It appears our leaders love spreading their chaos. None of this shows signs of ever ending
well, but yet we overdose the symptom to the extreme that the side affect is what finally
kills us. In the end it only matters how it shows on a profit and loss sheet.
rosemerry , November 18, 2018 at 2:05 pm
An excellent contribution-thanks realist.
The USA has steadfastly refused to rebuild their devastated victims' lands even when UN legal
demands clearly demanded it eg Nicaragua.
Excellent reporting, Max! I'm curious. Is there any connection with present or former Eric
Prince mercenary soldiers, or soldiers from other private mercenary organizations, with these
fascist movements?
Joe Tedesky , November 17, 2018 at 11:15 pm
This fascist trend should go well with Operation Timber Sycamore, where the U.S. armed the
terrorist jihadist. When will our American leaders learn, that if you play with fire you will
get burned. The rise of the Nazi is one more reason that we Americans should focus on this
type of news as Max Blumenthal reports. Furthermore the American Jewish who do not support
the Israeli apartheid state should join good thinking Americans to put down this disgusting
happening. So thank you Victoria Nuland, Geoffrey Pratt, and the rest of this sick and insane
DC bunch, because without you where would our Homeland Security budget be?
Think it can't happen here . the Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooter lived 4 blocks from me. Btw
these racist don't vote, they just hate. And 'no' I didn't know him, but I know of others
sick birds all of them.
And especially a warm thank you goes out to Max Blumenthal for his courageous reporting.
Bless you Max. Joe
Bob Van Noy , November 18, 2018 at 10:32 am
Thank you Joe. The larger picture and insanity of the "enemy of my enemy is my friend"
Philosophy, is and always has been totally without moral responsibility. Interestingly, it
seems to be a fundamental aspect of post WWII organizing by our own OSS, who became the CIA
in 1949. Alan Dulles was busy organizing this kind of activity before that war ended.
Thanks to you Joe and of course Max Blumenthal for addressing this subject. I'll include a
link to the early heritage of this bizarre and illegal concept here. Many thanks Consortium
News.
Thanks Bob reading John Mearsheimer well defined portrayal of what led up to the fall of
the Ukraine as we once knew it, is reminiscent of reading Robert Parry's many articles on
this subject. If you recall Parry was deeply into this U.S. led NATO aggression. Through the
MSM of the West the tables were turned to point the finger to instead Russian aggression.
Putin is never shown in light of his policy achievements nor are his speeches calling out to
the world for sensible detente where needed ever covered, but instead Putin is demonized to
no end.
Little is remembered, or even known by those in the West of another time where American
and British capitalism hugged the very nature of Nazism, while the Russians even back then
were too the target of this type of Western aggression. Who's needs history when dreams of
speculative profit should cloud their eyes?
It's in Europe's elite that we find the spirit of appeasement that once enabled fascists
and communists. •
November 16, 2018
French President Emmanuel Macron has a new go-to rhetorical trope: alarm over the return of
the horrors of the 1930s. Last summer, he decried the reappearance of populist governments
"rising like a leprosy, throughout Europe," as well as a "resurgent nationalism" and the
emergence of governments that support the closing of frontiers and don't respect "even the
right to asylum."
Macron's targets are the newly formed government of Italy, along with Hungary, Poland, and
the Czech Republic, all resistant to the flow of migrants into Europe. He returned again to the
analogy earlier this month, telling an interviewer he was "struck" by the present's
similarities to the 1930s and calling again for resistance to the "nationalist leprosy." He
went on this tear yet again while hosting the Armistice Day centenary commemorations, where he
contrasted the "generous" France of "universal values" with the shallow nationalism of nations
that look out only for their own interests, a remark widely interpreted as a rebuke to
President Trump.
To punctuate his point, he added a reference to Julien Benda's Treason of the
Intellectuals , published in 1927, which decried burgeoning nationalist sentiments among
Europe's intellectuals as a whole and certain French conservatives in particular. It closed
with a paean to Franco-German cooperation, the European Union, and the United Nations.
Macron is surely correct that the 1930s were generally a terrible decade. That's true even
if what he said is not all that different from the commonplace left-wing view that all
conservatives who think about anything more than reducing taxes can be safely decried as
fascists and Nazis and deserve no platform in our political system. But the analogy to the
1930s deserves unpacking. Whatever lessons might be learned from history, they're not nearly so
straightforward as Macron seems to believe.
First of all, there was not one but two active murderous totalitarian movements popular in
the '30s: fascism and communism. Communism came first. The Soviet government had probably
killed 10 million innocent people before Hitler came to power. By the 1930s, huge slices of the
intelligentsia in Britain, France, and, yes, the United States were head over heels in love
with Stalinism. These thinkers produced reams of tributes to the bloodthirsty Soviet system,
and were far more dominant in Western intellectual life than the targets of Benda's ire in the
1920s. Second, because Bolshevism came first, it acted as an accelerant, perhaps even a major
cause, of fascism. One definition of fascism -- from my thesis supervisor Bob Paxton, probably
the greatest American expert on the subject -- is "hard measures by a frightened middle
class."
What they were frightened of, of course, was Bolshevism. And rightly so, even if pursuing
violent and anti-democratic means in defense of property and order had a cost in suffering just
as horrific as those they had feared.
Additionally, among the large numbers of people who were neither fascists nor communists,
nor fellow travelers to either, there were significant currents of opinion hardly conducive to
maintaining democratic peace. In early 1933, the Oxford Union held one of its most famous and
historically significant debates: aye or nay on the motion "that this House will in no
circumstance fight for its King and Country." The motion carried by a nearly two-to-one margin,
a result noted and commented upon all over the world.
Some of the arguments made in favor of "aye" were standard communist fare, i.e., "It is no
mere coincidence that the only country fighting for the cause of peace, Soviet Russia, is the
country that has rid itself of the warmongering clique." But it's likely that the vast majority
of the students who supported the motion, the bright and favored sons of Britain's
establishment, were motivated by pure disgust at the horrendous toll, paid for no terribly good
reason, in the trenches of the Western Front. In any case, the sentiment was widespread enough
in Britain's ruling circles to buttress the arguments for appeasement made a few years later.
It certainly contributed to Hitler's view that Britain and France were soft, unwilling to
resist him.
So if one of the evils of the '30s was the extreme nationalism and fascism that Macron
decried, another was communism. And the combined energy of both led to a spirit of appeasement
on the part of those attached to neither far left or right but unable also to summon much
energy to defend an imperfect bourgeois order. It's this spirit that's most analogous to the
regnant attitudes in contemporary Europe.
For as world leaders and press descended upon Paris to commemorate the end of World War I,
one could see that desire for appeasement take a new form. Last week, a middle-aged Pakistani
Christian woman, a farm worker named Asia Bibi, was freed after eight years on death row for
the charge of "blasphemy." Her conviction was overturned by Pakistan's supreme court, a
decision that immediately provoked mass demonstrations by fundamentalist Muslims demanding her
death. Her attorney fled the country for his safety. Her family requested asylum in Britain, a
request that was reportedly denied because the British government feared it would provoke
"unrest" among Muslims.
Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron, those wordy celebrants of Europe's asylum generosity,
have uttered not a word in support of Bibi, even as both (particularly Merkel) have facilitated
entry into Europe of millions of young Muslim men as "refugees." In contrast to them, Italy's
interior minister Matteo Salvini has said that Italy would welcome Bibi and her family -- who
at this writing are still unable to leave Pakistan.
It's a telling moment -- the government indirectly accused by Macron of harkening back the
dark days of the 1930s is ready to open its arms to a genuine political refugee, while the
governments of Theresa May, Macron, and Merkel opt for social peace -- a "paix bien Munichoise"
as a writer for the French journal Causeur aptly describes the establishment's
accommodating stance towards fundamentalist Islam on European soil.
The Bibi case brings to mind the fascinating story of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Dutch woman of
Somali origin who became a member of parliament and then, after 9/11, a critic of Islam.
Because of threats of murder from Dutch Islamists, she was first forced to live under police
protection and eventually had her citizenship withdrawn by the Dutch government. She moved to
America, becoming, as Salman Rushdie put it, "maybe the first refugee from Western Europe since
the Holocaust."
But in Macron's view, and the view of others from the West's Davos-style establishment, the
threat to Europe's core values can come only from "nationalists" like Hungary's Victor
Orbán, Italy's Salvini, and the likes of Donald Trump. In his famous poem written at the
outbreak of World War II, W.H. Auden famously called the 1930s "a low dishonest decade." The
attitudes that made it so are very much alive in Europe's ruling classes today.
Scott McConnell is a founding editor of and the author of Ex-Neocon: Dispatches From
the Post-9/11 Ideological Wars .
Was French president Emmanuel Macron correct at the WWI commemoration over the weekend when he
asserted that patriotism is the opposite of nationalism in a pointed dig at US president Donald
Trump? RPI Board Members Lew Rockwell and John Laughland join scholar George Szamuely on RT's
Crosstalk to debate whether nationalism is the bogeyman that Macron and others make it out to
be. Or is blaming nationalism just a way to further destroy national sovereignty and bring
about an unelected permanent globalist empire?
President Macron's protests against nationalism this weekend stand in stark contrast with
the words of France's WWII resistance leader and the man who would then become president:
General Charles de Gaulle.
Speaking to his men in 1913, de Gaulle reminded them:
"He who does not love his mother more than other mothers, and his fatherland more than
other fatherlands, loves neither his mother nor his fatherland."
This unquestionable invocation of nationalism reveals how far France has come in its pursuit
of globalist goals, which de Gaulle described later in that same speech as the "appetite of
vice."
While this weekend the media have been sharpening their knives on Macron's words, for use
against President Trump, very few have taken the time to understand what really created the
conditions for the wars of the 20th century. It was globalism's grandfather: imperialism, not
nationalism.
This appears to have been understood at least until the 1980s, though forgotten now. With
historical revisionism applied to nationalism and the great wars, it is much harder to
understand what President Trump means when he calls himself a "nationalist." Though the fault
is with us, not him.
" Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism: nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism
By pursuing our own interests first, with no regard to others,' we erase the very thing that
a nation holds most precious, that which gives it life and makes it great: its moral values,"
President Macron declared from the pulpit of the Armistice 100 commemorations.
Had this been in reverse, there would no doubt have been shrieks of disgust aimed at Mr.
Trump for "politicizing" such a somber occasion. No such shrieks for Mr. Macron, however, who
languishes below 20 percent in national approval ratings in France.
With some context applied, it is remarkably easy to see how President Macron was being
disingenuous.
Nationalism and patriotism are indeed distinct. But they are not opposites.
Nationalism is a philosophy of governance, or how human beings organize their affairs.
Patriotism isn't a governing philosophy. Sometimes viewed as subsidiary to the philosophy of
nationalism, patriotism is better described as a form of devotion.
For all the grandstanding, Mr. Macron may as well have asserted that chicken is the opposite
of hot sauce, so meaningless was the comparison.
Imperialism, we so quickly forget, was the order of the day heading into the 20th century.
Humanity has known little else but empire since 2400 B.C. The advent of globalism, replete with
its foreign power capitals and multi-national institutions is scarcely distinct.
Imperialism -- as opposed to nationalism -- seeks to impose a nation's way of life, its
currency, its traditions, its flags, its anthems, its demographics, and its rules and laws upon
others wherever they may be.
Truly, President Trump's nationalism heralds a return to the old U.S. doctrine of
non-intervention, expounded by President George Washington in his farewell address of 1796:
" It must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves, by artificial ties, in the ordinary
vicissitudes of [Europe's] politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her
friendships or enmities."
It should not have to be pointed out that the great wars of the 20th century could not be
considered "ordinary vicissitudes", but rather, that imperialism had begun to run amok on the
continent.
It was an imperialism rooted in nihilism, putting the totality of the state at its heart.
Often using nationalism as nothing more than a method of appeal, socialism as a doctrine of
governance, and Jews as a subject of derision and scapegoating.
Today's imperialism is known as globalism.
It is what drives nations to project outward their will, usually with force; causes armies
to cross borders in the hope of subjugating other human beings or the invaded nation's natural
resources; and defines a world, or region, or continent by its use of central authority and
foreign capital control.
Instead of armies of soldiers, imperialists seek to dominate using armies of economists and
bureaucrats. Instead of forced payments to a foreign capital, globalism figured out how to
create economic reliance: first on sterling, then on the dollar, now for many on the Euro. This
will soon be leapfrogged by China's designs.
And while imperialism has served some good purposes throughout human history, it is only
when grounded in something larger than man; whether that be natural law, God, or otherwise. But
such things are scarcely long-lived.
While benevolent imperialism can create better conditions over a period of time, humanity's
instincts will always lean towards freedom and self-governance.
It is this fundamental distinction between the United States' founding and that of the
modern Republic of France that defines the two nations.
The people of France are "granted" their freedoms by the government, and the government
creates the conditions and dictates the terms upon which those freedoms are exercised.
As Charles Kesler wrote for the Claremont
Review of Books in May, "As a result, there are fewer and fewer levers by which the governed
can make its consent count".
France is the archetypal administrative state, while the United States was founded on
natural law, a topic that scarcely gets enough attention anymore.
Nationalism - or nationism, if you will - therefore represents a break from the war-hungry
norm of human history . Its presence in the 20th century has been rewritten and
bastardized.
A nationalist has no intention of invading your country or changing your society. A
nationalist cares just as much as anyone else about the plights of others around the world but
believes putting one's own country first is the way to progress. A nationalist would never seek
to divide by race, gender, ethnicity, or sexual preference, or otherwise. This runs contrary to
the idea of a united, contiguous nation at ease with itself.
Certainly nationalism's could-be bastard child of chauvinism can give root to imperialistic
tendencies. But if the nation can and indeed does look after its own, and says to the world
around it, "these are our affairs, you may learn from them, you may seek advice, we may even
assist if you so desperately need it and our affairs are in order," then nationalism can be a
great gift to the 21st century and beyond.
"... Look, mostly this whole patriotism/nationalism word game is just sadly funny. You are a patriot if you think like me. You are a nationalist if you don't. Patriotism is good, nationalism is bad. If I am a patriot, I am good, if you are a nationalist, you must be bad. ..."
... Look, mostly this whole patriotism/nationalism word game is just sadly funny. You are a patriot if you think like me. You
are a nationalist if you don't. Patriotism is good, nationalism is bad. If I am a patriot, I am good, if you are a nationalist,
you must be bad.
I think that the wisdom of Humpty Dumpty when speaking to Alice fits here:
"When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is which is to be master -- that's all."
"... . To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com. ..."
In a rebuke that bordered on a national insult Sunday, Emmanuel Macron sniped at Donald
Trump's calling himself a nationalist.
"Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism; nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism,"
Macron said.
As for Trump's policy of "America first," Macron trashed such atavistic thinking in this new
age: "By saying we put ourselves first and the others don't matter, we erase what a nation
holds dearest, what gives it life, what makes it great and what is essential: its moral
values."
Though he is being hailed as Europe's new anti-Trump leader who will stand up for
transnationalism and globalism, Macron revealed his ignorance of America.
Trump's ideas are not ideological but rooted in our country's history.
America was born between the end of the French and Indian War, the Declaration of
Independence in 1776, and the ratification of the Constitution in 1788. Both the general who
led us in the Revolution and the author of that declaration became president. Both put America
first. And both counseled their countrymen to avoid "entangling" or "permanent" alliances with
any other nation, as we did for 160 years.
Were George Washington and Thomas Jefferson lacking in patriotism?
When Woodrow Wilson, after being re-elected in 1916 on the slogan "He Kept Us Out of War,"
took us into World War I, he did so as an "associate," not as an Allied power. American troops
fought under American command.
After that war, the U.S. Senate rejected an alliance with France. Under Franklin Roosevelt,
Congress formally voted for neutrality in any future European war.
The U.S. emerged from World War II as the least bloodied and least damaged nation because we
stayed out for more than two years after it had begun.
We did not invade France until four years after it was occupied, the British had been thrown
off the Continent, and Josef Stalin's Soviet Union had been fighting and dying for three
years.
The leaders who kept us out of the two world wars as long as they did -- did they not serve
our nation well, given that America's total losses were just over 500,000 dead, compared with
the millions that other nations lost?
At the Armistice Day ceremony, Macron declared, "By saying we put ourselves first and the
others don't matter, we erase what a nation holds dearest its moral values."
But Trump did not say that other countries don't matter. He only said we should put our own
country first.
What country does Emmanuel Macron put first?
Does the president of France see himself as a citizen of the world with responsibility for
all of Europe and all of mankind?
Charles de Gaulle was perhaps the greatest French patriot of the 20th century. Yet he spoke
of a Europe of nation-states, built a national nuclear arsenal, ordered NATO out of France in
1966, and, in Montreal in 1967, declared, "Long live a free Quebec" -- inciting French
Canadians to rise up against "les Anglo-Saxons" and create their own nation.
Was de Gaulle lacking in patriotism?
By declaring American nationalists anti-patriotic, Macron has asserted a claim to the
soon-to-be-vacant chair of Angela Merkel.
But is Macron really addressing the realities of the new Europe and world in which we now
live? Or is he simply assuming a heroic liberal posture to win the applause of Western
corporate and media elites?
The realities: in Britain, Scots are seeking secession, and the English have voted to get
out of the European Union. Many Basques and Catalans wish to secede from Spain. Czechs and
Slovaks have split the blanket and parted ways.
Anti-EU sentiment is rampant in populist-dominated Italy.
A nationalism their peoples regard as deeply patriotic has triumphed in Poland and Hungary
and is making gains even in Germany.
The leaders of the world's three greatest military powers -- Trump in the U.S., Vladimir
Putin in Russia, and Xi Jinping in China -- are all nationalists.
Turkish nationalist Recep Tayyip Erdogan rules in Ankara; Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi is
head of India. Jair Bolsonaro, a Trumpian nationalist, is the incoming president of Brazil. Is
not Benjamin Netanyahu an Israeli nationalist?
In France, a poll of voters last week showed that Marine Le Pen's renamed party,
Rassemblement National, has moved ahead of Macron's party for the May 2019 European Parliament
elections.
If there is a valid criticism of Trump's foreign policy, it is not that he has failed to
recognize the new realities of the 21st century. It's that he has not moved expeditiously to
dissolve old alliances that put America at risk of war in faraway lands where no vital U.S.
interests exist.
Why are we still committed to fight for a South Korea far richer and more populous than the
nuclear-armed North? Why are U.S. planes and ships still bumping into Russian planes and ships
in the Baltic and Black seas?
Why are we still involved in the half-dozen wars into which Bush II and Barack Obama got us
in the Middle East?
Why do we not have the "America first" foreign policy we voted for?
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That
Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever . To find out more about Patrick
Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators
website at www.creators.com.
It's probably more complex and there is not solid boundary between nationalism (love of your
own country or ethnicity at the expense of other) and patriotism (just love of you own country).
Envy is a very human trait (Great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin said that it is the sister of
competition, so it comes for noble family) and if you love you country you definitely can envy
other countries and this feeling complicates things -- bridging the gap between the patriotism
and the nationalism.
The two are not always easy to distinguish and a 'My country right or wrong' mindset seems to
be dangerously on the rise. Also often this whole patriotism/nationalism word game is just sadly funny. You are a patriot if you
think like me. You are a nationalist if you don't. Patriotism is good, nationalism is bad. If I am a patriot, I am good, if you
are a nationalist, you must be bad.
Ukrainians has a saying that reflect this deep feeling of envy " God I do not want any
specific favors for myself, but please make it so that my neighbor house was burned out"
Notable quotes:
"... I long ago decided that Nationalism as these two great minds defined it was a bad thing and that I hoped the United States would not descend to such a depth of false pride as to become nationalistic in this sense. I have lived to be disappointed in this. ..."
George Orwell wrote in "Notes on Nationalism," that "By 'patriotism' I mean devotion to a
particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world
but has no wish to force upon other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both
militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for
power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige,
not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his
own individuality ."
I have tried to act as I imagine a patriot should and in a way that Kedourie and Orwell
might approve. I long ago decided that Nationalism as these two great minds defined it was
a bad thing and that I hoped the United States would not descend to such a depth of false pride
as to become nationalistic in this sense. I have lived to be disappointed in this.
In general I support Macron's expressed view on this subject but it should be said that much
of his vehemence on this subject is caused by his own search for approval in France and
reluctance to see Europe deprived of the post WW2 economic benefits and subsidized defense
against the USSR long provided by the United States. From my point of view Macron appears a
self serving politician in this matter.
We should all be careful not to confuse Patriotism and Nationalism. pl
Orwell's intellect is overrated, and his aphorisms have become thought-ending cliches.
Look at the string of assumptions in quote above. Do individuals really 'choose' to
'sink' their consciousness into a greater body? What makes far more sense is that at the
'core' of I there is a 'we', which is conditioned by prior forms of particularity -
religion, ethnicity, language, race, and culture. This is the basis of a harmonious
common good, and a meaningful lifeworld.
Orwell grew up in a time of increasing scale, managerialism, and atomizaton. His
thinking narrates the moral discourse shaped by that anti-social environment and its
effects (mass wars) but dresses it up in an emancipatory narrative. One is immediately
struck by his lack of foresight in predicting how power would operate as the 20th century
wore on (Foucault and and Huxley are a lot closer the truth), and his inability to
grapple with the essence of power and its moral and conceptual implications as a
whole.
In reality, power is a moral imperative, and its acquisition and application the
inaugural raison d'être of the state and the concomitant society. Hence, the cogito
subject at the heart of Orwell's evaluative presuppositions is itself a product of prior
systems of power, upstream from personal judgement and value sets. Orwell proceeds to
demand by implication we view the ancestral efforts which secured our position in the
present day as illegitimate, since they conformed to emergent anthropological patterns of
conflict and conquest instead of categorical laws plucked out of thin air by self-styled
'enlightened' big-brains during the 18th century. Had we actually lived by these
'standards', those of us left would be a marginalized set of tribes pushed to the far
north of Europe, regularly getting shafted by whatever Magian civilization moved in. As a
matter of fact, that's happening right now as these self-critical ideas have installed
themselves within our cultural substrate.
These pious set of mere assertions are deployed by the ruling globalist cabal to
justify the replacement of Western founding stocks. Yet they are so ingrained among our
senior cohort, when their *own people actually under attack* seek to affirm themselves
without contradiction in *response*, they are viewed as the root menace. But if you have
a decline and you have a desire to assert yourself to arrest the decline, and you have to
apologize to yourself about even having the idea of assertion to arrest decline, you're
not going to get anywhere, are you?
Those who feel uncomfortable about this should have worked harder to prevent the
erosion of the historic American nation, and if there is nothing they could have done
against the DC Behemoth, abstain from opposing the instinctive response of the cultural
immune system.
I'm not American, but i'm 5th generation in an Anglo-setter nation. The
implication here is that i'm an ungrateful you whipper-snapper who just doesn't
grasp the sacrifices and horrors of the 20th century. Exactly when does my
generation get the moral cachet entitling us to input directions into the
civilizational compass? Arguments predicated on commitment to a cause haven no
inherent validity. I'm certainly not disparaging or denying here, but you're
putting us in a position where our ambit of choice is circumscribed by the
ideology that justified post-War US hegemony (for which people from my community
were still dying until very recently in Afghanistan).
I have long thought that NATO should have been abolished after the fall of the
USSR. Go your own way. I am not concerned with you foreigners in Europe or
anywhere else. I am concerned with the state of mind of my own people who should
wise up and forget about Europe except as a trading partner and a tourist
destination.
Well, I would love to do that Col., but unfortunately Western civilization as a
whole goes the way of Washington, New York, Brussels, and maybe Paris and Moscow.
What happens to weaker power centres without the strong ones? What has happened
Tibet, that's what.
Thinking in terms of elites tied to specific nations is no longer a good model
to conceive of politics. Formal institutions like NATO are an expression of that.
We have to address transnational networks of soft power that bind together and
enculturate the ruling class. I have more in common with a Trump voter from
flyover country and he with me than either of us with our respective 'national'
elites.
An important distinction, thank you for forcing us to consider the difference.
The two are not always easy to distinguish and a 'My country right or wrong'
mindset seems to be dangerously on the rise. I was considering the use of the
national flag on homes in the US and UK. It surprised me how common it seemed in
the States and assumed it was a show of Patriotic fervor when I see it in the UK
it sends a shiver down my spine as (with the exception of major international
sporting events) I interpret it as extreme Nationalism often associated with
racist or Neo-Nazi sympathies. Conflation of the two seems much the same as that
of Anti-Israeli, Anti-Zionist and Anti-Semitic again three very distinct
mindsets.
I can truthfully state that I am either fish, nor fowl, nor good red meat on this
one. It seems to me to be a standard bit of verbal "wanking" so beloved by the
folks in the political arena.
I think that mostly this is a in your face dig at Trump, same tenor, same
sneering superiority that was displayed by the urban democrats who are currently
in their third year of an extended tantrum over Trump's taking their shiny ball
from them.
Look, mostly this whole patriotism/nationalism word game is just sadly funny.
You are a patriot if you think like me. You are a nationalist if you don't.
Patriotism is good, nationalism is bad. If I am a patriot, I am good, if you are
a nationalist, you must be bad.
I think that the wisdom of Humpty Dumpty when speaking to Alice fits here:
"When I use a word..it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor
less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many
different things."
"The question is which is to be master -- that's all."
But I suspect he also does not want to see another Verdun. Or another
Douaumont charnel house where the unidentified bones of 130,000 French and German
soldiers reside.
Or he does not want another Zone Rouge like the two million acres around
Verdun that remains forbidden territory even now. The only ones allowed in are
the EOD techs of the Département du Déminage that are still
digging out unexploded ordnance 102 years later. Much of that UXO contains
mustard, phosgene, or chlorine. All of it is badly corroded and volatile. French
EOD pulls out hundreds of tons every year.
I just heard that ignorant swine pansy Jesse Watters say that the French have not
known military glory sine Bonaparte. Too bad we cannot deposit him in that
contaminated zone to find his way out.
Somewhat related: Trump's refusal to stand in the rain on that solemn 100th
anniversary spoke more of the man than anything previous. Didn't want to get
rained on! That war, those trenches, the rain, the rain, the rain. He probably
cannot spell infantry, much less describe what it is. There is the Commander In
Chief in all his glory. We are lost.
Rob,
That was the fake news take on it. The reality is that the Secret Service wasn't
prepared to get him there in a vehicle. The original plan was to arrive by helo.
He was there the next day in the rain. Fake news is the enemy of the people.
No military record here, sir, I am a civilian, born in peace time, even at a time
when military service was no more mandatory....But no unaware of war fatigues,
since here in Europe we have had almost all relatives who fought the great
war....Granpa was a partisan then....
Just read that about the trenches and the rain...and remembered this film....I
hope you all can enjoy it....It´s good to watch this kind of films,
especially for us who had the great fortune of never being there...
It did not learn a single lesson from its fake reporting that led the Iraq War
Eh? They learned everything from it. They got away with it. Subsequent wars and aggression
in Libya, Syria, Yemen, Ukraine, Georgia could not have happened without Iraq paving the way.
Self professed liberals and leftists cams out in favour of, or remained indifferent to, all
of these assaults on national sovereignty. What is under attack here is the concept of
independent and sovereign nation states and national governments. Imperfect they might be,
but they are the only mechanism we have for protecting citizens' rights and freedom to pursue
a path of development independently of the dictates global monopoly capitalism is trying to
impose on the world.
>>Johnstone: The Best Way To Honor War Veterans Is To Stop Creating Them<<
Preach!
The military defends Money Power Monopolist Mega-Corporate Fascist Global Empire, not
America, and definitely NOT the Constitution. The New Deal effectively wiped out the
Constitution, which was the "Old Deal."
Syria and Iran aren't threats, they are countries that don't have debt-based money systems
controlled by the Money Power Monopolists.
"In a sense, there is no "future". Currently, you note a consolidation of the few
remaining countries without a "central bank" ...and how rapidly this is occurring. Look for
Syria next to fall, and fall quickly.
North Korea has already cut a deal under the aegis of China...feit accompli. Cuba has also
agreed to the North American integration once Fidel "passes".
That leaves IRAN. And biblical prophesy. The fallout from that conflict sets the stage for
the true new world order as has been broadcast in the media for the last 13 years or so."
~Unnamed Rothschild
The establishment of central banks is ALWAYS a necessary first step of subjugation of
geographically congregated bloodlines. Note that Libya's first official act, before even the
corpses turned stiff...was the establishment of a central bank. Those rebel forces were
certainly well schooled by someone!
~Unnamed Rothschild
Amazing how Libyan rebels took time out of their daily war duties to establish a CENTRAL
BANK! Imagine the paperwork in getting that done on the battlefield!
Those rebels are a well educated lot!
Laughing out Loud!
Seriously, don't the serfs notice things like this?
~Unnamed Rothschild
The financier of the military makes it clear they are attacking Western countries -
monetarily and economically.
"Remember, the equity and bond markets exist only to remove fiat from circulation!"
~Unnamed Rothschild
Our soldiers joined, were trained, given orders. The best way to honor veterans is to quit
putting it on them. This is the government we have because it is the government we
want. It's the government we allow. This is on all of us . I think it's time for
people who are dissatisfied with the treatment of veterans, with the voter fraud, with the
lies and theft of elected officials, local, state, and federal, tired of the media lying to
us and creating fake events... perhaps it's time to peacefully strike. Perhaps it's time to
say No to vote fraud, to say No to lies and deceit.
Perhaps it's time to peacefully petition the government for redress of grievances. That's
a Constitutional Right guaranteed to Citizens of the United States. That requires an active,
constructive peaceful assembly. Everyone has had it up to the eyes with this ******** and
this con-game we're being fed.
I'd rather get stomped to death than live on with this never ending slow coup against We
The People. We hold the power. Just us. We designate that power. It should be here to protect
us. That social contract deserves respect. You may be watching the only chance in your life
that you could do anything about it, given the current President and his attitude. I really
think that. It's not enough to watch the Proud Boys punch an Antifa in the jaw. That doesn't
do it for me. That's theatre.
My girlfriends father is old army security. I'm paying the bill at Dennys and he says, let
me put my military discount on that. So he's behind a guy in an Operation Iraqi Freedom
jacket. He says, hey; I like your jacket. The guy looks at him and he says, nice hat. Army
Security Agency. The military deserves more than a discount at ******* Denny's. They deserve
a country. So do I. So do you. But there's not going to be any country if we don't peacefully
come together to hang every last traitor scumbag lying trasonous seditious bastard by just
saying NO! Arrest these traitors! I don't want my vote raped. I don't want my speach raped.
Or yours! I don't give a **** about illegals or their kids because I take care of my kids
legally and lawfully and didn't put them in that **** expecting a parent of the century
award.
I don't ******* care what you call yourself. But if it's more important than your right to
call yourself whatever you want, you are my enemy and I tell you no.
If it's legal to vote and legal to be off work to vote, to peacefully assemble, it should
be legal to redress government. It's time to show out. It's time to say we want this ********
to stop. We have paid very well for the lifestyles and presidential libraries and foundations
and kept all the traitors in good health. But we reserve the right to cut you off if you
abuse our sacrifice to you and our votes to you. We reserve the right without prejudice to
say NO. That's our right. And until we say NO! our silence equals consent.
I say NO. I say **** THE SEDITIOUS TRAITORS trying to hold on to rape us of all our
Rights. And I say long live Trump for giving our country back to us at inauguration. That's
what's up. Let's peacefully **** these people up. USE IT OR LOSE IT.
And from a movie that says the futility of it all: "We fight because we are here." Imagine
dying in the trenches of WWI or in a shithole like the trenches of Korea.
The least we could do is to learn what really happened and why. I realize I was taught an
endless string of lies about history, especially US History, WWI, WWII, Vietnam war.
Be very careful and informed before joining the military.
Libtards don't really know much about anything, so it seems. Here's the deal:
As long as there are assholes in the world, there will be wars.
I don't have a problem with that. It's the world that I live in. It's been the case
throughout all of human history. A world without wars is pure ******* fantasy. It will never
happen. It's high time that libtards start accepting the world that they live in.
The problem that we're having , is that we're shooting the wrong assholes instead
of the right ones. But you know what? All of human history shows that problems like that are
always remedied as well. And if you're doing some soul-searching, trying to figure out who
the assholes are, they're probably going to be any group of people, who can't leave other
groups of people the hell alone .
Not surprisingly, the 20th century seems to be characterized by assholes fighting each
other.
Our psychopathic dna as a nation comes mainly from england, one of the most, if not the
most murdering countries in history. england cruelly colonized Asia and Africa, and literally
never stopped murdering the innocents. Now as our ALLY, among the other killing nations, such
as France and Germany, we the USA can kill literally any country or countries for any reason
or no reason.
we as the american people will be blamed for all the monstrous destruction and
innocents deaths. separation of our country and our politicians would be necessary if we are
to have a future. looking dim. why are we still dirty, and killing innocents, why are we
allowing saudi and israel to mass murder innocent women and children ?
no one cares enough
yet. you would think by 2018 we all would have banned war and conflict, we have not. this
makes me sick. I am a vet.
I'm actually thinking of not watching football anymore the war propaganda is constant. I
went to a game and it was like walking into an armed camp. Hundreds of cops and military.
Every five minutes they're marching around and everyone has to "honor" them. It's disgusting.
All the players are told to kiss every soldiers ***. The Army are the terrorists. They all
make me want to puke.
In Australia at the moment the suicide rate is a shocker among those coming back from
Afghanistan, Iraq and places unknown, the solution they are proposing is for priority airport
treatment and more medals and other stuff along the model the US has, which is an insult as it
does nothing to financially support or mentally cure, its a cop out.
Very few wars are even about righting some amazing wrong. They merely tend to be about
treasure i.e. nat gas, oil, rare earth materials, diamonds, water, blah blah blah. And, if
there happens to be some fight, ala WWII, then you can bet your *** on it that all corporate
assholes are funding and benefiting from the war....on both sides of the coin i.e. backing
each side until a peace is called.
I don't have an answer to the human condition or our propensity to be violent and fight
etc., but I sure as **** am not cool with sacking places, and killing kids, over *******
things. We're better than this.
I have 2 kids myself. You can all be on notice that if a bomb were to be dropped on my
house, and if my kids were killed, I would likely devolve and start picking off the low
hanging fruit i.e. the zombies shuffling in and out of said bomb makers companies, and
wasting them 1 person as a time. I'd slowly, if still able, work my way up to the execs.
Hopefully, and along the way, I'd be able to wipe shareholders off of the grid, also.
When you go off to fight for "freedom", and arrive home to find that you have little to no
real freedom and essentially live in a police state, it's a shocking blow.
This sounds like something I would write. And even the damn CHURCHES honor the veteran
"serving" his country. What a crock of ****. I tell the pastor that he will be judged harshly
when his time comes. And I tell Christians that because they support the rampant murder of
millions that when they die and are standing before Jesus for judgement they will be soaked
in the blood of the innocent and he will ask you why did you support this? Why did you not
speak out against it? Then I look at them and say "good luck because you're gonna need
it".
The world is not ruled by pure evil yet. In Brazil A nationalist was elected, in Italy and
much of eastern Europe other nationalists were elected. You think the Chinese protected the
Italian and Brazilian right to free and fair elections? You think Russia is the arsenal of
freedom? You think the EU upheld the votes of the people, allowing Britain to vote on leaving
the EU and Italy and eastern Europe? You think the unelected rulers of the EU respected other
peoples right to vote? Look out onto the world, and recognize that as of today, the nations
of the world have A group to join if they chose to fight for liberty, capitalism and all the
other virtues, and that group is grounded and guaranteed by the United States of America. In
G-d I trust.
Hopeful thinking for a hopeless reality. Truth is tyrants never fall by their own swords.
It always takes someone else's. The modern problem is a bit more complex when we make the
tyrants that we later topple. The toppling is where the bucks are... just ask any of the the
last 4 Presidents and their respective Congresses.
So war is just an American problem, something we just invented? Do we read much history or is it all PBS specials now. War has ALWAYS been fucked up. Violence has been a major contributor to immigration for
all of history. Like it or not, we live in dangerous times. We can ASSUME that if America shrank it's
military and ended all interventions that world peace would magically appear....but it won't.
We can pray that while we retreat behind of big screen TVs that China will end their
territorial expansion and military programs, but they WON'T.
I'm all for reigning in our interventions, but let's not pretend that America is to blame
for human evil and aggressive behaviors....just because we are good at it..
There is an endless stream of history illustrating the absolute brutality and evil that
had persisted since the beginning of time. We should avoid embracing it but we should avoid
thinking we have the power to end it. More arrogance to be used for destructive purposes.
Nah, it is just that USA has made forever war such a profitable and ongoing
mega-business. The degenerate banker and royal families of Europe would only fight every generation or
two. You fight all the time and try to start new ones, before you finish off with the old ones,
and print global toilet paper to pay for it all. Because it is good business. **** laws,
lives and human decency.
And then you have Hollywood make ****-for-brain movies about just wars, war comradery and
heroic sacrifice and spread that **** all over the world.
So yeah, you got all the reasons for being hated for your war business.
The only way to honor veterans, really, truly honor them, is to help end war and make
sure no more lives are put into a position where they are on the giving or receiving end of
evil, stupid, meaningless violence
A bit too close to the Bone for the average American to appreciate. A well thought out & articulated article.
The machine is not the problem. It's like a gun. Guns are just mechanical devices and
can't kill until people aim them and pull the trigger. It's people that kill by forcing the
machine to do their terrible evil bidding.
It's the business and political leaders that build, guide and enable the machine and
facilitate the infrastructure and culture to wage war.
Democrats love War as we saw with LBJ, Bill Clinton (bombing the hell out of and
destroying Yugoslavia), Obama and Hillary Clinton. Democrat McNamara was one of their finest! McNamara's Folly: The Use of Low-IQ Troops in the Vietnam War
It's both Republicans and Democrats - George Bush I's Desert Storm, Panama; George Bush II
invading Iraq, Afghanistan; Reagan invading GRENADA!, Nixon in Vietnam, assassinating
Salvador Allende in Chile, bombing Laos and Cambodia; Eisenhower started in Vietnam,
installed a dictator in Guatemala in 1954, installed Batista in Cuba, Kennedy was going to
withdraw from Vietnam and part of the reason he was assassinated; and on and on and on.
"... Veterans Day is not a holiday to honor the men and women who have dutifully protected their country. The youngest Americans who arguably defended their nation from a real threat to its shores are in their nineties, and soon there won't be any of them left. ..."
"... Every single person who has served in the US military since the end of the second World War has protected nothing other than the agendas of global hegemony, resource control and war profiteering. They have not been fighting and dying for freedom and democracy, they have been fighting and dying for imperialism, Raytheon profit margins, and crude oil. ..."
"... Veterans Day, like so very, very much in American culture, is a propaganda construct designed to lubricate the funneling of human lives into the chamber of a gigantic gun. It glorifies evil, stupid, meaningless acts of mass murder to ensure that there will always be recruits who are willing to continue perpetrating it, and to ensure that the US public doesn't wake up to the fact that its government's insanely bloated military budget is being used to unleash unspeakable horrors upon the earth. ..."
"... Your rulers have never feared the Koreans, the Vietnamese, the Iraqis, the terrorists, the Iranians, the Chinese or the Russians. They fear you. They fear the American public suddenly waking up to the evil things that are being done in your name and using your vast numbers to shrug off the existing power structures without firing a shot, as easily as removing a heavy coat on a warm day. If enough of you loudly withdraw your consent for their insatiable warmongering, that fear will be enough to keep them in check. ..."
The US will be celebrating Veterans Day, and many a striped flag shall be waved. The social
currency of esteem will be used to elevate those who have served in the US military, thereby
ensuring future generations of recruits to be thrown into the gears of the globe-spanning war
machine
Veterans Day is not a holiday to honor the men and women who have dutifully protected their
country. The youngest Americans who arguably defended their nation from a real threat to its
shores are in their nineties, and soon there won't be any of them left.
Every single person who
has served in the US military since the end of the second World War has protected nothing other
than the agendas of global hegemony, resource control and war profiteering. They have not been
fighting and dying for freedom and democracy, they have been fighting and dying for
imperialism, Raytheon profit margins, and crude oil.
I just said something you're not supposed to say. People have dedicated many years of their
lives to the service of the US military; they've given their limbs to it, they've suffered
horrific brain damage for it, they've given their very lives to it. Families have been ripped
apart by the violence that has been inflicted upon members of the US Armed Forces; you're not
supposed to let them hear you say that their loved one was destroyed because some sociopathic
nerds somewhere in Washington decided that it would give America an advantage over potential
economic rivals to control a particular stretch of Middle Eastern dirt. But it is true, and if
we don't start acknowledging that truth lives are going to keep getting thrown into the gears
of the machine for the power and profit of a few depraved oligarchs. So I'm going to keep
saying it.
Last week I saw the hashtag #SaluteToService trending on Twitter. Apparently the NFL had a
deal going where every time someone tweeted that hashtag they'd throw a few bucks at some
veteran's charity. Which sounds sweet, until you consider three things:
2. The NFL has taken millions of
dollars from the Pentagon for displays of patriotism on the field, including for the
policy of bringing all players out for the national anthem every game starting in 2009 (which
led to Colin Kaepernick's demonstrations and the obscene backlash against him).
3. VETERANS SHOULD NOT HAVE TO RELY ON FUCKING CHARITY.
Seriously, how is "charity for veterans" a thing, and how are people not extremely weirded
out by it? How is it that you can go out and get your limbs blown off for slave wages after
watching your friends die and innocent civilians perish, come home, and have to rely on charity
to get by? How is it that you can risk life and limb killing and suffering irreparable
psychological trauma for some plutocrat's agendas, plunge into poverty when you come home, and
then see the same plutocrat labeled a "philanthropist" because he threw a few tax-deductible
dollars at a charity that gave you a decent prosthetic leg?
Taking care of veterans should be factored into the budget of every act of military
aggression . If a government can't make sure its veterans are housed, healthy and happy in a
dignified way for the rest of their lives, it has no business marching human beings into harm's
way. The fact that you see veterans on the street of any large US city and people who fought in
wars having to beg "charities" for a quality mechanical wheelchair shows you just how much of a
pathetic joke this Veterans Day song and dance has always been.
They'll send you to mainline violence and trauma into your mind and body for the power and
profit of the oligarchic rulers of the US-centralized empire, but it's okay because everyone
gets a long weekend where they're told to thank you for your service. Bullshit.
Veterans Day, like so very, very much in American culture, is a propaganda construct
designed to lubricate the funneling of human lives into the chamber of a gigantic gun. It
glorifies evil, stupid, meaningless acts of mass murder to ensure that there will always be
recruits who are willing to continue perpetrating it, and to ensure that the US public doesn't
wake up to the fact that its government's insanely bloated military budget is being used to
unleash unspeakable horrors upon the earth.
The only way to honor veterans, really, truly honor them, is to help end war and make sure
no more lives are put into a position where they are on the giving or receiving end of evil,
stupid, meaningless violence. The way to do that is to publicly, loudly and repeatedly make it
clear that you do not consent to the global terrorism being perpetrated in your name. These
bastards work so hard conducting propaganda to manufacture your consent for endless
warmongering because they need that consent . So don't give it to them.
Your rulers have never feared the Koreans, the Vietnamese, the Iraqis, the terrorists, the
Iranians, the Chinese or the Russians. They fear you. They fear the American public suddenly
waking up to the evil things that are being done in your name and using your vast numbers to
shrug off the existing power structures without firing a shot, as easily as removing a heavy
coat on a warm day. If enough of you loudly withdraw your consent for their insatiable
warmongering, that fear will be enough to keep them in check.
This Veterans Day, don't honor those who have served by giving reverence and legitimacy to a
war machine which is exclusively used for inflicting great evil. Honor them by disassembling
that machine.
* * *
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Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers .
"... You know something is fundamentally wrong when the average high school drop-out MAGA-hat-wearing Texan or Alabaman working a blue collar job has more sense, can SEE much more clearly, than the average university-educated, ideology-soaked, East Coast liberal. ..."
"... Trump is a "nationalist". More or less every administration previous to his, going back at least 100 years, was "globalist". For much of its history, the USA has been known around the world as a very patriotic (i.e., nationalist) country. Americans in general had a reputation for spontaneous chants of "USA! USA! USA!", flying the Stars And Stripes outside their houses and being very proud of their country. Sure, from time to time, that pissed off people a little in other countries but, by and large, Americans' patriotism was seen as endearing, if a little naive, by most foreigners. ..."
"... Globalism, on the other hand, as it relates to the USA, is the ideology that saturates the Washington establishment think-tanks, career politicians and bureaucrats, who are infected with the toxic belief that America can and should dominate the world . This is presented to the public as so much American largess and magnanimity, but it is, in reality, a means to increasing the power and wealth of the Washington elite. ..."
"... Consider Obama's two terms, during which he continued the massively wasteful (of taxpayer's money) and destructive (of foreigners' lives and land) "War on Terror". Consider that he appointed Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, who proceeded to joyfully bomb Libya back to the stone age and murder its leader. Consider that, under Obama, US-Russia relations reached an all-time low, with repeated attacks (of various sorts) on the Russian president, government and people, and the attempted trashing of Russia's international reputation in the eyes of the American people. Consider the Obama regime's hugely destructive war waged (mostly by proxy) on the Syrian people. Consider the Obama era coup in Ukraine that, in a few short months, set that country's prospects and development back several decades and further soured relations with Russia. ..."
"... The problem however, is that the Washington elite want - no, NEED - the American people to support such military adventurism, and what better way to do that than by concocting false "Russian collusion" allegations against Trump and having the media program the popular mind with exactly the opposite of the truth - that Trump was a "traitor" to the American people. ..."
"... The only thing Trump is a traitor to is the self-serving globally expansionist interests of a cabal of Washington insiders . This little maneuver amounted to a '2 for 1' for the Washington establishment. They simultaneously demonized Trump (impeding his 'nationalist' agenda) while advancing their own globalist mission - in this case aimed at pushing back Russia. ..."
"... The US 'Deep State' did this in response to the election of Trump the "nationalist" and their fears that their globalist, exceptionalist vision for the USA - a vision that is singularly focused on their own narrow interests at the expense of the American people and many others around the world - would be derailed by Trump attempting to put the interests of the American people first . ..."
Billed as a 'referendum on Trump's presidency', the US Midterm Elections drew an
unusually high number of Americans to the polls yesterday. The minor loss, from Trump's
perspective, of majority Republican control of the lower House of Representatives, suggests, if
anything, the opposite of what the media and establishment want you to believe it means.
An important clue to why the American media has declared permanent open season on this man
transpired during a sometimes heated post-elections press conference at the White House
yesterday. First, CNN's obnoxious Jim Acosta insisted on bringing up the patently absurd
allegations of 'Russia collusion' and refused to shut up and sit down. Soon after, PBS reporter
Yamiche Alcindor joined her colleagues in asking Trump another loaded question , this time on the 'white
nationalism' canard:
Alcindor : On the campaign trail you called yourself a nationalist. Some people saw
that as emboldening white nationalists...
Trump : I don't know why you'd say this. It's such a racist question.
Alcindor : There are some people who say that now the Republican Party is seen as
supporting white nationalists because of your rhetoric. What do you make of that?
Trump : Why do I have among the highest poll numbers with African Americans?
That's such a racist question. I love our country. You have nationalists, and you have
globalists . I also love the world, and I don't mind helping the world, but we have to
straighten out our country first. We have a lot of problems ...
The US media is still "not even wrong" on Trump and why he won the 2016 election.
You know something is fundamentally wrong when the average high school drop-out
MAGA-hat-wearing Texan or Alabaman working a blue collar job has more sense, can SEE much more
clearly, than the average university-educated, ideology-soaked, East Coast liberal.
Trump is a "nationalist". More or less every administration previous to his, going back at
least 100 years, was "globalist". For much of its history, the USA has been known around the
world as a very patriotic (i.e., nationalist) country. Americans in general had a reputation
for spontaneous chants of "USA! USA! USA!", flying the Stars And Stripes outside their houses
and being very proud of their country. Sure, from time to time, that pissed off people a little
in other countries but, by and large, Americans' patriotism was seen as endearing, if a little
naive, by most foreigners.
Globalism, on the other hand, as it relates to the USA, is the ideology that saturates the
Washington establishment think-tanks, career politicians and bureaucrats, who are infected with
the toxic belief that America can and should dominate the world . This is presented to the
public as so much American largess and magnanimity, but it is, in reality, a means to
increasing the power and wealth of the Washington elite.
Consider Obama's two terms, during which he continued the massively wasteful (of taxpayer's
money) and destructive (of foreigners' lives and land) "War on Terror". Consider that he
appointed Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, who proceeded to joyfully bomb Libya back to
the stone age and murder its leader. Consider that, under Obama, US-Russia relations reached an
all-time low, with repeated attacks (of various sorts) on the Russian president, government and
people, and the attempted trashing of Russia's international reputation in the eyes of the
American people. Consider the Obama regime's hugely destructive war waged (mostly by proxy) on
the Syrian people. Consider the Obama era coup in Ukraine that, in a few short months, set that
country's prospects and development back several decades and further soured relations with
Russia.
These are but a few examples of the "globalism" that drives the Washington establishment.
Who, in their right mind, would support it? (I won't get into what constitutes a 'right mind',
but we can all agree it does not involve destroying other nations for profit). The problem
however, is that the Washington elite want - no, NEED - the American people to support such
military adventurism, and what better way to do that than by concocting false "Russian
collusion" allegations against Trump and having the media program the popular mind with exactly
the opposite of the truth - that Trump was a "traitor" to the American people.
The only thing
Trump is a traitor to is the self-serving globally expansionist interests of a cabal of
Washington insiders . This little maneuver amounted to a '2 for 1' for the Washington
establishment. They simultaneously demonized Trump (impeding his 'nationalist' agenda) while
advancing their own globalist mission - in this case aimed at pushing back Russia.
Words and their exact meanings matter . To be able to see through the lies of
powerful vested interests and get to the truth, we need to know when those same powerful vested
interests are exploiting our all-too-human proclivity to be coerced and manipulated by appeals
to emotion.
So the words "nationalist" and "nationalism", as they relate to the USA, have never been
"dirty" words until they were made that way by the "globalist" element of the Washington
establishment (i.e., most of it) by associating it with fringe Nazi and "white supremacist"
elements in US society that pose no risk to anyone, (except to the extent that the mainstream
media can convince the general population otherwise). The US 'Deep State' did this in response
to the election of Trump the "nationalist" and their fears that their globalist, exceptionalist
vision for the USA - a vision that is singularly focused on their own narrow interests at the
expense of the American people and many others around the world - would be derailed by Trump
attempting to put the interests of the American people first .
"... Bolsonaro, like Trump, is not a disruption of the current neoliberal order; he is an intensification or escalation of its worst impulses. He is its logical conclusion. ..."
"... Despite their professed concern, the plutocrats and their media spokespeople much prefer a far-right populist like Trump or Bolsonaro to a populist leader of the genuine left. They prefer the social divisions fuelled by neo-fascists like Bolsonaro, divisions that protect their wealth and privilege, over the unifying message of a socialist who wants to curtail class privilege, the real basis of the elite's power. ..."
"... The true left – whether in Brazil, Venezuela, Britain or the US – does not control the police or military, the financial sector, the oil industries, the arms manufacturers, or the corporate media. It was these very industries and institutions that smoothed the path to power for Bolsonaro in Brazil, Viktor Orban in Hungary, and Trump in the US. ..."
"... Former socialist leaders like Brazil's Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva or Hugo Chavez in Venezuela were bound to fail not so much because of their flaws as individuals but because powerful interests rejected their right to rule. These socialists never had control over the key levers of power, the key resources. Their efforts were sabotaged – from within and without – from the moment of their election. ..."
"... The media, the financial elites, the armed forces were never servants of the socialist governments that have been struggling to reform Latin America. The corporate world has no interest either in building proper housing in place of slums or in dragging the masses out of the kind of poverty that fuels the drug gangs that Bolsonaro claims he will crush through more violence. ..."
"... As in Pinochet's Chile, Bolsonaro can rest assured that his kind of neo-fascism will live in easy harmony with neoliberalism. ..."
"... Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include "Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East" (Pluto Press) and "Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair" (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net . ..."
With Jair Bolsonaro's victory in Brazil's presidential election at the weekend, the doom-mongers among western elites are out in force once again. His success, like Donald Trump's, has confirmed a long-held prejudice: that the people cannot be trusted; that, when empowered, they behave like a mob driven by primitive urges; that the unwashed masses now threaten to bring down the carefully constructed walls of civilisation.
The guardians of the status quo refused to learn the lesson of Trump's election, and so it will be with Bolsonaro. Rather than engaging the intellectual faculties they claim as their exclusive preserve, western "analysts" and "experts" are again averting their gaze from anything that might help them understand what has driven our supposed democracies into the dark places inhabited by the new demagogues. Instead, as ever, the blame is being laid squarely at the door of social media.
Social media and fake news are apparently the reasons Bolsonaro won at the ballot box. Without the gatekeepers in place to limit access to the "free press" – itself the plaything of billionaires and global corporations, with brands and a bottom line to protect – the rabble has supposedly been freed to give expression to their innate bigotry.
Here is Simon Jenkins, a veteran British gatekeeper – a former editor of the Times of London who now writes a column in the Guardian – pontificating on Bolsonaro:
"The lesson for champions of open democracy is glaring. Its values cannot be taken for granted. When debate is no longer through regulated media, courts and institutions, politics will default to the mob. Social media – once hailed as an agent of global concord – has become the purveyor of falsity, anger and hatred. Its algorithms polarise opinion. Its pseudo-information drives argument to the extremes."
This is now the default consensus of the corporate media, whether in its rightwing incarnations or of the variety posing on the liberal-left end of the spectrum like the Guardian. The people are stupid, and we need to be protected from their base instincts. Social media, it is claimed, has unleashed humanity's id.
Selling plutocracy
There is a kind of truth in Jenkins' argument, even if it is not the one he intended. Social
media did indeed liberate ordinary people. For the first time in modern history, they were not
simply the recipients of official, sanctioned information. They were not only spoken down to by
their betters, they could answer back – and not always as deferentially as the media
class expected.
Clinging to their old privileges, Jenkins and his ilk are rightly unnerved. They have much
to lose.
But that also means they are far from dispassionate observers of the current political
scene. They are deeply invested in the status quo, in the existing power structures that have
kept them well-paid courtiers of the corporations that dominate the planet.
Bolsonaro, like Trump, is not a disruption of the current neoliberal order; he is an
intensification or escalation of its worst impulses. He is its logical conclusion.
The plutocrats who run our societies need figureheads, behind whom they can conceal their
unaccountable power. Until now they preferred the slickest salespeople, ones who could sell
wars as humanitarian intervention rather than profit-driven exercises in death and destruction;
the unsustainable plunder of natural resources as economic growth; the massive accumulation of
wealth, stashed in offshore tax havens, as the fair outcome of a free market; the bailouts
funded by ordinary taxpayers to stem economic crises they had engineered as necessary
austerity; and so on.
A smooth-tongued Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton were the favoured salespeople, especially
in an age when the elites had persuaded us of a self-serving argument: that ghetto-like
identities based on colour or gender mattered far more than class. It was divide-and-rule
dressed up as empowerment. The polarisation now bewailed by Jenkins was in truth stoked and
rationalised by the very corporate media he so faithfully serves.
Fear of the domino effect
Despite their professed concern, the plutocrats and their media spokespeople much prefer a
far-right populist like Trump or Bolsonaro to a populist leader of the genuine left. They
prefer the social divisions fuelled by neo-fascists like Bolsonaro, divisions that protect
their wealth and privilege, over the unifying message of a socialist who wants to curtail class
privilege, the real basis of the elite's power.
The true left – whether in Brazil, Venezuela, Britain or the US – does not
control the police or military, the financial sector, the oil industries, the arms
manufacturers, or the corporate media. It was these very industries and institutions that
smoothed the path to power for Bolsonaro in Brazil, Viktor Orban in Hungary, and Trump in the
US.
Former socialist leaders like Brazil's Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva or Hugo Chavez in
Venezuela were bound to fail not so much because of their flaws as individuals but because
powerful interests rejected their right to rule. These socialists never had control over the
key levers of power, the key resources. Their efforts were sabotaged – from within and
without – from the moment of their election.
Local elites in Latin America are tied umbilically to US elites, who in turn are determined
to make sure any socialist experiment in their backyard fails – as a way to prevent a
much-feared domino effect, one that might seed socialism closer to home.
The media, the financial elites, the armed forces were never servants of the socialist
governments that have been struggling to reform Latin America. The corporate world has no
interest either in building proper housing in place of slums or in dragging the masses out of
the kind of poverty that fuels the drug gangs that Bolsonaro claims he will crush through more
violence.
Bolsonaro will not face any of the institutional obstacles Lula da Silva or Chavez needed to
overcome. No one in power will stand in his way as he institutes his "reforms". No one will
stop him creaming off Brazil's wealth for his corporate friends. As in Pinochet's Chile,
Bolsonaro can rest assured that his kind of neo-fascism will live in easy harmony with
neoliberalism.
Immune system
If you want to understand the depth of the self-deception of Jenkins and other media
gatekeepers, contrast Bolsonaro's political ascent to that of Jeremy Corbyn, the modest social
democratic leader of Britain's Labour party. Those like Jenkins who lament the role of social
media – they mean you, the public – in promoting leaders like Bolsonaro are also
the media chorus who have been wounding Corbyn day after day, blow by blow, for three years
– since he accidentally slipped past safeguards intended by party bureacrats to keep
someone like him from power.
The supposedly liberal Guardian has been leading that assault. Like the rightwing media, it
has shown its absolute determination to stop Corbyn at all costs, using any pretext.
Within days of Corbyn's election to the Labour leadership, the Times newspaper – the
voice of the British establishment – published an article quoting a general, whom it
refused to name, warning that the British army's commanders had agreed they would sabotage a
Corbyn government. The general strongly hinted that there would be a military coup first.
We are not supposed to reach the point where such threats – tearing away the
façade of western democracy – ever need to be implemented. Our pretend democracies
were created with immune systems whose defences are marshalled to eliminate a threat like
Corbyn much earlier.
Once he moved closer to power, however, the rightwing corporate media was forced to deploy
the standard tropes used against a left leader: that he was incompetent, unpatriotic, even
treasonous.
But just as the human body has different immune cells to increase its chances of success,
the corporate media has faux-liberal-left agents like the Guardian to complement the right's
defences. The Guardian sought to wound Corbyn through identity politics, the modern left's
Achille's heel. An endless stream of confected crises about anti-semitism were intended to
erode the hard-earned credit Corbyn had accumulated over decades for his anti-racism work.
Slash-and-burn politics
Why is Corbyn so dangerous? Because he supports the right of workers to a dignified life,
because he refuses to accept the might of the corporations, because he implies that a different
way of organising our societies is possible. It is a modest, even timid programme he
articulates, but even so it is far too radical either for the plutocratic class that rules over
us or for the corporate media that serves as its propaganda arm.
The truth ignored by Jenkins and these corporate stenographers is that if you keep
sabotaging the programmes of a Chavez, a Lula da Silva, a Corbyn or a Bernie Sanders, then you
get a Bolsonaro, a Trump, an Orban.
It is not that the masses are a menace to democracy. It is rather that a growing proportion
of voters understand that a global corporate elite has rigged the system to accrue for itself
ever greater riches. It is not social media that is polarising our societies. It is rather that
the determination of the elites to pillage the planet until it has no more assets to strip has
fuelled resentment and destroyed hope. It is not fake news that is unleashing the baser
instincts of the lower orders. Rather, it is the frustration of those who feel that change is
impossible, that no one in power is listening or cares.
Social media has empowered ordinary people. It has shown them that they cannot trust their
leaders, that power trumps justice, that the elite's enrichment requires their poverty. They
have concluded that, if the rich can engage in slash-and-burn politics against the planet, our
only refuge, they can engage in slash-and-burn politics against the global elite.
Are they choosing wisely in electing a Trump or Bolsonaro? No. But the liberal guardians of
the status quo are in no position to judge them. For decades, all parts of the corporate media
have helped to undermine a genuine left that could have offered real solutions, that could have
taken on and beaten the right, that could have offered a moral compass to a confused, desperate
and disillusioned public.
Jenkins wants to lecture the masses about their depraved choices while he and his paper
steer them away from any politician who cares about their welfare, who fights for a fairer
society, who prioritises mending what is broken.
The western elites will decry Bolsonaro in the forlorn and cynical hope of shoring up their
credentials as guardians of the existing, supposedly moral order. But they engineered him.
Bolsonaro is their monster.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include
"Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East"
(Pluto Press) and "Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair" (Zed Books).
His website is www.jonathan-cook.net .
"... By taking a similarly pragmatic look at the activities of Ukrainian far right, I claim that they should be viewed as political entrepreneurs who are trying to capitalise on their expertise in violence. ..."
"... Azov's network amounts to a far-right "state within a state" – a universe that aims to monopolise the nationalist sector of Ukraine's political field ..."
"... On the national level, this makes Azov's political patron, Ukraine's Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, the second most powerful person in the country, effectively possessing a private army which once in a while makes ambiguous comments about the possibility of a coup . However, the patronage networks and conflicts go much deeper on the local level. Some of them can be uncovered by analysing the events mentioned above. ..."
"... Many of Azov's public gestures, including incidents involving violence, are aimed at reinforcing the image of an independent movement, opposed to both Ukraine's police leadership and corrupt elites ..."
"... November 2016: Autonomous Resistance's social centre in Lviv is attacked by far-right. Source: YouTube / Kateryna Benjuk. ..."
"... In Kyiv, open struggle against the (weaker) leftists and liberals is the preferred activity of C14 – an organisation headed by Yevgen Karas, a former Svoboda activist who split from the party to become an independent entrepreneur of political violence. ..."
"... Aiming for Ukraine's mainstream patriotic public, C14 positions itself as a group of young and resolute men ready to employ violence for the sake of (national) justice. Their enemies are usually represented as (latent) supporters of pro-Russian separatists, which automatically diminishes their worth in the eyes of the public and amplifies the attackers' heroism. In effect, C14 is trying to take the niche that was occupied by Svoboda before Maidan: relatable and well-meaning troublemakers prepared to break the law for the greater good (by comparison, the agenda of National Corps stresses the values of order). ..."
"... Karas freely admitted to a sympathetic journalist that he cooperates with Ukraine's security services. Among Ukrainian far-right organisations, the activities of C14 are closest to those of Russian online vigilante movements such as "Occupy Pedophily" or "Lev Protiv"; their YouTube channel is consciously crafted to attract audiences (thus literally monetising their violence), and the most popular videos have between 50,000 and 300,000 views. ..."
"... Having created a "municipal guard" officially financed by Kyiv's city council, C14 works towards realising both aims: it gives them a pretext to patrol streets and maximise the probability of violent encounters (which can be publicised), and at the same time provides a "second-best" opportunity to those who could or would not join the structures of Azov. ..."
"... Its advertised readiness to resort to violence was the key to Svoboda's electoral success before Maidan, but this was overshadowed by the efforts of the competing entrepreneurs of political violence in the post-Maidan conjuncture, in which the level of and tolerance to violence has escalated. On the other hand, Svoboda keeps holding on to its hegemony in regional power settings in western Ukraine, even though its relations to nation-wide patronage networks is unclear. All in all, Azov/National Corps seems to be clearly the most successful partner in the big nationalist threesome, receiving the most from this alliance. ..."
"... As I have argued above, Ukraine's far right are taking the logic of "violent entrepreneurship" outside the purely commercial and apolitical realm – and employing it in the domain of political contestation, where illicit violence is a precious resource that can be bought and rented. ..."
The recent wave of anti-Roma pogroms in Ukraine has spawned
a new series of texts on right-wing violence. However, a significant part of this literature
still
mostly relies on discourse analysis , which cannot fully explain the actions of far right
organisations on the ground. Analysing far-right movements' programmes and ideological
statements can be useful when combined with a closer look at the actual activities of the
movements in question, the way they interact among themselves and the wider social and
political context. But judging a group primarily by how it presents itself to the world is
misleading.
The lack of primary sources from Ukraine's far-right milieu, as well as the general scarcity
of research on non-EU (and non-Russian) eastern Europe, has led to an exoticised perception of
central and eastern Europe as whole – and one that is open to politicisation by both
liberals and leftists. Public discussion thus tends to degenerate into either liberal denial of
the very existence of the far-right problem in Ukraine or sensationalist and exaggerated
"anti-imperialist" accounts of the "fascist junta" ruling the country.
To avoid oversimplification, I focus on the grounded context rather than ideologies and
programmes of far-right groups. Here, I will try to contribute to a better understanding of the
far right in Ukraine by conceptualising them as "entrepreneurs of political violence" – a
portmanteau of two established terms from different fields. A "political entrepreneur" is a
political actor who pursues opportunistic strategies aimed at gaining popularity and influence,
rather than following a specific ideological agenda. Likewise, "Violent
entrepreneurs" is the title of an influential study of Russian organised crime by
sociologist Vadim Volkov, who analysed post-Soviet mafia as a particular kind of
entrepreneurship where violence resources become a crucially important capital asset.
By taking a similarly pragmatic look at the activities of Ukrainian far right, I claim
that they should be viewed as political entrepreneurs who are trying to capitalise on their
expertise in violence. This can be a more productive lens than engaged approaches which
"take a stance" on the far right – approaches that simply acknowledge the gravity of the
situation or belittle it. These tend to be accompanied by wider political conclusions, and do
not seek to understand the issue at hand.
I give a concise chronology of the incidents of right-wing violence between January and
April 2018 (i.e. before the more recent string of Roma pogroms). I will look only at episodes
reported in the media, involving violence or a realistic threat of violence by members of
various organised far-right groups, directed outside the far right subculture, in peaceful
areas of Ukraine. I will then regroup these episodes, interpreting them as several processes
that have their own inner logic, but which intersect in time and space.
Chronology of
events
The 2018 season of political violence opened in Kyiv on 19 January, when nationalist
organisation C14
attacked a demonstration commemorating Russian antifascists Stanislav Markelov and
Anastasia Baburova.
This annual event is a traditional
target for the far right , although previous attacks had been led by different forces. C14
activists blocked the demonstration organised by liberal and leftist activists in central Kyiv,
shouting down the speakers and attacking them with snowballs and eggs. The Kyiv police failed
to create a barrier separating the two demonstrations, advising the antifascists simply "not to
provoke" their opponents. Later, the police detained eight anarchists; the arrest was met with
cheers from the nationalists, who were free to keep assaulting the demonstrators physically and
verbally. After the end of the demonstration, the far right attacked a random passerby whom
they mistook for an antifascist – he
happened to be a British tourist .
19 January 2018: attack on anti-fascist march, Kyiv. Source: Youtube. Ten days later, an
important incident
took place in Lviv . On 28 January, a large group of far-right activists, mostly members of
the Azov National Corps and its allied group Misanthropic Division, violently attacked a
demonstration (organised by the local leftist scene) against the use of animals in circuses.
The attackers threw smoke grenades into the crowd and shook hands with police officers,
exchanging the motto "White Pride". The police soon intervened by detaining leftist
demonstrators in a brutal manner; they were all taken to a police station, where they spent
several hours.
On the next day, 29 January, Azov's vigilante organisation National Militia blocked
Cherkasy city hall in central Ukraine. Here, they forced city deputies to vote for the
self-dissolution of the city council after they refused to approve new members of the executive
committee proposed by the mayor. The police did not intervene.
These January events set the trends for the period that followed. On 11 February, Azov
fighters violently
intervened and stopped a lecture about discrimination in the film industry, held at a
cultural centre in Mariupol. On 13 February, a group called Freikorps, which is believed to be
close to the Azov/National Corps movement, attacked a
lecture on the LGBT movement in Kharkiv in a similar manner. Two days later, C14 and Azov's
National Militia clashed
with police forces in Kyiv during a bail court hearing concerning Odessa city mayor Gennady
Trukhanov, who is facing theft charges.
International Women's Day, 8 March, saw many public events and almost as many attacks by far
right groups. Azov assaulted feminists and liberals marching in Mariupol. In Kyiv, attackers
from several organisations made use of the benevolent passivity of the police,
who were reluctant to protect the marchers . A plainclothes police officer actually helped
them steal a feminist banner.
The Kyiv police ignored statements by victims of violence. Instead, they opened criminal
proceedings against Olena Shevchenko, the organiser of the Women's March, after nationalists
claimed that the contents of the banner were tantamount to desecration of national symbols. The
first court hearing was held in the presence of a large nationalist audience, mobilised by C14,
Katekhon (a conservative circle tied to Ukrainian far-right political party Svoboda) and
Tradition and Order (TiP), a conservative nationalist group. At the second hearing, the defence
mobilised their own support, including some diplomats and liberal politicians. With the
dignitaries present in the court hall, and with far right waiting outside, the court acquitted
Shevchenko. She had to leave by taking a taxi from the court's backdoor.
On the same day in Lviv, members of National Corps physically assaulted
visitors at a feminist exhibition and participants of a "Sisterhood, Support, Solidarity"
march. When the marchers retreated into a tram, the attackers started throwing cobblestones at
it and later burnt one of their banners saying "No means no". The city police, meanwhile, stood
by, ready to intervene the moment the leftists would try to fight back. Some of the police
exchanged friendly greetings with the far right.
Meanwhile, in Uzhgorod, events took a slightly different turn. Activists of the local
organisation Karpatska Sich (KS)
poured red paint over a speaker at a local feminist demonstration, which led to a chemical
eye burn. Here, the police promptly detained the attackers – though they were released
later that day. In the week that followed, Karpatska Sich organised a string of attacks against
local leftist and liberal activists. Coincidentally, that week also hosted a wave of anonymous
property destruction against cars with Hungarian or other EU number plates. Once again, local
police reacted very reluctantly. According to activists, these were preparations for a large
demonstration that Karpatska Sich staged on 17 March. In Uzhgorod as well as in Lviv, local
police, realising their own inability to control the streets during such big events, simply
gave carte blanche to the far right.
A 17 March event in Uzhgorod to honour wartime nationalist anti-Hungarian fighters
(Karpatska Sich's namesake) became an event of
nationwide importance , gathering a wide spectrum of Ukraine's extreme right, from Right
Sector and Tryzub to C14 and Freikorps. Karpatska Sich, the hosting organisation, accounted for
a few dozen of the 250 participants. Contrary to the customary repertoire, the marchers readily
demonstrated "controversial" symbols like the "Celtic cross" and gestures like the "Roman
salute". Normally these are avoided at public events as too "provocative".
17 March: Karpatska Sich hosts a march in honour of wartime anti-Hungarian fighters,
Uzhgorod. Source: Karpatska Sich. On the eve of this gathering, the regional police chief
refused to take measures to protect a roundtable on discrimination and hate crimes organised by
an LGBT organisation, and strongly advised them to cancel it. Upon receiving this information,
the hotel that was to host the event revoked its agreement. Rank-and-file police officers were
better disposed to the organisers and helped them leave the town safely.
The town's leftist/liberal milieu reacted to these events by
organising a demonstration "For a European Uzhgorod" on 31 March. Their opponents occupied
the same square with their own demonstration,"For traditional family values". The city council
tried to forbid all demonstrations on that day, citing public safety considerations. However, a
local court did not prohibit the gatherings. Notably, Karpatska Sich was not officially present
at the counter-demonstration: it was formally organised by a KS-allied group "Black Sun",
Social-Nationalist Assembly (SNA) and a few less significant organisations. Karpatska Sich
militant activists were present next to the square, but there was no violence on that day. The
police did their job, efficiently separating the two demonstrations.
On 19 March, the far right blocked two events organised by liberal NGOs: a roundtable on
countering discrimination and hate crimes in
Vinnytsia and a lecture on gender-sensitive words in
Ivano-Frankivsk . In Vinnytsia, around 40 far right introduced themselves as ordinary
citizens, blocking the entrance and demanding to be let inside. The police created a corridor
to evacuate the participants of the roundtable. In Ivano-Frankivsk, the lecture was sabotaged
by Karpatska Sich and their partner organisation, Sokil. KS promised to repeat such
interventions in the future.
Unlike Right Sector, which tried and failed a strategy of violent confrontation with the
post-Maidan government, Azov's leadership has opted for a "long march through the
institutions"
On 23 March, a special police squad conducted searches at Kyiv's ATEK factory, which is used
by Azov as its headquarters and training grounds. Police chiefs explained that the intervention
had nothing to do with Azov, but the latter nevertheless quickly mobilised around 1,000
supporters, including members of parliament from Svoboda, to block the work of the police and
expel them. On that day, Azov leader Andriy Biletsky mentioned that "a considerable part of the
military will support in their hearts" a hypothetical coup d'état.
Three days later, 26 March was marked by
far-right violence against a lecture about the dangers of the far-right violence in Kyiv:
Right Sector, Svoboda and Tradition and Order, altogether around 40 people, invaded a cultural
centre and tore down posters bearing the slogan "Respect diversity". The police pushed them
outside, where they verbally attacked people coming in. Two hours later, the police evacuated
the building due to an anonymous report of a bomb threat.
On 29 March, several dozen National Militia members
broke into the Mykolayiv regional council and demanded that the deputies impeach the
regional governor. The deputies did not comply with this request, but the next day the governor
himself asked the president Poroshenko for temporary suspension.
On 16 April, an art exhibition dedicated to the far-right violence, which was opened at the
premises of a university in Kyiv under heavy police protection, had to close down . The exhibition's curator
insisted on shutting it down, citing the risk of aggression from far-right groups; the
administration of the university put additional pressure, accusing the artists of a
provocation.
On 18 April, C14 organised an anti-Roma raid at Kyiv railway station. The Roma, who had been
staying at the station for a few days, had become the subject of a moral panic in the
mainstream Ukrainian media a few days before. On 20 April, Hitler's birthday, a voluntary
"municipal guard" consisting of C14 activists violently expelled a Roma camp from a Kyiv
park, burning their possessions in the process. Their report, illustrated with picturesque
photos, received a very enthusiastic feedback from the wider public on social media. The city
police chief said they had not received any official violence complaints, and that the
municipal guard had simply burnt some garbage left by the Roma.
A few days later, when a news website published a video of men chasing Roma
families and attacking them with pepper spray and stones, the police said they had opened two
criminal proceedings into hate crime and hooliganism.
Connecting the dots
Can this intimidating but chaotic sequence of events be disentangled and regrouped into
several distinct plots, each having its own main characters and dynamics even while
intersecting with others? I will try to do so below.
The main character of the first thread to be found here, and indeed of the far-right
political scene in Ukraine as a whole, is the extended network of various structures known under the
general Azov movement brand . Unlike Right Sector, which tried and failed a strategy of
violent confrontation with the post-Maidan government, Azov's leadership has opted for a "long
march through the institutions", extending local patronage networks with criminals and
politicians and building a wide network of organisations and side projects.
Azov's network amounts to a far-right "state within a state" – a universe that
aims to monopolise the nationalist sector of Ukraine's political field
The creation of the Azov Civil Corps was the first step in this direction. This structure,
formally divorced from the Azov National Guard regiment, decided on a more pronounced public
political face. The Civil Corps served the double purpose of keeping Azov military regiment
veterans busy while also spreading Azov's hegemony among the far-right audience. This was
followed by creating the National Corps political party, the network of Azovets children's
summer camps, the Sports Corps, the veterans organisation Zirka, the nation-wide vigilante
network of National
Militias and other outlets. Azov's network thus amounts to a far-right "state within a
state" – a universe that aims to monopolise the nationalist sector of Ukraine's political
field.
Azov has become an important umbrella brand for Ukrainian far right organisations. On
the national level, this makes Azov's political patron, Ukraine's Interior Minister Arsen
Avakov, the second most powerful person in the country, effectively possessing a private army
which once in a while makes ambiguous comments about the possibility of a
coup . However, the patronage networks and conflicts go much deeper on the local level.
Some of them can be uncovered by analysing the events mentioned above.
For instance, the March 2018 incident at the ATEK factory in Kyiv. Here what's at stake is
the struggle for ownership rights to this factory, which currently hosts Azov's headquarters.
The factory previously belonged to Oleksandr Tretiakov, a politician and owner of a Ukrainian
lottery operator which allegedly
benefits from the National Corps' violent raids directed against competing lottery outlets
under the pretext of a campaign against illegal gambling. Tretiakov's old political partner,
Ukraine's former justice minister Roman Zvarych, helped Azov establish itself at the factory's
premises in November 2014.
At the time, the factory was at the centre of a corporate conflict. As reported by Hromadske , a
former lawyer for one of the parties to the factory dispute, KVV Group, claimed he paid
$195,000 to Sergey Korotkikh, Azov's head of intelligence, to occupy the factory on KVV's
behalf. However, after Azov did this, they refused to permit KVV to enter. Instead, according
to KVV's former lawyer, Azov advised KVV to discuss financial matters with Svitlana Zvarych,
whose charity foundation demanded 45.5m UAH ($3m) in order for Azov to leave the premises.
Svitlana Zvarych refutes this claim. Meanwhile, Azov started converting the factory to produce
military equipment with an eye on attracting government orders, while Azov Civil Corps, headed
at that time by Roman Zvarych, politicised the conflict by staging street protests "in defense of the
factory" .
Many of Azov's public gestures, including incidents involving violence, are aimed at
reinforcing the image of an independent movement, opposed to both Ukraine's police leadership
and corrupt elites
In October 2016, the co-owner of KVV Group, having spent two months in prison on charges of
financing separatism, surrendered his ownership rights to Zvarych's charitable foundation.
However, in the same month, according to Svitlana Zvarych, she was kicked out of the factory by
Azov's forces after refusing to give a share in the company's capital to Sergey Korotkikh and
Vadym Troyan, Kyiv regional police chief and former Azov battalion commander.
This context allows us to better understand Azov's apparent overreaction to the police visit
in March 2018 in contrast to their official explanation, which stated that the ""unreformed"
police wanted to plant weapons at Azov's base and then disband them. Indeed, Azov's official
version helps them mute their ties with Avakov, posing for the nationalist audience as victims
of the regime.
Many of Azov's public gestures, including incidents involving violence, are aimed at
reinforcing the image of an independent movement, opposed to both Ukraine's police leadership
and corrupt elites. Azov's clash with Odessa mayor Gennady Trukhanov's hired thugs and, more
importantly, with the police, is one such publicity stunt which "cleanses" the image of
National Squads from allegations of Avakov's patronage.
Azov's involvement in the incidents in Cherkasy and Mykolayiv, on the other hand, seems to
be connected with its involvement in patronage networks. Cherkasy city council was
torn by a conflict between city mayor Anatoliy Bondarenko and city council secretary
Oleksandr Radytsky. The latter, supported by the president's Petro Poroshenko Bloc and the
nationalist Svoboda party, commanded the majority of votes in the assembly and paralysed the
budget confirmation process. The mayor asked the parliament to dissolve the city council and
call a new election.
Here, the sudden intervention of Azov's National Militia, sporting balaclavas and firearms
cases, turned the tide in the mayor's favour. The city council passed the budget and then voted
for its own dissolution. Whether or not the claims about Avakov's political interests in
Cherkasy are true, this episode shows that the local configuration of power is often more
important than broad political agreements on the national level. Azov played into the hands of
the forces belonging to a different camp on the national scale, against fellow nationalists and
formal partners from Svoboda.
In Mykolayiv, the official reason for the intervention of Azov's National Militia were
accusations against regional governor Oleksiy Savchenko, whose corrupt ways allegedly motivated
the suicide of the local airport director, a war veteran. However,
according to another interpretation , this is an episode of a wider conflict between Azov's
patron Arsen Avakov and Ukraine's former general attorney, police general Vitaliy Yarema. The
latter is gaining influence on president Poroshenko, putting his trusted men, former policemen,
to important positions in the regions – and Oleksiy Savchenko is one of Yarema's
protégés. For Avakov, who wants to monopolise influence on the Ukrainian police
force, this situation is perceived as a threat.
Finally, the Mariupol episodes demonstrate the behaviour of Azov in their "base" city close
to the front line. As any large industrial city,
Mariupol has a lot of powerful local and regional interests , such as the important
metallurgical assets belonging to the country's richest man, Rinat Akhmetov -- these would
normally dwarf the influence of the likes of Azov. But the war, given the city's strategic
importance and reasonable doubts about the political loyalty of its population, has made Azov a
more influential player.
Mariupol's Azov movement feel enough at home to have installed a statue of medieval prince
Sviatoslav (a central figure in post-Soviet anti-Semitic mythology) in the city centre, despite
the lack of official permission from the city council, and to organise regular torchlight
marches there. A soldier from Azov, who killed a man in the street after a political argument
earlier this year,
was released by the local court , which sentenced him to a fine. Even if they do not
possess a complete monopoly on violence, Azov has certainly established political control of
the streets in Mariupol. To maintain this control, they have to react violently, even if not
officially, to any public event which diverges sufficiently from their political agenda.
The struggle for hegemony in Lviv
The contested hegemony over street-level political activism is the common rationale behind
the acts of far-right political violence in Lviv. This western city, Ukraine's "national
Piedmont", has always been considered the heartland of Ukrainian nationalism.
As early as 2010, Svoboda gained an absolute majority in the city council and relative
majority in the regional council. At that point, the party was in the control of an energetic
militant movement, Autonomous Resistance (AO). Founded by the former Hitlerist leadership of
the now defunct Ukrainian National Labour Party, it was headed by Svoboda deputy Yuriy Mykhalchyshyn,
whose PhD thesis dealt with the history of NSDAP and Mussolini's PNF. The militant movement,
which followed Strasserism , borrowed its political style from
the German autonomists. After a bitter conflict with Mykhalchyshyn in 2013, Autonomous
Resistance cut ties with Svoboda and gradually slided leftward politically. It played a
prominent role during Maidan in Lviv, occupying the regional council and fighting Svoboda
deputies. Coming from a right-wing background, AO paid attention to the development of combat
skills of its membership. It created its own MMA training facility, which is the core of a
social centre that hosts lectures and presentations. An online shop selling imported athletic
clothing previously provided the organisation with an independent source of income.
The peculiar political face of AO – their eclectic left nationalist ideology,
commitment to key nationalist symbols and figures, and active participation in the military
conflict in the east – has allowed them to survive politically, unlike most other leftist
organisations which have failed to find a winning strategy in the post-Maidan environment. A
number of splits gave birth to several other organisations, less nationalist but very active,
possessing street violence skills and maintaining partnerships with AO. This meant that the
street politics of the most important city in western Ukraine was dominated by a leftist
milieu.
The first far-right organisation that attempted to contest this situation was Right Sector.
In 2015, its local cell
forcibly blocked the 1 May "Social march" organised by AO, in order to "prevent a
neo-Bolshevik revanche". However, after a series of splits, Right Sector lost its mobilising
potential, as did Svoboda. Over 2016-2017, Lviv has seen a string of dramatic incidents of
right-wing violence: a
mobilisation against a Festival of Equality which intended to tackle LGBT rights issues; a
brutal attack on an AO march by several hundred Nazis;
attacks at a Publishers Forum because of two books allegedly promoting LGBT and leftist
politics. However, Right Sector did not figure prominently in these incidents. Most of these
far-right mobilisations were to a large extent anonymous, featuring "patriotic youth" instead
of specific political brands.
November 2016: Autonomous Resistance's social centre in Lviv is attacked by far-right.
Source: YouTube / Kateryna Benjuk.
The same lack of clear authorship is also true of violent incidents in 2018. However, in
personal communication to me, activists who were present on the ground clearly indicate the
leading role of Azov's National Corps in these attacks. According to them, Right Sector today
constitutes an alternative to Azov only as a military unit in eastern Ukraine, but politically
the latter "has swallowed up both Right Sector and Svoboda". Most participants of the 2015
blockade have since then either joined National Corps, or military battalions allied to Right
Sector or the police force. Having consolidated the local far-right scene, Azov is trying to
clean the political field of its leftist competitors. The Lviv police rank-and-file, which is
infiltrated by the far right according to local activists, do not prevent, or even choose to
help them to achieve this aim.
Why then is the National Corps reluctant to lead the struggle in Lviv as openly as it does
elsewhere? Several hypotheses can help answer this question. First, it cannot afford to lose
publicly. In November 2016, a potent coalition of several hundred Nazis joined forces to
physically destroy the organised left in Lviv – activists arrived from different regions,
representing Azov's Civic Corps, Right Sector and Karpatska Sich. Amazingly, they lost: failing
to penetrate the gates of the office under attack, eventually they had to retreat. For
political reasons, this kind of loss is unacceptable for an ambitious movement like Azov.
Therefore, they will not lead the fight officially unless they are guaranteed to win.
The second hypothesis concerns competition between the agencies of state violence. Both 2016
and 2017 have seen attacks on the Lviv left scene organised by the
Security Service of Ukraine (SBU). According to persons involved, these investigations seem
to have been partially motivated by SBU's own strategic aims, partially by the request of a
local developer, and partially by the personal revenge of Yuri Mykhalchyshyn (who now works for
the SBU as a consultant). Whatever the exact reasons in each specific case, Azov's National
Corps would hardly consider it expedient to be seen voluntarily helping the state institution
which is traditionally hostile to their political patron Arsen Avakov – and to give other
far right groups even more grounds to talk about their subservience to "the regime".
Finally, Azov's hegemony over the local extreme right may still not be quite consolidated
yet. Their relations with Svoboda may be too complicated for open involvement in Lviv at a
scale similar to other cities which have less competitive far-right scenes.
Challengers in Kyiv
In Kyiv, open struggle against the (weaker) leftists and liberals is the preferred
activity of C14 – an organisation headed by Yevgen Karas, a former Svoboda activist who
split from the party to become an independent entrepreneur of political violence. Compared
to the other far right organisations mentioned above, C14's profile has less to do with quietly
establishing informal domination and engaging in illicit activities for material gain, and more
with mediatised activities oriented at a wider audience.
Aiming for Ukraine's mainstream patriotic public, C14 positions itself as a group of
young and resolute men ready to employ violence for the sake of (national) justice. Their
enemies are usually represented as (latent) supporters of pro-Russian separatists, which
automatically diminishes their worth in the eyes of the public and amplifies the attackers'
heroism. In effect, C14 is trying to take the niche that was occupied by Svoboda before Maidan:
relatable and well-meaning troublemakers prepared to break the law for the greater good (by
comparison, the agenda of National Corps stresses the values of order).
C14's profile has less to do with quietly establishing informal domination and engaging in
illicit activities for material gain, and more with mediatised activities oriented at a wider
audience
This orientation is obvious from a Facebook poll in which C14 asked their audience which
politician associated with the old regime they would like the group to beat up (so far they did
not manage to target any of the persons mentioned in the poll). In line with this strategy,
Karas
freely admitted to a sympathetic journalist that he cooperates with Ukraine's security
services. Among Ukrainian far-right organisations, the activities of C14 are closest to those
of Russian online vigilante movements such as "Occupy Pedophily" or "Lev Protiv"; their YouTube
channel is consciously crafted to attract audiences (thus literally monetising their violence),
and the most popular videos have between 50,000 and 300,000 views.
The recent wave of anti-Roma pogroms fits this strategy very well: it has produced immense
positive feedback in the form of online comments from non-politicised "regular citizens",
enhancing brand recognition for C14. Roma can hardly pass as "separatists", but their
marginalised status makes them a perfect aim for this kind of strategically calculated
violence. Notably, the first anti-Roma raid at Kyiv railway station was a reaction to swelling
public demand (heated up by a moral panic in the media), rather than C14's own ideologically
dictated initiative. Meanwhile, the attack on the Kyiv antifascist rally in January 2018 is the
continuation of C14's more traditional political style – attacking easy targets that can
be represented as the "fifth column".
The 2018 feminist march in Kyiv also proves the selective approach of C14: it did not figure
prominently among the counter-protesters on 8 March, but afterwards it seized the opportunity
to inflate the hysteria around the feminist banner, claiming that the symbol of Azov's National
Militia on it looked too much like Ukraine's national symbol, and was located too close to the
woman's anus. Characteristically, the National Militia ignored the story, but C14 did its best
to mobilise its activists to attend the court hearings.
Here, though, there is a deeper calculation: consolidating Kyiv's far-right scene behind
C14. Just like Azov, C14 combine generic "healthy patriotic" message with subtler hints which
can be easily deciphered by members of the subculture (such as the symbolic date of the Roma
pogrom on Hitler's birthday or indeed the very name of the organisation). Similarly, people
belonging to politicised subcultures understand very well that the antifascists who were
attacked in January 2018 were not Kremlin agents, but old political enemies who cannot be
allowed to grow stronger. Having created a "municipal guard"
officially financed by Kyiv's city council, C14 works towards realising both aims: it gives
them a pretext to patrol streets and maximise the probability of violent encounters (which can
be publicised), and at the same time provides a "second-best" opportunity to those who could or
would not join the structures of Azov.
The desire to dominate the local far-right milieu is also apparent behind another series of
violent acts by C14, not mentioned above because they were directed against the participants of
the far-right scene. Dmitry Riznichenko, a prominent veteran of Ukraine's far right scene and
former member of C14, left the organisation after Maidan. After serving in the Donbas volunteer
battalion, Riznichenko created his own organisation, more socially liberal than is custom among
today's far right. (Some have gone as far as declaring him a leftist.) Whatever Riznichenko's
actual political views, the important thing is that he, along with another "erring rightist"
organisation ChorKom (Black Committee), maintains openly friendly relations with Lviv's AO and
openly challenges the hierarchy within the scene. Struggling to defend its authority, C14
launched an intensive
campaign of brutal physical attacks against Riznichenko.
"Anti-gender" ideology as a universal mobiliser
Even though neither Azov nor C14 explicitly mobilised for International Women's Day on 8
March, the demonstration did encounter violent far-right counter-protesters, aided and abetted
by some rank-and-file policemen belonging to the same political milieu.
The most prominent violent proponent of the "anti-gender" agenda in the post-Maidan years
has been Right Sector. Its ideological face was always more "fascist" or "Francoist" than the
white supremacist/Hitlerist Azov or LePen-like Svoboda. Inside the movement, Right Sector was
the main engine behind violent mobilisations against LGBT events such as the Equality March in
Kyiv. On the wider scale, it contributed to popularising and reinforcing the dichotomy between
pro-EU, pro-Poroshenko liberals and revolutionary conservative nationalists.
Today, this dichotomy is a common-sense understanding. The "anti-gender" ideology has turned
from an exclusive feature of Right Sector into a generic far-right set of ideas, which can be
used by anyone. This is one reason behind the anonymity of some attacks and blockages: their
authorship is known inside the relevant milieu, serving as one of the criteria for building
subculture hierarchies.
It is also noticeable that Azov has never officially participated in any "gendered" violent
actions. Even in their "home" town of Mariupol, attacks are not formally done on behalf of the
movement. Partially, this can be explained by their special relationship with the state
leadership, which was dying to hide all visible manifestations of xenophobia, homophobia and
other signs of lack of social progress from the eyes of the EU, which could have reacted by
backtracking on the visa-free regime, politically important for Ukrainian government.
However, this type of violence also generally does not fit Azov's strategy of publicity.
They like repeating that they fight "real and strong" enemies – Russians and separatists,
but also corrupt officials and other powerful figures within the society, almost ignoring some
classic rightist scapegoats.
Instead, the "anti-gender" violence scene has recently seen the rise of two new aspiring
actors, which stand behind all recent "gendered" episodes in Kyiv. One of them, Katekhon, is a
conservative Orthodox group, somewhat resembling the Russian
Union of Orthodox Banner-Bearers with their aggressive fundamentalist style. This group is
headed by Yuriy Noyevyi, a politician from Svoboda. Not long ago, in 2012-2014, Noyevyi and his
comrades were active in a different niche: their organisation Ukrainian Student attempted to
become a far-right student union, competing for the influence with the anarcho-syndicalist
union Priama Diya (Direct Action). When the latter ceased to be an important political
contender, Noyevyi's interests shifted from university syndicalism to religious fundamentalism.
Effectively, Katekhon is the rebranded Ukrainian Student, serving the same technological
purposes – promoting the interests of the party in the spheres which are considered the
most promising at the moment.
The second ambitious newcomer at the market of gendered political violence is Tradition and
Order (TiP). This party was created in the second half of 2016, and took Revanche, a group of
admirers of Italian fascism, as its basis. The creation of the party was facilitated by
political technologists involved in the patronage circles of the president's political
party, Petro Poroshenko Bloc. Today, the perception of TiP as "pro-Poroshenko" is widely shared
in Kyiv's marginal political subculture. Most likely, their task is to try and create an
alternative centre of gravity among the far right that would balance the influence of Azov
(whose political patron is not unconditionally loyal to Poroshenko) and the remaining authority
of Svoboda and Right Sector.
Thus, people violently fighting against "gender propaganda" shoulder to shoulder were
brought together in the same place by very different, and sometimes mutually exclusive,
considerations. In March 2017, National Corps, Svoboda and Right Sector
signed a "National Manifesto", pledging to coordinate their efforts in a joint struggle
against the government; however, in reality this political field is full of conflicting
interests as well as ambitious newcomers with powerful patrons.
The regional monopoly in Uzhgorod
There is one more far right group actively and violently fighting against "gender ideology"
in Ukraine – Karpatska Sich (KS), whose area of activity is mostly confined to Uzhgorod.
Unlike Azov, they are not tied by the limitations imposed by high-status patrons and
parliamentary political ambitions, and do not shy away from certain topics, catering to all
possible audiences in the regional far-right milieu.
This group is a financially self-sufficient political and criminal unit, functioning in a
border region where smuggling and similar petty criminal activities are an important source of
income for a large part of the population. The leadership of KS are founders of a
charitable foundation that receives goods confiscated at the customs for free, pledging to
deliver them to soldiers at the eastern front. However, among the goods thus obtained there
were two
tonnes of marble and women's lingerie , which can be hardly considered a useful material
aid but can be profitably sold. One of the founders also figures in cases of illicit land
allocations by Uzhgorod city council.
Simultaneously, KS has successfully established its exclusive control over street-level
violence in Uzhgorod. The publication of the information on their illicit activities by a local
anti-corruption activist was followed by a string of attacks against him and his colleagues by
KS. On the other hand, the nature of their relations with the police and local government is
markedly different from the situation in Kyiv and Lviv. In this case, there is hardly an
infiltration or benevolent attitude on the part of rank-and-file policemen; rather, the police
and the state apparatus are too weak to persecute KS as severely as they perhaps would like to.
In 2017, the leader of KS Taras Deyak was included in the list of 100 most influential people
of the region – this is very unusual, and suggests the depth of the group's involvement
in local criminal networks.
This influence is used to expand the clout of KS among the far-right scene and reap benefits
in high politics. The list of organisations which participated in the 79th anniversary march
was telling. It did not include either National Corps or Svoboda. Instead, it featured C14
(whose sphere of influence is geographically divided from KS) and the Social-National Assembly.
According to some
rumours , the leader of SNA Oleh Odnorozhenko (who was previously Azov's main ideologue) is
drifting closer to Oleh Lyashko and Igor Mosiychuk – people who left Azov in 2014.
Lyashko's Radical Party is an influential player in mainstream politics, and he personally
enjoys high rankings in presidential polls, opposing both Avakov and Poroshenko. Odnorozhenko's
frequent visits to Uzhgorod and participation in joint events may be a prelude to the inclusion
of SNA and KS into Lyashko's electoral machine.
Hegemony toolkit: Dosing violence, choosing friends and victims
The first and most important of the plots we have been able to discern above is the
establishment of the Azov movement as dominant in Ukraine's far-right scene on the national
level – and as a significant political player in the mainstream political scene.
The key factors that have allowed Azov to rise to these positions are its strategic choices
to maintain a reserved but not hostile public attitude towards the government and to maintain
close patron-client relationships with certain factions both on the national level and in
specific regional and local configurations. The third factor is Azov's military background,
which grants it access to the infrastructure of violence (arms, training facilities etc.) and
ensures its legitimacy both in the eyes of the wider public and of the nationalist scene. This
legitimacy hinges on the balanced demonstration of the resources of violence available to the
movement and its discretion in using them.
This combination is unique among the major far-right structures in Ukraine. Right Sector has
a strong military component, but its decision to choose an openly
confrontational path in its relations with the governing factions of the ruling class has
prevented it from gaining access to important physical and symbolic resources. In this
situation, Right Sector's bet on their clientelist relations with an opposition faction of
Ukraine's haute bourgeoisie (Ihor Kolomoisky's Privat Group) and revolutionary image did not
pay off. Now this movement seems to be in decline.
Svoboda, meanwhile, was too compromised by its perceived proximity to power during and
immediately after Maidan. The creation of Svoboda's own volunteer war units appears to have
failed to neutralise the lack of radicalism and militarism in its public image. Its
advertised readiness to resort to violence was the key to Svoboda's electoral success before
Maidan, but this was overshadowed by the efforts of the competing entrepreneurs of political
violence in the post-Maidan conjuncture, in which the level of and tolerance to violence has
escalated. On the other hand, Svoboda keeps holding on to its hegemony in regional power
settings in western Ukraine, even though its relations to nation-wide patronage networks is
unclear. All in all, Azov/National Corps seems to be clearly the most successful partner in the
big nationalist threesome, receiving the most from this alliance.
As mentioned above, Azov's success hinges partly on the measured dosage of violence in the
public space, which should project an image of a force conscious of its superiority in terms of
violent resources – but still using it sparingly. This is why National Corps prefers
semi-anonymity when acting in situations where its single-handed superiority is not guaranteed
a priori, like in Kyiv and Lviv. Its interpenetration with the police forces helps it establish
its hegemony in a covert manner. The efforts of National Corps to dominate street politics in
Lviv are the second plot.
The third plot concerns the activities of C14 in Kyiv. This movement is closer to a classic
vigilante group, generously using violence against commonly recognised "public enemies", i.e.
subjects of moral panic like the Roma or alleged pro-Russian fifth columnist. In their
activity, they appeal to two audiences: the wider public with its patriotic and anti-Roma
instincts and the far-right political subculture able to see more nuanced details. The first
dimension makes C14 a structural analogue of Russian vigilante groups with their commercialised
online platforms; the second dimension, oriented inside the far-right scene, has elevated C14
to the position of a co-organiser of the annual nationalist marches on 14 October, on a par
with the much more powerful Azov, Svoboda and Right Sector.
The use of "anti-gender" ideology is the fourth theme. The cases analysed here show that
this mobilising subject is used as a self-promotion arena by two competing groups: Katekhon,
trying to restore Svoboda's once leading positions in the scene; and TiP, aimed at creating
there a separate gravitation pole embedded in Poroshenko's patronage network. On the other
hand, Azov/National Corps seems reluctant to invest too much effort in forcing the topic.
Finally, a separate plot is unfolding in Uzhgorod, where the locally entrenched political
and criminal structure Karpatska Sich is overtly competing with the state apparatus for
influence on the regional level and is struggling to build alliances on the national scale.
These alliances, if constructed successfully, will be able to undermine the dominance of
Azov/National Corps by creating a patronage network of comparable capacity to compete with it
politically and otherwise on all levels.
As I have argued above, Ukraine's far right are taking the logic of "violent
entrepreneurship" outside the purely commercial and apolitical realm – and employing it
in the domain of political contestation, where illicit violence is a precious resource that can
be bought and rented.
Ukrainian Nazi movements thus exist on the intersection of several worlds (criminal,
commercial, military, marginal-political, mainstream political) and are prepared to mobilise
their violent resources for advancement of their own positions, up to and including displacing
former patrons and stepping into their shoes. The skillful and measured management and use of
these violent resources is the key to success in this strategy.
Because that is precisely how the smear game works. The way it works is, the smearers bait
the smearee into defending himself against the defamatory content of the smears. Once the
smearee has done that, the smearers have him. From then on, the focus of the debate becomes
whether or not the smears are accurate, rather than why he's being smeared, how he's being
smeared, and who is smearing him .
This is the smearers' primary objective, i.e., to establish the boundaries of the debate,
and to trap the target of the smears within them. If you've followed the fake "Labour
Anti-Semitism" scandal, you've witnessed this tactic deployed against
Corbyn , who unfortunately
fell right into the trap and gave the smearers the upper hand.
No, the only way to effectively counter a smear campaign (whether large-scale or
small-scale), is to resist the temptation to profess your innocence, and, instead, focus as
much attention on the tactics and the motives of the smearers as possible . It is
difficult to resist this temptation, especially when the people smearing you have significantly
more power and influence than you do, and are calling you a racist and an anti-Semite, but,
trust me, the moment you start defending yourself, the game is over, and the smearers have
won.
@Justsaying The evidence is that before Cockburn died Counterpunch would routinely
publish articles which were basically honest about Israel (ie not terribly flattering) and
now does not (as it states in the article above viewpoints of the extreme left and right ie
genuine critique will not be tolerated so only critique from inside established paradigms
will be allowed-just like every other media outlet).
Counterpunch used to be outside of the Jewish paradigm (ie it was genuinely leftist) but
now will be just another gelded publication. Cockburn did a good job of fending off
criticism-Counterpunch was a rather niche publication so it flew under the radar of the
Jews.
Counterpunch was routinely critical of the neocons and even pointed out their Jewishness
but a lot of liberal Jews did not like the neocons. Israel was and is the real litmus
test.
The Guardian always had Alan Rusbridger who I beleive was Jewish. It is not exactly funded
by Jewish money- it mainly subsists off of government departments advertising public sector
jobs. Before the rise of the internet and gumtree etc it was mainly funded by sales of
autotrader a car trading magazine (lol at the nost po faced anti pollution newspaper being
funded by the sales of cars).
What changed is that the Jews are no longer able to control the narrative- they used to
feel they could afford semi-critical comments about Israel before but not any more. This has
gone hand in hand with increased efforts to censor the internet. The Jews were able to
infiltrate BDS and subvert it, they were able to use their explicit power to pass anti BDS
laws but they were not able to really turn the tide of public opinion. They have resorted to
outright censorship.
As you say it is not suprising that Counterpunch was taken over any
publication/organisation that wants to work outside of established Jewish limits on
intellectual discourse will eventually be subverted. Just look at the British Labour party.
Corbyn is an old school lefists (ie he wants to give people options other than the new labour
globalist neo liberalism) and a very principaled one. He stands up for the Palestinians (some
people say he just does this because of his Muslim constituents but that is not the case-he
has always stood up for them) and as a result has been smeared time and time again by the
Jewish press.
There is a power struggle in the Labour party (Muslim ethnics weight of numbers vs Jewish
money) and it looks like the Jews will win.
It's very sad and like I said I hope the new Counterpunch will fold leaving Cockburn's
histroy of excellent journalism unsullied.
Thank you for describing my work as "meticulously researched and argued."
A point of dissent: I don't know of any "Jewocracy."
I'm cognizant of the power and influence of Zionism and Talmudism, but I would be loathe
to generalize about Judaic people under the rubric of "Jewocracy."
On pp. 463-466 of Judaism Discovered this writer attempts to elucidate the rabbinic
principle taught to Orthodox youth: " Halacha hi beyoduah she'Eisav soneh l'Yaakov "
("It is a given law: it is known that Esau hates Jacob").
What does this instruction connote within the broader context of Orthodox Talmudism? It
teaches that all goyim are irrevocably Jew-haters and that this hate is irrational and
directed at all Judaic persons, whether good or bad, Left or Right, Zionists or not,
religious or not. The intent of this deceitful and racist generalization is to unify
Judaics and keep them in the rabbinic fold, since it is asserted that they will be hated for
no reason no matter what they do, even if they reject the Talmud .
The antidote to this rabbinic propaganda is love for Judaic people and openness in
particular to those Judaics who seek a way out of Talmudism and/or Zionism. This is what my
books represent and one reason why they are viewed as a mortal threat to the
antediluvians.
When terms such as "Jewocracy" are employed then " Halacha hi beyoduah she'Eisav soneh
l'Yaakov " is being fulfilled.
The vast majority of the movement by non-Judaics to critique or oppose the Talmud is
almost always grounded in some sort of negative typecasting about "The Jews. " Hence,
when the individual Judaic who is trying to get free of the bondage of the Orthodox rabbinate
sees generalizations like that, their motivation is subverted and their suspicions that
perhaps the teaching imparted to them in their youth was true, is kindled anew.
If we truly wish to convert people into allies of truth and freedom, then we will not
replicate their slavemasters' tropes in our discourse. In other words, we will not behave
like Talmudists. If on the other hand, our principal aim is to vent our rage and anger at
Talmudic supremacy, then reckless disregard for these distinctions will hold sway, along with
the continued defeat of our espoused objectives.
There actually is only one fount of racism and supremacy on earth and it emanates from the
primeval antecedents of the Babylonian Talmud and the Zohar (Kabbalah), and the cognate
"sacred texts" that proceed from them. When the Germans began to worship themselves
(something Luther and Nietzsche detested and eschewed), as part of the Nazi praxis, they
became rabbis spiritually and psychologically, since the most fundamental constituent of
Orthodox Judaism is self-worship .
A sincere and empowered critic of the theology of the Talmud cannot himself be a
supremacist or a racist since those mental attitudes and philosophical commitments are part
and parcel of the Talmudic mentality. A Talmudist cannot cast out the Talmud (Matthew
12:25-26).
Michael Hoffman
Author: Judaism Discovered
and Judaism's Strange Gods
Thank you for describing my work as "meticulously researched and argued."
A point of dissent: I don't know of any "Jewocracy."
I'm cognizant of the power and influence of Zionism and Talmudism, but I would be loathe
to generalize about Judaic people under the rubric of "Jewocracy."
On pp. 463-466 of Judaism Discovered this writer attempts to elucidate the rabbinic
principle taught to Orthodox youth: " Halacha hi beyoduah she'Eisav soneh l'Yaakov "
("It is a given law: it is known that Esau hates Jacob").
What does this instruction connote within the broader context of Orthodox Talmudism? It
teaches that all goyim are irrevocably Jew-haters and that this hate is irrational and
directed at all Judaic persons, whether good or bad, Left or Right, Zionists or not,
religious or not. The intent of this deceitful and racist generalization is to unify
Judaics and keep them in the rabbinic fold, since it is asserted that they will be hated for
no reason no matter what they do, even if they reject the Talmud .
The antidote to this rabbinic propaganda is love for Judaic people and openness in
particular to those Judaics who seek a way out of Talmudism and/or Zionism. This is what my
books represent and one reason why they are viewed as a mortal threat to the
antediluvians.
When terms such as "Jewocracy" are employed then " Halacha hi beyoduah she'Eisav soneh
l'Yaakov " is being fulfilled.
The vast majority of the movement by non-Judaics to critique or oppose the Talmud is
almost always grounded in some sort of negative typecasting about "The Jews. " Hence,
when the individual Judaic who is trying to get free of the bondage of the Orthodox rabbinate
sees generalizations like that, their motivation is subverted and their suspicions that
perhaps the teaching imparted to them in their youth was true, is kindled anew.
If we truly wish to convert people into allies of truth and freedom, then we will not
replicate their slavemasters' tropes in our discourse. In other words, we will not behave
like Talmudists. If on the other hand, our principal aim is to vent our rage and anger at
Talmudic supremacy, then reckless disregard for these distinctions will hold sway, along with
the continued defeat of our espoused objectives.
There actually is only one fount of racism and supremacy on earth and it emanates from the
primeval antecedents of the Babylonian Talmud and the Zohar (Kabbalah), and the cognate
"sacred texts" that proceed from them. When the Germans began to worship themselves
(something Luther and Nietzsche detested and eschewed), as part of the Nazi praxis, they
became rabbis spiritually and psychologically, since the most fundamental constituent of
Orthodox Judaism is self-worship .
A sincere and empowered critic of the theology of the Talmud cannot himself be a
supremacist or a racist since those mental attitudes and philosophical commitments are part
and parcel of the Talmudic mentality. A Talmudist cannot cast out the Talmud (Matthew
12:25-26).
Michael Hoffman
Author: Judaism Discovered
and Judaism's Strange Gods I don't buy your cloying and passive aggressive pretense of
not hating Jews but being merely interested in their salvation.
I even struggle to imagine anyone who'd be stupid enough to do so.
(Does it help you sell books or is it merely a prop against horrific
self-realisation?)
Regardless, it is a shame that even your "scholarship" may be unbooked. Painfully dumb
arguments have value. They provide it by contrast.
I am not even particularly interested in that here though. Inevitably there's lots of
weird stuff in a milennia old wikipedia and bozos, sorry "revisionists", will read into it
what they feel like.
The issue though is very simple. Were any of these effluent theories that take causation
to run from Judaism to globalism to actually be true then we would see that the more Orthodox
the Jew, the more globalist they would be.
Yet the facts sit precisely opposite.
The very worst Jews, on politics, that I've met or read have never heard of the Talmud.
Indeed, the Ultra-Orthodox wouldn't even consider them (or me) actual Jews at all.
That you can't even get this most basic of observations right totally discredits you.
Still, I hope your books get reinstated. I don't care what people who hate me choose to
waste their money on and, to be honest, it makes my meagre qualities look good by
comparison.
@Miro23 There are useful parallels with Christianity, which went from being powerless and
persecuted in its early days under Imperial Rome to eventual domination of Medieval Europe.
It was a longish process, but an early small, private and ethical movement did eventually
morph into a dictatorial organization that hunted down its own dissidents (heretics).
In this game of power, the church certainly collected great wealth, developed a complex
administration, made alliances with temporal (non-spiritual) power holders , and instituted
the Holy Office of the Inquisition (or equivalents) to root out dissidents (heretics) or
anyone who got in the way.
Green quotes a complaint by historian Manuel Barrios[172] about one Inquisitor, Diego
Rodriguez Lucero, who in Cordoba in 1506 burned to death the husbands of two different
women he then kept as mistresses. According to Barrios,
the daughter of Diego Celemin was exceptionally beautiful, her parents and her husband
did not want to give her to [Lucero], and so Lucero had the three of them burnt and now
has a child by her, and he has kept for a long time in the alcazar as a mistress,
(Wikipedia).
It was the "higher power" in the form of the Revolutionary Republican Napoleon
Bonaparte who finally abolished the Inquisition with the French invasion of Spain, which
suggests by parallel that when the US state collapses it will take its Jewish inquisitors
with it. Also the Jewish attempt to develop "Holocaustianity" with themselves as the leading
martyrs is failing, since Judaism doesn't have the mass appeal of Christianity: 1) it lacks
the ethical content 2) it isn't universalist (accepting all races).
Bolshevism (class guilt) was an earlier attempt to found a religion with Saint Trotsky and
themselves as the leading martyrs, which did actually (for a while) connect with the public,
since they harnessed the rising tide of Socialism/Communism with its fantasy of an
egalitarian "workers paradise" (themselves in the leadership role).
Unfortunately Jewish leftism (not to be confused National Democratic leftism) still
survives in the West in its bizarre SJW LGBT form, with Jews yet again trying to present
themselves as victims – this time of fabricated "White Oppression" – never mind
that white America gave them a generous refuge and a home after they were chased out of
Central Europe.
However, the search for power through SJWism (race guilt) is being rejected in the West,
so realistically Jews can only maintain their ethnic group power through a straightforward
coup at the centre (United States) – which they seem to be working on a the moment,
with some kind of fabricated Emergency involving Russia/Syria/Iran designed to give them a
dictatorship.
And if they get it, it won't be benevolent judging by the mass murdering precedents in
Russia and Hungary.
Thank you for describing my work as "meticulously researched and argued."
A point of dissent: I don't know of any "Jewocracy."
I'm cognizant of the power and influence of Zionism and Talmudism, but I would be loathe
to generalize about Judaic people under the rubric of "Jewocracy."
On pp. 463-466 of Judaism Discovered this writer attempts to elucidate the rabbinic
principle taught to Orthodox youth: " Halacha hi beyoduah she'Eisav soneh l'Yaakov "
("It is a given law: it is known that Esau hates Jacob").
What does this instruction connote within the broader context of Orthodox Talmudism? It
teaches that all goyim are irrevocably Jew-haters and that this hate is irrational and
directed at all Judaic persons, whether good or bad, Left or Right, Zionists or not,
religious or not. The intent of this deceitful and racist generalization is to unify
Judaics and keep them in the rabbinic fold, since it is asserted that they will be hated for
no reason no matter what they do, even if they reject the Talmud .
The antidote to this rabbinic propaganda is love for Judaic people and openness in
particular to those Judaics who seek a way out of Talmudism and/or Zionism. This is what my
books represent and one reason why they are viewed as a mortal threat to the
antediluvians.
When terms such as "Jewocracy" are employed then " Halacha hi beyoduah she'Eisav soneh
l'Yaakov " is being fulfilled.
The vast majority of the movement by non-Judaics to critique or oppose the Talmud is
almost always grounded in some sort of negative typecasting about "The Jews. " Hence,
when the individual Judaic who is trying to get free of the bondage of the Orthodox rabbinate
sees generalizations like that, their motivation is subverted and their suspicions that
perhaps the teaching imparted to them in their youth was true, is kindled anew.
If we truly wish to convert people into allies of truth and freedom, then we will not
replicate their slavemasters' tropes in our discourse. In other words, we will not behave
like Talmudists. If on the other hand, our principal aim is to vent our rage and anger at
Talmudic supremacy, then reckless disregard for these distinctions will hold sway, along with
the continued defeat of our espoused objectives.
There actually is only one fount of racism and supremacy on earth and it emanates from the
primeval antecedents of the Babylonian Talmud and the Zohar (Kabbalah), and the cognate
"sacred texts" that proceed from them. When the Germans began to worship themselves
(something Luther and Nietzsche detested and eschewed), as part of the Nazi praxis, they
became rabbis spiritually and psychologically, since the most fundamental constituent of
Orthodox Judaism is self-worship .
A sincere and empowered critic of the theology of the Talmud cannot himself be a
supremacist or a racist since those mental attitudes and philosophical commitments are part
and parcel of the Talmudic mentality. A Talmudist cannot cast out the Talmud (Matthew
12:25-26).
Michael Hoffman
Author: Judaism Discovered
and Judaism's Strange Gods I thank you for that comment. Beautifully put, logically
reasoned. Now I want to propose an idea for you to consider. The Orthodox Talmudic
instruction that you mention above has morphed well beyond the limitations of the Orthodox
rabbinate. You yourself just mentioned Judaics that want to "seek a way out of Talmudism and
/ or Zionism". Zionism certainly isn't Talmudism; it is blood and soil nationalism of a land
that belongs to other people. Couching this original Talmudic instruction as merely a method
of keeping Jews in "the rabbinic fold" is inaccurate. The unifiying of Jews through this
belief that all goyim are Jew-haters and vilification of those Judaics who break out has
grown well beyond the rabbinic fold, and it is present in every manifestation of Judaism,
from the secular atheist to the most Orthodox. Indeed, it seems to be the common thread that
holds all Jews together.
I thank you again for your ideas, Michael Hoffman. I will visit your website and try to
purchase your books, even though I am not a wealthy man.
Jonathan Sacks is given an award by the war-criminal Tony Blair
Jeremy Corbyn
has a beard. So has
Jonathan
Sacks
. But this shared
philopogony
hasn't
brought the two men closer together. Sacks is the former Chief Rabbi
of Britain and, to be fair, I think we be better off if more Jews
were like him. He doesn't seem to
hate
Whites and the Christian religion
in the way so many of his
co-ethnics do.
Battle of the Beards
But that doesn't mean Sacks is a reasonable or objective man where
his own race is concerned. He can be ethnocentric and apply double
standards with the best of them, as he's just proved by his comments
on his fellow beardie:
Jeremy Corbyn is "an anti-Semite" who has "given support to
racists, terrorists and dealers of hate", the former chief rabbi
Jonathan Sacks has said. In an exclusive interview with the
New
Statesman
, the peer described Corbyn's recently reported
2013 remarks on "Zionists" as "the most offensive statement made
by a senior British politician since Enoch Powell's 1968 'Rivers
of Blood' speech".
Sacks, who was chief rabbi from 1991 until 2013, added: "It was
divisive, hateful and like Powell's speech it undermines the
existence of an entire group of British citizens by depicting
them as essentially alien."
At a speech made at the Palestinian Return Centre in London in
2013, Corbyn said of a group of British "Zionists": "They
clearly have two problems. One is they don't want to study
history and, secondly, having lived in this country for a very
long time, probably all their lives, they don't understand
English irony either." (
Corbyn's
"Zionist" remarks were "most offensive" since Enoch Powell, says
ex-chief rabbi
,
The
New Statesman
, 28th August 2018)
Enoch Powell
predicted
that
mass immigration would lead to race war.
Jeremy
Corbyn
said that some Zionists don't get "English irony."
Whether or not you agree with Powell, is it reasonable to compare
the words of the two men? Are they "hateful" and "divisive" in a
similar way? I'd say no, they're obviously not, and the vast
majority of British Whites probably agree with me.
Sacks doesn't agree with me, and he has the Community with him,
according
to
the
Jewish
Chronicle
: "Reform Rabbi Jonathan Romain of Maidenhead
Synagogue said that, while the Enoch Powell analogy may have shocked
people, 'it accurately reflected what most British Jews feel.'"
The poisoning of Britain's politics
Well, if Rabbi Sacks and other Jews want anti-Semitism, I think they
should look much closer to home. This is from the
Jerusalem
Post
in 2007:
Sacks: Multiculturalism threatens democracy
Multiculturalism promotes segregation, stifles free speech and
threatens liberal democracy, Britain's top Jewish official
warned in extracts from [a recently published] book Jonathan
Sacks, Britain's chief rabbi, defined multiculturalism as an
attempt to affirm Britain's diverse communities and make ethnic
and religious minorities more appreciated and respected. But in
his book,
The
Home We Build Together: Recreating Society
, he said the
movement had run its course. "Multiculturalism has led not to
integration but to segregation," Sacks wrote in his book, an
extract of which was published in the
Times
of
London.
"Liberal democracy is in danger," Sacks said, adding later: "The
politics of freedom risks descending into the politics of fear."
Sacks said Britain's politics had been poisoned by the rise of
identity politics, as minorities and aggrieved groups jockeyed
first for rights, then for special treatment. The process, he
said, began with Jews, before being taken up by blacks, women
and gays. He said the effect had been "inexorably divisive." "A
culture of victimhood sets group against group, each claiming
that its pain, injury, oppression, humiliation is greater than
that of others," he said. In an interview with the
Times
,
Sacks said he wanted his book to be "politically incorrect in
the highest order." (
Sacks:
Multiculturalism threatens democracy
,
The
Jerusalem Post
, 20th October 2007; emphasis added)
So Sacks claimed that "Britain's politics had been poisoned" by a
self-serving, self-pitying, self-aggrandizing ideology that "began
with Jews" and had been "inexorably divisive." His claim is
absolutely classic anti-Semitism, peddling a stereotype of Jews as
subversive, manipulative and divisive outsiders whose selfish
agitation has done huge harm to a gentile society.
Sacks was right, of course: Jews do demand special treatment and did
indeed invent the "identity politics" that has poisoned British
politics (and
American
,
Australian
,
French
and
Swedish
politics
too).
By saying all that, Sacks was being far more "anti-Semitic" than
Jeremy Corbyn was, even by the harshest interpretation of those
comments on Zionists. Furthermore, Sacks has proved that Corbyn was
right. Zionists
do
lack
irony. In 2007 Sacks, a staunch Zionist, claimed that the
"poisoning" of British politics "began with Jews." In 2018 he's
condemning Jeremy Corbyn for saying something much milder about
Zionists.
"Absolutely nothing apartheid about this"
And in 2018 Sacks is also offering a ridiculous defence of a new law
in his beloved land of Israel:
Asked by the
New
Statesman
to comment on Israel's new nationality law, which
states that the Jewish people have "an exclusive right to
national self-determination" in the country and stripped the
Arab language of its official status, Sacks said: "I'm not an
expert on this. My brother is, I'm not, he's a lawyer in
Jerusalem, he tells me that there's absolutely nothing apartheid
about this, it's just correcting a lacuna. As far as I
understand, it's a technical process that has none of the
implications that have been levelled at it." (
Corbyn's
"Zionist" remarks were "most offensive" since Enoch Powell, says
ex-chief rabbi
)
When Sacks said there was "absolutely nothing apartheid about this,"
he was
protesting
too much
. He is clearly uncomfortable about the new law and
struggling to defend it, which is why his usual fluency deserted him
when he spoke to the
New
Statesman
. One "levels" accusations, not implications. And the
implications of
the
new law
are perfectly clear, which is why Sacks was driven to
waffle about "a technical process." Yes, the law is a technical
process whereby Arabs are defined as second-class citizens and
Jewish supremacism is openly proclaimed as the guiding principle of
the Israeli state.
Of Monkeys and Men
I'm sure that one of Sacks' heroes, the great Jewish philosopher and
Talmudic scholar
Maimonides
(c.
1135-1208), would have applauded the new law. This is what
Maimonides wrote in his hugely influential
Guide
for the Perplexed
(c. 1190), one of the most revered and
respected texts in the three thousand years of Judaism:
The people who are abroad are all those that have no religion,
neither one based on speculation nor one received by tradition.
Such are the extreme Turks that wander about in the north, the
Kushites [Blacks] who live in the south, and those in our
country who are like these. I consider these as irrational
beings, and not as human beings; they are below mankind, but
above monkeys, since they have the form and shape of man, and a
mental faculty above that of the monkey. (
Guide
for the Perplexed
, Book 3, chapter 51)
Now
that
is
racism, ladies and gentlemen. And if you want proof that Maimonides'
poisonous ideas are alive and well in the Jewish world today, look
no further than Yitzchak Yosef, the Sephardic Chief Rabbi in Israel,
who
was
condemned
this very year for "calling black people 'monkeys'."
Rabbi Yosef has visited the headlines before: in 2016 he "stated
that non-Jews should not be allowed to live in Israel, except to
serve the Jewish population." The
Jewish
Chronicle
added
that
he "later reversed this position."
"Very, very good relations with the Jewish community"
Well, he might have said he no longer believed it, but that wouldn't
be speaking the truth. Servitude for goyim, the superiority of Jews
and the subhumanity of Blacks are all perfectly orthodox Jewish
doctrines. Jews are not the philanthropic egalitarians that they
pretend to be, and Jonathan Sacks was perfectly correct to describe
them as poisoners of British politics. He himself has upended
another vat of poison by joining in the hysteria and hyperbole about
Jeremy Corbyn's mild comments on Zionists.
Let's compare Corbyn with the
shabbos
goy
Tony Blair,
who
gave Sacks
a "Lifetime Achievement Award" in February this year
and hailed Sacks as "one of my heroes."
According
to
the
Jewish
Chronicle
, Blair "was conscious of the need to have very, very
good relations" with "the Jewish community."
In other words, the tiny Jewish minority pulled Blair's strings. At
the behest of his Jewish "fundraiser"
Lord
Levy
, Blair lied Britain into a hugely expensive
war
on Iraq
that killed vast numbers of
innocent
civilians
, fomented sectarian strife in the Middle East and
terrorism in Europe, and led directly to the rise of Islamic State.
Jeremy Corbyn
resolutely
opposed
the war and predicted its dire consequences. Blair is a
liar, confidence-trickster and war-criminal who will one day, I
hope, face
the
death-penalty
for what he and his Jewish immigration minister
Barbara
Roche
did to Britain. Jeremy Corbyn, by contrast, is a virtue-signalling
Marxist idiot who opposes war and the
military-industrial
complex
.
But Blair obeyed Jewish orders and Corbyn doesn't. That's why Blair
is now worth
more
than Ł60 million
and Corbyn is endlessly vilified in the British
media. Few British Whites know the term "
ethnocentrism
,"
but more and more of them can see the Jews practising it.
"Jeremy Corbyn has acknowledged Labour has a "real problem" with antisemitism as he
attempted to defuse the row engulfing his party."
Well, yes, "real problems," but not what you might think from a quick glance at the
headline.
The real problem is people using the accusation as a cheap attack, a way to libel a decent
man and influence a party, and doing so regularly over a considerable period of time.
Where was all this "anti-Semitism" hiding in Tony Blair's day? Or even after? It just
suddenly exploded into existence under Corbyn? Like a parody of Athena suddenly erupting from
the head of Zeus? No reasonable person can believe that. It's a bizarre notion. No, what has
changed since Blair's day is simply this.
A leader who helped kill about a million people and destroy a society, lying continuously
about what he was doing, and received the Israel Peace Prize plus many handsome sinecures for
his efforts, stopped being leader. Another man, a decent man who is fair-minded about the
Middle East, as he is about many other matters, became leader. So, all stops were pulled by
interested parties in doing something about it.
He's been attacked from the beginning. He had to win his leadership vote twice. The attacks,
here or there, seem to fade a bit, then, wham!, they're back, this recent round perhaps the
worst ever.
Well, you can have whatever kind of country you like, but this way of doing things is shabby
and dishonest and can produce nothing good.
Much as some of Theresa May's incompetent efforts and unwarranted attacks, all damaging and
utterly without evidence.
As a young man, I always thought of Britain as more honorable political society than the
United States with its folks like Senator Joseph McCarthy or FBI Director J Edgar Hoover or
blood-drenched liar, Lyndon Johnson.
But either I was naive or Britain has changed, and changed greatly for the worse
_________________________
Response to a comment, "But Jeremy Corbyn has said that Jews, uniquely, can't be trusted
to define anti-Semitism and that he knows best":
That's just plain dishonest.
He said no such thing.
But your using that claim as an argument is symbolic of this whole shabby business.
In the US, it is amazing how few young Americans know anything about the Vietnam War, a war
in which America conducted a holocaust killing 3 million Vietnamese, many in the most horrible
fashion as with napalm.
It was also a time that nearly divided America like a new Civil War.
Polls find few young Americans know much about it.
___________________________
Response to a comment:
Please, don't forget, the USSR lost 27,000,000 in the Hitler invasion.
The loss of men caused a huge demographic deficit.
Also, alcoholism in the USSR, in the 1970s, was widespread and desperate. Many men died
prematurely.
But the suffering from the collapse of the USSR did a lot of damage.
_________________________
Response to a comment:
I wasn't labeling Russians.
It is just a fact about the drinking, and it did shorten average lifespan.
Some of the conditions in the Soviet era could be pretty grim. You've heard the joke about
"They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work?"
Americans are indeed drug addicts. They consume about as many drugs as the rest of countries
together.
There is a whole range of this activity from cocaine at wealthy parties to people in the
streets and gutters consuming God-knows-what.
It's American demand that drives the awful drug cartels of Mexico, but Americans never give
that a thought.
In a number of American cities recently, the murder rates among blacks have been dramatic,
and it involves competitive gangs selling drugs.
The price of some drugs has dropped on the streets and there is over-supply. This has a lot
to do with America's pointless invasion of Afghanistan.
Growing opium poppies had been virtually halted by the Taliban government. Then America
invaded, and it has been "let her rip" with a flood of drugs.
This always happens in such regions with America. It happened too in the Vietnam War. Many
believe CIA makes off-the-books cash by working with drugs in such places. It was said Air
America, a then covert private airline serving CIA used to fly loads out. I don't doubt it at
all.
By the way, in early America, heavy drinking was very common. Rum from the Caribbean and
home-made whisky.
And it is said that Britain's industrial revolution was fueled by cheap gin for the
workers.
_______________________________
Response to a comment about the need for education:
You get no argument from me about education.
Trouble is, as with so many of society's institutions, public education – especially
in the United States – is highly political.
Many subjects and many ways of talking about those subjects are dangerous territory.
And what could be more stifling than the political correctness of local school boards, state
education departments, and the teachers' unions?
It's amazing when anything gets done beyond the basics.
With all these forces at work, in many locations of the US, public education likely has
little more latitude than in the good old USSR. Religion? Hands off. Political corruption?
Hands off. The delirious effects of plutocracy? Hands off. The political corruption of money?
Hands off. Why all the American wars? Hands off.
I don't see a lot of hope in general from education, although there always are exceptional
teachers who manage somehow. I had a few.
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY MICHAEL KREIGER IN RUSSIA INSIDER
"People Aren't Having Intelligent Conversations Anymore, They're Just Yelling at Each
Other"
I agree with the tone of the article.
But the United States has never been a place where what the French call "politesse"
featured. It is a myth for anyone to think so.
Going back to President Andrew Jackson, who horsewhipped an opponent and who regularly
challenged men to duels, this plainly is the fact. Yet note that his image is honored today on
the twenty-dollar bill.
You can never forget all those years of slavery – Jackson owned gangs of them (As did
Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and others) – which entailed public auctions of slaves
stripped of their clothes, including women who were sometimes bought by lonely rural farmers
for "company."
Slavery existed for the best part of a century in the formal United States, but of course it
went back long before that in order to build the colonial society that would become strong
enough to seek independence.
The culture and undertone of much of America were heavily colored for the future by this
pervasive and poisonous institution. It was definitely was not one that encouraged
conversations among either camps, supporters and opponents. There were violent disagreements
and brawls by politicians over much of the era.
The fact that slave owners quite typically slept with pistols and/or hunting knives under
their pillows or within easy reach, such was the constant paranoid fear of slave rebellion,
explains a great deal about America's violent gun culture down to this day and its relations
between black and white citizens.
Slavery, de facto, continued for about a century after the Civil War (1861-5) in the South's
sharecropper system combined with Jim Crow Laws. You know, even when Franklin Roosevelt was
President in the 1930s, lynching in town squares was common. It was even a practice, in parts
of the South, to hold family picnics on the grass at a lynching.
Then for much of the same period, we had America's treatment of Native people. Again, early
on, the honored Andrew Jackson featured. He signed a bill called the Indian Removal Act which
was to uproot tens of thousands of peaceful Natives belonging to about half a dozen tribes like
the Cherokee in America's Southeast, people who in many cases practiced agriculture, and drive
them with the American Cavalry to what was then the remote west, Oklahoma Territory, a land
that had no relationship to the places like Florida whey had lived and farmed for a long time.
It was quite a different climate and physical geography into which they were unceremoniously
dumped.
This forcible removal, named the Trail of Tears (1830s), caused the deaths of several
thousand by hunger, exhaustion, and exposure. This was a big number in those days when military
battles losses were often counted in hundreds. Their farms and settlements and resources in the
Southeast were greedily seized by white Americans.
Years later, as American population grew and pushed West, we had the Indian Wars, which
involved the American Calvary's again driving Natives off their lands. Since these were not
mainly settled farmers but migrating hunters on horseback, the tactics used against them were
much harsher. Whole villages were burned down and all the people killed, just as though they
were packs of wild animals being subdued. It was viewed about the same way as farmers shooting
coyotes or wolves.
We have old photos of things like a Cavalry Trooper posed proudly with his boot on a man's
dead body, resembling an image from the film, "Planet of Apes," and of long trench-like mass
graves into which rows of bodies were flung, something resembling smaller, rural versions of
Auschwitz.
As America continued to expand and drive westward, there was a constant sequence of such
violent events, including the appalling and unwarranted Mexican War (1846-8) intended only to
steal land from Mexico.
Still later in the 1890s, we had America's seizure of the Hawaiian Islands, a place which
had its own royalty and an established society. The Hawaiians were overwhelmingly opposed to
Washington's rule and sent a delegation to submit a petition signed by virtually everyone on
the islands. No one in Washington would even speak to them. They were ignored and treated with
contempt.
The ruthlessness and crudity weren't limited to stealing land and killing natives. Americans
practiced the kind of wholesale theft of what today is called "intellectual property" from
Europe. Many mechanisms and machines, as for farming, were purchased in Europe, shipped to
America, and then copied. This was done with anything you care to mention, even books. Charles
Dickens got quite bitter about the way a new book of his would appear shortly after publication
in London as a separate edition in Boston. He never saw a penny in royalties. It is ironic that
today America feels so self-righteous about the Chinese, for example, in this regard. All they
are seeing is their own history repeated.
Well, that's just a part of the story, but a surprising number of Americans have no idea of
the brutality involved in America's growth. There was mighty little civility ever. America was,
and remains, in many respects a raw place. G B Shaw joked that it went from barbarism to
decadence without ever passing through civilization. The fact that we still laugh at the joke
tells us something of its sharp truth.
A lot of what people complain of today in political discussion reflects some effects of the
Internet. All the ugly thoughts and words that once were reserved for the streets and alleys
now are put on view for anyone to share, and they do share them. And believe me, having grown
up in Chicago in the 1950s, there was plenty of ugly stuff around. There was just no way to
broadcast it, except graffiti, and there was plenty of that.
Look at Trump. You simply could not find a ruder, more careless-mouthed man if you tried,
and here he is, as President, constantly sending out thoughtless, libelous, and brutal words.
Maybe the incivility of much of the Internet helped pave the way for acceptance of his
record-setting public crudity.
Candidates for President were once limited by something so simple as having been divorced.
Although those kinds of limits were a social pretense, representing a lot of hypocrisy and
dishonesty, we have dropped the pretense. And we have dropped the pretense about the rudeness
and crude expression that was always there in private.
In many ways, Trump represents a large portion of contemporary American society. The words
and thoughts are not new, but the method of widespread transmission is, as is the ready
willingness to use it. And note that he is not ignored, by the mainline press or anyone else.
His stupidities if unreported would have far less effect, but his words are reported and
commented upon and copied daily.
I think it probably is creating something of a downward spiral in the public tone of
discussion as people become accustomed to nasty language, ugly thoughts, and prejudice openly
broadcast on the Internet, even by the President of the country. Experience suggests that any
practice which becomes much repeated, one way or another, tends to drive things even further
along. New norms keep being set.
By that, I'm not advocating any form of censorship, something to which I'm utterly opposed,
but I am making it clear that we are unavoidably into a new era of public discussion, although
I think "discussion" a wholly inadequate word, carrying, as it does, the connotation of calm
and rational exchange of ideas.
Indeed, the whole discussion of notions like "fake news," a Trump favorite with its
pejorative and accusatory tone, is muddled and meaningless since all sides in the debate
constantly engage in lying, distortion, and hypocrisy. That goes for The New York Times and
Washington Post as much as it does for an outfit like Breitbart News.
Everyone wants to get their views "out there," with little authentic regard for facts.
Outfits like The Times still maintain a façade of tone and claim of respectability, but
behind the façade, they have an immensely long history of dishonesty and promoting ugly
establishment interests, supporting wars and coups and aggression and imperialism in polite
words. I actually do not find that more attractive than what we are getting with the Internet.
They are both repulsive for anyone who wants to understand some truth.
And I stress that the nastiness and brutality have always been there as an integral part of
American culture, only lacking a mechanism of direct communication to large numbers and perhaps
being tamped down somewhat by a desire to seem a bit less crude in public. An awareness that
others in the world did not engage in quite the same way and responded badly to it may have
played a role. But such niceties are lost today.
Traditional religious values may have played a role too in tamping down the public tone, but
not only is traditional religion declining rather quickly, a good deal of what remains in
America has morphed into bizarre forms with preachers in some cases having parishioners bring
their guns to church services or preaching in fervent support of the kind of absolutely brutal
violence we see in Israel. Ditto for invoking God's blessings on "our troops" as they illegally
invade yet another country and bomb more women and children.
Actually, the traditional press used to act as something of a filtering mechanism. A great
deal of ugly stuff never made it out for anyone's attention, but it was in fact still there in
private. That same impulse to maintain an appearance of civility brought many dishonesties to
journalism.
Americans never even knew facts like Roosevelt being wheel chair-bound or Kennedy being
anything but a family man or Nixon, around the time of his resignation, putting his wife into
the hospital with a serious beating.
And likewise, they never knew the lies and most of the horror of Korea or Vietnam or Iraq.
The absolutely massive levels of brutality, as the fact that one-fifth of the entire population
of North Korea was exterminated by three years of American carpet bombing. Or that America left
Vietnam having killed 3 million souls with more carpet bombing and napalm and early cluster
bombs, also leaving the land packed with landmines and soaked with Agent Orange to keep killing
and crippling for decades.
Even earlier, there was journalism's lies about things like "Remember the Maine" in the
deliberately-engineered Spanish-American War, a false slogan which made its way into American
grade school history books as fact.
The Internet puts much into plain view, but it also does so with a new confusion, a chaotic
situation in which ugly fact and ugly myth and deliberate propaganda all come jumbled together.
Only people who carefully read and assess and balance realize its potential for communicating
truth, but such people always anywhere are a minority.
The chaotic nature of so much "discussion" in America is, just like the country's brutality
and crudeness, simply a part of America's heritage.
__________________________
Response some days later to someone who wrote a long and angry comment:
There's an old saying you might profitably make note of.
It's usually a good idea to know the words to the music before you get up to sing.
Nothing worse than using a statistic you've picked up somewhere to attempt characterizing a
situation you clearly have no understanding of.
Only a few percent of Americans were slaveholders?
My God, it is only a few percent of any population that are criminal, but they influence us
all every day of our lives.
They make police forces necessary. They make courts necessary. And prison systems and guards
and wardens. They make an entire criminal legal system necessary with criminal lawyers, judges,
juries, parole boards, the acts of politicians legislating, etc. Their acts fill our newspapers
and broadcasting, causing much fear and upset in many ordinary people. Their acts are the topic
of endless private and public discussion.
And just so slavery, perhaps even more so. I've read a good deal of serious history of the
United states. Slavery and all of its related issues colored and affected everything from the
way the Constitution was written to import laws to the courts and political arguments. It
affected the careers of politicians, it affected law enforcement, North and South, it affected
the courts and their decisions. It affected attitudes of people. Its pervasive and noxious
influence never went away, having absolutely no connection with the number of slaveholders.
A person of any understanding knows that this is the case for a great many parts of human
affairs. Today, we have the economic issue of the extremely lopsided distribution of wealth and
income and the "one-percent." And I suppose you think they do not affect almost everything in
society because of their small number? Its politics and the candidates of its political
parties? Its laws? Its wars and turmoil? Its taxation system? The government's treatment of
those less fortunate?
As for Trump, do you really think the approach of some corporate business people should
characterize government? The ways of Google or Apple or Amazon or John D. Rockefeller or Henry
Ford? There are many reasons for thinking that is a terrible idea. Such people already have
inordinate influence on government and its policies., and astute observers on both the Left and
the Right agree.
Running a company and running a government are two very different things. Different skills.
Different understanding. Different expectations. And working under different sets of rules.
Trump is an exceedingly ignorant and impatient man, and he did not even write "The Art of
the Deal," of which he told us he is so proud. He paid a ghostwriter. And that ghostwriter has
now spoken out several times about his private observations of Trump. He is an appalling man
who listens to no one, is totally obsessed with his own opinions, and is rude and unpleasant.
He, of course, only confirms the views of other outsiders who have worked near Trump and
written about it.
And do you really think it is the job of a head of government to publicly insult various of
its citizens? That is the behavior of an angry child, and a not very pleasant child. He is
supposed to be president of all the people, not just some. Imagine Putin doing this in Russia?
No, Putin only speaks to the kind of matters a President should speak to. He has what we used
to call "class," a quality utterly missing in Trump. You, know, some of his cheap-bully
remarks, here or there, might seem funny at first to some because we've never heard their like
before, but they do in fact lasting and long-term damage to society.
Again, the number of lynchings, which you obviously regard as small and try to minimize?
What an asinine statistic to quote. It addresses nothing but your own ego. I am well familiar
with it, but it has nothing to do with what I said.
By the way, from some of your remarks you show that you did not even understand what I
wrote. Hard to know why you would want to comment then, but one detects in your tone that same
Trumpian quality, a person ready to open his mouth, and loudly, without ever pausing to
think.
"... "But he needs to move quickly and decisively now" ..."
"... This fixation over anti-Semitism, always without any effort to provide proof of anything, borders on the days of Stalin. ..."
"... If Stalin was looking for "wreckers of the Revolution," as he did every once in a while, the phrase being his code words for a new purge, and you happened to be one in the eyes of your local NKVD detachment – perhaps for as little cause as the their needing to achieve their quota of wreckers this week – you were in deadly trouble. ..."
"... Corbyn is hated in Israel because he is fair-minded on Israel and Palestine, and that these days is simply not allowed. Actually, true liberals and the Left are hated widely in Israel because they stand for traditional Western values of human and democratic rights. ..."
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY MATTHEW NORMAN IN THE INDEPENDENT
"But he needs to move quickly and decisively now"
Move on what?
Nothing inappropriate was said or done, but someone has to "move" on it?
There is no anti-Semitism in the words. None. People were called "Trump fanatics." The
people happen to be Jewish, something they themselves continually draw attention to in their
unwarranted attacks on Corbyn.
This fixation over anti-Semitism, always without any effort to provide proof of anything,
borders on the days of Stalin.
If Stalin was looking for "wreckers of the Revolution," as he did every once in a while, the
phrase being his code words for a new purge, and you happened to be one in the eyes of your
local NKVD detachment – perhaps for as little cause as the their needing to achieve their
quota of wreckers this week – you were in deadly trouble.
That truly is the level of so much of this name-calling reverse-prejudice filth against a
decent man, Jeremy Corbyn.
I have never seen such ugliness, and I do understand the reason for it.
Corbyn is hated in Israel because he is fair-minded on Israel and Palestine, and that these
days is simply not allowed. Actually, true liberals and the Left are hated widely in Israel
because they stand for traditional Western values of human and democratic rights.
"... Jeremy Corbyn is a man who has dedicated his entire life to fighting racism and injustice -- he is not a racist and therefore clearly he is not anti-Semitic. He has not once denied the Holocaust and therefore he is not a Holocaust-denier. It seems, however, that none of this matters to those who would bring him down. ..."
"... The desperation of those seeking to oust Corbyn can be seen by the latest accusation against him: attending a memorial for terrorists. ..."
"... Corbyn did not remain silent. True to himself once again, he struck back, reminding Netanyahu that what is deserving of condemnation is Israeli forces' killing of hundreds of protesters in Gaza and the passing of the new, racist Israel Nation State Law . ..."
"... By trying to silence the discussion regarding Zionism and its legitimacy, Israel abuses the memory of the millions who died in the Holocaust, particularly the Jewish victims. There are entire communities of Jewish Holocaust survivors and descendants of survivors who are quite ready to discuss and debate any issue, including the Holocaust, and who view the Zionists' stance as absurd. These same Jewish communities also reject Zionism and support the Palestinian call for BDS , or Boycott Divestment and Sanctions against Israel. It is time that these voices be heard. ..."
"... Miko Peled is an author and human rights activist born in Jerusalem. He is the author of " The General's Son. Journey of an Israeli in Palestine ," and " Injustice, the Story of the Holy Land Foundation Five ." ..."
Jeremy Corbyn is a man who has dedicated his entire life to fighting racism and
injustice -- he is not a racist and therefore clearly he is not anti-Semitic. He has not once
denied the Holocaust and therefore he is not a Holocaust-denier. It seems, however, that none
of this matters to those who would bring him down.
The U.K. Labour Party conference is more than three weeks away and Jeremy Corbyn, true to
himself and his principles, has risen above the mud-slinging and continues to fight for the
principles to which he has dedicated his entire life. He focuses on issues like social justice;
caring for the many rather than the few, the millions not the millionaires; and, as Corbyn
himself said in his speech at last year's convention, "end[ing] the oppression of the
Palestinian people."
Zionist groups within the Labour Party, which include LFI (Labour Friends of Israel) and the
JLM (the Zionist 'Jewish Labour Movement'), skillfully utilize the pro-Zionist media. They are
trying -- and failing -- to paint Jeremy Corbyn as an anti-Semite. However, the problem is not
anti-Semitism but Corbyn's stance on Palestine.
These Zionist groups want to get rid of Corbyn because of his principled stance on Palestine,
Israeli colonialism and occupation of Palestine, and they use anti-Semitism labels because they
think it will work.
The 1972 Munich-attacks issue
The desperation of those seeking to oust Corbyn can be seen by the latest accusation against
him: attending a memorial for terrorists.
It was given impetus by a remark by the Israeli prime minister, in what is a shocking
intervention by Israel in British politics. Benjamin Netanyahu made
remarks about the Labour leader, saying that he deserves "unequivocal condemnation." In
what can only be described as an escalation of the already heavy-handed
intervention of Zionist groups to end Jeremy Corbyn's leadership, Netanyahu said that
Corbyn's participation in a ceremony at a cemetery in Tunis in 2014 is deserving of
condemnation, because -- according to Netanyahu -- terrorists are buried there.
Corbyn did not remain silent. True to himself once again, he struck back, reminding
Netanyahu that what is deserving of condemnation is Israeli forces' killing
of hundreds of protesters in Gaza and the passing of the new, racist Israel
Nation State Law .
Netanyahu -- along with what may well be the loudest Zionist mouthpiece in Britain, The
Daily Mail -- claims that Corbyn was present at a ceremony and even laid a wreath on the
graves of terrorists connected with the 1972 attack on the Israeli athletes during the
Munich
Olympic games .
The truth of the matter is that the event in which Corbyn participated had nothing to do
with the Munich attack. In 2014 Jeremy Corbyn attended a service at a cemetery in Tunis
commemorating the victims of the 1985
Israeli airstrike on the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) offices in Tunis. This
Israeli attack was a breach of international law, violated the sovereignty of another country,
and received worldwide condemnation, including by the United
States .
Furthermore, none of the
eight men who participated in the Munich attack are buried in Tunis. The four men who are
buried there -- and whose tombstones are shown in The Daily Mail photo -- are Salah Khalaf, who was Yasser Arafat's deputy; his aide,
Fakhri al-Omari; Hayel Abdel-Hamid, who was the PLO chief of security; and Atef Bseiso. Bseiso
was assassinated in Paris in 1992 -- 20 years after the Munich Olympics. He was heavily
involved in talks with the CIA in an attempt to advance relations between the U.S. and the PLO.
Israel claimed that all four were involved in the attack in Munich and had all of them
assassinated either directly or by the proxy terror group, Abu-Nidal. There was never a shred
of proof, not to mention a trial, to substantiate Israel's allegations against these men.
Blatant intervention
The big question is why does the Israeli prime minister feel he needs to engage in such
blatant intervention and and make such blatantly false accusations just as Britain's largest
political party is about to convene? Netanyahu and his henchmen must realize that U.K. Labour,
having gained over half a million members since Jeremy Corbyn's ascent as leader, is poised to
win in the next elections, so that, if Israel fails to oust him, Jeremy Corbyn will end up in
10 Downing Street.
One of the ridiculous charges laid against Corbyn is the following: He was criticized for
attending a passover
Seder with a particular group of Jewish people who "dismissed concerns about anti-Semitism
in the party." So it is not good enough that he went to a Seder and that he opted to do so
among people who live in his own constituency; he had to do so with Jewish people who think a
particular way.
Corbyn was also criticized for participating in an event with the late
Hajo Meyer , a Jewish holocaust survivor himself. This was in 2010, when Corbyn hosted a
Holocaust Memorial Day event in London with Meyer as the main speaker. Hajo Meyer was, like
many holocaust survivors, a fervent advocate for Palestinian rights and a severe critic of
Israel -- hence the criticism.
Anti-Semitism
Another sticking point is the self-appointed International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (
IHRA ), which apparently adopted a new and, in their own words, "non-legally binding"
working definition of
anti-Semitism . Initially Labour's national executive committee refused to accept this
definition, but there are signs that a compromise might be on the horizon. This definition of
anti-Semitism is one that entire Jewish communities do not accept because it seeks to silence
criticism of Israel and conflates Zionism with Judaism. The anti-Semitism definition includes
several clauses that have nothing to do with racism or anti-Semitism and have everything to do
with protecting Israel from criticism. For example:
Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination; e.g., by claiming that the
existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.
Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.
War of attrition
Another example, in which I was personally involved, has to do with a comment that I made at
a fringe event during the 2017 Labour conference and that turned into a major news item. During
a panel on free speech, I said that free speech means we should be able to discuss every issue,
including Palestine and the Holocaust. The Daily Mail published this as though it was a
scandalous thing to say and accused Labour and even Corbyn himself for allowing it to
happen.
Every other
newspaper in Britain followed suit and then papers in Palestine and even the Israeli papers
picked it up as well. I added in my remarks that, while free speech should not be criminalized,
we do not need to give a platform to proponents of any racist ideology, and that includes
Zionists who regularly demand to be present and give their perspective at events and
lectures.
My presence during the conference and my comments did not warrant such attention. However,
this is a war of attrition in which Labour Friends of Israel, the so-called 'Jewish Labour
Movement, and the British Daily Mail are leading the charge and will jump at every
opportunity to get attention. Once again, the problem was not denial of the Holocaust or
anti-Semitism -- because there was no expression of either one -- but the fear of a discussion
on Palestine and Zionism.
By trying to silence the discussion regarding Zionism and its legitimacy, Israel abuses the
memory of the millions who died in the Holocaust, particularly the Jewish victims. There are
entire communities of Jewish Holocaust survivors and descendants of survivors who are quite
ready to discuss and debate any issue, including the Holocaust, and who view the Zionists'
stance as absurd. These same Jewish communities also reject Zionism and support the Palestinian
call for BDS , or Boycott Divestment and
Sanctions against Israel. It is time that these voices be heard.
Jeremy Corbyn is a man who has dedicated his entire life to fighting racism and injustice --
he is not a racist and therefore clearly he is not anti-Semitic. He has not once denied the
Holocaust and therefore he is not a Holocaust-denier. However, none of this matters. As was
stated clearly in The Daily Mail,
"The Board of Deputies of British Jews warned Mr. Corbyn to 'come out of hiding' and said
the anti-Semitism crisis would not go away."
In other words, there is nothing he can say or do to "clear" himself. They are determined to
oust him and they think the anti-Semitic card will do the trick.
FWIW an Israeli journalist has made an FOI request to the Israeli government in an attempt
to tease out Israeli government connections with the villification of Corbyn by the various
'Friends of Israel' in the UK and the role of Masot wrt Israel as partially exposed in the Al
Jazeera undercover video on attempts to oust UK MPs insufficiently obeisant to Israel..
The problem with this scenario is that it's starting to look ineffective. Jeremy Corbyn is
still there and the pro Israelis have had an unprecedented amount of media coverage to convince
the population that he's on a par with Goebbels. I suspect having already suffered the
vilification he received in his ambassador days, he is in a much better position to endure
another campaign. There is also the (not so) small matter of a very loyal and supportive blog
readership which is always willing to help him in his hour of need. Craig Murray isn't the
sitting duck you would like him to think he is.
"... During the C21st the Conservative Party has become reliant on Jewish money. Even more than her predecessor Cameron, May is a "value free zone", as the commentator Richard North categorised her. She does whatever the donors want. Not that the Labour Party in power would be any better. It is just as riddled with Israel-supporting "moderates". ..."
CRITICIZE ISRAEL AND GO TO JAIL? IS THAT HOW LOW ZIONISTS HAVE SUNK?
Thanks for the interesting article, Sir.
As I read it, I felt sick in the abdomen, at how low the Zionists have sunk, demanding
that those who criticize Israel go to jail.
If there is evil in this world, this is it. These are the dark ages. These people are
primitive and seem to resist civilization.
No civilized human being should put up with this sort of evil.
The Brits need to wake up and actually repeal laws that make certain speech criminal
offences that are already on the books (except for incitements to violence and porn).
The need to vote for Labor and keep Corbyn, or vote for BNP, and tell the Zionists that
they are evil to make these demands.
Israel is not a democracy for a much simpler reason than that the author offers.
It denies the vote to the gentile inhabitants of Gaza and the West Bank; that is to say,
to about a quarter of its subjects.
Since the Jewish parties in the Knesset boycott the few Arab representatives that are
there, Israel effectively denies political representation to the gentiles within its
'pre-1967′ boundaries as well -- that is to say, to another sixth or so of its total
subject population.
Obviously, Israel is not a democracy in any sense of the word. 25% of its subjects are
without even theoretical representation, and another 17% lack it in any practical sense. It's
as if the US denied the vote to all inner-city residents except white 'settlers,' refused to
work with Congressmen who weren't Protestants. It would be absurd to regard it as a
democracy.
There are some democracies in the Middle East. Israel isn't one of them.
and Norm Finkelstein brilliantly demolishes the notion that there's any anti-semitism to
speak of in Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party, or Britain in general.
Corbyn is shell shocked and cannot comprehend what is required for him to counter this
blatant attempt at his ouster. An individual that could help him tremendously as an advisor
is Miko Peled, an Israeli citizen, living in the U.S. I mention Peled, because he is a
"lefty" just like Corbyn.
Giraldi writes that, "there exists an 'Israel Lobby' in many countries, all dedicated to
advancing the agendas promoted by successive Israeli governments no matter what the actual
interests of the host country might be."
ADL, a branch of the B'nai B'rith global enterprise, confirms they are subversive agents
that work against their host nation. Straight from their mouth
The center of the Axis of Evil is Zionist Israel. No other country, not even the planet's
"sole superpower" wields so much power and control over other "sovereign" nations as does
Zionist Israel. Regime change? Zionist, apartheid Israel has perfected that art and science
-- and without firing a shot. Why do it when others will cheerfully fight your battles for
you? Evil is as evil does. Still obsessed with Russophobia? Distractions aplenty for the
stupefied.
These efforts to criminalize criticism of Israel seem to be the necessary precursors to
major military moves in the Middle East to create 'the greater Israel.'
Probably in coordination with the ongoing efforts to neutralize and destroy all
independent players such as Iran and Russia.
There used to be a "supermarket" chain in Montreal called Steinberg, owned by Steinberg,
"Canadian" Jews. They sold the business to another supermarket label, Métro-Richelieu
or something, owned by a would-be-venture capitalist/economics professor, Michel Gauthier or
something. It was a laughing transaction even in the news. But during the due diligence for
the sale it surfaced that Steinberg had unusual deals with his suppliers, meat, dairy or
whatever. If you wanted to sell your products to Steinberg, Steinberg made you sign an
agreement to buy Israeli bonds. Talk about tied-selling under the Canada Competition Act!
Talk about Stephen Harper financing!
During the C21st the Conservative Party has become reliant on Jewish money. Even more than
her predecessor Cameron, May is a "value free zone", as the commentator Richard North
categorised her. She does whatever the donors want. Not that the Labour Party in power would
be any better. It is just as riddled with Israel-supporting "moderates".
In the near future, the Labour Party will break down into 2 or more groups. The "moderates"
and more radical groups who will be chasing the Muslim vote.
On top of that, a second Scottish Independence Referendum may not be too many years away. I
suspect it will be successful this time.
The dissolution of the British state seems likely over the coming years. The question is how
much damage May and her Conservatives In Name Only will do in the interim.
How ironic that a brave and principled man (Jeremy Corbyn) is being hounded out of office
and defamed from all sides while a dishonest neocon toady like such as John McCain is
lionized by both wings of Washington's duopoly (as well as our MSM) as a 'hero' and a
'maverick'.
Could this really be happening?
Oh it's happening alright.
McCain dutifully pimped for every US war against any Israeli foes since GHW Bush. McCain
expressed no regrets for the destruction of Iraq, the destruction of Libya, the dismemberment
of Palestine, or the destabilization of Syria. McCain never apologized for all the needless
death and suffering caused by spineless servants such as himself. He also openly advocated
for a US war on Iran, just as Israel wanted.
If the Zions didn't control our entire mass media this level of venality would not occur.
But they do and it does.
Indoctrination. Brainwashing. Repetition. Conformity. Taboo. Shame. Blacklisting.
Political corruption.
Do you deny making anti-Semitic remarks? What will your friends and family say?
The falsification of history is an ongoing and daily occurrence.
The manipulation of the masses: it works!
Who are you going to believe?–your own fallible judgement?–or the expert
analysis of our entire political class–including Harvard-educated scholars and
journalists?
C'mon. Get a clue. Think right. Stop talking that way.
It is Israel again up to its old tricks being the real entity that interferes in foreign
elections:
Corbyn is viewed by Israel as effectively the "figurehead of the delegitimisation
network".
"They hope that by taking action against him, they can decapitate what they see as the
most powerful figure in this network," he told Middle East Eye. "By making an example of
him, they can sow division, spread fear and suppress speech on Israel."
Certainly, Israel's fingerprints look to be present in the current claims of an
anti-Semitism crisis supposedly revolving around Corbyn.
Active interference by the Israeli government in British politics was highlighted last
year in a four-part undercover documentary produced by the Qatari channel Al Jazeera. It
secretly filmed the activities of an operative in Israel's embassy in London named Shai
Masot.
The Al Jazeera investigation provoked numerous complaints that it breached broadcasting
rules relating to anti-Semitism, bias, unfair editing and invasions of privacy. However,
Ofcom, the British broadcasting regulator, cleared the programme of all charges.
In fact, I think all of this has more to do with Brexit than with Israel. The Brexiteers
are in total panic. If they put the exit package to a referendum, they'll lose. If they call
an election on it, Corbyn will probably win and he opposes Brexit. Even a parliamentary vote
could be lost inasmuch as the Tories don't have a majority and the Brexiteers are a minority
within the party.
Thus, Corbyn has to be discredited at all costs. Whether accusations of
anti-Semitism will discredit him is quite another matter. In Europe generally, people are
indifferent to Israel. They don't care what happens to it one way or the other.
Nobody who is
likely to vote Labour cares a hoot about Israel and are not going to change their vote
because of the accusations. If anything, people will perceive the campaign against Corbyn as
Jewish bullying and rally to him.
I was surprised to learn that the population of Israel is only 8.8 million. So small!
Contrast that with Iran's 82 million .Egypt's 100 million Iraq's 40 million or Turkey's 82
million. How such a relatively tiny country makes so much noise and disruption for the rest
of the world is something to ponder. If you ever google one of those 'most hated countries in
the world' polls Israel or USA invariably top the list.
Gilad Atzmon, the self-described ex-Israeli and ex-Jew, writes reams about the Jewish
assault on Corbyn. In this
recent piece , he quotes from Douglas Reed's The Controversy of Zion :
The Conservative Party membership numbers are no longer published but they could be as low
as fifty thousand going on revenue from membership fees.
All this smearing has so far had no impact at all, in fact it is leading some to question
what is the agenda here. There is a nice article on the Israeli smear campaign in the Middle
East Eye.
Many believe that the easily observable dominance of the friends of Israel over some
aspects of government policy is a phenomenon unique to the United States, where committed
Jews and Christian Zionists are able to control both politicians and the media message
relating to what is going on in the Middle East.
Thank you for pointing this out.
Although I am no longer much of a Christian myself, I have always bristled every time I
hear some left-wing (usually Jewish) anti-Zionist blame American Christians for Washington's
mid-east policies, while describing the influence of the Jewish lobby as being 'exaggerated'.
The obvious counterargument is: if American Christians have so much power over the federal
government that they can virtually dictate mid-east policy, how come they can't ban abortion
or gay marriage? How come they can't–forgive the metaphor–resurrect prayer in
school?
Indeed, the mere fact that the US now has an entire branch of Christianity
devoted to Rapture-Zionism gives you a clue as to who rules whom in this country. Think about
it, people: we now have 'Christian' churches who are actually willing to put the interests
and well-being of another religion ahead of their own! And their otherwise patriotic
followers are being conned into putting the interests of another country ahead of their own.
Absolutely astounding! In modern America at least, not only have the Christians lost control
of their government; they've even lost control of Christianity!
Moreover, what about all those other western countries, such as Britain, France and
Germany, which really lack anything like American-style Rapture-Christians, yet are still
completely in thrall to Israel? L'affaire Corbyn is, if nothing else, proof that we are not
the only ones being jacked around by the Zionists.
Don't get me wrong: I really wish American Christians would wake the f*ck up and see that
they're being used, being made to look pathetic by the Zionists. But the allegation that
those Christians are actually running the show in the West is completely fatuous. In fact,
it's just a left-wing 'anti-Zionist' gate-keeper story. Don't believe it!
Failure to confront Israel's crimes against humanity combined with an inability to
resist its demands regarding how issues like anti-Semitism and hate speech are defined has
done terrible damage to free speech in Western Europe and, most notably, in the Anglophone
world.
We are all Palestinians now!
I really hope this serves as a wake-up call to all of the pro-Zionist alt-righters out
there. The Zionists can never truly be our friends. After all, once they are able to
ban anti-Zionist talk for being anti-Semitic, how much longer will be it before they are able
to just go ahead and ban all anti-Semitic speech? Then where will you be? You won't
even be allowed to criticize George Soros anymore!
Corbyn is indeed a man of the left who has consistently opposed racism, extreme
nationalism, colonialism and military interventionism.
Well, I'm not a hundred-percent sure about the "nationalism" part. While "extreme" may
well be in the eye of the beholder, it's also true that the IRA and most of the Palestinian
groups do self-describe as 'nationalist', and Corbyn has always been OK with them (as am I).
The only nationalism his seems to have a real problem with is English nationalism.
The traditionally liberal Guardian has in fact been in the forefront of Jewish criticism
of Corbyn, led by its senior editor Jonathan Freedland
They should just go ahead and relaunch The Guardian as The Shomer .
As Norman Finkelstein once observed, Jews "never forgive and never forget." Corbyn ought
to keep that in mind. All his bobbing and weaving will availeth nothing.
Why should there be panic by the Brexiteers ?
Britain's export to the remaining EU is far less than from the remaining EU to GB.
Especially France and Germany have huge exports to GB.
As a Brexiteer already long ago mentioned 'they need us more than we them'.
If Merkel and Macron would survive a hard Brexit, I wonder.
Under estimated is the why of Brexit, they want their country back, as one voter said 'they
even interfere with vacuum cleaners'.
I stopped reading the Guardian full stop 4-5 years ago, back when they launched their
"Russia is evildoer!!" shrill campaign of propaganda–also about the time the Ukraine
civil war got into gear. Never looked back, the Guardian is a steaming pile of
US/NATO/Atlantic Council bullshit. I'll never understand why so many fixate on it, such as
the Off-guardian.org bloggers who've devoted an entire blog for years on end to criticising
Guardian journos, 'comment is free', comment mods, etc. All fine and good, but why?
With so
many other better news sources is there a need? No, there isn't. Just move on. The Guardian
is not a relevant news outlet. I mean, why keep going there to read pro-Israeli/pro-US
government articles which make you angry? Doesn't make any sense.
we keep accepting these arguments like Giraldis' here and functioning intellectually at
this paused rate which is insufficient to the needs of the day and time.
it is immediate the reality in which we live, in all its demands on us and we must respond
at the same speed. the enemy moves at the rate of speed of life and succeeds in slowing us
down with these arguments in the media
Corbyn is bloody well wrong. he has gone out of his way to compromise with the Zionists
and every time they want more. we we knew that, that they would not compromise did we not .we
knew it. we know the game. they know they game. they have the power and they never
compromise..never! they know to give ground is to lose.
and it is in fact to lose..and the same for the people. that is why it is zero sum. the
economic/political game is no place to compromise.
in principle the people have all the power..and we do. where are the leaders who bring the
people into awareness of their total power, set up and lead them into that power in the
process of fixing society?
why must the leader of those who have all the power be at the feet of a minority who is
bleeding the life out of the society?
Corbyn behaves as if he has no power..as if he is not fixing to assume in behalf of the
people the greatest social power there is..the power of the people. so he is apologetic and
compromising of the peoples power, on and in dealing with the peoples issues
the people's power and social interest have been usurped and compromised by a minority
power and their pets in the peoples power structure..and in the media too. that is why we are
dealing with a prevaricator in Giraldi and not a radicalized person who brings us up to
speed..the speed required to fix society
the peoples power has been betrayed by treasonous citizens who have lied to the people and
usurped the peoples power. that is the truth, the immediate truth and requires an immediate
and direct response..no compromise will work. this article here by Giraldi is not an
immediate response but a kind of time-wasting prevarication. Corbyn and his politics are also
prevarication
MoscowBob ( you're never going back to London to live ), the above official Parliamentary
Research Briefing makes alarming reading if you are a Conservative supporter. As of April
2018, Conservative membership is put at 124,000, narrowly ahead of the SNP at 118,000.
Conservative membership collapsed from 1 million in 1990 ( see page 7 ) to less than 500,000
5 years later ( John Major ). Apart from a brief period, it has been declining steadily since
the year 2000, especially from 2009 ( David Cameron).
It is no longer a mass membership political party, it is Conservative In Name Only and at the
beck and call of any (((big donors ))).
This situation cannot continue much longer. Its hold on political power will be ended shortly
unless there is a turnaround, which seems unlikely.
Jonathan Cook has also recently written a very good article on the current Israeli
engineered onslaught against Jeremy Corbyn, making much the same argument as Dr. Giraldi.
Critique of Israeli government interference in internal affair of other states in a form of
pro-Israel lobby, or critique Zionism as an ideology is not equivalent to anti-Semitism.
Neoliberal states like Israel do not represent interests of its citizens, but mostly
transnationals and top 1%. Attempt to link those mean weaponizing anti-Semitism. For example,
while Israel is an ally of the USA some if its action are definitely are against the USA citizens
interests. Although the role of Israel as a collective lobbyist for US MIC should be
acknowledged.
Conversion of Israel into ethnostate is probably a logical development, but the problem here
is that it further alienate Palestinians, which have higher birth rate then Israelites.
Notable quotes:
"... It was also learned that the Israeli Embassy was secretly subsidizing and advising private groups promoting Israeli interests, including associations of Members of Parliament (MPs). ..."
"... Corbyn's crime has been that he is critical of the Jewish state and has called for an "end to the repression of the Palestinian people." As a reward, he has been hounded mercilessly by British Jews, even those in his own party, for over two years. ..."
"... Last month, rightwing Labour Parliamentarian Margaret Hodge raised the stakes, calling Corbyn "a fucking anti-Semite and a racist". She then wrote in the Guardian ..."
"... All of the invective has been more-or-less orchestrated by the Israeli government, which directly supports the gaggle of groups that have coalesced to bring down Corbyn. This effort to destroy the Labour leader has included the use of an app disseminating messages via social media accusing Corbyn of anti-Semitism. The app was developed by Israel's strategic affairs ministry , which "directs Israel's covert efforts to sabotage the Palestine solidarity movement around the world". ..."
"... The principal argument being made against Corbyn is that the Labour Party is awash with anti-Semitism and Corbyn has done little or nothing to oppose it. Some of the most brutal shots against Corbyn have come from the usual crowd in the United States. ..."
Many believe that the easily observable dominance of the friends of Israel over some aspects
of government policy is a phenomenon unique to the United States, where committed Jews and
Christian Zionists are able to control both politicians and the media message relating to what
is going on in the Middle East. Unfortunately, the reality is that there exists an "Israel
Lobby" in many countries, all dedicated to advancing the agendas promoted by successive Israeli
governments no matter what the actual interests of the host country might be. Failure to
confront Israel's crimes against humanity combined with an inability to resist its demands
regarding how issues like anti-Semitism and hate speech are defined has done terrible damage to
free speech in Western Europe and, most notably, in the Anglophone world.
For the United States this corruption of the media and the political process by Israel has
meant
endless wars in the Middle East as well of loss of civil liberties at home, but some other
countries have compromised their own declared values far beyond that. Former Canadian Prime
Minister Stephen Harper praised Israel completely inaccurately as a
light that " burns bright, upheld by the universal principles of all civilized nations --
freedom, democracy justice." He has also said "I will defend Israel whatever the
cost" to Canada, an assertion that some might regard as very, very odd for a Canadian head of
state.
In some other cases, Israel plays hardball directly, threatening retribution against
governments that do not fall in line. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
recently warned New Zealand that backing a U.N. resolution condemning Israeli settlements
would be a "declaration of war." He was able to do so because he had confidence in the power of
the Israel Lobby in that country to mobilize and produce the desired result.
It might surprise some that the "Mother of Parliaments" in Great Britain is perhaps the
legislative body most dominated by Israeli interests, more in many respects than the Congress
in the United States. The ruling Conservative Party has a Friends of Israel caucus that
includes more than 80% of its Parliamentary membership. BICOM , the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre,
is an American Israel Political Action Committee
(AIPAC) clone located in London. It is well funded and politically powerful, working
through its various "Friends of Israel" proxies. Americans might be surprised to learn how that
power is manifest, including that in Britain Jewish organizations uniquely are
allowed to patrol heavily Jewish London neighborhoods in police-like uniforms while driving
police-type vehicles. There have been reports of the patrols threatening Muslims who seek to
enter the areas.
Prime Minister Theresa May is careful never to offend either Israel or the wealthy and
powerful British Jewish community. After Secretary of State John Kerry described Israel's
government as "extreme right wing" on December 28, 2016, May sprang to Tel Aviv's defense,
saying "we do not believe that it is appropriate to attack the composition of the
democratically elected government of an ally." May's rejoinder could have been written by
Netanyahu, and maybe it was. Two weeks later, her government cited
"reservations" over a French government sponsored mid-January Middle East peace conference
and would not sign a joint statement calling for a negotiated two-state solution to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict after Netanyahu vociferously condemned the proceedings.
This deference all takes place in spite of a recent astonishing expose by al-Jazeera, which
revealed how the Israeli Embassy in London connived with government officials to "take down"
parliamentarians and government ministers who were considered to be critical of the Jewish
State. It was also learned that the Israeli Embassy was secretly subsidizing and advising
private groups promoting Israeli interests, including associations of Members of Parliament
(MPs).
British Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn has been under unrelenting fire due to the fact that he
is the first major political party leader in many years to resist the demands that he place
Israel on a pedestal. Corbyn is indeed a man of the left who has consistently opposed racism,
extreme nationalism, colonialism and military interventionism. Corbyn's crime has been that
he is critical of the Jewish state and has called for an "end to the repression of the
Palestinian people." As a reward, he has been hounded mercilessly by British Jews, even those
in his own party, for over two years.
The invective being spewed by some British Jews and Israel has increased of late, presumably
because Theresa May's Conservative government is perceived as being weak and there is a
distinct possibility that the leader of the Labour Party will be the next Prime Minister. That
a Prime Minister might be sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians is viewed as completely
unacceptable.
Last month, rightwing Labour Parliamentarian Margaret Hodge raised the stakes, calling
Corbyn "a fucking anti-Semite and a racist". She then wrote in the Guardian that
Labour is "a hostile environment for Jews." The traditionally liberal Guardian has in
fact been in the forefront of Jewish criticism of Corbyn, led by its senior editor Jonathan
Freedland, who reportedly believes
that "his Jewish identity is intimately tied to Israel, and that to attack Israel is to attack
him personally he is demanding the exclusive right to police the parameters of discussions
about Israel." Last month he featured in his paper a
letter attacking Corbyn signed by 68 rabbis.
All of the invective has been more-or-less orchestrated by the Israeli government, which
directly supports the gaggle of groups that have coalesced to bring down Corbyn. This effort to
destroy the Labour leader has included the use of an app disseminating messages via social
media accusing Corbyn of anti-Semitism. The app was developed by Israel's strategic affairs
ministry , which "directs Israel's covert efforts to sabotage the Palestine solidarity
movement around the world".
There are two principal objectives to the "get Corbyn" campaign. The first is to remove him
from the Labour Party leadership position, thereby ensuring that he will never be elected Prime
Minister, while also eliminating from the party any and all members who are perceived as being
"too critical" of Israel. In practice that has meant anyone who criticizes Israel at all. And
second it is to establish as a legal principle that the "hate crime" offense of anti-Semitism
specifically be defined to include criticism of Israel, thereby making it a criminal offense to
write or speak about Israel's racist behavior towards its Muslim and Christian minority while
also making it impossible to freely discuss its war crimes.
The principal argument being made against Corbyn is that the Labour Party is awash with
anti-Semitism and Corbyn has done little or nothing to oppose it. Some of the most brutal shots
against Corbyn have come from the usual crowd in the United States. Andrew Sullivan
recently
observed in New York Magazine that "When it emerged, that Naz Shah, a new Labour
MP, had opined on Facebook before she was elected that Israel should be relocated to the U.S.,
and former London mayor Ken Livingstone backed her up by arguing that the Nazis initially
favored Zionism, Corbyn didn't make a big fuss." Sullivan then went on to write that "It then
emerged that Corbyn himself had subscribed to various pro-Palestinian Facebook groups where
rank anti-Semitism flourished" and had even " attended a meeting on Holocaust Memorial Day in
2010, called 'Never Again for Anyone: Auschwitz to Gaza,' equating Israelis with Nazis."
In other words, Corbyn should have been responsible for policing the personal views of
Shah and Livingstone ,
both of whom were subsequently suspended from the Labour Party with Livingstone eventually
resigning. He should have also avoided Palestinian Facebook commentary because alleged
anti-Semites occasionally contribute their views and ought not to acknowledge in any fashion
the Israel war crimes being committed on a daily basis in Gaza.
So Corbyn must go based on the "fact" that he has to be a closet anti-Semite as discerned by
the likes of Andrew Sullivan on this side of the Atlantic and a host of Israel-firsters in
Britain. But the Labour leader's worst crime that is being regarded as an "
existential threat " to Jewish people everywhere is his resistance to the pressure being
exerted on him to endorse and adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's (IHRA)
precise multi-faceted definition of what constitutes anti-Semitism. The IHRA basic definition
of anti-Semitism is reasonable enough, including "a certain perception of Jews, which may be
expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti-Semitism are
directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community
institutions and religious facilities."
The Labour Party and Corbyn have accepted that definition but have balked at eleven
"contemporary examples of anti-Semitism" also provided by IHRA, four of which have nothing to
do with Jews and everything to do with Israel. They are:
Accusing Jewish citizens of being
more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of
their own nations. Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g.
One might observe that many Jews
And yes, Israel is a "racist endeavor." Just check out the recent nationality
law passed by the Knesset declaring Israel to be a Jewish State. It grants
self-determination only to those living within its borders who are Jews. And if using racial
distinctions for full citizenship while also bombing hospitals and schools while lining up
snipers to shoot thousands of unarmed Palestinian demonstrators is not Nazi-like behavior, then
what is? Israel and its leader are sometimes compared to Nazis and to Adolf Hitler because they
behave like Nazis and Adolf Hitler.
And finally there is the definition that challenges any "double standard" in demanding
behavior from Israel that is not expected from any other democratic nation. Well, first of all
Israel is not a democracy. It is a theocracy or ethnocracy if you prefer wrapped around a
police state. Other countries that call themselves democracies have equal rights under law for
all citizens. Other democracies do not have hundreds of thousands of settlers stealing land and
even water resources from the indigenous population and colonizing it to the benefit of only
one segment of its population. Other democracies do not regularly shoot dead unarmed
protesters. How many democracies are currently practicing ethnic cleansing, as the Israeli Jews
are doing to the Palestinians?
Will Corbyn give in to the IHRA demands to save his skin as party leader? One has to suspect
that he will as he is already regularly conceding points and apologizing, publicly delivering
the required obeisance to the holocaust as "the worst crime of the twentieth century." And
every time he tries to appease those out to get him he emerges weaker. Even if he submits
completely, the Israel firsters who are hot to get him, having just like in American
significant control over the media, will continue to attack until they find the precise issue
that will bring him down. The Labour National Executive Council will meet in September to vote
on full acceptance of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism. When they, as is likely, kneel
before force majeure that will be the end of free speech in Britain. Criticize Israel and you
go to jail.
And the same thing is happening in the United States in precisely the same fashion.
Criticism of Israel or protesting against it will sooner rather than later be criminalized. I
sometimes wonder if Senator Ben Cardin and the others who are promoting the hate legislation
really understand what will be lost when they sacrifice the U.S. Constitution to defend Israel.
Once free speech is gone, it will never return.
"... I am not here speaking about the elites who dominate our societies. They have their own agenda. They trade only in the language of money and power. I am speaking of us: the 99 per cent who live in their shadow. ..."
"... While this camp concedes that the media is owned by a handful of corporations driven by a concern for profit, it is nonetheless confident that the free market -- the need to sell papers and audiences -- guarantees that important news and a full spectrum of legitimate opinion are available to readers. ..."
"... This camp believes too that western democracies are better, more civilised political systems than those in other parts of the world. Western societies do not want wars, they want peace and security for everyone. For that reason, they have been thrust -- rather uncomfortably -- into the role of global policeman. Western states have found themselves with little choice of late but to wage "good wars" to curb the genocidal instincts and hunger for power of dictators and madmen. ..."
"... The current obsession with Russian conspiracies is in large part the result of the extraordinarily rapid rise of a second camp, no doubt fuelled by the unprecedented access western publics have gained through social media to information, good and bad alike. At no time in human history have so many people been able to step outside of a state-, clerical- or corporate-sanctioned framework of information dissemination and speak too each other directly and on a global stage. ..."
"... This new camp too is not easy to characterise in the old language of left-right politics. Its chief characteristic is that it distrusts not only those who dominate our societies, but the social structures they operate within. ..."
"... This camp regards such structures as neither immutable, divinely ordained ways for ordering and organising society, nor as the rational outcome of the political and moral evolution of western societies. Rather, it views these structures as the product of engineering by a tiny elite to hold on to its power. ..."
"... For this camp, politicians are not the cream of society. They have risen to the surface of a corrupted and corrupting system, and the overwhelming majority did so by enthusiastically adopting its rotten values. These politicians do not chiefly serve voters but the corporations who really dominate our societies. ..."
"... Likewise, the media -- supposed watchdogs on power -- are seen by this camp as the chief propagandists for the ruling elite. The media do not monitor the abuse of power, they actively create a social consensus for the continuation of the abuse -- and if that fails, they seek to deflect attention from, or veil, the abuse. ..."
"... This is inevitable, the second camp argues, given that the media are embedded within the very same corporate structures that dominate our societies. They are, in fact, the corporations' public relations arm. They allow only limited dissent at the margins of the media, and only as a way to create the impression of an illusory pluralism. ..."
"... These "enemies" are a real foe in the sense that, in their different ways, they refuse to submit to the neoliberalising reach of the western-based corporations. But more significantly, they are needed as an enemy, even should they want to make peace. These manufactured enemies, says the second camp, justify the redirection of public money into the private coffers of the military and homeland security industries. And equally importantly, a ready set of bogeymen can be exploited to distract western publics from troubles at home. ..."
"... The second camp is accused by the first of being anti-western, anti-American and anti-Israel (or more mischievously anti-semitic) for its opposition to western "humanitarian interventions" abroad. The second camp, it says, act as apologists for war criminals like Russia's Vladimir Putin or Syria's Bashar Assad, portraying these leaders as misunderstood good guys and blaming the west for the world's ills. ..."
"... Putin has power, but it is immeasurably less than the combined might of the profit-seeking, war-waging western military industries. Faced with this power equation, according to the second camp, Putin acts defensively or reactively on the global stage, using what limited strength Russia has to uphold its essential strategic interests. One cannot reasonably judge Russia's crimes without first admitting the west's greater crimes, our crimes. ..."
"... While the whole US political class obsess over "Russian interference" in US elections, this camp notes, the American public is encouraged to ignore the much greater US interference not only in Russian elections, but in many other spheres Russia considers to be vital strategic interests. That includes the locating of US military bases and missile sites on Russia's borders. ..."
"... The other camp has one small space to make its presence felt -- social media. That is a space rapidly shrinking, as the politicians, media and the corporations that own social media (as they do everything else) start to realise they have let the genie out of the bottle. This camp is derided as conspiratorial, dangerous, fake news. ..."
"... The two most significant disrupters of the first camp's narrative are climate breakdown and economic meltdown. The planet has finite resources, which means endless growth and wealth accumulation cannot be sustained indefinitely. Much as in a Ponzi scheme, there comes a point when the hollow centre is exposed and the system comes crashing down. We have had intimations enough that we are nearing that point. ..."
"... Our political language is rupturing because we are now completely divided. There is no middle ground, no social compact, no consensus. The second camp understands that the current system is broken and that we need radical change, while the first camp holds desperately to the hope that the system will continue to be workable with modifications and minor reforms. ..."
"... We are arriving at a moment called a paradigm shift. That is when the cracks in a system become so obvious they can no longer be credibly denied. Those vested in the old system scream and shout, they buy themselves a little time with increasingly repressive measures, but the house is moments away from falling. The critical questions are who gets hurt when the structure tumbles, and who decides how it will be rebuilt ..."
"... They have rightly identified social media as the key concern. This is where we -- the 99 per cent -- have begun waking each other up. This is where we are sharing and learning, emerging out of the darkness clumsily and shaken. We are making mistakes, but learning. We are heading up blind alleys, but learning. We are making poor choices, but learning. We are making unhelpful alliances, but learning ..."
"... Corbyn's significance -- and danger -- is that he brings much of the language and concerns of the second camp into the mainstream. He offers a fast-track for the second camp to reach the first camp, and accelerate the awakening process. That, in turn, would improve the chances of the paradigm shift being organic and transitional rather than disruptive and violent. ..."
"... That is why he has become a lightning rod for the wider machinations of the ruling elite. They want him destroyed, like blowing up a bridge to stop an advancing army. ..."
"... The corporate elite weaponised anti-semitism not because they care about the safety of Jews, or because they really believe that Corbyn is an anti-semite. They chose it because it is the most destructive weapon -- short of sex-crime smears and assassination -- they have in their armoury. ..."
"... The truth is the ruling elite are exploiting British Jews and fuelling their fears as part of a much larger power game in which all of us -- the 99 per cent -- are expendable. They will keep stoking this campaign to stigmatise Corbyn, even if a political backlash actually does lead to an increase in real, rather than phoney, anti-semitism. ..."
The latest "scandal" gripping Britain -- or to be more accurate, British elites -- is over the use of the term "Zionist" by the
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, the head of the opposition and possibly the country's next prime minister.
Yet again, Corbyn has found himself ensnared in what a small group of Jewish leadership organisations, which claim improbably
to represent Britain's "Jewish community", and a small group of corporate journalists, who improbably claim to represent British
public opinion, like to call Labour's "anti-semitism problem".
I won't get into the patently ridiculous notion that "Zionist" is a code word for "Jew", at least not now. There are lots of existing
articles explaining why that is nonsense.
I wish to deal with a different aspect of the long-running row over Labour's so-called "anti-semitism crisis". It exemplifies,
I believe, a much more profound and wider crisis in our societies: over the issue of trust.
We now have two large camps, pitted against each other, who have starkly different conceptions of what their societies are and
where they need to head. In a very real sense, these two camps no longer speak the same language. There has been a rupture, and they
can find no common ground.
I am not here speaking about the elites who dominate our societies. They have their own agenda. They trade only in the language
of money and power. I am speaking of us: the 99 per cent who live in their shadow.
First, let us outline the growing ideological and linguistic chasm opening up between these two camps: a mapping of the divisions
that, given space constraints, will necessarily deal in generalisations.
The trusting camp
The first camp invests its trust, with minor reservations, in those who run our societies. The left and the right segments of
this camp are divided primarily over the degree to which they believe that those at the bottom of society's pile need a helping hand
to get them further up the social ladder.
Otherwise, the first camp is united in its assumptions.
They admit that among our elected politicians there is the odd bad apple. And, of course, they understand that there are necessary
debates about political and social values. But they agree that politicians rise chiefly through ability and talent, that they are
accountable to their political constituencies, and that they are people who want what is best for society as a whole.
While this camp concedes that the media is owned by a handful of corporations driven by a concern for profit, it is nonetheless
confident that the free market -- the need to sell papers and audiences -- guarantees that important news and a full spectrum of
legitimate opinion are available to readers.
Both politicians and the media serve -- if not always entirely successfully -- as a constraint on corruption and the abuse of
power by other powerful actors, such as the business community.
This camp believes too that western democracies are better, more civilised political systems than those in other parts of
the world. Western societies do not want wars, they want peace and security for everyone. For that reason, they have been thrust
-- rather uncomfortably -- into the role of global policeman. Western states have found themselves with little choice of late but
to wage "good wars" to curb the genocidal instincts and hunger for power of dictators and madmen.
Russian conspiracies
Once upon a time -- when this camp's worldview was rarely, if ever, challenged -- its favoured response to anything difficult
to reconcile with its core beliefs, from the 2003 invasion of Iraq to the 2008 financial crash, was: "Cock-up, not conspiracy!".
Now that there are ever more issues threatening to undermine its most cherished verities, the camp's response is -- paradoxically
-- "Putin did it!" or "Fake news!".
The current obsession with Russian conspiracies is in large part the result of the extraordinarily rapid rise of a second
camp, no doubt fuelled by the unprecedented access western publics have gained through social media to information, good and bad
alike. At no time in human history have so many people been able to step outside of a state-, clerical- or corporate-sanctioned framework
of information dissemination and speak too each other directly and on a global stage.
This new camp too is not easy to characterise in the old language of left-right politics. Its chief characteristic is that
it distrusts not only those who dominate our societies, but the social structures they operate within.
This camp regards such structures as neither immutable, divinely ordained ways for ordering and organising society, nor as
the rational outcome of the political and moral evolution of western societies. Rather, it views these structures as the product
of engineering by a tiny elite to hold on to its power.
These structures are no longer primarily national, but global. They are not immutable but as fabricated, as man-made and replaceable,
as the structures that once made incontestable the rule of a landed aristocracy over feudal serfs. The current aristocracy, this
camp argues, are globalised corporations that are so unaccountable that even the biggest nation-states can no longer contain or constrain
them.
Illusions of pluralism
For this camp, politicians are not the cream of society. They have risen to the surface of a corrupted and corrupting system,
and the overwhelming majority did so by enthusiastically adopting its rotten values. These politicians do not chiefly serve voters
but the corporations who really dominate our societies.
For the second camp, this fact was well illustrated in 2008 when the political class did not -- and could not -- punish the banks
responsible for the near-collapse of western economies after decades of reckless speculation on which a financial elite had grown
fat. Those banks, in the words of the politicians themselves, were "too big to fail" and so were bailed out with money from the very
same publics who had been scammed by the banks in the first place. Rather than use the bank failures as an opportunity to drive through
reform of the broken banking system, or nationalise parts of it, the politicians let the banking casino system continue, even intensify.
Likewise, the media -- supposed watchdogs on power -- are seen by this camp as the chief propagandists for the ruling elite.
The media do not monitor the abuse of power, they actively create a social consensus for the continuation of the abuse -- and if
that fails, they seek to deflect attention from, or veil, the abuse.
This is inevitable, the second camp argues, given that the media are embedded within the very same corporate structures that
dominate our societies. They are, in fact, the corporations' public relations arm. They allow only limited dissent at the margins
of the media, and only as a way to create the impression of an illusory pluralism.
Manufactured enemies
These domestic structures are subservient to a still-bigger agenda: the accumulation of wealth by a global elite through the asset-stripping
of the planet's resources and the rationalisation of permanent war. That, this camp concludes, requires the manufacturing of "enemies"
-- such as Russia, Iran, Syria, Venezuela and North Korea -- to justify the expansion of a military-industrial machine.
These "enemies" are a real foe in the sense that, in their different ways, they refuse to submit to the neoliberalising reach
of the western-based corporations. But more significantly, they are needed as an enemy, even should they want to make peace. These
manufactured enemies, says the second camp, justify the redirection of public money into the private coffers of the military and
homeland security industries. And equally importantly, a ready set of bogeymen can be exploited to distract western publics from
troubles at home.
The second camp is accused by the first of being anti-western, anti-American and anti-Israel (or more mischievously anti-semitic)
for its opposition to western "humanitarian interventions" abroad. The second camp, it says, act as apologists for war criminals
like Russia's Vladimir Putin or Syria's Bashar Assad, portraying these leaders as misunderstood good guys and blaming the west for
the world's ills.
The second camp argues that it is none of these things: it is anti-imperialist. It does not excuse the crimes of Putin or Assad,
it treats them as secondary and largely reactive to the vastly greater power a western elite with global reach can project. It believes
the western media's obsession with crafting narratives about evil enemies -- bad men and madmen -- is designed to deflect attention
from the structures of far greater violence the west deploys around the world, through a web of US military bases and Nato.
Putin has power, but it is immeasurably less than the combined might of the profit-seeking, war-waging western military industries.
Faced with this power equation, according to the second camp, Putin acts defensively or reactively on the global stage, using what
limited strength Russia has to uphold its essential strategic interests. One cannot reasonably judge Russia's crimes without first
admitting the west's greater crimes, our crimes.
While the whole US political class obsess over "Russian interference" in US elections, this camp notes, the American public
is encouraged to ignore the much greater US interference not only in Russian elections, but in many other spheres Russia considers
to be vital strategic interests. That includes the locating of US military bases and missile sites on Russia's borders.
Different languages
Two camps, two entirely different languages and narratives.
These camps may be divided, but it would seriously misguided to imagine they are equal.
One has the full power and weight of those corporate structures behind it. The politicians speak its language, as do the media.
Its ideas and its voice dominate everywhere that is considered official, objective, balanced, neutral, respectable, legitimate.
The other camp has one small space to make its presence felt -- social media. That is a space rapidly shrinking, as the politicians,
media and the corporations that own social media (as they do everything else) start to realise they have let the genie out of the
bottle. This camp is derided as conspiratorial, dangerous, fake news.
This is the current battlefield. It is a battle the first camp looks like it is winning but actually has already lost. That is
not necessarily because the second camp is winning the argument. It is because physical realities are catching up with the first
camp, smashing its illusions, even as it clings to them like a life-raft.
The two most significant disrupters of the first camp's narrative are climate breakdown and economic meltdown. The planet
has finite resources, which means endless growth and wealth accumulation cannot be sustained indefinitely. Much as in a Ponzi scheme,
there comes a point when the hollow centre is exposed and the system comes crashing down. We have had intimations enough that we
are nearing that point.
It hardly needs repeating, except to climate deniers, that we have had even more indications that the Earth's climate is already
turning against humankind.
Out of the darkness
Our political language is rupturing because we are now completely divided. There is no middle ground, no social compact, no
consensus. The second camp understands that the current system is broken and that we need radical change, while the first camp holds
desperately to the hope that the system will continue to be workable with modifications and minor reforms.
It is on to this battlefield that Corbyn has stumbled, little prepared for the heavy historic burden he shoulders.
We are arriving at a moment called a paradigm shift. That is when the cracks in a system become so obvious they can no longer
be credibly denied. Those vested in the old system scream and shout, they buy themselves a little time with increasingly repressive
measures, but the house is moments away from falling. The critical questions are who gets hurt when the structure tumbles, and who
decides how it will be rebuilt .
The new paradigm is coming anyway. If we don't choose it ourselves, the planet will for us. It could be an improvement, it could
be a deterioration, it could be extinction, depending on how prepared we are for it and how violently those invested in the old system
resist the loss of their power. If enough of us understand the need for discarding the broken system, the greater the hope that we
can build something better from the ruins.
We are now at the point where the corporate elite can see the cracks are widening but they remain in denial. They are entering
the tantrum phase, screaming and shouting at their enemies, and readying to implement ever-more repressive measures to maintain their
power.
They have rightly identified social media as the key concern. This is where we -- the 99 per cent -- have begun waking each
other up. This is where we are sharing and learning, emerging out of the darkness clumsily and shaken. We are making mistakes, but
learning. We are heading up blind alleys, but learning. We are making poor choices, but learning. We are making unhelpful alliances,
but learning .
No one, least of all the corporate elite, knows precisely where this process might lead, what capacities we have for political,
social and spiritual growth.
And what the elite don't own or control, they fear.
Putting the genie back
The elite have two weapons they can use to try to force the second camp back into the bottle. They can vilify it, driving it back
into the margins of public life, where it was until the advent of social media; or they can lock down the new channels of mass communication
their insatiable drive to monetise everything briefly opened up.
Both strategies have risks, which is why they are being pursued tentatively for the time being. But the second option is by far
the riskier of the two. Shutting down social media too obviously could generate blowback, awakening more of the first camp to the
illusions the second camp have been trying to alert them to.
Corbyn's significance -- and danger -- is that he brings much of the language and concerns of the second camp into the mainstream.
He offers a fast-track for the second camp to reach the first camp, and accelerate the awakening process. That, in turn, would improve
the chances of the paradigm shift being organic and transitional rather than disruptive and violent.
That is why he has become a lightning rod for the wider machinations of the ruling elite. They want him destroyed, like blowing
up a bridge to stop an advancing army.
It is a sign both of their desperation and their weakness that they have had to resort to the nuclear option, smearing him as
an anti-semite. Other, lesser smears were tried first: that he was not presidential enough to lead Britain; that he was anti-establishment;
that he was unpatriotic; that he might be a traitor. None worked. If anything, they made him more popular.
And so a much more incendiary charge was primed, however at odds it was with Corbyn's decades spent as an anti-racism activist.
The corporate elite weaponised anti-semitism not because they care about the safety of Jews, or because they really believe
that Corbyn is an anti-semite. They chose it because it is the most destructive weapon -- short of sex-crime smears and assassination
-- they have in their armoury.
The truth is the ruling elite are exploiting British Jews and fuelling their fears as part of a much larger power game in
which all of us -- the 99 per cent -- are expendable. They will keep stoking this campaign to stigmatise Corbyn, even if a political
backlash actually does lead to an increase in real, rather than phoney, anti-semitism.
The corporate elites have no plan to go quietly. Unless we can build our ranks quickly and make our case confidently, their antics
will ensure the paradigm shift is violent rather than healing. An earthquake, not a storm.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include "Israel and the Clash of Civilisations:
Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East" (Pluto Press) and "Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair"
(Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net .
"The corporate elite weaponised anti-semitism not because they care about the safety of Jews, or because they really
believe that Corbyn is an anti-semite. They chose it because it is the most destructive weapon – short of sex-crime smears
and assassination – they have in their armoury."
I must admit I assumed it was because he's less than 100% behind Israel and thinks, not unreasonably, that the Palestinians
have had a pretty rough deal over the last 60 years. He raises the frightening (to some) prospect of a UK government that is more
neutral on the issues, and doesn't think we can bomb peace into the Middle East.
Occam's Razor would seem to suggest that's the answer.
"Corbyn's significance – and danger – is that he brings much of the language and concerns of the second camp into the
mainstream. "
You're right about the electorate being divided – but I'd suggest young Corbyn voters are just as blinkered as any Daily Mail
reader. My kids all voted for him because they thought he'd cancel their student debt.
Maybe Corbyn activists are better informed, but I very much doubt it.
Corbyn has to resist the temptation to give way to them. He is right on the Palestinian issue, and, since the Palestinians
are 100 % semites (though "anti-semitism" has been appropriated to mean anti-Jewish most Jewish emigrants from Europe have considerable
non-semitic blood mixed in) the real anti-semites here appear to be the Israeli element bent on eliminating the Palestinians.
The Gaza strip is a ghetto operated in a similar manner to how the Nazis operated the ghettoes in occupied Poland (though without
the Auschwitz end game up to now). The thing is, if Corbyn stands up to this, in my view, his supporters will fully back him up.
In my view, the Israelis are risking real anti-Israeli blowback which could resurrect evils buried with the collapse of the Nazi
regime. Indeed, the way they are acting on this and other related issues, threatening those who criticise them in any fashion
seems to be providing ex post facto justifications of the most absurd propaganda the Nazis put forward during that era.
The real question is why it is that even the slightest hint of a politician not being totally onboard with >1% of the population
results in a years long campaign to destroy him by most of the media, but mentioning the open desire of all three parties to discriminate
against and replace the native population of Britain makes you a pariah.
You said it. It's because Corbyn is not totally on board with the less than 1% that he is seen as a threat. Total control of
everyone and everything is their aim.
There is certainly an MSM/Blairite full court press to push the anti-Semitism story, that is mostly being fronted by goyim
who are kissing up – Jess Phillips, Maajid Nawaz, Dan Hodges (Glenda Jackson's son) etc. But it is getting no traction with the
public at large. If they force another leadership contest Corbyn will win easily.
These people live in a North London Anglo-American bubble, and they are now realizing that there is no large Evangelocon constituency
in Britain.
No Bubbas waiting to be raptured = Nobody much cares about Israel
"... Empire – the old far left and the new far right are against the USA having an Empire and against perpetual war. ..."
"... Economy – the old far left and the new far right think free trade and Wall Street are killing middle class jobs and the ladders of success. ..."
"... Race/Sex/Gender – the old far right KKK vlugar bigoted view is pretty much dead in America. The new far right is trying to work through real facts on group differences and what is reasonable to do about it. Everyone else is CCCrazy. ..."
I think we are all struggling to come up with a new vocabulary to rationally describe the
new forces at work in our society. I would welcome suggestions because I've got nuthin
here.
I agree. I used to be liberal, then became far left, and I am now far right. And I never
changed my views! The politics around me changed.
Here are some forces at work:
1. Empire – the old far left and the new far right are against the USA having an
Empire and against perpetual war. Read Pat Buchanan and Mike Whitney on Middle East wars
and Russia and they sound a lot alike. Everyone else in America supports the Empire, either
actively or passively.
2. Economy – the old far left and the new far right think free trade and Wall
Street are killing middle class jobs and the ladders of success. It's the old Democrat pro
union view and the old Republican main street vs. wall street view. If you like socialism, you
gotta hate Wall Street. If you like free markets, you gotta hate Wall Street. Everyone else in
America supports Wall Stree rule over the Fed and economic policy, either actively or
passively.
3. Race/Sex/Gender – the old far right KKK vlugar bigoted view is pretty much dead
in America. The new far right is trying to work through real facts on group differences and
what is reasonable to do about it. Everyone else is CCCrazy.
A name embraced by white nationalists and/or white supremacists to refer to themselves and
their ideology, which emphasizes preserving and protecting the white race through populist
endeavors, which includes the return of patriarchy, the revocation of the 1965 Immigration
Act, an emphasis on race realism and/or the reinstitution of Western Christian
civilization.
"Who speaks for it?"
John Derbyshire. Steve Sailer. Vox Day. Richard Spencer. Mike Cernovich. For starters.
There are antisemitic rants in many places on the web, almost all of which are ignored.
But make an objective criticism of the Zionist enterprise now a days and its apologists resort immediately to unrestrained
howls and accusations of antisemitism.
One ought, therefor, to understand this rhetorical device for the simple ad hominem attack that it is.
"... I never meet Jew haters in my personal life but there sure are a lot on this site. How does less than 2% of the US population utterly dominate the nation? Is each Jew 50 times stronger than every gentile. ..."
"... They tend to be urban dwellers where salaries are higher but standards of living are often lower. Those in my neighborhood are very well assimilated. They put elaborate Christmas lights on their houses. It is not a rich neighborhood. ..."
"... Their earlier history was wretched and included slavery and persecutions for thousands of years. Don't waste much time fearing Jews ..."
I never meet Jew haters in my personal life but there sure are a lot on this site. How does less than 2% of the US population
utterly dominate the nation? Is each Jew 50 times stronger than every gentile.
I meet many Jews but can't recall a single
super Jew. Maybe they are clever deceivers? The great majority are middle earners. There are some rich and some poor. Jews dominate
Hollywood and certain occupations but they are underrepresented as engineers and architects. So what.
They tend to be urban dwellers where salaries are higher but standards of living are often lower. Those in my neighborhood
are very well assimilated. They put elaborate Christmas lights on their houses. It is not a rich neighborhood.
Jewish history does not support the idea of a super race. They only entered middle classes in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, and only in the western world. Before that they were not allowed to attend universities or even own land in many cases.
Their earlier history was wretched and included slavery and persecutions for thousands of years. Don't waste much time
fearing Jews.
The Labour is in the midst of an "antisemitism crisis" orchestrated by the media, pro-Zionist Jewish groups, and the party's Blairite
faction bent on ousting Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader.
The UK's media is overwhelmingly rightwing and pro-Israel. Even the BBC, terrified of being donated to Rupert Murdoch in a Tory
privatization, is pro-Tory and pro-Israel in its news reporting, all its professions of "objectivity" notwithstanding.
Corbyn has been their constant target since he became the party's leader, and the "antisemitism" smear is the latest installment
in this rightwing effort to discredit him.
Even the supposedly liberal Guardian newspaper, whose editorial line on Israel is led by the staunch Zionist Jonathan
Freedland, is resolutely anti-Corbyn.
No leader of a major political party has been as resolute as Corbyn in defending Palestinian rights. The
Observer newspaper put this succinctly: "As a long-term and ardent critic of Israel's policies and staunch supporter of
Palestinian causes, he has always been distrusted by the Jewish community".
Pro-Zionist Jewish groups fear that under his leadership Britain will become much more like Ireland (which recently banned the
import of products made in the illegal Israeli settlements) in its disposition towards Israel.
A clue to the motivation of these pro-Zionist UK Jewish groups was provided by the recent public protest in London against Labour's
"antisemitism"– many protesters carried the Israeli flag and "Israel we stand behind you" signs, thereby making it clear that their
concern for Zionist Israel was highly instrumental, and perhaps primarily so, in their presence at this rally against Labour's "antisemitism".
Several Blairite Labour MPs were present at this demonstration.
The Blairite faction in Labour has already made one attempt to overthrow Corbyn when it made him submit to an unprecedented reelection
shortly after he became party leader.
Corbyn went on to win this challenge with a percentage exceeding Blair's when the latter was elected Labour leader.
Labour's Blairite bloc know that Corbyn has to lose the next general election if they are to survive as a force within the party.
If Labour (under Corbyn) wins this election, they will have little choice but to take the option already being talked about by some
of these Blairites, that is, splitting from Labour and forming a new "centrist" party.
Their eminence grise, Tony Blair himself, has already talked about creating this "centrist" party.
So, paradoxically, Labour's Blairites would rather have the Conservatives win the next general election as their ticket to survival
within their own party!
Predictably, one of these Blairites, Labour's deputy leader Tom Watson, jumped on the "crisis" bandwagon by
saying
that Labour faces "eternal shame" over antisemitism.
Of course, there are pockets of antisemitism in Labour, as is the case in nearly every non-Jewish British walk of life, including
the Tories (though dressing up in Nazi uniform and chanting "Sieg Heil!" at parties, as opposed to upholding Palestinian rights,
is their forte).
A few days ago, it was revealed that the senior Tory politicians Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, and Jacob Rees-Mogg had recently
met in secret with Steve Bannon, who runs Breitbart News , a haven for antisemitic views. The British media, and the Blairite
Labour MPs hounding Corbyn, have said nary a word about these meetings. Nor have the vociferous UK Jewish organizations.
The notion that there is significant antisemitism in Labour, let alone one amounting to a "crisis", is a red herring.
The most recent purported manifestation of this crisis pivots on the decision of Labour's National Executive Committee (NEC) to
adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Association's "non-legally binding working definition" of antisemitism, but not the
"illustrations" which accompany it. The definition states:
"Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations
of anti-Semitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions
and religious facilities."
The "illustrations" which accompany this definition include some which are uncontroversial for any fair-minded and relatively
rational person, and others which are highly problematic for such a person.
The uncontroversial "illustrations" of antisemitism:
+ advocating the killing or harming of Jews for ideological or religious reasons;
+ making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such;
+ holding Jews as a people responsible for real or imagined wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person or group;
+ Holocaust denial;
+ using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to
characterize Israel or Israelis;
+ holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel;
+ accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust.
The controversial "illustrations" of antisemitism (and non-coincidently they all have a bearing on the Palestinian cause):
+ accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel than to the interests of their own nations;
+ claiming that the existence of the state of Israel is a racist endeavour;
+ applying double standards by requiring of Israel conduct not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation;
+ drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.
A close examination of this latter set of "illustrations" shows that Labour is absolutely right to resist the immense pressure
from Zionists and their supporters to accept these latter "illustrations" as part of the definition of antisemitism.
There are examples of Jewish US citizens being more loyal to Israel than to the interests of their country.
The casino mogul Sheldon Adelson donated $25 million to Trump's 2016 campaign ($82 million in total to Republicans in 2016), and
$5 million towards his inauguration. Earlier this year Adelson donated $70 million to Birthright, the organization that brings young
Jews to Israel for nothing (he's donated $100m in total to Birthright). He also donated $30 million to Republicans after Trump withdrew
from the nuclear agreement with Iran. Adelson spent $150m in the 2012 election in a futile attempt to unseat the "anti-Israel" Barack
Obama.
Adelson's aim in all of this is to swing Trump behind his friend Netanyahu's "Greater Israel" political agenda. To this end Adelson
pushed hard for the US's withdrawal from the Iran deal, appointing the arch-Zionist John Bolton as a Trump adviser, recognizing Jerusalem
as Israel's capital (in contravention of international law), and moving the US embassy to Jerusalem. Adelson has succeeded in all
of these objectives.
Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and "envoy" for a "peace" deal in the Middle East, has made it clear that any such deal will
have to be compatible with Likud's "Greater Israel" political agenda.
According to The New York
Times , Kushner's family real estate company "received a roughly $30 million investment from Menora Mivtachim, an insurer
that is one of Israel's largest financial institutions".
The same NYT article also reported that "the Kushners had teamed up with at least one member of Israel's wealthy Steinmetz
family to buy nearly $200 million of Manhattan apartment buildings, as well as to build a luxury rental tower in New Jersey".
More from the same article: "Mr. Kushner's company has also taken out at least four loans from Israel's largest bank, Bank Hapoalim,
which is the subject of a Justice Department investigation over allegations that it helped wealthy Americans evade taxes".
Kushner's family foundation also donates to an illegal settlement in the West Bank.
Meanwhile , US military aid to Israel amounts to $3.8 billion annually, or $23,000 per year for every Jewish family living in
Israel for the next 10 years.
At the same time, 40 million Americans live in poverty, seniors and veterans are sleeping rough, and teachers have to buy school
supplies, and in some cases food, for their students.
Given these two examples of prominent Jewish individuals with loyalties divided between the US and Israel, with Israel acquiring
much and the US gaining so little from their actions, it is arguable whether it is "antisemitic" to broadcast the information detailed
above.
Claiming that the existence of the state of Israel is a racist endeavour is likewise hardly antisemitic. The recently passed Israeli
Nationality Law confirms why.
According to the law, Israel's full name is "Israel, the nation state of the Jewish people". The law stipulates that Eretz Israel
(historical Palestine) is the homeland of the Jewish people, while the state of Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people.
As such, only Jews have the right to self-determination in Israel. Hebrew is the only official language, with Arabic no longer
considered an official language.
The nationality law enjoins that future Jewish settlement in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories is a supreme national
objective (in contravention of international law).
The law also grants Jewish communities the right to a segregated territory in the state(in practice legalizing exclusive villages
and towns for Jews).
The nationality law effectively deprives Arabs of any official semblance of their national identity, and confirms Israel's status
as an apartheid, i.e. racist, state. Saying this is certainly anti-Zionist, but only a dogmatist would insist that it is ipso facto
"antisemitic".
The IHRA "illustration" maintaining that it is antisemitic to apply double standards by requiring of Israel conduct not expected
or demanded of any other democratic nation is likewise extremely awkward in formulation and also in practice.
The 2017 Democracy Index used 4 categories
to assess countries– full democracy, flawed democracy, hybrid regime, and authoritarian regime.
The following countries were ranked by the Index as full democracies: Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany,
Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, Mauritius, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and
Uruguay.
Israel was listed as a flawed democracy, as was the US.
Israel's leaders have always touted their country as "the only democracy in the Middle East", as if their country stood on a par
with the 19 countries ranked as full democracies by the 2017 Democracy Index.
Is it "antisemitic" to hold Israel to a standard deemed to be achieved by Mauritius and Uruguay?
Or to say that Israel is really an "ethnocracy", as opposed to being a democracy?
The Israeli political geographer Oren Yiftachel argued in his 2006 book Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics
in Israel/Palestine that an ethnocracy is a regime promoting "the expansion of the dominant group in contested territory
while maintaining a democratic façade".
When it comes todrawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis, it all depends on the basis used in making
the comparison between Israel and the Nazis.
Having gas chambers for mass exterminations, then certainly not.
However, nearly everyone who believes that comparing Israel with the Nazis is "antisemitic" invariably takes the concentration-camp
gas chambers as the implicit norm, whether out of bad faith or ignorance, for making such comparisons.
The Nazi "final solution", vast as it was, had many strands, with horror piled upon horror. This multiple-layering must be considered
when making the Israel-Nazi comparison.
Encircling and starving-out an entire community in a ghetto (Warsaw?), then yes, the comparison is valid– this is precisely what
is taking place in Gaza.
The Nazis confiscated Jewish property wholesale; the Israelis are doing the same to Palestinian houses and land in order to "clear"
them for the expansion of the illegal settlements, and for alleged military purposes. B'Tselem, Israel's human rights watchdog, confirms
this on their website . So, yes, in this case the comparison between
Israel and the Nazis is valid.
Jews were prevented from leaving German-occupied Poland by the SS. Similarly, Palestinians are prevented from leaving Gaza (even
for medical treatment) by the combined efforts of Israel and the Egyptian dictatorship. So, yes, in this case the comparison between
Israel and the Nazis is valid.
German Civil Police K-9 Units were used by the SS to assist in the roundup and deportation of Jews in WW2. Similarly, the Israeli
army uses attack dogs on
unarmed Palestinians when raiding their homes, and when
arresting
peaceful demonstrators. So, yes, in this case the comparison between Israel and the Nazis is valid.
It is difficult to see why comparing Israel to the Nazis on these latter bases, while scrupulously eschewing the gas chambers
as a basis for comparison (the Palestinians have not been sent to gas chambers en masse), necessarily makes one an "antisemite".
The Israeli historian Ilan Pappé describes Israel's policy regarding Gaza as "incremental genocide", in contrast to the Nazi's
absolute genocide. The final outcome however is not in doubt.
The distinguished Oxford jurist Stephen Sedley (himself a Jew) has saidthat "there is no legal bar on criticising Israel. Yet
several of the "examples" that have been tacked on to the IHRA definition (by whom is not known) seek to stifle criticism of Israel
irrespective of intent. The House of Commons select committee on home affairs in October 2016 advised adding: "It is not antisemitic
to criticise the government of Israel, without additional evidence to suggest antisemitic intent"."
Corbyn, under siege from the media and Jewish groups (who say, with risible hyperbole, that he poses an "existential threat" to
British Jews), has apologized for not doing enough to root out antisemitism in the Labour Party.
Corbyn's apology was unnecessary. Not just because it was not merited by the real circumstances underlying this manufactured "crisis",
but also because every step he takes now is dismissed as "meaningless" and "too little, too late" by his opportunistic opponents.
Instead Corbyn should have given an immediate forensic analysis of the IHRA's flawed "examples" of "antisemitism", indicating
that Labour was wise not to incorporate these, root and branch, in the definition of antisemitism it adopted.
Corbyn should also have come out earlier with his pledge to deal firmly with those justifiably guilty of antisemitism in the Labour
party.
Corbyn has many admirable qualities, but perhaps doing forensics is not one of them. However, he has many surrogates capable of
undertaking this task, and they should be entrusted with it immediately.
The late and much missed Robin Cook, the former Labour minister who demolished Blair's rationales for the Iraq war in the House
of Commons debate on Blair's push for the war, would have been perfect for the job.
Doesn't matter if it's 2004 or 2018, the (((usual suspects))) keep playing this cruel game
to maintain their eternal victim status, garner pity, sympathy and the mandatory outpouring
of tax dollars from the city/state/nation's Treasury to their jew supremacist pockets.
And it's been going on for centuries....all over the western world.
It's worth pointing out that described abstractly, Zionism and Nazism are ideologically very
similar. Both are essentially exaggerations of Nineteenth century European racial
nationalism, both posit a more or less imaginary history to justify their territorial claims,
both ignore the rights of all others in favor of their chosen group, both openly worship
violence, and both are contemptuous of both legal and moral constraints. Israel has committed
crimes proportionately as horrific as any Nazi Germany committed up to the outbreak of total
war in 1941, and I'm all too confident that if total war did come to the Middle East, Israel
would take advantage of the opportunity to engage in some very genocidal treatment of her
Palestinian subjects.
The primary differences are really that while Nazism was defeated over seventy years ago,
Israel is still very much in being, and that while we here in the US opposed Nazism, we
support Israel.
"Anti-semitism" is merely the enforcement wing of Zionism.
Anywhere Zionists uses injustice,
pointing that out becomes anti-Semitic.
The Zionists, unlike the dullard goyim, understand the power of the moral force, despite the
fact they work fully against it's dictates.
Multiculturalism is a recipe for national suicide. Culture, including religious belief, is
the unifying factor that allows strangers to work with one another, by ensuring that they
share the same assumptions about morality and about correct behavior in general.
Jews have been a problem for European societies for hundreds of years. The recent mass
migration of people of multiple races and religions to Europe and its settler outposts in the
America's and the Pacific is creating cultural chaos.
Immigrants who will not assimilate to the Christian culture of the West have no place in
the West. For Africans, Asians, Hispanics and Middle-Easterners the message must be:
assimilate or leave. The same for Jews who now, fortunately, have a place to go where they
can live by the precepts of their ancient religion, however bizarre some of those precepts
may seem to others.
That then leaves only the problem of the Palestinians. A solution can surely be found in a
deal with Egypt. The Sinai is twice the size of Palestine, yet has only a half a million
inhabitants. The US could easily organize a purchase, funded by itself, Britain, the country
primarily responsible for the dispossession of the Palestinians, the EU, Russia and some
other countries, and of course Israel, which would have to pay for the land and houses of the
departing Palestinians.
At say $10,000 per hectare, a ridiculous price for a desert sand and rocky hillsides, the
whole of Sinai could be purchased for $60 billion, a trivial amount in relation to the US
trillion-dollar defense budget. In addition, there might be a need for something like half a
trillion dollars for construction of the the cities and high-tech desert agricultural system
of the new Palestinian state. But again, that is a rather trivial amount over, say ten
years.
Only Leftists can defeat Leftists, only progressives can defeat progressives –
conserving the old cannot win. Ideas of stability, homeostasis, and the like, cannot
win.
You sure?
Don't know.
Franco, for example. Then, more recently, Nationalists winning over Communists in Eastern
Europe after the fall of The Wall. We could agree, I guess, that Nationalism is a bit older
than Communism.
And there is no organized opposition because there is no Platonic Idea around which they
can rally – while the Left has one. The Right seems to just be a headless chicken-
all body, no head.
In the West. In the East not so sure about that. Do a (mental) test: imagine that US
(military) power can't get delivered in Balkans anymore. Or Russian (military) power can't
get delivered in Donbass. Or some other places.
That's a good point about nationalism – but I think what we are seeing in places
like Russia and Poland is a resurgence of religious nationalism – pure nationalism,
without a Platonic Idea, just materialism, seems to have no long term success anywhere. I
don't think the attempt to revive it among materialist western right wingers will work. I
think they fundamentally misunderstand this.
In the context of a failed Communism, religious nationalism appears as progressive –
as an exciting step in the direction of progress towards a higher state.
Its not that old traditional ideas can't be revived – its that I think conservatives
basically misunderstand traditional ideas. In their time, traditional ideas were meant to
facilitate the self-perfection of man – not provide stability, safety, or homeostasis.
Christianity was a program for the perfection of man – not social stability.
Traditional ideas were based on a Platonic Idea – never materialism. The attempt to
revive traditional ideas on a materialist basis, because they provide stability, seems a
misunderstanding. In fact, traditional ideas provide stability because they were accepted as
part of the plan of self-perfection. That's why they secured consent – i.e became the
basis of a stable society. People accept a social organization that they believe will assist
in self-perfection, and that is the source of social stability.
As for military power projection, once local power balances alter its hard to predict what
will come to seem "progressive". And short term social expedients taken in chaotic cobditions
don't necessarily translate into long term social organization.
.traditional ideas were meant to facilitate the self-perfection of man – not
provide stability, safety, or homeostasis. Christianity was a program for the perfection of
man – not social stability.
..traditional ideas provide stability because they were accepted as part of the plan of
self-perfection.
I am not quite sure I get this.
Feels as a deep topic. Not well versed in that I am afraid.
A couple of things: the concept of "self-perfection" in, say, traditional
Catholic/Orthodox Christianity, with accepting that a man is a sinner and only though Jesus
he/she can find salvation.
Then, I can get that top thinkers of those nations maybe thought along those lines; common
folk, though, based their nationalism on simple living with people who shared the same values
in life. Sometimes even just the same customs. The sense of belonging. The perception of "us"
and "them" as the bottom line.
You want a problem to ponder about?
Here it is, then:
Why such ..animosity .. then, between Catholics and Orthodox in Balkans and Ukraine? The
same, now dormant, between Protestant and Catholics in N.I.?
I guess that your approach to nationalism is, say, what ..metaphysical?
Mine is way, way below. Just blood and soil, in that order. "Us" vs "them".
West is doomed re nationalism. Maybe. Not quite sure.
All those wars of Catholics vs Protestants ..and we are talking about people of the same
race.
Now, that "we" vs "them" is much more visible.
.short term social expedients taken in chaotic cobditions don't necessarily translate
into long term social organization.
Agree.
Again, so what? If it works during my lifetime fine (say, if I were a young man). After me,
their problem. Something like that.
That's a good point about nationalism – but I think what we are seeing in places
like Russia and Poland is a resurgence of religious nationalism – pure nationalism,
without a Platonic Idea, just materialism, seems to have no long term success anywhere. I
don't think the attempt to revive it among materialist western right wingers will work. I
think they fundamentally misunderstand this.
In the context of a failed Communism, religious nationalism appears as progressive –
as an exciting step in the direction of progress towards a higher state.
Its not that old traditional ideas can't be revived – its that I think conservatives
basically misunderstand traditional ideas. In their time, traditional ideas were meant to
facilitate the self-perfection of man – not provide stability, safety, or homeostasis.
Christianity was a program for the perfection of man – not social stability.
Traditional ideas were based on a Platonic Idea – never materialism. The attempt to
revive traditional ideas on a materialist basis, because they provide stability, seems a
misunderstanding. In fact, traditional ideas provide stability because they were accepted as
part of the plan of self-perfection. That's why they secured consent – i.e became the
basis of a stable society. People accept a social organization that they believe will assist
in self-perfection, and that is the source of social stability.
As for military power projection, once local power balances alter its hard to predict what
will come to seem "progressive". And short term social expedients taken in chaotic cobditions
don't necessarily translate into long term social organization.
"As this is the reason, there are twice as many Jews above some range, like 151, than
non-Jewish whites, which is what Terman found. "
Jew IQ is largely a myth established by marketing and media control, starting with the
Einstein brand. The myth is necessary to justify and conceal Jewish tribal nepotism as the
main factor establishing dominance of a hostile elite in host nations. The question has been
examined in numerous locations easily found with a search engine.
There are approximately six times as many white Americans with IQ above 140, as there are
Jews with IQ above 140. No, Jewish intelligence does not account for their dominance in
academia, media, and government. It must be Jew priviledge, not Jew IQ that justifies their
right to rule the goyim.
ParadiseNow Giraldi always says
what needs to be said. Excellent article.
Speaking of the news that evaporates--"The story was covered in Israel and Europe but insofar as I could determine did not appear
in any detail in the U.S. mainstream media"--and of the stories that disappear an hour or so after they are posted...
I've never come across anyone in the US who had seen or heard of the story that popped up on my monitor one day while working
in a newsroom in Los Angeles, a headline piece by the BBC stating that the California legislature in Sacramento had just passed a
resolution apologizing to Mel Gibson for the treatment he was subjected to after his drunken comments were illegally relayed to the
press. The article also reported that legislation was passed increasing fines and jail penalties in California for anyone who illegally
gave or sold arrest information to the media.
The story had some serious bearing on our immediate market as numerous celebrities' private medical information etc were being
illegally gathered and sold to news outlets. I brought it to the attention of my (Jewish) chief editor who read the article, thanked
me for the heads up, then completely ignored it.
Shortly after the piece just evaporated from the BBC site, and to this day I can find no trace of it in their archives.
On the subject of Jews celebrating the death of others, I have seen photos of them gaily cooking 'Rachel Corrie pancakes' to celebrate
the death of the American student they brutally crushed to death with a tractor in occupied Palestine.
I have seen photos of them gaily cooking 'Rachel Corrie pancakes'
Here's my take as a (non-Jewish) American.
My sympathies are with the Palestinians with regards to trying somehow to estabilsh sustainable territorial boundaries. IMHO
Israel is clearly stealing land by building settlements in the West Bank. But given the ad-hoc nature of the current borders and
the intent of the various parties, , God/Allah knows how this can be reasonably adjudicated.
I am ambivalent with regards to the plight of those in Gaza, Egypt is certainly in a position to help. The southern border
is after all under their control.
Launching random missiles into southern Israel (assuming that's an actual thing rather than propaganda on the Israeli's part)
seems silly and unlikely to improve the situation.
Both parties seem to regard the other as filth, undeserving of human compassion. How we move forward from here is beyond my
ability to guess.
Arab neighbors seem to view refugees as pawns to be kept in squalor for their own political aims.
It seems like (and this is my own reading from afar) Hamas uses the "right of return" as an issue to turn gullible Palestinian
youth into canon fodder. It's been 75 years and Israel is stronger than ever. Time to wake up and smell the coffee
There is so damn much much fault on both sides .
Now, having said all that – Rachael Corrie pancakes? She was an idiot and I have not the slightest sympathy for her. I wish
I'd thought the joke up .
" Launching random missiles into southern Israel (assuming that's an actual thing rather than propaganda on the Israeli's part)
seems silly and unlikely to improve the situation. "
What do you suggest the inmates of the Gaza concentration camp can do to get attention to their plight ?
The only way seems to be to provoke Israel into some retaliatory action.
Netanyahu is as stupid as Hitler, who let himself be provoked by Poland.
And indeed, both sides see the other as dirt.
Jabotinski in 1923 saw it well 'just force will make Palestinians give up their lands'. But he did not foresee that they never
really would give up.
What he also did not foresee that the ethnic cleansing would cause a growth of the number of Palestinians. As far as I can
see Israel has no long time strategy for dealing with the Palestinian problem.
Trying to convince the great majority of the world's countries in the UN Assembly that they're all wrong, and Israel right,
lunacy.
Looks like that author mixes Zionism with neoliberalism. Critique of Zionism here is mixes with critique of
neoliberalism and that makes the whole piece unconvincing.
Some points made are interesting, though.
Notable quotes:
"... "Anti-Semitism." ..."
"... we are losing! ..."
"... " All the world suffers from the user of the Jews, their monopoly and deceit. They have brought many unfortunate people into a state of poverty especially working people and the very poor." ..."
"... "All [personal] vows we are likely to make, all [personal] oaths and pledges we are likely to take between this Yom Kippur and the next Yom Kippur, we publicly renounce. Let them all be relinquished and abandoned, null and void, neither firm nor established. Let our [personal] vows, pledges and oaths are considered neither vows nor pledges nor oaths." ..."
"... -the Kol Nidrei. ..."
"... "In violent opposition to all this sphere of [positive], Jewish efforts rise the schemes of the International Jews. Most, if not all, of them, have forsaken the faith of their forefathers and divorced from their minds all spiritual hopes of the next world. This movement among the Jews is not new."- Winston Churchill. ..."
"... "His Majesty's government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people . It being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in ..."
"... " For in Palestine, we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting with wishes of the [Palestinians]. And Zionism (is) of far profounder[sic] import than the desire and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who inhabit this ancient land." ..."
"... "Possession is 9/10ths of the law." ..."
"... " America is a Golden Calf and we will suck it dry, chop it up, and sell it off piece by piece until there is nothing left Why? This is what we do to countries that we hate. We destroy them very slowly and make them suffer for refusing to be our slaves."- I sraeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu ..."
"... "Israel First" and "Corporations First." ..."
"... Consider the fate of former US Secretary of Defence, Chuck Hagel who, long ago during Obama's presidency had the audacity, just prior to leaving for Tel Aviv, to say that he was first and foremost an America and would put American interests before that of Israel, adding that, ""The political reality is that the Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up here." ..."
"... Once Hagel returned to the exceptional nation from Tel Aviv he was, due to his president being now under Zionist control, summarily fired. ..."
"... "suck it dry, chop it up, and sell it off piece by piece until there is nothing left " ..."
"... without a request by either of the two moving parties. ..."
"... "changed the case to give themselves an opportunity to change the law". ..."
"... Federalist Society (FS). ..."
"... "Never has there been a collusion like the one between the U.S. and Israel. It suggests another word and that is "immunity." It has a moral immunity, a cultural immunity, a geopolitical immunity, a legal immunity, and certainly a media immunity. All the talk of Iran and nuclear weapons is without any reference to the biggest nuclear power in the Middle East. [Israel] " ..."
"... get the hell out of Palestine. Remember, these people are occupied and it's their land " ..."
"... which further illustrated how endemic this doctrine of linking criticism of Israel to anti-Semitism has become. ..."
"... Did her example die with her? ..."
"... If you torture the numbers long enough, they will say whatever you want," ..."
"... Are they wrong? ..."
"... The House Committee on Foreign Affairs unanimously passed a measure on Thursday that ..."
"... it never gives back! ..."
"... Zionists are winning the battle for the hearts and minds of what remains of our world. ..."
"... then he is a Zionist. ..."
"... moral obligation ..."
"... then, she a Zionist. ..."
"... understood hypocrisy ..."
"... then, they are Zionists. ..."
"... knowingly prioritizes ..."
"... ignores the scriptures ..."
"... and their hearts- ..."
"... wilfully choose to do nothing ..."
"... clear conscience ..."
"... temptation to protest ..."
"... allow themselves ..."
"... "God, Forgive me." ..."
"... Too God Damned Late! ..."
"... Zionism cannot be understood outside the context of late 19th century European nationalism. The purpose of Zionism is to build a "normal" country of Jews in the Land of Israel, accepted by and at peace with it's Arab neighbors. The idea is to replace assimilation of individual Jews with the assimilation of the entire Jewish nation. ..."
"... Most Jews of course support Israel and they still practice mutual help, which causes the same problems as always: they were an endogamous and fast growing population trying to promote their group interests and seeing others as enemies. Jews in Israel face the problems of an occupation force: as they are confronted by asymmetric resistance, they are forced to do what they are doing, and that is the strategy of the resistance. ..."
"... Additionally there is Talmud with its different treatment of Jews and non-Jews, it makes things only worse. The actions Israel must make turn it into a pariah state. ..."
"... Zionism was, and is, a farcical and bloodthirsty imitation of the 19th-century German nationalism. ..."
There is much that the civilized world does not understand about modern Zionism. Today, the
definitions of being Jewish, Israeli or Zionist are, to most people, analogous. They are
not.
Indoctrinated into submitting to this incorrect, singular and collective definition, solely
due to Zionism's false claim of a direct religious link to Judaism, hence the objective,
critical world cowers at the similarly incorrect, but inevitable charge of
"Anti-Semitism." This false charge has too often caused the political and journalistic
demise of too many. Thus the world is scared away from exercising one's full mental faculties,
such faculties of conscience that would normally rise-up in collective reaction and
outrage.
The result, instead, has been worldwide apathy. This inaction towards the daily Zionist
violations of the fundamental laws of the conscience of man has become the designed result. In
the battle against the expansion of the many forms of worldwide Zionism, take note we are
losing!
For the outraged world to confidently and factually respond against the broad brush of the
charge of Anti-Semitism, one used continually and routinely to mask all discussion of Israeli
and Zionist crimes, it is essential to understand what today defines "modern" Zionism,
for here our fight for conscience begins. In reality, Zionism is an a-religious scourge that
uses a singular excuse to justify its existence and its collective actions, an excuse- a
hypocrisy- routinely missing in factual discussion and rarely understood by world Jewry as
well. Here is what can be accurately described as the root of Zionist thought.
This fundamental is a prayer. It has been debated, reviled, cast out and reborn in repeated
cycles by the most senior Jewish theologians over the past two thousand years. Most of the
growing horrors of our world- past and present- can be summed up and exemplified within this
single prayer, Jewish in creation, yet today exclusively Zionist in its modern use. Yes, one
single self-serving, rarely mentioned, prayer that, when considered correctly is today the
metaphor, if not the personification and the excuse, for all the moral ills that allow for the
suffering across the world today. This metaphoric prayer transcends all religions. It is the
propagation of a malignancy- now seemingly endemic- within a growing portion of humankind. Much
worse, this fundamental provides for the wilful individual rotting of one's mind, one's
conscience, and one's soul.
This unconscionable prayer's name? The Kol Nidrei.
Of, Zionism Past: Saying a Prayer for Zionism.
Zionism is not a recent ideology. The name is. In the 1890s, Theodor Herzl infused Zionism- the quest for
a nation of Israel- with an expanded ideology that lead to the First Zionist Congress at Basel in 1897, which created the World
Zionist Organization (WZO). Long ago cast-out from Judea since AD 70, by Roman emperor, Titus,
and in seeming finality by Hadrian- who renamed the whole region Syria Palestinia in 135 AD-
due to the Zionist Jew's growing dominance of that small piece of the Roman Empire. Sadly, this
happened repeatedly throughout history on multiple occasions by multiple other countries, and
for centuries Judaism was repeatedly without a host country.
Unfortunately for the whole of world Jewry, at many points throughout history, like in
Judea, their quest for a country was attempted via the ascension of powerful Jewish interests
progressively gaining control over established nations and afflicting societal crimes that
violated the conscience of the leaders of their host nations. As an example, in 1604 AD
Catholic Pope Clement VIII proclaimed:
" All the world suffers from the user of the Jews, their monopoly and deceit. They
have brought many unfortunate people into a state of poverty especially working people and
the very poor."
Here, Clement VIII- like many world leaders past and present- was inaccurate in his
statement, for he, too, did not understand Zionism nor have a separate definition for it, and
so made the oft-repeated mistake of associating all Jews together and therefore collectively
demonizing the entire religion and all its followers instead.
Then, as is the case today with modern Zionism, the vast majority of world Jewry had
committed no crime and deserved no charge, yet due to the actions of the few Jews who wilfully
worked towards hegemonic sedition from within their host country of the time, Clement VIII
cast-out all Jews in reaction. What Clement VIII failed to understand was that there was indeed
a difference within this one religion to be noted: a difference that was not Judaism; it was-
even back then- Zionism which excused its advocacy of the societal hypocrisy by citing within
the minds of certain Jews, the Kol Nidrei.
By extension, the unjustifiable horrors of the Holocaust inflicted on Jews were a similar
collective demonization by the German Third Reich of all Jews as their reaction to the
practices of the very few; those who had violated the boundaries of the societal conscience of
Germany and their own Torah.
However, the Germans who committed the resultant atrocities based solely on one's
affiliation with Judaism were unknowingly guilty of exactly the same failure of personal
conscience that ignored the fundamental tenets of their own religious Catholicism and their
bible. Together, these two subsets of religion within one society had one inherent amoral
similarity: a failure of personal conscience, one that deliberately ignored or excused away
their own religion's prohibition against their barbaric crimes against the norms of
society.
Known or not by name, theirs was each an individual use of an unjustifiable rationale; one
that allowed their afflicted minds to strangely turn Evil into Good, Devil into God, and Wrong
into Right. Today, this lapse of conscience is no longer peculiar to any one religion, but,
when considered correctly, is indeed purely Zionist. To understand worldwide Zionism is to
correctly understand the Kol Nidrei.
"All [personal] vows we are likely to make, all [personal] oaths and pledges we are
likely to take between this Yom Kippur and the next Yom Kippur, we publicly renounce. Let
them all be relinquished and abandoned, null and void, neither firm nor established. Let our
[personal] vows, pledges and oaths are considered neither vows nor pledges nor oaths."
-the Kol Nidrei.
The Kol Nidrei, ("All Vows") often misspelt Kol Nidre, was not originally a prayer, but a
declaration offered during Rosh Hashana, the start of the Jewish new year. In "modern" Judaism
it is now being delivered as a prayer and has so grown in prominence during the last sixty
years that it is now delivered at the commencement of Judaism's holiest yearly event of
Passover.
The internal philosophical Judaic controversy over whether the Kol Nidrei should be allowed
to be included in Jewish services has been argued, pro-or-con, for centuries by the most
pre-eminent Judaic scholars, most of whom vehemently opposed its inclusion and banned it
repeatedly. Their fundamental concern: How can the Jewish religion flourish if it violates the
most fundamental tenet of human conscience?: Adherence to Right vs. the temptation of
Wrong.
This question was succinctly answered over the centuries as the Kol Nidrei rightly fell from
grace or was subsequently reinstated by new Zionist elements of society. Historical examination
of the Kol Nidrei shows the polarity between the demand for the proper benevolence offered in
the original Judaism of the Torah verses the post-Torah books of the Talmud, which contain
rationales supported in part by this one single all-excusing prayer that is the fundamental
malady, if not the definition, of modern Zionism.
... ... ...
Thus viewed correctly, Zionism is not a religion, nor is it part of Judaism. It is a
political tool of expediency and far more comparable to the western created Daesh/ ISIS. Both
use a self-serving created form of an ostensibly beneficent religion, Muslim or Judaic, as an
alternate rendition of that religion that excuses away a person's obvious factual sins against
one's true religious dogma and one's own conscience.
In the ages-old religious argument of whether mankind is born good or evil, as is shown in
the daily newsreels of the continued and growing horrors against true humanity, Zionism, like
Saudi Wahhabism, has made an a-religious and hypocritical choice to honour the later.
Zionism First Defined: A Conquest of Country.
"In violent opposition to all this sphere of [positive], Jewish efforts rise the
schemes of the International Jews. Most, if not all, of them, have forsaken the faith of
their forefathers and divorced from their minds all spiritual hopes of the next world. This
movement among the Jews is not new."- Winston Churchill.
When the Israeli Zionists, in 1948, achieved their goal of attaining the nation of Israel,
theirs was a victory that had already shown, over the previous thirty years, their methods and
goals of new world hegemony to come.
The Zionist inspired Balfour agreement was not, as claimed, merely the guarantee of carving
Israel out of existing Palestine: It was a bribe.
On Nov. 7, 1917, Lord Lionel Walter Rothchild, arguably the leading Zionist financial and
political asset in Britain and America, due to his families multi-national banking interests,
guaranteed UK foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour and the British Government -- then losing WW I
desperately- that he would bring American military might to their side in exchange for its
ceding Palestine. This led to the signing of the Balfour Agreement, the entry of American
troops under false premises and the agreed upon genocide and enforced relocation of the
Palestinians. Said Balfour publicly:
"His Majesty's government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a
national home for the Jewish people . It being clearly understood that nothing shall be done
which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities inPalestine "[Emph. Added]
But, here, Balfour lied, having himself succumbed to Zionist influence within his own
failure of conscience and personal religious hypocrisy. This was clearly shown when he
privately, and far more truthfully, stated:
" For in Palestine, we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting with
wishes of the [Palestinians]. And Zionism (is) of far profounder[sic] import than the desire
and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who inhabit this ancient land."
This pro-Zionist and fully exclusionary mindset is continued in the horrors perpetrated
against Palestinians and other nations to this day. Consider the past three months of this
current year alone. Over 150 Palestinians have been slaughtered on their own land and almost
5,000 wounded because of related IDF approved genocidal target practice. Meanwhile, at the same
time, nearly 4,500 new illegal settlements have also been recently approved on the occupied
West Bank.
Soon, reportedly, the US will approve the Israeli seizure of the entire Golan Heights. For
within Zionism's mental adherence to the Kol Nidrei is a further incorrect Talmudic influenced
hegemonic adage which is used repeatedly as Israeli foreign policy, "Possession is 9/10ths
of the law."
Today, Palestine is a sliver of it's 1917 boundaries. Over ninety-five percent has been
purchased, coerced, annexed, destroyed or stolen by Israeli Zionists. Not satisfied yet, the
deplorable conditions imposed by Israel on the remaining Palestinians are deliberate attempts
at further genocide designed to finish their two thousand year project in their favour.
Expanding Zionism: From Palestine to America.
" America is a Golden Calf and we will suck it dry, chop it up, and sell it off piece
by piece until there is nothing left Why? This is what we do to countries that we hate. We
destroy them very slowly and make them suffer for refusing to be our slaves."- I sraeli Prime
Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu
Israel and its Zionist minions control America. Completely. American nationalism and
populism have been steadily changed since the establishment of Israel to an agenda today of
"Israel First" and "Corporations First." This is true for any aspiring US politician
as well as in the mind of the average American voter. Worse, this current national endemic
result is not limited only to America.
In the post-Palestine era after 1947, Zionists were not content with finally having their
own nation of Israel. Their new nation would not have resulted without the pressure exerted on
the United Nation's members by the American government which ultimately produced,
on Nov 27, 1947, UN resolution 181. As with the many previous host nations over the
previous centuries that provided sanctuary to the Jewish faith, the Zionist sub-set within
American politics began to further their power beyond the Israeli borders. Hence, Israel began
the strengthening of its political control of the US Congress and its individual politicians.
This, of course, is seen by the unapologetic decisions, platform and control exerted by
AIPAC ( the American Israeli Political Affairs
Committee) which is undeniably the foremost political action interest within the US
Congress. This is documented thoroughly in the 2006 academic work, "The Israel Lobby,"
by University of Chicago and Harvard University professors John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M.
Walt. Despite this carefully researched, referenced and footnoted study, and the fact that
Mearsheimer is a Jew, both were publicly excoriated as being anti-Semites.
It is well established that both houses of the US Congress care not for the concerns of
their voters once they have been placated every two or six years in order to be re-elected and
return to primarily pleasing Zionist interests. Looking at US foreign policy alone, today the
questionable moniker of, "Dual Loyalty," is used to justify growing Israeli involvement in US
military leadership and access by Israeli Zionists within the US government. In foreign policy,
America's military always marches to a Zionist tune that has little or no bearing on US
national security, yet it's politicians always avoid answering the question: "why?"
As shown repeatedly, from the 2015 Gaza war atrocities onto the granting of Jerusalem as the
US denoted Israeli capital, followed by the anticipated subsequent slaughter of the few
remaining indigenous Palestinians, if America is not invading on behalf of Israel or its
Zionist brethren, such as Saudi Arabia destroying Yemen, it is re-supplying Zionist vassals
with weapons or voting only for Zionist interests against UN resolutions and worldwide calls
for of peace and sanity. Are not "Neo-Conservatism" and "American Exceptionalism" really the
results of the inherent self-serving message of the Kol Nidrei applied to US nationalism and
re-branded as national security-not as Zionism- for the dulled American mind?
Consider the fate of former US Secretary of Defence, Chuck Hagel who, long ago during
Obama's presidency had the audacity, just prior to leaving for Tel Aviv, to say that he was
first and foremost an America and would put American interests before that of Israel, adding
that, ""The political reality is that the Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up here." Hagel later apologised for the use of the term "Jewish lobby", saying he should have said
"pro-Israel lobby", but Hagel did not back down over his comments. He also continued to
question the duplicity in US foreign and military policy that did not directly support American
interests first. Being a former US senator (1997- 2008) from Nebraska, Hagel was sincere in his
pro-American statements, so sincere in fact that he was hypocritically cast out by Obama, who
had, during his 2008 campaign, similarly opposed the, "unwavering pro-Likud approach to
Israel." Once Hagel returned to the exceptional nation from Tel Aviv he was, due to his
president being now under Zionist control, summarily fired.
Military control, however, is only one of the many facets of Zionist control within American
society and is certainly not necessarily Jewish. Here we see what the true goal of Zionism is
within American society and that it does indeed clearly intend to, "suck it dry, chop it
up, and sell it off piece by piece until there is nothing left "
From Health Care to Education, Social Services to Corporatization, life expectancy to
retirement, America is in decline and Americans are in denial, too scared at being charged with
anti-Semitism to take note of the obvious facts. Zionism is destroying their country, piece by
piece, but they, unlike Hagel, Thomas, Mearsheimer and Walt, have been indoctrinated that any
criticism will be denoted as anti-Semitic and/or disloyal to America. This only accelerates the
decline while emboldening the sociopaths who do run their country without any concern for
public well-being.
Gilens and Page tabulated more than 20 years of congressional voting data to answer the
question: Does the US government represent the people? They drew several conclusions,
particularly that, "The opinions of the bottom 90% of income earners in America has essentially
no impact at all because purchasing political influence is 100% legal." Those benefiting from
congressional votes in the House and the Senate were almost exclusively the interests of
corporate dominance, profit and greed, not the growing needs of the citizens. This is, and
always has been throughout history, a peculiar trait of Zionism, since it features a type of
greed so severe that it transcends human conscience and any obligation to society. In doing so,
this abrogation of duty by politicians is very much in keeping with the tenets and political
hypocrisy espoused by the Kol Nidrei.
Only in America are corporations legally treated as live human beings, but these newly
created humans, as expected, have no conscience at all. The Zionist mind of the corporation has
shown that it controls Congress as well as the US Supreme Court. Further, in the mind of the
Zionist, all social services including education need to be privatized and its finances under
their control, if not completely eliminated.
When the US Supreme Court made the case of Citizen's United v F.E.C. the law of the land,
few took the time to understand the real insidious nature of this historic and divisive Supreme
Court decision.
Thirty-five year Supreme Court Justice, John Paul Stevens, did.
In a
twenty-three page Dissenting Opinion and using strong words very rarely written within the
collegial confines of the court, Stevens railed against Citizen's United and its likely
results. As Stevens pointed out, the politically and corporately controlled court under brand
new Chief Justice, John Roberts, violated the time-honoured legal concept of Stare Decisis . This was an extremely
unusual move that saw the court take-up for its subsequent divisive decision a standing
appellate court decision, without a request by either of the two moving parties.
Stevens also argued that the Court addressed a question not raised by the litigants, and that
the majority "changed the case to give themselves an opportunity to change the
law".
Further, incoming Chief Justice, John Roberts, who ordered the case brought before the court
anyway, threw the majority of his own written legal precedents on corporations in the rubbish
bin of time in order to strangely join the majority opinion. Those are only a few of the
problems with the creation of Citizen's United, but here, again, Roberts and the 5-4 majority
(Roberts, Kennedy, Alito, Thomas, Scalia) found a way to mentally and morally approve what was
their own understood violation of law, if not a violation of conscience. Of course, this was in
keeping with the mental hypocrisy of the Kol Nidrei. No, they did not likely know it by name,
but those in the majority knew that they were indeed sacrificing their legal acumen, the US
constitution and their moral obligation to the higher a authority of modern Zionism.
This cadre of Zionist thought within the Supreme Court is fully admitted by these modern day
Pharisees of American jurisprudence who willingly brandish their personal attachment to the
Federalist Society (FS). Current
card carrying members members include Chief Justice John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Anthony
Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch. This organization supports rolling back civil
liberties, imperial wars, free-wheeling laissez-faire capitalism and corporatism, along with
ending New Deal/Great Society social programs. It's also against reproductive choice,
government regulations, labour rights, environmental protections, and justice for unwanted
aliens.
This accusation that Federalist doctrine is controlling and creating the laws of the land
was further confirmed this past week as this Supreme Court certified bigotry against one
religion (Muslim) by allowing Trump's pro-Israel travel ban. On the same day, the same court
gutted what little remains of the American unions and the political influence of working voters
via collective bargaining. As shown by the Page and Gilens study, Unions are also anathema to
corporate interests and this week national Unions joined the Muslim world in being prohibited
from helping social change against Zionist influence.
This was a big win for Zionism which abhors the nations of the Muslim world that it cannot
control and was clearly shown in the list of countries that were banned. The countries which do
not support American expansionism nor Zionism were all banned, while one of the most barbaric
Muslim nations, Saudi Arabia, was exempt because their country's leadership has been willing to
suck on America's and Israel's teat.
US healthcare, despite being the most expensive per capita in the world, is measured, not by
success in prevention, but by the nation's operating table mortality rates, infant mortality
rates and rising insurance rates, all of which are some of the worst in the developed world.
Despite these foibles of American capitalist Zionism, HMO profits are also at historically high
levels as are its administrative fees which exceed 20% compared to just over 2% in the UK's
vaunted NHS.
Pharmaceutical companies wine and dine doctors and politicians with a manipulative budget of
over $1.2 billion per year. As a result, no longer is the FDA the ultimate arbiter of new drugs
being brought to market since it allows and accepts verbatim the self-serving clinical trials
of the drug companies that create these drugs. Many, as shown clearly on US television
advertising, have a laundry list of side effects. Despite this, these drugs are approved and
the doctor's, with few exceptions, happily prostitute their Hypocratic Oath and scientific fact
in order to serve up these tainted drugs to their unsuspecting and trusting patients.
These and many other prescription drugs, despite being offered in many other countries, are
always the most expensive in America. When many Americans who realized that Canada and Mexico
offered the same drugs at a far lesser price, they took their prescriptions over the border to
save money. However, once Big
Pharma realized it no longer had a captured market, it used its powerful and paid for lobby in
congress to effect legislation making it a felony criminal offence similar to smuggling for
anyone to save money on their prescriptions by traveling. Not a peep was heard from doctors
nationally, nor from congress who had, of course, also sold their professional souls already.
This week, the Financial Times reported
that Pfizer, the largest drug company in the US, has now further raised prices on 100 products.
These price hikes were announced just weeks after President Trump claimed that US drug
companies would soon announce
"massive" voluntary price cuts .
Yearly, American education teaches Americans to be ignorant and not to think, much less
develop an informed, fact-based opinion. Less and less federal funding goes to public education
and the poor test scores show
America in 38 th position of developed nations worldwide in mathematics and 17
th overall. This poor performance has led to the advent of private charter
schools.
As championed by US Education Secretary, Betsy De Voss, who is decidedly Zionist within her
stated public comments about fixing public education, already world geography and critical
thinking are rarely taught and history is so heavily skewed as to be revisionist. This is shown
by too many Americans still believing that modern day Russia and the long dismembered Soviet
Union remain unchanged and an identical threat as well as their failure to be able to find
their own nation on a globe. This myopic narrow-mindedness has left most Americans with no
interest in discerning the truth about the remaining world around them, but an illogical
enthusiasm for US
expansionism and "thermonuclear war."
Americans are not stupid, but they are indeed extraordinarily ignorant. An ignorant populace
increasingly has no desire for divining the truth of world events and so routinely turns to
their singular news source for the "facts" that they hold as indisputable. To this end, in
America most journalists prostitute their necessary role as the vanguards of society. This is
easily evidenced by the fact that over
90% of all traditional media sources ( TV, Radio, Newspaper) are owned and managed by just six
huge corporate interests that have an all too similar editorial slant that favours a
Zionist agenda. 20th-century American writer, Truman Capote, in a 1968 Playboy interview,
assailed "the Zionist mafia" of his time that has since only increased its monopolizing of the
news publishing industry today.
Reaffirming the current condition of journalism, this past week during a public speech in
support of Julian Assange, award-winning, career journalist and documentary film maker, John
Pilger commented on today's Zionist media editorial control, saying,
"Never has there been a collusion like the one between the U.S. and Israel. It
suggests another word and that is "immunity." It has a moral immunity, a cultural immunity, a
geopolitical immunity, a legal immunity, and certainly a media immunity. All the talk of Iran
and nuclear weapons is without any reference to the biggest nuclear power in the Middle East.
[Israel] "
Indeed. With critical thinking substantially suppressed in America, and the media proffering
virtually no criticism of Israel, nor Zionist crimes against society, the supposed journalists
of the 4th Estate and First Amendment are mostly willing propagandists.
Or else.
Scared into submission while offering only as one sided Zionist agenda, and bribed with
lucrative contracts and benefits, no US mainstream journalist will risk the likely connected
charge of anti-Semitism. Virtually none will stand-up, respect their conscience and do a proper
job of reporting on journalism's control, and societal connection to, Zionism. In the minds of
many, however, remains the sudden and tragic demise of the most senior White House
correspondent in press history, Helen Thomas. Her crime: Stating what every member of the press
already knew to be true, but did not have the guts to say themselves.
While chatting privately during of a Washington, DC cocktail party, Thomas said that Israel
should, "
get the hell out of Palestine. Remember, these people are occupied and it's their land
" Then, as today, this sent of howls of outrage that she or anyone would audaciously
state the truth, even in private. Hence, Thomas, her fifty-seven years as a White House
correspondent and her exemplary dedication to a high standard of news reporting were gone from
public view within 48 hours, when Hearst publications dutifully fired her in order to placate
the Zionist outrage against the truth of this matter. She was, of course, speaking about
Zionists, not Jews, yet she was charged with Anti-Semitism, a capital crime, and summarily
convicted.
Not one US journalist publicly came to Helen Thomas' defence which further illustrated
how endemic this doctrine of linking criticism of Israel to anti-Semitism has become.
Helen Thomas, like the facts, truth and example of courage she represented, died less than
two years later.
Did her example die with her?
Pre-Modern Zionism: Buying the Stairway to Heaven?
"New York is the city of privilege. Here is the seat of the Invisible Power represented by
the allied forces of finance and industry. This Invisible Government is reactionary,
sinister, unscrupulous, mercenary, and sordid. It is wanting in national ideals and devoid of
conscience . . . This kind of government must be scourged and destroyed."
Before modern Zionism took a hold on America there once was a religious mandate to wilfully
provide for the less fortunate. Because of the scriptures, if not an ultimate fear of God, many
of society's super-wealthy of that by-gone era did substantially contribute to serving the
societies around them. This was shown in the construction of libraries, museums, universities,
hospitals, endowments, social services and church social programs paid for by oligarchs such as
Carnegie, Roosevelt, Blair, Morgan, Getty, Mellon and Tufts. Some of these men, knowing the
capitalist crimes they had perpetrated on the path to their riches, were certainly buying their
own "Stairway to Heaven." Try as they might, none could deny in their minds the unavoidable
final decision that would befall them all come "Judgement Day."
Today, no such religious obligation exists. Any such religious requirements have long since
been replaced by the tenets of the Kol Nidrei that allows for, and excuses away, the pure
selfishness of Zionism's influence.
By comparison, as a positive example of these too long-ignored religious requirements of
societal ethics in business, take Charles William (C.W.) Post and Will Keith (W.K.) Kellogg
. These were the breakfast cereal barons of the late 19th century and became very wealthy men
indeed. Post was a Christian, Kellogg a Seventh Day Adventist. Both believed and practised the
concept that an employee was an asset to be propagated for the good of the company and the good
of the worker.
Both Post and Kellogg headquartered their growing empires in Battle Creek, MI. Here they
needed a massive workforce, while thousands in pre-industrial and post-depression America
needed jobs. Believing that both owner and worker could benefit from their collective
endeavours, Post and Kellogg built thousands of modest houses near the factories for the
workers, many of which exist today. These houses were sold to the workers at cost and the
owners provided credit terms so favourable that workers could pay them off to full ownership on
the 30 hour work week that both Post and Kellogg believed to be part of this mutual bargain.
Company stores bought their goods at wholesale prices and passed this discount along to the
worker. Retirement benefits were guaranteed to all long-standing employees, the majority of
whom stayed that long.
As a result, the community of Battle Creek- until the advent of NAFTA and monopoly-
flourished, as did both the companies and their profits. At the onset of the 1929 Great
Depression, Battle Creek became a sought-after final destination for the many unemployed
"two-tankers"- those with just enough money remaining for, not one, but two tanks of gas for
their cars- who came up from the southern states seeking work.
With both the owners and the workers prospering, neither Kellogg nor Post had the need to
buy their own stairway to heaven, nor prostitute their conscience. They did not know it, but
they had not succumbed to the mindset of the Kol Nidrei and did not care to become Zionists,
for they chose to honour what their conscience and their religion told them was right and,
thus, ignore what they knew to be wrong.
Contrast this socially correct example of religious discipline with a quite different memory
from the same time period, one that still wafts in the air across the hills and surrounding
green valleys of Merthyr Tydfil in Southern Wales, UK. Here, in what was, for more than a
century, iron and coal country, the name and the odour of the infamous steelworks owner,
Robert
Thompson Crawshay, remains to this day in the minds and on the lips of the local Welsh.
Crawshay typified the many all-powerful industrialist owners of America and Britain in the
times when the value of a workhorse far exceeded the value of the human worker. Employees were
expendable as was evidenced by the horrible living and working conditions and the massive
amount of workplace injuries and fatalities to which the owners, like Crawshay, could not have
cared less. Despite being a routine church-goer himself, the list of the societal horrors
inflicted on the workers and their families by Crawshay was a long one indeed.
He was born rich, lived that way and died in luxury, and he wanted to let the impoverished
community outside his walled estate know it. When Crawshay had a new mansion built in Merthyr
he also built a tall four-sided clock tower, but the side facing the workers and the ironworks
was left blank. When one year the workers organized a strike, rather than negotiating a
settlement with them he closed the entire ironworks and every other business in the town, thus
putting everyone, including support trades and other manufacturing in nearby towns, out of
work. This fomented dissent in the already starving community and the breaking of the strike.
Crawshay also built homes and company stores for his workers, but the homes were on loan at his
pleasure and he charged exorbitant rents as he did inflated prices at his stores. This kept the
workers forever in debt and indentured to him and his factories.
To further show his personal power over all who lived in his domain, on the eve of a
worker's wedding day Crawshay would often have the driver of his two-horse black carriage
deliver him to the doorstep of the groom. He would then provide him with an ultimatum: allow
him to be the first to deflower the man's betrothed that very night, or lose his job and be
blackballed from working in all other nearby locations on the very day of his wedding. To cross
Crawshay then, or at any time, was to be "sacked," with the local Crawshay foreman knocking
unannounced on one's door of an evening, holding a single used burlap sack for the victim to
carry out everything and what little he and his family owned, forthwith, while two Crawshay
goons attended to the sacking.
As a staunch Protestant Crawshay knew that his actions were not supported by his bible, his
God, nor his conscience, yet he carried on, relishing in his unchecked power and the hatred
towards him by the whole town. No, Crawshay did not know the correct definition of his crimes,
but he, too, was inherently a Zionist within his own mind. So conscious was Crawshay of his
demonstrative and deliberate earthly violations that when he died in 1879 he commissioned a
massive horizontal gravestone made of one piece of 16-inch thick granite to cover over his
entire grave so that no one would dig up his remains and scatter his God-forsaken corpse to
winds or to the hogs.
Yes, Crawshay was, in practice, a Zionist. Today, the capitalist malady exhibited by
Crawshay has returned to the factories, sweatshops, and service sector jobs that offer no
benefits, retirement or future for workers or families worldwide. The return of the mindset of
Crawshay has infected the many corporate religious hypocrites of the today's new industrial
age, regardless of religion. Humanity has been cast out. Zionism has returned beginning in
America.
The state of America today is already deplorably Zionist in its lack of societal or moral
concern. While the US government uses the Zionist economic mantra," If you torture the
numbers long enough, they will say whatever you want," in order to brandish its touted
lies of purported success, the reported 3.8% unemployment rate does not bare scrutiny with real
unemployment actually at 21.4% according to Shadowstats economist John Williams.
The Trump regime and GOP-controlled Congress- like the Federalists on the Supreme Court-
want New Deal/Great Society programs eliminated altogether via de-funding or privatization,
giving Wall Street and other corporate predators new profit centers to pillage at the expense
of the grievously harmed working people, particularly the nation's most vulnerable.
Most US workers are underemployed in future-less part-time or temp jobs because millions of
full-time ones that include benefits and retirement no longer exist – lost by offshoring
to low-wage countries by corporate Zionist who do not care about their own society that spawned
their own business successes. They only care about continued profit. As a further example, this
past Tuesday, June 19,
Republican House members introduced an FY 2019 budget proposal, calling for $5.4 trillion in
mandatory social service spending cuts over the next decade yet they strangely demanded
even more defence spending and further tax cuts for the rich and not a penny more for the poor
and the indigent. Major cuts to Medicare and Medicaid are prioritized over the next decade
– $537 billion and $1.5 trillion respectively- and another $5 billion per year from
Social Security and additional cuts from other social programs.
Such is the mind of the corporate and political Zionist in America, today. Robert Thompson
Crawshay would have been most supportive of seeing thie return to the amoral conscience of the
corporate Zionist. For in his mind, as in the minds of today's corporate Zionists, admission
beyond the Pearly Gates is just a matter of buying the Stairway to Heaven.
Are they wrong?
Modernizing Zionism: A Claim to One's Mind and Soul.
Like Crawshay, who failed to heed his bible's teachings in favour of a Zionist-like
selfishness and quest for power and more money, seemingly all the major religions today are
also similarly affected by a wilful ignorance of conscience.
This week it was reported that, for the first time ever, at the exclusively pro-Zionist
gathering of the Bilderberg Group summit
the Secretary of State of the Catholic church, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, will be attending from
Rome. It is not likely that he will be tutoring this Zionist coven on any of his own
religion's twelve commandments, but more likely he will tutored by them on the need for
reviewing the spirit of the Kol Nidrei for inclusion as Catholicism's new thirteenth.
By extension, over the last twenty-plus years the advent of the religious duplicity known as
the " Christian
Zionist" has also manifested itself behind too many American pulpits that spout a
deliberately pro- Israel mantra to their parishioners. This hypocrisy was by design of the
Israeli Zionists that these supposed Christian ministers now actually serve. Virtually all of
them have accepted all-expense-paid junkets to Israel and Jerusalem and thus been indoctrinated
with a pro-Zionist / anti- Muslim philosophy that they have been convinced is integral to
Judaism and Christianity. This has served Israel well, with the Christian Zionist being blinded
into the actual giving of his mind and his religion over to Zionism while parishioners attempt
to appease their chosen God in favour of a very different God.
Modern Zionism has even managed to take over a religion that is specifically anti-war,
anti-greed, anti-poverty and pro-peace and love. Is it not Zionism further personified when we,
the civilized world, behold the daily television spectacle of religious hypocrisy which shows,
before our very eyes, the crimson and saffron-colored velvet robes, shaved-heads and
be-sandaled Buddhist monks who, incredibly, are now brandishing AK-47 rifles and shooting, when
not burning, innocent Rohingha? Yes. They too are not correctly serving their God. They have
replaced their true religion with their own bastardized version, one that favours the mantra of
the Kol Nidrei over that of non-violence and peace. Thus, they are not Buddhists. They, too,
have become .Zionists.
However, what took place in America during the past seventy years since the Kol Nidrei
returned is the working model and example of Zionist hegemony as seen across the globe in most
countries today. This modern goal is not just a hegemony that attempts to control new country,
it is one that seeks to, and results in, forcing, not merely a change in national allegiance in
favour of Israel, but worse, it demands a change within one's mind, as personified by the Kol
Nedrei, that is beyond Judaism, yet penetrates all religions and morals.
War, selfishness, greed, and avarice are now seemingly endemic in the conscience of society
worldwide. This is the great crime of the Zionists: creating a world that now subliminally and
unknowingly abrogates its conscience to the religiously hypocritical agenda of the Kol Nidrei.
For those of proper religious and/or moral virtue, the concept of the Kol Nidrei, whether
defined or not, is naturally abhorrent. For those with a pro-Zionist predisposition,
justification of their personal crimes of conscience are too easily excused. Personal success
at any cost is the modern mantra. Once sprinkled with the cerebral Zionist pixie-dust of the
Kol Nidrei's pervasive influence, any primary concern towards proper humanity becomes tertiary
at best.
The crimes of Zionism, via this deliberate cross-societal indoctrination of the Kol Nidrei,
go far beyond the bartered religion of Judaism. Many of the required societal elements, such as
nationalism, political parties, military defence, education, journalism, medicine, banking,
industry, manufacturing and respect for knowledge are similarly degraded by this immoral plague
against conscience and society.
The Zionist is wrong in thinking that the whole world beyond America is similarly and
completely afflicted with this terminal lapse of conscience. Increased opposition to Israel and
Zionism in cities across the globes show that those of true conscience understand their
adversary very well. But not necessarily by name.
Zionism's answer to this growing opposition uses the creation of ignorance and apathy as it
weapon in forcing the false accusation of anti-Semitism on all who dare to correctly attack its
philosophy, its goals and results. But for those who do rarely stand up and state what is
obvious, their resistance, free will and minds have now been made illegal.
Take the recent Israeli efforts to make photographing and reporting on any IDF crime against
humanity a mandatory prison sentence of 5-10 years. Aside from attempting to further hide their
crimes, the Zionist mind wishes to force a new choice of prison vs. conscience on those who
would rise to a normal societal standard.
Floating through the US House is another legal challenge to one's free will and thoughts
that seeks to challenge any opposition on college campuses in America that would criticize, via
peaceful protest, the crimes of the Zionist Israelis. This bill, if successful, would require a
full administrative investigation- paid for at public expense- of any campus protest against
Israel and of those involved in the new crime of free will and conscious thought. Of course,
any similar protests by Zionists are not to be investigated, only those that would attempt to
blaspheme against their demonstrative examples of moral turpitude.
Faced with this legalized Zionism, the far greater crime is that the once rational minds of
the vast majority of the world are now willing to prostitute their own minds into apathy, or
worse, accept this societal influenza in exchange for buying-in to a decidedly personal agenda
that ignores the needs of all others. Hence, more than ever before rational humans of all
religions- as we see with the Christian Zionists, Industrialists, Buddhists and world leaders
across almost all ethnicities, are volunteering to sell their souls merely for the desire a few
more shekels. For these rewards, they ignore all else and have, too often, sold their
souls.
For Zionism takes it never gives back!
Zionism Today: America's No.1 Export.
As modern Zionism has methodically taken over Palestine and America, so it has done to a
vast portion of the world. Today, there are almost no world leaders who put their allegiance to
their own countrymen before that of their Zionist masters. The game plan of Zionist hegemony
towards political leaders, country, mind and opposition are just as complete in Australia,
Canada, the European Union, Britain, Japan, South Korea, etc.,al. For those who have not bitten
from their immoral fruit, the Zionist offers only one other choice: financial degradation and
internal civil war! This is shown in the few countries that resist a Zionist agenda such as
Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, China, Brazil, Venezuela, Russia and others. These countries have
been the targets of Zionist propaganda- via American foreign policy- which demands regime
change and war.
Take Britain for example and its upstart parliamentary leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy
Corbyn. Despite being Jewish himself, the unabashed "Friends of Israel" coalition within the UK
parliament, knowing which side their own bread is buttered on, have attacked Corbyn as being an
anti-Semite. On face value this is claimed to be the result of his public and well-articulated
support of Palestine and his condemnation in the press of IDF war crimes. But this is not
Corbyn's true threat to the Zionists who are buried in parliaments around the world and are
rarely exposed by the Zionist controlled world press. No. His true crime is that he offers hope
to the many Brits who have suffered years of unjustified austerity at the hands of the Zionist
European Union that has, like their American brethren, imposed years of increased funding for
hypothetical war at the expense of any social obligations.
Corbyn is possibly the only true socialist leader in the world- one with a track record of
standing up for his voters and not surrendering his leadership nor his conscience to the
influence of the Zionists. Corbyn not only speaks for a growing majority in the UK, he speaks
for the much more powerful interests in Britain that would like to see a return to the policies
of True Labour, not the New Labour that was bastardized into existence by the Zionist former
Prime Minister, Tony Blair, an indoctrination that seemed almost complete until the rise to
power of Corbyn as a true populist Champion. What most fail to observe within Corbyn's rise is
that he has successfully weathered not one but two attempts by the Zionist controlled traitors
within his own party to oust him as leader. Despite these attempts, Corbyn has emerged
unscathed and more popular than ever, and this strongly indicates the power base behind the
scenes that wants to see him bring a return to a socialist Britain.
He is also the sole example to a world desperately looking for a leader to follow in their
own fight for a return to proper society in their own nations.
This, of course, is anathema to everything the Zionists stand for and for what control they
have gained since Maggie Thatcher morphed into John Major, who hatched into Gordon Brown, who
then spawned Tony Blair who allowed for the rise of David Cameron and Theresa May, but whose
chrysalis has now been crushed under the boot of this rising populism lead by Corbyn.
At the seat of European Zionist control, Brussels, the EU is too busy crushing Zionist
opposition in Greece, Italy, Spain/ Catalonia and Brexit to devote their full attention, yet,
to Corbyn. Few realize that creation of the EU, from its inception to its current form of
unelected economic and social control over 27 once-sovereign nations was,in reality, spawned,
propagated, institutionalized and brought to power by the American Zionists looking to
further their centralized national control using the pre-existing American model.
The American model of "United" states or nations had, far before 1999, become a tool to
prioritize a Zionist agenda over that of the public. Once the Zionist banking interests had
succeeded in adding central monetary control to the EU via its emulation of the US Federal
Reserve Bank, the interests of the twenty-eight nations were reduced to the interests of the
corporation, never more the voter.
Then, there is the IMF. As the foremost tool for turning sovereign nations into Zionist debt
slaves, the IMF has used its coercion to force nations across the globe into accepting massive
loan packages of US dollars that are more than fully secured by the pledging of national assets
that the Zionist business interests covet. The results of this tactical plunder is shown by the
fact that the IMF currently holds the third largest gold reserves in the world, all of which
was provided as ransom from the countries it afflicted. It has also inflicted massive economic
and environmental disasters of staggering proportions on its host nations whose Zionist
inspired leadership sought to do a deal with the devil, one that helped their pockets, but not
their nation, their people, nor their long term future.
In his book, "Confessions of an Economic
Hit Man," John Perkins details the way the IMF forces countries to take on these unpayable
loan packages and how the IMF uses this as a wedge to seed its hegemony, austerity, misery and
political upheaval- in the name of "progress"- on so much of the unsuspecting world. Greece, is
of course, the poster child for these results where a treasonous Alexis Tsipras, as Prime
Minister, has now sold off most of the public assets to private corporate interests, has
destroyed the national social obligations to his countrymen, and has made Greece a vassal state
of the EU, yet he still has made barely a dent in the massive debt obligations to the Troika;
the EU, IMF and World Bank.
Still, they want more.
The societal results today, as predicted by the previous results of the American model, have
been almost worldwide in its austerity imposed on the poor, massive increases in military
armaments purchases, elimination of democracy and democratic results, restrictions of existing
civil rights and social services, an ever growing refugee crisis and the autocratic political
control of Europe and most of the world by a selected or unelected coven of Zionists who have
already sold their own souls for personal power and riches.
In destroying the nation of Greece, theirs is not just a message to the Greeks from the
Zionists who run the EU and the Troika. It was a message to all the other nations and peoples
of the world: Resistance is futile!
Or, is it?!
Zionism's "Final Solution" Are You a Zionist?!
Yes, when considered in its many worldwide manifestations the true definition of Zionism is
much broader and seemingly all encompassing. Once its incorrect attachment to Judaism is
accurately debunked, Zionism's degradations of the cornerstones of civilization and its goal
towards a subliminal personal adherence to selfishness, greed, and the immoral can be correctly
defined in summation by the single all-serving excuse offered by the Kol Nidrei.
But the "Final solution" of Zionism is much worse.For the final goal of Zionism is to take
away your human desire to resist.
Truly, Zionism's greatest success has been in indoctrinating the opposition conscience of
the remaining world into acquiescence, apathy and failure. Zionism would not have achieved its
world threatening level of power had the morals of society already risen up en mass
against the crimes of Israeli and Zionist expansion. So far, our world has allowed this to be
our current societal condition. Hence we are losing!
As clearly shown, the world is awash in the mindset of the Zionist. Virtually all aspects of
civilization are now steeped in the subtle manipulative and hypocritical tenets of the Zionist-
not Jewish- Kol Nidrei. This infection of the conscience is certainly spreading worldwide and,
whether one knows it by name, this infection has become increasingly systemically endemic. As
done so many times through history, Zionism and Zionists must be cast out again from world
society.
Across the world, as shown, examples of the horrors of Zionism are not at all limited to the
barbarism that is ongoing in Palestine. As suggested in a previous article, "The
Good Friday Massacre : World, We Are All Palestinians Now," we, the remaining civilized
world, must quickly awaken to the knowledge that we are apathetically existing in an
ever-growing cage of Zionist control while to cage door is quickly closing. It is time to
understand Zionists are winning the battle for the hearts and minds of what remains of our
world.
When the politician ignores his conscience , the will of the voters, his duty to
country, and his oath of office in favour of supporting a foreign interest then he is a
Zionist.
When the journalist casts aside her moral obligation and wilfully crafts preposterous
pro- Israeli articles that distort and belie the truth, while deliberately leaving out the
horrors of Israeli war crimes and worldwide influence- thus prostituting the true tenets of
objective reporting then, she a Zionist.
When doctors, lawyers and teachers, use understood hypocrisy to justify allowing
personal interests and money to come before their obligation to their charges within the
society they serve then, they are Zionists.
When the professional athlete knowingly prioritizes continued riches and fame
before his obligation to the people whose accolades made him wealthy and fails to use his media
power to stand-up against or take a knee in opposition to the injustices he or she sees
then, those athletes are Zionists.
When the Preacher, Rabbi, Imam, Priest, Monk or Holy Father ignores the scriptures
of their particular religion and does not thunder a call from the pulpit for the immoral
factions within their religion to be ejected then, that man of God is a Zionist.
But, the most critical manifestations that defines modern Zionism are those within society
who know in their own minds and conscience- and their hearts- that their own world,
and that of human kind, is being destroyed, yet they wilfully choose to do nothing in
opposition. Those of the moral world who do see the social hegemony of Zionism before
very eyes, yet fail to be disgusted to the point of action. Men and women of clear
conscience whomerely pass quiet comment rather than shaking their fists in proper outrage.
People whose temptation to protest is too easily calmed by the next media
distraction
when those of the civilized world allow themselves to become too scared and
apathetic to disconnect Zionism from Judaism and scream at, throw back and laugh-off the
erroneous accusation of Ant-Semitism and, then, demand that modern Zionism be removed
completely from our world's society for the good, for the future, for the very existence of
mankind then, sadly, they too have been, thus, similarly afflicted. And so, yes
they, too, have become Zionist.
Epitaph For Zionism- The Day of Judgement.
On a warm summer's day in mid-Wales, while wandering the hills of the old iron town of
Merthyr, a hiker might suddenly be almost overcome by the unmistakable stench of human
urine.
It is the grave of Robert Thompson Crawshay.
Long since dead, the memory of this scourge, a man who ignored his religion, his society and
his conscience, is still, and will forever be, firmly in the minds of the Welsh. The grave is
surrounded by a picketed wrought iron fence, made in his iron works and designed to keep the
actions of those of outrage and conscience at bay. So sits his massive flat gravestone, a
single, one-line epitaph inscribed at the top. His grave, today, remains as an unintended
testament to this man, and all men, who hypocritically defiled their own religious
obligations..
Yes, here on this slowly decaying plot, during the many decades past and many more to come,
a fence will not be enough to restrict those who respect the true value of mankind and are not
so easily put off. Acting on their own continued outrage against what this man once did, and
still does, stand for, here they climb that fence. Here, they consciously stand in defiance on
his gravestone, a marker that seeks to cover-over the crimes of one man against mankind.
Here. they stare down at the final words of a man so foul that those of conscience, true
morals and memory, to this day, have only one possible choice to make.
So, every summer's day they do not forget, deliberately climbing that spiked fence to stand
atop of this oligarch and wilfully emptying their bladders all over this villain of humanity.
Thus, they leave their mark, their opinion and their personal statement here to waft through
the air as the smell of ongoing resistance all over Crawshay's one line epitaph.
Far too many in our world today, like Crawshay, assume that they will somehow, despite their
crimes, purchase their own stairway to heaven. For all of his money, his mansions and his final
one line, desperate epitaph- carved forever at the head of the massive granite slab- these
words could not, would not, and forever will not, sanctify or turn all the Wrongs into
Right.
Yes, Crawshay was indeed a Zionist. Like all Zionists, he assumed that atonement for his
crimes– such as others pray for using the the Kol Nidrei- could be easily absolved by
scrawling his own final prayer to God.
On that gravestone, in 12-inch chiselled letters, is a simple one line epitaph his own final
prayer, his desperate demand, for ultimate absolution. "God, Forgive me." cries out Crawshay, in the finality of his life on hard,
unforgiving stone.
For an unconscionable man like Crawshay, it was, then Too God Damned Late!
About the Author: Brett Redmayne-Titley has published over 170 in-depth articles over the
past eight years for news agencies worldwide. Many have been translated. On-scene reporting
from important current events has been an emphasis that has led to his many multi-part exposes
on such topics as the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations, NATO summit, Keystone XL
Pipeline, Porter Ranch Methane blow-out, Hizbullah in Lebanon, Erdogan's Turkey and many
more. He can be reached at: live-on-scene((at)) gmx.com. Prior articles can be viewed at his
archive: www.watchingromeburn.uk
Zionism cannot be understood outside the context of late 19th century European nationalism.
The purpose of Zionism is to build a "normal" country of Jews in the Land of Israel,
accepted by and at peace with it's Arab neighbors. The idea is to replace assimilation of
individual Jews with the assimilation of the entire Jewish nation.
Clearly this ideology violates the Torah. The Torah commands us to physically destroy
the Arabs and anyone else who challenges us and four us to expand our borders from the Nile
to the Euphrates. The Temple must be rebuilt, sacrifices must be resumed and Israel must
return to being a theocratic monarchy led by somebody from King David's line.
Peace with the Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians and Iranians? Impossible because we are
clearly commanded to annihilate those nations. What about the Iraqis, Egyptians and Saudis
then? No, because they also currently occupy land that rightfully belongs to us.
As for the rest of the Arab/Islamic world, when they pay reparations to us and agree to
send us an annual tribute in perpetuity and then recognize us as G-d's chosen people and
the rightful rulers of the entirety of the Land, then we shall grant them peace. These
terms, however, are in final form and non negotiable.
When the politician ignores his conscience, the will of the voters, his duty to
country, and his oath of office in favour of supporting a foreign interest then he is a Zionist .
FIFY
When the politician ignores his conscience, the will of the voters, his duty to
country, and his oath of office in favour of supporting a foreign interest then he is a traitor .
I will comment this as I have for the last ten years tried to get to the bottom of this
"conspiracy".
About the conspiracy:
The New World was an idea of the Enlightenment, replacement of the Old Regime by democracy
and capitalism, later by socialism and communism. This idea was promoted by a secret
society, Freemasons, later by Communists and other secret societies which did not want
communism. Jews were not yet active in this movement, they had a niche as kings people, a
separate class. They did not fit into the new world, so they either had to assimilate or to
move to some place. As they did not want to assimilate, and they had the tendency of mutual
help, proto-Zionists started preparing the transfer of Jews to Palestine already 1840ies.
Those proto-Zionists included Freemasons, some bankers and so on, and it is this group that
become to rule the world in a short time, and it is the new form of this group that are the
globalists wanting to unify the world and get immigrants and all that. They do not include
Masons anymore, but one can identify some organizations working for these goals. To get the
non-assimilating Jews out of the new world, they needed Zionism.
Herzl's Zionism and modern
Anti-Semitism were created by this group about the same time for this exact purpose. Israel
was their creation. The logic behind the new world is to create one world, free market, no
religion,.. (just like Imagine of John Lennon or the Masonry dream) But there has to be a
ruling class, maybe secret.
In Communism it was the party, UK/US Freemasons possibly saw it
as WASPs, maybe it is an ethnic group here. I do not know, these models change and such
groups can be infiltrated unless they are closed and endogamous.
About the Jews:
Most Jews of course support Israel and they still practice mutual help, which causes the
same problems as always: they were an endogamous and fast growing population trying to
promote their group interests and seeing others as enemies. Jews in Israel face the
problems of an occupation force: as they are confronted by asymmetric resistance, they are
forced to do what they are doing, and that is the strategy of the resistance.
Additionally
there is Talmud with its different treatment of Jews and non-Jews, it makes things only
worse. The actions Israel must make turn it into a pariah state. The strategy of the
resistance may or may not lead to a success.
American Jews support Israel, which is natural
as Jews should support Jews. Christian Zionists support Israel, as they read the Bible in
that way, the Jews as God's nation. Yet, neither of these groups are the globalists who run
the world. Jews, including Zionists, are a cover for the ruling group: resistance is posed
as antisemitism. It is the same as was with Freemasonry. Most Freemasons did not make
revolutions, it was Memphis and Mizraim, but they acted as a cover: any opposition to the
revolutionary Masonry was ridiculed as conspiracy theories and normal Masons insisted that
they are innocent, as they were, but they just covered up those lodges which were not at
all innocent. Jews have the same role: opposition to those who do all this that must be
opposed is presented as opposition to the Jews and Israel and dubbed antisemitism.
Maybe I am wrong in this view that there are two different groups, but historically
taken, it was not the Jews who started this development to the new world. Jews are called
the lesser cousins in the Protocols and in Joly's Dialogues Machiavelli is a group of evil
men, who have taken the ways of the Jews, that is, it was not ethnic Jews at that time
(Mizraim members were mostly Catholic, though some were crypto: Frankists and so on).
'Committed no crime'. If anyone knows the definition of crime in international politics, I'd like to hear it. Lewis Mumford, 'The city in history, Its origins, its transformations and its prospects',
London, 1991, 1961 writes that the judaic rules were meant to cause separation from non
jews, and maximum growth of population, in itself no crimes. I'm reading on the European fourth and fifth centuries, cannot say that judaism's efforts
for power were worse than those described.
Anyhow, Rome in the first century CE twice sent powerful armies to Palestine to
subjugate jewry, in how far these armies were sent because jews were suspected of being
implicated in the murder of the Roman emperor, I'm not sure.
If christianity indeed was created by Paul as secret agent of the Roman emperor, to
underrmine judaism, an interesting theory.
The copper Dead Sea scroll describes where the jewish treasure was hidden, I'm inclined to
think that what is described was real, the Jerusalem temple was very rich.
Michael Grant, 'The Jews in the Roman World', 1973, New York
After the west, in any case on the surface, became christian, with the pope as highest
authority, jews became a nuisance: they made clear that the pope was not almighty, kings
liked to use the jews for tax gathering etc., the pope could not interfere.
As jews were excluded from many professions, often also forbidden to own land of houses, it
is not suprising that some of them lent themselves to shady practices of kings etc.
What went wrong, in my view, is that jews, not all of them, of course, assimilated
insufficiently after the got equal rights in the 19th century.
Katz writes 'the expectation that jews would disappear through assimilation was not
fullfilled, on the contrary, jews became more visible'. 'From prejudice to destruction', Jacob Katz, 1980, Cambridge MA.
One of the factors Katz mentioned for success was 'close economic cooperation'.
And so, after 1870 in the unified Germany, antisemitism emerged.
Antisemitism is not antijudaism, as the anti sentiment after 1870 was also against non
religious jews.
Zionism, in my view, no more than a reaction to antisemitism.
The creation of Israel, the most stupid thing jews ever did, my idea.
Zionism is seen by many as the same as judaism, Israel advertises the worst aspects of
jewish culture.
Israel can only exist through jewish power in the USA, and wars by the USA.
Israel may be the third military power in the world, as the British said 'one can do a lot
with bayonets, except sit on them'.
A very stream-of-consciousness & confusing text. As for myself, I'm all for Zionism
with consequences, similar to Arthur Koestler. Let's see..
1. Jews are religious-cultural-historical people. Wherever they settled, they remained
an isolated group.
2. Europe, if you wish, is a state of mind: first during Greco-Roman cultural sphere
& then during long centuries of Christianity. Jews remained the only tolerated Middle
Eastern group in Europe, a group that, mostly, did not assimilate (Muslims and others were
booted).
3. in Muslim & Eastern cultural spheres (Iran, Ottomans, Arabs,..) Jews were just
one among co-existing cultural groups because Islamic world did not developed as Europe:
the nations & nation-states (language, territory, customs, law, culture, history,..)
became in past 500-800 years primal foci of loyalty of European peoples. Jews did not fit
in.
4. during 19th-20th C Theodor Herzl was a shrewd observer. He clearly saw that most Jews
were Europeanized, but still alien Middle-Eastern historical people living among various,
different European peoples. Zionist idea was a realist admission that Jews in Europe
remained a separate nation, whether they lived in Italy, Germany, France or Russia. Of
course, this does not apply to assimilated, not just acculturated Jews: Jews simply cease
to be Jews when they lose their ethnic religious identity & fully embrace different
cultural-identity matrix. Was Karl Marx a Jew? No, he was a German of Jewish descent.
5. after establishment of Israel, Jews got their nation-state. But, many diaspora Jews
continued with their anti-national culture war against western nations, while extolling
Israel as a Jewish nation. Sorry guys, you can't have it both ways. It can't be
multiculturalism & anti-nationalism for thee (US, France, Poland, Italy,..) &
nationalism for me (Israel).
6. contemporary BDS crowd is mostly composed of home-grown far leftists, ideological
progeny of the 1960s counter-culture & New Left, and various anti-Jewish racial &
religious groups (Muslims, Africans..-who historically don't belong to Europe).
Pro-Palestinian, pro-Muslim & pro-3rd world rhetoric is absurdity for most sane whites
(Europeans & North Americans). They're not worried about fully integrated co-nationals
of Jewish origin; they're annoyed by Zionist Jews who behave like accepted, but still alien
& sometimes hostile group; and they're extremely inimical toward unassimilable racial
& cultural aliens (blacks, Muslims, Asians, )
For most Europeans & Europe-derived peoples (at least the mentally sane majority)-
they want to get rid of all- Asians, blacks, self-conscious Middle Easterners these guys
don't belong here. It is not a continuation of some Jewish obsession, but a simple
admission: sorry guys, you're not my people. You got your home somewhere in the East &
go there. We may trade with all you Israelis, Turks, Moroccans, Pakistanis, Nigerians, .but
good fences make good neighbors.
In sum, Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East and its army is the most moral army
in the world. Indeed, Israel was founded to be a shining light onto humanity, illuminating
how a state should function vis a vis its citizens and its neighbors. Both learned and
unlearned know that to be so. To elaborate is no avail, and unquestionably anti-semitic.
A very good article on Zionism that addresses the JQ straight on. Unfortunately, I think it
is off target by trying to equate the greed and madness for power of Crayshaw, and jews in
general, with Zionism. He never really links Crawshays' actions to Kol Nidrei, it is more
of a association through a high correlation of depravity and greed.
By confining his definition of Jewish Power be to a subset of Zionism, he provides "good
jews" far too much wiggle room to disassociate themselves from their people actions, often
when they themselves are citizens of Israel.
"Long ago cast-out from Judea since AD 70, by Roman emperor, Titus ..": but that's simply
untrue, a yarn invented centuries after 70AD. They were banned from living in Jerusalem,
sure, but that was after the second revolt, not the first. Nor were they ever expelled from
Palestine. Plain didn't happen.
Being on the losing side of a revolt against Rome must be grim but expulsion was not one
of the punishments. For a start, why would the Romans expel those Jews who took no part in
the revolt? When else did Rome expel a whole population as a punishment? Why is there no
record of this punishment of the Jews? Even Josephus makes no mention of this purported
exile. Pah! It's baloney.
Why the maximalism, bro? You make a great case against Zionism, and then conflate it with
the Federalist Society's support of "rolling back civil liberties, imperial wars,
free-wheeling laissez-faire capitalism and corporatism, along with ending New Deal/Great
Society social programs", and their stance "against reproductive choice, government
regulations, labour rights, environmental protections, and justice for unwanted aliens."
I happen to love laissez-faire capitalism, and the thought of ending New Deal/Great
Society social programs tickles me pink.
Does that make me a Zionist catspaw?
Some of us think the term "reproductive rights" is a euphemism for "child murder", and
"government regulations, labour rights, environmental protections, and justice for unwanted
(illegal) aliens" are subjectively defined terms, to say the least.
I would have read the whole thing, but after that you devolved into Counterpunchian
logorrhea, and I just aint got the time.
After the fake quote supposedly from Netanyahu (lol at least spell his name correctly next
time) I kept pressing page down and it kept going. Amazing. Why does Unz publish these
idiotic schizoid rants?
"He(Jeremy Corbyn) is also the sole example to a world desperately looking for a leader to
follow in their own fight for a return to proper society in their own nations."
Not a very good example IMHO. Better example is the former PM of Malaysia and again PM
of Malaysia recently elected at the young age of 92. Mahathir Mohamad is a well known
"anti-semite" which of course means is an enemy of the "Zionist international mafia."
Jeremy Corbyn, if elected, will be the new Alexis Tsipras. Why ? Because as everyone
knows, if the "Zionist international mafia" have complete control of the USA, it is obvious
that they also have complete control of GB. Corbyn like Tsipras, will do as told.
More: As a leader of opposition, Jeremy Corbyn never had the courage to call a cat a
cat. He has never called the former PM and a well known zionist-Tony Bair- a war
criminal.
Most British people and Labour members believe that TB is a war criminal.
Even today, the blairites (Zionists) still control the Labour Party. How credible that someone that doesn't control his own party, will control Britain's
deep state ?
"Thus viewed correctly, Zionism is not a religion, nor is it part of Judaism".
This seems to be, according to Gilad Atzmon wishful thinking from the writer and "Rabbi
Yaakov Shapiro, probably the most eloquent Torah Jew spokesperson".
"Zionism cannot be understood outside the context of late 19th century European
nationalism." – Sure. "National Socialism, more commonly known as Nazism, subscribed to theories of racial
hierarchy and Social Darwinism The Nazis aimed to unite all Germans living in historically
German territory, as well as gain additional lands for German expansion under the doctrine
of Lebensraum and exclude those who they deemed either community aliens or "inferior"
races." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism Replace Nazism with Zionism: " Zionism subscribed to theories of racial hierarchy and
Social Darwinism The Zionism aimed to unite all Jews living in historically Jewish
territory, as well as gain additional lands for Jewish expansion under the doctrine of
Lebensraum and exclude those who they deemed either community aliens or "inferior"
races."
– Close your holocaust museums already. The worst among the Jews have plagiarized the
German nationalism' ideas to create the monstrosity of indecent, dishonorable, inhuman,
immoral, and obnoxious imitation (forgery), Zionism. The forgery has been flourishing
thanks to the deeply-dishonest talmudic traditions married to tribal solidarity.
The talmudic lunatics have been destroying each and very safe haven throughout Europe and
now in the US. Your Polish bastard Bibi and the Moldovan thug Avi can try on taking all
possible poses and mannerism of "distinguished" men -- this will not help. They are
thugs. Zionism is a dangerous cancerous growth on western civilization. Would not it be great if
your lot collectively disappear from the cultural centers of the EU and the US?
Your problem is, the Zionists cannot coexist with the Zionists. The article explains,
why.
Same sex is the only choice the Jewish Rabbi Jezus allows in
Jewheaven.
"When Jewgod raises people to life, they won't marry. They will be like the Jewangels in
Jewheaven." (((Matthew 22:30)))
That perversion alone is reason enough to refuse any offer of a Jew to save you to his
Jewish utopia. Yet you fall for this degenerate storytelling hook, line, and sinker!
"Zionism, in my view, no more than a reaction to antisemitism."
– The above paper's focus is on a specific prayer:
"All [personal] vows we are likely to make, all [personal] oaths and pledges we are likely
to take between this Yom Kippur and the next Yom Kippur, we publicly renounce. Let them all
be relinquished and abandoned, null and void, neither firm nor established. Let our
[personal] vows, pledges and oaths are considered neither vows nor pledges nor oaths." -the Kol Nidrei.
The Kol Nidrei, ("All Vows") often misspelt Kol Nidre, was not originally a prayer, but a
declaration offered during Rosh Hashana, the start of the Jewish new year. In "modern"
Judaism it is now being delivered as a prayer and has so grown in prominence during the
last sixty years that it is now delivered at the commencement of Judaism's holiest yearly
event of Passover."
– It was not "antisemitism" but the anti-talmudism reaction towards the indecency and
treachery of a certain segment of the Jewish populace. Zionism was, and is, a farcical and bloodthirsty imitation of the 19th-century German
nationalism.
I should like to cite several passages from Yuval Harari's excellent book, "
Sapiens ":
p.210: " all social orders and hierarchies are imagined, they are all fragile, and
the larger the society, the more fragile it is. The crucial historical role of religion has
been to give superhuman legitimacy to these fragile structures.
two distinct criteria: 1. Religions hold that there is a superhuman order, which is not the product of human
whims or agreements.
2. Based on this superhuman order, religion establishes norms and values that it considers
binding. "
p. 195 It's for your own good : " Evolution has made Homo sapiens. like other
social mammals, a xenophobic creature. Sapiens instinctively divide humanity into two
parts, 'we' and 'they'. We are people like you and me, who share our language, religion and
customs. We are all responsible for each other, but not responsible for them. We were
always distinct from them, we owe them nothing. We don't want to see any of them in our
territory, and we don't care an iota what happens in their territory. They are barely even
human. "
p. 228 The Worship of Man : " if we take into consideration natural-law
religions, then modernity turns out to be an age of intense religious fervour, unparalleled
missionary efforts, and the bloodiest wars of religion in history. The modern age has
witnessed the rise of new natural-law religions, such as liberalism, Communism, capitalism,
nationalism, and Nazism. These creeds do not like to be called religions, and refer to
themselves as ideologies. But this is just a semantic exercise. If a religion is a system
of human norms and values that is founded on belief in a superhuman order, then Soviet
Communism was no less a religion than Islam. "
p. 242 Blind Clio : " Ever more scholars see cultures as a kind of mental
infection or parasite, with humans as its unwitting host. Organic parasites, such as
viruses, live inside the body of their host. They multiply and spread from one host to the
other, feeding off their hosts, weakening them, and sometimes killing them. As long as the
hosts live long enough to pass along the parasite, it cares little about the condition of
its host. In just this fashion, cultural ideas live inside the minds of humans. They
multiply and spread from one host to another, occasionally weakening the host and sometimes
even killing them. – can compel a human to dedicate his or her life to spreading that
idea, even at the price of death. The human dies, but the idea spreads. . Successful
cultures are those that excel in reproducing their memes, irrespective of the costs and
benefits to their human hosts. Similar arguments are common in the social sciences, under
the aegis of game theory. Game theory explains how in multi-player systems, views and
behaviour patterns that harm all players nevertheless manage to take root and spread.
"
Corporate Media's About-Face on Ukraine's Neo-Nazis July 5, 2018 •
59 Comments
U.S. corporate media spent years dismissing the role of neo-Nazis in Ukraine's 2014 coup but
it is suddenly going through a conversion, as Daniel Lazare reports.
By Daniel Lazare Special to Consortium News
Last month a freelance journalist named Joshua
Cohen published an
article in The Washington Post about the Ukraine's growing neo-Nazi threat.
Despite a gratuitous swipe at Russia for allegedly exaggerating the problem (which it hasn't),
the piece was fairly accurate.
Entitled "Ukraine's ultra-right militias are challenging the government to a showdown," it
said that fascists have gone on a rampage while the ruling clique in Kiev closes its eyes for
the most part and prays that the problem somehow goes away on its own.
Thus, a group calling itself C14 (for the fourteen-word ultra-right motto, "We must secure
the existence of our people and a future for white children") not only beat up a socialist
politician and celebrated Hitler's birthday by stabbing an antiwar activist, but bragged about
it on its website. Other ultra-nationalists, Cohen says, have stormed the Lvov and Kiev city
councils and "assaulted or disrupted" art exhibits, anti-fascist demos, peace and gay-rights
events, and a Victory Day parade commemorating the victory over Hitler in 1945.
Yet nothing has happened to stop this. President Petro Poroshenko could order a crackdown,
but hasn't for reasons that should be obvious. The U.S.-backed "Euromaidan" uprising not only
drove out former president Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014, who had won an OSCE-certified
election, but tore the country in two, precisely because ultra-rightists like C14 were in the
lead.
When resistance to the U.S.-backed coup
broke out in Crimea and parts of the country's largely Russian-speaking east, the base of
Yanukovych voters, civil war ensued. But because the Ukrainian army had all but collapsed, the
new, coup government had no one to rely on other than the neo-fascists who had helped propel it
to power.
So an alliance was hatched between pro-western oligarchs at the top – Forbesputs
Poroshenko's net worth at a cool $1 billion – and neo-Nazi enforcers at the bottom.
Fascists may not be popular. Indeed, Dmytro Yarosh, the fire-breathing leader of a white-power
coalition known as Right Sector, received less than one percent of the vote when he
ran for president in May 2014.
But the state is so weak and riddled with so many ultra-rightists in key positions –
Andriy Parubiy, founder of the neo-Nazi Social-National Party of Ukraine, is speaker of the
parliament, while ultra-rightist Arsen Avakov is minister of the interior – that the path
before them is clear and unobstructed. As Cohen points out, the result is government passivity
on one hand and a rising tide of ultra-right violence on the other. In the earlier stages of
the civil war, for instance, the rightwing extremists burned more than 40 people alive in a
labor union building in Odessa, a horrific incident downplayed by Western media.
Cohen's article may have Washington Post readers scratching their heads for the
simple reason that the paper has long said the opposite. Since Euromaidan, the Post
has toed the official Washington line
that Vladimir Putin has exaggerated the role of the radical right in order to discredit the
anti-Yanukovych revolt and legitimize his own alleged interference.
Sure, anti-Yanukovych forces had festooned the Kiev town hall with a white supremacist
banner, a Confederate flag , and a giant image of Stepan Bandera , a Nazi
collaborator whose forces killed thousands of Jews during the German occupation and as many as
100,000 Poles. And yes, they staged a 15,000-strong torchlight parade in Bandera's honor and
scrawled an SS symbol on a toppled
statue of Lenin. They also destroyed a memorial to Ukrainians who
had fought on what Bandera supporters regard as the wrong side of World War II, that is, with
the Soviets and against the Axis.
But so-called responsible, mainstream journalists are supposed to avert their eyes to avoid
being tarred as a "
useful idiot " whom Putin supposedly employs to advance his "anti-American agenda." Ten
days after Yanukovych's departure, the Post dutifully
assured its readers that Russian reports of "hooligans and fascists" had "no basis in
reality."
A week or so later, it
said "the new government, though peppered with right-wing politicians, is led primarily by
moderate, pro-European politicians." A few weeks after that, it
described Bandera as no more than "controversial" and quoted a Kiev businessman as saying:
"The Russians want to call him a fascist, but I feel he was a hero for our country. Putin is
using him to try to divide us."
Thus, the Post and other corporate media continued to do its duty by
attacking Putin for plainly saying "the forces backing Ukraine's government in Kiev are
fascists and neo-Nazis." But who was wrong ?
The New York Times was no better. It
assailed Russia for hurling "harsh epithets" like "neo-Nazi," and
blamed the Russian leader for "scaremongering" by attributing Yanukovych's ouster to
"nationalists, neo-Nazis, Russophobes, and anti-Semites." The Guardian 's Luke Harding
–
a leading Putin basher –
said of the far-right Svoboda Party:
"Over the past decade the party appears to have mellowed, eschewing xenophobia, academic
commentators suggest. On Monday, the U.S. ambassador in Kiev, Geoffrey Pyatt, said he had
been 'positively impressed' by Svoboda's evolution in opposition and by its behavior in the
Rada, Ukraine's parliament. 'They have demonstrated their democratic bona fides,' the
ambassador asserted."
This is the party whose founder, Oleh Tyahnybok,
said in a 2004 speech that "a Moscow-Jewish mafia" was running the Ukraine and that
Bandera's followers "fought against the Muscovites, Germans, Jews and other enemies who wanted
to take away our Ukrainian state." Had the leopard really changed its spots, according to
Pyatt? Or was it simply a matter of America not giving a damn as long as Svoboda joined the
fight to encircle Russia and advance NATO's drive to the east?
As someone named Marx once observed , "Who you gonna believe, me or your
own two eyes?" As far as Ukraine was concerned, the answer for the corporate press came from
the U.S. State Department. If Foggy Bottom said that Ukrainian neo-Nazism was a figment of
Russia's imagination, then that's what it was, regardless of evidence to the contrary.
Someday, historians will look back on Euromaidan Ukraine as one of the looniest periods in
western journalism – except, of course, for all the ones that have followed. But if one
had to choose the looniest story of all, one that best reflects the abject toadyism of the
reporting classes, it would have to be "Why Jews and Ukrainians Have Become Unlikely Allies," a
1,400-word article
that ran on the Post -owned Foreign Policy website in May 2014. Four years
later, it stands as a model of how not to write about an all-important political crisis.
Cohen's Conversion
Tyahnybok: 'Moscow-Jewish mafia' is running Ukraine.
The piece begins with the usual hand-wringing about Svoboda and Right Sector and expresses
remorse that the latter still venerates the "controversial" Bandera, whose followers "fought on
the side of the Nazis from 1944 until the end of World War II." (Actually, they welcomed the
Germans from the start and, despite rocky relations with the Slav-hating Nazis, continued to
work with them throughout the occupation.)
But then it gets down to business by asserting that as bad as Ukrainian nationalists may be,
Russia is doubly worse. "Despite the substantial presence of right wing nationalists on the
Maidan during the revolution," it says, "many in Ukraine's Jewish community resent being used
by Putin in his propaganda war." The proof is an open letter signed by 21 Ukrainian Jewish
leaders asserting that the real danger was Moscow.
"We know that the political opposition consists of various groups, including some that are
nationalistic," the letter declared. "But even the most marginal of them do not demonstrate
anti-Semitism or other forms of xenophobia. And we certainly know that our very few
nationalists are well-controlled by civil society and the new Ukrainian government –
which is more than can be said for the Russian neo-Nazis, who are encouraged by your security
services."
This was music to Washington's ears. But if neo-Nazis are free of "anti-Semitism or other
forms of xenophobia," how does one explain the white-power symbols in the Kiev town hall? If
nationalists were "very few" in number, why did journalists need to explain them away? If
Russian security forces really encouraged neo-Nazis, where were the torchlight parades and
portraits of Bandera-like collaborators hanging from public buildings in Moscow?
The article might have noted that Josef Zissels, the Jewish community leader who organized
the letter, is a provocative figure who has long maintained close relations with Ukraine's far
right. A self-styled
Zhydobanderivets – a word that roughly translates as "Kike follower of Bandera"
– he has since infuriated other Jewish leaders by criticizing California Congressman Ro
Khanna for sending a letter to the State Department asking that pressure be brought on the
governments of Poland and Ukraine to combat Holocaust revisionism in their countries.
Forty-one Jewish leaders were so angry, in fact, that they sent out
a letter of their own thanking Khannna for his efforts, expressing "deep concern at the
rise of anti-Semitic incidents and expressions of xenophobia and intolerance, including attacks
on Roma communities," and "strongly proclaim[ing] that Mr. Iosif Zissels and the organization
VAAD do not represent the Jews of Ukraine." A Jewish community leader in Russia was so outraged
by the pro-Bandera apologetics of Zissels and a Ukrainian-Jewish oligarch named Igor Kolomoisky
that he
said he wanted to hang both men "in Dnepropetrovsk in front of the Golden Rose Synagogue
until they stop breathing."
So Foreign Policy used a highly dubious source to whitewash Ukraine's growing
neo-Nazi presence and absolve it of anti-Semitism. As crimes against the truth go, this is
surely one of the worst. But now that the problem has gotten too big for even the corporate
media to ignore, overnight muckrakers like Joshua Cohen are seeing to it that getting away with
such offenses will no longer be so easy. Before his abrupt about-face, the author of that
misleading Foreign Policy piece was Joshua Cohen.
Daniel Lazare is the author ofThe Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is
Paralyzing Democracy(Harcourt Brace, 1996) and other books about American
politics. He has written for a wide variety of publications fromThe NationtoLe Monde Diplomatique, and his articles about the Middle East,
terrorism, Eastern Europe, and other topics appear regularly on such websites asJacobinand The American Conservative .
If you enjoyed this original article please consider
making a donation to Consortium News so we can bring you more stories like this
one.
mike k , July 6, 2018 at 4:49 pm
The leaders of Israel who sell weapons to the Nazis in Ukraine, are no better than those
Nazis.
Susan Sunflower , July 6, 2018 at 1:37 pm
for those having Alice In Wonderland whiplash, yes the USA was funding the Ukranian
neonazis Azov Brigade before Congress banned the funding in March 2018.
same old "syrian playbook" wrt to enemy-of-my-memory bull .
rosemerry , July 6, 2018 at 10:12 am
The two-hour documentary "Putin" shows in an interview Pres. Putin explaining his
government's cooperating with the Western- supported Ukrainian government for four years
(because they were neighbors and had many links) which he considered normal behavior.
However, once the 2014 election brought in a more "Moscow-friendly" team to govern Ukraine,
the USA began its plans to overthrow it and we see all the consequences shown in this
article.
The tacit support given by the centre-left to the installation of the regime in Kiev
should give them cause for concern writes Frank.
Politics in the Ukraine can only be understood by reference to its history and ethnic and
cultural make-up – a make-up criss-crossed by lasting and entrenched ethnic, cultural
and political differences. The country has long been split into the northern and western
Ukraine, where Ukrainian is the official and everyday lingua franca, and the more
industrialised regions of the east and south where a mixture of Russian speaking Ukrainians
and ethnic Russians reside. Additionally, there has long been Hungarian and Romanian
settlement in the west of the country, and a particularly important Polish presence, whose
unofficial capital, Lviv, was once the Polish city of Lwow. The Russian Orthodox Church is
the predominant form of Christianity in the East, whilst in the west the Christian tradition
tends towards Roman Catholicism.
Politically the Eastern and Southern Oblasts (Regions) which includes the cities and
centres of heavy industry, Kharkov, Lugansk, Donetsk, Zaporozhe, Nikolayev, Kherson,
Simferopol and Odessa, have tended to tilt towards Russia whilst the western regions have had
a more western orientation. This has traditionally been reflected in the electoral division
of the country. There is no party which can be considered 'national' in this respect, except
ironically, the old Communist party, which of course is now banned. The major regional
parties have been the Fatherland party of Yulia Tymoshenko (since renamed) and the former
head of government, Arseniy Yatsenyuk as well as the ultra-nationalists predominantly in the
west of the country, and the deposed Victor Yanukovich's Party of the Regions in the East
(now defunct) along with its junior partner in the coalition, the Ukrainian Communist
Party.
However, what is new since the coup in February 2014 there has been the emergence from the
shadows of ultra-nationalist (fascist) parties and movements, with both parliamentary and
extra-parliamentary (i.e.,military) wings. In the main 'Svoboda' or Freedom Party, and the
paramilitaries of 'Right Sector' (Fuhrer: Dimitry Yarosh) who spearheaded the coup in Kiev;
these have been joined or changed their names to inter alia the Radical Party, and Patriots
of the Ukraine; this in addition to the punitive right-wing militias, such as the Azov
Regiment responsible for numerous atrocities in the Don Bas.
Suffice it to say, however, that these political movements and parties did not emerge from
nowhere.
This far-right tradition has been historically very strong in the western Ukraine. The
Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) was first established in 1929 and brought
together, war veterans, student fraternities, far-right groups and various other disoriented
socially and political flotsam and jetsam under its banner. The OUN took its ideological
position from the writings of one, Dymtro Dontsov, who, like Mussolini had been a socialist,
and who was instrumental in creating an indigenous Ukrainian fascism based upon the usual
mish-mash of writings and theories including Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Sorel, and Charles
Maurras. Dontsov also translated the works of Hitler and Mussolini into Ukrainian.
The OUN was committed to ethnic purity, and relied on violence, assassination and
terrorism, not least against other Ukrainians, to achieve its goal of a totalitarian and
homogeneous nation-state. Assorted enemies and impediments to this goal were Communists,
Russians, Poles, and of course – Jews. Strongly oriented toward the Axis powers OUN
founder Evhen Konovalets (1891-1938) stated that his movement was ''waging war against mixed
marriages'', with Poles, Russians and Jews, the latter which he described as ''foes of our
national rebirth''. Indeed, rabid anti-Semitism has been a leitmotif in the history of
Ukrainian fascism, which we will return to below.
Konovelts himself was assassinated by a KGB hit-man in 1938 after which the movement split
into two wings: (OUN-m) under Andrii Melnyk and, more importantly for our purposes (OUN-b)
under Stepan Bandera. Both wings committed to a new fascist Europe. Upon the German invasion
in June 1941, the OUN-b attempted to establish a Ukrainian satellite state loyal to Nazi
Germany. Stepan Lenkavs'kyi the then chief propagandist of the OUN-b 'government' advocated
the physical destruction of Ukrainian Jewry. OUN-b's 'Prime Minister' Yaroslav Stets'ko, and
deputy to Bandera supported, ''the destruction of the Jews and the expedience of bringing
German methods of exterminating Jewry to Ukraine, barring their assimilation and the
like.''
During the early days of the rapid German advance into the Soviet Union there were some
140 pogroms in the western Ukraine claiming the lives of between 13000-35000 people
(Untermensch, in fascist terminology). In 1943-1944 OUN-b and its armed wing the Ukrainian
Insurgent Army (Ukrainska povstanska armia – UPA) carried out large scale ethnic
cleansing resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands; this was a particularly gruesome
affair in Volhynia where some 90000 Poles and thousands of Jews were murdered. The campaign
of the UPA continued well into the 1950s until it was virtually wiped out by the Soviet
forces.
It should be said that during this early period Bandera himself had been incarcerated by
the German authorities up until his release in 1944, since unlike Bandera they were not
enamoured of an independent Ukrainian state but wanted total control. Bandera was only
released at this late date since the German high command was endeavouring to build up a
pro-German Ukrainian quisling military force to hold up the remorseless advance of the Red
Army. Also pursuant to this it is also worth noting that during this period the 14th Galizian
Waffen SS Division, a military Ukrainian collaborationist formation established by Heinrich
Himmler, was formed to fight the Soviet forces, and yet another being the Nachtingal brigade;
(1) this unit was integrated into the 14th Galizian in due course. It is also interesting to
note, that every year, and up to 2014 commemoration ceremony including veterans of this unit
takes place with a march through Lviv in an evening torchlight parade – genuine Nazi
pastiche. The flag of this unit is not dissimilar to the Peugeot logo, the standing lion, and
can be seen at ultra-nationalist rallies as well as football matches involving Lviv Karparti
FC. There are also numerous statues of Bandera across Ukraine, and since the 2014 coup even
street names bearing the same name. Significantly the UPA have now received political
rehabilitation from the Kiev Junta, with Bandera declared a hero of the Ukraine and the UPA
rebranded as 'freedom fighters.' One particularly splendid statue of Bandera stands proudly
in Lviv and is usually adorned with flowers.
Other novel attractions the capital of Banderestan include 'Jewish themed restaurants' one
such is Kryivka (Hideout or Lurking Hole) where guests have a choice of dishes and whose
dinning walls are decorated with larger than life portraits of Bandera, the toilet with
Russian and Jewish anecdotes. At another Jewish themed restaurant guests are offered black
hats of the sort worn by Hasidim. The menu lists no prices for the dishes; instead, one is
required to haggle over highly inflated prices ''in the Jewish fashion''. Yes, it's all good
clean fun in Lviv. Anti-Semitism also sells. Out of 19 book vendors on the streets of central
Lviv, 16 were openly selling anti-Semitic literature. About 70% of the anti-Semitic
publications in Ukraine are being published by and educational institution called MUAP (The
Inter-Regional Academy of Personnel Management). MAUP is a large, well-connected and
increasingly powerful organization funded from outside anti-Semite sources, and also
connected to White Supremacist groups in the USA and to the David Duke, former Grand Wizard
of the Ku Klux Klan.
(It is one of the ironies of history that if the Zionists in AIPAC and the Washington
neo-con think tanks, and the Labour Party Friends of Israel, were so concerned about
anti-Semitism, they might try looking for it in Lviv. They wouldn't have to search very
far.)
Present day neo-Nazi groupings in Ukraine – Svoboda (Freedom) party and Right Sector
– have been the direct descendants from the prior ideological cesspool. Heading Svoboda
is Oleh Tyahnybok. Although these are separate organizations Tyahnybok's deputy Yuriy
Mykhalchyshyn is the main link between Svoboda's official wing and neo-Nazi militias like
Right Sector. The Social-Nationalist party as it was formerly known chose as its logo an
amended version of the Wolfsangel, a symbol used by many SS divisions on the Eastern front
during the war who in 2004 a celebration of the OUN-UPA, stated in 2004, that ''they fought
against the Muscovite, Germans, Jews and other scum who wanted to take away our Ukrainian
state.'' And further that ''Ukraine was ruled by a Muscovite-Jewish mafia.'' Tyahnybok came
under pressure from the then President, Yuschenko, to retract his inflammatory statements,
which he did, but he then retracted the retraction!
Given the fact that Svoboda was, apart from its stamping grounds in the west, making
little national electoral headway, it was essential to clean up its image and deny its Nazi
past. But this was always going to be difficult since the members of such groups cannot help
the unscripted outbursts and faux pas which they tend to make and which reveals their true
colours. For example, following the conviction and sentencing of John Demjanjuk to five years
in jail for his role as an accessory to the murder of 27,900 people at the Sobibor death
camp, Tyahnybok travelled to Germany and met up with Demjanjuk's lawyer, presenting the death
camp guard as a hero, a victim of persecution ''who is fighting for truth''.
And so it goes on. We can therefore infer that this organization is inveterate fascist. More
disturbing Svoboda has links with the so-called Alliance of National European Movements,
which includes: Nationaldemokraterna of Sweden, Front Nationale of France, Fiamma Tricolore
in Italy, the Hungarian Jobbik and the Belgian National Front. More importantly Svoboda held
several ministerial portfolios in the Kiev administration, and Right Sector swaggers around
Kiev streets with impunity, and/or are being drafted into a National Guard to deal with the
separatist movements in the east, or to beat down anyone who doesn't conform to their Ayran
racial and political ideals.
One would have thought that this mutating revolution in the Ukraine would have drawn
attention of the centre-left to the fact that fascism had gained a vital beachhead in Europe,
and that the danger signals should be flashing. But not a bit of it; a perusal of the
Guardian newspaper quickly reveals that their chief concern has been with a non-existent
'Russian threat'. One of their reporters – or old friend, Luke Harding -described Right
Sector as an ''eccentric group of people with unpleasant right-wing views.'' Priceless! This
must rank as the political understatement of the century. In fact, the Guardian was simply
reiterating the US-imposed neo-conservative foreign policy. But naturally, this is par for
the course.
(1) The Nachtingal brigade, which was later incorporated into the SS Galizien, took part
in a three-day massacre of the Jewish population of Lvov (now Lviv) from 30 June 1941. Roman
Shukhevych was the commander of the Nachtingal and later, in 1943, became commander of the
Ukrainian Insurgent Army (the "Banderivtsy", or UPA/UIA[5] ), armed henchmen of the fascist
Stepan Bandera, who after the war pretended that they had fought both Nazis and Communists.
Members of the division are also accused of having murdered some 800 residents of the Polish
village of Huta Pieniacka and 44 civilians in the village of Ch?aniów.
Paolo , July 6, 2018 at 7:11 am
Just for the record: the Ukrainians hailed the Nazis as liberators after the Soviets had
let millions of Ukrainians die of hunger in the thirties, a sort of "genocide" that goes
under the name of Holodomor and has officially been recognized by western Parlaments only a
few decades ago. In eastern Ukraine there were no more inhabitants after the Holodomor, and
the Russians imported hundreds of thousand peasants from Russia to get agriculture working
again.
The problems of Ukraine are so deep that fomenting regime change there was a most idiotic
thing to do. Sooner or later the problems will explode, and it will be tough shit. Whoever
helped this regime change should be locked up in some high security jail as far as
possible.
Garrett Connelly , July 6, 2018 at 9:52 am
The big lie is 180° opposite of reality repeated over and over using free corporate
propaganda.
vinnieoh , July 5, 2018 at 3:15 pm
Still scratching my head at the electric last line of Mr. Lazare's piece. I'm mean, I'm
used to "official" organs like WaPo and NYT publishing whatever narrative is most helpful to
whatever pieces are being moved on the chessboard, but for the same "freelance journalist" to
have written both the earlier Foreign Policy piece and the recent WaPo piece is a puzzle to
me.
Does Joshua Cohen just write stuff that goes with the flow (at any particular moment) and
has a good chance of being published (and consequently of himself being paid)?
Or did this
person really have an epiphany, and the scales fell from his eyes? I suspect a third
explanation though what that may be eludes me. One thing is for sure, as a Trump/Putin
meeting gets closer, expect more false "official" narratives concerning both Ukraine and
Syria.
'The U.S.-backed "Euromaidan" uprising not only drove out former president Viktor
Yanukovych in February 2014, who had won an OSCE-certified election, but tore the country in
two, precisely because ultra-rightists like C14 were in the lead But if one had to choose the
looniest story of all, one that best reflects the abject toadyism of the reporting classes,
it would have to be "Why Jews and Ukrainians Have Become Unlikely Allies," a 1,400-word
article that ran on the Post-owned Foreign Policy website in May 2014.'
Here's the thing though: however weird it may sound, there actually DOES seem to exist
some sort of tacit alliance between (some, not all) Jews and Ukrainian Nazis. Even if their
ultimate goals are completely at odds–the Nazis hate the EU, but the Jews mostly want
to join it–they nearly always seem to work together against Russia. It has even been
maintained that the Azov Battalion (one of the all-volunteer Neo-Nazi militias fighting
against the Donbass rebels) was entirely financed for a time by Jewish oligarch Ihor
Kholomoisky, at least until he did something to piss Poroshenko off and got sacked from his
post as governor of Dniepropetrovsk. And in the beginning, Jews who tried to point out that
Neo-Nazi groups were involved in overthrowing Yanukovych, like Dr. Stephen Cohen, were
roundly denounced a 'Russia apologists' just for stating facts.
But now that Washington's whole Ukraine project has gone south, I guess the Nazis, having
outlived their usefulness, are, as usual, to be the fall-guys and take all the blame.
Anna , July 5, 2018 at 2:39 pm
yeh, the Kaganat of Nuland has many veils.
The most stunning aspect of the banderite putsch in Kiev was the dead silence of nazi-hunters
from Wiesenthal Center, the always oh-so-sensitive ADL, the main 52 (fifty-two!) American
Jewish organizations, and the overall docility and compliance of the "righteous" Israel with
the banderite-neo-Nazi ideology by Kagans-selected power structures in Ukraine.
Mr. Kolomojsky, a financier of neo-nazi battalion Azov, is still an Israeli citizen.
Mrs. Nuland-Kagan, the main machinator of the regime change in Kiev, has not been ostracized
by the Jewish Community at large.
The deeply amoral and bloodthirsty Carl Gerschman from NED, who has been the main cheerleader
for the putsch and for the installing the banderite-friendly government in Kiev, has not been
ostracized by the Jewish Community at large either. What a stench!
https://medium.com/@gmochannel/us-staged-a-coup-in-ukraine-brief-history-and-facts-898c6d0007d6
Pft , July 5, 2018 at 9:07 pm
Yeah. The prime minister and many of the top oligarchs are Jewish. Relations between
Ukraine and Israel seem quite good despite the UNSC vote that the US abstained on regarding
Israeli settlements in the West Bank, perhaps reminded by Stalin doing the same to them in
the 1920's.
As for relations with the neo nazis I remember before WWII that Zionists in Palestine
cooperated with Nazis who sent German Jews to Palestine in return for the purchase of German
goods which were being boycotted by Jews in the west
I suspect most Americans don't know Ukrainian history. The early years of Bolshevik rule
were quite brutal and over 10 million rural Christians lost their lives in Ukraine over their
policies .Solzhenitsyn 200 years can shed some light on the roots of the anti-Semitism among
the peasants that developed in the 20's-30's and no doubt has been passed on.
Robert , July 6, 2018 at 4:24 pm
I've thought about this myself and have concluded that a fair number of Jewish
organizations and institutions in the Ukraine were receiving a small portion of the US State
Department funding allocated to the Ukraine each year of $200-250 million, totaling $5
billion since 1992. In return for this rather small (by US standards) outlay to a broad
spectrum of NGOs, private educational and religious institutions, and political groups, the
US purchased an enormous amount of influence. Most of the members of these groups were
unaware of this US support, as the funds were funneled through individual leaders who were
tasked to influence opinion, organize demonstrations and petitions, and write letters to the
press and government members. Scholarships to the US and Canada were offered to promising
youth to ensure continuity of support. For this reason, most Jewish and other groups
operating in Ukraine have, until recently and only with reluctance, been willing to deviate
from the official US "story". Thus, they knowingly (at least as far as their leadership was
concerned) supported an overtly US-led neo-Nazi coup.
mike , July 5, 2018 at 1:24 pm
Makes sense that Josh Cohen is a former U.S. Agency for International Development project
officer involved in managing economic reform projects in the former Soviet Union. Isn't that
really what this is all about? Putin gets elected and takes charge of the economy, jailing
corrupt oligarchs and putting the kibosh on said reform projects sponsored by us in care of
Jeffrey Sachs et al. As Russia tries to reassert its sovereignty the US gets miffed and
retaliates.
The Electronic Intifada has just posted an article by Asa Winstanley detailing how Israel,
among others, has been supplying the Ukrainian Azov Battalion with military arms. It's well
worth reading.
The next time you hear a pro-Israel mouthpiece sounding off about purported antisemitism
in the British Labour Party, or in pro-Palestinine activist circles in the U.S., invite them
to consider Israel's policy -- and that of the U.S. as well as friendly European states -- of
direct military sponsorship of textbook Nazism in Ukraine. Jews are being menaced and beaten
in the streets of Kiev by armed bands who celebrate their historical persecution, while thugs
like Avigdor Lieberman sit cordially with officials representing that regime. But then, such
warm relations between Zionists and anti-Semites is an old story.
Jeff Harrison , July 5, 2018 at 1:03 pm
Interesting. Anyone with two brains to rub together knows that the US, to the best of it's
ability, has been surrounding Russia with compliant right wing governments, usually
dictators, but we've gotten better at manipulating elections to get reliable puppet
government. The bad news is that it is a full time job to stay on top of that.
It used to be that the only things one could depend on were "death & taxes." Now of
course we must add to that list the very dependable presence of CIA / State Dept lies
parroted by MSM all over the West. Lies which are endlessly repeated in defiance of all
physical reality and often in direct opposition to actual events in the actual world we live
in. From the Ukraine coup, to Russia-gate, to the "Assad's gassing his own people" regime
change propaganda, to the totally surreal Alice in Wonderland Skripnal poisoning nonsense in
the U.K, the Western MSM have been as dependable as the rising sun. They can and do provide
fact-free, evidence-free reporting directly from the bowels of the deep state in support of
the neocolonial West, including unending support for the never ending resort to mass violence
the West relies upon to keep the rest of the planet subjugated – just as it has for the
last 500+ years.
irina , July 5, 2018 at 2:06 pm
It's not just the media. The late night talk show hosts are doing their bit too, as I
heard
last night on a Jimmy Kimmel rerun (of a recent show). Can't remember the context as
I was doing the dishes, but did hear him say the usual "Russian illegally annexed Crimea"
standard phrase, immediately followed by "and then invaded Ukraine". The latter just
casually tossed off as a given. People hear these memes constantly repeated and,
regardless of their veracity (suspect to say the least) it becomes part of their
worldview.
Who is behind the political preaching of hosts like Jimmy Kimmel ?
Inquiring minds want to know !
Joe Tedesky , July 5, 2018 at 2:43 pm
You know what irina, seeing these late night talk shows go all crazy over Putin makes me
think of the Zio-Media executives, and where their allegiance to power resides. Joe
Devil's Advocate , July 5, 2018 at 2:48 pm
I would assume you'd have to look at who owns the media source in question. Kimmel's show
is on ABC, which is partly owned by Disney. Follow the money chain of those 2 parent
companies, and you have your answer.
irina – I quite agree. The same is true of the former Daily Show crew members who
now have their own shows. Several have shown themselves to be quite the little imperialist
war mongers when it comes to gleefully repeating the CIA sponsored Syrian regime change and
Russiagate propaganda. Samantha Bee & John Oliver kept triggering my gag reflex with
their propaganda lines until I found a simple but effective solution and stopped watching
them altogether. We have an amazingly seamless propaganda system here in the U.S. One can
chose to either get one's "pro-war regime change propaganda" delivered with barely concealed
racism and misogyny from Fox News, or instead opt for hearing the same nonsense delivered
with pretentious blather and catchy jazz interludes at PBS. American democracy is all about
having "choices."
Jeff Harrison , July 5, 2018 at 7:57 pm
I quite agree. I knew the minute that they started calling RT a propaganda outlet that, in
fact, the USG was running a full scale propaganda operation. I don't know if I simply wasn't
paying enough attention or if they have, in fact ramped the operation up, but I can hardly
read any MSM outlet's output without calling bullshit on it.
irina , July 6, 2018 at 2:55 am
Jimmy Kimmel actually used to be funny and there is a really good clip
(somewhere on youtube no doubt) of him reading a 'doctored' Dr. Seuss
book to The Donald (a live guest) during his primary candidacy.
But since The Donald's election Kimmel has opened almost every show
with 'ten minutes hate' segment on The Donald. I still watch (or at least
listen) occasionally because I want to know what is being fed to The Public.
You are absolutely right though, "we have an amazingly seamless propaganda
system here in the US". The average person maybe has 30 minutes to
devote to the news, between getting home and having dinner; they watch
some sort of news show and think they are 'informed'. But it actually takes
MANY hours and a knowledge of alternative websites to even begin to piece
together an approximation of what might, in reality, be going on.
The Russians used to say that, at least they knew they were being propagandized.
Unfortunately, probably due to 'American Exceptionalism', most Americans think
the MSM is bringing them 'the truth'. But nothing could be further from The Truth.
Peter H , July 6, 2018 at 10:41 am
I can't count the number of times I've had to turn off Colbert's Late Show for his
Russian/Putin bashing BS. So disappointing. That's a rule in my house now. The first mention
of Russia and off it goes.
Drew Hunkins , July 5, 2018 at 12:52 pm
Likewise, the corporate militarist-Zio media should eventually have to concede someday
that the current Syrian "rebels" are little more than ruthless sociopathic
Saudi-Zio-Washington intel agency supported mercenary terrorists.
Folks in the know knew very early on that much of the Kiev putschists and violent invaders
of Eastern Ukraine were neo-Nazi types bent on eradicating the last vestiges of Russian
social and ethnic solidarity.
It's really truly remarkable when one steps back to think about it all. These are the
depraved groups the crypto-fascists, the Wall Street militarist imperialists, and Zionists
have embedded themselves with: bloodthirsty Takfiri mercenary terrorists and neo-Nazis.
Bob Van Noy , July 5, 2018 at 2:25 pm
Each time I see an article like this I'm reminded of the videos of Zbigniew Brzezinski's
early meetings with the Mujahideen and his manipulation of cultures on The Grand Chessboard
or "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" a totally absurd assumption and the natural outcome
of that absurdity, is blowback which this article again addresses. Our "boots on the ground"
end up paying the price of this kind of supposed intellectualism. Shameful. Thank you Drew
Hunkins.
Joe Tedesky , July 5, 2018 at 2:39 pm
Bob the old saying if I got right is the company you keep is what you become. We have
truly loss our way, and Zbigniew Brzezinski is one of the biggest reasons we have become the
predators of this dying green earth. All this for the profit, as all mankind must yield to
the power of the dollar. Sad. Joe
MBeaver , July 6, 2018 at 5:03 am
One would think we had learned from Vietnam. Instead the "peace loving" liberals do
everything to destabilize whole region for nothing and then send soldiers in who die for
their messed up agenda.
JWalters , July 5, 2018 at 7:16 pm
It is truly remarkable. A lot of the behind-the-scenes magic is explained in "War
Profiteers and Israel's Bank" http://warprofiteerstory.blogspot.com
.
What is happening in Germany? Is "open borders" that Merkel has championed on its last
legs? It seems that the CSU is worried about the coming elections in Bavaria where AfD might
do much better than expected. Just as the outcome of the Italian elections was for a
government coalition opposed to illegal economic immigration under the guise of asylum for
political persecution.
Hungarian foreign minister in an interview with a snowflake BBC reporter. It seems that
the political trend in central Europe is away from multi-culturalism. Hungary wants to
maintain its culture.
The Red Tory thing is interesting. I can see what "anon" (comment No. 5) is driving at,
though the use of the word fascism is freighted with the eventual barbaric outcome of the
Nazi project, as well as the outgrowths of western guilt for allowing it to proceed which in
many instances such as political correctness and toleration of Nazi-like tactics by
descendents of Nazi victims, have resulted in a new version of fascism.
It is interesting to note that the anti-system parties of Europe, such as those in control
in Hungary and Austria, seem to take more leftwing positions on issues other than immigration
than sell-out former Socialist parties which have degenerated into the politically correct
portion of the anti-russian neo-liberal centre. Even the term "anti-system" is associated
with the Nazi movement during Weimar but fits with the situation in the western world today.
Thus, Le Pen, Orban and the Austrian government are more reliable at protecting workers'
rights than the sell-out centre, and the cinque stelle (I hope I'm not that far off in
spelling) can coalesce with the Lega, which also takes positions to the left of the corrupt
centre in areas other than immigration. On immigration itself, here in Canada or in the US
where everybody is eventually an immigrant other than the first nation remnant, it is hard to
be totally anti-immigrant, but it is understandable in Europe where historic ethnicities are
in some danger and where the results of the destabilisation of Africa and the Middle East by
the yankee imperium and the Israelis is the root cause of the immigration problem.
As a final statement, I agree with the writer and say mea culpa mea maxima culpa as far as
his anti or really pro- Putin-Nazi viewpoint is expressed.
The term "national neoliberalism" should probably be adopted as the most succinct term for Trump economic policy
Notable quotes:
"... To paraphrase Ralph Nader, the U.S. corporate state is a two-headed beast. Sure, President Trump and the Republican Party are currently handing over public lands to oil and gas companies, eliminating net neutrality, introducing pro-corporate tax legislation, kowtowing to the military industrial complex, defunding the welfare state, and attempting to privatize education and deregulate finance. ..."
"... But let's not forget our recent Democratic presidents, for example, who are also guilty of empowering and enriching big business and disempowering and impoverishing ordinary Americans. ..."
"... In war the moral is to the material as 3 is to one, said Bonaparte. The neoliberal world order according the Bretton Woods and Washington cannot raise and apply enough material [bombings, drones, aircraft carrier intimidation THAAD in Korea are the ante] without destroying itself and in its throes the world. ..."
"... The U.S. trade deficit in goods, without services, was $810 billion. The United States exported $1.551 trillion in goods. It imported $2.361 trillion. The USA imports more than they export to: China, Japan, Canada, Germany and Mexico. USA top 5 Trade deficits: China $375 billion, Mexico $71, Japan $69, Germany $65, and Canada 18 billion. ..."
Trump behavior at Canadian G7 meeting was boorish, but it is logical and is consistent which his previous stance on globalization:
he rejects neoliberal globalization.
Sasha Breger Bush proposed the term "national neoliberalism" to depict the transition from "classic neoliberalism" which has
been started with the election of Trump.
I think the term really catches the essence of the election of Trump. and should probably be adopted as a succinct description
of Trump economic policy.
The nationalism, xenophobia, isolationism, and paranoia of Donald Trump are about to replace the significantly more cosmopolitan
outlook of his post-WWII predecessors. While Trump is decidedly pro-business and pro-market, he most certainly does not see
himself as a global citizen.
Nor does he intend to maintain the United States' extensive global footprint or its relatively open trading network. In
other words, while neoliberalism is not dead, it is being transformed into a geographically more fragmented and localized system
(this is not only about the US election, but also about rising levels of global protectionism and Brexit, among other anti-globalization
trends around the world).
I expect that the geographic extent of the US economy in the coming years will coincide with the new landscape of U.S. allies
and enemies, as defined by Donald Trump and his administration.
But if we take seriously the idea that Trump is a consequence of the disintegration of American democracy rather than the
cause of it, this "blame game" becomes especially problematic.
Partisan bickering, with one party constantly pointing to the other as responsible for the country's ills, covers up the
fact that Democrats and Republicans alike have presided over the consolidation of corporate power in the United States.
To paraphrase Ralph Nader, the U.S. corporate state is a two-headed beast. Sure, President Trump and the Republican
Party are currently handing over public lands to oil and gas companies, eliminating net neutrality, introducing pro-corporate
tax legislation, kowtowing to the military industrial complex, defunding the welfare state, and attempting to privatize education
and deregulate finance.
But let's not forget our recent Democratic presidents, for example, who are also guilty of empowering and enriching
big business and disempowering and impoverishing ordinary Americans.
JackD, June 10, 2018 9:58 am
@Likbez: "Sure, President Trump, etc" is your important sentence. It is the immediate need. First things, first.
ilsm, June 10, 2018 3:12 pm
In war the moral is to the material as 3 is to one, said Bonaparte. The neoliberal world order according the Bretton Woods
and Washington cannot raise and apply enough material [bombings, drones, aircraft carrier intimidation THAAD in Korea are the
ante] without destroying itself and in its throes the world.
Trump is not tearing apart NATO anyone not earning money is a PNAC think tanks knows NATO has become an aggression against
Russia with similar intent as Hitler.
Grabbing Sevastopol and aiding Russians in territory occupied by Kyiv are [bold] defensive moves. The threat of Chinese islands
in the South China Sea is the US Navy super carriers intimidations has no career raiding Hainan.
rps, June 10, 2018 7:42 pm
I was curious if Yglesias is a Canadian since his editorial sided with the G7 leaders stance against Trump's fair-trade often
labelled as 'protectionism' of USA industries. He's a New Yorker as I pondered what's his stake in this political tirade against
Trump's pro-America versus anti-globalist policies?
It appears that the media has glided over the fact Trump had suggested to the other G7 leaders that all trade barriers, including
tariffs and subsidies, be eliminated, ""You go tariff-free, you go barrier-free, you go subsidy free." Protectionist Canadian
PM Trudeau howled at a press conference after Trump had left on his way to Singapore. Why? Is it because Trudeau is committed
to the welfare of Canadians and their industries? How dare the president of the USA- in turn, advocate for citizenry and country
as does his G7 counterparts for their countries.
The U.S. trade deficit in goods, without services, was $810 billion. The United States exported $1.551 trillion in goods.
It imported $2.361 trillion. The USA imports more than they export to: China, Japan, Canada, Germany and Mexico. USA top 5 Trade
deficits: China $375 billion, Mexico $71, Japan $69, Germany $65, and Canada 18 billion.
US citizens and their jobs were swindled with cheaper foreign goods flooding American businesses and stores as good manufacturing
jobs headed overseas. Jobs that created the middle class and all their earned benefits and standard of living decreased/disappeared
quickly with NAFTA and the WTO.
Concisely, trade deficits destroyed the middle class, the working class, blue collar, and in turn, increased poverty and homelessness.
Destroyed small town anywhere in the USA with manufacturing and jobs fleeing overseas in search of cheap labor. Go travel across
the USA and see the boarded up towns, walk the streets of Flint Michigan, Detroit, Martinsville Virginia, Gary Indiana, Freeport
Il, etc. Throw a dart at a USA map and you'll hit a town devastated by 'free' to lose your job trade. In 2014, 2.3 million job
losses due to trade with China. Job losses in the millions have been slowly replaced with 'service' jobs and/or $8.00 an hour
part-time no benefits workers as the new norm.
Remember when Walmart's original slogan was "Buy American"? Sam Walton before he died, was big on "Buy American," and it appeared
in signs in the stores and on TV ads. His heirs quickly changed it to "Buy Chinese" destroying the american dream and small town
USA.
Yet Yglesias' preference is all for the unbalanced trade with our G7 frenemies and punishing a president who chooses fair trade
practices to ensure US jobs for American citizens. Makes me wonder who or what Yglesias truly advocates for, the NWO or the country
of origin on his passport?
"What we must do is this: revise our tariff on the basis of a reciprocal exchange of goods, allowing other Nations to buy and
to pay for our goods by sending us such of their goods as will not seriously throw any of our industries out of balance Such objectives
as these three, restoring farmers' buying power, relief to the small banks and home-owners and a reconstructed tariff policy,
are only a part of ten or a dozen vital factors. But they seem to be beyond the concern of a national administration which can
think in terms only of the top of the social and economic structure. It has sought temporary relief from the top down rather than
permanent relief from the bottom up. It has totally failed to plan ahead in a comprehensive way. It has waited until something
has cracked and then at the last moment has sought to prevent total collapse.
It is high time to get back to fundamentals. It is high time to admit with courage that we are in the midst of an emergency
at least equal to that of war. Let us mobilize to meet it." "The Forgotten Man" speech, 1937. Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Since Clinton signed NAFTA in 1994 and the WTO, American jobs and industry left our shores seeking the lowest common denominator-
cheap slave labor. To paraphrase FDR into the late 20th and early 21st century, "Clinton and his successors concern of their national
administrations thought in terms only of the top of the social and economic structure. It has sought temporary relief from the
top down rather than permanent relief from the bottom up.It has totally failed to plan ahead in a comprehensive way."
Bruce Webb, June 10, 2018 9:16 pm
Nothing personally Rps, but you do not get Triffin Dilemma and global reserve currency. Please no more NAFTA obsession when
no jobs left with that deal and exports excelerated. The global reserve currency and booming financial markets create a surplus
in services over goods. It also creates the need for a goods deficit to stabilize the financial system. You cannot wave a wand
and cure something that cannot be cured. You need a major depression to rebalance and drive capital from america.
Bruce Webb, June 10, 2018 9:19 pm
Likbez, Neoliberalism IS American. Trump is pro-East Asia
"... By the way, the US provides 22% of NATO funding, a formula which is based on population. Thus, if the European members increased their contributions to NATO, the US contribution would also rise! ..."
"... Donald Trump will remain exasperated because he is fighting the good fight but not really understanding who his adversary's are. ..."
"... Foreign countries aren't taking advantage of the USA. American industrialists are taking advantage of the USA. Why does Apple make its iPhones in China? Why does Ford build so many of its SUVs in Mexico? Not because of the decisions those countries have made. It's because of the decisions American industrial leaders have made. ..."
"... The USA has a trade surplus with Canada. Trump lied about that. ..."
At the G-7 summit in Canada, President Donald Trump described America as "the piggy bank
that everybody is robbing."
After he left Quebec, his director of Trade and Industrial Policy, Peter Navarro, added a
few parting words for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau: "There's a special place in hell for any
foreign leader that engages in bad faith diplomacy with President Donald J. Trump and then
tries to stab him in the back on the way out the door. And that's what weak, dishonest Justin
Trudeau did. And that comes right from Air Force One."
In Singapore, Trump tweeted more about that piggy bank: "Why should I, as President of the
United States, allow countries to continue to make Massive Trade Surpluses, as they have for
decades [while] the U.S. pays close to the entire cost of NATO-protecting many of these same
countries that rip us off on Trade?"
To understand what drives Trump, and explains his exasperation and anger, these remarks are
a good place to begin.
Our elites see America as an "indispensable nation," the premiere world power whose ordained
duty it is to defend democracy, stand up to dictators and aggressors, and uphold a liberal
world order.
They see U.S. wealth and power as splendid tools that fate has given them to shape the
future of the planet.
Trump sees America as a nation being milked by allies who free-ride on our defense efforts
as they engage in trade practices that enrich their own peoples at America's expense.
Where our elites live to play masters of the universe, Trump sees a world laughing behind
America's back, while allies exploit our magnanimity and idealism for their own national
ends.
The numbers are impossible to refute and hard to explain.
Last year, the EU had a $151 billion trade surplus with the U.S. China ran a $376 billion
trade surplus with the U.S., the largest in history. The world sold us $796 billion more in
goods than we sold to the world.
A nation that spends more than it takes in from taxes, and consumes more of the world's
goods than it produces itself for export, year in and year out, is a nation on the way
down.
We are emulating our British cousins of the 19th century.
Trump understands that this situation is not sustainable. His strength is that the people
are still with him on putting America first.
Yet he faces some serious obstacles.
What is his strategy for turning a $796 billion trade deficit into a surplus? Is he prepared
to impose the tariffs and import restrictions that would be required to turn America from the
greatest trade-deficit nation in history to a trade-surplus nation, as we were up until the
mid-1970s?
Americans are indeed carrying the lion's share of the load of the defense of the West, and
of fighting the terrorists and radical Islamists of the Middle East, and of protecting South
Korea and Japan.
But if our NATO and Asian allies refuse to make the increases in defense he demands, is
Trump really willing to cancel our treaty commitments, walk away from our war guarantees, and
let these nations face Russia and China on their own? Could he cut that umbilical cord?
Ike's secretary of state John Foster Dulles spoke of conducting an "agonizing reappraisal"
of U.S. commitments to defend NATO allies if they did not contribute more money and troops.
Dulles died in 1959, and that reappraisal, threatened 60 years ago, never happened. Indeed,
when the Cold War ended, our NATO allies cut defense spending again. Yet we are still
subsidizing NATO in Europe and have taken on even more allies since the Soviet Empire fell.
If Europe refuses to invest the money in defense that Trump demands, or accept the tariffs
America needs to reduce and erase its trade deficits, what does he do? Is he prepared to shut
U.S. bases and pull U.S. troops out of the Baltic republics, Poland, and Germany, and let the
Europeans face Vladimir Putin and Russia themselves?
This is not an academic question. For the crunch that was inevitable when Trump was elected
seems at hand.
Trump promised to negotiate with Putin and improve relations with Russia. He promised to
force our NATO allies to undertake more of their own defense. He pledged to get out and stay
out of Mideast wars and begin to slash the trade deficits that we have run with the world.
That's what America voted for.
Now, after 500 days, he faces formidable opposition to these defining goals of his campaign,
even within his own party.
Putin remains a pariah on Capitol Hill. Our allies are rejecting the tariffs Trump has
imposed and threatening retaliation. Free-trade Republicans reject tariffs that might raise the
cost of the items U.S. companies make abroad and then ships back to the United States.
The decisive battles between Trumpian nationalism and globalism remain ahead of us. Trump's
critical tests have yet to come.
And our exasperated president senses this.
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of a new book, Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles
That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever. To find out more about Patrick
Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators
website at www.creators.com.
America spends 3 times as much on defense as its allies because it is addicted to military
spending. The solution is not to pressure other countries to acquire the same addiction. The
solution is for America cut its own military spending.
This is just another example of America trying to "export" its domestic issues. Quit
blaming foreigners and deal with your issues.
"A nation that spends more than it takes in from taxes, and consumes more of the world's
goods than it produces itself for export, year in and year out, is a nation on the way down.
We are emulating our British cousins of the 19th century." never imagined I'd say this, but
you are absolutely correct. of course you neglect to acknowledge, Trump himself is an "elite"
and a "globalist". the fact his "game" is real estate, as opposed to governance is more of a
semantic distinction than ideological. debt-fueled consumerism drives real estate just as it
drives globalism. this is nothing new. add to this the pathological narcissism and the
ability to leverage moral bankruptcy as he has the tax codes and bankruptcy laws, and voila,
just another globalist in populist clothing. as I have maintained all along, he is not so
much anti-establishment as he is an establishment of one – he simply thrives in a
different type of swamp and favors a smaller oligarchy/plutocracy. and of course, there is
the big news out of Singapore/Korea, but again, much of the 'spin' or upside cited in a
denuclearized Korean peninsula involves the opportunity for North Korea to join the
globalists at the globalists' table. one can only wonder if there will be Ivanka's handbags
will be made in Panmunjom, and if Kim Jong Un will stay at the Trump hotel in DC? either way,
you are correct he is the candidate the American people, and the globalists "elected".
One problem with Trump's rant: the US enjoys a small trade surplus with Canada.
Would someone please get this president some hard facts and drill him on them for however
long it takes top get them fixed in his mind before he goes off half-cocked with any more
nonsense?
As always, Mr Buchanan sets out his personal agenda and then claims that Trump promised to
implement it if elected. The more Trump backs away from globalised free trade (if that's what
he's really doing), the more that suits the EU. The "core value" of the EU is a large
internal market protected by a high tariff wall. Globalization was rammed down an unwilling
EU's throat by the US in the Reagan years and only the British elite ever really believed in
it. As for NATO, nobody now believes that the US will honor its commitments, no matter how
much Europe pays, so logically, the European members are concentrating their additional
expenditure on an independent European defense system, which, needless to say, the US is
trying to obstruct.
By the way, the US provides 22% of NATO funding, a formula which is based
on population. Thus, if the European members increased their contributions to NATO, the US
contribution would also rise!
Donald Trump will remain exasperated because he is fighting the good fight but not really
understanding who his adversary's are.
Foreign countries aren't taking advantage of the USA. American industrialists are taking
advantage of the USA. Why does Apple make its iPhones in China? Why does Ford build so many
of its SUVs in Mexico? Not because of the decisions those countries have made. It's because
of the decisions American industrial leaders have made.
Secondly, there is absolutely no threat to NATO from Russia or Putin. Europe could slash
its already meager defense budget with only beneficial consequences. The same with Japan and
S. Korea. None of these countries need US military help. There are no real military threats
to these countries. US military spending has never been about defending other countries. It
is about enriching the shareholders of American military contractors.
So here is the real world: The United States has established a "liberal rules-based global
order" that allows wealthy American and European commercial interests to benefit mightily
from trade, and property and resource control in foreign countries. And this order is
maintained by US military power. That is why the US is "the one indispensable nation". We are
the nation that is allowed to break the order, to be the bully, in order for the rules-based
order to even exist. That's why we are beating up on countries that try to live outside of
this order like Iran, NK, Venezuela, Russia and everyone else who don't fall in line.
So Donald Trump is fighting against the power elite of the United States, he just doesn't
understand that. He is fighting against the most powerful people in the world, people who are
well represented by both political parties. He can win this fight if he lets the average
American on to this reality. And then leads them properly to a better, more balanced world.
But I suspect that he would be assassinated if he tried.
In re NATO and other oversea DOD spending, the old saying "who pays, says" has a corollary.
Who wants to say has to pay. The US, since WWII, has wanted, insisted, on being in charge of
everything we touch. This costs a lot, not to mention it often doesn't work the way we want.
It would be easy enough to stop spending all this money. The Pentagon and the
military-industrial complex would have a conniption and those whose defense bills we've been
paying would complain to high heaven, but Trump seems intent on trashing all those alliances
anyway and also on spending more money on defense than even the Pentagon thinks they need.
Trade deficits don't work the way you think they work. In todays economy the traditional
measures of deficits don't actually tell us much about what is going on.
Do you know what China does with that $350b trade surplus? A huge percentage of it is
rolled back immediately into US Treasury bonds because we are the only issuer of credit in
sufficient amounts and of suitable stability for them to buy. All of that deficit spending
Trump and the Republicans in congress passed last year is being financed by the very trade
imbalance that Trump is trying to eliminate.
But trade imbalances really don't tell us much about the flow of money. Most of the
imbalance is created by US companies that have built factories in China to sell goods back to
the US, then repatriate money back to the US in the form of dividends or stock buy backs
(which are not counted in the trade balance at all).
At best trade balances tell us very little meaningful about what is really going on, but
can be wildly deceptive. At worst they are an easy tool, for demogogs who have zero
understanding of what is going on, to inflame other uninformed people to justify trade
wars.
Interesting the things that Buchanan ignores (on purpose?). The USA has a trade surplus with
Canada. Trump lied about that. There's nothing wrong with the USA spending less money to defend other countries. Trump
doesn't have to insult our allies to do that.
"Trump understands that this situation is not sustainable."
You give him more credit than he deserves. What he does understand is that while we're
being the world's piggy bank, the American taxpayer is being the Military-Industrial
Complex's piggy-bank and that's just fine with him. As it is with most members of
Congress.
" our NATO allies cut defense spending again. Yet we are still subsidizing NATO in Europe "
Mr. Buchanan, like Trump, does not understand how NATO is funded. All NATO members have
been paying their dues. In fact, many pay a greater proportion relative to GDP per capita
than the U.S. does. Defense budgets are a different matter entirely.
This entire article seems to reduce complex issues into simple arithmetic. Economics and job
creation is about much more than balance of payments both the author and the US president
don't seem to realise this. Very shallow article.
America has a trade surplus with Canada, but seems determined to rub it in.
Some background. As the glaciers retreated south at the end of the ice age, they scraped
away Canada's topsoil and deposited it in America. Rural Canada has little arable areas; it's
beef and dairy by necessity. Costs are high and there are ten Americans to every Canadian
hence the subsidy. America subsidizes it's agriculture $55 billion annually.
Great, if we're upset about having to protect our allies in the Pacific, let's change the
Japanese constitution to allow them to have a real military again to defend themselves and
give the South Koreans nukes to balance out the power situation between them and the Norks/
Chinese. (Why is it so little is ever said about China being a nuclear power?) This whole
fantasy of denuclearization of the Korean peninsula is so naive it's laughable. If nukes
exist, there will never be any permanent guarantee of anything, and other countries will just
keep getting the bomb without our permission, like Pakistan and China. The genie is out of
the bottle, so time to be brutally realistic about what we face and what can be done. We can
whine all we want to about how it's not our responsibility, but then we expect other
countries to be hobbled and still somehow face enemy powers.
Lets take a look at the growing list of nations shifting to the right (nationalism and
populism)
-The Czech, Slovak and Slovenia Republics Poland, Hungary, Switzerland, the US.
Nations shifting this year to the right (nationalism and populism)
-Austria, Bavaria and Italy
Nations leaning to the right and leaning toward joining the VISEGRAD
-Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Serbia and Greece
AS YOU CAN SEE THE PILLARS OF MARXIST / SOCIALIST / COMMUNIST OPEN BORDERS EUROPE/EU ARE
BEING TAKEN DOWN. THE FIGHT WILL BE WITH FRANCE, GERMANY, BELGIUM, NETHERLANDS, BRITAIN,
SWEDEN AND THE UNELECTED EU SUPERSTATE. RIGHT NOW THE FIGHT IS WITH THE POOR SOUTHERN AND
EASTERN EUROPEAN INDIVIDUAL MEMBERS BUT EVENTUALLY IT WILL REACH A TIPPING POINT WHERE IT
BECOMES AN EXISTENTIAL THREAT BUT ITS ONLY AN EXISTENTIAL THREAT FOR THE LEFT AS THE EU
REACHES THE TIPPING POINT AND THE POWER SHIFTS TO THE RIGHT.
There is no universal, global brotherhood of "nationalist, right-wing, anti-SJW" values as
you seem to be trying to imply. The western far-right/alt-right is entirely self-serving and
their appeals to some kind of global nationalistic ideology is basically just a thin facade
that they promote in order to help generate support for their own self-serving agenda. The
only reason that the western far-right wants to reach out for allies right now is because
they are on the ropes and in a position of weakness; if the western far-right was instead in
a position of strength then they would not hesitate to put their boot on your neck. You are
quite naive if you don't think otherwise.
As an long time observer of the western far-right; its very clear that at the end of the
day, it is not principles that they care about, it is only themselves. That in itself would
be fine if they were upfront about it, however the problem is that they insist on being very
deceptive about their true motives. As I have said in this post, and so many others; why is
it that the far-right wants to postulate about "rights" and "fairness" when it comes to the
preservation of the white race, but then when it comes to any other ethnic group on earth
that has been negatively impacted by western colonialism the far-right just tells them to go
fuck themselves? This tells you all you need to know about how the far-right really feels
about its so called vaunted principles regarding racial/cultural preservation. They believe
in it for themselves yes, but will be more than willing to compromise this belief when it
comes to any others. You are missing the forest for the trees if you insist on adhering to
notions of abstract jointly-held values at the expense of basic strategic interests; this is
something I guarantee you is not lost on the western far-right.
You also assume that SJWism is going to spread to east asia and negatively affect the
culture there in the same way that it has in the west. Is this or is this not the primary
motivation why you seek an alliance with the western far-right? Have I understood your motive
correctly? Going on the assumption that this is actually your motive; then why haven't you
taken into account the fact that culturally and genetically speaking, east asians simply
think differently than whites do? There is no reason to believe that SJWism is going to run
as rampantly in east asia as it has in the west. It will gain a foothold that is for sure,
but it won't gain the same kind of traction that it has in the west. Ideologies cannot
completely change the essential natures of people, if this was the case then the alt-right
(based on racial determinism) would not exist in the first place. Anyways this is a moot
point; if the west fully declines then it would be unable to export its leftist ideals
anyways, so I don't see what you're mad about.
Once again, to reiterate my original point. It is absurd for POC to assume that the
western far-right in any way, shape or form represents their interests or at the very least
is a neutral entity towards them. It is true that POC is a clumsy, extremely general term,
but in this context it functions perfectly. The western far-right worldview is basically
encapsulated as "whites vs all others"; therefore within this context, a pan non-white
concept like POC is useful for working within such a stark, extremist ideological framework.
What is playing out in the west right now is basically the west struggling with its own past
actions; highly conscientious POC need to sit on the sidelines, shutup and let this play out
on its own. There is no need to take sides here, the west made its own bed, let it sleep in
it, this has nothing to do with POC.
Most of us are against both 'invite the world' and 'invade the world'.
Im an old hand on the internet far-right/alt-right scene; what you said is generally true
except with a major caveat. The alt-right is against invading the world only when it doesn't
result in any net gain for the west. The alt-right doesn't actually have a principled stance
against colonization/invading other countries; rather they are only against invading other
countries when it inconveniences them, but when it happens to benefit them, they are fully
supportive of all kinds of invasions. This is probably one of the things that disgusts me
most about the alt-right is how they lack any kind of true, consistent moral foundation but
like to act as if they do.
Its not really a useful argument to ask if something is really a grassroots thing or not.
You could apply that same line of reasoning to anything to the extent where it could obscure
the true reality of an event. Is globalization due to the actions of a jewish ruling class?
Perhaps. But many on the alt-right still blame jews in general because they understand that
there is something in jewish culture that is sympathetic to the globalization project
overall. The same thing applies to western colonization as well. Regardless of what the
western ruling class chose to do, there was an eager, sympathetic and compliant population
which enabled western colonization to happen. If the population was not enthusiastic about
the colonization project then the broad and thorough scale of european colonization would
have been impossible otherwise.
The very act of colonizing and expansion is something that speaks to the very soul of
western man. Most on the far-right fully agree with this sentiment btw and this is something
that you see them say over and over. Simply trying to deflect all the blame on the ruling
class and absolve the people actually carrying out actions is pretty disingenuous. The
reality is, both the ruling class and its subjects are both equally culpable for european
colonization. More importantly, I want to add that while colonialism may not have originated
as a grassroots movement, it certainly had (and continues to have) grassroots support
(especially among the far-right). Which is something that is equally important to consider
(and equally damning as well)
You have a weird obsession with colonialism. Everyone's self-serving; the form changes but
at the end of the day, that's nature.
You're just as self-serving, except that you've apparently have a global image of "POC"
being united for some reason. And evidently the West, which for whatever foibles it has,
shouldn't at least make an effort to survive?
Lol, you couldn't address any of my points, that's why you just throw everything out and
take potshots at me.
The modern world, and nearly everything that unz.com is about ultimately goes back to
colonialism. You could equally say that the writers on unz.com have a weird obsession with
immigration/globalization. Likewise, I could equally say that you have some weird obsession
with leftism. You see how flawed your logic is?
No, im not being self-serving here. I know that my usage of the term POC triggered your
anti-left/anti-SJW sensibilities, but you're reading too much into the usage of a word. The
term POC was used because it was appropriate for the context (as I explained in my reply to
you and you conveniently ignored), not because I have an extreme left political
orientation.
Once again, to reiterate my original point. It is absurd for POC to assume that the
western far-right in any way, shape or form represents their interests or at the very least
is a neutral entity towards them. It is true that POC is a clumsy, extremely general
term, but in this context it functions perfectly. The western far-right worldview is
basically encapsulated as "whites vs all others"; therefore within this context, a pan
non-white concept like POC is useful for working within such a stark, extremist ideological
framework. What is playing out in the west right now is basically the west struggling
with its own past actions; highly conscientious POC need to sit on the sidelines, shutup
and let this play out on its own. There is no need to take sides here, the west made its
own bed, let it sleep in it, this has nothing to do with POC.
As for the west trying to make some effort to survive; I had never claimed that it should
not. In fact I never made any argument to that effect in any of my comments on this article.
In fact, I want you to prove me wrong . Since you seem so sure of your position, quote
and paste where I clearly made an argument to the effect of the west should just give up and
stop trying to survive. I'll be waiting.
You need to work on your reading comprehension. Clearly I have been making the argument
that POC (I hope you get triggered by this) need to stop trying to prop up the west by
rubbing shoulders with the alt-right and should instead sit back and watch things play out.
This is not their fight. Making this argument is completely different than what you were
trying to imply I was saying.
As I've said before, I give as much effort to a reply as I think a person deserves.
Obviously you're not one of them, in no small part because of your insane fetish with
"colonialism" – which I barely could care for.
Indeed, colonialism can be plenty helpful for improving the condition of a population
objectively, which is surprising given that its goal is traditionally extractive but when the
native elite is so incompetent or even more extractive of their population, then it is a net
benefit to the population.
Not that I really care; I don't see anything fundamentally wrong with conquest. At the end
of the day, competition is the means to determine which values and memes of humanity survive
and by removing violence completely as a method, it leads to warping of the population.
I'm descended from mandarins; I have a pretty clear line of family history as far back as
the Yuan. We've done beautiful things – marvelous terraced farms, canals that remain to
this day, and a slew of impressive artwork. We've done terrible things – kept
generations of illiterate serfs and bondsmen. "European colonialism" may hurt us, but the
Cultural Revolution did a lot more damage and almost wiped us out. And we've invaded Vietnam,
and I don't regret it: Annam, the peaceful south. Had the Ming held it, had it remained
Chinese, its hard to argue that it would not be wealthier and more beautiful than it is
now.
So no, I don't feel anything in common with your so-called POC. And your rants about
colonialism only irritate me further. There are many terrible things in life and the world.
And often, they are also beautiful and glorious things.
LOL. This is hilarious, keep backtracking. You obviously care because you bothered to
reply in the first place. Tellingly, you were unable to address the most cogent points in the
argument that I brought up against you in my previous replies and instead prefer to dissemble
about something that has nothing to do with the original point of discussion. Don't think I
didn't notice the (clumsy) sleight of hand. You try to act as if you're above replying to me
but really the problem is that you're unable to argue against the points that I made. Its
really that simple. If you were able to disprove my arguments then you would already be doing
that instead of talking in circles about it.
Ethically speaking, colonialism is wrong. Doesnt matter who does it, white black or
yellow. That being said, I understand the dark parts of human nature and why colonialism
happens. Time and time again, I have clearly stated how the crux of my argument is the
hypocrisy of the far-right when it comes to the topic of colonialism, not so much the act of
colonialism itself. That's it. And I couldn't make my point any clearer. The onus falls on
you, and not on I to correctly perceive this point. My problem is not that the west colonized
the world (shit happens), my problem is that the far right wants to celebrate and condone
colonialism (hence celebrate the historical destruction of other races and cultures) while
simultaneously wanting to complain about their own racial displacement and cultural
destruction (ironically brought about by globalization which in turn was brought about
through western colonialism in the first place). The far-right has a major ideological
consistency here which it is either blind to, or willfully ignores. I'm sorry but the western
far-right can't have its cake and eat it too. It needs to clearly decide how they feel about
the ethics of colonization and then take a principled and consistent stance on it.
Regardless, both in the comments for this post, and for the entirety of my posting
history, my stance regarding colonization has been the same. It is you that has misunderstood
it due to your faulty reading comprehension, and anybody who doubts my words is perfectly
free to read my prior comments in this thread as well as look through my comment history as
well. Therefore, the thrust of your reply completely misses the mark. I suspect however that
your misunderstanding was intentional considering how clearly I made my point regarding
colonialism in all of my posts. Regardless, why should anyone take what you have to say
seriously when you have already demonstrated a clear tendency for poor reading comprehension
or willful misperception? Don't forget about this:
You're just as self-serving, except that you've apparently have a global image of
"POC" being united for some reason. And evidently the West, which for whatever foibles
it has, shouldn't at least make an effort to survive?
God, that's stupid.
As for the west trying to make some effort to survive; I had never claimed that it
should not. In fact I never made any argument to that effect in any of my comments on this
article. In fact, I want you to prove me wrong . Since you seem so sure of your
position, quote and paste where I clearly made an argument to the effect of the west should
just give up and stop trying to survive. I'll be waiting.
I'm still waiting for you to clearly provide proof of your assertion that I implied the
west should just give up; which in fact I never wrote anything to the effect of that, but in
your rush to debunk me, you obviously missed that. The alt-right always prides itself on
relying strictly on the facts, so please live up to this ethos. Everything I wrote is an open
book, either prove your assertions or admit that you can't.
So no, I don't feel anything in common with your so-called POC. And your rants about
colonialism only irritate me further. There are many terrible things in life and the world.
And often, they are also beautiful and glorious things.
Nor do you have to feel anything in common with so-called POC. Do you think I care what
you feel? You vastly overestimate your own importance. Remember, it was you who went out
of you way to start up this dialogue with me, not I . I'm glad that my "rants" regarding
colonialism irritate you. That being said, if they irritate you so much, instead of
responding to them, please ignore them from now on. You are aware that you are not obligated
to reply to anything I write, right?
True! There are many terrible things in life and the world, and also there are many
glorious and beautiful things as well. I think it is beautiful that the west has lived at the
expense of others for so long, and now we are reaching a point where everything that the west
has done is now catching up with it in unexpected ways. It turns out the the universe has a
sense of humor afterall. What goes up, must come down. This applies to all races and all
civilizations. As humans, we must seek to live in harmony with each other, and not simply
exploit and kill one another. There is beauty in seeking to rise above such primitive
impulses, and if possible acting with understanding and compassion towards our fellow man.
That is truly the meaning of "being civilized".
Truly I do not harbor ill-will against the west because it is western, rather I harbor
ill-will towards the west because of its past actions and present attitudes. This is why I
specifically target the far-right (because of their present attitudes about the west's past
actions), as opposed to attacking all western people. I especially have a soft-spot for
westerners that are able to genuinely feel remorse about the past. I strongly believe in the
concept of forgiveness and letting things go, provided that the sentiment is genuine and
mutual. Actually on that topic; even indifference is an acceptable emotion. I think its
stupid to morally hold westerners to past events when even they are indifferent about their
own racial/cultural future. I only stick it to the far-right because they automatically incur
higher moral/ethical standards for themselves to meet when they want to start talking about
the importance of having moral rights for racial/cultural survival.
That being said, the west has a tremendous amount of momentum from its past actions
gathered against it; so it doesn't really matter how I feel, the west will still have to deal
with everything that is happening to it and what is going to happen to it in the future.
Nothing you say or do will impact this in any way, so you might as well enjoy the ride
instead of complaining that I am pointing out inconvenient truths which harm your delicate
sensibilities. Ironically those who complain most about fragile SJW snowflakes are those who
get triggered the easiest themselves
In fact, looking at your history, you are a rare breed: you are a genuine, unironic
anti-white crusader. You actually think there is something uniquely evil about "white
people" and talk without any sense of contradiction that you have "extensive experience of
white people."
The mind boggles.
It was a mistake to give you any time at all.
This is actually a lie what you have written. For your convenience, and for the
convenience of anybody reading, I have provided the quote of what I had originally written
which you are referring to:
GammaRay says:
April 29, 2018 at 7:04 pm GMT • 200 Words
@Wizard of Oz
This is an interesting question and definitely worth looking into. That being said, I do
not buy into the reasoning that an exploding british population is the only or even major
reason behind colonization. From learning about european culture, and understanding the
general weltanschauung of white people, as well as from having extensive social experience
with them; it is clearly evident to me that there is a strong extraversive, expansive
component that exists in the white collective consciousness which under certain
circumstances strongly compels them to colonize, displace and replace much more so than
other races would do so under similar circumstances. What alt-righters/WN would call
"ambition" and "drive", others might prefer to recognize it as "greed". Regardless of the
semantic trivialities; it is clear that there is a strong internal drive within westerners
that causes them to vigorously pursue both the physical and cultural colonization of "the
other". This is not a negative or positive judgment though; it is merely intended to be
understood as an objective observation.
What I had written clearly strives to be dispassionate and objective as opposed to the
maniacal and frothing at the mouth anti-white diatribe that you are attempting to make it out
to be.
Im sorry but the truth of the matter is that HBD is probably real; racial differences
probably exist on a genetic level which influence the behavior and temperaments of different
races and ethnic groups. The fact that whites are more likely to be domineering and have a
tendency for colonizing "the other" does not make them evil; it is an impulse that can be
channeled in both positive and negative ways. That being said, just because I bring up this
inconvenient fact doesn't automatically make me racist or "anti-white". I am merely trying to
work within a framework of reality, we have both multiple centuries of history to draw
inferences from, as well as interpersonal anecdotal observations of white behavior both in
real life as well as on the internet in spaces such as these. I don't think its very
controversial that I am making observations based on noticing patterns. I mean, is noticing
patterns illegal or something undesirable?
"... One of the hallmarks of brainwashing is a phenomenon that everyone can notice: the total absence of a second opinion. When a commentator voices the official line on an event, does anyone express an alternative version? Is there a debate between the official spokesman and a contrary commentator? In the democratic media, that would be commonplace. Here it is very, very rare. ..."
"... What can be done to counter such brainwashing? Not much. ..."
"... First of all: there is a vital need for a second voice. Brainwashing can be efficient only when the official voice enjoys a complete monopoly. That was one of the aims of Haolam Hazeh, the weekly which I edited for 40 years. It met every untrue government version with a contrary version. Although our voice was weak, compared to the powerful government machine (even in those days), the very fact that there are two voices, however unequal, prevents a total brainwashing. The citizen hears two versions and wonders "who is right?" ..."
"... The power of the truth against a brainwashing machine is always limited. But in the end, even if it takes time, truth will prevail. It needs courage. ..."
It's
frightening. Unprincipled psychologists, in the service of a malignant regime, use
sophisticated techniques in order to control the mind of a person from afar.
The term "brainwashing" was born in 1950. It is a Chinese word ("xinao", literally wash
brain). Originally it served to describe a technique used – so it was claimed – by
Chinese masterminds to manipulate the minds of American prisoners in the Korean War. They
changed their unconscious mental processes and turned them into agents of sinister forces.
Many books and movies purported to show how this works. For example, the classic film "The
Manchurian Candidate" shows how the communists take an American prisoner-of-war in the Korean
war, an officer, manipulate his mind and give him an order to kill the US presidential
candidate. The American officer does not know that he has been turned unconsciously into a
communist agent. He does not remember the order given him under hypnosis and does not know that
he acts accordingly.
This pilot is ridiculous, like most of the pseudo-scientific descriptions. In practice, it
is much easier to manipulate the minds of people, individuals and collectives.
For example, the Nazi "propaganda". It was invented by Adolf Hitler himself. In his book,
Mein Kampf , he describes how, as a soldier on the Western front in WWI, he witnessed
the extremely successful British propaganda. The British dropped leaflets over the German
trenches and shattered the soldiers' confidence in their leadership.
When Hitler came to power in Germany, he entrusted one of his faithful henchmen, Joseph
Goebbels, with the creation of a Ministry of Propaganda. Goebbels turned propaganda into an art
form. Among other means he turned all the German media – newspapers and the radio –
into government agencies. In German that was called "Gleichschaltung" – connecting all
components to one electric line. Thanks to this, Nazi Germany continued fighting long after it
was clear that it had lost WWII.
One of the means was the disconnection of the German public from any other source of
information. The official propaganda was blared from every medium. Listening to a foreign
broadcast was a major crime, punished severely.
Thus it happened that the Germans still believed in their final victory – the Endsieg
– even after the Soviets in the East and the Anglo-Saxons in the West had already crossed
the borders into Germany.
Does it take a dictatorial regime – Nazi or Communist – to turn the media into a
brainwashing machine? Common sense says that this is impossible in a democracy. Common sense is
wrong.
It will be remembered that Hitler attained power by democratic means. Even now, fanatical
nationalists are winning democratic elections in many countries. All their leaders are busy
destroying the courts, stuffing the parliaments with useful idiots and – especially
– turning the media into brainwashing instruments. In our country, too.
How is this done? It's quite simple, really: one has to suppress all other voices. One has
to make sure that the citizen hears only one voice. One that repeats a few messages over and
over, endlessly. This way the lie becomes truth.
In such a situation, the ordinary citizen becomes convinced that the official line is really
their own personal opinion. This is an unconscious process. When one tells a citizen that they
are brainwashed, they are deeply insulted.
This has been happening in Israel over the last few years. The citizen is not conscious that
it is happening. He or she absorbs diverse newspapers, TV programs and radio broadcasts, and
sees that all these media are freely arguing with each other and even quarreling with each
other. The citizen is not conscious of the fact that on the one critical subject of our life
– war and peace – all the media are "connected" to one singular line of
brainwashing.
During the last few weeks we have been seeing a perfect example of this mechanism. The
events on the Gaza Strip border have activated a mechanism of brainwashing that dictatorial
regimes in the world can only envy.
Let's examine ourselves: what have we heard over the radio? What have we seen on TV? What
did we read in the papers?
Within a few weeks more than a hundred human beings were shot dead, and many thousands were
wounded by live fire. Why?
"We were forced to fire at them because they were storming the border fence". And indeed,
did the Gazans themselves not proclaim their will to "return home" – meaning, to return
to Israeli territory?
But on May 14, "Black Monday", 63 unarmed demonstrators were shot dead and over 1500 wounded
by live fire. Every Israeli knows that this was necessary because the demonstrators stormed the
fence and were about to swarm into Israel. Nobody paid attention to the simple fact that there
was not a single photo showing such an occurrence. Not even one. In spite of the fact that on
both sides of the fence there were hundreds of photographers, including Israeli army
photographers, who filmed every single detail. Tens of thousands stormed, and not a single
picture?
One should notice the use of the word "terror". It has turned into an adjective attached to
everything. There are not just tunnels – they are all always "terror-tunnels". There are
"terror-activists". There is "the Hamas terror-regime" and there are "terror-bases". Now there
are "terror-kites".
Notice: not just "incendiary kites", or "destruction-kites", only "terror-kites". The same
every day in all media. Someone has made the terminology decision. Of course, everyone who has
the word "terror" attached to his name is "a son of death", as you say in biblical Hebrew.
Another proud term of the brainwashing.
The inhabitants of the Gaza Strip are "terrorists". (In Hebrew, a special term has been
invented: "Mekhablim"). All of them? Of course, no question. Especially Hamas members. But
Hamas is a political party, which has won democratic elections in all of Palestine. A civilian
party which has indeed a military wing. But in our media all party members and supporters are
"terrorists", sons of death. Of course.
The use of these terms, hundreds of times every day, clearly constitute brainwashing,
without the citizens noticing it. They are getting used to the fact that all Gazans are
terrorists, mekhablim. This is a process of dehumanization, the creation of Untermenschen in
the Nazi lexicon. Their killing is allowed, even desirable.
In such an atmosphere, even abominable sentences pass unnoticed. For example, this week I
heard on one of the TV news programs this sentence from the mouth of a military correspondent,
speaking about the coming Gaza demonstration: "Iran wants dead demonstrators, and it seems that
they will get them." One has to read this sentence twice to realize what it says: that the
Israeli sharpshooters serve Iranian interests.
Or a sentence that is repeated again and again, even by respected commentators: "Iran wants
to destroy the State of Israel". I don't know what 80 million Iranians want, nor does the
writer. But the sentence itself is ridiculous. Israel is a nuclear power. How does one
annihilate a nuclear power (with submarines that can launch nuclear devices in the hour of
need). Are the Iranians ready to turn their country – one of the cradles of human
civilization – into a graveyard and a desert?
Or a forecast "Friday another violent demonstration will take place". "Violent"? "Another"?
There is no argument about the fact that all the demonstrations along the Gaza fence were
completely nonviolent. The demonstrators did not shoot one single shot, when thousands of them
were wounded by live fire, and more than a hundred killed. Yet the lie passes without
comment.
Not a single one of the hundreds of TV news program presenters ever corrects such statements
by correspondents. Because the directors, presenters, commentators and correspondents are
themselves thoroughly brainwashed. The army spokesman knows the truth, of course, but he is a
central cog in the brainwashing machine.
Events reached a climax with the murder of the 21-year-old female paramedic Razan Ashraf
al-Najjar, when she was trying to save the life of a wounded demonstrator. The sharpshooter who
shot her in the chest saw that she was a medic treating a wounded person. It was a clear war
crime.
Was there a public outcry? Did the media demand an investigation? Did the media report this
event in their page one headline? Did the Knesset observe a minute of silence? Nothing of the
sort. A minor news item in some papers (by no means all). An excellent
article by the admirable Amira Hass in Haaretz . And that's that.
A few days passed, and abroad there were outcries. The Argentine soccer team, with the
admired Messi, canceled a friendly game against the Israeli team in Jerusalem.
The brainwashers realized that it was impossible not to react. So the army spokesman
published a statement saying that an investigation had taken place. What did it discover? Ah,
well. It was clearly established that nobody had shot Razan. She was hit by the ricochet of a
bullet that had hit the ground far from her. That is such a blatant lie that even the army liar
should be ashamed of producing it. It was accepted by the brainwashed public.
One of the hallmarks of brainwashing is a phenomenon that everyone can notice: the total
absence of a second opinion. When a commentator voices the official line on an event, does
anyone express an alternative version? Is there a debate between the official spokesman and a
contrary commentator? In the democratic media, that would be commonplace. Here it is very, very
rare.
What can be done to counter such brainwashing? Not much.
First of all: there is a vital need for a second voice. Brainwashing can be efficient
only when the official voice enjoys a complete monopoly. That was one of the aims of Haolam
Hazeh, the weekly which I edited for 40 years. It met every untrue government version with a
contrary version. Although our voice was weak, compared to the powerful government machine
(even in those days), the very fact that there are two voices, however unequal, prevents a
total brainwashing. The citizen hears two versions and wonders "who is right?"
If all the peace and human rights groups in Israel set up a joint center for information,
which will be heard, perhaps the monopoly of official propaganda can be broken. Perhaps.
There is in the country a tiny band of commentators who are not afraid to tell the truth,
even when this is considered treason. Gideon Levy, Amira Hass, and a few others. We must ensure
that their voice is heard. They must be encouraged.
All the media must be pressured to present a variation of views on matters of war and peace,
to let the "internal enemy" be heard, so that the citizen is able to form an opinion of their
own.
The foreign media must be allowed free access to the sources of information, even when the
foreign media are critical, "hostile" and "anti-Semitic". Friends of Israeli-Palestinian peace
abroad must be encouraged to pressure the media in their homelands to publish the truth about
what is happening here.
I don't like the word "must". But in this context, no other will do. The power of the
truth against a brainwashing machine is always limited. But in the end, even if it takes time,
truth will prevail. It needs courage.
The movie The Manchurian Candidate has a surprise ending: in the last minute, instead
of killing the presidential candidate, the brainwashed man shoots the communist agent who was
supposed to take his place.
Uri Avnery is a peace activist, journalist, writer, and former member of the Israeli
Knesset. Read other articles by Uri , or visit
Uri's website
.
We need a Nationalist government, which will automatically see itself as the mortal enemy of
the primary Internationalist (there used to be a song about that) force in the world today,
and which affects us greatly in terms of resource exploitation: Globalisation, or what we
used to call 'multi national corporations' or 'international capital'.
Nationalism is a decision-making tool as it always poses a question; what is good for
this country ?
When/if he mentions de-Globalisation, an Aus-Indonesian defence alliance, citizen
initiated referenda, and a Constitutional ban on donations and parties , then people
may listen, however he cannot be accused of being too imaginative or bright. He is
however advocating authoritarianism not fascism.
Fascism doesn't require a state sanctioned religion or suppression of religion
That said the Catholicism/fundamentalist Christian bent of the present cabinet and the
demonisation of any green beliefs is uncomfortably close to what you describe
And the nexus between big business and govern, the destruction of public institutions, the
reduction in the capacity of media to report truth and the vitriolic attacks on opponenents
are straws in an ill wind
You are right, it's not "fascismmmmmmmmmmmmmm".... it's Fascism. Which brings back to my
memory what Tom Elliott (the son of Liberal Party former president John Elliott) wrote in the
Herald Sun on 6 February 2015: "It's time we temporarily suspended the democratic process and
installed a benign dictatorship to make tough but necessary decisions."
Polack is, effectively, almost any Polish national who dances upon the official
fairy-telling narrative of Polish state puppeteers. In that Marvelous Universe, Poland is a
truly indispensable part of the West, for its glorious deeds of once Saving the Christendom
in Vienna, and containing the Bear all other time.
In reality, it is a loser entity that 'Cannot Into Space' on many historic occasions
– mostly from building multi-ethnic empire to invading Russia. Poles suffer from being
surrounded by equally capable neighbors, Russians and Germans. Chopin is good, but he is
neither Mozart nor Chaikovsky, and to have such genii, one has to build empire first, and
then enjoy imperial music and literature.
For the West, Poland is an 'useful idiot' or a dupe, never treated as equal partner. In
Western (Capitalist) division of nations labor Poles are The Exploited. They are 1) cannon
fodder from Vienna to Monte-Cassino 2) theater of war and destruction to prevent Russians
from entering and destroying True Europe 3) cheap labor or preferrable white slaves 4) one
who pays for everything. Today, option 3 is fullfilled, others are selected by the the West.
Poland is a still a resource, and will be consumed by the West on any pretext. To the East,
there is a Big Brother that has its own resources.
We Russians used to treat the Polish identity illness, by capturing Warsaw many times. The
prognosis is still grave. Dear Polish brethren, we have no other options for you. Stick with
the West, keep your Catholic dreams and continue to perish. When you go critical, we may
think of surgery again.
The US decided, by promulgating Act 447, that a Polish Jew has never been a citizen of
Poland; he was a member of Jewry, and his property should revert to Jewry, not to the
Goyish Polish state.
It is nice that the US issues laws that are supposed to have effect in other states; the
slightly tipsy Galactus of Democracy is in his Heaven, all is right with the World.
It means that they can seize property of recently deceased ones in the Homeland and
embiggen the Tribe, But how are they going to enforce it in Poland? Sanctions? Threats to
move NATO out of Poland? No F-35 for you?
(Also, did the Scriptures say anything about when the Monstrously Swollen Jewish Messiah
will meet Ultra-Confucius for a Battle at the End of Times?)
The West pushed the Poles to rise against Germans in 1944, hoping to re-establish
anti-Russian Poland once again, but did nothing when the rebels bled to death. (Well, not
exactly nothing: they complained why Russian soldiers do not want to die for them).
Please do not forget the extraordinary role of the RAF and SAAF aircrews who flew supplies
to the Home Army in Warsaw from bases in southern Italy. Many of them lost their lives and
are buried in a Commonwealth cemetery in Krakow.
Magnificent article . Pole troops even invaded Spain with Napoleon , those " catholic " Poles
did not seem to feel bad for joining antichristian French revolutionary armies invading
Catholic Spain .
Polish Pope John Paul II , Woytila , joined forces with Reagan and Thatcher , with the
most wild anglosaxon imperialism , against the rest of the world . John Paul II , with his 27
year pontificate , left the Catholic Church devastated , the Catholic churches empty , the
people faithless .
When Polacks , baltics , and other weirdo countries of eastern europe joined the EU I
realized that the EU had no future .
Poland is a very sinister country , a factor of endless conflicts .
To liken Jewry to a feudal order of obligations and ownership explains a lot about their
collective behavior.
I hope the Polish people tell the United States to go to hell.
Perhaps there is little that we as Americans can do right now to stop the control freaks
in our Zionist controlled government from behaving like ruthless feudal landlords, but I am
hoping that the rest of the Western world removes the American boot off its neck and tells
the US to -- - off.
"... The Liberal prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, hobnobbed with Nazi notables including Adolf Hitler, and thought that his British counterpart Neville Chamberlain had not gone far enough in appeasing Hitlerite Germany ..."
"... persona non grata ..."
"... Some Canadians harboured illusions about the NDP as a progressive alternative to the Liberal and Conservative parties ..."
"... Identity politics and Canadian multiculturalism are now invoked to defend Ukrainian fascism celebrated in the streets of Kiev with torchlight parades and fascist symbols, remembering and celebrating Nazi collaborators and collaboration during World War II ..."
"... Any country sending representatives to Russia's celebration of the 70th anniversary of their victory against Adolf Hitler," ..."
"... in April 2015, "will be blacklisted by Ukraine." ..."
Canada has a reputation for being a relatively progressive state with universal,
single-payer health care, various other social benefits, and strict gun laws, similar to many
European countries but quite unlike the United States. It has managed to stay out of some
American wars, for example, Vietnam and Iraq, portrayed itself as a neutral "peace keeper",
pursuing a so-called policy of "multilateralism" and attempting from time to time to keep a
little independent distance from the United States.
Behind this veneer of respectability lies a not so attractive reality of elite inattention
to the defence of Canadian independence from the United States and intolerance toward the
political and syndicalist left. Police repression against communist and left-wing unionists and
other dissidents after World War I was widespread. Strong support for appeasement of Nazi
Germany, overt or covert sympathy for fascism, especially in Québec, and hatred of the
Soviet Union were widespread in Canada during the 1930s. The Liberal prime minister, William
Lyon Mackenzie King, hobnobbed with Nazi notables including Adolf Hitler, and thought that his
British counterpart Neville Chamberlain had not gone far enough in appeasing Hitlerite Germany.
Mackenzie King and many others of the Canadian elite saw communism as a greater threat to
Canada than fascism. As in Europe, the Canadian elite -- Liberal or Conservative did not matter
-- was worried by the Spanish civil war (1936-1939). In Québec French public opinion
under the influence of the Catholic Church hoped for fascist victory and the eradication of
communism. In 1937 a Papal encyclical whipped up the Red Scare amongst French Canadian
Catholics.
Rejection of Soviet offers of collective security against Hitler was the obverse side of
appeasement. The fear of victory over Nazi Germany in alliance with the USSR was greater than
the fear of defeat against fascism. Such thoughts were either openly expressed over dinner at
the local gentleman's club or kept more discrete by people who did not want to reveal the
extent of their sympathy for fascism.
The Liberal prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, hobnobbed with Nazi notables
including Adolf Hitler, and thought that his British counterpart Neville Chamberlain had not
gone far enough in appeasing Hitlerite Germany
Even after the Nazi invasion of the USSR in June 1941, and the formation of the Grand
Alliance against the Axis, there was strong reticence amongst the governing elite in Canada
toward the Soviet Union. It was a shotgun marriage, a momentary arrangement with an undesirable
partner, necessitated by the over-riding threat of the Nazi Wehrmacht. "If Hitler invaded
Hell," Winston Churchill famously remarked, "I would make at least a favourable reference to
the devil in the House of Commons." Once Hitler was beaten, however, it would be back to
business as usual. The Grand Alliance was a "truce", as some of my students have proposed to
me, in a longer cold war between the west and the USSR. This struggle began in November 1917
when the
Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd; it resumed after 1945 when the "truce", or if you
like, the Grand Alliance, came to a sudden end.
This was no more evident than in Canada where elite hatred of communism was a homegrown
commodity and not simply an American imitation. So it should hardly be a surprise that after
1945 the Canadian government -- Mackenzie King was still prime minister -- should open its
doors to the immigration of approximately 34,000 "displaced persons", including thousands of
Ukrainian
fascists and Nazi collaborators , responsible for heinous war crimes in the Ukraine and
Poland. These were
veterans of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the Waffen SS Galicia and the Organisation
of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), all collaborators of Nazi Germany during World War II.
The most notorious of the Nazi collaborators who immigrated to Canada was
Mykhailo Chomiak , a mid-level Nazi operative in Poland, who came under US protection at
the end of the war and eventually made his way to Canada where he settled in Alberta. Had he
been captured by the Red Army, he would quite likely have been hanged for collaboration with
the enemy. In Canada however he prospered as a farmer. His grand-daughter is the
"Ukrainian-Canadian" Chrystia Freeland, the present minister for external affairs. She is a
well-known Russophobe, persona non grata in the Russian Federation, who long claimed
her grandfather was a "victim" of World War II. Her claims to this effect have been
demonstrated to be
untrue by the Australian born journalist John Helmer , amongst many others.
In 1940 the Liberal government facilitated the creation of the Canadian Ukrainian Congress (UCC)
, one of many organisations used to fight or marginalise the left in Canada, in this case
amongst Canadian Ukrainians. The UCC is still around and appears to dominate the Ukrainian-Canadian
community . Approximately 1.4 million people living in Canada claim full or partial
Ukrainian descent though generally the latter. Most "Ukrainian-Canadians" were born in Canada;
well more than half live in the western provinces. The vast majority has certainly never set
foot in the Ukraine. It is this constituency on which the UCC depends to pursue its political
agenda in Ottawa.
In 1940 the Liberal government facilitated the creation of the Canadian Ukrainian Congress (UCC)
, one of many organisations used to fight or marginalise the left in Canada, in this case
amongst Canadian Ukrainians. The UCC is still around and appears to dominate the Ukrainian-Canadian
community . Approximately 1.4 million people living in Canada claim full or partial
Ukrainian descent though generally the latter. Most "Ukrainian-Canadians" were born in Canada;
well more than half live in the western provinces. The vast majority has certainly never set
foot in the Ukraine. It is this constituency on which the UCC depends to pursue its political
agenda in Ottawa.
The Harper
government allowed fund raising for Pravyi Sektor , a Ukrainian fascist
paramilitary group
There is no political opposition in the House of Commons to these policies. Even the New
Democratic Party (NDP), that burnt out shell of Canadian social democracy, supported the Harper
government, at the behest of Mr. Grod, a Ukrainian lobbyist who knows his way around Ottawa. In
2015 the UCC put a list of questions to party leaders, one of which was the following: "Does
your party support listing the Luhansk People's Republic and the Donetsk People's Republic as
terrorist organizations?" The Lugansk and Donetsk republics are of course anti-fascist
resistance movements that emerged in reaction to the violent coup d'état in Kiev. They
are most certainly not "terrorist" organisations, although they are subjected to daily
bombardments against civilian areas by Kiev putschist forces. Nevertheless, the then NDP
leader, Thomas Mulcair, who would have agreed to almost anything to win power, answered in the
affirmative. This must have been a moment of dismay for Canadians who still harboured illusions
about the NDP as a progressive alternative to the Liberal and Conservative parties. How could
it support a US/EU installed putschist regime which governs by intimidation and violence? In
fact, it was a Conservative electoral strategy to obtain the votes of people of Ukrainian and
East European descent by backing putschist Kiev and denouncing Russia. Mulcair was trying to
outflank Harper on his right, but that did not work for he himself was outflanked on his
left.
Some Canadians harboured illusions about the NDP as a progressive alternative to the
Liberal and Conservative parties
In the 2015 federal elections the Liberals under Justin Trudeau, outwitted poor Mr. Mulcair
and won the elections. The NDP suffered heavy electoral losses. Mulcair looked like someone who
had made a Faustian bargain for nothing in return, and he lost a bid to remain as party leader.
The Liberals campaigned on re-establishing better relations with the Russian Federation, but
that promise did not hold up. The minister for external affairs, Stéphane Dion, tried to
move forward on that line, but appears to have been stabbed in the back by Mr. Trudeau, with
Ms. Freeland guiding his hand in the fatal blow. In early 2017
Dion was sacked and Freeland replaced him. That was the end of the Liberal promise to
improve relations with the Russian government. Since then, under Freeland, Russian-Canadian
relations have worsened.
The influential Mr. Grod appears to keep the Canadian government in his hip pocket. There
are photographs of him side by side with Mr. Harper and then with Mr. Trudeau, with Ms.
Freeland on his left. Mr. Grod has been a great success in backing putschist Kiev. Last summer
Mr. Trudeau even issued a traditional Ukrainian fascist salute, "SlavaUkraini!"
, to celebrate the anniversary of Ukrainian independence. The prime minister is a great
believer in identity politics.
The latest gesture of the Canadian government is to approve $1.4 million as a three year
grant to promote a "Holodomor National Awareness Tour". Ukrainian "nationalists" summon up the
memory of the "Holodomor", a famine in the Ukraine in 1932-1933, deliberately launched by
Stalin, they say, in order to emphasise their victimisation by Russia. According to the latest
Stalin biographer, Steven Kotkin, there was indeed a famine in the USSR that affected various
parts of the country, the Ukraine amongst other regions. Kazakhstan, not the Ukraine suffered
most. Between five and seven million people died. Ten millions starved. "Nonetheless, the
famine was not intentional. It resulted from Stalin's policies of forced collectivization
,"Kotkin writes, himself no advocate of the Soviet Union. Compulsion, peasant rebellion,
bungling, mismanagement, drought, locust infestations, not targeting ethnicities, led to the
catastrophe. "Similarly, there was no 'Ukrainian' famine," according to Kotkin, "the famine was
[a] Soviet[-wide disaster]" ( Stalin , 2017, vol. 2, pp. 127-29).
So the Liberal government is spending public funds to perpetuate a politically motivated myth
to drum up hatred of Russia and to support putschist Kiev.
Identity politics and Canadian multiculturalism are now invoked to defend Ukrainian
fascism celebrated in the streets of Kiev with torchlight parades and fascist symbols,
remembering and celebrating Nazi collaborators and collaboration during World War II
The Canadian government also recently renewed funding for a detachment of 200 "advisors" to
train Ukrainian militias, along with
twenty-three million dollars -- it is true a pittance by American
standards -- for "non-lethal" military aid, justified by Ms. Freeland to defend Ukrainian
"democracy". Truly, we live in a dystopian world where reality is turned on its head. Fascism
is democracy; resistance to fascism is terrorism. Identity politics and Canadian
multiculturalism are now invoked to defend Ukrainian fascism celebrated in the streets of Kiev
with torchlight parades and fascist symbols, remembering and celebrating Nazi collaborators and
collaboration during World War II. " Any country sending representatives to Russia's
celebration of the 70th anniversary of their victory against Adolf Hitler,"
warned putschist Kievin April 2015, "will be blacklisted by Ukraine."
"The further a society drifts from the truth," George Orwell once said, "the more it will
hate those that speak it." Well, here is one truth that Mr. Trudeau and Ms. Freeland will not
want to hear, hate it or not: 42,000 Canadian soldiers, not to mention 27 million Soviet
citizens, died during the war against the Axis. Memories must be fading, for now we have come
to this pass, where our government is supporting a violent, racist regime in Kiev directly
descended from that very enemy against which Canada and its allies fought during World War
II.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping started his second term as President
last month and delivered his speech with a nationalistic appeal stating China's desire to take
up its "due place in the world." Xi seems to be taking the long way to achieve Chinese
superiority all over the world. Xi began his new tenure in an ultra nationalistic manner rather
than with a communist internationalist plea.
Prior to Xi's re-election, the Chinese Communist Party put "democratic weakness" aside as
the Chinese parliament endorsed a new law including removing the restriction that had limited
the presidency to two consecutive five-year terms. The Parliament justified the change as a
necessity to line up the presidency with Xi's two other, more powerful, posts -- head of the
party and of the military since they have no term limits.
The move was not unexpected; after his accession to power in 2012, Xi has chosen a rough,
hard but consolidated long road to walk. His way has differed from the way of his last two
predecessors. Xi's two precursors Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao strictly followed the rule of
collective leadership which was introduced by Deng Xiaoping to dilute the one man autocracy of
the Mao Zedong era by including a restriction limiting the presidency to two consecutive
five-year terms. Following the ending of Deng era, the power transforming processes were kept
free from disturbance.
After his ascent in power, Xi Jinping turned away from the path of his two predecessors and
wanted to be a Chinese thinker, pathfinder and philosopher like Mao Zedong.
In 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping adopted the concept of OBOR as one of the greatest
investment projects in the history of the planet. Similarly, the USA launched the Marshall Plan
for reconstruction of Western Europe after the end of Second World War; the USA invested US$ 13
billion dollars which is roughly equivalent to US$ 130 billion in today's money. According to
news media China has already invested $ 1 trillion in OBOR and several trillion is due to be
invested over the next decade.
Chinese OBOR has the basic objective to gain both political and economic supremacy over
western countries. Following the Chinese revolution China's leadership strongly denounced
western capitalism and vowed to fight against US led "imperialism" & "expansionism". Mao
Zedong, founder of modern China emerged as a great competitor to US led capitalistic
leadership. He introduced and developed the three world theory. According to his theory, the
first world comprises USA led western countries, second world consisting of Soviet Union and
its allies and all countries of Asia except Japan, all countries of Africa & Latin America
are in third world. Mao Zedong intended to be the pathfinder for the third world countries to
struggle against western exploitation. Since the foundation of new China, the Chinese
leadership feels comfortable working with "third world" countries against western dominance.
China played a vital role in the Korean War and also in the Vietnam War against US
expansionism. China also wanted to export revolution to all third world countries but they were
not successful due to the lack of Chinese financial capacity or to avoid direct conflict with
other countries. Therefore, China's effort to export revolution was aired on propaganda
machinery rather than practically. As an example the Indian Maoist faction only got moral
support from China in the mid 60s, when they campaigned for an armed struggle to grow a
communist regime.
It seemed, the Chinese leadership was waiting for favorable circumstance and opportunity to
establish a proletarian third world.
After the death of Mao Zedong the Chinese leadership has gradually shifted from the policy
of exporting revolution towards exporting Chinese industrial products to third world countries.
China also shifted from a controlled economy to a free market economy. Under the communist
party leadership China turned into a capitalist country. China has the world's fastest-growing
economy with average growth rates of 10% over 30 years. The economic success of China has
developed a geopolitical ambition like Mao's to be a world player.
Now China is at its most prosperous in its history and present President Xi Jinping is the
most powerful leader after Mao Zedong. Under Xi's leadership, China has promoted vigorous
growth of military might and geopolitical influence. President Xi's aspiration is boosting
China to gain the prime role on the stage of the global power game and to subdue US dominance.
The rivalry between the USA and China is on a range of different issues such as the South China
Sea, cyber security, trade disputes, human rights and intellectual property rights.
After attaining power, Shifting from the previous policy of peaceful coexistence with its
neighbors, Xi has introduced a nationalistic and aggressive stance in foreign policy regarding
dealings with his counterparts. He is looking for geographical expansion of Chinese territory
and increasing the Chinese influence all over the world. China already has claims over almost
the entire South China Sea and its islands and reefs. The South China Sea is also claimed in
part by the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan and Brunei. China has constructed three
artificial islands in the South China Sea ignoring cries from its neighbors. Xi also took a
very strong stance on the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands issue with Japan and declared an Air defense
identification Zone in the area. Along with Japan, the US has opposed the Chinese actions in
the South China Sea.
Responding to US criticism, China was critical of the presence of the U.S. in Asia Pacific
Ocean waters and the US "strategic pivot" to Asia.
"Matters in Asia ultimately must be taken care of by Asians. Asia's problems ultimately must
be resolved by Asians and Asia's security ultimately must be protected by Asians", Xi told a
regional conference in Shanghai on 21 May 2014. Indicating the USA's interference in Asia Xi
called on Asian countries to unite and forge a way together, rather than get involved with
third party powers. Subsequent to this, Xi announced his One Belt and One Road initiatives to
persuade the world.
The 'One Belt, One Road (OBOR) consists of two routes-one overland "Silk Road Economic
Belt", another "21 st -Century Maritime Silk Road" in an objective to link China
economically to Europe through countries across Eurasia, Africa and the Indian Ocean. The land
corridors are China-Mongolia-Russia; China-Central Asia-West Asia; the China-Indochina
peninsula; China-Pakistan; and Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar. The OBOR will integrate of the
region into an interconnected economic area through building infrastructure, increasing
cultural exchanges, and broadening trade. China is investing to build infrastructure such as
railways, roads, ports, energy systems and telecommunications networks to implement OBOR. On
the Maritime Silk Road, China will invest to improve efficiency and security of the major sea
ports along the routes.
China's banks are providing massive funds for Chinese enterprise to construct infrastructure
while the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) will provide loans for other countries.
AIIB has issued the first loans for Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Tajikistan. The Bank of
China has clarified that the Renminbi (Chinese currency) will be the main trading and
investment currency. Entering the Chinese Banks into new OBOR countries will promote the
globalization of the Chinese economy. China also called upon Chinese expatriates to invest in
OBOR projects.
The Chinese President has played his OBOR card when the USA, the prime competitor to China,
got an egotistic and unpredictable President like Donald Trump. XI's OBOR initiatives are
contending as the USA turns to isolationism and protectionism.
The USA and its allies are under threat of raising extreme nationalism and communalism.
Donald Trump likes to appear as a nationalistic President rather than an international player.
In the meantime, Donald trump decided to withdraw from the Paris climate treaty and ignore USA
global responsibility. On the contrary Chinese President Xi asserted his eagerness to implement
the Paris Climate treaty and intention to work with European leaders.
Emerging as European core ally, Xi also called for more Chinese responsibility for global
issues.
Xi's stance on global affairs impacted positively on his OBOR initiatives. Now the
relationship between China and Western Europe is at its highest level of cooperation since the
Chinese revolution. Therefore China got a very positive response from Western Europe regarding
OBOR initiatives.
So the conference on the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, which was held
last May was participated in by representatives from all Western European countries including
Swiss President Doris Leuthard, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, and Italian Prime Minister
Paolo Gentiloni. Germany and France are not very enthusiastic about OBOR, but they look for
business opportunities which would come from OBOR. In a nutshell, every country of the planet,
even the USA private sector is keen to explore the cost and benefits of the enormously
ambitious project. It is not surprising that the OBOR initiative has belted a wide range of
countries from Asia and Africa to Europe and even South America.
Apart from heads of state, Executives of 61 international organizations attended the summit,
including UN secretary general António Guterres, president of the World Bank Jim Yong
Kim and managing director of the International Monetary Fund Christine Lagarde.
Leaders of ASEAN Countries including Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, Malaysian Prime
Minister Najib Razak, Vietnamese President Tran Dai Quang and Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen,
participated in the OBOR summit and not surprisingly that they moved aside from their dispute
with China on the South China Sea.
However, OBOR have been criticized for dominating tiny economies through long-term control
of infrastructures, natural resources and associated land assets. China may control the OBOR
countries market, labor and exports through transferring Chinese-own production units to those
countries. Some also doubt the efficiency of Chinese Banks. Another allegation is that in the
context of security measures the Chinese Liberation Army could dominate all the geographical
routes of OBOR area and could intervene in internal affairs.
On the other side of coin, the OBOR countries will benefit from Chinese investment much more
than from World Bank or IMF loans. So, the OBOR initiative is universally welcomed by both
developed and developing countries. The Developing countries (Mao's Third World) have huge
demands for infrastructure development and required funding, which they can easily obtain from
the OBOR fund. Therefore the developing countries are very positive when they analyze the
objectives of OBOR.
Historically, the Chinese Dragon used to shock the world when it woke up from hibernation.
It woke up in 1949 from opium addiction and the Chinese Revolution (the first Dragon of New
China) surprised the world. Again the Chinese Dragon hibernated in the 1960s following Mao
Zedong's cultural- revolution. During the Cultural Revolution Mao Zedong closed the Chinese
door for 10 years but surprisingly he initiated opening the door for imperialist 'puppet-tiger'
USA through 'ping-pong' diplomacy. His step was very significant for awaking the new
Chinese-Dragon.
The whole world was astonished again when the Chinese manufacturing dragon, the second
dragon occupied the global market in 1980s. Nowadays, nobody can ignore Chinese commodities for
even a single day.
The third dragon is Xi's OBOR initiatives, the world is waiting for the outcome of OBOR,
which has already commenced its journey and roams across all the continents and oceans of the
planet.
Sazzad Haider is a writer and filmmaker living in Bangladesh. He edits The Diplomatic
Journal.
"... Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of a new book, ..."
"... . To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com. ..."
"Together," President Macron instructed President Trump, "we can resist the rise of aggressive nationalisms that deny our history
and divide the world."
In an address before Congress on Wednesday, France's Macron denounced "extreme nationalism," invoked the UN, NATO, WTO, and Paris
climate accord, and implored Trump's America to come home to the New World Order.
"The United States is the one who invented this multilateralism," Macron went on, "you are the one now who has to help preserve
and reinvent it."
His visit was hailed and his views cheered, but on reflection, the ideas of Emmanuel Macron seem to be less about tomorrow than
yesterday. For the world he celebrates is receding into history. The America of 2018 is coming to see NATO as having evolved into
an endless U.S. commitment to go to war with Russia on behalf of a rich Europe that resolutely refuses to provide for its own defense.
Since the WTO was created in the mid-90s, the U.S. has run $12 trillion in trade deficits, and among the organization's biggest
beneficiaries -- the EU. Under the Paris climate accord, environmental restrictions are put upon the United States from which China
is exempt. As for the UN, is that sinkhole of anti-Americanism, the General Assembly, really worth the scores of billions we have
plunged into it?
"Aggressive nationalism" is a term that might well fit Napoleon Bonaparte, whose Arc de Triomphe sits on the Champs-Elysees. But
does it really fit the Hungarians, Poles, Brits, Scots, Catalans, and other indigenous peoples of Europe who are now using democratic
methods and means to preserve their national homes?
And the United States would seem an odd place to go about venting on "aggressive nationalisms that deny our history." Did Macron
not learn at the Lycee Henri IV in Paris or the Ecole Nationale d'Administration how the Americans acquired all that land? General
Washington, at whose Mount Vernon home Macron dined, was a nationalist who fought for six years to sever America's ties to the nation
under which he was born. How does Macron think Andrew Jackson acquired Florida from Spain, Sam Houston acquired Texas from Mexico,
and Winfield Scott and Zachary Taylor acquired the Southwest? By bartering?
Aggressive nationalism is a good synonym for the Manifest Destiny of a republic that went about relieving Spain of Cuba, Puerto
Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. How does Macron think the "New World" was conquered and colonized if not by aggressive British,
French, and Spanish nationalists determined to impose their rule upon weaker indigenous tribes? Was it not nationalism that broke
up the USSR into 15 nations?
Was not the Zionist movement that resurrected Israel in 1948, and in 1967 captured the West Bank and then annexed East Jerusalem
and the Golan Heights, a manifestation of aggressive nationalism?
Macron is an echo of George H.W. Bush who in Kiev in 1991 warned Ukrainians against the "suicidal nationalism" of declaring independence
from the Russian Federation. "Aggressive nationalisms divide the world," warns Macron. Well, yes, they do, which is why we have now
194 members of the U.N., rather than the original 50. Is this a problem? "Together," said Macron, "we will build a new, strong multilateralism
that defends pluralism and democracy in the face of ill winds."
Macron belongs to a political class that sees open borders and free trade thickening and tightening the ties of dependency, and
eventually creating a One Europe whose destiny his crowd will forever control.
But if his idea of pluralism is multiracial, multiethnic, and multicultural nations, with a multilateral EU overlord, he is describing
a future that tens of millions of Europeans believe means the deaths of the nations that give meaning to their lives.
And they will not go gently into that good night.
In America, too, millions have come to recognize that there is a method to the seeming madness of open borders. Name of the game:
dispossessing the deplorables of the country they love.
With open borders and mass migration of over a million people a year into the USA, almost all of them from third-world countries
that vote 70 to 90 percent Democratic, the left is foreclosing the future. They're converting the greatest country of the West into
what Teddy Roosevelt called a "polyglot boarding house for the world." And in that boarding house the left will have a lock on the
presidency.
With the collaboration of co-conspirators in the media, progressives throw a cloak of altruism over the cynical seizure of permanent
power.
For, as the millions of immigrants here legally and illegally register, and the vote is extended to prison inmates, ex-cons, and
16-year-olds, the political complexion of America will come to resemble San Francisco.
End goal: ensure that what happened in 2016, when the nation rose up and threw out a despised establishment, never happens again.
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of a new book, Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President
and Divided America Forever . To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists,
visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.
Firs of all Mark Galeotti is very weak. That's incurable.
I want your money poor Pinocchio -- that the new slogan of May government. Kind of
compensation for Brexit losses at Russian oligarchs expense.
What Russophobe Galiotti does not understand is that this another nail in the coffin of neoliberalism. As soon as you
start to distriminate between oligarche neoliberalism stops and nationalism starts
Notable quotes:
"... Of course, the irony is that by driving out Russian money, London would in part be doing Putin's work for him ..."
"... He has launched a " de-offshorization " campaign to try to persuade, cajole, and intimidate oligarchs and minigarchs into bringing their money back home. Along with the stabilization of the economy as a whole, this has had some limited success. While more than $31 billion flowed out of the country last year alone, this is a dramatic fall from 2014's $154 billion . ..."
"... The thought that Britain would actually be returning capital into Putin's grasp may be an uncomfortable one. After all, a third possible policy goal would be actively to seek to undermine the regime in Moscow. ..."
This is also a project in which further international cooperation would be crucial. Chasing
that money and the influence it buys out of London but seeing it find comfortable new homes in
Paris, Frankfurt, and New York is only half the job done and will do little to chasten Moscow.
Although it will be difficult to persuade others to turn away tempting business, the unexpected
support Britain is receiving from European Union partners in particular suggests this may be an
opportune moment to convince them that in its experience this money is too toxic to be safe and
that this is a Western, not just a British, problem.
Of course, the irony is that by driving out Russian money, London would in part be doing
Putin's work for him . Since 2014, the Russian economy has been in the doldrums.
Furthermore, Putin is a man who understands power better than economics, and he is unhappy to
see elites stash their money outside his grasp.
Putin is a man who understands power better than economics, and he is unhappy to see elites
stash their money outside his grasp.
He has launched a "
de-offshorization " campaign to try to persuade, cajole, and intimidate oligarchs and
minigarchs into bringing their money back home. Along with the stabilization of the economy as
a whole, this has had some limited success. While more than $31
billion flowed out of the country last year alone, this is a dramatic fall from 2014's
$154 billion .
The thought that Britain would actually be returning capital into Putin's grasp may be
an uncomfortable one. After all, a third possible policy goal would be actively to seek to
undermine the regime in Moscow. Overt efforts at regime change would be dangerous and
likely counterproductive, but London may feel that it should not pass up opportunities to
weaken the Kremlin
London may feel that it should not pass up opportunities to weaken the Kremlin
, in the hope that this may tame its appetite for playing confrontational
geopolitics.
... ... ...
Mark Galeotti is a senior research fellow at the Institute of International Affairs Prague and a visiting fellow with
the European Council on Foreign Relations.
Robert Bartley, the late editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal, was a free trade
zealot who for decades championed a five-word amendment to the Constitution: "There shall be
open borders."
Bartley accepted what the erasure of America's borders and an endless influx or foreign
peoples and goods would mean for his country.
Said Bartley, "I think the nation-state is finished."
His vision and ideology had a long pedigree.
This free trade, open borders cult first flowered in 18th-century Britain. The St. Paul of
this post-Christian faith was Richard Cobden, who mesmerized elites with the grandeur of his
vision and the power of his rhetoric.
In Free Trade Hall in Manchester, Jan. 15, 1846, the crowd was so immense the seats had to
be removed. There, Cobden thundered:
"I look farther; I see in the Free Trade principle that which shall act on the moral world
as the principle of gravitation in the universe -- drawing men together, thrusting aside the
antagonisms of race, and creed, and language, and uniting us in the bonds of eternal
peace."
Britain converted to this utopian faith and threw open her markets to the world. Across the
Atlantic, however, another system, that would be known as the "American System," had been
embraced.
The second bill signed by President Washington was the Tariff Act of 1789. Said the Founding
Father of his country in his first address to Congress: "A free people should promote such
manufactures as tend to make them independent on others for essential, particularly military
supplies."
In his 1791 "Report on Manufactures," Alexander Hamilton wrote, "Every nation ought to
endeavor to possess within itself all the essentials of national supply. These comprise the
means of subsistence, habitat, clothing and defence."
This was wisdom born of experience.
At Yorktown, Americans had to rely on French muskets and ships to win their independence.
They were determined to erect a system that would end our reliance on Europe for the
necessities of our national life, and establish new bonds of mutual dependency -- among
Americans.
Britain's folly became manifest in World War I, as a self-reliant America stayed out, while
selling to an import-dependent England the food, supplies and arms she needed to survive but
could not produce.
America's own first major steps toward free trade, open borders and globalism came with
JFK's Trade Expansion Act and LBJ's Immigration Act of 1965.
By the end of the Cold War, however, a reaction had set in, and a great awakening begun.
U.S. trade deficits in goods were surging into the hundreds of billions, and more than a
million legal and illegal immigrants were flooding in yearly, visibly altering the character of
the country.
Americans were coming to realize that free trade was gutting the nation's manufacturing base
and open borders meant losing the country in which they grew up. And on this earth there is no
greater loss.
The new resistance of Western man to the globalist agenda is now everywhere manifest.
We see it in Trump's hostility to NAFTA, his tariffs, his border wall.
We see it in England's declaration of independence from the EU in Brexit. We see it in the
political triumphs of Polish, Hungarian and Czech nationalists, in anti-EU parties rising
across Europe, in the secessionist movements in Scotland and Catalonia and Ukraine, and in the
admiration for Russian nationalist Vladimir Putin.
Europeans have begun to see themselves as indigenous peoples whose Old Continent is mortally
imperiled by the hundreds of millions of invaders wading across the Med and desperate come and
occupy their homelands.
Who owns the future? Who will decide the fate of the West?
The problem of the internationalists is that the vision they have on offer -- a world of
free trade, open borders and global government -- are constructs of the mind that do not engage
the heart.
Men will fight for family, faith and country. But how many will lay down their lives for
pluralism and diversity?
Who will fight and die for the Eurozone and EU?
On Aug. 4, 1914, the anti-militarist German Social Democrats, the oldest and greatest
socialist party in Europe, voted the credits needed for the Kaiser to wage war on France and
Russia. With the German army on the march, the German socialists were Germans first.
Patriotism trumps ideology.
In "Present at the Creation," Dean Acheson wrote of the postwar world and institutions born
in the years he served FDR and Truman in the Department of State: The U.N., IMF, World Bank,
Marshall Plan, and with the split between East and West, NATO.
We are present now at the end of all that.
And our transnational elites have a seemingly insoluble problem.
To rising millions in the West, the open borders and free trade globalism they cherish and
champion is not a glorious future, but an existential threat to the sovereignty, independence
and identity of the countries they love. And they will not go gentle into that good night.
"... Angleton embodied and shaped the CIA's operational ethos and its internal procedures, especially in the realm of counterintelligence. His theories of Soviet penetration dominated the thinking of Western intelligence agencies, and their legacy can even be seen in the counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign and allegations of collusion with Russia. I want to emphasize that I only use the term deep state as a colloquial shorthand term for the array of US national security agencies that operate under the shroud of official secrecy. ..."
"... Angleton, I'm going to put to you, was a founding father of what we call the deep state. ..."
"... With the passage of the National Security Act in July 1947, Angleton went to work at the CIA. The CIA came into existence and Angleton became the chief of the foreign intelligence staff with responsibility for intelligence collection operations worldwide. ..."
"... Angleton became the CIA's exclusive liaison with the Mossad in 1951. ..."
"... He was introduced to Amos Manor, chief of counterespionage for Israel's domestic security service known as Shabak or Shin Bet. ..."
"... "I didn't know exactly what to do, but I had the idea of giving them material we had gathered a year earlier about the efforts of the Eastern Bloc to use Israel to bypass an American trade embargo. We edited the material and informed them that they should never ask us to identify our sources." From such arrangements, the CIA-Mossad relationship began to grow. Manor would be friends with Angleton for the rest of his life. ..."
"... Asher Ben-Natan, Angleton's source dating back to the OSS days, was playing a key procurement role in the secret Israeli program to obtain nuclear weapons. Teddy Kollek, one of Angleton's closest contacts and friends in Washington, later became the mayor of Jerusalem. Angleton's Israeli friends in short were really the architects, some of the architects of the Zionist state. ..."
"... As I came to learn his story from talking to CIA veterans and Israelis and reading a lot, a couple of things stood out to me. First of all, the Israeli recruitment of Angleton was extremely astute. In the early 1950s, Angleton was a rising star at this new agency, the CIA, but he was not a senior figure and not even particularly powerful. The Israelis recognized the latent qualities that would make him powerful. ..."
"... In 1954 Angleton became the chief of the CIA's counterintelligence staff, the first one. In 1956 Amos Manor passed him a copy of Nikita Khrushchev's secret speech to the Soviet Communist Party in which he criticized the cult of personality around the deceased dictator, Joseph Stalin. This intelligence coup made Angleton a legend within the CIA and the power within the agency as well, and it was very much made possible by the Israelis. ..."
"... Angleton's formative and sometimes decisive influence on US policy towards Israel can be seen in many areas – from the impotence of US nuclear nonproliferation policy in the region, to Israel's triumph in the 1967 Six-Day War, to the feeble US response to the attack on the Liberty, to the intelligence failure represented by the Yom Kippur War of 1973. ..."
"... The question, which was put to me by Grant but is right on point, was why didn't the CIA help the FBI investigate the diversion of US weapons-grade material from the United States to Israel in the 1960s and 1970s? The short answer is because Jim Angleton didn't want to. Angleton played a key role in enabling Israel to obtain nuclear weapons, and he did so in a subtle way that characteristically left few fingerprints. He was not a man to investigate himself. Many of these details are now known thanks to Grant Smith, Roger Mattson, John Hadden, Jr. and others. ..."
"... the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation, otherwise known as NUMEC, started processing highly-enriched uranium in the United States in 1959. NUMEC had been created by David Lowenthal, a Zionist financier who financed the postwar boatlift from Europe to Palestine that was romanticized in the book and movie Exodus. He hired Zalman Shapiro, a brilliant young metallurgist to run the company. ..."
"... By October 1965, the AEC estimated that 178 kilograms of highly-enriched uranium had gone missing from the NUMEC facility, by March 1968, that figure was 267 kilograms. ..."
"... John Hadden was the CIA station chief in Israel from 1964 to 1967. He worked very closely with Angleton throughout this period. He would later concur with the near unanimous assessment of CIA's nuclear scientist that Israel had indeed stolen fissile material from NUMEC and used it to build their nuclear arsenal. ..."
"... With the fissile material diverted from NUMEC, Israel was able to construct its first nuclear weapon by 1967 and become a full-blown nuclear power by 1970 – the first and still the only nuclear power in the Middle East. Angleton, it is fair to say, thought collaboration with Israel was more important than US nonproliferation policy. ..."
"... When Angleton left government service 20 years later, Israel held twice as much territory as it had in 1948. The CIA and Mossad collaborated on a daily basis and the governments of the United States and Israel were strategic allies knit together by expansive intelligence sharing, multibillion-dollar arms contracts and coordinated diplomacy. ..."
"... Angleton's influence on U.S.-Israeli relations between 1951 and 1974 exceeded that of any Secretary of State with the possible exception of Henry Kissinger. His influence was largely unseen by Congress, the press, other democratic institutions, and much of the CIA itself. He was empowered by his own ingenuity and the clandestine arrangements rationalized by doctrines of national security and counterintelligence. The arc of his career breathes life into the concept of the deep state. ..."
"... Angleton, more than any other American, enabled the Americans to gain and hold this strategic high ground in the Middle East. He was, as his friend Meir Amit said, the biggest Zionist of the lot ..."
Angleton embodied and shaped the CIA's operational ethos and its
internal procedures, especially in the realm of counterintelligence. His theories of Soviet
penetration dominated the thinking of Western intelligence agencies, and their legacy can even
be seen in the counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign and allegations of
collusion with Russia. I want to emphasize that I only use the term deep state as a colloquial
shorthand term for the array of US national security agencies that operate under the shroud of
official secrecy.
Let's not forget there are a dozen, at least a dozen such agencies based here in Washington.
The CIA with its $15 billion a year budget is the largest. The NSA with a budget of about $10
billion is the second largest. The Defense Intelligence Agency is about $4 billion. Then along
with some other obscure but still very large agencies like the NGIA. Never heard of the NGIA? I
didn't think so. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is a $4.9 billion a year agency.
Collectively, these agencies spend probably $50 billion to $60 billion a year, which make them
a very small but powerful potent sector in the American scheme of power.
Want to know how the NGIA spent your $4.9 billion? Good luck. Want to see a line item budget
of CIA activities in Africa last year? Move along. It's true that Congress nominally has
oversight powers over these agencies. Our elected officials do have their security clearances
that we don't have, so they can go in and look at selected operations. But the intelligence
oversight system is very weak as even its defenders will admit. The intelligence committees
polarized and politicized can't even agree on what kind of secret activities they're supposed
to monitor. The FISA court system is supposed to protect Americans from surveillance by their
government, but it largely functions as a rubberstamp of the secret agencies. A secret
government is the norm in America in 2018 which is why the discourse of the deep state has such
currency today.
Angleton, I'm going to put to you, was a founding father of what we call the deep state. So who was he? Born in
December 1917, James Angleton grew up as the oldest son of James Hugh Angleton, a brash self-made American businessman who moved
to Milan, Italy during the Depression and made a fortune during the time Benito Mussolini selling cash registers. Angleton
attended private school in England. He went to Yale College, and then to Harvard Law school. He was a precocious good-looking
young man with sophisticated manners and a literary frame of mind.
As an undergraduate, he befriended his fellow expatriate – Ezra Pound – in
Italy. Pound was the modernist poet in the mad tribune of Mussolini's fascism. In their
correspondence, which I found at Yale, Angleton sometimes ape the anti-Semitic rhetoric of Ezra
Pound. For example, criticizing the Jewish book merchants who he thought overcharged for
Pound's books.
In 1943, Angleton was recruited into the Office of Strategic Services, America's first
foreign intelligence service stationed in Rome during and after World War II. He excelled at
secret intelligence work. I tell a story in The Ghost of how he rescued a leading Nazi and a
leading Italian fascist from postwar justice. Among other tasks, he reported on the flow of
Jews escaping from Germany and heading for Palestine. The revelations of the Holocaust
transformed his disdain for Jews into something of sympathy. He began to develop sources among
the leaders of the Jewish and Zionist organizations – including Teddy Kollek who was a
British intelligence agent, and a German operative named Arthur Pier who later became known as
Asher Ben-Natan.
With the passage of the National Security Act in July 1947, Angleton went to work at the
CIA. The CIA came into existence and Angleton became the chief of the foreign intelligence
staff with responsibility for intelligence collection operations worldwide. In those days, the
CIA was right here in the heart of Washington. It's hard for people to believe now, but the CIA
was located in a series of temporary buildings located along the reflecting pool next to the
Lincoln Memorial. The tempos, as they were called by CIA people, were drafty in the winter, hot
in the summer, and devoid of charm year-round. But this is where Angleton worked, at what was
known as the Office of Special Operations.
Angleton, while sympathetic to Jewish suffering, was still very wary of Israel when he
started his career at the CIA. Before the 1948 war, the Jewish army had been largely armed by
Czech arms manufacturers and communist Czechoslovakia. The Soviet Union was the first country
to recognize the state of Israel in 1948. Angleton initially feared that the Soviets would use
Israel as a platform for injecting spies into the West. The Israelis, for their part, were
looking to cultivate American friends. Stalin's anti-Semitic purges in 1948 showed that his
allegiance to the Jewish state was superficial at best.
In 1950 a man named Reuven Shiloah, the founder of Israel's first intelligence organization,
came to Washington. He visited the CIA and he came away very impressed with how it was
organized. He went back to Israel and in April 1951, he created out of a very fractious
collection of security forces what was known as the Institute for Intelligence and Special
Tasks – inevitably known as Mossad, Hebrew for institute.
In 1951 Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion came to the United States and brought Shiloah with
him. Ben-Gurion met privately with President Truman, and Angleton arrange for Ben-Gurion to
also have lunch with his friend Allen Dulles who would shortly become the director of the CIA.
The purpose of this meeting, Efrain Halevy, a retired director of the Mossad and a longtime
friend of Angleton's told me in an interview in Tel Aviv, the purpose was in Halevy's words to
clarify in no uncertain terms that notwithstanding what had happened between Israel and United
States 1948 and notwithstanding that Russia had been a key factor in Israel's survival, Israel
considered itself part of the Western world and would maintain the relationship with the United
States in this spirit.
Shiloah stayed on in Washington to work out the arrangements with Angleton. Shiloah,
according to his biographer, soon developed a special relationship – quote/unquote
– and Angleton became the CIA's exclusive liaison with the Mossad in 1951. Angleton
return the favor by traveling to Israel often. He was introduced to Amos Manor, chief of
counterespionage for Israel's domestic security service known as Shabak or Shin Bet.
Manor headed up Operation Balsam which was the Israeli's conduit to the Americans. "They
told me I had to collect information about the Soviet bloc and transmit it to them," Manor
recalled about the Americans. "I didn't know exactly what to do, but I had the idea of giving
them material we had gathered a year earlier about the efforts of the Eastern Bloc to use
Israel to bypass an American trade embargo. We edited the material and informed them that they
should never ask us to identify our sources." From such arrangements, the CIA-Mossad
relationship began to grow. Manor would be friends with Angleton for the rest of his life.
In 1963 a man named Isser Harel was succeeded as the chief of Mossad by a military
intelligence officer named Meir Amit. Amit found Angleton to be a little eccentric, but he
noted that his – quote – identification with Israel was a great asset for Israel.
Asher Ben-Natan, Angleton's source dating back to the OSS days, was playing a key procurement
role in the secret Israeli program to obtain nuclear weapons. Teddy Kollek, one of Angleton's
closest contacts and friends in Washington, later became the mayor of Jerusalem. Angleton's
Israeli friends in short were really the architects, some of the architects of the Zionist
state.
As I came to learn his story from talking to CIA veterans and Israelis and reading a lot, a
couple of things stood out to me. First of all, the Israeli recruitment of Angleton was
extremely astute. In the early 1950s, Angleton was a rising star at this new agency, the CIA,
but he was not a senior figure and not even particularly powerful. The Israelis recognized the
latent qualities that would make him powerful.
Second, Angleton's creative intellect and his operational audacity inspired deep feelings of
loyalty among the Israelis. While Angleton's counterintelligence vision would become very
controversial within and bitterly divisive within the CIA, he was widely admired in Israel as a
stalwart friend. He still is to this day.
In 1954 Angleton became the chief of the CIA's counterintelligence staff, the first one. In
1956 Amos Manor passed him a copy of Nikita Khrushchev's secret speech to the Soviet Communist
Party in which he criticized the cult of personality around the deceased dictator, Joseph
Stalin. This intelligence coup made Angleton a legend within the CIA and the power within the
agency as well, and it was very much made possible by the Israelis.
Angleton's formative and sometimes decisive influence on US policy towards Israel can be
seen in many areas – from the impotence of US nuclear nonproliferation policy in the
region, to Israel's triumph in the 1967 Six-Day War, to the feeble US response to the attack on
the Liberty, to the intelligence failure represented by the Yom Kippur War of 1973. I tell a
lot of the story in The Ghost, but the story of Angleton in Israel is really so large and so
profound that it probably deserves its own book. I could certainly not do justice to it in the
18 minutes that I have, so I'm going to confine myself to one narrow question about the
tradeoffs that became implicit in this arrangement between the CIA and the Mossad and its
implications for us.
The question, which was put to me by Grant but is right on point, was why didn't the CIA
help the FBI investigate the diversion of US weapons-grade material from the United States to
Israel in the 1960s and 1970s? The short answer is because Jim Angleton didn't want to.
Angleton played a key role in enabling Israel to obtain nuclear weapons, and he did so in a
subtle way that characteristically left few fingerprints. He was not a man to investigate
himself. Many of these details are now known thanks to Grant Smith, Roger Mattson, John Hadden,
Jr. and others.
I want to just give you a sense of how this transpired. So the Nuclear Materials and
Equipment Corporation, otherwise known as NUMEC, started processing highly-enriched uranium in
the United States in 1959. NUMEC had been created by David Lowenthal, a Zionist financier who
financed the postwar boatlift from Europe to Palestine that was romanticized in the book and
movie Exodus. He hired Zalman Shapiro, a brilliant young metallurgist to run the company.
At that time, the US government owned all of supplies of nuclear fuel which private
companies, like NUMEC, were allowed to use but ultimately had to return to the government.
Within a few years the Atomic Energy Commission noticed worrisome signs that the Apollo Plant
– NUMEC had a plant in Apollo, Pennsylvania – that the plant's security and
accounting were very deficient. Unexplained losses of nuclear material did happen at other
companies, but NUMEC's losses were proportionately much larger. By October 1965, the AEC
estimated that 178 kilograms of highly-enriched uranium had gone missing from the NUMEC
facility, by March 1968, that figure was 267 kilograms.
John Hadden was the CIA station chief in Israel from 1964 to 1967. He worked very closely
with Angleton throughout this period. He would later concur with the near unanimous assessment
of CIA's nuclear scientist that Israel had indeed stolen fissile material from NUMEC and used
it to build their nuclear arsenal. This story is now very well documented. In the spring of
1965, a technician working at the night shift at NUMEC went out on a loading dock for a breath
of fresh air and saw an unusual sight. Zalman Shapiro was pacing on the dock while a foreman
and truck driver loaded cylindrical storage containers, known as stovepipes, onto a flatbed
truck.
The technician saw a clipboard saying that the material was destined for Israel. It was
highly unusual to see Dr. Shapiro in the manufacturing section of the Apollo nuclear facility,
the technician said. It was unusual to see Dr. Shapiro there at night, and it was very unusual
to see Dr. Shapiro so nervous. The next day NUMEC's personnel manager visited the technician
and threatened to fire him if he did not keep his mouth shut, that's a quote, concerning what
he had seen. It would be 15 years before the employee told the story to the FBI.
What did Angleton know about NUMEC? Well, he knew that the AEC and the FBI were
investigating starting in 1965. As the Israel desk officer of the CIA, he talked about the
NUMEC case with liaison agent Sam Papich who was monitoring the investigation for the FBI. He
also spoke about it with his colleague John Hadden.
On the crime scene particulars, Hadden defended his former boss. "Any suggestion that
Angleton had help the Israelis with the NUMEC operation was totally without foundation," he
told journalists Andrew and Leslie Cockburn. But Hadden didn't deny that Angleton had helped
the Israeli nuclear program. Why would somebody whose whole life was dedicated to fighting
communism have any interest in preventing a very anti-Communist nation for getting the means to
defend itself, Hadden asked. The fact they stole it from us didn't worry him in the least, he
went on. I suspect that in his inmost heart he would have given it to them if they had asked.
Hadden knew better than to investigate any further. I never sent anything to Angleton on this
– the nuclear program – because I knew he wasn't interested, Hadden later told his
son, and I knew he'd try to stop it if I did.
With the fissile material diverted from NUMEC, Israel was able to construct its first
nuclear weapon by 1967 and become a full-blown nuclear power by 1970 – the first and
still the only nuclear power in the Middle East. Angleton, it is fair to say, thought
collaboration with Israel was more important than US nonproliferation policy. He believed that
the results proved his point. When he started as chief of the counterintelligence staff in
1954, the state of Israel and its leaders were regarded warily in Washington – especially
at the State Department. When Angleton left government service 20 years later, Israel held
twice as much territory as it had in 1948. The CIA and Mossad collaborated on a daily basis and
the governments of the United States and Israel were strategic allies knit together by
expansive intelligence sharing, multibillion-dollar arms contracts and coordinated
diplomacy.
Angleton's influence on U.S.-Israeli relations between 1951 and 1974 exceeded that of
any Secretary of State with the possible exception of Henry Kissinger. His influence was
largely unseen by Congress, the press, other democratic institutions, and much of the CIA
itself. He was empowered by his own ingenuity and the clandestine arrangements rationalized by
doctrines of national security and counterintelligence. The arc of his career breathes life
into the concept of the deep state.
I thought of this story when I visited one of the memorials to Angleton in Israel in 2016.
The memorial is located on a winding road outside the city of Mevaseret Zion, which is now
really a suburb of Jerusalem. Historically, control of this high ground has been seen as key to
the control of Jerusalem and of Palestine itself. A nearby ruins of a castle built by
12th-century Christian crusaders for exactly that purpose stands in mute testimony to the
importance of its strategic location.
The Angleton memorial consists of a pedestal of stones topped with a black plaque. To James
Angleton, a friend it says. This plaque was dedicated in 1987, a few months after Angleton
died, and it has been maintained by his Israeli friends ever since. It's still in perfect
condition. The location is no accident. In the course of his extraordinary career,
Angleton, more than any other American, enabled the Americans to gain and hold this
strategic high ground in the Middle East. He was, as his friend Meir Amit said, the biggest
Zionist of the lot . Thank you.
Those are two different phenomena. Most of the opposition is directed against warmongering
Likudniks, neocons and financial oligarchy (signicant part of which is ethnically Jewish, like
Germany in 30th), while often incorrectly using ethnic terminology. So in many case you need to
substitution Jew with a Neocon or Likudnik to make sense of the sentiments expressed.
"How much anti-Jewish hostility is there today in America? A lot? A little? Is it
negligible? Potentially explosive? It is hard to tell because disliking Jews is often a
firing offense, and a controlled press makes discussion impossible.
A clue can perhaps be
found in the comments sections of political websites where, protected by anonymity,
commenters are often bitterly anti-Jewish. But then, these comments may, or may not, be the
work of a few cranks."
This is a question that has moving parts. There might be a lot of hostility today and was
very little a few decades ago because what was once thought behavior we could afford or was
perhaps thought a temporary reaction to WW2 now seems much more insidious.
Or any of a dozen
similar relationships. I have always noticed Jewish behavior being a New Yorker, but had
until very recently been rather indulgent about it.
What some refer to as "Middle Eastern" characteristics probably more correctly can be called the "rug merchant mentality."
Notable quotes:
"... Diversity often disappears through assimilation. Today people named O'Toole and Libertini may be proud of their ancestry, but they think of themselves as American, not as Irish and Italian. So do others. Thus hostility to them, once intense, has vanished. ..."
"... Jews do not assimilate. Yes, they speak the same language, wear the same clothes, and peck at smartphones like everyone else. Yet they think of themselves as Jews. So, therefore, does everyone else. While there is no legal or moral reason why they should not so think of themselves, there are consequences: Human nature is what it is, regardless of whether we think it should be. ..."
"... Worse -- and this has caused millions of deaths -- Jews are often successful. It doesn't matter whether the success arises from superior intelligence, greater drive, collusion, or the will of Yahweh. It happens. Thus the pattern repeated over and over and over down the ages. Jews prosper, become rich, gain power sometimes abused, and become arrogant. If Christians did this -- Bill Gates, or the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age -- they would be resented as individuals perhaps, not as an ethnicity. But Jews are Them. The surrounding population feels colonized -- by Them, by Space Aliens, by internal foreigners -- and deeply resents it. ..."
"... Power and wealth are not necessary to engender slaughter. Mere difference, specifically not being Christian, has often been enough. History is littered with examples, of which Jews are well aware. When the First Crusade took Jerusalem in 1099, the Christian armies immediately burned the synagogue with the Jews inside. Why? The Jews had no part in the war, which was between Muslims and Christians. ..."
"... A Jewish friend once expressed the attitude as sometimes being, "Look what they have done to us. We can do anything we want to them." ..."
"... "It appears that gypsies are born only to be thieves. They are born as thieves, raised among thieves, study to be thieves, and finally end by being common thieves." Cervantes died in 1616, which makes the story over 400 years old. Yet this description of gypsies is their reputation today, very much supported by police files.They haven't assimilated, and they haven't changed. Jews of course have never been associated with burglary or picking pockets, but the passage makes clear that peoples can maintain characteristics over centuries ..."
"... Jews with remarkable consistency have been described for centuries as smart, greedy, combative, clannish, "pushy," exploitative, and arrogant. This is how I hear them described in Mexico, where I live. (I think of these as Middle Eastern traits, but never mind.) Then there is chutzpah. which in practice seems to mean "brashly walking over other people." It can leave others feeling bulldozed, defeated, used. This bruising of the ego, of self-respect, arouses a hostility all out of proportion to actual damage done. It is, or so I think, a major cause of dislike for Jews. Such descriptions are dismissed today as stereotypes. A stereotype is just the aggregate observation of many people over time. ..."
"... In sum, Jews seem alien, smarter than others and far more aggressive than Christians, whom they seem to trample. Christians feel that they cannot compete, that they are outsmarted at every turn, or at least pushed around, and made victims. This bruising of the ego sets off irrational, serious hostility. It is the attitude of blacks toward whites, for the same reasons ..."
"... Finally there is Israel, the albatross around the Jewish neck, making it impossible for Jews quietly to be more or less normal Americans. To Jews Israel is of immense and understandable importance, but this enthusiasm brings up charges of dual loyalty or, often, loyalty exclusively to Israel. The truth of this doesn't matter. It looks true, which is enough. Does Rachel the Jewish dentist in Peoria back Israel? To what extent? What does she think of Israeli behavior? We don't know. We know that Jewish lobbies like AIPAC and the Neocons back Israel one hundred percent. And they control American Mid-Eastern policy. This is much noted on the Web. ..."
"... America is not really stable. Political animosity runs high, racial hostility is great and growing, standards of living fall, offshoring and automation leave the young with nowhere for their lives to go. Wealth goes rapidly from the many to the few and what was the working class falls into drugs and anomie. The wars never end. Infrastructure ages and falls behind that of more advanced nations. Anger grows. As the pie shrinks, someone will have to get less pie. ..."
It is strange: Jews have been disliked everywhere and in all times. The dislike appears in odd places. I was astonished to find
that my Nepalese trekking guides were intensely hostile to Jews. They said that Jews (actually Israelis in most cases I think, but
the Nepalese do not seem to make the distinction) were loud, demanding, and always trying to force down the guides' fees. Historically
the hostility has often been powerful and, not infrequently, murderous. Jews have been expelled from country after country, excluded
from polite society, subjected to quotas,and required to live in certain regions. Why?
How much anti-Jewish hostility is there today in America? A lot? A little? Is it negligible? Potentially explosive? It is hard
to tell because disliking Jews is often a firing offense, and a controlled press makes discussion impossible. A clue can perhaps
be found in the comments sections of political websites where, protected by anonymity, commenters are often bitterly anti-Jewish.
But then, these comments may, or may not, be the work of a few cranks.
Today there appear news stories about growing hostility on campuses, that Jews are fleeing Paris because of increased or more
openly expressed dislike, or that the German Right, never fond of Jews, gains strength.
Since the dislike has existed for at least two thousand years, there must be some enduring reason or reasons. What?
One I think is the Space Alien Effect. It is human nature to dislike people different from oneself. This fact runs against today's
cult of diversity, which accounts for the disastrous reality of American life, but a glance around the world reveals that diversity
causes most of the planet's troubles: Sunni and Shia, Jew and Muslim, Tutsi and Hutu, black, white and brown in America, Tamil and
Sinhalese; Turks and Kurds; Turks and Armenians; Thais and Muslims, Germans and Jews. Protestants and Catholics in Ireland, on and
on for a very long list of religious, ethnic, and racial differences. Diversity is nobody's strength.
Diversity often disappears through assimilation. Today people named O'Toole and Libertini may be proud of their ancestry, but
they think of themselves as American, not as Irish and Italian. So do others. Thus hostility to them, once intense, has vanished.
Jews do not assimilate. Yes, they speak the same language, wear the same clothes, and peck at smartphones like everyone else.
Yet they think of themselves as Jews. So, therefore, does everyone else. While there is no legal or moral reason why they should
not so think of themselves, there are consequences: Human nature is what it is, regardless of whether we think it should be.
Specifically, Jews are always Them. We are Us. We are aware that Feinstein is Jewish as we are not aware that O'Malley is Irish
-- because he isn't. Difference alone doesn't cause antagonism. but makes it much more likely.
Worse -- and this has caused millions of deaths -- Jews are often successful. It doesn't matter whether the success arises
from superior intelligence, greater drive, collusion, or the will of Yahweh. It happens. Thus the pattern repeated over and over
and over down the ages. Jews prosper, become rich, gain power sometimes abused, and become arrogant. If Christians did this -- Bill
Gates, or the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age -- they would be resented as individuals perhaps, not as an ethnicity. But Jews are
Them. The surrounding population feels colonized -- by Them, by Space Aliens, by internal foreigners -- and deeply resents it.
As noted, the reaction may take the form of ostracism, enforced quotas, confinement to the Pale of Settlement, expulsion from the
country, ghastly pogroms, or Auschwitz.
Hitler's complaints against the Jews were along usual lines, that Jews controlled German culture, finance, academia, and the media.
These are also things said in America today today on the internet against Jews . Whether these criticisms are true, fair, justified,
or make sense does not matter. What matters is that people feel, or can easily be made to feel, controlled, by Them. Making a list
of powerful Jews is sufficient and, with the internet, easy.
The dislike is profoundly visceral, not rational, tapping into deep wells of instinct that make little sense -- which doesn't
matter. This can be seen in the wild disproportion between offense given and reaction. How do you get rationally in Germany from
growlings in beer halls, "There are too damn many Jews in everything," to "We should kill all the Jews"?
Them, not Us. It makes little obvious sense to say that Jews are not Americans. Bob Dylan isn't an American? Lauren Bacall? Yet
this is clearly how anti-Jewish commenters on the web see it. Them, not Us. It is a matter of limbic tribalism, which does not map
well onto legal principles.
The hostility is often to Jews more as a metaphysical category than as actual people. Many who loathe Jews have little contact
with them. Ask, "What have Jews actually done to you? Hacked your bank account? Gypped you out of your house? Shot your dog?" and
the answer will likely be, "Nothing." Rachel Cohen, the dentist next door in Peoria, is not easily envisioned as trying to destroy
America, impose communism, or wreck the currency. Thus, "some of my best friends but ." While the Jews one actually knows probably
are not bad people, or at most annoying, The Jews collectively are a sort of ominous barely visible miasma. (For the record, no American
Jew has ever harmed me, and many have helped me in what I humorously call "my career." Coupla girlfriends, too.)
Importantly, Jewish presence is seen as Jewish conspiracy. Four Jews on the Supreme Court? From two percent of the population?
My God, they must be up to something . A conspiracy, doubtless. But a conspiracy to do what? A candidate theory, correct as it happens,
is that Jews as a people do anything and everything they can to advance the fortunes of Israel. But on the Supreme Court how? Other
suggestions are a desire to destroy the white race (including themselves?), to bring America down (why?), to wreck the international
monetary system (why?), or to impose a Zionist world empire. Most of these make between little and no sense, which doesn't matter.
Jews don't actually have to sacrifice Christian children to die for it. They just have to be thought to do so.
It is interesting that these usually nonexistent Jewish conspiracies get enduring attention while other, demonstrably real, conspiracies
do not arouse similar ire. For example, the Koch brothers, who are not Jewish, have funded and led a massive and disguised campaign
to subvert American politics for the benefit of big business. The arms industry bribes, suborns, and finagles to get the government
to buy hugely expensive weapons. The FBI was recently caught trying to prevent the election of Donald Trump. The Clintons are crooked
as kite string in a ceiling fan. So why do Jewish conspiracies, sometimes real but, more usually, imagined, get attention on the
web?
The Space Alien Effect. Jews are Them. We are Us. Both know it.
The importance of this tribalism should not be underestimated. I once walked down Main Street in Farmville, Virginia, a small
town in the Southside, with a friend. He said -- I forget how the subject came up -- with some bitterness, "The Jews own everything
on Main Street. Just like they do everywhere." He pointed to Rose's, a perfectly ordinary department store. It did nothing wrong
or even interesting. But it was Jewish. That was enough.
Them, not Us. The Presbyterian owners of a store actually engaged in gouging would have been resented as individuals, not as a
tribe. The Jews.
Power and wealth are not necessary to engender slaughter. Mere difference, specifically not being Christian, has often been
enough. History is littered with examples, of which Jews are well aware. When the First Crusade took Jerusalem in 1099, the Christian
armies immediately burned the synagogue with the Jews inside. Why? The Jews had no part in the war, which was between Muslims and
Christians.
This explains why Jews do not like Christianity, though the antipathy typically is (wisely) disguised as a principled adherence
to the invented constitutional doctrine of separation of church and state. Note that while Americans think of the Holocaust as something
the Germans did (I do) to Jews it can look like just another attack by a Christian country (Poland, Russia, England, the Baltics,
and so on.) A Jewish friend once expressed the attitude as sometimes being, "Look what they have done to us. We can do anything
we want to them."
Here we encounter the unfortunate human tendency to blame entire groups for what a few members did. For example, the Jews killed
Christ. "(Gosh, Rachel, you don't look old enough.") Or whites enslaved blacks. Actually, no one in the United States has been a
slave, or owned one, for a century and a half. Most of liberal politics would wither to nothing if we accepted that people cannot
be guilty of things they did not do.
It is not necessarily wise to be seen as trying to eliminate a majority religion.
Note that a people, though living always among others, can maintain characteristic over long periods. Recently I was reading Las
Novelas Ejemplares of Cervantes, specifically La Gitnailla , which means very approximately The Little Gypsy Girl. It begins,
"Parece que los gitanos y gitanas solamente nacieron en el mundo para ser ladrones: nacen de padres ladrones, críanse con ladrones,
estudian para ladrones y, finalmente, salen con ser ladrones corrientes."
"It appears that gypsies are born only to be thieves. They are born as thieves, raised among thieves, study to be thieves,
and finally end by being common thieves." Cervantes died in 1616, which makes the story over 400 years old. Yet this description
of gypsies is their reputation today, very much supported by police files.They haven't assimilated, and they haven't changed. Jews
of course have never been associated with burglary or picking pockets, but the passage makes clear that peoples can maintain characteristics
over centuries .
Jews with remarkable consistency have been described for centuries as smart, greedy, combative, clannish, "pushy," exploitative,
and arrogant. This is how I hear them described in Mexico, where I live. (I think of these as Middle Eastern traits, but never mind.)
Then there is chutzpah. which in practice seems to mean "brashly walking over other people." It can leave others feeling bulldozed,
defeated, used. This bruising of the ego, of self-respect, arouses a hostility all out of proportion to actual damage done. It is,
or so I think, a major cause of dislike for Jews. Such descriptions are dismissed today as stereotypes. A stereotype is just the
aggregate observation of many people over time.
Of course the evidence does not always support a particular explanation for avisible effect. A Jewish friend says, "We're no more
greedy than anyone else. We're just good businessmen so we make money." Those with money are usually described as greedy. I don't
think I have ever met a greedy Jew, though I have met many who were very careful with money. It doesn't matter whether you really
are greedy only that people think you are.
Chutzpah: When I was seven we lived in Arlington, Virginia, next to the Furmans, recently someone said, of Hell's Kitchen, which
I didn't know what was. The Furmans were by no means bad people. One day Mrs. Furman came over and gave my mother a hard time because
my little brother, five was playing with a kid across the street instead of little Andrew Furman. Mom had done nothing to influence
my brother's choice of friends. She, a quietly genteel woman from the Southside of Virginia, was horrified by the aggressiveness.
She told me of this decades later, so it clearly made a bad impression. Thereafter, Them were not our kind of people. Small things
can produce lifelong dislike.
In sum, Jews seem alien, smarter than others and far more aggressive than Christians, whom they seem to trample. Christians
feel that they cannot compete, that they are outsmarted at every turn, or at least pushed around, and made victims. This bruising
of the ego sets off irrational, serious hostility. It is the attitude of blacks toward whites, for the same reasons .
Finally there is Israel, the albatross around the Jewish neck, making it impossible for Jews quietly to be more or less normal
Americans. To Jews Israel is of immense and understandable importance, but this enthusiasm brings up charges of dual loyalty or,
often, loyalty exclusively to Israel. The truth of this doesn't matter. It looks true, which is enough. Does Rachel the Jewish dentist
in Peoria back Israel? To what extent? What does she think of Israeli behavior? We don't know. We know that Jewish lobbies like AIPAC
and the Neocons back Israel one hundred percent. And they control American Mid-Eastern policy. This is much noted on the Web.
Jewish backing for Israel requires emotional contortions since Israel is everything liberals, to include Jews, profess to hate,
being racist -- just now it is expelling blacks -- religiously exclusive, an apartheid state, militaristic, and brutal in its treatment
of Arabs. This I suspect bothers some Jews, but assuredly is a grave PR problem for the country. But then, as a small coastal enclave
in a part of the world intensely hostile to it, a sort of second Crusader Kingdom, it is hard to see what choices it has. If it becomes
democratic or allows extensive intermarriage, for example, it will quickly cease to be a Jewish state, and there is no way to rule
nicely over a sea of people who want to kill you.
Is there a possibility of active anti-semitism in America? Yes. Why is America immune to a dislike that has influenced all of
history?
Yet at the moment, no. No overt expression will soon occur, and perhaps never will. But the classic preliminary conditions exist
and grow. The appearance of Jewish power is strong. Four of nine justices of the Supreme Court, a majority of Ivy presidents, CEOs
of television networks. Zuckerberg of Facebook, Sergei Brin co-founder of Google. the New York Times , Time-Warner, Disney,
much of Hollywood, huge parts of retail, most of the big publishing houses in New York. Anyone who has worked in Washington knows
that Jewish control of Congress and the media is near absolute. The list could go on for pages. Things like this create a propagandist's
paradise.. If America's tight control over expression ever slipped, a would-be Adolf with Google searches could come up with a shocking
list.
A rational person might ask, "So what?" Do the Supreme Court's Jewish justices make Jewish decisions -- whatever that might mean?
Or do they vote like any four NPR listeners chosen at random? Did Mark Zuckerberg do anything underhanded? Or was he a very bright
Jewish kid who had an idea and the strength of character to push it into existence? Does Schultz of Starbucks do something evil,
or does he, like, you know, sell reasonably good coffee at a reasonable price?
It doesn't matter. They are there, so they must be conspiring. And their influence is becoming more obvious, as with Trump's subservience
(as seen by much of the world) to Israel in planning to move the embassy.
People who think they are defending Jews will point to Jewish contributions to nearly everything -- science, music, math, technology,
literature, charity, medicine, support for symphonies. These contributions are real and immense. With respect to anti-Jewish politics,
they are also irrelevant or worse. Since the hostility to Jews rests largely on their excessive presence (again, in the eyes of the
anti-Jewish) pointing to their intellectual contributions just increases the dislike. It emphasizes both the Jewish presence and
apparent superiority.
Happy, prosperous societies seldom form lynch mobs. When things break down, when hope wanes, expectations fall, and near-desperation
sets in, explosions come. Today the United States quite arguably heads into a Weimar-like future of chaos and social violence. This
may sound crazy but is it? Nobody thought such a highly civilized country as Germany capable of Treblinka.
America is not really stable. Political animosity runs high, racial hostility is great and growing, standards of living fall,
offshoring and automation leave the young with nowhere for their lives to go. Wealth goes rapidly from the many to the few and what
was the working class falls into drugs and anomie. The wars never end. Infrastructure ages and falls behind that of more advanced
nations. Anger grows. As the pie shrinks, someone will have to get less pie.
It is hard to see how this can continue forever. My guess is that the fighting -- "unrest" is the polite term -- will break out
first between white and black. Whites are quiescent now, but see their lives worsening and their world deteriorating. The kneelers
in the NFL, the rioters
Fred, you know we love most of your columns, but this one is deeply flawed:
Specifically, Jews are always Them. We are Us.
That's it, huh? Then why did you go on to write the following?
Anyone who has worked in Washington knows that Jewish control of Congress and the media is near absolute.
That doesn't sound like being hated for the offense of simply being different; that sounds like something that would piss people
off.
They said that Jews (actually Israelis in most cases I think, but the Nepalese do not seem to make the distinction) were
loud, demanding, and always trying to force down the guides' fees.
Implicit in this is that the Nepalese don't dislike most other foreign visitors as much as they do the Israelis. And what had
the Israelis done, other than just what the Nepalese guides said? Failed to assimilate into the culture of Nepal while on vacation
there? I think your're kind of undermining your central thesis with this one.
Animus goes much deeper than simple resentment at Jewish success.
It is because of the destruction of our once stable society and the implosion of Western European nations under cultural currents
unleased by the Jews that is the source of that animus.
Speak honestly Fred and stop the tangential and mealy mouthed explanations for the animus.
For someone who thinks antisemitism is irrational, Fred, you sure do seem to provide a lot of rational sounding reason for disliking
the Jews.
Note: I haven't encountered any Jews who were pushy or hostile with me. I've known Jews from work, school and the community,
and they don't seem any more likely to be aggressive, in the interpersonal sense, than anyone else. I think this tendency has
been exaggerated – a lot. When I was in my early twenties my blond shiksa cousin had a couple of Jewish friends she would take
with her when she visited. Trust me, the only aggressive and mean one in the bunch was my cousin. The two Jewish girls were good
company, and my friends and I were always happy to socialize with them. The one Jewish kid in my class would never have been described
as aggressive by anyone.
That was in 1099. I could give a F who did what to whom that long ago. But with Jews their motto is "never forgive, never forget".
Even when they've lived better in white Christian nations than in any other they still work to undermine the white Christians
they live among. That their historical grudges have an endless shelf life is reason to hate them and bar them from living in our
nations.
Importantly, Jewish presence is seen as Jewish conspiracy. Four Jews on the Supreme Court?
Right. When Jews are overrepresented in any field it's because they're so darn smart. It whites are overrepresented in their
own friggin countries then Jews lecture us about unearned white privilege. This is why I and a growing number of whites hate them.
And it just so happens that all four Jews represent the totalitarian left wing of the court who consistently vote against white
American interests. Another reason they're hated.
I won't waste too much time since Fred's writing philo-semitic propaganda and taking pot shots at anyone who doesn't think
they're as groovy as he does. This is just one of Freddy's partisan diatribes similar to how he lionizes and promotes Mexicans
and Mexico.
Anyone who examines the historical record and the history of the Jews in the diaspora with an open mind will become anti-semitic.
As Fred hinted, Jews prize their ethnic identity much more than most whites. For example, while Italian and Greek Americans may
pay homage to their respective identities, they don't wear them on their sleeves. They certainly wouldn't describe an Italian
marrying a Greek as "intermarriage," a few potential exceptions notwithstanding.
Of course, Jews bragging about their success doesn't help either. Chinese and other Asian Americans – while not wielding the
political and cultural clout of Jews – are also very economically successful; but they at least have the wisdom to keep quiet
about it, as evidenced by their strident rejection of the "model minority" stereotype. Successful minorities worldwide such as
Bohras in India also manage to quietly enjoy their success; and that's saying something, given that India is an openly – and often
violently – majoritarian country.
Ultimately, I think that Jews' chutzpah engenders a lot of ill will. Of all affluent and accomplished minorities, they're
certainly the most flamboyant and pushy.
When a state is composed of a homogeneous population, the natural inertia of such a population will hold the Stage together
and maintain its existence through astonishingly long periods of misgovernment and maladministration.
But the situation is utterly different in a country where the population is not homogeneous .Should the ruling hand show signs
of weakness in such a State the result will be to awaken the individualistic instincts which are slumbering in the ethnological
groups.
Fred the apologist clearly states the jooies exercise "near absolute control" of Wash DC i.e. the goy 98% of the
US population has essentially been disenfranchised. That's not a reason to hate on the vile conniving jooies?
March 5, 2018 at 3:27 am
GMT 100 Words Stereotypes come from somewhere.
I have a friend who is prejudiced against Chinese people, based on his dealings with Chinese in the computer industry. His
perception (right or wrong, but it is the perception which matters) is that they were "sneaky," "underhanded," they "stuck
together against the round eyes."
Yet, as a school teacher, this same fellow readily bragged up the achievements of his numerous Oriental students. Which tells
me that, on a personal level, prejudice can be overcome. As the saying went, back in the days of hippies vs. rednecks, "Bar
stool to bar stool, things can be pretty cozy."
My friend is a devout evangelical Christian. Whenever I see the "fish" symbol, I tend to run the other way. But, I make an
exception in his case, because I know him to be, and respect him as, a good man.
Hitler's complaints against the Jews were along usual lines, that Jews controlled German culture, finance, academia,
and the media.
Not exactly.
In his own words:
There were few Jews in Linz.
As I thought they were persecuted on account of their Faith my aversion to hearing remarks against them grew almost into
a feeling of abhorrence.
Then I came to Vienna.
In the Jew I still saw only a man who was of a different religion, and therefore, on grounds of human tolerance, I was against
the idea that he should be attacked because he had a different faith.
Once, when passing through the inner City [Vienna], I suddenly encountered a phenomenon in a long caftan and wearing black
side-locks. My first thought was: Is this a Jew? They certainly did not have this appearance in Linz.
Cleanliness, whether moral or of another kind, had its own peculiar meaning for these people.
What soon gave me cause for very serious consideration were the activities of the Jews in certain branches of life .Was
there any shady undertaking, any form of foulness, especially in cultural life, in which at least one Jew did not participate?
The fact that nine-tenths of all the smutty literature, artistic tripe and theatrical banalities, had to be charged to the
account of people who formed scarcely one percent of the nation – that fact could not be gainsaid.
In summary, Hitler states that his antipathy towards Jews, as a group, was based on his experiences in the "big city" (Vienna),
and his *perception* that the Jews he encountered there were mostly immoral and corrupt, unlike those he had known in his (smaller)
home town.
"David Goldman–Sadly, American Jews stand out as a horrible example of demographic failure. In the United States, secular
and loosely affiliated American Jews, that is, the vast majority, have the lowest fertility rate of any identifiable segment
of the American population. As I wrote in my book How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam is Dying, Too):
Nowhere is the fertility gap between religious and non-religious more extreme than among American Jews. As a group, American
Jews show the lowest fertility of any ethnic group in the country. That is a matter of great anguish for Jewish community leaders.
According to sociologist Steven Cohen, "We are now in the midst of a non-Orthodox Jewish population meltdown. Among Jews in
their 50s, for every 100 Orthodox adults, we have 192 Orthodox children. And for the non-Orthodox, for every 100 adults, we
have merely 55 such children."
Half of the non-Orthodox children, moreover, marry non-Jews, and very few children of mixed marriages will remain Jewish.
As Reform Rabbi Lance J Sussman wrote in 2010, "With the exception of a number of Orthodox communities and a few other bright
spots in or just off the mainstream of Jewish religious life, American Judaism is in precipitous decline the Reform movement
has probably contracted by a full third in the last ten years!"
which in turn was inspired, if that is the word, by the trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus of the French Army, in which Capt
Dreyfus was unjustly convicted of espionage.
From the preface:
In 1902, he [Herzl] published a utopian novel about the Jewish state, Altneuad (oldnew
land) a vision complete with monorails and modern industry. , Altneuad
envisioned a multipluralistic Democracy in which Arabs and Jews had equal
rights.
Doesn't seem to have worked out that way.
The central premise of Zionism seems to be that Jews cannot expect equable treatment in a majority Gentile society. Ironically,
the infamous case which inspired it also disproves this hypothesis.
To wit:
In the long run, justice was done in the case of Capt. Dreyfus.
He was very publicly restored to rank, with a promotion, in the French Army, and served honorably in what was then known as
the Great War, which was all he ever wanted to do in the first place.
On 12 July 1906, Dreyfus was officially exonerated by a military commission. The day after his exoneration, he was readmitted
into the army with a promotion to the rank of major (Chef d'Escadron). A week later, he was made Knight of the Legion of
Honour,[6] and subsequently assigned to command an artillery unit at Vincennes.
Of course, there are (particularly) Jews who will say, "But he had years of his life stolen from him." This is, of course,
true, but in the long run it is nothing more, nor less, than another miscarriage of justice, which in the case was, fortunately
for its victim, eventually corrected. It is, in that sense, not unique. It did result in an an outcome more favorable than
some both before and since.
It isn't just cultural currents unleashed; it's deliberate destruction planned by institutional Jewry. Barbara Specter's
married to the chief rabbi of Sweden and says Europe's "too monolithic," meaning "too white." She says Jews will be resented
for their leading role in making Europe multicultural, i.e., non-white majority. Right you are, Barbara.
1,200+ rabbis in the U.S. came out for unchecked immigration of "refugees" and Adelson, Saban, Gelbaum, the ADL, the AJC,
the HIAS, and BB are all for open borders. And the utter destruction of white America.
Jews played a huge role in Bolshevism, in putsches in Hungary, Austria, and Germany, and in Holodomor. "Jew" and "communist"
were practically synonymous in 1930s America and Israel ran Pollard, one of the most destructive spies ever known in America.
Jews have also done their utmost to push the most destructive aspects of the civil rights disaster.
Israel went to war against the U.S. with its deliberate attack on the USS Liberty with machine gunning of our sailors trying
to make it into the lifeboats. It's protestations of "mistake" were transparent lies.
AIPAC ensures that billions from the treasury are squandered every year on an enemy nation that tries to involve us in fighting
their wars for local hegemony. Is greater Israel also one of our projects?
Finally, institutional Jewry does everything in its power to distort National Socialism as "right-wing" to deflect attention
from the leftist essence of totalitarian destruction, torture, theft, and murder and the disproportionate Jewish role in extreme
leftist movements. The Jewish obsession with "The" Holocaust is the ultimate "holocaust denial." And woe betide he who cares
to point that out. "The" Holocaust pales in comparison to the communist ones? Hater!!
What is not to loathe in organized Jewry?
I know of decent, patriotic Jews but I know of few Jews who dare to speak out against what I have mentioned. I would be
attacked for "anti-Semitism" long before such voices are heard.
Fred us always a great read and a personal hero of mine. However, he missed the target here with his discussion of a bland
"otherness." Reading excerpts from the Talmud and quotes from the great Rabbi Schneerson reveals that there is indeed some
virulent Jewish hatred of the goyim out there. Bland otherness is not what I'm picking up.
Hitler's complaints against the Jews were along usual lines
You disingenuously fail to note that it is the consistency of these particular accusations throughout history that makes
them 'usual'. Jews are always persecuted for the same list of crimes . because they're always up to the same list of crimes.
How many times have they been expelled from the gentile nations that were effectively isolated in time and by geography. Are
you saying that gentile civilization has quietly conspired to sew a false narrative of Jews, across national borders, and throughout
it's entire, and diversely recorded history? Because that's the official Jewish narrative, as wild and absurd as it is. Of
course, you'll have to fight tooth and nail just to get one of them to be honest enough to admit that they've been routinely
expelled from a great many nations that had formerly welcomed them. And even then, you'll almost never get one honest enough
to admit any wrongdoing on the part of the Jews in any such instances of expulsion. Jews can only be victims or heroes, after
all. Never villains. Just ask the Democrats, or the Republicans. Or the Media. Or the ADL, or the SPLC, or your college professor
etc etc etc.
Them, not Us. It makes little obvious sense to say that Jews are not Americans.
Tell that to the Jews. They're the one's who don't practice what they preach. More than anything, it's that double standard,
along with the mass censorship of all criticism and dissent via a deafening chorus of cries of 'antisemitism' that foster the
most hostility towards Jews as a collective. Even your dentist Isn't likely to reproach Jews for their wrongdoings, or call
for the Orwellian 'strength' of diversity to flood Israel, the way they would in America. You make no mention of the widespread
'ethno-nationalism for me, but not for thee' views held by Jews with regards to Israel and the West.
Four Jews on the Supreme Court? From two percent of the population? My God, they must be up to something. A conspiracy,
doubtless.
Don't stop there. Not unless you're TRYING to be dishonest. You've pointed out a single piece in a very long pattern of
such events and then attempted to misrepresent the rest of the argument by omitting all the other pieces of evidence that come
together to show a cohesive Jewish conspiracy that is rooted in verifiable facts. Tell everyone how much of our government,
media, academia, finance etc is overwhelmingly dominated by this 2%.
Then compare the results of such an analysis with Hitler's complaints against the Jews. And then look at the collective
leftward political lean of all these Jewish dominated positions of power and influence in America/The West. The Marxists in
our colleges, the academics dictating our historical narrative and how we record it in history books, the bankers, the globalist
billionaires and media moguls and Hollywood big wigs etc etc etc.
What they all lobby for, advocate for and push, is all the same things they won't tolerate at all in Israel. And for exactly
all the same reasons that they decry whites as racists and bigots for bringing up.
Jews with remarkable consistency have been described for centuries as smart, greedy, combative, clannish, "pushy," exploitative,
and arrogant. This is how I hear them described in Mexico, where I live.
At some point, Fred, hopefully you figure out how to tell the difference between a coincidence and pattern of events. I'm
not holding my breath though.
I was astonished to find that my Nepalese trekking guides were intensely hostile to Jews. They said that Jews (actually
Israelis in most cases I think, but the Nepalese do not seem to make the distinction) were loud, demanding, and always trying
to force down the guides' fees. Historically the hostility has often been powerful and, not infrequently, murderous. Jews
have been expelled from country after country, excluded from polite society, subjected to quotas,and required to live in
certain regions. Why?
LOL.
No, see, this is just brainwashing by the Great Global Antisemitic Conspiracy. They read some virulent antisemitism online
first. Then, primed for antisemitism, they saw bad behavior from Jews where it didn't exist.
How much anti-Jewish hostility is there today in America? A lot? A little? Is it negligible? Potentially explosive? It
is hard to tell because disliking Jews is often a firing offense, and a controlled press makes discussion impossible.
Yeah, no recipe for animus there.
Countersemitism is probably less common than the countersemites think, and more common than the philosemites think.
Jewish success isn't the problem. Jews are very fond of this answer, because it strokes their ethnic egos, and feeds their
dindu nuffin culture (nobody, I mean NOBODY, does dindu culture like the Jews), but it's silly. Whites are rich tourists; did
your Nepalese friends say they didn't like whites? Or do you suppose they bitch to their Jewish clients about whites? I suppose
it's possible.
Countersemitism thrives despite an extremely hostile environment (it's firing, ruination, and unpersoning stateside; prison
time in Europe) because there are much better reasons for it than envy. No serious person takes up countersemitism trivially;
the cost is too high. There are far easier ways to work out one's psychological needs, if that's the only motive. No, countersemitism
is driven by altruism.
Finally there is Israel, the albatross around the Jewish neck, making it impossible for Jews quietly to be more or less
normal Americans.
Jews make it impossible. All they have to do is what whites would do; turn on Israel the way whites turned on South Africa.
All they have to do is be consistent in their leftism, and subject themselves to the same rules that they enforce on others.
You just glide past this and start yakking about Israel; what they do is their business, what the Jewish diaspora does
is our business.
Whites and Jews really are different.
Jewish behavioral profile: "we should be the last people to have to live by the rules we push on everyone else."
White behavioral profile: "we can't push rules on everyone else that we aren't already living by ourselves."
A rational person might ask, "So what?" Do the Supreme Court's Jewish justices make Jewish decisions–whatever that might
mean? Or do they vote like any four NPR listeners chosen at random? Did Mark Zuckerberg do anything underhanded? Or was
he a very bright Jewish kid who had an idea and the strength of character to push it into existence? Does Schultz of Starbucks
do something evil, or does he, like, you know, sell reasonably good coffee at a reasonable price?
It doesn't matter. They are there, so they must be conspiring. And their influence is becoming more obvious, as with
Trump's subservience (as seen by much of the world) to Israel in planning to move the embassy.
A rational person might point to the Jews and their leftism, support for "diversity" and such. Jews say "we need black faces
here, brown faces," etc., but then we're not supposed to turn around and say, "fine, we need white gentile faces in here"?
Sauce, gander. Jews see removal of Jews as antisemitism, so we should see removal of white gentile faces as anti-white racism.
Let Jews and all the rest advocate for their own representation, and we whites will advocate for ours.
That's the rational response.
People who think they are defending Jews will point to Jewish contributions to nearly everything–science, music, math,
technology, literature, charity, medicine, support for symphonies. These contributions are real and immense. With respect
to anti-Jewish politics, they are also irrelevant or worse. Since the hostility to Jews rests largely on their excessive
presence (again, in the eyes of the anti-Jewish) pointing to their intellectual contributions just increases the dislike.
It emphasizes both the Jewish presence and apparent superiority.
Nah. Jews follow whites around, the same way blacks do. Jews need whites, to live in white countries, the same way
blacks do. Jews chimp out at the thought of being excluded from white communities or countries, the same way blacks
do. That burning need is not the hallmark of superiority. Whites, on the other hand, don't need either group. They certainly
don't need to follow either around, or go ape at the idea of being excluded from their communities or countries.
This explains a lot of the chip on the Jewish shoulder. Jews have a love-hate, superiority-inferiority complex going with
whites, big time.
America is not really stable.
Owed mostly to diversity, which in turn is owed largely to the Jews, and their tireless efforts from 1924 to 1965 to pry
open our borders.
Your idealism and altruism are wasted on Fred Reed.
He isn't arguing in good faith.
He is just writing lies, which he knows full well to be lies, to provoke the anger of his audience, for his own amusement.
I believe they call it "trolling".
The only way antisemitism will ever go away is if more members of the Jewish elite follow the lead of Ron Unz and Stephen
Miller and make a good faith effort to use their influence for the benefit of the host community. (If you made a list of the
100,000 most influential Jews in America, would there be anyone on that list other than Unz and Miller who is favorably disposed
towards old-stock Americans?)
Trolls like Fred Reed, on the other hand, will reliably increase antisemitism every time they get access to a keyboard.
They will be perceived as toadies of the hostile Jewish elite, and unfortunately all Jews will receive a share of the animus
stirred up by the all too numerous likes of Fred Reed.
"... Western elites may deplore the return of nationalism. But they had best not dismiss it, for assertions of national and tribal identity appear to be what the future is going to be all about. ..."
"... In Hungary and Poland, ethnonationalism, the belief that nation-states are created and best suited to protect and defend a separate and unique people, with its separate and unique history and culture, is already ascendant. ..."
"... Globalists may see the U.N., EU, NAFTA, TPP as stepping stones to a "universal nation" of all races, tribes, cultures and creeds. But growing numbers in every country, on every continent, reject this vision. And they are seeking to restore what their parents and grand-parents had, a nation-state that is all their own. ..."
"... Looking back over this 21st century, the transnational elite that envisions the endless erosion of national sovereignty, and the coming of a new world order of open borders, free trade and global custody of mankind's destiny, has triggered a counter-revolution. Does anyone think Angela Merkel looks like the future? ..."
"... Indeed, now that George W. Bush's crusade for democracy has ended up like Peter the Hermit's Children's Crusade, what is the vision, what is the historic goal our elites offer to inspire and enlist our people? ..."
"... The US has always been ruled or parasitized by corrupt, murderous psychopaths with the results we have to live with today. All corny rhetoric aside, it has never been a force for peace, justice, or freedom. Why would anyone desire it to remain what she has been? ..."
"... There is a rebellious coolness in tearing down the PC edifice similar to the fun that could be had attacking Christianity and its holy cows back in the 20th century. The age of Blair, Merkel, Obama and Juncker is drawing to a close. ..."
"... Nationalists supporting such people – any supposedly nationalist movement rooted on the political left – will simply be betrayed, as were the Greeks who voted for SYRIZA, the leftist supposedly "anti-establishment" party that carried its leaders into office and power and then transformed itself into a "respectable" party of the "centre left", and ensured that the boat was not rocked in any ways that might really upset the EU/globalist elites. ..."
"... The war is between globalism and nationalism, the stakes are whether we continue on the path to one world corporatist government and culture – a place where there are no borders, there is no "outside", and no escape from the crushing dogmas of political correctness, or step off before it's too late. And the only true nationalism is the nationalism of the right. That will be true until parties of the old left – devoted to supporting indigenous workers and not to pushing social radicalism – reappear, if they ever do. ..."
In a surprise overtime victory in the finals of the Olympic men's hockey tournament, the
Russians defeated Germany, 4-3. But the Russians were not permitted to have their national anthem played or flag raised, due
to a past doping scandal. So, the team ignored the prohibition and sang out the Russian
national anthem over the sounds of the Olympic anthem. One recalls the scene in "Casablanca," where French patrons of Rick's saloon stood and
loudly sang the "La Marseillaise" to drown out the "Die Wacht am Rhein" being sung by a table
of German officers.
When the combined North-South Korean Olympic team entered the stadium, Vice President Mike
Pence remained seated and silent. But tens of thousands of Koreans stood and cheered the
unified team. America may provide a defensive shield for the South, but Koreans on both sides of the DMZ
see themselves as one people. And, no fool, Kim Jong Un is exploiting the deep tribal ties he
knows are there.
Watching the Russians defiantly belt out their anthem, one recalls also the 1968 summer
Olympics in Mexico City where sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos stood on the podium, black
gloved fists thrust skyward in a Black Power salute, asserting their separate racial
identity
Western elites may deplore the return of nationalism. But they had best not dismiss it, for
assertions of national and tribal identity appear to be what the future is going to be all
about.
Some attendees at the CPAC conclave this past week were appalled that Britain's Nigel Farage
and France's Marion Le Pen were present.
But Farage was the man most responsible for Brexit, the historic British decision to leave
the EU. Le Pen is perhaps the most popular figure in a National Front party that won 35 percent
of the vote in the runoff election won by President Emmanuel Macron.
And the most unifying stand of the NF appears to be "Let France be France!" The French
people do not want their country invaded by unassimilable millions of migrants from Africa and
the Islamic world. They want France to remain what she has been. Is this wrong? Is preservation of a country, the national family one grew up in, not conservative?
In Hungary and Poland, ethnonationalism, the belief that nation-states are created and best
suited to protect and defend a separate and unique people, with its separate and unique history
and culture, is already ascendant.
Globalists may see the U.N., EU, NAFTA, TPP as stepping stones to a "universal nation" of
all races, tribes, cultures and creeds. But growing numbers in every country, on every
continent, reject this vision. And they are seeking to restore what their parents and
grand-parents had, a nation-state that is all their own.
Nationalists like Farage, who seek to pull their countries out of socialist superstates like
the EU, and peoples seeking to secede and set up new nations like Scotland, Catalonia, Corsica
and Veneto today, and Quebec yesterday, are no more anti-conservative than the American
patriots of Lexington and Concord who also wanted a country of their own.
Why are European peoples who wish to halt mass migration from across the Med, to preserve
who and what they are, decried as racists? Did not the peoples of African and Middle Eastern countries, half a century ago, expel the
European settlers who helped to build those countries? The Rhodesia of Spitfire pilot Ian Smith was a jewel of a nation of 250,000 whites and
several million blacks that produced trade surpluses even when boycotted and sanctioned by a
hating world. When Smith was forced to yield power, "Comrade Bob" Mugabe took over and began the looting
of white Rhodesians, and led his Shona tribesmen in a slaughter of the Matabele of rival Joshua
Nkomo.
Eighty-five percent of the white folks who lived in Rhodesia, prior to "majority rule," are
gone from Zimbabwe. More than half of the white folks who made South Africa the most advanced
and prosperous country on the continent are gone.
Are these countries better places than they were? For whom?
Looking back over this 21st century, the transnational elite that envisions the endless
erosion of national sovereignty, and the coming of a new world order of open borders, free
trade and global custody of mankind's destiny, has triggered a counter-revolution. Does anyone think Angela Merkel looks like the future?
Consider the largest countries on earth. In China, ethnonationalism, not the ruling
Communist Party, unites and inspires 1.4 billion people to displace the Americans as the first
power on earth. Nationalism sustains Vladimir Putin. Nationalism and its unique identity as a Hindu nation
unites and powers India. Here, today, it is "America First" nationalism.
Indeed, now that George W. Bush's crusade for democracy has ended up like Peter the Hermit's
Children's Crusade, what is the vision, what is the historic goal our elites offer to inspire
and enlist our people?
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of a new book, "Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That
Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever."
It's far more complicated. Scotland and Catalonia wanted to secede because they found their
nations TOO CONSERVATIVE. Catalonia wanted to be independent to take in MORE immigrants.
Scotland wanted independence to take in MORE immigrants and push diversity and leftism even
more.
At this point, I think France is too far gone. By some estimates, 70% of all births in
Paris are to Africans and Muslims. And French women got serious junglois fever, and many new
black babies are popping out of white wombs.
Also, Korean nationalism is myth. Koreans are toadies of any great power. 80% of Koreans
want to move to US or Canada and forever abandon their identity. Even though the current
'leftist' regime in SK is for better relations with NK, it is also for massive immigration
and replacement of Koreans with foreigners. And 80% of Korean youth support Diversity since
their US-trained teachers taught them so.
I'm not sure what Buchanan means by including Rhodesia. Is he saying nationalism was
justified in expelling whites? Or is he saying imperialism is better because whites ran a
better nation?
what is the vision, what is the historic goal our elites offer to inspire and enlist our
people?
The globalists envision the earth as a plantation with oligarchs (stateless corporate
monopolists) as planters, former national governments as overseers and the people of earth as
niggers.
They want France to remain what she has been. Is this wrong?
Insofar as France has been a colonial power, the answer is, "yes." Insofar as France has
been a puppet of Israel, the answer is also, "yes."It's really sad when an historian of PB's
caliber seems to be either clueless or worse about what France has been. As far as the US being what she has been, the answer is also, "yes." Why would anyone want the US to support an entity like the bloody USSR as it has done in
the past? Why would anyone want to US to be a morally and fiscally bankrupt nation ruled by
monsters and controlled by Zio-gangsters, as she has been, and is?
The US has always been ruled or parasitized by corrupt, murderous psychopaths with
the results we have to live with today. All corny rhetoric aside, it has never been a force
for peace, justice, or freedom. Why would anyone desire it to remain what she has been?
Pretty much this, Pat. The future of white people rebounds inexorably towards
ethnonationalism. Yes, there will be a boiling off into so much mystery meat of immigrants
and whites who are attracted to that or end up with it, but a lot of those areas are
Balkanized. Every white child that is born will have more genetic and/or cultural attraction
to their own by default.
The baby boomers who have ascended the heights of the institutions can't take it with
them. Their time is over. The time for those adults who have been able to make a realistic
assessment of the world, now it's not a whitopia any more, has come. They are emboldened by
the s *** posting of the internet, the audacity of Trump. There is a rebellious coolness in
tearing down the PC edifice similar to the fun that could be had attacking Christianity and
its holy cows back in the 20th century. The age of Blair, Merkel, Obama and Juncker is
drawing to a close. The era of Xi and Putin has already been here a while, and now we have
Trump and will have a cascade of similar leaders in the West in due course I believe.
peoples seeking to secede and set up new nations like Scotland, Catalonia, Corsica and
Veneto today, and Quebec yesterday, are no more anti-conservative than the American
patriots of Lexington and Concord who also wanted a country of their own.
Well, yes and no. On the one hand, these people are in fact inherently anti-conservative
in the most fundamental sense – they are radicals, seeking to overturn the existing
order. On the other hand, where they are merely local elites seeking to formalise their own
power and shrug off remote overseers, and don't seek radical social change otherwise, then
they are also conservative. That's why the American Secession was not a revolution, merely a
transfer of power from remote to local elites.
Things are complicated further by supposed "nationalist" movements that are run by
leftists – as in the case of Scotland or Catalonia. These are people who merely want to
transfer control from the established state to a more distant superstate, the EU, and who are
firmly committed to all the dogmas of leftism – internationalism, antiracism, open
borders, social radicalism, and who are just as much dupes for globalist corporatism as any
establishment pseudo-conservative.
Nationalists supporting such people – any supposedly nationalist movement rooted on
the political left – will simply be betrayed, as were the Greeks who voted for SYRIZA,
the leftist supposedly "anti-establishment" party that carried its leaders into office and
power and then transformed itself into a "respectable" party of the "centre left", and
ensured that the boat was not rocked in any ways that might really upset the EU/globalist
elites.
The war is between globalism and nationalism, the stakes are whether we continue on the
path to one world corporatist government and culture – a place where there are no
borders, there is no "outside", and no escape from the crushing dogmas of political
correctness, or step off before it's too late. And the only true nationalism is the
nationalism of the right. That will be true until parties of the old left – devoted to
supporting indigenous workers and not to pushing social radicalism – reappear, if they
ever do.
It's far more complicated. Scotland and Catalonia wanted to secede because they found
their nations TOO CONSERVATIVE. Catalonia wanted to be independent to take in MORE
immigrants. Scotland wanted independence to take in MORE immigrants and push diversity and
leftism even more.
And they did not want independence, they wanted to transfer their subordination to a
slightly more remote, more globalist supranational organisation, namely the developing
superstate that is the EU.
And 80% of Korean youth support Diversity since their US-trained teachers taught them
so.
Considering growing numbers of S. Koreans want U.S. forces out of their nation and their
highly restrictive immigration policy where's the evidence that they're becoming diversity
loving social justice warriors?
Globalists may see the U.N., EU, NAFTA, TPP as stepping stones to a "universal nation"
of all races, tribes, cultures and creeds. But growing numbers in every country, on every
continent, reject this vision. And they are seeking to restore what their parents and
grand-parents had, a nation-state that is all their own.'
Right on Pat! So why your hypocritical stance towards Ukraine and its quest to separate
itself from Russian imperial interests? Your inconsistencies are appalling!
No, it's the eternal lure of family. As Sailer has noted, races/ethnicities are just
extended families. Only sociopaths don't care more for their family than strangers. Even with
the most overarching propaganda – schools, media, government, etc. – in history
pushing whites to forget this, we are slowly coming out of our slumber. Will we ever fully
wake up and, if so, in time? Who knows.
But I do know that our current society won't last. Much like what's going on in Africa,
this system – based on the falsehood of racial equality – will slowly (then
quickly) fall apart. Of course, the timeframe that I use is historic, not the timeframe that
we use in our own lives. A hundred years is a nothing if you look over the past 5,000 years
when human civilization began.
Does anyone really believe that the current Cult of Equality system in W. Europe and the
U.S. will still be around in 100 years, much less 200 years? No chance. Could it still be
hanging on by a thread in 50 or 60 years – long after I'm dead? Quite possibly.
However, we're already seeing some cracks in the system after 50 years and things seem to
be accelerating. What happens when Muslims start demanding Sharia law in parts of Paris or
London? What happens when whites are no longer welcome in the Dem Party as we're beginning to
see at the top level? What happens when government debt reaches a level where the gov can't
borrow as much and must start cutting welfare spending? What happens when an increasingly
black and brown Congress (and state houses) starts to demand much higher taxes on whites (and
Asians) to support blacks and browns?
Wanting to be ruled by your own people is natural – and good. Whites have been on
top for 500 years and have forgotten what it's like to have to fight for our place in the
sun. As we start to get ruled by others year after year, that tribal instinct will grow. Will
it grow fast enough that we survive? Again, who knows. I hope so.
If not, well, natural selection is a bitch, isn't it.
Should we give up these evil nation states for an evil global feudalism?
I can understand a desire for more options. The anarchists have the best of it in my
opinion when it comes to political ideology. But there is the real problem of security and
survival for anarchists in a non anarchist world.
From the point of view of globalists, nationalism is already a de-centralization of
political power. I favor decentralization even if it will not take me all the way to a
Jeffersonian agrarian utopia.
Who said "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good"?
French people do not want their country invaded by unassimilable millions of migrants
from Africa and the Islamic world.
They want France to remain what she has been. Is this wrong?
I guess six million wasn't enough for Pat Buchanan
anyone with a kippah's worth of brains know that if France is allowed to remain French,
then the gas chambers and soap factories are only a matter of time.
let's let ((Nicolas Sarkozy)) explain it to you all
Nazis:
must be forced to mix, if they don't do so willingly, because if not, then you can
just sit back and count the days until geysers of blood start shooting out of the ground
again.
we've all seen this kind of 'will to power' before, when people like the French (and Poles
and Hungarians) think they can threaten others with their anti-Semitism by refusing to mix
and blend their vile and evil white Nazi features and culture away.
Totally agree. If gentile whites aren't breed out of existence, it's just a matter of time
before we see gas chambers in Ohio or Lincolnshire.
Throughout Jewish history, non-Jewish whites inexplicably have shown an insanely
irrational dislike of Jews. Since it emerges over and over, across time and regions, it must
be some form of mental sickness inherent in gentile whites. There's no other explanation. The
only commonalty is gentile whites.
No matter where Jews go, within a century or two, the local goys start to hate them to the
point that Jews are often ejected from the area, sometimes attacked. Everywhere, every time.
Jews, who just want to fit in and become a part of the community – no, to improve the
community – are singled out for no reason again and again.
Well, this must end. Even with their own homeland surrounded by a fence and protected by
nuclear weapons, Jews will never be safe until gentile whites are no longer a race. What is
the loss of the European peoples and their culture compared to the need to protect the Jewish
people from the inevitable Holocaust II: Revenge of the Goys.
Thankfully, the new breed – a mix of African, European, Mesitzo and whatever else
– will be more enlightened.
Here's an interesting example of modern nations trying to deal with the consequences of
globalism in the context of the ruling political correctness dogmas:
Imagine trying that in the US! How's that for some disparate impact, eh Obama?
He denied that harsher penalties in one area could simply drive criminals into other
areas.
This seems a bit of a stretch really. I mean, it's still got to be a good thing to harass
ghetto thugs and petty criminal oafs on the turf they think is theirs, but there needs to be
preparation for the inevitable spillover into more respectable areas. Unless you take the
view that ghetto dweller crime spilling over more is a price worth paying because it will
help to "wake up" the wealthy leftist classes who vote for more immigration and evade the
costs.
it's just a matter of time before we see gas chambers in Ohio or Lincolnshire.
we already saw it in Charlottesville!
the SS was goose stepping towards Sobibór redux, chanting Nazi propaganda about how
'Jews will not replace us"
have you ever heard anything so vile?!
Of course Jews will replace you! because white people are congenitally EVIL!
They don't know their place, because jehovah put them here to SERVE the Jews!!! Yet
they stubbornly refuse!
and appoint a Nazi goyim to the Supreme Court!!!
and a CIS at that!
I'm sure glad you too can see what we're up against as these neo-Nazis in France try to
assert their inner Himmler, and avoid the Great Kosher Blending.
Thankfully, the new breed – a mix of African, European, Mesitzo and whatever else
– will be more enlightened.
not unattractive, but more to the point, unconnected to any ethnic or cultural
heritage.
the perfect obedient slave race
a doubleplus good improvement over the Nazis (all white people/anti-Semites)
Scotland wanted independence to take in MORE immigrants and push diversity and leftism
even more.
Scottish elites – in the form of the Scottish National Party – wanted that.
But did Scottish voters? Or were they just voting for Scottish independence rather than for
the policies of the SNP? Hard to tell.
I'm not sure what Buchanan means by including Rhodesia. Is he saying nationalism was
justified in expelling whites? Or is he saying imperialism is better because whites ran a
better nation?
I think he's saying that white Rhodesians were the nation, and that they would have
been justified in expelling the blacks if the blacks weren't happy with their lot –
rather than allowing the blacks to destroy 'their' country. This is a very old school WN
viewpoint that, even among WNs, you don't hear much of anymore, but Buchanan likes to make
ambiguous and plausibly deniable statements like this. I mean, it's very easy for him to
backtrack and claim that he simply meant one of the options you outlined, but probably what
he really believes is the version I put forward.
Rhodesia's a bit much, imo; there were just too few whites. You need to have
Israeli-settler-like fanaticism to support whites' keeping control of all that territory. I
could have supported the South Africans sending the blacks to their own 'homelands' and then
cutting off contact with them. That would have been a better long term solution than the
segregation they tried to implement. You need a much larger majority – like the South
has/had – to pull segregation off. Although, even then, apartheid could have last much
longer than it did, if it wasn't for pressure from other white countries.
It's not just nationalism that's rising but racial nationalism or what some like to refer to
as ethno-nationalism. No doubt those Russian hockey players were all ethnically Russian and
their celebration was as much one of blood as of nation which in saner times are indivisible.
black gloved fists thrust skyward in a Black Power salute, asserting their separate
racial identity
And it's long past due that whites in America and throughout the Western world start to
assert their separate racial identity and act accordingly. We are the only race of people
that doesn't act in its own racial interests and if that doesn't change we won't last this
century.
Raceless civil nationalism is a dead end for white people and it doesn't resonate with
anyone but brainless and brainwashed whites. Religion will always play second fiddle to race
and ethnicity and it always will.
Militant multiculturalism, the de facto secular religion of the West, must be overthrown
by any means necessary along with its many mullahs in government, universities and the
media.
"No, it's the eternal lure of family. As Sailer has noted, races/ethnicities are just
extended families."
No, races and ethnicities do NOT fit that description. It's an appeal to authority.
"But I do know that our current society won't last."
No, you are only speculating here. No one knows for certain.
"What happens when Muslims start demanding Sharia law in parts of Paris or London? What
happens when whites are no longer welcome in the Dem Party as we're beginning to see at the
top level? What happens when government debt reaches a level where the gov can't borrow as
much and must start cutting welfare spending? What happens when an increasingly black and
brown Congress (and state houses) starts to demand much higher taxes on whites (and Asians)
to support blacks and browns?"
Chicken Little.
"Wanting to be ruled by your own people is natural – and good."
Our people are Americans.
"Whites have been on top for 500 years and have forgotten what it's like to have to fight
for our place
in the sun."
The human race is more important than whites or blacks or Asians.
And French women got serious junglois fever, and many new black babies are popping out
of white wombs.
Is this right? Anyone have stats? Is anyone keeping count?
Even though Black African nationalism did expel European powers, can nationalism survive
in black Africa without whites?
Good point – no doubt the current borders have a lot to do with how lines were drawn
by the retreating European powers.
Without whites and their organization skills, black African tends to fracture into
tribes, and warring tribes do no make a nation
Possibly, but they did have the capability to organize into fairly large empires
(depending on which part of Africa you are talking about. The capability to form an empire
over a vast multi-ethnic, multi-religious landscape is certainly a stepping stone for the
ability to form a modern nation-state (not that that is the goal).
If things do fracture down and tribal alliances become preeminent, then expect the very
large ethno-linguistic groups (like the Fulani and Hausa that number in the tens of millions)
to form something that lies across many of the current borders.
Religion will always play second fiddle to race and ethnicity and it always will.
That seems to be ahistorical when put in those absolute terms. Consider that Catholics and
Protestants joined others apart from their own ethno-linguistic background to slaughter (what
they considered) heretics of their own ethnicity. The current mess in the Middle East is also
quite a bit related to religious fault-lines. Sunni and Shiah of various backgrounds are
ganging up on each other.
To take another example of a recent breakdown of civil law and slaughter (the Rwandan
genocide). It was split; being Christian didn't seem to matter to transcend ethnic fault
lines, but being Muslim did:
"Roman Catholicism has been the dominant faith in Rwanda for more than a century. But many
people, disgusted by the role that some priests and nuns played in the killing frenzy, have
shunned organized religion altogether, and many more have turned to Islam.
'People died in my old church, and the pastor helped the killers," said Yakobo Djuma
Nzeyimana, 21, who became a Muslim in 1996. 'I couldn't go back and pray there. I had to find
something else.'"
As an imam from Rwanda explains, the Muslim Hutus and Tutsis have made their ethnic
identity a lesser priority:
"First, you have to remember that Muslims represent one of the only -- perhaps the only --
truly integrated community in Rwanda. What do I mean by this? I mean that most mothers of
Muslims are Tutsis, and most fathers of Muslims are Hutus -- let's say something like 80
percent on each side. And while many Muslims share the appearance of Tutsis, we are really a
mixed community. We are a community built by intermarriage."
So I understand this attitude in places like Europe, but that's because they don't really
take religion as seriously as they used to, which means that other priorities bubble up. If
you observe other places in the world, ethnicity plays second fiddle.
Peace.
Note: By the way, sometimes people being scared of you can be quite helpful (from the
above article):
"You see, for many years Hutus had been taught to fear Muslims. They were scared of our
mosques, so we could hide Tutsis there without fear of Hutus entering. Hutus had been taught
that our mosques were houses of the devil. They were taught that the devil lived in Muslim
homes, too. It went even further. It was also believed by many Hutus that if you shook the
hand of a Muslim something bad would happen to you, maybe get sick, because Muslims were
dirty people. So for all these reasons, Hutu militias were afraid of Muslims and left us
alone for the most part. "
Please provide an example of Catholics and Protestants joining ethnic others to slaughter
heretics of their own race/etnicity so I can better respond.
The current mess in the Middle East is also quite a bit related to religious
fault-lines. Sunni and Shiah of various backgrounds are ganging up on each other.
Without a doubt but what Muslims won't admit is that there are also ethnic fault lines
between Kurd, Arab, Turk and Persian. Turks, Kurds and Arabs are mostly Sunni yet Sunni Islam
has not united them or fostered goodwill and they are savagely fighting each other. The
enmity between Arab Muslim and Turkish Muslim goes back almost 1000 years.
To take another example of a recent breakdown of civil law and slaughter (the Rwandan
genocide). It was split; being Christian didn't seem to matter to transcend ethnic fault
lines, but being Muslim did:
Partly proves my point that the Catholic faith of Hutu and Tutsi didn't avert the
inter-ethnic bloodshed nor was Catholic dogma sufficient to prevent the bloodletting. I don't
think I was aware that some turned to Islam which is arguably a much more militant,
uncompromising and violent faith than Christianity or Catholicism. So any future conflicts
involving that particular group are likely to be religious in nature.
So I understand this attitude in places like Europe, but that's because they don't
really take religion as seriously as they used to, which means that other priorities bubble
up. If you observe other places in the world, ethnicity plays second fiddle.
Be careful with that claim, because again it appears Hutu and Tutsi took Catholicism far
more seriously than Europeans do but it did not transcend the ethnic hatred and tensions that
existed.
Iran takes religion seriously but it, too, is affected by ethnic tensions such that the
CIA was inflaming ethnic minorities against the majority Persians in 2006 in an attempt to
weaken the central government. Racial and ethnic diversity isn't such a strength after all
since a foreign government could easily foment racial unrest in America with it's 40%
no-white population.
Afghanistan takes the Islamic religion very seriously (home of the Taliban) but Sunni
Uzbeks and Tajiks loathe the Sunni Pashtuns and vice versa while the Pashtuns loathe the
Shiite Hazeras. Islam has not melded the various ethnic groups into one polity nor has it
fostered mutual affection between them.
In America it's been long known that Sunday Christian worship is a very racially
segregated affair and Christianity and Catholicism has not melded its three dominant racial
groups (white, black, Latino) into a cohesive group.
Europeans took religion far more seriously during the WWI and WWII era (but less seriously
than previous centuries) but that didn't stop the mind boggling fratricide during the two
world wars which may yet lead to the demise of Western Europe and the U.K. Ideology,
nationality and ethnicity had greater pull and won the day.
While there's certainly outliers and exceptions I believe that the evidence shows that,
generally speaking, ethno-nationalism trumps religion in most cases because it's a force of
nature that people must come to terms with instead of deny.
So I understand this attitude in places like Europe, but that's because they don't
really take religion as seriously as they used to, which means that other priorities bubble
up.
And don't forget that Europeans took religion so seriously in the 17th century that it
nearly wiped out 50% of Germany's population during the Thirty Years War. I doubt ethnic
conflict would have been any more bloody and brutal. Your Tamerlane took it so seriously that
he's responsible for murdering 17 million people.
Note: By the way, sometimes people being scared of you can be quite helpful (from the
above article):
Not unlike a KKK member wearing a white sheet in the 19th century since blacks thought the
mask wearer(s) were ghosts and would flee in terror and fear. They incurred the slur "spook"
since they were so easily spooked by the sight of a white men wearing white sheets.
White people will be bred out and chased down. Within the next generation they will become
functionally enslaved (we're halfway there already). Our Overlords have seen to this by
shifting our nation's demographics in a decisive and irreversible way. Everything–
everything –is being redefined such that if white people do it, it's a crime,
and if nonwhite people or chosenites do it, it's a mitzvah . Your predictions? They
are delusional–I say enjoy them!
They stole America once they had grabbed the reins of the mass media, and that happened
before Patrick came along. Since then it's just been consolidation. PJB is one of the most
courageous voices of our time and he's paid a very high price professionally. Neither of
these is true of his critics, yourself included.
Referendums, at the point of a Russian gun, as was done in Crimea aren't truly an accurate
meaure of anything.
Would you feel that a referendum today, after somewhere in the vicinity of 3million people
have left the Donbas, would likewise settle anything?
I'd bet on the bred out before I'd bet on the functionally enslaved. It's hard to enslave
a population that's smarter and better-organized than your people. At the moment, whites are
enslaving themselves. That's very different than being enslaved.
Gentile whites can free themselves at any moment – if we choose to. Will we? Good
question. I don't care if whites drop to 10% or 20% of the population; if that small minority
found its racial/ethnic cohension and decided to push back as a group, it'd be functionally
independent and free in a very short period of time.
Whites are not blacks or mestizos. We are not being enslaved. (Jews are clever and
certainly a major driving force behind much of what's going on, but they aren't omnipotent.)
We have agency. A glitch in our DNA makes many whites ill suited for the current environment,
ironically, an environment we created. This means that one of three things will happen. All
whites will be absorbed by other groups better suited for this environment. Whites with the
attributes to survive in this environment – the tribal whites – survive and
prosper while other whites fade away. The environment changes.
The future is not linear. You can't just extrapolate today's trends a hundred years out.
Europe was 99%+ white a hundred years ago. Now, 10% to 15% of births are to non-whites with
immigration continuing. North America was 100% native Indians 600 years ago. Now, they are
only a couple of percentage points of the population.
Things change. Momentum changes. I already hear whites laughing in public about being call
a racist. Granted, they laugh because they believe that they are "color blind" and thus not
racist, rather than being proud of being white. But let's take this one step at a time.
Indeed, my own child – truly unprompted – mentioned to me that she should be as
proud of European ancestry and a black should be of their African ancestry.
That is patently false. Whites are free to make their own decisions, and are only
"enslaved" as individuals if their choices box them in, and they choose not get themselves
out of their predicament.
"I don't care if whites drop to 10% or 20% of the population; if that small minority found
its racial/ethnic cohension and decided to push back as a group, it'd be functionally
independent and free in a very short period of time."
No, because that group would be enslaving the 80-90% of other white people. You neglect to
consider that European whites themselves tend to lack cohesiveness due to their political or
religious differences. You assume this minority group will be able to set aside their
problems for the benefit of their "race". Perhaps, but perhaps not.
"A glitch in our DNA makes many whites ill suited for the current environment, ironically,
an environment we created."
A false premise on your part.
"Indeed, my own child – truly unprompted – mentioned to me that she should be
as proud of European ancestry and a black should be of their African ancestry."
Yet she was programmed to make this remark, maybe without realizing it. No different than
an SJW who have their own kids and indoctrinate them. You and them are one in the same in
this regard.
Please provide an example of Catholics and Protestants joining ethnic others to
slaughter heretics of their own race/etnicity so I can better respond.
Not race, but certainly ethnicity. The slaughter in Germany that you described was (if I
recall my history correctly) due to the Thirty Years War where various powers from outside
what is now Germany were called in on one side or another; from as far as Sweden, Spain, even
Scotland. Some states even sided with the Ottomans (though I think they did not put soldiers
out in the field).
I don't really have a problem with your greater point that ethnicity/tribal identity is
often at odds and in tension with religious identity and often wins out. I simply don't see
how one can make an absolutist claim that ethnicity always wins out since there are many
historical exceptions to the rule.
For instance you pointed to the tension among the various ethnic groups in Afghanistan.
This is true, but religion also can help them transcend that divide, something that the
Taliban have been pushing successfully as of late:
"Ethnic Minorities Are Fueling the Taliban's Expansion in Afghanistan: The Taliban is gaining
dangerous leverage by recruiting Tajiks, Turkmen, and Uzbeks."
Of Islam and race, Arnold Toynbee (the very capable British historian) wrote:
"The extinction of race consciousness as between Muslims is one of the outstanding moral
achievements of Islam, and in the contemporary world there is, as it happens, a crying need
for the propagation of this Islamic virtue; for, although the record of history would seem on
the whole to show that race consciousness has been the exception and not the rule in the
constant interbreeding of the human species, it is a fatality of the present situation that
this consciousness is felt-and felt strongly-by the very peoples which, in the competition of
the last four centuries between several Western powers, have won-at least for the moment-the
lion's share of the inheritance of the Earth."
Though Toynbee was being hyperbolic, it is a phenomenon that is quite real and caused
someone like Malcolm X (ra) to completely re-evaluate his assumptions about White people
after having gone to Hajj, writing:
"During the past eleven days here in the Muslim world, I have eaten from the same plate,
drunk from the same glass, and slept on the same rug – while praying to the same God
– with fellow Muslims, whose eyes were the bluest of blue, whose hair was the blondest
of blond, and whose skin was the whitest of white. And in the words and in the deeds of the
white Muslims, I felt the same sincerity that I felt among the black African Muslims of
Nigeria, Sudan and Ghana."
You are right about ethnic/tribal affiliation being part of the core of the human animal.
It is, like sexuality and lust, embedded deep in the recesses of human consciousness. Just
like a pack of wolves or a troop of chimpanzees will tear apart another group in competition
for resources, we too have that innate animal instinct in us. But like sexuality, avarice or
a whole host of human traits – the whole point of religion is to help us to; a)
transcend them and b) point them to a useful purpose or keep them under control.
We will never see ethnic identity or attraction to it completely wiped out (thank God),
that is part of the beauty of the human project:
"O mankind, indeed We have created you from male and female and made you nations and tribes
that you may know one another. Indeed, the most noble of you in the sight of Allah is the
most pious of you. Indeed, Allah is Knowing and Acquainted." (49:13)
However, religion is supposed to helps us to overcome the pathologies and extremes that
can arise from it, same as from unchecked sexuality or other natural human tendencies. Of
course, religion can be used to underwrite other pathologies as well. Well, the world is
never perfect, eh? It'll be interesting to see which way this goes.
I think people will start to be more ethnocentric and identity-conscious for a while
(Whites will jump in on this as Blacks and other minorities already do), but I simply don't
know how long that will last since that really doesn't provide much in the way of long term
transcendental purpose and seems really to be a temporary reaction to the way things have
gone to the other extreme for the last few decades.
Yet she was programmed to make this remark, maybe without realizing it.
Not sure about this. It comes naturally to people and there is a side of it that is wrong
(which takes it to extreme pride and arrogance) and a side which is natural and healthy.
On twitter, I follow an African American Muslim scholar, Dr. (Shaykh) Abdullah Ali, who
once wrote – in criticism of some of the SJW Muslim activists that like to call
everyone racist:
Can a White Man Be Proud of His People?
Another area of concern related to Muslim activists is the push for cultural Marxist
egalitarianism. It is not that one should be opposed to equal opportunity for all members
of society. It is just that Islam promotes meritocracy rather than "sameness" and "equal
representation" for the sake of equal "representation." According to this cultural
paradigm, it is "good" to celebrate and take pride in what is unique about one's own
culture. This seems the case, at least, for any person who is not "white." White people, on
the other hand, due to their historical domination of others are forbidden from publicly
expressing pride about European civilizational contributions lest they be declared a racist
or white supremacist. This concern is shared by nativists like Richard Spencer. But
Spencer, however, regurgitates the pseudoscientific racist assumptions of the 19th century
French aristocrat Arthur De Gobineau who pioneered the Aryan master race theory. Those
blinkered notions aside, what legitimate wrong could be claimed about a white man or woman
feeling pride about the achievements of their ancestors if it does not result in cultural
domination?
The question he ends with is a pertinent one; what is wrong with that, especially if
everyone else is able to publicly do it and not be shamed. Why should we assume this is a
sign of indoctrination and not something very natural and healthy. My kids are mixed
heritage; I definitely want them to know and love their European side as much as their roots
from the Indian subcontinent.
Corny's not a bad guy. He has schtick – sort of a cross between "We're all God's
children" and libertarianism – and he sticks to it. Whether he believes it or not, who
knows.
But he is disingenuous.
There was a point in my career when I dealt a lot with lawyers from other companies about
reasonably complex issues. After awhile, I could tell when a lawyer was doing their best to
make things clearer to see if we could reach a deal and when a lawyer was trying to make
things murky in hopes of cheating you out on something. Naturally, the DB lawyers would
always argue that our side just wasn't smart enough to understand their brillant
proposition.
It was just annoying. Everyone knew what was going on. I suppose that the DB lawyers felt
that they needed to try, but it just ended up making everything take a lot longer than
necessary.
Corny most definitely falls in the DB lawyer camp. He deliberately obfuscates. If you tell
him that an orange is the color orange, he'll say that you can't prove that because there are
different shades of orange and thus the color orange doesn't exist. It's tedious and
pointless.
It's a shame. I'd love to have someone who believes in multi-everything to discuss these
issues with. I've changed my mind on a number of things over the years so maybe they could
show me where I'm wrong. That'd be a fascinating dialogue.
Sadly, that's Corny is not that guy. He's either a true believer or a very diligent (maybe
paid?) troll. Either way, not of much use.
There were opportunities to take it back but they weren't taken and Pat was there then.
The reason it isn't written about much is because Pat would have to come to terms with who
the real Nixon and Reagan were and Pat will never allow such thoughts into his head, let
alone his writing.
"... He basically is a Senator for Israel. He totally supports the Israeli foreign policy viewpoint, which is a very hawkish, if you were a Republican you would call him a neocon. ..."
"... Schumer criticized the Obama administration for abstaining on this very basic resolution, which every other country voted for. So the US was still a pariah, because the US didn't vote for it, it just abstained on it. But to Schumer that was not enough, he wanted it to be completely vetoed, because anything that Israel does is sacrosanct, and anyone who criticizes it, in Schumer's eyes, is not someone he wants to ally with politically, so he'd rather affectively ally with Trump. ..."
"... The most recent showing of that allegiance was last month, when Schumer supported Trump's decision to launch an air strike on an Air Force base in Syria, something Israel also strongly supported. ..."
"... The criticism of the Democratic Party is it is the Wall Street and war party. That is Chuck Schumer, and so for him to have this kind of pretend progressive image, it's just so obviously fraudulent. ..."
"... Chuck Schumer has replaced Joe Lieberman as the Senator representing Israeli interests in the Senate. US interests are usually secondary to his machinations ..."
"... Great development and exposure of this hillary-look-alike. Love the phrase 'pretend progressive,' as it describes Schumer to a T. Great piece. ..."
"... Schumer and Clinton must be understood in relation to Israel. Israel to both of them are sacrosant. Israel can do no wrong. Both these two war hawks for Israel takes their orders from Netanyahu. He is like a vice president for Israel in the United States. ..."
"... Schumer (sic) is a scum bucket who ought to be trounced out of the Senate, through the revolving door to his sinecure on Wall Street. Schumer's ultimately loyalties are to his corporate benefactors on Wall Street. Which too is his constituency. ..."
"... Schumer is a puppet for the deep state and the deep state may have some "dirt" on him in order to keep him in line...and his famous quote about the security state: "they have 6 ways to Sunday to get back at you" or something to this effect...makes me wonder what he knows? ..."
"... Israel is the driving force behind disruption of the middle east...the more the middle east is neutralized, the better for Israel...Chuck is one of their best foot soldiers ..."
"... Generals gathered in their masses, just like witches at black masses. Evil minds that plot destruction, sorcerer of death's construction. In the fields the bodies burning, as the war machine keeps turning. Death and hatred to mankind, poisoning their brainwashed minds...Oh lord yeah! ..."
"... Politicians hide themselves away They only started the war Why should they go out to fight? They leave that role to the poor ..."
"... Time will tell on their power minds Making war just for fun Treating people just like pawns in chess Wait `till their judgement day comes, yeah! ♪ ..."
Thomas Hedges: In the 2007 book he published, Positively American, in the midst of his campaign against the war, Schumer
admitted that his opposition that year and the year before, was as much about ending a failed policy as it was about getting votes.
In reality Schumer had been one of the war's most ardent supporters, beyond his public display against the war carefully timed for
the 2006 Congressional elections, Schumer in fact pitted much of the blame on Iraqis themselves, arguing that Sunis, Shiites and
Kurds seemed more interested in starting a civil war in Iraq than in receiving help from the Americans and constructing any democratic
central government.
He even said, that in a similar future situation, he might vote again to authorize the use of force against a country like Iraq.
"Today," he wrote in his book, "I still believe that when our country is under attack the chief executive deserves a degree of latitude,
if God forbid, we were attacked again, I could well vote to give it to a future President, Democrat or Republican." And when a Real
News correspondent pressed Schumer in 2007 on US reparations to the Iraqi people, this is what he had to say.
Sam Husseini: Do we owe something to the Iraqi people other than just getting out? Do we owe them reparations for having
brought about this war?
Chuck Schumer: I don't believe that.
Ben Norton: It's hard to find a Democrat that's more gung-ho about war than Chuck Schumer. Not only did he support the
Iraq war, and fearmonger about weapons of mass destruction, he tepidly criticized the Bush administration for how it carried out
the war.
Thomas Hedges: In fact, tepid criticism seems to be Schumer at his most radical. In general, he is someone who supports
hard-line policy decisions, atoning for mistakes only years down the line, and usually because it's politically expedient to do so,
as in an election is about to take place.
Chuck Schumer: If you don't give up and you keep fighting and you're right, you win!
Thomas Hedges: In his early days, Schumer wasn't as focused on foreign policy, in the years before 911 would shift America's
attention to the Middle East, Congressman Schumer, along with the new Democrats like Bill Clinton among others, would exploit the
crime scare of the 1990's in order to gain more votes and more power. During those years, Schumer supported the Omnibus Crime Bill
of 1994, which spiked the prison population. And in 1995 he sponsored the Omnibus Counterterrorism Act, which became the foundation
from which the Patriot Act six years later, was built.
Ben Norton: When it comes to the war on terror he was a very enthusiastic supporter and remains so. He voted for the Patriot
Act, and again this is a supposed Democratic leader, who voted for the Bush administration to take away Americans civil liberties.
Thomas Hedges: In the years straddling 911, he supported many of the same policies Republicans supported. From his tough
on crime approach to supporting war in the Middle East, to defending the surveillance of Muslim groups in New York after 911. Schumer
and the GOP had very few differences, in fact despite shedding tears at a press conference earlier this year after the Muslim ban
that Trump implemented, Schumer himself had proposed something eerily similar.
Ben Norton: In November of 2015, not that long ago, less than two years ago, Schumer also said that the US government should
consider a so called pause on the re-settlement of Syrian refugees. He also, in one of the most egregious yet under reported aspects
of Schumer, previously said that torture should be considered in some places, and he said that, "Oh well if you oppose torture, you
say this now, but you need to put yourself in the shoes of people in these particular situations etc." So he really left torture
on the table.
Before Trump was President, he had actually donated money to Schumer, that of course, represents something, this is not a progressive
Democrat. Schumer actually represents the segment, the influential powerful segment of the Democratic Party, that has helped pave
the way for Donald Trump to carry out many of the policies he's already implementing.
Thomas Hedges: But for voters who have paid attention to Schumer for a long time, the Senator's policy choices are anything
but surprising.
Kevin Zeese:He basically is a Senator for Israel. He totally supports the Israeli foreign policy viewpoint, which
is a very hawkish, if you were a Republican you would call him a neocon.
Ariel Gold: He has come out in strong opposition to the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement and was very supportive
of New York Governor Cuomo's order to ban BDS in New York state, and Schumer made a direct statement in support of that.
Thomas Hedges: Schumer's staunch support for Israel has prompted him for example, to criticize the Obama administration,
when in 2016, the United States abstained from a UN Security Council resolution re-affirming something the Council had almost unanimously
upheld since 1979. Namely, that Israel's settlement building projects on Palestinian land violated international law.
Ben Norton:Schumer criticized the Obama administration for abstaining on this very basic resolution, which every other
country voted for. So the US was still a pariah, because the US didn't vote for it, it just abstained on it. But to Schumer that
was not enough, he wanted it to be completely vetoed, because anything that Israel does is sacrosanct, and anyone who criticizes
it, in Schumer's eyes, is not someone he wants to ally with politically, so he'd rather affectively ally with Trump.
Thomas Hedges:The most recent showing of that allegiance was last month, when Schumer supported Trump's decision to
launch an air strike on an Air Force base in Syria, something Israel also strongly supported.
Chuck Schumer: On Syria, I salute the professionalism and skill of our armed forces, who took action last night. The
people of Syria have suffered untold horrors and violence at the hands of Bashar al-Assad and his supporters in Tehran and in
Putin's Russia, making sure that Assad knows when he commits such despicable atrocities he will pay a price, is the right thing
to do.
Thomas Hedges: But perhaps Schumer's greatest show of allegiance to Israel, was his decision to oppose the Iran nuclear
deal, without which experts have warned, would put the United States and Iran on a collision course.
Ben Norton: Under President Obama, Schumer was one of the most prominent Democrats to oppose the Iran nuclear deal, and
he was of course fearmongering about Iran, which to him is the devil incarnate, and he actually made factually false statements about
the nuclear agreement, and claimed that it would allow Iran in 10 years to produce nuclear weapons etc.
Thomas Hedges: Leading up to his decision, Schumer reassured Zionists that he was consulting the most credentialed men
in Washington, including Henry Kissinger, an opponent of the deal, and the man who orchestrated the violent coup in Chile that toppled
its democratically elected leader, as well as the architect of the very bloody Vietnam war.
Chuck Schumer: I spent some time with Dr. Kissinger, I'm spending time with excellence.
Ariel Gold: So it threatened to pull us into another war, and we're back in that threat again with Trump winning the election
we hear a lot about undoing the Iran nuclear deal, and it's one of the things that Israel has been saying they would like to see
come out of the Trump administration.
Thomas Hedges: Schumer's willingness to oppose the deal early on, which created an opening for other undecided Democrats
to do the same, is a strong display of support for Israel.
News Anchor: Schumer's support here really would have been key for the White House, but coming out overnight against
this deal saying in a statement quote, "I will vote to disapprove the agreement, not because I believe war is a viable or desirable
option, not to challenge the path of dis-plomacy it is because, I believe Iran will not change."
Thomas Hedges: It also put him in yet the same camp as current President Donald Trump in terms of pursuing a Middle East
policy that is in line with Washington's most hawkish advocates. In the end, Schumer's a friend of the neo conservative foreign policy
agenda. While he may cry over Trump's Muslim ban and purport to have the same inclinations as America's most progressive members
of the Senate, he's fundamentally in agreement with the United States forceful efforts abroad.
Kevin Zeese:The criticism of the Democratic Party is it is the Wall Street and war party. That is Chuck Schumer, and
so for him to have this kind of pretend progressive image, it's just so obviously fraudulent.
Thomas Hedges: As the United States nears yet another arms deal with Middle East ally Saudi Arabia, this time for
a hundred billion dollars, and coupled with its four billion dollar annual aid to Israel, we can expect Schumer not only to support
an even more militarized Middle East, but to continue to rail against countries like Iran that pose a threat to US and Israel's hegemony
in the region.
Chuck Schumer has replaced Joe Lieberman as the Senator representing Israeli interests in the Senate. US interests are
usually secondary to his machinations
Schumer and Clinton must be understood in relation to Israel. Israel to both of them are sacrosant. Israel can do no wrong.
Both these two war hawks for Israel takes their orders from Netanyahu. He is like a vice president for Israel in the United States.
"I only take up causes in which I know I'll find no allies. And often I wait for a cause to become successful before
attacking it."
Schumer (sic) is a scum bucket who ought to be trounced out of the Senate, through the revolving door to his sinecure on
Wall Street. Schumer's ultimately loyalties are to his corporate benefactors on Wall Street. Which too is his constituency.
Anything in the way of progressiveness that you suggest will be only, like Obama's eloquent blackness, to run cover for favors
for the war party. Which at this late date ought also be christened the "hastening to collective extinction" party.
Schumer is a puppet for the deep state and the deep state may have some "dirt" on him in order to keep him in line...and
his famous quote about the security state: "they have 6 ways to Sunday to get back at you" or something to this effect...makes
me wonder what he knows?
Israel is the driving force behind disruption of the middle east...the more the middle east is neutralized, the better
for Israel...Chuck is one of their best foot soldiers
♪ Generals gathered in their masses,
just like witches at black masses.
Evil minds that plot destruction,
sorcerer of death's construction.
In the fields the bodies burning,
as the war machine keeps turning.
Death and hatred to mankind,
poisoning their brainwashed minds...Oh lord yeah!
Politicians hide themselves away
They only started the war
Why should they go out to fight?
They leave that role to the poor
Time will tell on their power minds
Making war just for fun
Treating people just like pawns in chess
Wait `till their judgement day comes, yeah! ♪
Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, the right-wing French politician, delivered a solid speech to CPAC today. It's embedded
above. It was not the usual American conservative boilerplate. For example, check out this passage:
To open oneself to the outside, you must have a solid core. To welcome, you have to remain, and to share, you must
have something to offer. Without nation, and without family, the limits of the common good, natural law, and
collective morality disappears, as the reign of egoism continues.
Today, even children have now become merchandise. We hear now in the public debate, we have the right to order a
child from a catalog, we have the right to rent a woman's womb, we have the right to deprive a child of a mother or
father. No you don't! A child is not a "right". Is this the freedom that we want? No. We don't want this atomized
world of individuals without gender, without fathers, without mothers, and without nation.
She went on to condemn euthanasia, gender theory, and transhumanism. Le Pen said that the fight cannot be political
alone, but must take place in culture, in media, and in the education system. She ended like this:
I finish with a Mahler quote I like very much, a quote which sums up conservatism in modernity: 'Tradition is not
the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire."
I like that quote very much too:
"Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire." -- Gustav Mahler.
#BenedictOption
Michael Brendan
Dougherty picked out the most unusual thing about her speech
: how it inadvertently revealed how very, very
Protestant most American conservatism is. Check out his short reaction piece for the details. That is what occurred to
me as well, especially having just returned from a week in France. Even though
The Benedict Option
was written for an American readership, I find it so much easier to discuss it with
French and Italian Catholics, for reasons that I have not been able to figure out. Hearing Le Pen in an American context
really brought that out. Even American Catholics are a lot more Protestant in how they think politically than they
realize.
I don't say this as a put-down; it's what you would expect from people raised in an overwhelmingly Protestant nation,
one built on Protestant, classic-liberal principles. But there it is. My friend Fred Gion, a Catholic and political
conservative in Paris, told me over a decade ago that the arguments in my book
Crunchy Cons,
which was being
attacked by many US conservatives for being crypto-liberal, made perfect sense to European conservatives.
Continental conservatives in the Le Pen mold are more traditionalist, focusing on natural law, religion, and culture.
Conservative US Protestants share a lot of the views of European conservatives, but there seems to be among
conservatives from Catholic cultures a deeper sense of order unifying these principles. There also tends to be much more
skepticism of the free market and individualism.
Readers who have thought more about this than I have: tell me why this is. Which principles define conservative
politics in Britain and America as more Protestant than conservative politics on the continent? Let's talk about this --
but anybody, Protestant or Catholic, who wants to sneer at the other, keep it to yourself.
I agree with this from Dougherty as well:
And I have a warning for those who would warm to [Le Pen's speech] uncritically. As my career grants me
friendships with other conservatives across Europe, I notice the tendency in them and in myself to idealize or
project hopes onto the conservatives in other nations.
My Irish and
English friends tend to be far more positive about Trump than I am. And I have been far more positive about some of
their would-be champions than they can be. Unfamiliarity breeds fantasy.
This is true. I was asked quite a bit about Trump while I was in France. It was interesting to me
that most of my interlocutors regarded him ideally, in contrast to Emmanuel Macron, whom they detested. I could tell
that folks didn't really understand why I was so cool on Trump. I bet that things would be exactly reversed in the
matter of Marion Maréchal-Le Pen (but not her secular nationalist aunt Marine, whom I find unappealing!).
The main reason why nothing ever gets done in the Beltway is because the two-party system has strangled
everything. It is an archaic system which cries out for reform.
Hear! Hear! Three or four parties doing
some honest horse trading would serve us much better.
'Look, you know we're never going to agree to X, but, none of us alone have sufficient strength to form a
government, so, we could give you Y if you'll go along with Z, and pretty much all of us agree on Q.'
Any way there are a lot reasons that Trump is still unpopular in a nation with ~4% unemployment.
The
European country with the lowest unemployment rate is the Czech Republic (also with good economic growth and
tied for the second-lowest Gini index in the world), and they're also the most ethnocentric and, in a value
neutral sense, the most opposed to ethnic diversity. Denmark and Switzerland among others have also seen
major
reactions against ethnic diversification, in spite of being model high performing social democracies.
I don't know what they think about Trump per se in the Czech Republic or Denmark, I doubt they care for him at
all, but I do think it's a mistake to reduce all concerns about ethnicity and identity to economics. (As noted,
it's also a major mistake to elide all anti-liberal, ethnic-tribalist politicians together. Trump is not Marine
Le Pen, much to his discredit, and he's a cut below most other major cultural-reactionary leaders in Europe as
well, both in terms of ideology and personal character).
Yes, as a commenter above noted, I have to wonder where you found these pro-Trump Frenchmen? That alone gives
me pause about their supposedly Catholic ways. I get that there can be cultural differences that make the grass
look greener on the other hill. But they are seeing green where even their fellow countrymen see an
orange-colored blight. Worry.
I think the difference between American Protestant "conservatives" and European Catholic conservatives is
rather simple: the latter are steeped in the "Tory" benevolent paternalism of the social justice encyclicals of
the modern papacy, which, though not overtly socialistic, are extraordinarily concerned with the social
responsibilities of the "owners" and the rights and dignities of the "laborers." Those encyclicals totally and
completely reject unregulated free-market capitalism, albeit favoring entrepreneurship. The model of capitalism
they seem to embrace is called "distributism."
New ideas, good or bad, achieve escape velocity more easily where traditions are weak. Just as ideas can be
good or bad, traditions can be stultifying or sustaining. Protestant culture developed in rebellion against an
established culture and any time the dust begins to settle it can be stirred up again by rebels referring to
founding principles (inner light, congregationalism, every man his own priest, etc.)
My preference is for
protestantism as a personal mode of existence but I feel that a successful society will probably have a strong,
stiffening admixture of catholicism.
I'm not really religious and I'm trying to abstract protestantism and catholicism a bit from their formal
identities. I think that is okay if understood in the same spirit that Rod says that the United States is a
protestant culture and that this influences even American Catholics. I use upper and lower case letters to
differentiate confessing members of religions from general tendencies and mental dispositions.
Walter Bagheot once said that a reason the British political experience had been happier and more successful
than the French was that the British were more stupid. From the essay:
"In fact, what we opprobriously call 'stupidity,' though not an enlivening quality in common society, is
nature's favorite resource for preserving steadiness of conduct and consistency of opinion; it enforces
concentration: people who learn slowly, learn only what they must. The best security for people's doing their
duty is, that they should not know anything else to do; the best security for fixedness of opinion is, that
people should be incapable of comprehending what is to be said on the other side."
Bagheot doesn't just mention the French and the English, he also compares Greece to Rome. And in Bagheot's
formulation the inquisitive and experimental virtues are given to the Catholic French and steadiness assigned
to Protestant Great Britain Possibly a reason to look for a deeper more accurate division than protestant and
catholic.
Within the same TAC site, it's interesting how
Bill Wirtz
had a polar opposite reaction to La Pen's CPAC speech. Wirtz's obsession with Jean-Marie Le
Pen's Holocaust quote (which must be
contextualized
) notwithstanding, there is a profound struggle for the soul of the conservative movement
taking place, both here in the States and across Europe.
DRK,
Marine
LePen is the divorced-and-cohabiting one. (as for her religious beliefs, she claims to be a
believer, but doesn't go into detail and doesn't appear to be a regular churchgoer. She did have all her kids
baptised).
Marion
Marechal Le Pen is the practicing Catholic one.
Why is the "Benedict Option" easier to discuss with the French and Italian Catholics, even though it was
written mainly for the American readership? This is what I, a Traditionalist Catholic, think:
(a)
Protestantism covers a wide spectrum of beliefs, so a less "cohesive" and more "grainy" response is to be
expected (Fragmentation);
(b) Benedict Option may sound like "salvation by works" – if we only work hard and form these communities
ourselves, we'll survive and be "saved" in the end. And anyway, weren't those monasteries dens of vice?
(Anathema);
(c) A belief that God blesses the faithful us, but others bring evil upon themselves because they have
abandoned God, or follow idolatrous religions (Exceptionalism);
(d) Benedict Option, if it's to be done right, requires a comprehensive and rigorous study of the past.
However, such studies often bring on uncomfortable questions which can challenge "settled facts" (Amnesia);
To be fair, many Catholics share in some of the above. Part (c) can be heard among a few of my fellow
Catholic Traditionalists, and (d) can be found within the Vatican II faction. I think part (c) is particularly
tricky – the Book of Job comes to mind.
I've formerly posted at TAC as "A Libertarian Guy"
I watched Marion Maréchal-Le Pen's speech at CPAC last
night. It was like a thunderbolt out of a clear blue sky when she got to the part where she spoke against
surrogate mothering and the nonsensical fluid-gender stuff. I had no idea there were any political people in
Europe with that kind of common sense and morals.
I too, liked the quote, : 'Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire."
"... For Germany, the idea of Europeanism has provided the country's elites with the perfect alibi to conceal their hegemonic project behind the ideological veil of 'European integration' ..."
"... "That may sound absurd given that today's Germany is a successful democracy without a trace of national-socialism – and that no one would actually associate Merkel with Nazism. But further reflection on the word 'Reich', or empire, may not be entirely out of place. The term refers to a dominion, with a central power exerting control over many different peoples. According to this definition, would it be wrong to speak of a German Reich in the economic realm?" ..."
"... More recently, an article in Politico Europe ..."
"... Even though the power exercised by Europe's 'colonial masters' is now openly acknowledged by the mainstream press, it is however commonplace to ascribe Germany's dominant position as an accident of history: according to this narrative, we are in the presence of an 'accidental empire', one that is not the result of a general plan but that emerged almost by chance – even against ..."
"... Germany (and France) have been the main beneficiaries of the sovereign bailouts of periphery countries , which essentially amounted to a covert bailout of German (and French) banks, as most of the funds were channelled back to the creditor countries' banks, which were heavily exposed to the banks (and to a lesser degree the governments) of periphery countries. German policy, Helen Thompson wrote , overwhelmingly 'served the interests of the German banks'. ..."
"... This is a telling example of how Germany's policies (and the EU's policies more in general), while nominally ordoliberal – i.e., based upon minimal government intervention and a strict rules-based regime – are in reality based on extensive state intervention on behalf of German capital, at both the domestic and European level. ..."
"... German authorities have also been more than happy to go along with – or to encourage – the European institutions' 'exercise of unrestrained executive power and the more or less complete abandonment of strict, rules-based frameworks' – Storey is here referring in particular to the ECB's use of its currency-issuing monopoly to force member states to follows its precepts – 'to maintain the profitability of German banks, German hegemony within the Eurozone, or even the survival of the Eurozone itself'. ..."
"... Germany (and France) are also the main beneficiaries of the ongoing process of 'mezzogiornification' of periphery countries – often compounded by troika -forced privatisations –, which in recent years has allowed German and French firms to take over a huge number of businesses (or stakes therewithin) in periphery countries, often at bargain prices. A well-publicised case is that of the 14 Greek regional airports taken over by the German airport operator Fraport. ..."
"... France's corporate offensive in Italy is another good example: in the last five years, French companies have engaged in 177 Italian takeovers, for a total value of $41.8 billion, six times Italy's purchases in France over the same period. This is leading to an increased 'centralisation' of European capital, characterised by a gradual concentration of capital and production in Germany and other core countries – in the logistical and distribution sectors, for example – and more in general to an increasingly imbalanced relationship between the stronger and weaker countries of the union. ..."
"... In short, the European Union should indeed be viewed a transnational capitalist project, but one that is subordinated to a clear state-centred hierarchy of power, with Germany in the dominant position. In this sense, the national elites in periphery countries that have supported Germany's hegemonic project (and continue to do so, first and foremost through their support to European integration) can thus be likened to the comprador bourgeoisie ..."
"... Exportnationalismus' ..."
"... Modell Deutschland ..."
"... Even more worryingly, Germany is not simply aiming at expanding its economic control over the European continent; it is also taking steps for greater European military 'cooperation' – under the German aegis, of course. As a recent article in Foreign Policy ..."
"... In other words, Germany already effectively controls the armies of four countries. And the initiative, Foreign Policy ..."
Originally from: Germany's dystopian plans for Europe: from fantasy to reality?By Thomas
Fazi 4 December 2017
For Germany, the idea
of Europeanism has provided the country's elites with the perfect alibi to conceal their
hegemonic project behind the ideological veil of 'European integration'
After Emmanuel Macron's election in France, many (including myself) claimed that this
signalled a revival of the Franco-German alliance and a renewed impetus for Europe's process of
top-down economic and political integration – a fact that was claimed by most
commentators and politicians, beholden as they are to the Europeanist narrative, to be an
unambiguously positive development.
Among the allegedly 'overdue' reforms that were said to be on the table was the creation of
a pseudo-'fiscal union' backed by a (meagre) 'euro budget', along with the creation of a
'European finance minister', the centre-points of Macron's plans to 're-found the EU' – a
proposal that raises a number of very worrying issues from both political and economic
standpoints,
which I have discussed at length elsewhere .
The integrationists' (unwarranted) optimism, however, was short-lived. The result of the
German elections, which saw the surge of two rabidly anti-integrationist parties, the
right-wing FDP and extreme right AfD; the recent collapse of coalition talks between Merkel's
CDU, the FDP and the Greens, which most likely means an interim government for weeks if not
months, possibly leading to new elections (which polls show would
bring roughly the same result as the September election); and the growing restlessness in
Germany towards the 13-year-long rule of Macron's partner in reform Angela Merkel, means that
any plans that Merkel and Macron may have sketched out behind the scenes to further integrate
policies at the European level are now, almost certainly, dead in the water. Thus, even the
sorry excuse for a fiscal union proposed by Macron is now off the table, according to most
commentators.
At this point, the German government's most likely course in terms of European policy
– the one that has the best chance of garnering cross-party support, regardless of the
outcome of the coalition talks (or of new elections) – is the 'minimalist' approach set
in stone by the country's infamous and now-former finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, in
a 'non-paper' published shortly
before his resignation.
The main pillar of Schäuble's proposal – a long-time obsession of his –
consists in giving the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), which would go on to become a
'European Monetary Fund', the power to monitor (and, ideally, enforce) compliance with the
Fiscal Compact. This echoes Schäuble's previous calls for the
creation of a European budget commissioner with the power to reject national budgets – a
supranational fiscal enforcer.
The aim is all too clear: to further erode what little sovereignty and autonomy member
states have left, particularly in the area of fiscal policy, and to facilitate the imposition
of neoliberal 'structural reforms' – flexibilisation of labour markets, reduction of
collective bargaining rights, etc. – on reluctant countries.
To this end, the German authorities even want to make the receipt of EU cohesion funds
conditional on the implementation of such reforms , tightening the existing arrangements
even further. Moreover, as noted by Simon
Wren-Lewis , the political conflict of interest of having an institution lending within the
eurozone would end up imposing severe austerity bias on the recovering country.
Until recently, these proposals failed to materialise due, among other reasons, to France's
opposition to any further overt reductions of national sovereignty in the area of
budgetary policy; Macron, however, staunchly rejects France's traditional
souverainiste stance, embracing instead what he calls 'European sovereignty', and thus
represents the perfect ally for Germany's plans.
Another proposal that goes in the same direction is the
German Council for Economic Experts' plan to curtail banks' sovereign bond holdings.
Ostensibly aimed at 'severing the link between banks and government' and 'ensuring long-term
debt sustainability', it calls for: (i) removing the exemption from risk-weighting for
sovereign exposures, which essentially means that government bonds would no longer be
considered a risk-free asset for banks (as they are now under Basel rules), but would be
'weighted' according to the 'sovereign default risk' of the country in question (as determined
by credit rating agencies); (ii) putting a cap on the overall risk-weighted sovereign exposure
of banks; and (iii) introducing an automatic 'sovereign insolvency mechanism' that would
essentially extend to sovereigns the bail-in rule introduced for banks by the banking union,
meaning that if a country requires financial assistance from the ESM, for whichever reason, it
will have to lengthen its sovereign bond maturities (reducing the market value of those bonds
and causing severe losses for all bondholders) and, if necessary, impose a nominal 'haircut' on
private creditors.
As noted by the German economist Peter Bofinger , the only member of the German Council of
Economic Experts to vote against the sovereign bail-in plan, this would almost certainly ignite
a 2012-style self-fulfilling sovereign debt crisis, as periphery countries' bond yields would
quickly rise to unsustainable levels, making it increasingly hard for governments to roll over
maturing debt at reasonable prices and eventually forcing them to turn to the ESM for help,
which would entail even heavier losses for their banks and an even heavier dose of
austerity.
It would essentially amount to a return to the pre-2012 status quo, with governments once
again subject to the supposed 'discipline' of the markets, particularly in the context of a
likely tapering of the ECB's quantitative easing (QE) program. The aim of this proposal is the
same as that of Schäuble's 'European Monetary Fund': to force member states to implement
permanent austerity.
Of course, national sovereignty in a number of areas – most notably fiscal policy
– has already been severely eroded by the complex system of new laws, rules and
agreements introduced in recent years, including but not limited to the six-pack, two-pack,
Fiscal Compact, European Semester and Macroeconomic Imbalances Procedure (MIP).
As a result of this new post-Maastricht system of European economic governance, the European
Union has effectively become a sovereign power with the authority to impose budgetary rules and
structural reforms on member states outside democratic procedures and without democratic
control.
The EU's embedded quasi-constitutionalism and inherent (structural) democratic deficit has
thus evolved into an even more anti-democratic form of 'authoritarian constitutionalism' that
is breaking away with elements of formal democracy as well, leading some observers to suggest
that the EU 'may easily become the postdemocratic prototype and even a pre-dictatorial
governance structure against national sovereignty and democracies'.
To give an example, with the launch of the European Semester, the EU's key tool for economic
policy guidance and surveillance, an area that has historically been a bastion of national
sovereignty – old-age pensions – has now fallen under the purview of supranational
monitoring as well. Countries are now expected to
(and face sanctions if they don't): (i) increase the retirement age and link it with life
expectancy; (ii) reduce early retirement schemes, improve the employability of older workers
and promote lifelong learning; (iii) support complementary private savings to enhance
retirement incomes; and (iv) avoid adopting pension-related measures that undermine the long
term sustainability and adequacy of public finances.
This has led to the introduction in various countries of several types of automatic
stabilizing mechanisms (ASMs) in pension systems, which change the policy default so that
benefits or contributions adjust automatically to adverse demographic and economic conditions
without direct intervention by politicians. Similar 'automatic correction mechanisms' in
relation to fiscal policy can be found in the Fiscal Compact.
The aim of all these 'automatic mechanisms' is clearly to put the economy on 'autopilot',
thus removing any element of democratic discussion and/or decision-making at either the
European or national level. These changes have already transformed European states into
'semi-sovereign' entities, at best. In this sense, the proposals currently under discussion
would mark the definitive transformation of European states from semi-sovereign to de
facto (and increasingly de jure ) non-sovereign entities.
Regardless of the lip service paid by national and European officials to the need for
further reductions of national sovereignty to go hand in hand with a greater 'democratisation'
of the euro area, the reforms currently on the table can, in fact, be considered the final
stage in the thirty-year-long war on democracy and national sovereignty waged by the European
elites, aimed at constraining the ability of popular-democratic powers to influence economic
policy, thus enabling the imposition of neoliberal policies that would not have otherwise been
politically feasible.
In this sense, the European economic and monetary integration process should be viewed, to a
large degree, as a class-based and inherently neoliberal project pursued by all
national capitals as well as transnational (financial) capital. However, to grasp the processes
of restructuring under way in Europe, we need to go beyond the simplistic capital/labour
dichotomy that underlies many critical analyses of the EU and eurozone, which view EU/EMU
policies as the expression of a unitary and coherent transnational (post-national) European
capitalist class.
The process underway can only be understood through the lens of the geopolitical-economic
tensions and conflicts between leading capitalist states and regional blocs, and the
conflicting interests between the different financial/industrial capital fractions located in
those states, which have always characterised the European economy. In particular, it means
looking at Germany's historic struggle for economic hegemony over the European continent.
It is no secret that Germany is today the leading economic and political power in Europe,
just as it is no secret that nothing gets done in Europe without Germany's seal of approval. In
fact, it is commonplace to come across references to Germany's 'new empire'.
A controversial Der Spiegel editorial from a few years back event went as far as
arguing that it is not out place to talk of the rise of a 'Fourth Reich':
"That may sound absurd given that today's Germany is a successful democracy without a trace
of national-socialism – and that no one would actually associate Merkel with Nazism. But
further reflection on the word 'Reich', or empire, may not be entirely out of place. The term
refers to a dominion, with a central power exerting control over many different peoples.
According to this definition, would it be wrong to speak of a German Reich in the economic
realm?"
More recently, an article in
Politico Europe – co-owned by the German media magnate Axel Springer AG
– candidly explained why 'Greece is de facto a German colony'. It noted how, despite
Tsipras' pleas for debt relief, the Greek leader 'has little choice but to heed the wishes of
his "colonial" masters', i.e., the Germans.
This is because public debt
in the eurozone is used as a political tool – a disciplining tool – to get
governments to implement socially harmful policies (and to get citizens to accept these
policies by portraying them as inevitable), which explains why Germany continues to refuse to
seriously consider any form of debt relief for Greece, despite the various commitments and
promises to that end made in recent years: debt is the chain that keeps Greece (and other
member states) from straying 'off course'.
Even though the power exercised by Europe's 'colonial masters' is now openly acknowledged by
the mainstream press, it is however commonplace to ascribe Germany's dominant position as an
accident of history: according to this narrative, we are in the presence of an 'accidental
empire', one that is not the result of a general plan but that emerged almost by chance –
even against Germany's wishes – as a result of the euro's design faults, which
have allowed Germany and its satellites to pursue a neo-mercantilist strategy and thus
accumulate huge current account surpluses.
Now, it is certainly true that the euro's design – strongly influenced by Germany
– inevitably benefits export-led economies such as Germany over more internal
demand-oriented economies, such as those of southern Europe. However, there is ample evidence
to support the argument that Germany, far from having accidently stumbled upon European
dominance, has been actively and consciously pursuing an expansionary and imperialist strategy
in – and through – the European Union for decades.
Even if we limit our analysis to Germany's post-crisis policies (though there is much that
could be said about Germany's post-reunification policies and subsequent offshoring of
production to Eastern Europe in the 1990s), it would be very naïve to view Germany's
inflexibility – on austerity, for example – as a simple case of ideological
stubbornness, considering the extent to which the policies in question have benefited Germany
(and to a lesser extent France).
Germany (and France) have been
the main beneficiaries of the sovereign bailouts of periphery countries , which essentially
amounted to a covert bailout of German (and French) banks, as most of the funds were channelled
back to the creditor countries' banks, which were heavily exposed to the banks (and to a lesser
degree the governments) of periphery countries. German policy, Helen Thompson wrote ,
overwhelmingly 'served the interests of the German banks'.
This is a telling example of how Germany's policies (and the EU's policies more in general),
while nominally ordoliberal – i.e., based upon minimal government intervention
and a strict rules-based regime – are in reality based on extensive state
intervention on behalf of German capital, at both the domestic and European level.
As Andy Storey notes, not only did the German government, throughout the crisis, show a
blatant disregard for ordoliberalism's non-interference of public institutions in the workings
of the market, by engaging in a massive Keynesian-style programme in the aftermath of the
financial crisis and pushing through bailout programmes that largely absolved German banks from
their responsibility for reckless lending to Greece and other countries; German authorities
have also been more than happy to go along with – or to encourage – the European
institutions' 'exercise of unrestrained executive power and the more or less complete
abandonment of strict, rules-based frameworks' – Storey is here referring in particular
to the ECB's use of its currency-issuing monopoly to force member states to follows its
precepts – 'to maintain the profitability of German banks, German hegemony within the
Eurozone, or even the survival of the Eurozone itself'.
Germany (and France) are also the main beneficiaries of the ongoing process of
'mezzogiornification' of periphery countries – often compounded by troika
-forced privatisations –, which in recent years has allowed German and French firms to
take over a huge number of businesses (or stakes therewithin) in periphery countries, often at
bargain prices. A well-publicised case is that of the 14 Greek regional airports taken over by
the German airport operator Fraport.
France's corporate offensive in Italy is another good example: in the last five years,
French companies have engaged in 177 Italian takeovers, for a total value of $41.8 billion, six
times Italy's purchases in France over the same period. This is leading to an increased
'centralisation' of European capital, characterised by a gradual concentration of capital and
production in Germany and other core countries – in the logistical and distribution
sectors, for example – and more in general to an increasingly imbalanced relationship
between the stronger and weaker countries of the union.
These transformations cannot simply be described as processes without a subject: while there
are undoubtedly structural reasons involved – countries with better developed economies
of scale, such as Germany and France, were bound to benefit more than others from the reduction
in tariffs and barriers associated with the introduction of the single currency – we also
have to acknowledge that there are loci of economic-politic power that are actively driving and
shaping these imperialist processes, which must be viewed through the lens of the unresolved
inter-capitalist struggle between core-based and periphery-based capital.
From this perspective, the dichotomy that is often raised in European public discourse
between nationalism and Europeanism is deeply flawed. The two, in fact, often go hand in hand.
In Germany's case, for example, Europeanism has provided the country's elites with the perfect
alibi to conceal their hegemonic project behind the ideological veil of 'European integration'.
Ironically, the European Union – allegedly created as an antidote to the vicious
nationalisms of the twentieth century – has been the tool through which Germany has been
able to achieve the 'new European order' that Nazi ideologues had theorised in the 1930s and
early 1940s.
In short, the European Union should indeed be viewed a transnational capitalist project, but
one that is subordinated to a clear state-centred hierarchy of power, with Germany in the
dominant position. In this sense, the national elites in periphery countries that have
supported Germany's hegemonic project (and continue to do so, first and foremost through their
support to European integration) can thus be likened to the comprador bourgeoisie of
the old colonial system – sections of a country's elite and middle class allied with
foreign interests in exchange for a subordinated role within the dominant hierarchy of
power.
From this point of view, the likely revival of the Franco-German bloc is a very worrying
development, since it heralds a consolidation of the German-led European imperialist bloc
– and a further 'Germanification' of the continent. This development cannot be understood
independently of the momentous shifts that are taking place in global political economy –
namely the organic crisis of neoliberal globalisation, which is leading to increased tensions
between the various fractions of international capital, most notably between the US and
Germany.
Trump's repeated criticisms of Germany's beggar-thy-neighbour mercantilist policies should
be understood in this light. The same goes for Angela Merkel's recent call – much
celebrated by the mainstream press – for a stronger Europe to counter Trump's
unilateralism. Merkel's aim is not, of course, that of making 'Europe' stronger, but rather of
strengthening Germany's dominant position vis-à-vis the other world powers (the US but
also China) through the consolidation of Germany's control of the European continental economy,
in the context of an intensification of global inter-capitalist competition.
This has now become an imperative for Germany, especially since Trump has dared to openly
challenge the self-justifying ideology which sustains Germany's mercantilism – a
particular form of economic nationalism that Hans Kundnani has
dubbed ' Exportnationalismus' , founded upon the belief that Germany's massive
trade surplus is uniquely the result of Germany's manufacturing excellence ( Modell
Deutschland ) rather than, in fact, the result of unfair trade practices.
This is why, if Germany wants to maintain its hegemonic position on the continent, it must
break with the US and tighten the bolts of the European workhouse. To this end, it needs to
seize control of the most coveted institution of them all – the ECB –, which
hitherto has never been under direct German control (though the Bundesbank exercises
considerable influence over it, as is well known). Indeed, many commentators openly acknowledge
that Merkel now has her eyes on the ECB's presidency. This would effectively put Germany
directly at the helm of European economic policy.
Even more worryingly, Germany is not simply aiming at expanding its economic control over
the European continent; it is also taking steps for greater European military 'cooperation'
– under the German aegis, of course.
As a recent article in Foreign Policy revealed , 'Germany is quietly building a
European army under its command'.
This year Germany and two of its European allies, the Czech Republic and Romania, announced
the integration of their armed forces, under the control of the Bundeswehr. In doing so, the
will follow in the footsteps of two Dutch brigades, one of which has already joined the
Bundeswehr's Rapid Response Forces Division and another that has been integrated into the
Bundeswehr's 1st Armored Division.
In other words, Germany already effectively controls the armies of four countries. And the
initiative, Foreign Policy notes, 'is likely to grow'. This is not surprising: if
Germany ('the EU') wants to become truly autonomous from the US, it needs to acquire military
sovereignty, which it currently lacks.
Europe is thus at a crossroads: the choice that left-wing and popular forces, and periphery
countries more generally, face is between (a) accepting Europe's transition to a fully
post-democratic, hyper-competitive, German-led continental system, in which member states
(except for those at the helm of the project) will be deprived of all sovereignty and autonomy,
in exchange for a formal democratic façade at the supranational level, and its workers
subject to ever-growing levels of exploitation; or (b) regaining national sovereignty and
autonomy at the national level, with all the short-term risks that such a strategy entails, as
the only way to restore democracy, popular sovereignty and socioeconomic dignity. In short, the
choice is between European post-democracy or post-European democracy.
There is no third way. Especially in view of the growing tensions between Germany, the US
and China, periphery countries should ask themselves if they want to be simple pawns in this
'New Great Game' or if they want to take their destinies into their own hands.
Money quote: "And even given that, I would have to qualify the nature of the threats. Russia and China are best described as adversaries
or competitors rather than enemies as they have compelling interests to avoid war, even if Washington is doing its best to turn them
hostile. Neither has anything to gain and much to lose by escalating a minor conflict into something that might well start World War
3. Indeed, both have strong incentives to avoid doing so, which makes the actual threat that they represent more speculative than real.
And, on the plus side, both can be extremely useful in dealing with international issues where Washington has little or no leverage,
to include resolving the North Korea problem and Syria, so the US has considerable benefits to be gained by cultivating their cooperation."
Notable quotes:
"... And even given that, I would have to qualify the nature of the threats. Russia and China are best described as adversaries or competitors rather than enemies as they have compelling interests to avoid war, even if Washington is doing its best to turn them hostile. Neither has anything to gain and much to lose by escalating a minor conflict into something that might well start World War 3. Indeed, both have strong incentives to avoid doing so, which makes the actual threat that they represent more speculative than real. And, on the plus side, both can be extremely useful in dealing with international issues where Washington has little or no leverage, to include resolving the North Korea problem and Syria, so the US has considerable benefits to be gained by cultivating their cooperation. ..."
"... Cohen-Watnick is thirty years old and has little relevant experience for the position he holds, senior director for intelligence on the National Security Council. But his inexperience counts for little as he is good friend of son-in-law Jared Kushner. He has told the New York Times ..."
"... Both Cohen-Watnick and Harvey share the neoconservative belief that the Iranians and their proxies in Syria and Iraq need to be confronted by force, an opportunity described by Foreign Policy ..."
"... What danger to the U.S. or its actual treaty allies an Iranian influenced land corridor would constitute remains a mystery but there is no shortage of Iran haters in the White House. Former senior CIA analyst Paul Pillar sees "unrelenting hostility from the Trump administration" towards Iran and notes "cherry-picking" of the intelligence to make a case for war, similar to what occurred with Iraq in 2002-3. And even though Secretary of Defense James Mattis and National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster have pushed back against the impulsive Cohen-Watnick and Harvey, their objections are tactical as they do not wish to make U.S. forces in the region vulnerable to attacks coming from a new direction. Otherwise they too consider Iran as America's number one active enemy and believe that war is inevitable. Donald Trump has unfortunately also jumped directly into the argument on the side of Saudi Arabia and Israel, both of which would like to see Washington go to war with Tehran on their behalf. ..."
"... You forgot the third significant potential threat from a friendly nation, i.e. Israel. Israel will sabotage any effort to normallize relations with Russia or even Iran. They will resort to false flag operations to start a war with Iran. ..."
"... The problem with this White House, as well as the previous ones, is that none of the so-called experts really understand the Middle East. The US is not interested in having friendly relations with all nations. All her efforts are towards one goal, the world domination. Even if President Trump wanted to normalize relations with Russia, the MSM, the democrats, as well as, his republican opponents will not let him. ..."
"... That is why the constan drumbeat of Russia's meddling in the 2016 election despite the fact that no proof has been given so far. Similarly, the "Iran has nuclear weapons" narrative is constantly repeated, the reports by IAEA and the 17 Intelligence Agencies to the contrary not withstanding. ..."
"... The elevation of Muhammad bin Salman to the Crown Prince position will only make the Middle East situation worse. Israel will be able to manipulate him much more easily than the old guard. ..."
"... The titanic elephant in the room -- that US foreign policy is not governed by "rationality" but by "special interests" seems .missing ..."
"... Trump has no control of most government functions, particularly foreign affairs. The Deep State takes care of that for him. The Deep State has been calling the shots for decades and all Presidents who weren't assassinated have complied. Democracies never work and ours quit long ago. ..."
"... I fully agree that attacking Iran would be yet another disaster but I don't understand why Saudi Arabia is portrayed as an 'enemy', the 'real' one, no less, in alt-media circles like this. I mean let's be honest with ourselves. KSA is the definition of a vassal state. Has been so since the state established established relations with the USA in the 1940s and the status was confirmed during the 1960s under King Faisal. Oil for security. Why pretend that they have any operational clearance from the US? ..."
"... The BIGGEST threat to the USA is from within, as we are nothing more than an occupied colony of Apartheid Israel, paying that bastard state tributes each year in the form of free money and weapons, political backing at the UN, and never tire of fighting her wars of conquest. ..."
"... The also have a choke-hold on Congress, which is always eager to wag their tail and hope their Yid Overlord gives them a treat and not a dressing-down in the Jew MSM, which is a career killer. ..."
"... Israel's current "agreements" and its "kowtowing" to Saudi Arabia speaks VOLUMES. Once again, Israel is about to get others to do their "dirty work" for them. ..."
"... There's no alternative to Saudi royal family rule of the peninsula. Who's there to replace them? Any other group, assuming there might be one somewhere waiting in the wings, would probably be anti-American and not as compliant as the Saudis. They've spent gigantic sums in the endless billions buying military equipment from the US, weapons they can't even fully use, as a way of making themselves indispensable customers. Many other billions of petrodollars find their way westward into our financial systems. They collaborate with the US in various schemes throughout the Muslim world using their intelligence services and money in furtherance of US goals. ..."
"... Mattis still seems stuck with his Iran obsession. Shame I thought he had the intellectual curiosity to adapt. Trump has good instincts, I hope Tillerson comes to the fore, and Bannon stays influential. ..."
"... Iran is US enemy #1 not only because it is against that country smaller than New Jersey with less people (Israel) but also because Iran has been a model for other countries to follow because of its intransigence to US oppression and attacks, financial political and cyber. As the world becomes multi-polar, Iran's repeated wise reactions to the world hegemon have been an inspiration to China and others to go their own way. The US can't stand that. ..."
"... Contrary to the popular view, Wahabism is necessary to keep the local population under control. Particularly the minority Shia population who live along the eastern coast, an area, which incidentally also has the all the oil reserves. USA fully understands this. Which is why they not only tolerated Wahabism, but strongly promoted it during Afghan jihad. The operation was by and large very successful btw. It was only during the '90s when religion became the new ideology for the resistance against the empire across the Muslim world. Zero surprise there because the preceding ideology, radical left wing politics was completely defeated. Iran became the first country in this pattern. The Iranian left was decimated by the Shah, another vassal. So the religious right became the new resistance. ..."
"... And as far as the KSA is considered, Wahabi preachers aren't allowed to attack the USA anyway. If any individual preacher so much as makes a squeak, he will be bent over a barrel. There won't be any "coming down very hard on Saudi Arabia" because USA already owns that country. ..."
"... The British Empire 'made' the House of Saud. Thinking it wise to use Wahhabism to control Shia Islam is like thinking it wise to use blacks to control the criminal tendencies of Mexicans. ..."
It is one of the great ironies that the United States, a land mass protected by two broad oceans while also benefitting from the
world's largest economy and most powerful military, persists in viewing itself as a potential victim, vulnerable and surrounded by
enemies. In reality, there are only two significant potential threats to the U.S. The first consists of the only two non-friendly
countries – Russia and China – that have nuclear weapons and delivery systems that could hit the North American continent and the
second is the somewhat more amorphous danger represented by international terrorism.
And even given that, I would have to qualify the nature of the threats. Russia and China are best described as adversaries
or competitors rather than enemies as they have compelling interests to avoid war, even if Washington is doing its best to turn them
hostile. Neither has anything to gain and much to lose by escalating a minor conflict into something that might well start World
War 3. Indeed, both have strong incentives to avoid doing so, which makes the actual threat that they represent more speculative
than real. And, on the plus side, both can be extremely useful in dealing with international issues where Washington has little or
no leverage, to include resolving the North Korea problem and Syria, so the US has considerable benefits to be gained by cultivating
their cooperation.
Also, I would characterize international terrorism as a faux threat at a national level, though one that has been exaggerated
through the media and fearmongering to such an extent that it appears much more dangerous than it actually is. It has been observed
that more Americans are killed by falling furniture than by terrorists in a year but terrorism has a particularly potency due to
its unpredictability and the fear that it creates. Due to that fear, American governments and businesses at all levels have been
willing to spend a trillion dollars per annum to defeat what might rationally be regarded as a relatively minor problem.
So if the United States were serious about dealing with or deflecting the actual threats against the American people it could
first of all reduce its defense expenditures to make them commensurate with the actual threat before concentrating on three things.
First, would be to establish a solid modus vivendi with Russia and China to avoid conflicts of interest that could develop
into actual tit-for-tat escalation. That would require an acceptance by Washington of the fact that both Moscow and Beijing have
regional spheres of influence that are defined by their interests. You don't have to like the governance of either country, but their
national interests have to be appreciated and respected just as the United States has legitimate interests within its own hemisphere
that must be respected by Russia and China.
Second, Washington must, unfortunately, continue to spend on the Missile Defense Agency, which supports anti-missile defenses
if the search for a modus vivendi for some reason fails. Mutual assured destruction is not a desirable strategic doctrine
but being able to intercept incoming missiles while also having some capability to strike back if attacked is a realistic deterrent
given the proliferation of nations that have both ballistic missiles and nukes.
Third and finally, there would be a coordinated program aimed at international terrorism based equally on where the terror comes
from and on physically preventing the terrorist attacks from taking place. This is the element in national defense that is least
clear cut. Dealing with Russia and China involves working with mature regimes that have established diplomatic and military channels.
Dealing with terrorist non-state players is completely different as there are generally speaking no such channels.
It should in theory be pretty simple to match threats and interests with actions since there are only a handful that really matter,
but apparently it is not so in practice. What is Washington doing? First of all, the White House is deliberately turning its back
on restoring a good working relationship with Russia by insisting that Crimea be returned to Kiev, by blaming Moscow for the continued
unrest in Donbas, and by attacking Syrian military targets in spite of the fact that Russia is an ally of the legitimate government
in Damascus and the United States is an interloper in the conflict. Meanwhile congress and the media are poisoning the waters through
their dogged pursuit of Russiagate for political reasons even though nearly a year of investigation has produced no actual evidence
of malfeasance on the part of U.S. officials and precious little in terms of Moscow's alleged interference.
Playing tough to the international audience has unfortunately become part of the American Exceptionalism DNA. Upon his arrival
in Warsaw last week, Donald Trump doubled down on the
Russia-bashing, calling on Moscow to "cease its destabilizing activities in Ukraine and elsewhere and its support for hostile regimes
including Syria and Iran." He then recommended that Russia should "join the community of responsible nations in our fight against
common enemies and in defense of civilization itself."
The comments in Warsaw were unnecessary, even if the Poles wanted to hear them, and were both highly insulting and ignorant. It
was not a good start for Donald's second overseas trip, even though the speech has otherwise been interpreted as a welcome defense
of Western civilization and European values. Trump also followed up with a two hour plus discussion with President Vladimir Putin
in which the two apparently agreed to differ on the alleged Russian hacking of the American election. The Trump-Putin meeting indicated
that restoring some kind of working relationship with Russia is still possible, as it is in everyone's interest to do so.
Fighting terrorism is quite another matter and the United States approach is the reverse of what a rational player would be seeking
to accomplish. The U.S. is rightly assisting in the bid to eradicate ISIS in Syria and Iraq but it is simultaneously attacking the
most effective fighters against that group, namely the Syrian government armed forces and the Shiite militias being provided by Iran
and Hezbollah. Indeed, it is becoming increasingly clear that at least some in the Trump Administration are seeking to use the Syrian
engagement as a stepping stone to war with Iran.
As was the case in the months preceding the ill-fated invasion of Iraq in 2003, all buttons are being pushed to vilify Iran. Recent
reports suggest that two individuals in the White House in particular have been pressuring the Trump administration's generals to
escalate U.S. involvement in Syria to bring about a war with Tehran sooner rather than later. They are Ezra Cohen-Watnick and Derek
Harvey, reported to be holdovers from the team brought into the White House by the virulently anti-Iranian former National Security
Adviser Michael Flynn.
Cohen-Watnick is thirty years old and
has little relevant experience for the position he holds, senior director for intelligence on the National Security Council.
But his inexperience counts for little as he is good friend of son-in-law Jared Kushner. He has told the New York Times
that "wants to use American spies to help oust the Iranian government," a comment that reflects complete ignorance, both regarding
Iran and also concerning spy agency capabilities. His partner in crime Harvey, a former military officer who advised General David
Petraeus when he was in Iraq, is the NSC advisor on the Middle East.
Both Cohen-Watnick and Harvey share the neoconservative belief that the Iranians and their proxies in Syria and Iraq need
to be confronted by force,
an opportunity described by Foreign Policy magazine as having developed into "a pivotal moment that will determine whether
Iran or the United States exerts influence over Iraq and Syria." Other neocon promoters of conflict with Iran have described their
horror at a possible Shiite "bridge" or "land corridor" through the Arab heartland, running from Iran itself through Iraq and Syria
and connecting on the Mediterranean with Hezbollah in Lebanon.
What danger to the U.S. or its actual treaty allies an Iranian influenced land corridor would constitute remains a mystery
but there is no shortage of Iran haters in the White House. Former senior CIA analyst Paul Pillar
sees "unrelenting hostility from the Trump administration" towards Iran and notes "cherry-picking" of the intelligence to make
a case for war, similar to what occurred with Iraq in 2002-3. And even though Secretary of Defense James Mattis and National Security
Advisor H.R. McMaster have pushed back against the impulsive Cohen-Watnick and Harvey, their objections are tactical as they do not
wish to make U.S. forces in the region vulnerable to attacks coming from a new direction. Otherwise they too consider Iran as America's
number one active enemy and believe that war is inevitable. Donald Trump has unfortunately also jumped directly into the argument
on the side of Saudi Arabia and Israel, both of which would like to see Washington go to war with Tehran on their behalf.
The problem with the Trump analysis is that he has his friends and enemies confused. He is actually supporting Saudi Arabia, the
source of most of the terrorism that has convulsed Western Europe and the United States while also killing hundreds of thousands
of fellow Muslims. Random terrorism to kill as many "infidels and heretics" as possible to create fear is a Sunni Muslim phenomenon,
supported financially and doctrinally by the Saudis. To be sure, Iran has used terror tactics to eliminate opponents and select targets
overseas, to include several multiple-victim bombings, but it has never engaged in anything like the recent series of attacks in
France and Britain. So the United States is moving seemingly inexorably towards war with a country that itself constitutes no actual
terrorist threat, unless it is attacked, in support of a country that very much is part of the threat and also on behalf of Israel,
which for its part would prefer to see Americans die in a war against Iran rather that sacrificing its own sons and daughters.
Realizing who the real enemy actually is and addressing the actual terrorism problem would not only involve coming down very hard
on Saudi Arabia rather than Iran, it would also require some serious thinking in the White House about the extent to which America's
armed interventions all over Asia and Africa have made many people hate us enough to strap on a suicide vest and have a go. Saudi
financing and Washington's propensity to go to war and thereby create a deep well of hatred just might be the principal causative
elements in the rise of global terrorism. Do I think that Donald Trump's White House has the courage to take such a step and change
direction? Unfortunately, no.
Saudi Arabia is THE worst nation in the Middle East.
Why does the US follow along blindly? Well, it is a WASP thing. We are the new Brit Empire. By the height of the Victorian
era, virtually all English Elites were philoSemitic. Roughly half of the UK WASP Elite philoSemitism was pro-Jewish and half was
pro-Arabic/Islamic. And by the time of WW1, the English Elite pro-Arabic/Islamic faction came to adore the house of Saud. So,
our foreign policy is merely WASP culture continuing to ruin most of the rest of the world, including all the whites ruled by
WASP Elites.
In reality, there are only two significant potential threats to the U.S. The first consists of the only two non-friendly
countries – Russia and China – that have nuclear weapons and delivery systems that could hit the North American continent and
the second is the somewhat more amorphous danger represented by international terrorism.
No, the only threats are the following three:
Too many Meso-Americans invading from the border. These people have totally changed the SW and may drastically alter parts
of US as well. This is an invasion. Meso-Americans are lackluster, but Too Many translates into real power, especially in elections.
The other threat is Hindu-Indian. Indians are just itching to unload 100s of millions of their kind to Anglo nations. Unlike
Chinese population that is plummeting, Indian population is still growing.
The other threat, biggest of all, is the Negro. It's not Russian missiles or Chinese troops that turned Detroit into a hellhole.
It is Negroes. And look at Baltimore, New Orleans, Selma, Memphis, Oakland, St. Louis, South Side Chicago, etc.
Afromic Bomb is more hellish than atomic bomb. Compare Detroit and Hiroshima.
Also, even though nukes are deadly, they will likely never be used. They are for defensive purposes only. The real missiles
that will destroy the West is the Afro penis. US has nukes to destroy the world, but they haven't been used even during peak of
cold war. But millions of Negro puds have impregnanted and colonized white wombs to kill white-babies-that-could-have-been and
replaced them with mulatto Negro kids who will turn out like Colin Kapernick.
The real missile gap is the threat posed by negro dong on white dong. The negro dong is so potent that even Japanese women
are going Negroid and having kids with Negro men and raising these kids as 'Japanese' to beat up real Japanese. So, if Japan with
few blacks is turning like this, imagine the threat posed by Negroes on whites in the West.
Look at YouTube of street life and club life in Paris and London. Negro missiles are conquering the white race and spreading
the savage genes.
Look how Polish women welcomed the Negro missile cuz they are infected with jungle fever. ACOWW will be the real undoing of
the West.
Besides what Priss Factor said above the following is to be reinforced with every real American man, woman and child.
Israel , which for its part would prefer to see Americans die in a war against Iran rather that sacrificing its
own sons and daughters.
Israel, the REAL enemy! ,
@K India is looking to unload hindus to U.S? Quite the opposite. India is 'losing' its best brains to the U.S so its
trying to attract them back to their country. For eg: The chief- architect of IBM's Watson is a Hindu Indian and so is the
head of IBM's neuro-morphic computing. These people are advancing western technology.... civilian and also defense (IBM
is collaborating with the American defense organization DARPA) instead of helping India achieve technological competence.
And most of other super intelligent Indians also India is losing them to the west.
(i dont hate the west for doing that. Any country in amercia's place would have done the same. It is india's job to keep
its best brains working for it and not for others. And india is trying its best to do that albeit unsuccessfully.)
100 Words #UNRIG adds AMERICA FIRST, NOT ISRAEL to Agenda.
."A.I.P.A.C.. you're outta business!"
Due to slanderous attacks by a Mossad internet psy-op, Steele now prioritizes Israeli malign influence on US. Also, check out
Cynthia McKinney's twitter.
#UNRIG – Robert David Steele Weekly Update
@Durruti Nice action approach
to cure ills of society.
Enclosing copy of flier we have distributed - with a similar approach at a cure.
*Flier distributed is adjusted & a bit more attractive (1 sheet - both sides).
The key is to Restore the Republic, which was definitively destroyed on November 22, 1963.
Feel free to contact.
Use this, or send me a note by way of a response.
For THE RESTORATION OF THE REPUBLIC
"We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal governments are instituted among men, deriving their
just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the
right of the people to alter or abolish it and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles "
The above is a portion of the Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson.
We submit the following facts to the citizens of the United States.
The government of the United States has been a Totalitarian Oligarchy since the military financial aristocracy destroyed
the Democratic Republic on November 22, 1963 , when they assassinated the last democratically elected president, John Fitzgerald
Kennedy , and overthrew his government. All following governments have been unconstitutional frauds. Attempts by Robert
Kennedy and Martin Luther King to restore the Republic were interrupted by their murder.
A subsequent 12 year colonial war against Vietnam , conducted by the murderers of Kennedy, left 2 million dead in a
wake of napalm and burning villages.
In 1965, the U.S. government orchestrated the slaughter of 1 million unarmed Indonesian civilians.
In the decade that followed the CIA murdered 100,000 Native Americans in Guatemala .
In the 1970s, the Oligarchy began the destruction and looting of America's middle class, by encouraging the export of industry
and jobs to parts of the world where workers were paid bare subsistence wages. The 2008, Bailout of the Nation's Oligarchs
cost American taxpayers $13trillion. The long decline of the local economy has led to the political decline of our hard working
citizens, as well as the decay of cities, towns, and infrastructure, such as education.
The impoverishment of America's middle class has undermined the nation's financial stability. Without a productive foundation,
the government has accumulated a huge debt in excess of $19trillion. This debt will have to be paid, or suffered by future generations.
Concurrently, the top 1% of the nation's population has benefited enormously from the discomfiture of the rest. The interest rate
has been reduced to 0, thereby slowly robbing millions of depositors of their savings, as their savings cannot stay even with
the inflation rate.
The government spends the declining national wealth on bloody and never ending military adventures, and is or has recently
conducted unconstitutional wars against 9 nations. The Oligarchs maintain 700 military bases in 131 countries; they spend as much
on military weapons of terror as the rest of the nations of the world combined. Tellingly, more than half the government budget
is spent on the military and 16 associated secret agencies.
The nightmare of a powerful centralized government crushing the rights of the people, so feared by the Founders of the United
States, has become a reality. The government of Obama/Biden, as with previous administrations such as Bush/Cheney, and whoever
is chosen in November 2016, operates a Gulag of dozens of concentration camps, where prisoners are denied trials, and routinely
tortured. The Patriot Act and The National Defense Authorizations Act , enacted by both Democratic and Republican
factions of the oligarchy, serve to establish a legal cover for their terror.
The nation's media is controlled, and, with the school systems, serve to brainwash the population; the people are intimidated
and treated with contempt.
The United States is No longer Sovereign
The United States is no longer a sovereign nation. Its government, The Executive, and Congress, is bought, utterly owned
and controlled by foreign and domestic wealthy Oligarchs, such as the Rothschilds, Rockefellers, and Duponts , to name only
a few of the best known.
The 2016 Electoral Circus will anoint new actors to occupy the same Unconstitutional Government, with its controlling International
Oligarchs. Clinton, Trump, whomever, are willing accomplices for imperialist international murder, and destruction of nations,
including ours.
For Love of Country
The Restoration of the Republic will be a Revolutionary Act, that will cancel all previous debts owed to that unconstitutional
regime and its business supporters. All debts, including Student Debts, will be canceled. Our citizens will begin, anew, with
a clean slate.
As American Founder , Thomas Jefferson wrote, in a letter to James Madison:
"I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be self evident, 'that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living':"
"Then I say the earth belongs to each of these generations, during it's course, fully, and in their own right. The 2d. Generation
receives it clear of the debts and incumberances of the 1st. The 3d of the 2d. and so on. For if the 1st. Could charge it with
a debt, then the earth would belong to the dead and not the living generation."
Our Citizens must restore the centrality of the constitution, establishing a less powerful government which will ensure
President Franklin Roosevelt's Four Freedoms , freedom of speech and expression, freedom to worship God in ones own way, freedom
from want "which means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peace time life for its inhabitants
" and freedom from fear "which means a world-wide reduction of armaments "
Once restored: The Constitution will become, once again, the law of the land and of a free people. We will establish a government,
hold elections, begin to direct traffic, arrest criminal politicians of the tyrannical oligarchy, and, in short, repair the damage
of the previous totalitarian governments.
For the Democratic Republic!
Sons and Daughters of Liberty [email protected]
In reality, there are only two significant potential threats to the U.S. The first consists of the only two non-friendly
countries – Russia and China – that have nuclear weapons and delivery systems that could hit the North American continent and
the second is the somewhat more amorphous danger represented by international terrorism.
You forgot the third significant potential threat from a friendly nation, i.e. Israel. Israel will sabotage any effort
to normallize relations with Russia or even Iran. They will resort to false flag operations to start a war with Iran.
The problem with this White House, as well as the previous ones, is that none of the so-called experts really understand
the Middle East. The US is not interested in having friendly relations with all nations. All her efforts are towards one goal,
the world domination. Even if President Trump wanted to normalize relations with Russia, the MSM, the democrats, as well as, his
republican opponents will not let him.
That is why the constan drumbeat of Russia's meddling in the 2016 election despite the fact that no proof has been given
so far. Similarly, the "Iran has nuclear weapons" narrative is constantly repeated, the reports by IAEA and the 17 Intelligence
Agencies to the contrary not withstanding.
The elevation of Muhammad bin Salman to the Crown Prince position will only make the Middle East situation worse. Israel
will be able to manipulate him much more easily than the old guard.
The western world is dependent on oil, especially ME oil. Saudi Arabia was made the USA's main oil supplier at the end of 1944.
The Saud dynasty depends on the USA. That the Saudis would sponsor terrorism, why would they ? And which terrorism is Muslim terrorism
?
Sept 11 not, Boston not, Madrid and London very questionably. We then are left with minor issues, the Paris shooting the biggest.
That Saudi Arabia is waging war in Yemen certainly is with USA support. The Saudi army does what the USA wants them to do.
Mr. Giraldi, you forgot to mention Israel as one of America's biggest liabilities besides Saudi Arabia. But with such amateur
dramatics in the White House and on the Security Council, the US is destined for war but only against the wrong enemy such as
Iran. If the Saudis and the right-wing Netanyahu regime want to get after Iran they should do it alone. They surely will get a
bloody nose. Americans have shed enough blood for these rascal regimes. President Trump should continue with his rapprochement
towards Russia because both nation states have more in common than expected.
I'm a little disappointed in this article. Not that it's a bad article per se: perfectly rational, reasonable, academic even.
But unfortunately, it's simply naive.
"Realizing who the real enemy actually is and addressing the actual terrorism problem would not only involve coming down very
hard on Saudi Arabia rather than Iran, it would also require some serious thinking in the White House about the extent to which
America's armed interventions all over Asia and Africa have made many people hate us enough to strap on a suicide vest and have
a go."
Realize who the real enemy is ? Come down hard on the Saud's ? No -- really ?
The titanic elephant in the room -- that US foreign policy is not governed by "rationality" but by "special interests" seems
.missing. Israel, the Saudi's themselves, the MIC & so on & so forth ARE the special interests who literally "realise" US Policy.
Well, the real enemy of the people are the real terrorists behind the scenes. Those who planned the 9/11 false flag.
Those who sent the Anthrax letters to resisting congress members. Those who pre-planned the wars of aggression in the whole middle
east.
So any appeal to the "White House" is almost pointless since the White House is one element of the power structure captured
by the war-criminal lunatics.
To change something people in the US should at first stop buying their war criminal lying mass media.
Then they should stop supporting ANY foreign intervention by the US and should stop believing any of the preposterous lies
released by the media, the state dept., or any other neocon outlet.
Actually Trump was probably elected because he said he was anti-intervention and anti-media. But did it help?
The US needs mass resistance (demonstrations, strikes, boycotts, non-participation, sit-ins, grass-root information, or whatever)
against their neocon/zionist/mafia/cia power groups or nothing will change.
We need demonstrations against NATO, against war, against false flag terrorism, against using terrorists as secret armies,
against war propaganda!
B.t.w. Iran has always been one of the main goals. Think of it: Why did the US attack Afghanistan and Iraq? What have those
two countries in common? (Hint: a look on the map helps to answer this question.)
I am beginning to get interested in why some people are sure 9/11 was a false flag affair covered up by a lot of lies.
So may I try my opening question on you. How much, if any of it, have you read of the official 9/11 commission report? ,
"The White House is targeting Iran but should instead focus on Saudi Arabia"
Trump has no control of most government functions, particularly foreign affairs. The Deep State takes care of that for
him. The Deep State has been calling the shots for decades and all Presidents who weren't assassinated have complied. Democracies
never work and ours quit long ago.
I fully agree that attacking Iran would be yet another disaster but I don't understand why Saudi Arabia is portrayed as an 'enemy',
the 'real' one, no less, in alt-media circles like this.
I mean let's be honest with ourselves. KSA is the definition of a vassal state. Has been so since the state established
established relations with the USA in the 1940s and the status was confirmed during the 1960s under King Faisal. Oil for security. Why pretend that they have any operational clearance from the US?
Contrary to the popular view, Wahabism is necessary to keep the local population under control. Particularly the minority Shia
population who live along the eastern coast, an area, which incidentally also has the all the oil reserves.
USA fully understands this. Which is why they not only tolerated Wahabism, but strongly promoted it during Afghan jihad. The
operation was by and large very successful btw.
It was only during the '90s when religion became the new ideology for the resistance against the empire across the Muslim world.
Zero surprise there because the preceding ideology, radical left wing politics was completely defeated. Iran became the first
country in this pattern. The Iranian left was decimated by the Shah, another vassal. So the religious right became the new resistance.
And as far as the KSA is considered, Wahabi preachers aren't allowed to attack the USA anyway. If any individual preacher so
much as makes a squeak, he will be bent over a barrel. There won't be any "coming down very hard on Saudi Arabia" because USA
already owns that country.
So what's the answer? Well, props to Phillip as he understood – "it would also require some serious thinking in the White House
about the extent to which America's armed interventions all over Asia and Africa have made many people hate us enough to strap
on a suicide vest and have a go."
Your analysis starts too late. The US supports Wahhabism and the House of Saud because the pro-Arabic/Islamic English
Elites of 1910 and 1920 and 1935 supported Wahhabism and the House of Saud.
The British Empire 'made' the House of Saud,
Thinking it wise to use Wahhabism to control Shia Islam is like thinking it wise to use blacks to control the criminal
tendencies of Mexicans.
In reality, there are only two significant potential threats to the U.S. The first consists of the only two non-friendly
countries – Russia and China – that have nuclear weapons and delivery systems that could hit the North American continent and
the second is the somewhat more amorphous danger represented by international terrorism.
No, the only threats are the following three:
Too many Meso-Americans invading from the border. These people have totally changed the SW and may drastically alter parts
of US as well. This is an invasion. Meso-Americans are lackluster, but Too Many translates into real power, especially in elections.
The other threat is Hindu-Indian. Indians are just itching to unload 100s of millions of their kind to Anglo nations. Unlike
Chinese population that is plummeting, Indian population is still growing.
The other threat, biggest of all, is the Negro. It's not Russian missiles or Chinese troops that turned Detroit into a hellhole.
It is Negroes. And look at Baltimore, New Orleans, Selma, Memphis, Oakland, St. Louis, South Side Chicago, etc.
Afromic Bomb is more hellish than atomic bomb. Compare Detroit and Hiroshima.
Also, even though nukes are deadly, they will likely never be used. They are for defensive purposes only. The real missiles
that will destroy the West is the Afro penis. US has nukes to destroy the world, but they haven't been used even during peak of
cold war. But millions of Negro puds have impregnanted and colonized white wombs to kill white-babies-that-could-have-been and
replaced them with mulatto Negro kids who will turn out like Colin Kapernick.
The real missile gap is the threat posed by negro dong on white dong. The negro dong is so potent that even Japanese women
are going Negroid and having kids with Negro men and raising these kids as 'Japanese' to beat up real Japanese. So, if Japan with
few blacks is turning like this, imagine the threat posed by Negroes on whites in the West.
Look at youtube of street life and club life in Paris and London. Negro missiles are conquering the white race and spreading
the savage genes.
Look how Polish women welcomed the Negro missile cuz they are infected with jungle fever. ACOWW will be the real undoing of
the West.
Replies: @Sowhat And what grudge
is that? The only two I can find are connected. The deposing of our puppets, the Assads and the nationalization of their natural
resources. I have the impression that it removes around future hegemon and the rich gas reserves off their coast and the decades
long desire to run a pipeline west to the Mediterranean.
The BIGGEST threat to the USA is from within, as we are nothing more than an occupied colony of Apartheid Israel, paying that
bastard state tributes each year in the form of free money and weapons, political backing at the UN, and never tire of fighting
her wars of conquest.
You won't see Israeli troops in the streets, since their confederates control the economy thru their control of the FED and
US Treasury and most of those TBTF banks, which we always bail out, no matter the cost.
The also have a choke-hold on Congress, which is always eager to wag their tail and hope their Yid Overlord gives them
a treat and not a dressing-down in the Jew MSM, which is a career killer.
The WH is also Israeli territory, especially now with a Jew NYC slumlord now Trump's top adviser and his fashion model faux
Jew daughter egging Daddy on to kill more Arab babies, since she can't stand the sight of dead babies
@Paul Well, the real enemy of
the people are the real terrorists behind the scenes. Those who planned the 9/11 false flag. Those who sent the Anthrax letters
to resisting congress members. Those who pre-planned the wars of aggression in the whole middle east.
So any appeal to the "White House" is almost pointless since the White House is one element of the power structure captured
by the war-criminal lunatics.
To change something people in the US should at first stop buying their war criminal lying mass media.
Then they should stop supporting ANY foreign intervention by the US and should stop believing any of the preposterous lies
released by the media, the state dept., or any other neocon outlet.
Actually Trump was probably elected because he said he was anti-intervention and anti-media. But did it help?
The US needs mass resistance (demonstrations, strikes, boycotts, non-participation, sit-ins, grass-root information, or whatever)
against their neocon/zionist/mafia/cia power groups or nothing will change.
We need demonstrations against NATO, against war, against false flag terrorism, against using terrorists as secret armies,
against war propaganda!
B.t.w. Iran has always been one of the main goals. Think of it: Why did the US attack Afghanistan and Iraq? What have those
two countries in common? (Hint: a look on the map helps to answer this question.) I am beginning to get interested in why some
people are sure 9/11 was a false flag affair covered up by a lot of lies. So may I try my opening question on you. How much, if
any of it, have you read of the official 9/11 commission report?
@eah The WH should focus on
the USA. And what grudge is that? The only two I can find are connected. The deposing of our puppets, the Assads and the nationalization
of their natural resources. I have the impression that it removes around future hegemon and the rich gas reserves off their coast
and the decades long desire to run a pipeline west to the Mediterranean.
Israel's current "agreements" and its "kowtowing" to Saudi Arabia speaks VOLUMES. Once again, Israel is about to get others
to do their "dirty work" for them.
The point that everybody seems to miss is the fact that Judaism and Islam are inextricably linked. In fact, one could safely
argue that Islam is an arabicized form of Judaism.
1. Both Judaism and Islam promote their own forms of supremacy, relegating non-adherents as "lesser human beings", or in Judaism's
take "no better than livestock, albeit with souls, to be used for the advantage of the jew".
2. Both systems proscribe lesser (or no) punishment for those of each respective "tribe" who transgress against "outsiders"
-- goyim
or infidels. Both systems proscribe much harsher punishments against "outsiders" who transgress against those of each respective
"tribe".
3. When it comes to "equality under law", Israel is no better than Saudi Arabia, as a jew who has a disagreement with an "outsider"
will always have the advantage of a judicial system which almost always rules for the jew.
4. Both Judaism and Islam have taken it upon themselves to be arbiters of what the rest of the world should follow, demanding
that "outsiders" conform to what THEY believe, thinking that they know what is best (for the rest of us). Just look at the demands
moslems (who are guests in western Europe) make of local non-moslem populations.
Read the jewish Talmud and islamic Koran you will find virtually identical passages that demonize and marginalize those of
us who are "goyim" or "infidels".
A pox on both their houses
Now before I say what I'm going to say I want to say that Israel has the right to define and defend her interests just
as China, Russia and USA do, as Geraldi says above. No nation or people can be denied this (without force).
Having said that, I am grateful to you, anarchyst, for having pointed out the familial similarities between Islam and
Judaism. In addition to what you say there is the fact that the Jewish genome is virtually identical to that of the Palestinians--except
for that of Ashkenazi Jews who are more than half European.
As far as I can see, Ashkenazi Jews have an existential choice. They can identify with their European half whereby they
acknowledge that the Greeks and not Moses made the greatest contributions to humanity (and more particularly, their humanity)
or they can go with their atavistic Semitic side and regress to barbarism. Science, Logic, Math, History, Architecture,
Drama and Music or blowing up Buddhas and shrouding your women. Take your pick.
Of course, this is sorta unfair in as much as they were kicked out of Europe and now dwell in the ME where if they try
to act like Europeans they will be persecuted by their neighbors as apostates. The Jews do indeed have a tough row to hoe.
, @bjondo Jews/Judaism
bring death, destruction, misery.
Muslims/Islam (minus Western creation of "Muslim"terrorists) brought golden ages to many areas.
Christianity and Islam elevate the human spirit. Judaism degrades.
June 7, 2017 We Have Met the Evil Empire and It Is Us
Life in America was pure injustice, the lash and the iron boot, despite the version of history we have been given by the Ford
and Rockefeller Foundations who "re-invented" America and its history through taking control of public education in the late 1940s.
You see, the multi-generational ignorance we bask in today is not unplanned. The threat represented by advances in communications
and other technology was recognized and dealt with, utterly quashed at birth.
@anarchyst Israel's current
"agreements" and its "kowtowing" to Saudi Arabia speaks VOLUMES. Once again, Israel is about to get others to do their "dirty
work" for them.
The point that everybody seems to miss is the fact that Judaism and Islam are inextricably linked. In fact, one could safely argue
that Islam is an arabicized form of Judaism.
1. Both Judaism and Islam promote their own forms of supremacy, relegating non-adherents as "lesser human beings", or in Judaism's
take "no better than livestock, albeit with souls, to be used for the advantage of the jew".
2. Both systems proscribe lesser (or no) punishment for those of each respective "tribe" who transgress against "outsiders"--goyim
or infidels. Both systems proscribe much harsher punishments against "outsiders" who transgress against those of each respective
"tribe".
3. When it comes to "equality under law", Israel is no better than Saudi Arabia, as a jew who has a disagreement with an "outsider"
will always have the advantage of a judicial system which almost always rules for the jew.
4. Both Judaism and Islam have taken it upon themselves to be arbiters of what the rest of the world should follow, demanding
that "outsiders" conform to what THEY believe, thinking that they know what is best (for the rest of us). Just look at the demands
moslems (who are guests in western Europe) make of local non-moslem populations.
Read the jewish Talmud and islamic Koran...you will find virtually identical passages that demonize and marginalize those of
us who are "goyim" or "infidels".
A pox on both their houses... Now before I say what I'm going to say I want to say that Israel has the right to define and defend
her interests just as China, Russia and USA do, as Geraldi says above. No nation or people can be denied this (without force).
Having said that, I am grateful to you, anarchyst, for having pointed out the familial similarities between Islam and Judaism.
In addition to what you say there is the fact that the Jewish genome is virtually identical to that of the Palestinians–except
for that of Ashkenazi Jews who are more than half European.
As far as I can see, Ashkenazi Jews have an existential choice. They can identify with their European half whereby they acknowledge
that the Greeks and not Moses made the greatest contributions to humanity (and more particularly, their humanity) or they can
go with their atavistic Semitic side and regress to barbarism. Science, Logic, Math, History, Architecture, Drama and Music or
blowing up Buddhas and shrouding your women. Take your pick.
Of course, this is sorta unfair in as much as they were kicked out of Europe and now dwell in the ME where if they try to act
like Europeans they will be persecuted by their neighbors as apostates. The Jews do indeed have a tough row to hoe.
Trump is torn between Israel's permanent need to weaken its powerful neighbors (Iraq, Iran) and the necessity to protect the USA
from terrorists attacks.
Iran is an hypothetical threat to Israel, Saudi Arabia has proven to be a threat to the world.
In Tehran and other Iranian cities including Iran's holiest, that is, most conservative cities like Mashad. there are taxi
companies owned and run by women.
Tehran traffic makes NYC look like Mayberry RFD; many Iranians use small motorcycles to commute and take care of daily chores.
It's not at all uncommon to see an Iranian woman in full chador driving a motorcycle with a child and parcels in tow.
Iranian women could offer to teach the women of Saudi Arabia to drive.
@Wizard of Oz I am beginning
to get interested in why some people are sure 9/11 was a false flag affair covered up by a lot of lies. So may I try my opening
question on you. How much, if any of it, have you read of the official 9/11 commission report? A better question: Have YOU read
The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation by Phillip Shenon?
There's no alternative to Saudi royal family rule of the peninsula. Who's there to replace them? Any other group, assuming
there might be one somewhere waiting in the wings, would probably be anti-American and not as compliant as the Saudis. They've
spent gigantic sums in the endless billions buying military equipment from the US, weapons they can't even fully use, as a way
of making themselves indispensable customers. Many other billions of petrodollars find their way westward into our financial systems.
They collaborate with the US in various schemes throughout the Muslim world using their intelligence services and money in furtherance
of US goals.
They live the royal life thanks to being able to use the money from their nation's resource wealth as their own personal kitty,
living in palaces, buying obscene amounts of jewelry and other luxury goods, and so on. They'll never give that up and being a
close ally of the US affords them protection which of course they pay for. They may be seen as an enemy by the average person
but not at the elite level with whom they all consort and roll around in the money with.
Mattis still seems stuck with his Iran obsession. Shame I thought he had the intellectual curiosity to adapt. Trump has
good instincts, I hope Tillerson comes to the fore, and Bannon stays influential.
Iran is US enemy #1 not only because it is against that country smaller than New Jersey with less people (Israel) but also
because Iran has been a model for other countries to follow because of its intransigence to US oppression and attacks, financial
political and cyber. As the world becomes multi-polar, Iran's repeated wise reactions to the world hegemon have been an inspiration
to China and others to go their own way. The US can't stand that.
@Paul Well, the real enemy of
the people are the real terrorists behind the scenes. Those who planned the 9/11 false flag. Those who sent the Anthrax letters
to resisting congress members. Those who pre-planned the wars of aggression in the whole middle east.
So any appeal to the "White House" is almost pointless since the White House is one element of the power structure captured
by the war-criminal lunatics.
To change something people in the US should at first stop buying their war criminal lying mass media.
Then they should stop supporting ANY foreign intervention by the US and should stop believing any of the preposterous lies
released by the media, the state dept., or any other neocon outlet.
Actually Trump was probably elected because he said he was anti-intervention and anti-media. But did it help?
The US needs mass resistance (demonstrations, strikes, boycotts, non-participation, sit-ins, grass-root information, or whatever)
against their neocon/zionist/mafia/cia power groups or nothing will change.
We need demonstrations against NATO, against war, against false flag terrorism, against using terrorists as secret armies,
against war propaganda!
B.t.w. Iran has always been one of the main goals. Think of it: Why did the US attack Afghanistan and Iraq? What have those
two countries in common? (Hint: a look on the map helps to answer this question.) "Well, the real enemy of the people are the
real terrorists behind the scenes. Those who planned the 9/11 false flag."
Saudi Arabia is THE worst nation in the Middle East.
Why does the US follow along blindly? Well, it is a WASP thing. We are the new Brit Empire. By the height of the Victorian
era, virtually all English Elites were philoSemitic. Roughly half of the UK WASP Elite philoSemitism was pro-Jewish and half was
pro-Arabic/Islamic.
And by the time of WW1, the English Elite pro-Arabic/Islamic faction came to adore the house of Saud.
So, our foreign policy is merely WASP culture continuing to ruin most of the rest of the world, including all the whites ruled
by WASP Elites. SECOND worst,my friend.
@Chad I fully agree that attacking
Iran would be yet another disaster but I don't understand why Saudi Arabia is portrayed as an 'enemy', the 'real' one, no less,
in alt-media circles like this.
I mean let's be honest with ourselves. KSA is the definition of a vassal state. Has been so since the state established
established relations with the USA in the 1940s and the status was confirmed during the 1960s under King Faisal. Oil for security.
Why pretend that they have any operational clearance from the US?
Contrary to the popular view, Wahabism is necessary to keep the local population under control. Particularly the minority
Shia population who live along the eastern coast, an area, which incidentally also has the all the oil reserves. USA fully understands
this. Which is why they not only tolerated Wahabism, but strongly promoted it during Afghan jihad. The operation was by and large
very successful btw. It was only during the '90s when religion became the new ideology for the resistance against the empire across
the Muslim world. Zero surprise there because the preceding ideology, radical left wing politics was completely defeated. Iran
became the first country in this pattern. The Iranian left was decimated by the Shah, another vassal. So the religious right became
the new resistance.
And as far as the KSA is considered, Wahabi preachers aren't allowed to attack the USA anyway. If any individual preacher
so much as makes a squeak, he will be bent over a barrel. There won't be any "coming down very hard on Saudi Arabia" because USA
already owns that country.
So what's the answer? Well, props to Phillip as he understood - "it would also require some serious thinking in the White House
about the extent to which America's armed interventions all over Asia and Africa have made many people hate us enough to strap
on a suicide vest and have a go."
Bingo. Your analysis starts too late. The US supports Wahhabism and the House of Saud because the pro-Arabic/Islamic English
Elites of 1910 and 1920 and 1935 supported Wahhabism and the House of Saud.
The British Empire 'made' the House of Saud. Thinking it wise to use Wahhabism to control Shia Islam is like thinking it
wise to use blacks to control the criminal tendencies of Mexicans.
1,000 Words @RobinG#UNRIG
adds AMERICA FIRST, NOT ISRAEL to Agenda.
..................."A.I.P.A.C.. you're outta business!"
Due to slanderous attacks by a Mossad internet psy-op, Steele now prioritizes Israeli malign influence on US. Also, check out
Cynthia McKinney's twitter.
#UNRIG - Robert David Steele Weekly Update Nice action approach to cure ills of society.
Enclosing copy of flier we have distributed – with a similar approach at a cure.
*Flier distributed is adjusted & a bit more attractive (1 sheet – both sides).
The key is to Restore the Republic, which was definitively destroyed on November 22, 1963.
Feel free to contact.
Use this, or send me a note by way of a response.
For THE RESTORATION OF THE REPUBLIC
"We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal governments are instituted among men, deriving their
just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the
right of the people to alter or abolish it and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles "
The above is a portion of the Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson.
We submit the following facts to the citizens of the United States.
The government of the United States has been a Totalitarian Oligarchy since the military financial aristocracy destroyed
the Democratic Republic on November 22, 1963 , when they assassinated the last democratically elected president, John Fitzgerald
Kennedy , and overthrew his government. All following governments have been unconstitutional frauds. Attempts by Robert
Kennedy and Martin Luther King to restore the Republic were interrupted by their murder.
A subsequent 12 year colonial war against Vietnam , conducted by the murderers of Kennedy, left 2 million dead in a
wake of napalm and burning villages.
In 1965, the U.S. government orchestrated the slaughter of 1 million unarmed Indonesian civilians.
In the decade that followed the CIA murdered 100,000 Native Americans in Guatemala .
In the 1970s, the Oligarchy began the destruction and looting of America's middle class, by encouraging the export of industry
and jobs to parts of the world where workers were paid bare subsistence wages. The 2008, Bailout of the Nation's Oligarchs
cost American taxpayers $13trillion. The long decline of the local economy has led to the political decline of our hard working
citizens, as well as the decay of cities, towns, and infrastructure, such as education.
The impoverishment of America's middle class has undermined the nation's financial stability. Without a productive foundation,
the government has accumulated a huge debt in excess of $19trillion. This debt will have to be paid, or suffered by future generations.
Concurrently, the top 1% of the nation's population has benefited enormously from the discomfiture of the rest. The interest rate
has been reduced to 0, thereby slowly robbing millions of depositors of their savings, as their savings cannot stay even with
the inflation rate.
The government spends the declining national wealth on bloody and never ending military adventures, and is or has recently
conducted unconstitutional wars against 9 nations. The Oligarchs maintain 700 military bases in 131 countries; they spend as much
on military weapons of terror as the rest of the nations of the world combined. Tellingly, more than half the government budget
is spent on the military and 16 associated secret agencies.
The nightmare of a powerful centralized government crushing the rights of the people, so feared by the Founders of the United
States, has become a reality. The government of Obama/Biden, as with previous administrations such as Bush/Cheney, and whoever
is chosen in November 2016, operates a Gulag of dozens of concentration camps, where prisoners are denied trials, and routinely
tortured. The Patriot Act and The National Defense Authorizations Act , enacted by both Democratic and Republican
factions of the oligarchy, serve to establish a legal cover for their terror.
The nation's media is controlled, and, with the school systems, serve to brainwash the population; the people are intimidated
and treated with contempt.
The United States is No longer Sovereign
The United States is no longer a sovereign nation. Its government, The Executive, and Congress, is bought, utterly owned
and controlled by foreign and domestic wealthy Oligarchs, such as the Rothschilds, Rockefellers, and Duponts , to name only
a few of the best known.
The 2016 Electoral Circus will anoint new actors to occupy the same Unconstitutional Government, with its controlling International
Oligarchs. Clinton, Trump, whomever, are willing accomplices for imperialist international murder, and destruction of nations,
including ours.
For Love of Country
The Restoration of the Republic will be a Revolutionary Act, that will cancel all previous debts owed to that unconstitutional
regime and its business supporters. All debts, including Student Debts, will be canceled. Our citizens will begin, anew, with
a clean slate.
As American Founder , Thomas Jefferson wrote, in a letter to James Madison:
"I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be self evident, 'that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living':"
"Then I say the earth belongs to each of these generations, during it's course, fully, and in their own right. The 2d. Generation
receives it clear of the debts and incumberances of the 1st. The 3d of the 2d. and so on. For if the 1st. Could charge it with
a debt, then the earth would belong to the dead and not the living generation."
Our Citizens must restore the centrality of the constitution, establishing a less powerful government which will ensure
President Franklin Roosevelt's Four Freedoms , freedom of speech and expression, freedom to worship God in ones own way, freedom
from want "which means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peace time life for its inhabitants
" and freedom from fear "which means a world-wide reduction of armaments "
Once restored: The Constitution will become, once again, the law of the land and of a free people. We will establish a government,
hold elections, begin to direct traffic, arrest criminal politicians of the tyrannical oligarchy, and, in short, repair the damage
of the previous totalitarian governments.
For the Democratic Republic!
Sons and Daughters of Liberty [email protected]
are studying US states and ranking them according to financial stability measures. The states with biggest problems -- Illinois,
California, New Jersey, Connecticut -- are in the mess they are in largely because of pension liability issues: some pensions
are unfunded or underfunded.
I recall that ten years ago about a dozen Jewish organizations formed the "Iran Task Force," ** whose primary activity was
to persuade managers of State pension funds to divest from Iran-connected companies; that is, corporations & banks, etc. that
did business with Iran. I recall very clearly that Arnold Schwartznegger was the poster child for California's vanguard role in
divesting from such nasty nasty companies, in accord with the wishes of Jewish Israel-firsters.
Perhaps the Mercatus scholars could prepare an exercise in alternative financial history: What shape would the US economy,
and the various States's economies, be in if the US were NOT so overwhelmingly influenced by Israel firsters, and were NOT persuaded,
Against Our Better Judgment, to entangle themselves in Israel's nefarious activities?
____
** The 2007 Iran Task Force is NOT the same as the group formed in 2015 or so, embedded in US House/Senate, with Joe Lieberman
and Michael Hayden playing prominent roles in attempting to influence the Iran Deal.
The 2007 initiative was sponsored by groups such as ZOA, RJC, AIPAC, etc., and / or spun off groups such as Foundation for
Defense of Democracy, United Against Nuclear Iran.
Nationalism really represent a growing threat to neoliberalism. It is clear the the rise of
nationalism was caused by the triumph of neoliberalism all over the globe. As neoliberal
ideology collapsed in 2008, thing became really interesting now. Looks like
1920th-1940th will be replayed on a new level with the USA neoliberal empire under stress from
new challengers instead of British empire.
Rumor about the death of neoliberalism are slightly exaggerated ;-). This social system still
has a lot of staying power. you need some external shock like the need of cheap oil (defined as
sustainable price of oil over $100 per barrel) to shake it again. Of some financial crisis similar
to the crisis of 2008. Currently there is still
no alternative social order that can replace it. Collapse of the USSR discredited both socialism even
of different flavors then was practiced in the USSR. National socialism would be a step back from
neoliberalism.
Notable quotes:
"... The retreat of [neo]liberalism is very visible in Asia. All Southeast Asian states have turned their backs on liberal democracy, especially Indonesia, the Philippines and Myanmar in the last decade. This NYT article notes that liberalism has essentially died in Japan, and that all political contests are now between what the west would consider conservatives: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/15/opinion/liberalism-japan-election.html ..."
"... What is today called "Liberalism" and "Conservatism" both are simply corrupted labels applied to the same top-down corporate-fascistic elite rule that I think Mr. Buchanan once referred to as "two wings of the same bird of prey." ..."
"... Nobody at the top cares about 'diversity.' They care about the easy profits that come from ever cheaper labor. 'Diversity' is not suicide but rather murder: instigated by a small number of very powerful people who have decided that the long-term health of their nations and civilization is less important than short-term profits and power. ..."
"... Hillary and Obama are to the right of the President that Buchanan served in his White House. Richard Nixon was to the Left of both Hillary and Obama. I can't even imagine Hillary accepting and signing into law a 'Clean Water Act' or enacting Price Controls to fight inflation. No way. Heck would freeze over before Hillary would do something so against her Banker Backers. ..."
"... It's sure that financial (neo)liberalism was in a growth phase prior to year 2000 (under Greenspan, the "Maestro") with a general belief that the economy could be "fine tuned" with risk eliminated using sophisticated financial instruments, monetary policy etc. ..."
"... If [neo] Liberalism is a package, then two heavy financial blows that shook the whole foundation were the collapse of the dot.com bubble (2000) and the mortgage bubble (2008). ..."
"... And, other (self-serving) neoliberal stories are now seen as false. For example, that the US is an "advanced post-industrial service economy", that out-sourcing would "free up Americans for higher skilled/higher wage employment" or that "the US would always gain from tariff free trade". ..."
"... The basic divide is surely Nationalism (America First) vs. Globalism (Neo-Liberalism), as shown by the last US Presidential election. ..."
"... Neoliberalism, of which the Clintons are acolytes, supports Free Trade and Open Borders. Although it claims to support World Government, in actual fact it supports corporatism. This is explicit in the TPPA Trump vetoed. Under the corporate state, the state controls the corporations, as Don Benito did in Italy. Under corporatism, the corporations tell the state what to do, as has been the case in America since at least the Clinton Presidency. ..."
"... But I recall that Pat B also said neoconservatism was on its way out a few years after Iraq war II and yet it's stronger than ever and its adherents are firmly ensconced in the joint chiefs of staff, the pentagon, Congress and the White House. It's also spawned a close cousin in liberal interventionism. ..."
Asked to name the defining attributes of the America we wish to become, many liberals would answer
that we must realize our manifest destiny since 1776, by becoming more equal, more diverse and more
democratic -- and the model for mankind's future.
Equality, diversity, democracy -- this is the holy trinity of the post-Christian secular state
at whose altars Liberal Man worships.
But the congregation worshiping these gods is shrinking. And even Europe seems to be rejecting
what America has on offer.
In a retreat from diversity, Catalonia just voted to separate from Spain. The Basque and Galician
peoples of Spain are following the Catalan secession crisis with great interest.
The right-wing People's Party and far-right Freedom Party just swept 60 percent of Austria's vote,
delivering the nation to 31-year-old Sebastian Kurz, whose anti-immigrant platform was plagiarized
from the Freedom Party. Summarized it is: Austria for the Austrians!
Lombardy, whose capital is Milan, and Veneto will vote Sunday for greater autonomy from Rome.
South Tyrol (Alto Adige), severed from Austria and ceded to Italy at Versailles, written off by
Hitler to appease Mussolini after his Anschluss, is astir anew with secessionism. Even the Sicilians
are talking of separation.
By Sunday, the Czech Republic may have a new leader, billionaire Andrej Babis. Writes The Washington
Post, Babis "makes a sport of attacking the European Union and says NATO's mission is outdated."
Platform Promise: Keep the Muslim masses out of the motherland.
To ethnonationalists, their countrymen are not equal to all others, but superior in rights. Many
may nod at Thomas Jefferson's line that "All men are created equal," but they no more practice that
in their own nations than did Jefferson in his
... ... ...
European peoples and parties are today using democratic means to achieve "illiberal" ends. And
it is hard to see what halts the drift away from liberal democracy toward the restrictive right.
For in virtually every nation, there is a major party in opposition, or a party in power, that holds
deeply nationalist views.
European elites may denounce these new parties as "illiberal" or fascist, but it is becoming apparent
that it may be liberalism itself that belongs to yesterday. For more and more Europeans see the invasion
of the continent along the routes whence the invaders came centuries ago, not as a manageable problem
but an existential crisis.
To many Europeans, it portends an irreversible alteration in the character of the countries their
grandchildren will inherit, and possibly an end to their civilization. And they are not going to
be deterred from voting their fears by being called names that long ago lost their toxicity from
overuse.
And as Europeans decline to celebrate the racial, ethnic, creedal and cultural diversity extolled
by American elites, they also seem to reject the idea that foreigners should be treated equally in
nations created for their own kind.
Europeans seem to admire more, and model their nations more, along the lines of the less diverse
America of the Eisenhower era, than on the polyglot America of 2017.
And Europe seems to be moving toward immigration polices more like the McCarran-Walter Act of
1950 than the open borders bill that Sen. Edward Kennedy shepherded through the Senate in 1965.
Kennedy promised that the racial and ethnic composition of the America of the 1960s would not
be overturned, and he questioned the morality and motives of any who implied that it would.
Liberalism is the naivete of 18th century elites, no different than today. Modernity as you
know it is unsustainable, mostly because equality isn't real, identity has value for most humans,
pluralism is by definition fractious, and deep down most people wish to follow a wise strongman
leader who represents their interests first and not a vague set of universalist values.
Blind devotion to liberal democracy is another one of those times when white people take an
abstract concept to weird extremes. It is short-sighted and autistically narrow minded. Just because
you have an oppressive king doesn't mean everyone should be equals. Just because there was slavery/genocide
doesn't mean diversity is good.
The retreat of [neo]liberalism is very visible in Asia. All Southeast Asian states have turned their
backs on liberal democracy, especially Indonesia, the Philippines and Myanmar in the last decade.
This NYT article notes that liberalism has essentially died in Japan, and that all political contests
are now between what the west would consider conservatives:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/15/opinion/liberalism-japan-election.html
Good riddance. The idea that egalitarianism is more advanced than hierarchy has always been
false, and flies against the long arc of history. Time for nationalists around the world to smash
liberal democracy and build a new modernity based on actual humanism, with respect to hierarchies
and the primacy of majorities instead of guilt and pathological compassion dressed up as political
ideology.
"Liberalism" is not dying. "Liberalism" is dead, and has been since at least 1970.
What is today called "Liberalism" and "Conservatism" both are simply corrupted labels applied
to the same top-down corporate-fascistic elite rule that I think Mr. Buchanan once referred to
as "two wings of the same bird of prey."
Nobody at the top cares about 'diversity.' They care about the easy profits that come from
ever cheaper labor. 'Diversity' is not suicide but rather murder: instigated by a small number
of very powerful people who have decided that the long-term health of their nations and civilization
is less important than short-term profits and power.
Its been dead for nearly 20 years now. Liberalism has long been the Monty Python parrot nailed
to its perch. At this point, the term is mainly kept alive in right-wing attacks by people who
lack the imagination to change their habitual targets for so long.
To my eye, the last 'liberal' politician died in a susupicious plane crash in 2000 as the Bush
Republicans were taking the White House by their famous 5-4 vote/coup and also needed to claim
control of the Senate. So, the last authentic 'liberal' Senator, Paul Wellstone of MN was killed
in a suspicious plane crash that was never properly explained.
Hillary and Obama are to the right of the President that Buchanan served in his White House.
Richard Nixon was to the Left of both Hillary and Obama. I can't even imagine Hillary accepting
and signing into law a 'Clean Water Act' or enacting Price Controls to fight inflation. No way.
Heck would freeze over before Hillary would do something so against her Banker Backers.
And, at the root, that is the key. The 'Liberals' that the right now rails against are strongly
backed and supported by the Wall Street Banks and other corporate leaders. The 'Liberals' have
pushed for a government Of the Bankers, By the Bankers and For the Bankers. The 'Liberals' now
are in favor of Endless Unconstitutional War around the world.
Which can only mean that the term 'Liberal' has been so completely morphed away from its original
meanings to be completely worthless.
The last true Liberal in American politics was Paul Wellstone. And even by the time he died
for his sins, he was calling himself a "progressive" because after the Clintons and the Gores
had so distorted the term Liberal it was meaningless. Or it had come to mean a society ruled by
bankers, a society at constant war and throwing money constantly at a gigantic war machine, a
society of censorship where the government needed to control all music lyrics, the same corrupt
government where money could by anything from a night in the Lincoln Bedroom to a Presidential
Pardon or any other government favor.
Thus, 'Liberals' were a dead movement even by 2000, when the people who actually believed in
the American People over the profits of bankers were calling themselves Progressives in disgust
at the misuse of the term Liberal. And now, Obama and Hillary have trashed and distorted even
the term Progressive into bombing the world 365 days a year and still constantly throwing money
at the military machine and the problems it invents.
So, Liberalism is so long dead that if you exumed the grave you'd only find dust. And Pat must
be getting senile and just throwing back out the same lines he once wrote as a speechwriter for
the last Great Lefty President Richard Nixon.
Another question is whether this is wishful thinking from Pat or some kind of reality.
I think that he's right, that Liberalism is a dying faith, and it's interesting to check the
decline.
It's sure that financial (neo)liberalism was in a growth phase prior to year 2000 (under
Greenspan, the "Maestro") with a general belief that the economy could be "fine tuned" with risk
eliminated using sophisticated financial instruments, monetary policy etc.
If [neo] Liberalism is a package, then two heavy financial blows that shook the whole foundation
were the collapse of the dot.com bubble (2000) and the mortgage bubble (2008).
And, other (self-serving) neoliberal stories are now seen as false. For example, that the
US is an "advanced post-industrial service economy", that out-sourcing would "free up Americans
for higher skilled/higher wage employment" or that "the US would always gain from tariff free
trade".
In fact, the borderless global "world is flat" dogma is now seen as enabling a rootless hyper-rich
global elite to draw on a sea of globalized serf labour with little or no identity, while their
media and SWJ activists operate a scorched earth defense against any sign of opposition.
The basic divide is surely Nationalism (America First) vs. Globalism (Neo-Liberalism),
as shown by the last US Presidential election.
A useful analogy might be Viktor Orbán. He started out as a leader of a liberal party, Fidesz,
but then over time started moving to the right. It is often speculated that he started it for
cynical reasons, like seeing how the right was divided and that there was essentially a vacuum
there for a strong conservative party, but there's little doubt he totally internalized it. There's
also little doubt (and at the time he and a lot of his fellow party leaders talked about it a
lot) that as he (they) started a family and having children, they started to realize how conservatism
kinda made more sense than liberalism.
With Kurz, there's the possibility for this path. However, he'd need to start a family soon
for that to happen. At that age Orbán was already married with children
Neoliberalism, of which the Clintons are acolytes, supports Free Trade and Open Borders.
Although it claims to support World Government, in actual fact it supports corporatism. This is
explicit in the TPPA Trump vetoed. Under the corporate state, the state controls the corporations,
as Don Benito did in Italy. Under corporatism, the corporations tell the state what to do, as
has been the case in America since at least the Clinton Presidency.
Richard Nixon was a capitalist, not a corporatist. He was a supporter of proper competition
laws, unlike any President since Clinton. Socially, he was interventionist, though this may have
been to lessen criticism of his Vietnam policies. Anyway, his bussing and desegregation policies
were a long-term failure.
Price Control was quickly dropped, as it was in other Western countries. Long term Price Control,
as in present day Venezuela, is economically disastrous.
Let's hope liberalism is a dying faith and that is passes from the Western world. If not it will
destroy the West, so if it doesn't die a natural death then we must euthanize it. For the evidence
is in and it has begat feminism, anti-white racism, demographic winter, mass third world immigration
and everything else that ails the West and has made it the sick and dying man of the world.
But I recall that Pat B also said neoconservatism was on its way out a few years after
Iraq war II and yet it's stronger than ever and its adherents are firmly ensconced in the joint
chiefs of staff, the pentagon, Congress and the White House. It's also spawned a close cousin
in liberal interventionism.
What Pat refers to as "liberalism" is now left wing totalitarianism and anti-white hatred and
it's fanatically trying to remain relevant by lashing out and blacklisting, deplatforming, demonetizing,
and physically assaulting all of its enemies on the right who are gaining strength much to their
chagrin. They resort to these methods because they can't win an honest debate and in a true free
marketplace of ideas they lose.
Nationalism really represent a growing threat to neoliberalism. It is clear the the rise of
nationalism was caused by the triumph of neoliberalism all over the globe. As neoliberal
ideology collapsed in 2008, thing became really interesting now. Looks like
1920th-1940th will be replayed on a new level with the USA neoliberal empire under stress from
new challengers instead of British empire.
Rumor about the death of neoliberalism are slightly exaggerated ;-). This social system still
has a lot of staying power. you need some external shock like the need of cheap oil (defined as
sustainable price of oil over $100 per barrel) to shake it again. Of some financial crisis similar
to the crisis of 2008. Currently there is still
no alternative social order that can replace it. Collapse of the USSR discredited both socialism even
of different flavors then was practiced in the USSR. National socialism would be a step back from
neoliberalism.
Notable quotes:
"... The retreat of [neo]liberalism is very visible in Asia. All Southeast Asian states have turned their backs on liberal democracy, especially Indonesia, the Philippines and Myanmar in the last decade. This NYT article notes that liberalism has essentially died in Japan, and that all political contests are now between what the west would consider conservatives: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/15/opinion/liberalism-japan-election.html ..."
"... What is today called "Liberalism" and "Conservatism" both are simply corrupted labels applied to the same top-down corporate-fascistic elite rule that I think Mr. Buchanan once referred to as "two wings of the same bird of prey." ..."
"... Nobody at the top cares about 'diversity.' They care about the easy profits that come from ever cheaper labor. 'Diversity' is not suicide but rather murder: instigated by a small number of very powerful people who have decided that the long-term health of their nations and civilization is less important than short-term profits and power. ..."
"... Hillary and Obama are to the right of the President that Buchanan served in his White House. Richard Nixon was to the Left of both Hillary and Obama. I can't even imagine Hillary accepting and signing into law a 'Clean Water Act' or enacting Price Controls to fight inflation. No way. Heck would freeze over before Hillary would do something so against her Banker Backers. ..."
"... It's sure that financial (neo)liberalism was in a growth phase prior to year 2000 (under Greenspan, the "Maestro") with a general belief that the economy could be "fine tuned" with risk eliminated using sophisticated financial instruments, monetary policy etc. ..."
"... If [neo] Liberalism is a package, then two heavy financial blows that shook the whole foundation were the collapse of the dot.com bubble (2000) and the mortgage bubble (2008). ..."
"... And, other (self-serving) neoliberal stories are now seen as false. For example, that the US is an "advanced post-industrial service economy", that out-sourcing would "free up Americans for higher skilled/higher wage employment" or that "the US would always gain from tariff free trade". ..."
"... The basic divide is surely Nationalism (America First) vs. Globalism (Neo-Liberalism), as shown by the last US Presidential election. ..."
"... Neoliberalism, of which the Clintons are acolytes, supports Free Trade and Open Borders. Although it claims to support World Government, in actual fact it supports corporatism. This is explicit in the TPPA Trump vetoed. Under the corporate state, the state controls the corporations, as Don Benito did in Italy. Under corporatism, the corporations tell the state what to do, as has been the case in America since at least the Clinton Presidency. ..."
"... But I recall that Pat B also said neoconservatism was on its way out a few years after Iraq war II and yet it's stronger than ever and its adherents are firmly ensconced in the joint chiefs of staff, the pentagon, Congress and the White House. It's also spawned a close cousin in liberal interventionism. ..."
Asked to name the defining attributes of the America we wish to become, many liberals would answer
that we must realize our manifest destiny since 1776, by becoming more equal, more diverse and more
democratic -- and the model for mankind's future.
Equality, diversity, democracy -- this is the holy trinity of the post-Christian secular state
at whose altars Liberal Man worships.
But the congregation worshiping these gods is shrinking. And even Europe seems to be rejecting
what America has on offer.
In a retreat from diversity, Catalonia just voted to separate from Spain. The Basque and Galician
peoples of Spain are following the Catalan secession crisis with great interest.
The right-wing People's Party and far-right Freedom Party just swept 60 percent of Austria's vote,
delivering the nation to 31-year-old Sebastian Kurz, whose anti-immigrant platform was plagiarized
from the Freedom Party. Summarized it is: Austria for the Austrians!
Lombardy, whose capital is Milan, and Veneto will vote Sunday for greater autonomy from Rome.
South Tyrol (Alto Adige), severed from Austria and ceded to Italy at Versailles, written off by
Hitler to appease Mussolini after his Anschluss, is astir anew with secessionism. Even the Sicilians
are talking of separation.
By Sunday, the Czech Republic may have a new leader, billionaire Andrej Babis. Writes The Washington
Post, Babis "makes a sport of attacking the European Union and says NATO's mission is outdated."
Platform Promise: Keep the Muslim masses out of the motherland.
To ethnonationalists, their countrymen are not equal to all others, but superior in rights. Many
may nod at Thomas Jefferson's line that "All men are created equal," but they no more practice that
in their own nations than did Jefferson in his
... ... ...
European peoples and parties are today using democratic means to achieve "illiberal" ends. And
it is hard to see what halts the drift away from liberal democracy toward the restrictive right.
For in virtually every nation, there is a major party in opposition, or a party in power, that holds
deeply nationalist views.
European elites may denounce these new parties as "illiberal" or fascist, but it is becoming apparent
that it may be liberalism itself that belongs to yesterday. For more and more Europeans see the invasion
of the continent along the routes whence the invaders came centuries ago, not as a manageable problem
but an existential crisis.
To many Europeans, it portends an irreversible alteration in the character of the countries their
grandchildren will inherit, and possibly an end to their civilization. And they are not going to
be deterred from voting their fears by being called names that long ago lost their toxicity from
overuse.
And as Europeans decline to celebrate the racial, ethnic, creedal and cultural diversity extolled
by American elites, they also seem to reject the idea that foreigners should be treated equally in
nations created for their own kind.
Europeans seem to admire more, and model their nations more, along the lines of the less diverse
America of the Eisenhower era, than on the polyglot America of 2017.
And Europe seems to be moving toward immigration polices more like the McCarran-Walter Act of
1950 than the open borders bill that Sen. Edward Kennedy shepherded through the Senate in 1965.
Kennedy promised that the racial and ethnic composition of the America of the 1960s would not
be overturned, and he questioned the morality and motives of any who implied that it would.
Liberalism is the naivete of 18th century elites, no different than today. Modernity as you
know it is unsustainable, mostly because equality isn't real, identity has value for most humans,
pluralism is by definition fractious, and deep down most people wish to follow a wise strongman
leader who represents their interests first and not a vague set of universalist values.
Blind devotion to liberal democracy is another one of those times when white people take an
abstract concept to weird extremes. It is short-sighted and autistically narrow minded. Just because
you have an oppressive king doesn't mean everyone should be equals. Just because there was slavery/genocide
doesn't mean diversity is good.
The retreat of [neo]liberalism is very visible in Asia. All Southeast Asian states have turned their
backs on liberal democracy, especially Indonesia, the Philippines and Myanmar in the last decade.
This NYT article notes that liberalism has essentially died in Japan, and that all political contests
are now between what the west would consider conservatives:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/15/opinion/liberalism-japan-election.html
Good riddance. The idea that egalitarianism is more advanced than hierarchy has always been
false, and flies against the long arc of history. Time for nationalists around the world to smash
liberal democracy and build a new modernity based on actual humanism, with respect to hierarchies
and the primacy of majorities instead of guilt and pathological compassion dressed up as political
ideology.
"Liberalism" is not dying. "Liberalism" is dead, and has been since at least 1970.
What is today called "Liberalism" and "Conservatism" both are simply corrupted labels applied
to the same top-down corporate-fascistic elite rule that I think Mr. Buchanan once referred to
as "two wings of the same bird of prey."
Nobody at the top cares about 'diversity.' They care about the easy profits that come from
ever cheaper labor. 'Diversity' is not suicide but rather murder: instigated by a small number
of very powerful people who have decided that the long-term health of their nations and civilization
is less important than short-term profits and power.
Its been dead for nearly 20 years now. Liberalism has long been the Monty Python parrot nailed
to its perch. At this point, the term is mainly kept alive in right-wing attacks by people who
lack the imagination to change their habitual targets for so long.
To my eye, the last 'liberal' politician died in a susupicious plane crash in 2000 as the Bush
Republicans were taking the White House by their famous 5-4 vote/coup and also needed to claim
control of the Senate. So, the last authentic 'liberal' Senator, Paul Wellstone of MN was killed
in a suspicious plane crash that was never properly explained.
Hillary and Obama are to the right of the President that Buchanan served in his White House.
Richard Nixon was to the Left of both Hillary and Obama. I can't even imagine Hillary accepting
and signing into law a 'Clean Water Act' or enacting Price Controls to fight inflation. No way.
Heck would freeze over before Hillary would do something so against her Banker Backers.
And, at the root, that is the key. The 'Liberals' that the right now rails against are strongly
backed and supported by the Wall Street Banks and other corporate leaders. The 'Liberals' have
pushed for a government Of the Bankers, By the Bankers and For the Bankers. The 'Liberals' now
are in favor of Endless Unconstitutional War around the world.
Which can only mean that the term 'Liberal' has been so completely morphed away from its original
meanings to be completely worthless.
The last true Liberal in American politics was Paul Wellstone. And even by the time he died
for his sins, he was calling himself a "progressive" because after the Clintons and the Gores
had so distorted the term Liberal it was meaningless. Or it had come to mean a society ruled by
bankers, a society at constant war and throwing money constantly at a gigantic war machine, a
society of censorship where the government needed to control all music lyrics, the same corrupt
government where money could by anything from a night in the Lincoln Bedroom to a Presidential
Pardon or any other government favor.
Thus, 'Liberals' were a dead movement even by 2000, when the people who actually believed in
the American People over the profits of bankers were calling themselves Progressives in disgust
at the misuse of the term Liberal. And now, Obama and Hillary have trashed and distorted even
the term Progressive into bombing the world 365 days a year and still constantly throwing money
at the military machine and the problems it invents.
So, Liberalism is so long dead that if you exumed the grave you'd only find dust. And Pat must
be getting senile and just throwing back out the same lines he once wrote as a speechwriter for
the last Great Lefty President Richard Nixon.
Another question is whether this is wishful thinking from Pat or some kind of reality.
I think that he's right, that Liberalism is a dying faith, and it's interesting to check the
decline.
It's sure that financial (neo)liberalism was in a growth phase prior to year 2000 (under
Greenspan, the "Maestro") with a general belief that the economy could be "fine tuned" with risk
eliminated using sophisticated financial instruments, monetary policy etc.
If [neo] Liberalism is a package, then two heavy financial blows that shook the whole foundation
were the collapse of the dot.com bubble (2000) and the mortgage bubble (2008).
And, other (self-serving) neoliberal stories are now seen as false. For example, that the
US is an "advanced post-industrial service economy", that out-sourcing would "free up Americans
for higher skilled/higher wage employment" or that "the US would always gain from tariff free
trade".
In fact, the borderless global "world is flat" dogma is now seen as enabling a rootless hyper-rich
global elite to draw on a sea of globalized serf labour with little or no identity, while their
media and SWJ activists operate a scorched earth defense against any sign of opposition.
The basic divide is surely Nationalism (America First) vs. Globalism (Neo-Liberalism),
as shown by the last US Presidential election.
A useful analogy might be Viktor Orbán. He started out as a leader of a liberal party, Fidesz,
but then over time started moving to the right. It is often speculated that he started it for
cynical reasons, like seeing how the right was divided and that there was essentially a vacuum
there for a strong conservative party, but there's little doubt he totally internalized it. There's
also little doubt (and at the time he and a lot of his fellow party leaders talked about it a
lot) that as he (they) started a family and having children, they started to realize how conservatism
kinda made more sense than liberalism.
With Kurz, there's the possibility for this path. However, he'd need to start a family soon
for that to happen. At that age Orbán was already married with children
Neoliberalism, of which the Clintons are acolytes, supports Free Trade and Open Borders.
Although it claims to support World Government, in actual fact it supports corporatism. This is
explicit in the TPPA Trump vetoed. Under the corporate state, the state controls the corporations,
as Don Benito did in Italy. Under corporatism, the corporations tell the state what to do, as
has been the case in America since at least the Clinton Presidency.
Richard Nixon was a capitalist, not a corporatist. He was a supporter of proper competition
laws, unlike any President since Clinton. Socially, he was interventionist, though this may have
been to lessen criticism of his Vietnam policies. Anyway, his bussing and desegregation policies
were a long-term failure.
Price Control was quickly dropped, as it was in other Western countries. Long term Price Control,
as in present day Venezuela, is economically disastrous.
Let's hope liberalism is a dying faith and that is passes from the Western world. If not it will
destroy the West, so if it doesn't die a natural death then we must euthanize it. For the evidence
is in and it has begat feminism, anti-white racism, demographic winter, mass third world immigration
and everything else that ails the West and has made it the sick and dying man of the world.
But I recall that Pat B also said neoconservatism was on its way out a few years after
Iraq war II and yet it's stronger than ever and its adherents are firmly ensconced in the joint
chiefs of staff, the pentagon, Congress and the White House. It's also spawned a close cousin
in liberal interventionism.
What Pat refers to as "liberalism" is now left wing totalitarianism and anti-white hatred and
it's fanatically trying to remain relevant by lashing out and blacklisting, deplatforming, demonetizing,
and physically assaulting all of its enemies on the right who are gaining strength much to their
chagrin. They resort to these methods because they can't win an honest debate and in a true free
marketplace of ideas they lose.
Also the concept of "Neoliberal jihad is valid, but it is better to call it Neoliberal World revolution as it was borrowed
from Trotskyism
Notable quotes:
"... Jihad vs. McWorld ..."
"... In the two decades since Barber's book, this conflict has seemed to play out along overtly cultural lines: with Islamic extremism representing jihad, in opposition to Western neoliberalism representing McWorld. ..."
"... Linking Brexit and Trump to global right-wing tribal nationalisms doesn't mean conflating them all, of course. ..."
"... Yet at the same time, we can't understand our 21st century world without a recognition of this widespread phenomenon of global, tribal nationalism. ..."
In his ground-breaking
1995 book Jihad vs. McWorld , political scientist Benjamin Barber posits that the
global conflicts of the early 21st century would be driven by two opposing but equally
undemocratic forces: neoliberal corporate globalization (which he dubbed "McWorld") and
reactionary tribal nationalisms (which he dubbed "Jihad"). Although distinct in many ways, both
of these forces, Barber persuasively argues, succeed by denying the possibilities for
democratic consensus and action, and so both must be opposed by civic engagement and activism
on a broad scale.
In the two decades since Barber's book, this conflict has seemed to play out along overtly
cultural lines: with Islamic extremism representing jihad, in opposition to Western
neoliberalism representing McWorld. Case in pitch-perfect point: the Al Qaeda terrorist attacks
on the World Trade Center. Yet despite his use of the Arabic word Jihad, Barber is clear that
reactionary tribalism is a worldwide phenomenon -- and in 2016 we're seeing particularly
striking examples of that tribalism in Western nations such as Great Britain and the United
States.
Britain's vote this week in favor of leaving the European Union was driven entirely by such
reactionary tribal nationalism. The far-right United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) and its
leader Nigel Farage
led the charge in favor of Leave , as exemplified by a recent UKIP poster featuring a photo
of Syrian refugees with the caption " Breaking point: the EU has failed
us ." Farage and his allies like to point to demographic statistics about how much the UK
has changed in the last few decades , and more
exactly how the nation's white majority has been somewhat shifted over that time by the
arrival
of sizeable African and Asian immigrant communities.
It's impossible not to link the UKIP's emphases on such issues of immigration and demography
to the presidential campaign of the one prominent U.S. politician who is
cheering for the Brexit vote : presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump. From his
campaign-launching speech about Mexican immigrant "criminals and rapists" to his proposal to
ban Muslim immigration and his "Make American Great Again" slogan, Trump has relied on
reactionary tribal nationalism at every stage of his campaign, and has received the
enthusiastic endorsement
of white supremacist and far-right organizations as a result. For such American tribal
nationalists, the 1965 Immigration Act is the chief bogeyman, the origin point of continuing
demographic shifts that have placed white America in a precarious position.
The only problem with that narrative is that it's entirely inaccurate. What the 1965 Act did
was reverse a
recent, exclusionary trend in American immigration law and policy, returning the nation to
the more inclusive and welcoming stance it had taken throughout the rest of its history.
Moreover, while the numbers of Americans from Latin American, Asian, and Muslim cultures have
increased in recent decades, all of those
communities have been part of o
ur national community from its origin points . Which is to say, this right-wing tribal
nationalism isn't just opposed to fundamental realities of 21st century American identity -- it
also depends on historical and national narratives that are as mythic as they are
exclusionary.
Linking Brexit and Trump to global right-wing tribal nationalisms doesn't mean conflating
them all, of course. Although Trump rallies have featured troubling instances of violence, and
although the
murderer of British politican Jo Cox was an avowed white supremacist and Leave supporter,
the right-wing Islamic extremism of groups such as Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Boko Haram rely far more
consistently and centrally on violence and terrorism in support of their worldview and goals.
Such specific contexts and nuances are important and shouldn't be elided.
Yet at the same time, we can't understand our 21st century world without a recognition of
this widespread phenomenon of global, tribal nationalism. From ISIS to UKIP, Trump to France's
Jean-Marie Le Pen, such reactionary forces have become and remain dominant players across the
world, influencing local and international politics, economics, and culture. Benjamin Barber
called this trend two decades ago, and we would do well to read and remember his analyses -- as
well as his call for civic engagement and activism to resist these forces and fight for
democracy.
Weak article but some valuable observations: "Since these [neoliberal] figures and
institutions delivered an economics of inequality and a foreign policy of war over the last three
decades, the flight from the center is certainly understandable." ... "Secessionist movements are
gaining momentum" ... "Those who might enjoy an EU-style frisson of
schadenfreude look at Europe's ills as a case of the chickens coming home to roost. Many
European governments supported the American-led conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria
that have shattered the Greater Middle "
He does not understand that neoliberalism, and , especially, neoliberal globalization,
generates powerful splash of nationalism. So in Europe 2020th might be a repeat 1920th on a new
level. As colonialism under neoliberalism was replaced by neo-colonialism in a form of debt
slavery and enforcement of Washington consensus, what we observe is the start of blowback.
In a way nationalism remain the only viable option ion the fight against neoliberalism.
Sure, most Americans don't yet fall into irreconcilable
factions . But if you consider the transformation of Yugoslavia from vacation spot to
killing field in two short years after 1989, it's easier to imagine how a few demagogues, with
their militant supporters, could use minority passions in this country to neutralize majority
sentiments. All of which suggests why the "American carnage" that Trump invoked in his
inaugural address could turn out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Of course, it's not just Donald Trump. Globally speaking, the fledgling American president
is more symptom than cause. The United States is just now catching up to much of the rest of
the world as President Trump, from his bullying pulpit, does whatever he can to make America
first in fractiousness.
When it comes to demagogues and divisiveness, however, he has plenty of competition -- in
Europe, the Middle East, indeed all over our splintering planet.
The Multiplication of Division
The recent referendum on independence in Catalonia is a reminder that a single well-timed
blow can break apart the unitary states of Europe as if they were nothing but poorly made
piñatas. True, it's not clear how many Catalans genuinely want independence from Spain.
Those who participated in the referendum there opted overwhelmingly in favor of secession, but
only 42 percent of voters even bothered to register their preference. In addition, the
announced relocation of
531 companies to other parts of the country is a sobering reminder of the potential
economic consequences of secession. However the standoff may be resolved, though, separatist
sentiments are not about to vanish in Catalonia, particularly given the Spanish government's
heavy-handed attempts to
stop the vote.
Such splittism is potentially contagious. After Britons narrowly supported Brexiting the
European Union (EU) in a referendum in 2016, the Scots again began talking about independence
-- about, that is, separating from their southern cousins while remaining within the EU.
Catalans have a different dilemma. A declaration of independence would promptly sever the new
country from the European Union, even as the move might spread independence fever to other
groups in Spain, particularly the
Basques .
The British and the Catalans have delivered something like a prolonged one-two punch to the
EU, which until recently had been in continuous expansion: from six member states in 1957 to 28
today. Losing both Great Britain and Catalonia would mean kissing goodbye to more than
one-fifth of that organization's economic output. (According to
2016 numbers , the United Kingdom contributes 2.7 trillion euros and Catalonia 223
billion euros to the EU's 14.8 trillion euro gross domestic product.) That's the economic
equivalent of California and Florida peeling
off from the United States.
The question is whether the British and Catalan votes are the culmination of a mini-trend or
the beginning of the end. Although Brexit actually
gave a boost to the EU's popularity across its member states (including England), Brussels
continues to experience pushback from those states on immigration, financial bailouts, and the
process of decision-making.
Euroskeptic movements like the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany and the Freedom
Party in Austria have met with growing success and rising voter support, even in Euro-friendly
countries. In that continent's future lie: a possible
Czexit as a right-wing billionaire takes over as prime minister of the Czech Republic and
looks to create a governing coalition with a vehemently anti-immigrant and anti-EU partner; a
Nexit if Euroskeptic Geert Wilders succeeds in expanding his political base further in the
Netherlands; and even an Italexit as
voters there have bucked the "Brexit effect," with 57 percent now favoring a referendum on
membership.
... ... ...
Nationalism is a relatively recent phenomenon. Prior to the consolidation of
the French nation in the nineteenth century, for instance, the inhabitants of the country
thought of themselves as Bretons, Provençals, Parisians, and the like. Contrary to
various founding myths, the nation didn't exist from time immemorial. It had to be conjured
into existence -- and for a reason.
The nineteenth century witnessed the first great modern shattering as people weaponized the
new concept of "nation" and companion notions of ethnic solidarity and popular sovereignty in
their struggles against empires. The revolutions of 1825 in Greece and Russia, the 1848 "spring
of nations" throughout Europe, the subsequent unification of Germany and Italy -- all were
blows against the empires presided over by the Habsburgs, the Romanovs, and the Ottoman
sultans.
World War I then dispatched those weakened empires to their graves in one huge
conflagration. After the war ended, a Middle East of heterogeneous nation-states and a new
group of independent Balkan countries emerged from the defunct Ottoman Empire. Imperial Russia
briefly fragmented into dozens of smaller states until the Soviet Union glued them back
together by force. The house of the Habsburgs fell and the Central European countries of
Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary crawled out from under the wreckage.
The second great shattering, which stretched across the middle span of the twentieth
century, accompanied the collapse of the colonial empires. The British, French, Dutch, Italian,
Portuguese, and German overseas colonies all achieved independence, and a new global map of
nation-states emerged in Africa, Asia, and to a lesser extent Latin America where
decolonization had largely occurred a century earlier.
... ... ...
Consider, for instance, the impact of economic globalization. The expansion
of trade, investment, and corporate activity has long had the effect of drawing nations
together -- into cartels like OPEC, trade communities like the European Union, and
international institutions like the International Monetary Fund. By the 1970s, however,
economic globalization was eating away at the exclusive prerogative of the nation-state to
control trade or national currencies or implement policies regulating the environment, health
and safety, and labor.
At the same time, particularly in industrialized countries like the United Kingdom and the United States ,
income inequality increased dramatically. The wealth gap is now worse
in the United States than in Iran or the Philippines. Among the top industrialized countries,
according to the
Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, the gap between the richest 10 percent of
the population and the poorest 10 percent has grown appreciably larger.
Even among countries where inequality has dropped because of government efforts to
redistribute income, the perception has grown that globalization favors the rich, not the poor.
Fewer than half of French respondents to a 2016 YouGov poll
believed that globalization was a force for good -- even though income inequality has fallen in that country
since the 1970s. Having once reduced tensions among countries and strengthened the
nation-state, economic globalization increasingly pits peoples against one another within
countries and among countries.
Other forms of globalization have had a similar effect. Facebook and Twitter, for instance,
have connected people in unprecedented ways and provided a mechanism to mobilize against a
variety of societal ills, including dictators, trigger-happy police, and sexual harassers. But
the other side of the ability to focus organizing efforts within digital affinity groups is the
way such platforms Balkanize their users, not by ethnicity as much as by political perspective.
Information or opinions challenging one's worldview that once appeared in the newspaper or
occasionally on the evening news get weeded out in the Facebook newsfeed or the Twitter stream
of one's favorite amplifiers.
Ethnic cleansing by decree has been largely overtaken by ideological cleansing by consent.
What's the point of making the necessary compromises to function in a diverse nation-state when
you can effectively secede from society and hang with your homies in a virtual community?
Given the polarizing impact of economic and technological globalization, it's no surprise
that the politics of the middle has either disappeared or, because of a weak left, drifted
further to the right. Donald Trump is the supreme expression of this stunning loss of faith in
centrist politicians as well as such pillars of the institutional center as the mainstream
media.
Since these figures and institutions delivered an economics of inequality and a foreign
policy of war over the last three decades, the flight from the center is certainly
understandable. What's new, however, is the way Trump and other right-wing populists have
stretched this disaffection, which might ordinarily have powered a new left, to encompass what
might be called the three angers over: immigration, the expansion of civil rights, and
middle-class entitlement programs. Fueled by a revulsion for the center, Trump is not simply
interested in undermining his political opponents and America's adversaries. He has a twin
project, promoted for decades by the extreme right, of destroying the federal government and
the international community.
That's why the fourth great shattering is different. In the past, people opposed empires,
colonial powers, and the ideological requirements of the Cold War by banding together in more
compact nation-states. They were still willing to sacrifice on behalf of their unknown
compatriots -- to redistribute tax revenues or follow rules and regulations -- just on a
smaller scale.
Nationalism hasn't gone away. Those who want to preserve a unitary state (Spain) as well as
those who want out of the same state (Catalonia) appeal to similarly nationalist sentiments.
But today, the very notion of acting in solidarity with people in a territorial unit presided
over by a state is fast becoming passé. Citizens are in flight from taxes,
multiculturalism, public education, and even the guarantee of basic human rights for all. The
fourth great shattering seems to be affecting the very bonds that constitute the nation-state,
any nation-state, no matter how big or small.
Nationalism was used and will be used by Western powers to weaken opponents as "enhanced" divide
and conquer strategy. That's given. an interesting nuance is that several nationalist
movement (for example in Ukraine and Baltic countries) de-facto promote enlargement of
neoliberal empire led by the USA, which, in reality is the bitter enemy of any national
self-determination and will support them only until such support weakened their geopolitical
adversaries. The key political players in this empire are not nations but transnational
corporations. Such a paradox, that several nationalist movement fail to understand.
An interesting nuance with Crimea and Ukraine was that at the moment of Crimea referendum for
independence, Provisional government of Yatsenyuk-Turchinov in Kiev was form international legal
norms standpoint an illegitimate junta, as Yanukovich was still alive (despite attempts to kill him)
and did not pass the presidential power to Provisional government. The only claim to
legitimacy of Provisional government was the fact that it was supported by the USA and EU.
Putin refused to play this card, but in general he could announce Ukrainian government in
exile and occupy all Eastern and Southern Ukraine under the pretext of restoring legitimate.
there were two problems with this solution: Yanukovich was probably hated by most population for
corruption (which actually did not exceed the levels achieved under Poroshenko; so it is unclear
what Ukraine people gained here) and that might create problems with a few cities
with some sizable "nationalists" population (Dnepropetrovsk is one), but that's about it. In such
situation Western Ukraine and announce that it is legitimate Ukraine, with Western Ukraine simply
cut from the rest.
As new regime now dropped the standard of living of population to African level of
poverty, and population started to reject Western Ukrainian nationalism as a path to nowhere,
this scenario might still possible in case some major crisis in Kiev. The key issue here is
that new separate republic should be independent from both Russia and Western Ukraine. Of
couse the USA will try their best to block this scenario.
Notable quotes:
"... 'self-determination' ..."
"... Many of the prime movers of empire-building adopted the tactics of dividing and conquering adversaries – under the liberal pretext of promoting 'self-determination', ..."
"... 'central' ..."
"... 'national unity' ..."
"... 'self-determination' ..."
"... 'uneven and combined development' ..."
"... 'Nationalism', ..."
"... 'nationalism' ..."
"... 'nationalist' ..."
"... 'divide and conquer', ..."
"... 'regime change' ..."
"... In the case of Iraq in the 1990's, Kurds were sponsored, armed, funded and defended by the US and Israel in order to weaken and divide the secular-nationalist Iraqi republic. Kurds, again with US support, have organized regional conflicts in Turkey and more recently in Syria, in order to defeat the independent government of Bashar Assad. Leftist Kurds cynically describe their imperial allies, including the Israelis, as 'progressive colonialists'. ..."
"... In brief, the Kurds act as surrogates for the US and Israel: They provide mercenaries, access to military bases, listening and spy posts and resources in their newly ' liberated ..."
"... In the Ukraine, the US hailed the cause of self-determination when it engineered a violent coup to oust an elected regime, whose crime was its commitment to independence from NATO. The coup was openly funded by the US, which financed and trained fascist thugs committed to the expulsion or repression of ethnic Russian speakers, especially in the eastern Donbas region and Crimea with the aim of placing NATO bases on Russia's border. ..."
"... 'self-determination'. ..."
"... 'self-determination' ..."
"... 'We bombed the wrong side'. ..."
"... The US imperialist state, like all aspiring empire-builders, represses or supports movements for self-determination according to their class and imperial interests. To be clear: Self-determination is a class-defined issue; it is not a general moral-legal principle. ..."
"... Imperialism's selective use and abuse of self-determination is not a case of 'hypocrisy' or 'double standards', as their left-liberal supporters complain. Washington applies a single standard: Does this movement advance Empire by securing and buttressing vassal regimes and their supporters? The language of 'liberation' ..."
"... For decades, Eastern European, Balkan and Baltic countries were encouraged to struggle for 'self-determination' against the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact, only to later embrace the yoke of vassalage under the command of NATO, the EU and Washington. In many cases their sovereignty and standard of living collapsed followed by ethnic cleansing, including the mass expulsion of Serbs from Croatia and Kosovo and the cultural-linguistic repression of ethnic Russians in Latvia and Ukraine. ..."
"... Beyond the immediate conflicts, many independent regimes, in turn, become oppressive rulers of their own minorities and native critics. 'Self-determination' ad infinitum can ultimately lead to schizoid individuals – extolling their mythical people while oppressing others. Today, Zionism is the ultimate parody of 'self-determination'. Newly independent countries and rulers frequently deny minorities of their own right to self-determination – especially those who sided with the previous power. ..."
"... As for "kleptocracy", that term would seem to describe both the Russian government and the US government, and its vast wasteful & crooked complex of "connected" military contractors, medical-insurance and pharma corporations, big union leadership, and the revolving door of think tanks and "media" outlets. ..."
Since World War II most of the world's conflicts have revolved around struggles for independence
against Western and Japanese colonial/imperial regimes
Following formal independence, a new type of imperial domination was imposed – neo-colonial regimes,
in which the US and its European allies imposed vassal rulers acting as proxies for economic exploitation.
With the rise of US unipolar global domination, following the demise of the USSR (1990), the West
established hegemony over the East European states. Some were subject to fragmentation and sub-divided
into new NATO dominated statelets.
The quest for a unipolar empire set in motion a series of wars and ethnic conflicts in the Middle
East, Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Baltic States, North Africa, Asia and Western Europe – leading
to ethnic cleansing and the global mass refugee crises.
The break-up of nation states spread across the globe as the rhetoric and politics of 'self-determination'
replaced the class struggle as the flagship for social justice and political freedom.
Many of the prime movers of empire-building adopted the tactics of dividing and conquering adversaries
– under the liberal pretext of promoting 'self-determination', without clarifying who and
what the 'self' represented and who really benefited
Sectional, regional, cultural and ethnic identities served to polarize struggles. In contrast
'central' regimes fought to retain 'national unity' in order to repress regional
revolts.
The purpose of this paper is to analyze and discuss the national and international forces behind
the slogans of 'self-determination' and the larger international and regional consequences.
Basic Concepts: Ambiguities and Clarification
One of the striking aspects of the process of globalization and national development is 'uneven
and combined development' (ICD). This takes several forms – uneven development between regions,
within and between countries, and usually both.
Imperial countries concentrate industries, commerce and banking while colonized/neo-colonized
countries are left with export-linked, resource-based enclaves and low-wage assembly plants. Frequently,
the capital cities of colonized and de-colonized countries concentrate and centralize political power,
wealth, infrastructure, transport and finance while their provinces are reduced to providing raw
material and cheap labor by subject people. Infrequently political power and administration – including
the military, police and tax collection agencies – are concentrated in economically un-productive
central cities, while the wealth-producing, but politically weaker regions, are economically exploited,
marginalized and depleted.
Combined and uneven development on international and national levels has led to class, anti-imperialist
and regional struggles. Where class -based struggles have been weakened, nationalist and ethnic leaders
and movements assume political leadership.
'Nationalism', however, has two diametrically opposing faces: In one version Western
backed regional movements work to degrade anti-imperialist regimes in order to subordinate the entire
nation to the dictates of an imperial power. In a different context, broad-based secular nationalists
struggle to gain political independence by defeating imperial forces and their local surrogates,
who are often ethnic or religious minority rent-collecting overlords.
Imperial states have always had a clear understanding of the nature of the different kinds of
'nationalism' and which serve their interests. Imperial states support regional and/or
'nationalist' regimes and movements that will undermine anti-imperial movements, regimes
and regions. They always oppose 'nationalist' movements with strong working class leadership.
Historical Experience
Imperial Perfidious Albion, the United Kingdom, slaughtered and starved millions of people who
resisted its rule in Asia (India, Burma, Malaya and China), Africa (South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria,
etc.) and Europe (Ireland).
At the same time, British imperialists promoted regional conflicts arming Muslims to fight Hindus,
Sikhs to fight Muslims, Gurkas to oppress Malays and create various warring religious, ethnic and
linguistic groups throughout the Indian subcontinent, Burma and Malaya. Likewise the UK promoted
conflicts among religious, secular nationalist and conservative groups throughout the Middle East.
The imperial powers naturally operate through the strategy of 'divide and conquer', labeling
their adversaries as 'backward' and 'authoritarian' while praising their surrogates as 'freedom fighters'
which they claim are 'in transition to Western democratic values'.
However, the strategic issue is how imperial states define the kind of self-determination to support
or repress and when to change their policies: Today's allies are dubbed 'democrats' in the Western
press and tomorrow they can be re-assigned the role of 'freedom's enemies' and 'authoritarian', if
they act against imperial interests.
The Two Faces of Self-Determination
In contrast to the imperial practice of shifting policies toward dominant regimes and separatist
movements, most of the 'left' broadly support all movements for self-determination and label all
opponents as 'oppressors'.
As a result the left and the imperialist regimes may end up on the same side in a massive
'regime change' campaign!
The libertarian left cover-up their own fake 'idealism' by labeling the imperial powers as 'hypocrites'
and using a 'double-standard'. This is a laughable accusation, since the guiding principle behind
an imperial decision to support or reject 'self-determination' is based on class and imperial interests.
In other words, when 'self-determination' benefits the empire, it receives full support. There are
no abstract historical, moral precepts, devoid of class and imperial content determining policy.
Case Studies: The Myths of the "Stateless Kurds" and "Ukraine's Liberation"
In the Twentieth Century, the Kurdish citizens of Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Iran have made claims
of 'self-determination' and fought against established nation-states in the name of 'ethnic liberation'.
But who defines the real 'self' to be liberated?
In the case of Iraq in the 1990's, Kurds were sponsored, armed, funded and defended by the
US and Israel in order to weaken and divide the secular-nationalist Iraqi republic. Kurds, again
with US support, have organized regional conflicts in Turkey and more recently in Syria, in order
to defeat the independent government of Bashar Assad. Leftist Kurds cynically describe their imperial
allies, including the Israelis, as 'progressive colonialists'.
In brief, the Kurds act as surrogates for the US and Israel: They provide mercenaries, access
to military bases, listening and spy posts and resources in their newly ' liberated (and
ethnically cleansed) country ', to bolster US imperialism, which 'their warlord leaders'
have chosen as the dominant 'partner'. Is their struggle one of national liberation or mercenary
puppetry in the service of empire against sovereign nations resisting imperial and Zionist control?
In the Ukraine, the US hailed the cause of self-determination when it engineered a violent
coup to oust an elected regime, whose crime was its commitment to independence from NATO. The coup
was openly funded by the US, which financed and trained fascist thugs committed to the expulsion
or repression of ethnic Russian speakers, especially in the eastern Donbas region and Crimea with
the aim of placing NATO bases on Russia's border.
The overwhelmingly Russian-speaking people of Crimea opposed the coup and exercised their right
to self-determination by voting to rejoin Russia. Likewise the industrialized Donbas region of eastern
Ukraine declared its autonomy, opposing the oppressive and grossly corrupt US installed regime in
Kiev.
The violent US-EU sponsored coup in Kiev was a blatant form of imperial annexation, while the
peaceful vote in Crimea and the militant Eastern Ukraine (Donbas) exercise of self-determination
presented a progressive response by anti-imperialist forces. Thwarted in its project to turn Eastern
Ukraine and Crimea into NATO launching pads for aggression against Moscow, US/EU condemned this response
as 'Russian colonization'.
Tibet and the Uighurs in China's Xinjiang Province
Separatist groups have been actively engaged in armed uprisings for many decades in Tibet and
Xinjiang, Western China. While they claimed to be 'independent', their feudal warlords have long
been hostile to the positive advances of the Chinese revolution (including the abolition of slavery
in Tibet, as well as opium trade and bride price and the extension of universal education in feudal
Moslem regions). They collaborated with the US and expansionist India (where the Dalai Lama established
his palace and camps of armed supporters, trained and armed by Western imperial agencies).
While the West advertises the Dalai Lama as a peace-loving holy man giving platitudinous speeches
to adoring crowds, this saint never condemned the genocidal US wars against fellow Buddhists in Vietnam,
Korea or elsewhere.
The well-funded Western pro-Tibet and pro-Uighur celebrity/victim circuit has ignored the links
between the Dalai Lama and his imperial patrons, which ultimately defines the operational meaning
of 'self-determination'.
Kosova: Self-Determination by Terrorist White Slavers
After World War II, Yugoslavia, liberated from its vicious Nazi collaborators by the Communist
partisans, embarked on becoming a peaceful self-managed, multi-ethnic socialist society. But in the
1990's, the overt military intervention of NATO forces deliberately engineered the violent break-up
of Yugoslavia into 'independent' statelets. The experiment of a multiethnic socialist state in Europe
was destroyed. After massive ethnic cleansing of its non-Albanian populations, a new NATO puppet-state,
Kosova, came under the control of an internationally recognized terrorist, white slaver, narco-US
vassal Hashim Thaci and his Kosovo Liberation Army thugs.
With the massive US bombing campaign against Belgrade and other Yugoslav cities and with NATO
military support, Kosova achieved 'self-determination' – as a huge land-based US aircraft
carrier and 'R&R' center (Camp Bondsteel) with discounts at KLA-run brothels for the GI's. Because
Kosova serves as a mercenary outpost run by vassal thugs, Washington and Brussels endorsed its claims
as a 'liberated independent state'. It has also served as an international discount depot for the
gruesome trade in human organs for transplant. Viewing the ethnically cleansed mafia state of Kosovo,
then NATO commander, Canadian General Lewis MacKenzie, later admitted: 'We bombed the wrong side'.
The break-up of Yugoslavia, led to multiple separatist mini-states, each of which fell in line
with EU-economic domination and US military control. In Western jargon this was dubbed 'democratic
self-determination' – the ugly reality is that of massive ethnic cleansing, impoverishment and criminality.
Catalunya's Independence and Neo-Franco Spain
Spain is under the rule of a regime descended from the fascist dictator Francisco Franco. President
Mariano Rajoy and his misnamed 'Popular Party' (PP) and his royal sidekick, King Felipe VI, have
engaged in massive corruption scandals, money laundering and fraudulent multi-million euro public–private
building contracts. Rajoy's neo-liberal policies significantly contributed to a financial crash which
resulting in a 30% unemployment rate and an austerity program stripping Spanish workers of their
collective bargaining power.
In the face of Catalunya's pursuit of self-determination via free and democratic elections, Rajoy
ordered a police and military invasion, seizing ballots, breaking heads and asserting total control.
The Catalans' peaceful exercise of self-determination via free elections, independent of imperial
manipulation, was rejected by both the EU and Washington as 'unlawful'– for disobeying Rajoy and
his neo-Franco legions.
Self-Determination for Palestine and US Backed Israeli Colonization and Subjugation
For a half-century, Washington has supported brutal Israeli occupation and colonization of the
Palestinian 'West Bank'. The US consistently denies self-determination for the people of Palestine
and its millions of displaced refugees. Washington arms and finances Israeli expansion through the
violent seizure of Palestinian territory and resources as well as the starvation, incarceration,
torture and assassination of Palestinians for the crime of asserting their right of self-determination.
The overwhelming majority of US Congressional officials and Presidents, past and present, slavishly
take their cues from the Presidents of the 52 Major Jewish (Israeli) Organization who add billions
to the coffers of colonial Tel Aviv. Israel and its Zionist surrogates inside the US government manipulate
the US into disastrous wars in the Middle East against the self-determination of independent Arab
and Muslim nations.
Saudi Arabia: Enemy of Yemen's Self-Determination
Saudi Arabia's despotic regime has fought against self-determination in the Gulf States and Yemen.
The Saudis, backed by US arms and advisers, have dispossessed millions of Yemeni civilians and killed
thousands in a merciless bombing campaign. Over the past decade the Saudis have bombed and blockaded
Yemen, destroying its infrastructure, causing a massive plague of cholera and threatening starvation
for millions of children in an effort to defeat the Houthi-led Yemeni liberation movement.
The US and UK have provided over a hundred billion dollars in arms sales and give logistical support,
including bombing coordinates to the Saudi tyrants while blocking any UN-sponsored diplomatic action
to relieve the immense suffering. In this grotesque war crime, Washington and Israel are the Saudi
Monarchy's closest associates in denying self-determination to the oppressed people of Yemen who
have long resisted Saudi control.
Conclusion
The US imperialist state, like all aspiring empire-builders, represses or supports movements
for self-determination according to their class and imperial interests. To be clear: Self-determination
is a class-defined issue; it is not a general moral-legal principle.
Imperialism's selective use and abuse of self-determination is not a case of 'hypocrisy' or
'double standards', as their left-liberal supporters complain. Washington applies a single standard:
Does this movement advance Empire by securing and buttressing vassal regimes and their supporters?
The language of 'liberation' is a mere gloss to secure the allegiance of vassals opposed
to independent states.
For decades, Eastern European, Balkan and Baltic countries were encouraged to struggle for
'self-determination' against the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact, only to later embrace the yoke of vassalage
under the command of NATO, the EU and Washington. In many cases their sovereignty and standard of
living collapsed followed by ethnic cleansing, including the mass expulsion of Serbs from Croatia
and Kosovo and the cultural-linguistic repression of ethnic Russians in Latvia and Ukraine.
The Kurdish 'freedom fighters', followed ethnic warlords who were funded by the US and Israel,
and took over town, cities, oil resources and territory to serve as imperial military bases against
the sovereign governments of Iraq, Iran and Syria.
In this context, the Kurdish warlords and oligarchs are loyal vassals and an integral component
of the long-standing US-Israeli policy aimed at dividing and weakening independent allies of Palestine,
Yemen and genuine liberation movements.
Clearly the criteria for deciding whose claims of self-determination are valid require identifying
whether class and anti-imperialist interests are advanced.
Beyond the immediate conflicts, many independent regimes, in turn, become oppressive rulers
of their own minorities and native critics. 'Self-determination' ad infinitum can ultimately lead
to schizoid individuals – extolling their mythical people while oppressing others. Today, Zionism
is the ultimate parody of 'self-determination'. Newly independent countries and rulers frequently
deny minorities of their own right to self-determination – especially those who sided with the previous
power.
To the extent that the 'national' struggle is limited to political independence it can lead to
a mere 'changing of the guard' – maintaining oppressive class exploitation and introducing new forms
of cultural-ethnic and gender oppression.
In some instances the new forms of class exploitation may even surpass their previous conditions
under imperial vassalage. Kurds, Tibetans, fascist Ukrainian nationalists, Uighurs and other so-called
freedom fighters turn out to be military Sepoys for aggressive US incursion against independent China,
Iran and Russia. Leftist backers of these dubious 'liberation movements' tag along behind the empire.
Capitalist 'globalization' is today's greatest enemy to authentic self-determination. Imperial
globalization supports fragmented statelets – all the better to convert them into new vassals with
their own flag and anthem!
I wrote months ago that the U.S, the EU, the Kiev provisional government and Russia should have
met and then proposed a solution to Ukraine. They could have suggested a poll of Ukrainian citizens
as to whether to split the country into East and West Ukrainian nations along the Dnieper, with
built in provisions for free movement of people, finance and goods between the two countries for
a specified period in order to ameliorate difficulties of transition. This would have maintained
both countries' access to the Black Sea and eliminated the cause of Russia's occupation of Crimea,
as well avoiding the subsequent trouble and bloodshed tearing the country apart and the increasing
international tension it's causing.
The Kiev government needs increased connection with the West, not the problem of governing
half a country's worth of Russophiles in the east. There would be no great threat to the West
by having an Eastern Ukraine bordering the Dnieper – the longer the East acceded to the mindset
and demands of the kleptocracy that is Russia, especially as greener forms of energy take over,
the worse it would look to both itself and others in comparison to West Ukraine, which would be
well rid of it, and accelerating its own progress aided by its connections with the West.
But this scenario would require political leadership instead of the standard bumbling and gamesmanship
in response to each daily event.
It would seem that the average Ukrainian would tend to benefit from increasing trade with both
Russia and the Western countries. Why mention only that "[t]he Kiev government needs increased
connection with the West" without mentioning the benefit of trade with the Russian Federation?
As for "kleptocracy", that term would seem to describe both the Russian government and
the US government, and its vast wasteful & crooked complex of "connected" military contractors,
medical-insurance and pharma corporations, big union leadership, and the revolving door of think
tanks and "media" outlets.
"Self-determination is a class-defined issue; it is not a general moral-legal principle."
-- Petras
That seems clear enough on its face, but then, in his conclusion, Petras introduces "authenticity"
into the mix:
Capitalist 'globalization' is today's greatest enemy to authentic self-determination.
So it appears that we are right back in the moral-legal realm after all, under the heading
of "authenticity." Or, perhaps, under the mind-numbing category of "class-defined issues"?
In effect, Petras does indeed apply a moral-legal principle: the principle of "authenticity."
Under this pretence, Petras essentially equates Kosovo and Tibet, going so far as to conflate
the Dalai Lama with whatever "warlords" perhaps exist anywhere in the western regions claimed
by the PRC.
Not only is Petras' BS an instance of guilt by association, the association exists nowhere
but in Petras' rhetoric -- certainly not any place on the ground in Asia. Ah, but this is where
Petras' arch-villain comes in handy for his argument! Who knows whether there may be CIA operatives
skulking around, spreading USD in places like Samarkand, setting up arms deals and the like? (Clearly,
the Dalai Lams is involved in that, eh?) Thus Petras would pull off a trick of shifting the burden
of proof: since the Dalai Lama never involved himself in Vietnam or Korea, then clearly the burden
of proof is on those like myself, who question Petras' grand narrative, to show that the Dalai
Lama is anything other than a stooge of the arch-villain USA.
Petras expects us to agree, categorically, that there is nothing authentic about "free Tibet"
or about objections that the PRC's occupation of Tibet is an instance of genocide, just as surely
as was the campaign of the Japanese Empire to annex vast regions of China in WW2. But the truth
is that the world doesn't know that the "free Tibet" meme is in any way inauthentic actually we
recognize something authentic about it! Perhaps we can condemn the occupation of Palestine by
Israel, but to also condemn the occupation of Tibet by China? No, no, no nothing "authentic" about
Tibetans' desire for freedom from Chinese imperialism?
Maybe, instead of Russia-Gate, we have is Israel-Gate. This time Netanyahu discreetly interfering
in US Presidential Election ..Chilling thought though!
Notable quotes:
"... casus belli ..."
"... To be sure, my observations are neither new nor unique. Former Congressmen Paul Findley indicted the careful crafting of a pro-Israel narrative by American Jews in his seminal book They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel's Lobby , written in 1989. Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's groundbreaking book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy said much the same thing nine years ago and discussions of Jewish power do emerge occasionally, even in the mainstream media. In the Jewish media Jewish power is openly discussed and is generally applauded as a well-deserved reward bestowed both by God and by mankind due to the significant accomplishments attributed to Jews throughout history. ..."
"... That many groups and well-positioned individuals work hand-in-hand with the Israeli government to advance Israeli interests should not be in dispute after all these years of watching it in action. Several high level Jewish officials, including Richard Perle , associated with the George W. Bush Pentagon, had questionable relationships with Israeli Embassy officials and were only able to receive security clearances after political pressure was applied to "godfather" approvals for them. Former Congressman Tom Lantos and Senator Frank Lautenberg were, respectively, referred to as Israel's Congressman and Senator, while current Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has described himself as Israel's "shomer" or guardian in the U.S. Senate. ..."
"... The documentary reveals that local Jewish groups, particularly at universities and within the political parties, do indeed work closely with the Israeli Embassy to promote policies supported by the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. ..."
"... That's the money shot, Phil. I'm okay with Jews, okay with the existence of Israel, all that, but I think we were massively had by Iraq II. When Valerie Plame spoke in my area, she talked disgustedly about a plan to establish American military power throughout the Middle East. She used the euphemism "neocons" for the plan's authors, and seemed about to burst with anger. ..."
"... I recall the basic idea was for the U. S. to do Israel's dirty work at U. S. expense and without a U. S. benefit, and I think there was the usual "God talk" cover in it about "democratization", "development", blah-blah. ..."
"... I'd also add Adlai E. Stevenson III and John Glenn. Stevenson was crucial in getting compensation -- paltry sum though it was– payed to "Liberty" families for their loss. The Israelis had been holding out. Something for which the Il Senator was never forgiven (especially by The Lobby). ..."
"... Netanyahu should not have been allowed to address the joint session. No foreign leader should be speaking in opposition to any sitting President (in this case Obama). It only showed the power of "The Lobby." Netanyahu who knew that Iran didn't have the weapons the Bush Adm. had claimed, was treated like a trusted ally. He shouldn't have been. ..."
"... Maybe, instead of Russia-Gate, we have is Israel-Gate. This time Netanyahu discreetly interfering in US Presidential Election ..Chilling thought though! ..."
"... And Israeli interference in U.S. government and elections is also a given. Endorsement of Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election by the Netanyahu government was more-or-less carried out in the open. ..."
"... All embassies try to further their national interest through political machinations and all people in politics tend to use hyperbolic language to describe what they are doing. I don't know if your shock is just for show or you are just a bit dim. The same applies to Buzzfeed's 'expose' of Bannon and the gasps the article let out at his use of terms like #War. ..."
"... The British government attitude was that everything was fine because the Israeli government "apologised" and the "rogue individual" responsible was taken out of the country, and the British media mostly ignored the story after an initial brief scandal. Indeed the main substantive response was the Ofcom fishing expedition against Al Jazeera looking for ways to use the disclosure of these uncomfortable truths as a pretext for shutting that company's operations down. ..."
"... The supreme irony behind all this is that Trump has been prevented by his own personal and family/adviser bias from using the one certain way of removing all the laughably vague "Russian influence" nonsense that has been used against him so persistently. All he had to do was to, at every opportunity, tie criticism and investigation of Russian "influence" to criticism and investigation of Israel Lobby influence under the general rubric of "foreign influence", and almost all of the high level backing for the charges would in due course have quietly evaporated. ..."
"... WASP culture has always been philo-Semitic. That cannot be stated too much. WASP culture is inherently philo-Semtic. WASP culture was born of Anglo-Saxon Puritanism, which was a Judaizing heresy. ..."
"... You cannot solve 'the Jewish problem' unless you also solve 'the WASP problem.' ..."
"... The Israeli lobby is more powerful throughout the Anglosphere than the Saudi/Arabic lobby, but the Saudi lobby is equally detestable and probably even a more grave threat to the very existence of Western man. ..."
"... That the intelligence services of many countries engage in such conduct is not really news. Indeed, you could say that it's part of their normal job. They usually don't get caught and when accused of anything they shout "no evidence!" (now, where have I heard that recently?) Of course, if the Israelis engage in such conduct, then, logically, other countries' services do so too. ..."
"... Not surprising that the Jewish public gets gamed by Israeli political elites, just as the American public keeps getting gamed by our own cabal of bought politicians. Trying to fool enough of the people, enough of the time, contra Lincoln (who was not exactly a friend of critical dissent against war either .) ..."
One month ago, I initiated here at Unz.com a discussion of the role of American Jews
in the crafting of United States foreign policy. I observed that a politically powerful and well-funded
cabal consisting of both Jewish individuals and organizations has been effective at engaging the
U.S. in a series of wars in the Middle East and North Africa that benefit only Israel and are, in
fact, damaging to actual American interests. This misdirection of policy has not taken place because
of some misguided belief that Israeli and U.S. national security interests are identical, which is
a canard that is frequently floated in the mainstream media. It is instead a deliberate program that
studiously misrepresents facts-on-the ground relating to Israel and its neighbors and creates
casus belli involving the United States even when no threat to American vital interests exists.
It punishes critics by damaging both their careers and reputations while its cynical manipulation
of the media and gross corruption of the national political process has already produced the disastrous
war against Iraq, the destruction of Libya and the ongoing chaos in Syria. It now threatens to initiate
a catastrophic war with Iran.
To be sure, my observations are neither new nor unique. Former Congressmen Paul Findley indicted
the careful crafting of a pro-Israel narrative by American Jews in his seminal book
They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel's Lobby , written in 1989. Professors
John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's groundbreaking book
The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy said much the same thing nine years ago and discussions
of Jewish power do emerge occasionally, even in the mainstream media. In the Jewish media Jewish
power is openly discussed and is generally applauded as a well-deserved reward bestowed both by God
and by mankind due to the significant accomplishments attributed to Jews throughout history.
There is undeniably a complicated web of relationships and networks that define Israel's friends.
The expression "Israel Lobby" itself has considerable currency, so much so that the expression "The
Lobby" is widely used and understood to represent the most powerful foreign policy advocacy group
in Washington without needing to include the "Israel" part. That the monstrous Benjamin Netanyahu
receives 26 standing ovations from Congress and a wealthy Israel has a guaranteed income from the
U.S. Treasury derives directly from the power and money of an easily identifiable cluster of groups
and oligarchs – Paul Singer, Sheldon Adelson, Bernard Marcus, Haim Saban – who in turn fund a plethora
of foundations and institutes whose principal function is to keep the cash and political support
flowing in Israel's direction. No American national interest, apart from the completely phony contention
that Israel is some kind of valuable ally, would justify the taxpayers' largesse. In reality, Israel
is a liability to the United States and always has been.
And I do understand at the same time that a clear majority of American Jews, leaning strongly
towards the liberal side of the political spectrum, are supportive of the nuclear agreement with
Iran and do not favor a new Middle Eastern war involving that country. I also believe that many American
Jews are likely appalled by Israeli behavior, but, unfortunately, there is a tendency on their part
to look the other way and neither protest such actions nor support groups like Jewish Voice for Peace
that are themselves openly critical of Israel. This de facto gives Israel a free pass and
validates its assertion that it represents all Jews since no one important in the diaspora community
apart from minority groups which can safely be ignored is pushing back against that claim.
That many groups and well-positioned individuals work hand-in-hand with the Israeli government
to advance Israeli interests should not be in dispute after all these years of watching it in action.
Several high level Jewish officials, including
Richard Perle , associated with the George W. Bush Pentagon, had
questionable relationships with Israeli Embassy officials and were only able to receive security
clearances after political pressure was applied to "godfather" approvals for them. Former Congressman
Tom Lantos and Senator Frank Lautenberg were, respectively, referred to as Israel's Congressman and
Senator, while current Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has described himself as Israel's "shomer"
or
guardian in the U.S. Senate.
A recent regulatory decision from the United Kingdom relates to a bit of investigative journalism
that sought to reveal precisely how the promotion of Israel by some local diaspora Jews operates,
to include how critics are targeted and criticized as well as what is done to destroy their careers
and reputations.
Last year, al-Jazeera Media Network used an
undercover reporter to infiltrate some U.K. pro-Israel groups that were working closely with
the Israeli Embassy to counter criticisms coming from British citizens regarding the treatment of
the Palestinians. In particular, the Embassy and its friends were seeking to counter the growing
Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS), which has become increasingly effective in Europe.
The four-part documentary
released late in 2016 that al-Jazeera produced is well worth watching as it consists mostly of secretly
filmed meetings and discussions.
The documentary reveals that local Jewish groups, particularly at universities and within
the political parties, do indeed work closely with the Israeli Embassy to promote policies supported
by the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It also confirms that tagging someone
as an anti-Semite has become the principal offensive weapon used to stifle any discussion, particularly
in a country like Britain which embraces concepts like the criminalization of "hate speech." At one
point, two British Jews discussed whether "being made to feel uncomfortable" by people asking what
Israel intends to do with the Palestinians is anti-Semitic. They agreed that it might be.
The documentary also describes how the Embassy and local groups working together targeted government
officials who were not considered to be friendly to Israel to "be taken down," removed from office
or otherwise discredited. One government official in particular who was to be attacked was Foreign
Office Minister Sir Alan Duncan.
Britain, unlike the U.S., has a powerful
regulatory agency that oversees communications, to include the media. It is referred to as Ofcom.
When the al-Jazeera documentary was broadcast, Israeli Embassy political officer Shai Masot, who
reportedly was a Ministry of Strategic Affairs official working under cover, was forced to resign
and the Israeli Ambassador offered an apology. Masot was filmed discussing British politicians who
might be "taken down" before speaking with a government official who plotted a "a little scandal"
to bring about the downfall of Duncan. Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, who is the first head of
a political party in Britain to express pro-Palestinian views, had called for an investigation of
Masot after the recording of the "take down" demand relating to Duncan was revealed. Several Jewish
groups (the Jewish Labour Movement, the Union of Jewish Students and We Believe in Israel) then counterattacked
with a complaint that the documentary had violated British broadcast regulations, including the specific
charge that the undercover investigation was anti-Semitic in nature.
On October 9 th , Ofcom ruled in favor of al-Jazeera, stating that its investigation
had done nothing improper, but it should be noted that the media outlet had to jump through numerous
hoops to arrive at the successful conclusion. It had to turn over all its raw footage and communications
to the investigators, undergoing what one source described as an "editorial colonoscopy," to prove
that its documentary was "factually accurate" and that it had not "unfairly edited" or "with bias"
prepared its story. One of plaintiffs, who had called for critics of Israel to "die in a hole" and
had personally offered to "take down" a Labour Party official, responded bitterly. She
said that the Ofcom judgment would serve as a "precedent for the infringement of privacy of any
Jewish person involved in public life."
The United States does not yet have a government agency to regulate news stories, though that
may be coming, but the British tale has an interesting post script. Al-Jazeera also had a
second undercover reporter inserted in the Israel Lobby in the United States, apparently a British
intern named James Anthony Kleinfeld, who had volunteered his services to The Israel Project, which
is involved in promoting Israel's global image. He also had contact with at least ten other Jewish
organizations and with officials at the Israeli Embassy,
Now that the British account of "The Lobby" has cleared a regulatory hurdle the American version
will reportedly soon be released. Al-Jazeera's head of investigative reporting Clayton Swisher commented
"With this U.K. verdict and vindication past us, we can soon reveal how the Israel lobby in America
works through the eyes of an undercover reporter. I hear the U.S. is having problems with foreign
interference these days, so I see no reason why the U.S. establishment won't take our findings in
America as seriously as the British did, unless of course Israel is somehow off limits from that
debate."
Americans who follow such matters already know that groups like the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee (AIPAC) swarm over Capitol Hill and have accomplices in nearly every media outlet. Back
in 2005-6 AIPAC Officials Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman were actually tried under the Espionage
Act of 1918 in a case involving obtaining classified intelligence from government official Lawrence
Franklin to pass on to the Israeli Embassy. Rosen had once boasted that, representing AIPAC and Israel,
he could get the signatures of 70 senators on a napkin agreeing to anything if he sought to do so.
The charges against the two men were, unfortunately,
eventually dropped "because court rulings had made the case unwinnable and the trial would disclose
classified information."
And Israeli interference in U.S. government and elections is also a given. Endorsement of Mitt
Romney in the 2012 presidential election by the Netanyahu government was more-or-less carried out
in the open. And ask Congressmen like Paul Findley, Pete McCloskey, William Fulbright, Charles Percy
and, most recently, Cynthia McKinney, what happens to your career when you appear to be critical
of Israel. And the point is that while Israel calls the shots in terms of what it wants, it is a
cabal of diaspora American Jews who actually pull the trigger. With that in mind, it will be very
interesting to watch the al-Jazeera documentary on The Lobby in America.
Philip Giraldi is a rare American treasure. A voice of integrity and character in a sea of moral
cowardice and corruption. If there is any hope for this nation, it will be due specifically to
the integrity of men like Mr. Giraldi to keep speaking truth to power.
When the Jewish Messiah comes, all of us goyim (Black, White, Yellow, brown or Red) will be living
like today's Palestinians. Our slave descendant will be scurrying around in their ghettos afraid
of the Greater Israeli Army military andriod drones in the sky.
But if I was a Westerner, I would support Israel any day. Because if the Israeli state were
to be ever dismantled, all of them Israelis would go to the West. Why would you want that?
My admittedly subjective impression is that your UR reports are becoming more open/unbounded
after your release from the constraints of the American Conservative . In other word, you're
now being enabled to let it all hang out. In my book that's all to the good.
Of course your work and those of the other UR writers are enabled by the beneficence
of its patron, Ron!
There may be limits to their power in Britain. Jeremy Corbyn is hated by them, and stories are
regularly run in the MSM, in Britain and also (of course!) in the New York Times claiming
that under Corbyn Labour is a haven of anti-Semitism. Corbyn actually gained millions of votes
in the last election. Perhaps they will nail him somewhere down the road but they have failed
so far.
" . . . [W]ars in the Middle East and North Africa that benefit only Israel and are, in
fact, damaging to actual American interests (emphases mine).
That's the money shot, Phil. I'm okay with Jews, okay with the existence of Israel, all
that, but I think we were massively had by Iraq II. When Valerie Plame spoke in my area, she talked
disgustedly about a plan to establish American military power throughout the Middle East. She
used the euphemism "neocons" for the plan's authors, and seemed about to burst with anger.
I looked up the plan, but don't recall the catch phrase for it.
I recall the basic idea was for the U. S. to do Israel's dirty work at U. S. expense and
without a U. S. benefit, and I think there was the usual "God talk" cover in it about "democratization",
"development", blah-blah.
I remain skeptical that the Al-Jazeera undercover story in the US will be able to be viewed. I
anticipate a hoard of Israel-firster congress critters to crawl out from under their respective
rocks and deem Al-Jazeera to be antisemitic and call for it being banned as a foreign propaganda
apparatus, much as is being done with RT and Sputnik.
I fear that we are long past the point of being redeemed as a nation. We can only watch with
sorrow as this great nation crumbles under the might of Jewish power – impotent in our ability
to arrest its fall.
ask Congressmen like Paul Findley, Pete McCloskey, William Fulbright, Charles Percy
I'd also add Adlai E. Stevenson III and John Glenn. Stevenson was crucial in getting compensation
-- paltry sum though it was– payed to "Liberty" families for their loss. The Israelis had been
holding out. Something for which the Il Senator was never forgiven (especially by The Lobby).
Netanyahu should not have been allowed to address the joint session. No foreign leader
should be speaking in opposition to any sitting President (in this case Obama). It only
showed the power of "The Lobby." Netanyahu who knew that Iran didn't have the weapons the Bush
Adm. had claimed, was treated like a trusted ally. He shouldn't have been.
And the point is that while Israel calls the shots in terms of what it wants, it is a cabal
of diaspora American Jews who actually pull the trigger. With that in mind, it will be very
interesting to watch the al-Jazeera documentary on The Lobby in America.
Maybe, instead of Russia-Gate, we have is Israel-Gate. This time Netanyahu discreetly interfering
in US Presidential Election ..Chilling thought though!
And Israeli interference in U.S. government and elections is also a given. Endorsement
of Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election by the Netanyahu government was more-or-less
carried out in the open.
London's Mayor, Sadiq Khan, actually went to America to campaign for Hillary. Numerous European
leaders endorsed her, while practically all denounced Trump. Exactly the same can be said of the
Muslim world, only more so.
The problem with criticism of Israel is not that it lacks basis in truth. It is that it is
removed from the context of the rest of the world. Israel's actions do not make Israel an outlier.
Israel fits very much within the norm. Even with the recording this is the case.
All embassies try to further their national interest through political machinations and
all people in politics tend to use hyperbolic language to describe what they are doing. I don't
know if your shock is just for show or you are just a bit dim. The same applies to Buzzfeed's
'expose' of Bannon and the gasps the article let out at his use of terms like #War.
Unfortunately, contemporary idiots of all stripes seem to specialise in removing context so
that they can further their specious arguments.
"so I see no reason why the U.S. establishment won't take our findings in America as seriously
as the British did"
Sadly, Clayton Swisher is probably correct that the US establishment will take their findings
in America just as "seriously" as the British media and political establishment, and government,
did.
The British government attitude was that everything was fine because the Israeli government
"apologised" and the "rogue individual" responsible was taken out of the country, and the British
media mostly ignored the story after an initial brief scandal. Indeed the main substantive response
was the Ofcom fishing expedition against Al Jazeera looking for ways to use the disclosure of
these uncomfortable truths as a pretext for shutting that company's operations down.
But there's no "undue influence" or bias involved, and if you say there might be then you are
an anti-Semite and a hater.
The supreme irony behind all this is that Trump has been prevented by his own personal
and family/adviser bias from using the one certain way of removing all the laughably vague "Russian
influence" nonsense that has been used against him so persistently. All he had to do was to, at
every opportunity, tie criticism and investigation of Russian "influence" to criticism and investigation
of Israel Lobby influence under the general rubric of "foreign influence", and almost all of the
high level backing for the charges would in due course have quietly evaporated.
And in this rare company I would place former congressman, Ron Paul.
Here's an excerpt from his latest article, President Trump Beats War Drums for Iran
:
Let's be clear here: President Trump did not just announce that he was "de-certifying" Iran's
compliance with the nuclear deal. He announced that Iran was from now on going to be in the
bullseye of the US military. Will Americans allow themselves to be lied into another Middle
East war?
This state of affairs, where the Zionist tail wags -- thrashes -- the US dog is bizarre to the
point of laughter. Absent familiarity with the facts, who could believe it all? Is there a historical
parallel ? I can't think of one that approaches the sheer profundity of the toxic embrace the
Zionists have cover the US & west generally.
So how is using money we give them as foreign aid (it's fungible by any definition of the US Treasury
and Justice Department) to lobby our legislators not a form of money laundering? Somebody ought
to tell Mnuchin to get FINCEN on this yeah, I know, it sounded naive as I typed it. FINCEN is
only there to harass little people like you and me.
I fear that we are long past the point of being redeemed as a nation. We can only watch
with sorrow as this great nation crumbles
We are long past that point.
I myself am watching with joy, because this supposedly "great nation" was corrupt to the core
from its inception.
For evidence, all one has to do is read the arguments of the anti-federalists who opposed the
ratification of the constitution* such as Patrick Henry, Robert Yates and Luther Martin. Their
predictions about the results have come true. Even the labels, "federalist" and "anti-federalist"
are misleading and no doubt intentionally so.
Those who spoke out against the formation of the federal reserve bank* scheme were also correct.
The only thing great about the US in a moral sense are the high sounding pretenses upon
which it was built. As a nation we have never adhered to them.
*Please note that I intentionally refrain from capitalizing those words since I refuse to show
even that much deference to those instruments of corruption.
Philip, glad to see you undaunted after the recent attacks on you. We can maybe take solace in
the fact that their desire for MORE will finally pass a critical point, and dumbass Americans
will finally wake up.
"She said that the Ofcom judgment would serve as a "precedent for the infringement of privacy
of any Jewish person involved in public life."
I have news for that twister of words.
In my opinion, if you choose to put yourself in the limelight, you have no private life. That
is especially true for those who think they're entitled to a position of power.
In other words, if you think you're special, then you get judged by stricter standards than
the rest of us.
It's called accountability.
BTW, speaking of Netanyahu, why do we hear so little about the scandal involving the theft
of nuclear triggers from the US?
"The Israeli press is picking up Grant Smith's revelation from FBI documents that Benjamin
Netanyahu was part of an Israeli smuggling ring that spirited nuclear triggers out of the U.S.
in the 80s and 90s."
When you listen to Abby Martin describe her experience regarding this brutal apartheid system
in Israel and the genocide of the Palestinian people, remember, Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief
of The Atlantic , was a prison guard in the Israeli Defense Forces guarding the West Bank
death camp. And David Brooks, political and cultural commentator for The New York Times
and former op-ed editor for The Wall Street Journal , has a son in the Israel Defense Forces
helping to perpetuate this holocaust of the Palestinian people. I hope I live to see the day when
some Palestinian Simon Wiesenthal hunts these monsters down and brings them to trial in The Hague.
The lobby is not as powerful in Britain as it is the US, we can talk about it and someone like
Peter Oborne is still a prominent journalist, but I don't see that it makes that much difference.
We seem to end up in the same places the US does.
I had my meeting with the Rothschilds, Goldman Sachs and the Israeli Department of Hasbara last
week and we discussed how our plan to suppress both the US and British governments is progressing.
Apparently we are meeting our targets and everything is going according to plan.
Speaking about how greatly rare a treasure are the P.G.'s words, below is linked a deliberately
rare letter written by Congressman Donald Rumsfeld on behalf of the AZC.
Also, re, "Will Americans allow themselves to be lied into another M.E. war?"
(Sigh)
History shows that, in order for ZUSA to start M.E. wars, Americans are routinely fed Executive
Branch / Corporate Media-sauteed lies. Such deceit is par-for-the-course.
At present, it would be foolish for me to not realize there is a False Flag Pentagon plan "on
the table" & ready for a war with Iran.
What is playing out in the UK, and is in early stages in America, is the fight between the two
side of Victorian WASP pro-Semtiism.
WASP culture has always been philo-Semitic. That cannot be stated too much. WASP culture
is inherently philo-Semtic. WASP culture was born of Anglo-Saxon Puritanism, which was a Judaizing
heresy. Judaizing heresy naturally and inevitably produces pro-Jewish culture. No less than
Oliver Cromwell made the deal to get Jewish money so he could wage culture war to destroy British
Isles natives were not WASPs.
WASP culture has always been allied with Jews to destroy white Christians who are not WASPs.
You cannot solve 'the Jewish problem' unless you also solve 'the WASP problem.'
By the beginning of the Victorian era, virtually all WASP Elites in the Empire – who then had
a truly globalist perspective – were divided into two pro-Semitic camps. The larger one was pro-Jewish.
It would give the world the Balfour Declaration and the state of Israel.
The smaller and growing one was pro-Arabic and pro-Islamic. It would give the world the people
who backed Lawrence of Arabia and came to prop up the House of Saud.
Each of these philo-Semitic WASP Elites groups was more than happy to keep the foot on the
pedal to destroy non-WASP European cultures while spending fortunes propping up its favorite group
of Semites.
And while each of those camps was thrilled to ally to keep up the war against historic Christendom
and the peoples who naturally would gravitate to any hope of a revival of Christendom, they also
squabbled endlessly. Each wished, and always will wish, to be the A-#1 pro-Semitic son of daddy
WASP. Each will play any dirty trick, make any deal with the Devil himself, to get what he wants.
The Israeli lobby is more powerful throughout the Anglosphere than the Saudi/Arabic lobby,
but the Saudi lobby is equally detestable and probably even a more grave threat to the very existence
of Western man.
It is impossible to take care of a serious problem without knowing its source and acting to
sanitize and/or cauterize and/or cut out that source. The source of this problem is WASP culture.
That the intelligence services of many countries engage in such conduct is not really news. Indeed,
you could say that it's part of their normal job. They usually don't get caught and when accused
of anything they shout "no evidence!" (now, where have I heard that recently?) Of course, if the
Israelis engage in such conduct, then, logically, other countries' services do so too.
Thus, Mr Giraldi's argument lends credibility to the claims that Russia interfered in the US
election and to the proposition that US intelligence agents are seeking to undermine the EU.
Since those two operations are part of the same transaction, i.e. maintain US global hegemony
by breaking the EU up into its constituent Member States or even into the regional components
of the larger Member States, using Putin as a battering ram and a bogeyman to frighten the resulting
plethora of small and largely defenseless statelets back under cold war-era American protection,
could it be that US and Russian intelligence services collaborated to manipulate Trump into the
White House? If that were true, it would be quite a scandal! Overthrowing foreign governments
is one thing, collaborating with a foreign power to manipulate your own country's politics is
quite another! But of course, there's "no evidence"
Not surprising that the Jewish public gets gamed by Israeli political elites, just as the
American public keeps getting gamed by our own cabal of bought politicians. Trying to fool enough
of the people, enough of the time, contra Lincoln (who was not exactly a friend of critical dissent
against war either .)
It becomes complicated. If the question of secession -- and not just secession of, as in the
case of California, but of any entity -- really be examined, then wide variations in culture,
history, ethnicity, economics and politics should be considered, taken into consideration.
While secession can be a viable and satisfactory solution to insoluble national problems, it
is not always in every case advisable. There may be good reasons for a region, or a state, or a
province to depart from a larger entity. I would argue strongly that the painful decision by
the Southern states of the United States to secede from the American union in 1860-1861 was
largely justified on historical, cultural and economic reasons, not to mention the politics
involved.
Actually, the departures of those eleven states (or, actually, thirteen if you count the
illegally thwarted departures of Kentucky and Missouri) came in two waves: the first began with
South Carolina and continued with the exit of several Deep South states. Lincoln's call in
April 1861 for troops to suppress South Carolina shocked the constitutional sensibilities of
additional states in the Upper South, several of which had resisted the initial impulse to join
the secession. And by early summer the Confederate States of America was a functioning nation,
albeit a country facing invasion from its powerful former co-citizens.
But, I can think of instances when secession -- that is, the break-up of larger nations or
empires -- is not only inadvisable, but positively injurious not only to the whole, but also to
the respective seceding parts. The dissolution of the old Austria-Hungarian Empire in 1918, for
instance, was not only a tragic mistake geopolitically, but made little sense economically,
ethnically or historically. What was produced by the Treaties of Saint-Germain and Trianon was
a succession of angrily dissatisfied, uber-nationalist states and displaced ethnic minorities
imprisoned in new, arbitrary and irrational geographical expressions, waiting for the next
powder keg to explode.
Interestingly, it was the heir to the wizened old Kaiser, Franz Josef, the Archduke Franz
Ferdinand, who advocated additional decentralization of the old empire, with a third, Slavic
kingdom, to join Austria and Hungary in a tripartite monarchy. That he and his wife, Sophie,
were cruelly assassinated in Sarajevo in July 1914 by a Serbian nationalist, not only put into
motion the coming of the First World War, but stymied what might have been a revitalized,
regionalist future for the creaky old Habsburg Empire.
The castration of the ancient Russian homeland more recently is another case of good
(American) intentions gone awry: the creation of new artificial states such as Byelorussia and
Kazakhstan was not only historically and politically wrongheaded, but economically ill-advised.
President Vladimir Putin's statement -- rightly understood -- that the break-up of the Soviet
Union was one of the greatest disasters of the 20 th century was intended in this
sense (and not , as some Russophobic Neocons attempt to construe it, as a lament for
Communism!).
Talking to a friend recently, I expressed some serious skepticism about the recent
plebiscite in Catalonia on the question of secession from Spain. My friend, knowing of my
longstanding defense of secession historically when it concerns the South, was surprised. I
attempted in a very brief discussion to explain why I demurred in the Catalan case, but the
conversation was cut short.
What I would suggest is that the simple slogan that secession is always good policy
is not really defensible, historically, culturally, economically, ethnically, or
politically.
In the case of Catalonia, my arguments against secession are multiple, and range from the
very practical and statistical, to the historical and cultural.
Let's start with the historical and cultural. Basically, the medieval County of Barcelona
was united under the crown of Aragon in the mid-12 th century. The de facto
dynastic union of Aragon and Catalonia (ruled by the Counts of Barcelona) became a de
jure one, a legal one, in 1258. Thus, for eight centuries the region has been united with
Spain. While the Catalan language, which while distinct from Spanish, is also similar to it,
remained the lingua franca of rural areas, Castilian Spanish began to be spoken in more urban
areas. But like the other kingdoms and principalities that came together to create Spain,
Catalonia retained many of its customs, and regional and historic rights, within the
new Spanish monarchy.
Historically, Spain was a composite, a dynastic federation and union of the ancient kingdoms
of Castile and Leon, Aragon, Valencia, and then, the Kingdom of Navarra and the Basque
territories in the north of the country, plus the formerly Muslim Kingdom of Granada in the
South. Indeed, even at the time of the great monarch, Philip II -- supposedly, according to
Anglophile and Protestant propagandists of the 16 th century, that all-powerful
authoritarian monarch of the early modern era -- Spain was known as "las Espanas," that is,
"the Spains," to indicate that King Philip was not actually the absolute king of a unitary,
centralized royal state, but rather the monarch over a collection of fiercely regionalist
states, each with its own traditions, history and parliaments (or "cortes"), but all together
composing a country. Philip was dependent on them for financing his government. Each of those
regions, those ancient components, of Spain had legal codes ("recopilaciones de leyes") which
guided jurisprudence; those historic and regional rights were called "fueros," which we would
render in English to mean "states' rights." Eventually portions of those statutes and
legislated customs were cobbled together in a common law for the entire country. Nevertheless,
the historic regions jealously guarded their respective traditions, languages, customs and
fueros, and continued to do so throughout the remainder of Habsburg Spain into the early 19
th century.
Not only because of the dynastic question, but precisely over those fueros much of Spain
underwent a series of bloody civil wars in the 19 th century. And what many
foreigners find ironic and incomprehensible is that it was the so-called royalist
"absolutistas," the defenders of the ancient regime and the old monarchy, the traditionalists
who took the name "Carlists" after the dispossessed rightful heir to the throne, Don Carlos V
("de jure" king of "las Espanas") in 1833, who actually defended the historic
regionalism and subsidiary of the old regime. For them it was a powerful king who ruled from
Madrid, but who was also limited in his powers by the historic, unbridgeable rights of the
"kingdoms" that made up the country, which guaranteed more essential and more local liberties
to the citizens. Like the martyred King Charles I of England, who declared at his illegal trial
that he was more the defender of the "rights of the good people of England" than the rump
parliamentarians, the traditional monarchs in Spain, with the legacy of the patchwork of
historic states and their sacralized customs and legal "recopilaciones,"offered far more
self-government, far more "liberties" than any centralizing liberal state could or ever
would.
During those several civil wars in the 19 th century, Catalonia stood, by and
large, with the traditionalist defenders of the ancient regime, the Carlists. It was the
Carlists who defended the fueros and who advocated the return of a strong king who actually had
power, but whose powers were also circumscribed by the historic regions and traditions of the
country. It was the Carlists -- and some of their most perceptive political philosophers (e.g.,
Jaime Balmes, Francisco Navarro Villoslada, Juan Vazquez de Mella) -- who understood that 19
th century liberalism, despite it slogan of "liberty and equality," would actually
do away with and suppress those old regionalist statutes and protections, those intermediate
institutions in society, that secured more liberties for the citizens.
Only 40% of the eligible voters in Catalonia participated in the recent plebiscite on
possible independence; of those around 90% voted "Si." But that means that approximately just
30% of the electorate truly favors independence. And those political groups that most zealously
support such a move are on the Left politically. They see the region, which is the most
economically successful area of Spain and the most "Europeanized," as able to get a better deal
economically within the European Union. They welcome globalism and a unitary European
government with themselves also at the helm sharing power.
Of course, it is always good to hit the bloated central government in Madrid in the eye, but
at what price?
The present-day proponents of independence do not represent the ancient and best traditions
and historic legacy of Catalonia. Their advocacy of Catalan independence is not a comfortable
fit with the long history of that region. The nationalism they advance owes far more to the
liberal statism of the 19 th century than to the Catalan heritage of local and
regional self-rule. Catalonia is not a nation-waiting-to-be-born; its association as one of the
integral and historic, largely autonomous regions within Spain is its tradition. Catalonia can
best find its destiny in reasserting its role as a largely self-governing region -- but within
the historic federation of the Spanish kingdom.
Good time to address the issue of secession. Krugman was just talking about this at the
NYT and like most liberals he assumes that secession is a threat that the coastal
states can wield over the benighted interior states. But is this truly a real threat?
I don't think so. First, when the South seceded, the North dragged them back. Today, if
every county that voted Trump were to break away from Hillary voters they would take with
them the most productive farming, manufacturing, mining, electricity generating sectors of
the economy. The coastal Hillary voters are the banking, information sectors of the economy.
Now which of the two is independent? Which is dependent?
Right. That's why secession by the heartland would no more be tolerated today than
secession was in 1860. The coastal "Elite" are entirely dependent on the heartland for their
basic commodities and yet they have no loyalty to the people who dwell there and further,
want to displace them with outsiders and can't wait for them to die (even gunning them down
in public spaces).
The coastal "Elite" are entirely dependent on the heartland for their basic commodities
and yet they have no loyalty to the people who dwell there and further, want to displace
them with outsiders and can't wait for them to die (even gunning them down in public
spaces).
True. Most of them also have no significant real life skills which matter, bar some
hipsters obsessed with organic food–many of them are trying, actually, to grow it and
that is a plus. But yes, most people you describe here never spent a day on manufacturing
floor, or in the uniform, or anywhere which requires serious labor and uncomfortable
existence.
@Andrei
Martyanov But more, Andrei. All the hydroelectric dams are locate inland, the mineral
deposits, the fertile soil and so on. The coastal are to the people of the heartland as an
absentee landlord is to his tenant farmers.
Before 1965, virtually every business located in the downtown of cities of under say,
250,000 citizens was locally owned (some exceptions, Sears, Penny's, Montgomery Ward). Now,
every business is a franchise whose central office is in New York City et al. The coastal
elite, having financialized everything in the American economy worth financializing, now own,
via money loaned into existence by the Central Bank, America's small town economies. That
this doesn't have to be so is proved by the fact that it wasn't always so.
America was a better place to live before the local economies were destroyed and displaced
by the global one. We are currently suffering from a plague like the ones imported from the
East during the dark days of the Black Death and for the same reason. We are being exposed to
the toxic effects of moving people and goods around the world with no regard for the effect
this has on local ecologies–cultural or natural. That this is literally killing us is a
matter of indifference to our coastal elites.
The coastal elite, having financialized everything in the American economy worth
financializing
Agree. But then again, we live in the world where Facebook "capitalization" is several
times larger than that of Boeing, which provides half of the world with needed actual
high-tech products. B-787 is a marvel. We have Tesla which is one of the most outstanding
(together with Musk's "Mars mission") frauds in history. A madhouse. But while agreeing with
you in principle, I also have to make some clarifications, I also observed how many, namely
from logging industry on the West Coast didn't want to take new opportunities, granted paying
less than their logging professions, to turn their life around. The opportunities were there,
they just refused. Opportunities were in aerospace, in excellent Air Washington Program (I
took advantage of it to get some CNC courses for general horizons expansion) , granted that
it required math and more brain-work than usually is required from logging. But no, they just
wanted it the way they wanted it. Knowing how logging worked on the West Coast I kinda see
why they wanted it back but it will never be back the way it was. Next step for them once it
doesn't come back? Well, we have here a massive growth of pot dispensaries, that will take
care of the labor force (bitter sarcasm).
Catalonia can best find its destiny in reasserting its role as a largely self-governing
region -- but within the historic federation of the Spanish kingdom.
One of the best articles ever on Unz, with a great presentation of the historical roots of
modern Spain. Maybe it underplays the role of 20th Century leftist internationalism (i.e.
Bolshevism light or otherwise) but still , it would correctly see radical international
leftism as a new arrival on the scene, mostly burning itself out with the exit of Spanish
feudalism .
But, I can think of instances when secession -- that is, the break-up of larger nations
or empires -- is not only inadvisable, but positively injurious not only to the whole, but
also to the respective seceding parts. The dissolution of the old Austria-Hungarian Empire
in 1918, for instance, was not only a tragic mistake geopolitically, but made little sense
economically, ethnically or historically.
I'm not so sure about this.
Austria-Hungary, prior to its collapse, wasn't a respectful alliance of largely
self-governing regions. There were a lot of other things going on – most notably
hopeless race wars focused on Vienna.
Just as an example:
"In the old Austria, nothing could be done without patronage. That's partly explained by
the fact that nine million Germans were in fact rulers, in virtue of an unwritten law, of
fifty million non-Germans. This German ruling class took strict care that places should
always be found for Germans. For them this was the only method of maintaining themselves in
this privileged situation. The Balts of German origin behaved in the same way towards the
Slav population."
"Hitler's Table Talk". Conversation Nº 109 15th-16th January 1942
and,
"The rise of the Jews in Austria-Hungary may well have been the most sudden , impressive
rise of Jews in modern history."
" .all public life was dominated by Jews. The banks, the press, the theater, literature,
social organizations, all lay in the hands of the Jews . The aristocracy would have nothing
to do with such things . The small number of untitled patrician families imitated the
aristocracy; the original upper-middle class had disappeared .. The court, the lower middle
class and the Jews gave the city its stamp. And that the Jews, as the most mobile group,
kept all the others in continual motion is, on the whole, not surprising."
Albert Lindeman, "Esau's Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews"
@Anonymous
The interior has very little population though and would have trouble holding territory. The
interior's farmland could be sabotaged and destroyed and its access to major waterways and
water traffic would be cut off. The coasts have extensive global trade networks and would
effectively lay siege on the interior.
The coasts have extensive global trade networks and would effectively lay siege on the
interior.
Actually, it is the other way around. What coasts? If in the East it could be viewed as a
somewhat continuous urban chain in the North-East, the West Coast "elites" reside mostly in
Seattle, Portland, SF urban areas, which, while large, are in effect the places of compact
residence. As such, they are fairly easily isolated, not to mention the fact of undeniable
emasculation of their male residents. They can not find often their own ass with their two
hands in a brightly lit room, let alone "lay siege" to anything. This is not to speak of the
fact that all, without exception, urban centers depend entirely on "interior" for food. As
per interior main cities–as latest elections showed, Ohio or Indiana, which are
interior and do contain serious urban centers are not "elitists" states. Neither is Texas,
which is also a major urban and port state. In other words, it is a very complex picture.
Although I agree that this historical overview of Catalonia since the 1200′s is
quite good, I still have a few quibbles and one big caveat. First quibble: Catalonia was
joined to the kingship of Aragon, but was functionally separate from the State of Aragon and
generally left alone by the various kings over the next several centuries. Second quibble:
Catalonia rebelled quite regularly since the 1400′s when its neighbours sought to
encroach on traditional Catalan rights and prerogatives. It has never been long an easy
member of what became the Spanish nation following the reconquest.
My caveat is the part of the history that has been left out. Catalonia existed as a
distinct entity or one allied with its (now) French neighbour. Catalonia has had strong ties
with its Mediterranean neighbours and with France during its long historical period of
development following the fall of Rome in the West. During the existence of El Andelus under
caliphate rule and later after various statelets splintered off of the caliphate, Catalonia
often allied with the muslim states as well as having strong ties northward. Many of its
feudal rulers were descendents of Visigoths who descended out of the decaying Roman Empire
and set up rule in many parts of Iberia. This long formative period of Catalan history can
still be felt in many Catalan customs and in the Catalan language.
So, is it surprising that a large portion of the people of Catalonia might have a strong
independent spirit and outlook. However, I agree that independence in today's context needs
more than a vibrant history, language and customs. It needs a strong and functioning
administration, government and military to defend itself and its borders. It needs to
preserve and protect and grow its economy. It also needs international recognition.
The media constantly pumps out the lie that there is a silent anti-independence majority
in Catalonia, which is merely curiously invisible.
Consider this. The highest turnout ever at an election in Catalonia was the 74.9% in the
2015 Regional Election, with 4,130.196 people casting their vote. At Spanish general
elections turnout is even lower, at 69%. A minimum of 25.1% of the population never vote at
all. Of that 25% who do not vote, some will be dead, or moved away, but most are probably
just not civilly engaged.
The trick of the pro-Spanish lobby is to boycott polls on Independence, and then claim
that this minimum 25% of the electorate who never vote at all anyway, are anti-Independence
and participating in the boycott. In truth there are absolutely no grounds to attribute the
minimum 25% habitual non-voters as anti-independence. Particularly the dead ones.
So in fact the 2,044,038 votes cast in favour of Independence on Sunday, that survived the
police and could be counted, already amounted to 49.6% of the highest number of votes ever
cast in any election in Catalonia. When you add in the hundreds of thousands of votes
confiscated by the police, and the voters who were deterred by the terrible violence, there
is no doubt whatsoever that Sunday's referendum would have seen a healthy majority for
Independence on any probable turnout figure ..
Most participants here will know virtually nothing about Spain, Catalonia, or even
successful confederal models in Europe. Long, complicated topics, so I will make only a few
short comments here.
1. The present spanish monarchy essentially involved a murderous dictator designating a
king. A poisonous contradiction (restoring a monarchy) was mostly accepted to escape from the
murderous dictatorship. There are "republicans" who would like to end the monarchy throughout
Spain, including Catalonia. The issue of constitutional reform is now on the table and the
Spanish would be wise to get rid of such an anachronism. The country has suffered every time
that it has had foreigners as kings, starting with the "germans" Carlos I and Carlos II who
bled Spaniards for numerous wars in Europe. The present royal family is of French (the
Borbons) and German (Schleswig-Holstein Sonderburg-Glücksburg) ancestry. The grandmother
of the present king (Felipe VI) can be seen (together with her brothers) dressed in the
uniform of the Hitler Youth in numerous web sites.
2. Cataluña is not the only area of Spain that "rebels" against right-wing,
centralized control. Similar sentiments are present (to more or less degree) in Pais Vasco,
Galicia, Valencia, Baleares, Canarias, . Spain has a centuries long history of failing to
deal with the pluri-national nature of the country and seems to be failing once again.
3. There are models of pluri-national confederations/nations that are exemplary instances
of how to deal with such problems. Switzerland is perhaps the best known. The
"Eidgenossenschaft" (confederation) of the german-speaking areas dates from about 1250 and
initially involved seven independent countries, each of which retained its own sovereignity.
The model was soon after copied in the french- and italian-speaking areas of modern
Switzerland. The present confederation includes 27 kantons (the federal constitution
guarantees that they remain sovereign nations, i.e. in principle can withdraw) and 4
different languages. The Kantons retain power over taxes, education, welfare, citizenship, ..
Direct democracy reigns at both the national and kantonal level, i.e. citizens can
reject/initiate laws by referendum, including kantonal/national taxation/expenditure.
4. Spain actually has a mixed system in which certain "autonomia" (states – Pais
Vasco, Navarra, Aragon) have a status somewhat like Kantons in Switzerland, e.g. a separate
status with regard to taxation.
Probably the best thing that Spain could do would be to copy the Swiss model and get rid
of the monarchy. Probably even Cataluña could be convinced to join such a model.
Only 40% of the eligible voters in Catalonia participated in the recent plebiscite on
possible independence; of those around 90% voted "Si." But that means that approximately
just 30% of the electorate truly favors independence.
1. The 40% is because the Madrid government interfered with the vote.
2. In the 2016 American election, turnout was 54.7% of whom 46.1% voted from Trump. That's
25.2% of the electorate favoring Trump. In the 2012 election, turnout was 54.9%, 51.1% of
whom voted for Obama. That's 28% of the electorate favoring Obama. A higher percentage of
Catalonia's electorate favor independence than American electorate favored the last two US
presidents.
.. Macron's victory was both overwhelming and underwhelming. All records of abstention
were broken; for the first time in over a century, a majority of eligible voters stayed away
from the polls in the first round of the parliamentary elections, and abstention rose to 57%
in the second round. He owes his landslide to less than 20% of registered voters ..
@ThreeCranes
But more, Andrei. All the hydroelectric dams are locate inland, the mineral deposits, the
fertile soil and so on. The coastal are to the people of the heartland as an absentee
landlord is to his tenant farmers.
Before 1965, virtually every business located in the downtown of cities of under say,
250,000 citizens was locally owned (some exceptions, Sears, Penny's, Montgomery Ward). Now,
every business is a franchise whose central office is in New York City et al. The coastal
elite, having financialized everything in the American economy worth financializing, now own,
via money loaned into existence by the Central Bank, America's small town economies. That
this doesn't have to be so is proved by the fact that it wasn't always so.
America was a better place to live before the local economies were destroyed and displaced
by the global one. We are currently suffering from a plague like the ones imported from the
East during the dark days of the Black Death and for the same reason. We are being exposed to
the toxic effects of moving people and goods around the world with no regard for the effect
this has on local ecologies--cultural or natural. That this is literally killing us is a
matter of indifference to our coastal elites. A cogent analysis by all Three Cranes (Martin,
Niles, and Fraser?
Seriously, I would offer a partial counter-argument, but only a partial one. The rest of
the country buys enormous quantities of fruits, vegetables, and nuts (the jokes write
themselves) from California, right? I assume CA would be glad to keep selling to the rest of
the USA, but with the farther-left, more anti-white government that would come to power in an
independent CA, who knows. They might elect to sell only to other countries, and China and
India can buy up anything CA can produce in that regard.
On the other hand, as California grows ever more over-populated, it further exceeds the
carrying capacity of this territory. Among other baleful effects, we see that California
droughts become more common, more prolonged, and more severe.
There are increasing battles over agricultural producers' access to the scarce water
supplies of this State. Dire results seem almost inevitable as the population is allowed to
keep growing without an end in sight.
In fact, the loons who run Cali now -- and the even loonier loons who will run an
independent Cali -- will make it a badge of honor to show how many Mexicans they can admit to
settle on their land, and how fast. That will intensify the drought and hasten the day when
Cali can no longer maintain anything like its current ag output. God help them, and us, when
that day comes.
The coasts have extensive global trade networks and would effectively lay siege on the
interior.
Actually, it is the other way around. What coasts? If in the East it could be
viewed as a somewhat continuous urban chain in the North-East, the West Coast "elites" reside
mostly in Seattle, Portland, SF urban areas, which, while large, are in effect the places of
compact residence. As such, they are fairly easily isolated, not to mention the fact of
undeniable emasculation of their male residents. They can not find often their own ass with
their two hands in a brightly lit room, let alone "lay siege" to anything. This is not to
speak of the fact that all, without exception, urban centers depend entirely on "interior"
for food. As per interior main cities--as latest elections showed, Ohio or Indiana, which are
interior and do contain serious urban centers are not "elitists" states. Neither is Texas,
which is also a major urban and port state. In other words, it is a very complex picture.
This is going to be a bitter pill for Steve Sailer to swallow, but his beloved California is
not the preeminent region in America's economy.
"According to the Brookings Institution, if it stood alone as a country, the Great Lakes
economy would be one of the largest economic units on earth (with a $4.5-trillion gross
regional product). It contains most of an area urban planners have viewed as an emerging
Great Lakes Megalopolis which has an estimated 54 million people."
"If the state were considered separately, it would rank as the sixth largest economy in
the world, behind rest of the United States, China, Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom.
The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that California's GDP was $2.5 trillion in
2015, up 4.1 percent from a year earlier."
Let California go. We don't need them with their mealy, inedible vegetables.
@Anonymous
You make a great point about the prospect of economic blockade, in effect, by coastal
independent Cali against the inland portion of the State that presumably remains with the
USA.
First of all, the inland and more rural-to-suburban counties must demand to leave Cali
before Cali secedes. They could comprise the new U.S. States of, say, East California and
North California.
Second, the non-seceding States -- and by extension the USA -- MUST keep territory leading
to the coast, and significant frontage on the Pacific Ocean in northern, central, and
southern California, for reasons economic and military above all.
If merely the LA and SF metroplexes, broadly construed, secede, leaving the majority of
the State's counties to stay in the USA, that might not be so bad for the rest of the
USA.
Here is the website of a California political party advocating eventual negotiated
independence:
They are waaaaaay too far left for me, but then, (1) that's why they want to leave the
USA, and (2) that's why my wife and I would almost certainly have to pick up stakes and leave
LA if Cali seceded, because something like the Cali National Party platform would surely
garner a BIG supermajority of support in many of Cali's coastal counties.
P.S. But would the rest of the USA have the balls to prohibit all immigration from the new
Third World coastal "Republic" of California? That would need to happen for it to benefit
(and not continue gradually balkanizing and destroying) the rest of the USA longer-term.
@Andrei
Martyanov Texas may not be nearly as much a home to America-hating elites as LA, SF, NY,
and DC, to be sure, but politically it will become part of that coalition seeking to replace
and subjugate European-Americans nationwide. As you know, Texas is going Mexican, and its
politics are about to change drastically.
In its current size and form, much of Texas even ten years from now cannot be counted as a
reliable ally or as a place for Americans to seek refuge from violence, discrimination,
etc.
Perhaps Texas, too, is in need of a peaceful, negotiated break-up into smaller, more
manageable, more culturally / socially cohesive States. This needn't entail secession, just
new U.S. States whose people are allowed the broad autonomy guaranteed them by the Tenth
Amendment. (yeah, I know, cue the laugh track)
I often think that simply adhering to our Constitution would greatly dampen the ardor and
perceived need for secession. The Constitution called for very limited powers for the federal
government, and conversely very broad autonomy for the people of each State to decide almost
everything except national monetary and foreign policy. Why would California "need' to secede
if they were allowed to have whatever laws they want on abortion, homosexual marriage,
universal government-funded or government-provided healthcare, etc.? Why would Texas need to
secede if they were allowed to have quite the opposite laws, without interference or threat
from the fed gov (including the un-elected legislators known as the federal judiciary).
@Andrei
Martyanov P.S. There are entire counties in south Texas where the population is almost
100% Mexican. Not just right on the border, either.
This phenomenon of immi-vasion keeps spreading northward while we Americans focus on the
REALLY important issues like preventing Russians in Crimea from reuniting with Russia &
demanding more "rights" for mentally ill people ("transgenders").
@hyperbola
Most participants here will know virtually nothing about Spain, Catalonia, or even successful
confederal models in Europe. Long, complicated topics, so I will make only a few short
comments here.
1. The present spanish monarchy essentially involved a murderous dictator designating a
king. A poisonous contradiction (restoring a monarchy) was mostly accepted to escape from the
murderous dictatorship. There are "republicans" who would like to end the monarchy throughout
Spain, including Catalonia. The issue of constitutional reform is now on the table and the
Spanish would be wise to get rid of such an anachronism. The country has suffered every time
that it has had foreigners as kings, starting with the "germans" Carlos I and Carlos II who
bled Spaniards for numerous wars in Europe. The present royal family is of French (the
Borbons) and German (Schleswig-Holstein Sonderburg-Glücksburg) ancestry. The grandmother
of the present king (Felipe VI) can be seen (together with her brothers) dressed in the
uniform of the Hitler Youth in numerous web sites.
2. Cataluña is not the only area of Spain that "rebels" against right-wing,
centralized control. Similar sentiments are present (to more or less degree) in Pais Vasco,
Galicia, Valencia, Baleares, Canarias, . Spain has a centuries long history of failing to
deal with the pluri-national nature of the country and seems to be failing once again.
3. There are models of pluri-national confederations/nations that are exemplary instances
of how to deal with such problems. Switzerland is perhaps the best known. The
"Eidgenossenschaft" (confederation) of the german-speaking areas dates from about 1250 and
initially involved seven independent countries, each of which retained its own sovereignity.
The model was soon after copied in the french- and italian-speaking areas of modern
Switzerland. The present confederation includes 27 kantons (the federal constitution
guarantees that they remain sovereign nations, i.e. in principle can withdraw) and 4
different languages. The Kantons retain power over taxes, education, welfare, citizenship, ..
Direct democracy reigns at both the national and kantonal level, i.e. citizens can
reject/initiate laws by referendum, including kantonal/national taxation/expenditure.
4. Spain actually has a mixed system in which certain "autonomia" (states – Pais
Vasco, Navarra, Aragon) have a status somewhat like Kantons in Switzerland, e.g. a separate
status with regard to taxation.
Probably the best thing that Spain could do would be to copy the Swiss model and get rid
of the monarchy. Probably even Cataluña could be convinced to join such a model. I
need to learn more about the structure of the government in Spain, and its recent history.
Your comment was VERY helpful, thank you
@AP
And imagine if the US had a two-round system for our presidential elections, i.e., top two
vote-getters from the first round advancing to a run-off.
We could have seen MILLIONS more people voting Green or Libertarian instead of Trump or
Clinton. That system would tell us the real popularity of these "major-party" candidates,
which is pitifully low when people feel that they have a realistic alternative and a way to
express it through their vote.
Trump and Clinton probably wouldn't get even 30% of the votes each in such a first round.
Even farther below the support that Catalonian voters just showed for independence.
Go Catalonia!
Go Scotland!
And while we're at it, "don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out, LA and San
Francisco, Portland and Seattle."
@hyperbola
I don't consider Spain v Catalonia any of my business so I'm neutral but Murray seems to be
an ideologue more interested in narrative than truth. He even claims today's Spaniards had
Muslim ancestors, a typical leftist talking point. He's not very credible.
The Constitution called for very limited powers for the federal government, and
conversely very broad autonomy for the people of each State to decide almost everything
except national monetary and foreign policy.
Very broad autonomy to decide means that they would have to use this autonomy
– which is a shockingly different mindset from what exists at present. Each citizen
would have to be personally involved in evaluating issues, attending meetings and voting
– and the only way I could see this happening is if Civic Democratic participation was
compulsory.
"Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it." -George Bernard Shaw
My assumption is that most citizens would be too busy or too lazy and disinterested to
participate, so it would have to be mandatory, with a penalty of loss of voting rights or
even loss of citizenship. The idea is that you are only a citizen as long as you act as a
citizen, and it would almost certainly need to combine with a period of compulsory military
service for all male citizens to concretize the idea.
the people of each State to decide almost everything except national monetary and
foreign policy.
Monetary and foreign policy would have to come back to the states as well. Foreign policy
needs to be firmly rooted in full participative state decision making, and FED/Treasury
national level credit creation completely halted (we know where that money goes).
With respect to Northern California, the author misses the obvious precedent of West
Virginia, which in 1861 was carved out of the western parts of a recently seceded
Virginia.
@RadicalCenter
Then there's the issue of what to do with the launch facilities of Vandenberg AFB. Will this
relationship be like Russia leasing Baikonur from Khazakhstan? Do we have any reason to fear
a nuclear armed Southern California with Ballistic Missile Technology? Should Mr. Trump start
a pre-emptive bombing campaign now?
The idea is that you are only a citizen as long as you act as a citizen, and it would
almost certainly need to combine with a period of compulsory military service for all male
citizens to concretize the idea.
Also, out-of-state military service would help Americans to get to know each other
(Californians to Ohio, Texans to California, Alabamians to Washington State, New Yorkers to
Montana or Hawaiians to Alaska).
The dissolution of the old Austria-Hungarian Empire in 1918, for instance, was not only
a tragic mistake geopolitically, but made little sense economically, ethnically or
historically.
Of course the dissolution of A-H was necessary and it's further existance would be absurd
– it woudl also destablize the Europe, because of constant frictions within it.
Historically, Poland, Czechia etc were historic nations, who were unwilling to be ruled by
Austrians (even though in 1914 Austrians were the best from the three partitioners). I don't
know why double standards with respect to southern states and my own country. Don't Poles
deserve the same right to live in their own country as southerners?
Interesting point of view, though I beg to differ on a point or two.
It would seem that your presentation of Catalan claims to independence lacks a few key
observations. The union of Spanish crowns actually dates from the late 15th century with the
marriage of Queen Isabel of Castile to King Ferdinand of Aragon. While they each continued to
rule over their own kingdom, they did coordinate some key policies. Their daughter Juana "la
Loca" was the first to rule over the two kingdoms together. "Spain" became a Habsburg land
when Juana's son Charles I succeeded in 1517. Spain continued to be ruled by Habsburgs until
1700, when Charles II died without leaving an heir. The heir apparent was Louis XIV's
grandson Philip, a Bourbon. However, the Netherlands and England did not want him to succeed
and therefore they recognized Charles VI, son of the German Emperor, as King of Spain. In the
ensuing War of the Spanish Succession (1700-1713/4), the Dutch and English conquered
Gibraltar and occupied Catalonia. In the end they had to accept that while Catalonia
supported Charles VI, most of the rest of Spain preferred Philip. Once firmly on the throne,
the new monarch did not exactly favor Catalonia, to put it mildly. However the seeds for
Catalan separatism had now been planted in fertile soil.
As for the point of what constitutes a nation, the answer is simple: anything at all,
whether geographic location, language (which really is a "dialect with an army"), wealth,
economic specialization, religion (Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks all speak the same language,
but Serbs are Orthodox, Croats Roman Catholic and Bosniaks Mohammedan), etc.
Basically, the key elements for constituing a nation are money, time, perseverance,
violence and propaganda.
The tyrannical actions of Madrid against a referendum that probably would have failed
otherwise, fully justify secession (at least as a threat) at this point. Another point,
misunderstood by the author, is that the Catalan language is the primary language spoken in
Barcelona and the region around it, and is the official language of the universities and
Government. The Basques, who are the most creative group in Spain, also are chafing under
Madrid's rule .
"1258. Thus, for eight centuries the region has been united with Spain".
This is completly false, Spain simply HAS NOT 8 centuries of existence, learn History first,
wright after. americans and History, what a difficult relation.
@Miro23
Yes, an excellent article from Prof Cathey.
And you are right, Miro23, about the role of C 2oth "leftist internationalism" which
continues to envelope Barcelona. People living very bourgeois lifestyles would come up to you
and spout often very extreme left wing opinions, which you knew they had no intention of
following in real life.
My brother, a Post Grad in Spanish History, had to teach in Barcelona for a year as part of
his course. I visited him several times. He came to despise Barcelona and its phony Toytown
anarchists and other leftists. Neither he nor I have ever felt the desire to return.
Without these Toytown leftists, I doubt there would have been a Referendum at all. Puigdemont
needed their support and this was his bribe.
@hyperbola
You are spot on hyperbola. The author here tries to "stick his thumb on the scale"
" Only 40% of the eligible voters in Catalonia participated in the recent plebiscite
on possible independence; of those around 90% voted "Si."[my emphasis]
His conclusion ? The plebiscite/referendum lacks popular validity.
Absent, of course, is Madrid's direct sabotage of the vote: ballots "stolen", & voters
obstructed from voting (sometimes violently, also psychologically).
Nor, if memory serves, is the 40% that much less than the voter turn- out for some other
countries, such as the US.
The story that the WWI is the direct result of the assassination of the Austrian Archduke
is an example of Fake News at its best.
In reality, the English planned to take down Germany long before WWI. The Entente Cordiale
with France had secret clauses that neither the British parliament nor most of the Cabinet
knew anything about.
Winston Churchill switched from Conservatives to Liberals in order to get the Liberals to
start the war. As First Lord of the Admirality, he agreed with the French that their fleet
should stay in the Mediterranean and the Royal Navy would defend their Atlantic coast.
The British public were in favour of the Prussians and against the Russians and French.
All of that was changed in a concerted propaganda campaign that went on for more than 10
years.
Belgium was not a neutral country – the main pretext for getting the UK into the war
– as it planned with the British the details of how a large British expeditionary force
should deploy into Belgium to fight the Germans – long before 1914.
Lastly, Germany was the last country to mobilise. So much for "German Aggression".
I spent much of September in Spain, often trying to reconcile my conviction that Catalan
separatists were wrongheaded provincials heading down a dangerous path with my past
sympathies for some secessionist movements elsewhere. This article, with its compact history
review, was helpful in describing some of the nuances differentiating diverse separatist
movements. It shows that different conclusions about which ones are justified need not
reflect a double standard.
@Matra
"I'm neutral but Murray seems to be an ideologue . He even claims today's Spaniards had
Muslim ancestors, a typical leftist talking point."
Maybe he is an ideologue, but you certainly are.
Although I guess the practice of history is itself typically leftist.
Imagine claiming that modern Spaniards may have Muslim ancestors when Muslim's controlled
much of Spain (in ever decreasing area) from 711AD to 1492. I wonder whether a few drops or
more of Muslim/Arabic blood my snuck into all that European blood over the course of
100′s of years ?
Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks all speak the same language
It's more complicated than that. There are several dialects in ex-Yugoslavia, crossing
through the ethnic lines. The are three dialects in Croatia, and I was told that one
(official language) is almost same as Serbian, while two others are as different as almost a
different language. If some Croat is here, he could confirm.
I tend to support popular secessionist movements reflexively, since the ability to opt out
is the only thing that gives real meaning to consent of the governed. But if Spain is
determined to drown this attempt in a Lincolnesque bloodbath, the Catalans better ask
themselves if it is really worth it. Some of us onlookers will wish them well, most won't
care, but no one will ride to their rescue.
The brief synopsis of Spanish history is helpful, and Catalonia is the issue. But the
article opens with California, which is the primary interest of almost all of us in terms of
secession. Not necessarily CA, but the USA Empire.
Yes, if California secedes, its many 'conservative' peoples and their towns and counties
will be even more at the mercy of the ultra looney Left of Hollywood and San Francisco. But
that is not a deal-breaker of the idea. The secession of 13 colonies of the British Empire
meant that in each of those 13 colonies sizable numbers of pro-Empire people were made very
unhappy at losing their concept of nation.
The fact is that there will be no classic secession within the current USA Empire, no
state or 2 or 13 will leave with the rest remaining as the USA. If anything comes, it will be
a divorce. The entire compact will be abolished, with property divided.
And yes, that splitting of states will mean that we will see movements out of one into the
other. We will see more conservative people living in, say, CA or MA or MN, moving to NC or
MO or TX. We will see Liberals living in VA and FL and AR fleeing to NY or Chicago or
Portland or Seattle.
@ThreeCranes
'Elite' states secede? Could be interesting.
- 45% of California, for example, is Federal land.
- Without US taxpayers money CA would be a 3rd world country completely filled with
unemployable & dumb illegal immigrants.
- Think about this brief list made possible by the US taxpayers / federal government,
money CA would not get and then tens of thousands of CA people would lose their jobs (= lost
CA tax revenues):
aerospace contracts, defense contracts, fed gov, software contracts, fed gov airplane
orders, bases, ports, money for illegal aliens costs, federal monies for universities,
'affirmative action monies, section 8 housing money, monies for highways, monies for 'mass
transportation', monies to fight crime, monies from the EPA for streams & lakes, monies
from the Nat. Park Service, monies for healthcare, monies for freeloading welfare recipients,
and all this is just the tip of the iceberg
- Not to mention the numerous counties in CA which will not want to be part of the
laughable 'Peoples Republic of California'.
- And imagine the 'Peoples Republic of California Army', hilarious.
"... "Behind the assault on the working class in Spain is a European and indeed global crisis of capitalism. After a quarter century of social cuts and escalating imperialist wars across the Middle East since the Stalinist bureaucracy dissolved the Soviet Union in 1991, European capitalism is in an advanced state of collapse. Particularly since the 2008 Wall Street crash and global economic crisis, the ruling elites in Europe and America all sought to strengthen the military and police agencies, while imposing devastating austerity on the workers. ..."
"... Spanish capitalism is economically moribund. Spain's unemployment rate stands at a massive 17.8 percent and at 38.6 percent for the under-25s. One in four unemployed have not had a job for at least four years. 2.5 million workers came off the unemployment rolls not because they found jobs in Spain, but because they emigrated to find work elsewhere." ..."
Profoundly illuminating analysis of the Catalonia situation the observation that national
balkanization is very problematic in the context of bringing substantially enhanced economic
rights and opportunities to a broad spectrum of the oppressed in a nation's population is
consistent with recent history elsewhere, e.g the former Yugoslavia.
"Behind the assault on the working class in Spain is a European and indeed global crisis
of capitalism. After a quarter century of social cuts and escalating imperialist wars across
the Middle East since the Stalinist bureaucracy dissolved the Soviet Union in 1991, European
capitalism is in an advanced state of collapse. Particularly since the 2008 Wall Street crash
and global economic crisis, the ruling elites in Europe and America all sought to strengthen
the military and police agencies, while imposing devastating austerity on the workers.
This left Spain -- like Greece, Portugal, Italy, and much of Eastern Europe -- in ruins.
Spanish capitalism is economically moribund. Spain's unemployment rate stands at a massive
17.8 percent and at 38.6 percent for the under-25s. One in four unemployed have not had a job
for at least four years. 2.5 million workers came off the unemployment rolls not because they
found jobs in Spain, but because they emigrated to find work elsewhere."
He makes a point that by banning the referendum, the Spanish Government unwittingly
promotes the cause for independence of Catalonia. Since the referendum is deemed to be
illegal, the only ones to attend it would be pro-independence-minded people, which would
result in the high percentage of vote for the independence. Consequently, pro-independence
leaders would be able to capitalize on that result by claiming that it reflects the will of
the people (despite the low voter turnout).
"... How Catholicism fell from grace in Ireland , Chicago Tribune, ..."
"... coup d'état ..."
"... Men of 1916 had much in common with Bolsheviks | But October Revolution and Easter Rising had radically diverging ideologies , ..."
"... on all sorts of subjects ..."
"... for all kinds of outlets. (This ..."
"... no longer includes ..."
"... National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and ..."
"... and several other ..."
"... . He has had two books published by VDARE.com com: ..."
"... ( also available in Kindle ) and ..."
"... People who are impoverished proclaim their allegiance to their community, because they are looking for help . Hence nationalism and especially religion. ..."
"... I view national sovereignty as an indispensable fire wall against globalism which ends in universal, perpetual Feudalism wherein the .001% have everything and the rest nothing. But neither do I wish to be ruled by Imperial Washington which I regard as distant, foreign and EVIL. ..."
"... I'm currently residing in Texas which is at least a big as Spain. If Texas holds a referendum on secession I know how I will vote. I don't even care about the downside if the upside is the removal of Washington's boot from between my shoulder blades. ..."
"... "Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it." -George Bernard Shaw ..."
Nationalism isn't hard to understand. People want to live among and be governed by other
people mostly like themselves, with the same language and shared history, not by foreigners in
some distant city who don't understand them.
It is of course the case that our co-ethnics may be crazy beasts -- North Korea 's a nation ; Khmer
Rouge Cambodia was a nation -- while the foreigners in that distant city might be benign and wise , or at
any rate not life-threatening.
The Middle East under the Ottoman Empire was not an exemplar of peace and justice, but it
doesn't compare badly with today's Middle
East.
I'm basically on the same page with these nationalists, but with reservations. When the
Vietnamese army put an end to the Khmer Rouge government by invading Cambodia, most Cambodians
hailed them as liberators. Perhaps I would have, too; perhaps even Enoch Powell would have.
So there are qualifications to be made about nationalism, especially small-country
nationalism or sub-nationalism. You're not drawing from a big pool of political talent there. I
have mixed occasionally with Scottish and Welsh nationalists; let's just say I wasn't
impressed.
Sub-nationalism like Catalonia's is also in contradiction to nationalism proper. Who's the
truer nationalist: the Spanish citizen who would fight and die for Spain, or the Catalan
separatist who feels the same way about his province?
Here you're in the zone of differences that can only finally be decided by force of
arms.
You don't have to recall horrors like Cambodia or North Korea to develop
some caution about nationalism. Growing up in mid-20th-century
England, we had an instance of passionate nationalism -- or sub-nationalism, depending on
your point of view -- right on our doorstep . That was
of course Ireland.
The Irish had been
struggling for centuries to attain self-government. In 1921, after some
revolutionary violence
, they got autonomy ; then in
1937, full independence.
Having won their independence, the Irish signed on to every trans-national organization that
came along. When I took my wife on a tour of the United Nations headquarters in 1987, our tour
guide was an Irishman, and we heard a lot of Irish accents around the building.
Likewise with the European Union, on which the Irish are very keen. The sour joke in Britain
thirty years ago was that having fought eight hundred years for their independence , the
Irish had then sold it for a package of EU agricultural subsidies.
You may say that the right to national independence includes the right to national suicide.
I suppose it does. Still, as a fan of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's observation
that "Nations are the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities," I lament the
transformation of Ireland, the Land of Saints and Scholars, into an airport departure lounge --
with the rest of Britain not far behind, indeed in some respects ahead .
"What was long divided must unite, what was long united must divide." Hearing that now we
Americans of course think of the secession talk that seems to be getting more and more common
on the blogs, including very smart and sensible ones like the Audacious
Epigone .
If Catalonia, why not California, or Texas, or New England?
All right; history has its ebbs and flows, to be sure, and to stand athwart them crying
"Stop!" is most likely futile. As a conservative, though, I rather strongly favor leaving the
big old nations as they are, absent some obvious and pressing need to break them up.
So without knowing much about Catalonia or its independence movement, I'll register myself
as guardedly skeptical, on general grounds. America for Americans; Spain for Spaniards;
nationalism over trans-nationalism and sub-nationalism both .
The tension between nationalism and imperialism was a factor in Lenin's revolution. Tsarist
Russia was an empire; it included numerous non-Russian nationalities. What plan did the
Bolsheviks have for them?
Irish historian Frank Armstrong had a thoughtful op-ed on this in Wednesday's Irish
Times , contrasting the Bolshevik coup of 1917 with the Easter Rising in Ireland
the previous year.[ Men
of 1916 had much in common with Bolsheviks | But October Revolution and Easter Rising had
radically diverging ideologies , October 5, 2017] . He points out the tension among
Bolsheviks, notably Stalin, between, on the one hand, the orthodox Marxist line that "the
proletariat has no homeland" and nationalism is a reactionary bourgeois impulse, and on the
other hand, admiration for revolutionary violence like that practiced by the Irish rebels.
Armstrong doesn't go anywhere much with his op-ed, but it's a useful reminder that
nationalists and trans-nationalists can find themselves thinking the same thoughts.
Here's where I renew my call for a worldwide alliance of nationalists along the lines of the
old Comintern, the Communist International.
We can call this alliance the Natintern, the Nationalist International. I'm still waiting
for someone to come up with a suitable anthem, to be called of course The Nationale
.
A good discussion of a complex topic. Touches on conservatism versus radicalism as well,
which I think affects whether one is likely to support sub-nationalism against an established
nation, even one's own.
Perhaps light on the aspect of ethnic and "blood and soil" nationalism versus "citizenist"
(to use I think Sailer's term) nationalism. I would propose that the Catalan secessionists
lack the stomach to win a fight for independence and will lose if they start one, in part
because their nationalist movement is not strongly based upon ethnic solidarity, because they
are indoctrinated in the modern globalist dogma which says that would be "racist".
I noted recently that there is an interesting contrast between the British government's
concession, in the case of Scotland, to the sub-nation of the inherent right to unilateral
independence based merely on a majority of the sub-nation's population supporting it, and
Spain's adherence to the opposite (and much more widespread) principle that secession is a
matter for the nation as a whole, or simply treasonous sedition.
Someone has pointed to Quebec as another case where the point was conceded to the popular
will of the sub-nation, and the whole process of the British withdrawal from colonial empire
could be viewed as being the same (although there was a deal of US coercion and implicit
threats of secessionist violence involved, along with the basic fact that thanks to WW1 &
WW2 the British elites knew they lacked the strength to hold onto their colonies).
Clearly the constitutional positions of Scotland and of Catalonia are very different, but
I think the governments of both Spain and Britain could have found ways to rationalise making
the opposite choice to the one they took, if they had wanted to. Perhaps it comes down to the
British government being confident they would win a referendum, but the Spanish government
fearing they would not.
It seems to me you are countering the "What was long divided must unite, what was long
united must divide," philosophy with one of "This far but no farther." You even recognize
that your point of view cannot prevail but prefer it anyway. Well here's to you Don Quixote!
May separaratism never come to La Mancha.
I have recently been thinking that one of the strongest and most consistent geopolitical
trends of the past one hundred years has been an explosion in national entities. We went from
around 50 in 1900 to around 200 today.
But it wasn't always like this. I haven't seen any data on this, but the number of states
or state-like entities must have exceeded a thousand during the medieval period, before the
rise of the great gunpowder empires.
And there's no logical reason for this fragmentation not to continue, at least so long as
the world remains generally peaceful with the associated lack of selection against small
(i.e. militarily weak) states. As local, pre-imperial identities are rediscovered, we could
be looking at something like 400 states by 2100 (if projecting linearly) or even close to
1000 (if projecting exponentially). Much like the inexorable forwards march of liberalism,
can this even be stopped?
And there's no logical reason for this fragmentation not to continue, at least so long
as the world remains generally peaceful with the associated lack of selection against small
(i.e. militarily weak) states.
But is there any reason to expect it necessarily to continue, given that it appears to be
an aggregate function of a number of different processes, some of which are no longer in
force, some of which are countervailing and might well become more dominant in future?
It certainly isn't just a function of the world becoming more peaceful and therefore
smaller states being more viable – after all the process you describe began before the
two world wars. The breakup of the big continental European empires is a different process
from the later breakup of the colonial overseas empires, which again is a different process
from the collapse of the Soviet empire or of Yugoslavia. They all have in common that they
represent the loss of central authority over sub-nations, but they all result from different
causes.
Then you have the much vaunted general loss of real sovereignty in the modern globalised
world. Many of the newly "independent" entities probably have less freedom of action than
many vassals of the Holy Roman Empire. And you have the rise of the EU. How genuinely
sovereign will the constituent nations be as the EU develops further towards a United States
of Europe?
For all the effort expended, there are few real examples of the long established nations
of Europe fragmenting other than as the result of military defeat. Scotland, Wales, the
Basque Country, Catalonia, Lombardy, etc, are all still part of the larger states of which
they are sub-nations.
Enoch Powell said the European community was the economic wing of a
military alliance (Nato). A couple of countries (Greece for one) were told they could not join
the EC unless they were in Nato.
As local, pre-imperial identities are rediscovered, we could be looking at something
like 400 states by 2100 (if projecting linearly) or even close to 1000 (if projecting
exponentially). Much like the inexorable forwards march of liberalism , can this
even be stopped?
Oooooh, did someone screech a boogeyman term? Who cares? Let it fragment. Reduce the size of the state -- always a good thing. The
higher the ratio of citizens to wannabe rulers, the better.
Catalonian like Scottish nationalism is largely motivated by resentment by region that
perceives itself as being used by a milch cow. Ireland was more authentically nationalist.
Powell said the British state was always keen to divest itself of Ireland , but originally
wanted the fig leaf of home rule.
According to Paul Johnson in the Offshore Islanders,
Ireland was a net drain of Britain (that might also have been true of the Empire be the
beginning of the 20th century. Arthur Balfour was right their could be no halfway house.
Nationalism isn't hard to understand. People want to live among and be governed by other
people mostly like themselves, with the same language and shared history, not by foreigners
in some distant city who don't understand them.
People who are impoverished proclaim their allegiance to their community, because they are
looking for help . Hence nationalism and especially religion.
.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nigel-barber/atheism-to-replace-religion-by-2041-a-clarification_b_3695658.html
Research has shown that religion declines not just with rising national wealth but with all
plausible measures of the quality of life, including length of life, decline of infectious
diseases, education, the rise of the welfare state, and more equal distribution of income.
Clearly there is less of a market for religion in societies where ordinary people feel
secure in their daily lives. In the most developed countries, such as Japan and Sweden, the
quality of life is so good that the majority is already secular.
Religion in an affluent society has not a snowball's chance in hell . When it was the
poorest country in Europe, Scotland was a byword for religious fanaticism. A crypto-clerical
Irish state had economic growth that was the poorest in western Europe and possibly all
Europe. But once hyper-capitalism transformed Ireland, it became like everywhere
else–only worse. They don't need the Church now–or nationalism. With war you
would see nationalism. It is not nationalism that produces war but more the other way about.
Germany got tired of great powers marching across it. Cambodia and North Korea too. For a
resurgence of worldwide nationalism, a global war more true in the Clausewitz sense (ie
unlimited) than anything imaginable would be needed.
"Nationalism isn't hard to understand. People want to live among and be governed by other
people mostly like themselves, with the same language and shared history, not by foreigners
in some distant city who don't understand them."
I view national sovereignty as an indispensable fire wall against globalism which ends in
universal, perpetual Feudalism wherein the .001% have everything and the rest nothing. But
neither do I wish to be ruled by Imperial Washington which I regard as distant, foreign and
EVIL.
I'm currently residing in Texas which is at least a big as Spain. If Texas holds a
referendum on secession I know how I will vote. I don't even care about the downside if the
upside is the removal of Washington's boot from between my shoulder blades.
Some things expand – others decline. For example the total number
of languages is dropping quickly I'm told. Every now and then there will be a media story
about some old tribesman who dies and with him some language. The tone is always "Og was the
last person on earth to speak (some obscure language)". When I read that I always wonder if
he was the last speaker- who was he conversing with? It seems to me that a language is truly
dead when the second to last speaker dies.
But if one of the root causes for nationalism and splitting off from the old country is
language, with fewer languages shouldn't we have less nationalism?
There is also the 700 channel phenomenon. I have 700 TV channels (I think). The people who
purport to understand such things tell us that newscasters are killing off regional dialects.
Surely if we all speak the same more or less same language in more or less the same way, that
will lessen the pressures to split off and form your own country. No?
Chinese shopping malls I see on the web look a lot like the malls in California. South
Korea might give up the Korean language and adopt Chinese or Japanese. But they could adopt
English. If they wanted to become the 51st state that would help.
As local, pre-imperial identities are rediscovered, we could be
looking at something like 400 states by 2100 (if projecting linearly) or even close to 1000
(if projecting exponentially).
The US could (and maybe should) break up into 50 different nation-states, while the entity
known as the "United States" could evolve from a unitary nation into a transnational
organization, similar to the evolution of the European Union except in reverse.
Meanwhile the EU could easily grow into 50 or more states, the former Soviet Union another
50, India a couple dozen, Africa an unknowable number etc. But even if the fringe areas of
China broke away, that would still leave a homogeneous Han core of more than 1 billion
people.
So in any widespread international fragmentation scenario, China probably wins. And that's
OK, as long as Europeans/whites are allowed to maintain sovereignty over at least parts of
Europe and North America.
On the other hand, if open-borders Spain and other suicidal Western countries (including
the US and Russia) are allowed to survive in their present form, then they are all
demographically doomed as white-majority nations.
@Randal A good discussion of a complex topic. Touches on conservatism versus radicalism
as well, which I think affects whether one is likely to support sub-nationalism against an
established nation, even one's own.
Perhaps light on the aspect of ethnic and "blood and soil" nationalism versus "citizenist"
(to use I think Sailer's term) nationalism. I would propose that the Catalan secessionists
lack the stomach to win a fight for independence and will lose if they start one, in part
because their nationalist movement is not strongly based upon ethnic solidarity, because they
are indoctrinated in the modern globalist dogma which says that would be "racist".
I noted recently that there is an interesting contrast between the British government's
concession, in the case of Scotland, to the sub-nation of the inherent right to unilateral
independence based merely on a majority of the sub-nation's population supporting it, and
Spain's adherence to the opposite (and much more widespread) principle that secession is a
matter for the nation as a whole, or simply treasonous sedition.
Someone has pointed to Quebec as another case where the point was conceded to the popular
will of the sub-nation, and the whole process of the British withdrawal from colonial empire
could be viewed as being the same (although there was a deal of US coercion and implicit
threats of secessionist violence involved, along with the basic fact that thanks to WW1 &
WW2 the British elites knew they lacked the strength to hold onto their colonies).
Clearly the constitutional positions of Scotland and of Catalonia are very different, but
I think the governments of both Spain and Britain could have found ways to rationalise making
the opposite choice to the one they took, if they had wanted to. Perhaps it comes down to the
British government being confident they would win a referendum, but the Spanish government
fearing they would not.
Perhaps light on the aspect of ethnic and "blood and soil" nationalism versus
"citizenist" (to use I think Sailer's term) nationalism. I would propose that the Catalan
secessionists lack the stomach to win a fight for independence and will lose if they start
one, in part because their nationalist movement is not strongly based upon ethnic
solidarity, because they are indoctrinated in the modern globalist dogma which says that
would be "racist".
Well .a little correction if I may.
Ethnic and "blood and soil" nationalism is definitely much stronger in self-sacrifice and
will to fight.
Definitely.
But, in this case, I am not quite sure that Catalan seccseionists aren't actually exactly
that.
I have a feeling that underneath that "citizenist' veneer there is that "ethnic and blood and
soil" element.
If if that is the case you actually, secession wise, have a perfect combination: ethnic
solidarity and open mind; open mind technically, technologically and, of course,
tactically.
You probably visit ARRSE.
Take a look as some of posts by Brits (and ex-military most likely) who live there. Those
hint, strongly, at "ethnic element" in this move. I mean, really, at the end of the day, why this can't be as Slovakia and Czech
Republic?
Or Baltic states?
Or Macedonia (before Kosovo, that is .)? If it goes shooting it could be Slovenia. Short and effective for secession.
Of course, from there it can go through Croatia into, even, Bosnia. Uglier and much
uglier.
I doubt it can go Chechnya or Kosovo. Just not the environment, IMHO.
I see the problem here as deeply emotional and irrational element (by secessionists)
versus modern, soft, civilized logic of Western world (by EU, NATO, US).
The sheer willpower by secessionists, in this case, can simply sweep all that logic
aside.
If .if ..that's that "real" nationalism.
I don't see any good reason why Texas should not have independence if the people who live
there want it. It is bigger than many independent nations like Lithuania or Moldovia that
were once parts of the USSR.
If even tiny places like St. Kitts and Nevis can be independent nations, why shouldn't
constituent United States disunite if they want to, or form new groups of United States? The
constituent states of the US at present time are growing so that they all look the same, so I
would like to see more diversity of lifestyles.
If Catalonia, Why Not California, Texas, or New England?
Don't quote me on this, but I think we already had a war over this, Old Sport.
Don't quote me on this, but I think we already had a war over this, Old Sport.
On the other hand, if a defined population holds a referendum and votes by, say 3/4
majority to separate the political bonds that bind, why not? Is the Constitution a suicide
pact? Is it forever and ever, no matter what?
@John Jeremiah Smith "Defending the Constitution" during the American Civil War almost
turned it into a suicide pact. Hundreds of thousands were killed or wounded, the South
impoverished for the next century, and angry resentments persist to this day.
There are quite a few Americans now whom one could call Neo-Confederates. They argue for
what they claim was the right and rightness of the historic Southern secession. Some speak of
doing it again. I wonder what Derb would say to them?
Ireland was English ruled for centuries, and part of the United Kingdom for about a
century and a quarter (Six counties still are.), but it was never part of Britain. Hibernia
and Brittania are two separate islands, a fact of geography apart from politics, culture,
etc.
I'm currently residing in Texas which is at least a big as Spain. If Texas holds a
referendum on secession I know how I will vote. I don't even care about the downside if the
upside is the removal of Washington's boot from between my shoulder blades.
You wouldn't win a vote on secession (too complicated with borders, currencies, passports
etc), but you might win a vote on the return of States Rights as envisaged in the
Constitution:
Tenth Amendment
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it
to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people".
So go back to the original idea, and mostly RAISE TAXES LOCALLY AND SPEND THEM LOCALLY.
Combine this with the removal of the Washington/FED right to create credit and the removal of
most Presidential powers and that's the end of Washington.
And BTW you could also change the name of the "United States" to the "Confederation of
American States" or "American Confederation" in recognition of the fact that states don' t
have to be united, but could still respect each other's decisions and differences of
opinion.
Let Texas be Texas and California be California.
It's also a useful way to stop foreign military adventures, since local voters would have
to discuss the issue beforehand, budget for the expense and raise a special tax.
Question. The race problem in America. Was it slavery or race? Imagine the following thought-experiment. 300 yrs ago, suppose the colonists brought over 300,000 white or Asian slaves and 300,000
free black Africans.
Suppose, at some time, the white or Asian slaves were freed whereas blacks were never
under slavery.
Today, which group would be causing the most problems? White or Asian descendants of
slaves or black descendants of free blacks?
I think blacks would still be causing the most problem.
Genocide is worse than slavery, and it's been said pre-American Indians got 'genocided'.
But they cause far less problems than blacks(and despite their great poverty).
Blacks were bound to cause more problems because of biological factors. They are more
muscular, more aggressive, and less reflective.
"Defending the Constitution" during the American Civil War almost turned it into a
suicide pact. Hundreds of thousands were killed or wounded, the South impoverished for the
next century, and angry resentments persist to this day.
Indeed. IMO, had the seceding southern states been allowed to go their own way, in all
likelihood they would have abolished slavery of their own accord within two decades.
Possibly, reunification of several states would have eventually occurred, and the America of
today would have a much stronger, more unified country and a less oppressive government.
Is America a nation? It is a country, but to call it a nation seems a bit too far. Think about it: it includes Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Pico and Kansas. What do these areas
have in common. Nothing.
"I view national sovereignty as an indispensable fire wall against globalism which ends
in universal, perpetual Feudalism wherein the .001% have everything and the rest nothing.
But neither do I wish to be ruled by Imperial Washington which I regard as distant, foreign
and EVIL." -- WorkingClass
Hear ye! Especially when globalism is of the corporatist variety -- and is there any other
now in 2017? Small nations generally don't stand a chance nor do the large nations unless
their politic is a functional democracy -- actually ruled for and by an educated and aware
electorate. In the case of small nations, they are like the states of the USA when the states
compete for which can give more to huge corporations in hopes of the corporations relocating
and bringing capital and jobs to Nebraska, Georgia, Texas, etc. and the winner is Global
Capital, Inc..
@Miro23 As Justice Clarence Thomas has pointed out (I believe it was in dissenting
opinion in Gozales v. Raich ), the SCOTUS with their radical judicial activism (from
both the 'liberal' and the 'conservative' sides if the Court) have effectively repealed the
Tenth Amendment.
I agree with Thomas on that score, but that doesn't mean that I agree with those who find
merit in the Confederacy's claim that the Tenth Amendment justified formation of the CSA and
the bombardment of Fort Sumter by the Confederate States Army, thus beginning the Civil
War.
If the Tenth Amendment were intended to nullify Article I, Section 10, then it needed to
spell it out within the Amendment.
No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation
No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, enter into any Agreement or Compact
with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or
in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.
-- U.S. Const., Art. I, Section 10
Sure, there are arguments to the contrary, but this approach is by far the most practical
and truly conservative approach. The solution to the problem is difficult but plain enough.
The people need to make clear to themselves and to their representatives in Congress that
they do not want to see Congress surrendering its powers under the Constitution, whether that
be to the Executive or to the Judiciary; and, the Congress then needs to rein in the activism
of the SCOTUS, exercising their powers as given in Art. III, Sect. 2:
In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in
which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all
the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both
as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress
shall make. -- U.S. Const.Art. III, Section 2
This approach to the necessary reforms is hoping for a lot from the American people, and
it will be a long and difficult pull to effect it, but any other course will be either more
difficult or will entail disaster. Many Americans have given up on reform within the
Constitution, and have given up on the Constitution, and thus they would gladly court
disaster today, thinking that we already have disaster but what is the way out if not by way
of the Constitution?
One great big fly in the ointment of any nation is the rise of the global corporation and
finance. If the CEO of GM could claim during his Senate confirmation hearing back in the
first Eisenhower Administration that there was no conflict of interest from his being Defense
Secretary because 'what was good for GM was good for America" ( and vice versa) that is no
longer true because GM and most other major companies have no 'national' base just
markets.
As we are seeing right now large companies based out of Catalonia are scrambling to
register their business address elsewhere to escape any punitive sanctions that might be
levied by Madrid or Brussels against a putative Catalonian state.
Unless a 'nation' is large enough to fight back against the dominant power of large
corporations ( and really today only the United States and China are) national independence
is mostly an illusion.
First, that slavery is mostly a rhetorical tool in the ongoing Jewish/ SJW race war
against Anglo Americans (of course ignoring the Jewish involvement). The reality of US
slavery was that black slaves were valuable property, and as such, were mostly adequately
housed and fed. They were owned and sometimes abused but apart from legal definitions, I
can't see much practical difference in their situation when compared to much current US
minimum wage (or illegal) work.
There was a recent comment on Unz from someone running three fast food jobs with
hopelessly long, tightly controlled hours and lousy conditions. This work allowed him to
support his family in a minimal way. You could argue that he was not a slave and was "free",
but in what real sense is he any different from a slave. Same as Mexican illegals picking
fruit. They probably work as hard as black slaves did for a minimum of food and shelter.
Second, it's a fact that there are biological differences between races in mean abilities.
But it's still a mean. People like Carson and Obama can be way above the national average on
intelligence and good luck to them.
A positive idea, is that different average ability levels aren't used to identify superior
or inferior races – but rather to see individuals co-operatively contributing at
their own particular level to a project (e.g. family or workplace). Some are at a higher
level, and some at a lower level, but that's true of any organization, and doesn't stop
people co-operating with a fair (not equal) share out of the rewards.
But it isn't going to happen in a divisive SJW environment where the media and education
constantly push a racial narrative, and it's not going to happen with mass immigration that
overwhelms any efforts at integration.
And, of course, it's all much easier with one race, one country, which is more or less how
the world developed naturally over millennia.
However, what is 100% fatal for present US society, is racial patronage (reserved
positions to leverage forward one's own race) of which US Jews are the prime exponents
– pushing forward as an organized racial block to appropriate power for Jewish racial
advantage – even to the extent of expending $ trillions of US resources for the benefit
of Israel.
@peterAUS I agree that there are certainly strong ethno-centric elements to the
nationalism in Catalonia, as presumably there always are in nationalist movements of any
size. My point is really that the movement itself is unable to mobilise those sentiments
effectively – among the most powerful human motivating factors around, which is exactly
why globalists place such a big emphasis on delegitimising their expression, criminalising
and silencing them – probably because they are hobbled by their own leftist
internationalist political philosophy (see the political origins of the main Catalan
separatist parties).
The sheer willpower by secessionists, in this case, can simply sweep all that logic
aside.
If .if ..that's that "real" nationalism.
We, outsiders, don't know that.
Only Catalans do.
Yes, we can't know it for certain. But we can try to assess it from the available
indicators, and my assessment fwiw is that that is not going to happen in the Catalan case,
for various reasons.
Only a fool or a liar would claim certainty on such an issue, though.
@Hibernian Yes, Derbyshire was a little lax using the term "Britain", when he should have
written: " with the rest of the British Isles not far behind "
There are enormous economic advantages in having a large, national economy. You have a
large domestic market, you can have a highly diversified economy, and you have a national
currency. The best way to view this is from the outside. Decades of largely failed
development economics are entirely consumed with how to overcome the advantages of the large,
highly developed economies.
Industrialization's secret sauce was scale -- which a large national economy can support.
This is so obvious and fundamental that it seems to be invisible. But also -- a large
national economy also has 'diseconomies' and people have had to focus so long on those that
it is understandable that the advantages no longer have the proper mindshare.
I view the US as both very strong as well as an underachiever.
Regardless. If a sub-nation splits off and then, for example, adopts the Euro, belongs to
the EU, and is a member of NATO, then it isn't much of a nation. Leaving aside the question
of military, would an independent California continue to use the dollar? And have free trade
and open borders with Oregon and Nevada? And have a free trade agreement with the current 49
US states? If so, then there isn't all that much point. If not, then there are real costs and
likely much higher costs than the states can imagine. The West Coast does quite will in
global trade. And not in small part because Boeing is subsidized and US Tech firms and Media
share a currency with the rest of the country that don't have the same export strength. Not
unlike Germany, who benefit from a Euro that is much weaker than a stand alone Mark would
be.
And finally -- like it or not -- the US will be dealing with a country (China) that will
have massive scale advantages.
@CatoYes, but how many mutually unintelligible dialects would be spoken within that
"homogeneous" Han core?
There are seven major subgroups of spoken Chinese. Of those Mandarin is by far the
largest, with about 950 million first language speakers, or 70% of China's total population.
So even if China was reduced to its Mandarin core it would still be a massive nation.
Enoch Powell was a hypocrite. He was an imperialist and wanted to be Viceroy of India. Yet
when a few workers from Pakistan and Jamaica made it to his country, he became a demagogue
braying about rivers of blood. To him it was always "nationalism for me but not for
thee."
It's in the northeastern corner of Spain, actually.
In that case, which corner is the Basque country around Bilbao and San Sebastian? Maybe
that is not a corner at all. Spain seems to have 2 north east corners, but you might want to
call the Barcelona corner the south east corner as it sits on the Mediterranean facing of the
Iberian peninsula, rather than the Atlantic coast or Bay of Biscay.
In any case, if you really want to nit pick, Barcelona is below the corner formed by the
Mediterranean and the French frontier and faces towards the Balearics.
And are Almeria and Gibraltar and Huelva located at corners, and what are they called?
Spain is actually shaped like the tilted head of a bull, with the two horns extending over
Portugal and below France, so it has a lots of angles and corners and is not as square or
rhomboidal as one might think.
@Miro23 "The reality of US slavery was that black slaves were valuable property, and as
such, were mostly adequately housed and fed. They were owned and sometimes abused but apart
from legal definitions, I can't see much practical difference in their situation when
compared to much current US minimum wage (or illegal) work."
First, Europeans brutally and viciously stripped a group of people from their homeland and
of their identity. Second, Europeans conferred to slavery as being "valuable" and as
"property"; in other words, "gimmedats". Why didn't Europeans work the land themselves? Were
they THAT lazy? Third, black slaves were generally abused by their masters; they were given
the bare necessities, but not education nor individual rights. Fourth, how do YOU feel about
modern day slavery? Based on your logic, you and your family would have no quibble if ripped
from your homeland and forced to till someone else's fields.
"Second, it's a fact that there are biological differences between races in mean
abilities."
IF true, these differences do NOT justify the enslavement of people.
"However, what is 100% fatal for present US society, is racial patronage (reserved
positions to leverage forward one's own race) of which US Jews are the prime exponents "
the Derb does not favor breaking up the large nations what a surprise after all, he is a
conservative and conservatism is nothing if not a propaganda arm of Big Business and keeping
large nations together is important to Big Business profits how else can Big Business thwart
the will of the white majority? After all, the governments of large nations such as america
are not really controllable by the white majority and instead are controlled by .wait for it
Big Business!
In general, the larger the nation, the less united and cohesive the nation and the easier
it is for Big Business to control it the smaller the nation, in general, the more unified and
cohesive .so the people are more united and they are more in control of their own government
.large nations like the USA are not united and cohesive .and thus easier for Big Business to
control the media and the GOP are against the Catalonia revolt a Catalonian nation would be
more united and cohesive than the larger nation of Spain with Catalonia Big Business will
lose out .a Catalonian nation would be better able to control its own immigration and no more
cheap labor for Big Business no more consumer demand via immigration..oh no and no more cheap
domestic labor for upper class propagandists like the Derb
Think about it: it includes Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Pico and Kansas. What do these areas
have in common."
Human beings live here. They are Americans or are part of the United States. They share
a common language, customs, and ways of life.
Having human beings living in a country only differentiates it from uninhabited territory,
so is not a very useful distinction as Antarctica and Greenland and the Arctic seem like the
only really large land masses that are not inhabited, and they all have one thing in
common–they are very cold.
Actually Spanish is spoken as the primary language in Puerto Rico, and there are other
countries, for example Canada other than Quebec, where the way of life might have more in
common with Alaska than with Puerto Rico or Hawaii, which also has its own language, though
it is secondary to English.
@John Jeremiah Smith Non sequitar–an inference or a conclusion that does not follow
from the premises
Slavery is a moral scourge.Moral scourges need to be eradicated.
Therefore, slavery is a moral scourge that needs to be eradicated. **
Please point out how the conclusion ** does not logically flow from the previous
statements.
"Unlikely. Industrialization would have rendered Southern slavery non-competitive."
Southern slave owners, as well as northern business owners, would have employed slaves
rather than imported foreigners to do the backbreaking labor. Then, your ancestors would
likely not come to America, and that would have been an absolute shame.
"Also, spare me your personal moralizing, eh, Corv?"
The same way you personally moralize about the scourge of liberals, the elites, and the
Jews?
First, Europeans brutally and viciously stripped a group of people from their homeland
and of their identity. Second, Europeans conferred to slavery as being "valuable" and as
"property"; in other words, "gimmedats". .Third, black slaves were generally abused by
their masters; they were given the bare necessities, but not education nor individual
rights.
How slaves were treated probably depended on who their owners were. Slavery is obviously
wrong but it doesn't automatically mean that the SJW trope "slaves were generally abused by
their masters" is true.
Fourth, how do YOU feel about modern day slavery? Based on your logic, you and your
family would have no quibble if ripped from your homeland and forced to till someone else's
fields.
I never said that. I was talking about modern day, "free market" hard minimum wage work
for excess hours, in return for a bare survival wage, and the similarity to slavery.
"Second, it's a fact that there are biological differences between races in mean
abilities."
IF true, these differences do NOT justify the enslavement of people.
Try reading what I wrote. No one is trying to enslave anybody. The whole point is that
mean racial differences are irrelevant given 1) the amount of variation about the average and
2) people of different abilities being able to harmoniously and usefully work together in
most real life situations.
"However, what is 100% fatal for present US society, is racial patronage (reserved
positions to leverage forward one's own race) of which US Jews are the prime exponents
"
Why are you so obsessed with Jews?
I know that it's taboo to mention the fact the Jewish 2% of the US population have an
outsized influence on Congress, the media, the FED/Treasury and US foreign policy, and they
have got it through a long term policy of ethnic patronage (i.e. racism).
The true obsession is US media concern with hiding the fact.
Sorry Mr Derbyshire. I know that you're an American by choice while I'm merely one by
ancestry, but it seems to me and to many others that the need to disaggregate is obvious and
pressing. If I thought that there was even a remote chance of returning the republic to
something reasonably like the one I grew up in during the 1950s and 1960s, I'd certainly make
the effort to effect that change. But we're past the point of no return. Too much of the
nation is now a polyglot melange of Third Worlders. The only hope now is to try to save those
parts of the Heartland that may yet be pulled back from the brink.
@Miro23 There's at least as good a chance of disaggregation as there is of returning to
federalism. I'd say it's a considerably better chance. The globalists/multiculturalists in
the blue regions (blue islands in a sea of red) will never consent to federalism. They might
not be able to prevent other regions from breaking away.
@Grandpa Charlie The Constitution is a dead letter. It is routinely flouted by both
parties. One of the parties clearly despises it except when judges that they appointed can
interpret it to mean the opposite of what it clearly means. If what you are suggesting were
possible, I'd be in full agreement with you, but that ship has long since sailed.
@anon I have no problem trading with the people of California, and I'd hope that they'd
have no problem trading with me. But I don't want to live under the sort of laws that
Californians want to live under. Best solution: We go our separate ways, but still cooperate
where such cooperation is seen to be beneficial to both the parties.
@Corvinus Your grasp of the realities of the slave trade is weak indeed. Those who
"stripped" the homeland and identity from the African slaves were the Africans who kidnapped
them (or enslaved them by judicial process) and then sold them to European and Arab slave
traders. The European and Arab slave traders (and those who bought the slaves from them) are
not without serious fault, but they were simply availing themselves of a trade that had
existed for centuries.
@Propagandist Hacker the Derb does not favor breaking up the large nations...what a
surprise...after all, he is a conservative...and conservatism is nothing if not a propaganda
arm of Big Business...and keeping large nations together is important to Big Business
profits...how else can Big Business thwart the will of the white majority? After all, the
governments of large nations such as america are not really controllable by the white
majority and instead are controlled by....wait for it...Big Business!
In general, the larger the nation, the less united and cohesive the nation...and the
easier it is for Big Business to control it...the smaller the nation, in general, the more
unified and cohesive....so the people are more united...and they are more in control of their
own government....large nations like the USA are not united and cohesive....and thus easier
for Big Business to control...the media and the GOP are against the Catalonia revolt...a
Catalonian nation would be more united and cohesive than the larger nation of Spain with
Catalonia...Big Business will lose out....a Catalonian nation would be better able to control
its own immigration...and no more cheap labor for Big Business...no more consumer demand via
immigration..oh no...and no more cheap domestic labor for upper class propagandists
like...the Derb I should like to see John Derbyshire respond to this? Ahoy, Mr Derbyshire,
are you reading the comments?
"Here's where I renew my call for a worldwide alliance of nationalists along the lines of
the old Comintern, the Communist International. We can call this alliance the Natintern, the
Nationalist International. I'm still waiting for someone to come up with a suitable anthem,
to be called of course The Nationale."
We already have a stirring anthem; we just need new lyrics.
I wonder whether this Billy Bragg (the name itself is humorous) is sincere, or is an
anti-Communist parodist. His exaggerated British accent sounds comical (e.g., "comraids"),
and his lyrics, with their imperfect scansion, read like a mock on political correctness:
Stand up, all victims of oppression / For the tyrants fear your might / Don't cling so
hard to your possessions [a taunt at John Lennon's "Imagine"?] / For you have nothing if you
have no rights / Let racist ignorance be ended
Let no one build walls to divide us / Walls of hatred nor walls of stone [Hear that, Trump?]
/ Come greet the dawn and stand beside us / We'll live together or we'll die alone
@Grandpa Charlie The South tried to break away from the Union – and the result was
the Civil War.
The idea is to stay within a looser Union (American Confederation?), whereby States can
still respect and cooperate with each other, but with a lot smaller role for Washington, and
correspondingly greater role in looking after their own affairs (raising and spending taxes
locally).
Power would switch back to the State/County level and require plenty of citizen
participation (almost certainly obligatory) which wouldn't be a bad thing.
"Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it." -George Bernard Shaw
Trends in China are toward centralization, not separation.
There are different opinions on this:
The true foot soldiers of the political and economic program of Xi and Li are the people
who have the most power in the current system – the local party leadership. This
includes the heads of the 2,862 counties, 333 prefectures and 31 provincial-level divisions
(not counting Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan). Put this group of just roughly 3,200 together,
and you have the most important constituency of all for Xi and Li.
The loyalty and competence of provincial leadership in contemporary China is critical.
Many of the key leaders from this group in fact sit on the Central Committee.
"... Historically, the USSR was on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil war and there are still a lot of ties between Russia and Catalonia today. However, there is also s sympathy between Russia and Spain and the Russians understand that Spain is supporting any and all US policies towards Russia because it is a voiceless and totally subservient US colony. ..."
"... The question which divides a lot of Russians is this: is Russia better off with a strong EU because a strong EU might be more capable of standing up to the US or is Russia better off with a weak EU because a weak EU weakens the Western 'front' against Russia? My personal opinion is that EU is doomed anyway and that a collapse of the EU would be a good thing for the people of Europe as it would bring closer the inevitable decolonization of the European continent. This suggests to me that while the eventual outcome of the current crisis is probably irrelevant to Russia, the fact that a crisis is happening is to Russia's advantage. ..."
"... the Kremlin's position that " this is an internal Spanish issue " is probably supported by a majority of experts. Russia has nothing to gain by involving herself in this crisis and she therefore won't do so. ..."
Catalonia is far away from Russia and the outcome of the crisis there will have no real
impact on Russian national interests. But on a political level, Catalonia is highly relevant to
the Russian political debates. See for yourself:
The case of Catalonia can be compared to Crimea: a local referendum, organized against the
will of the central government. In contrast, when Kosovo was cut-off from Serbia in total
illegality and without any kind of referendum the entire West gave this abomination a standing
ovation. The Russians then issues stark warnings about the precedent this set and thereafter
South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Crimea happened. Is the secession of Catalonia not the next logical
step? Is there not a karmic beauty in the fact that Spain and the rest of the EU are now being
hit by the very same demon they unleashed in Kosovo? There is a definite Schadenfreude
for many Russians in seeing the pompous asses of EU politicians sitting on the red ants nest of
separatism – let's see how smart and "democratic" you guys truly are?! It is rather
funny, in a bitter-sweet way, to see how 'democratic' policemen beat up peaceful demonstrators
whose only "crime" was to want to cast a ballot in a box. A lot of Russians are now saying that
Russia is now the only truly democratic and free country left out there. Needless to say, the
way the Madrid government handled this situation further damage the credibility of the West,
the EU and the entire notion of "civilized Europe" being "democratic".
My feeling is that the way the central government handled this event alienated most Russian
who are simply baffled by the utter stupidity and needless brutality of the police crackdown
during the vote: what in the world were the cops trying to achieve?! Did they really think that
they could prevent the vote? And what is the point in then denying that a referendum did take
place? Or what about the praise for the police and their behavior? I have to say that for all
my pro-Spanish biases, the way Madrid handled it all truly seems fantastically stupid and
self-defeating to me.
Historically, the USSR was on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil war and there
are still a lot of ties between Russia and Catalonia today. However, there is also s sympathy
between Russia and Spain and the Russians understand that Spain is supporting any and all US
policies towards Russia because it is a voiceless and totally subservient US colony.
Still, a lot of Russian commentator did speak about Madrid's "Fascism" in handling the events
in Catalonia, and footage of anti-separatists screaming Francoist slogans did not help.
Some Russians, however, mostly liberal, caution about supporting separatism movements in
Europe because Russia herself in multi-national and because of the risk of the separatist fad
coming right back to Russia. I don't think that this is much of a real risk for Russia. Not
after Chechnia. I just don't see any region in Russia really interested in trying to secede
from the Russian Federation. If anything, I see more potential for various region on the other
side of the Russian border wanting to join Russia (Novorussia to begin with).
The question which divides a lot of Russians is this: is Russia better off with a strong
EU because a strong EU might be more capable of standing up to the US or is Russia better off
with a weak EU because a weak EU weakens the Western 'front' against Russia? My personal
opinion is that EU is doomed anyway and that a collapse of the EU would be a good thing for the
people of Europe as it would bring closer the inevitable decolonization of the European
continent. This suggests to me that while the eventual outcome of the current crisis is
probably irrelevant to Russia, the fact that a crisis is happening is to Russia's
advantage.
I think that most Russians have positive feelings towards both Spain and Catalonia. The only
clearly negative feelings I have seen over the past couple of days are elicited by the brutal
and dumb way Madrid handled this crisis: most Russians are sincerely appalled at the violence
and at the hypocrisy of the EU politicians. But other than that, the Kremlin's position
that " this is an internal Spanish issue " is probably supported by a majority of
experts. Russia has nothing to gain by involving herself in this crisis and she therefore won't
do so.
Strong on the Kurdish/Russian analysis. Not so impressed with the Catalonia stuff, which
seems to me to be overly impressed by all the hysterical propaganda about "police brutality"
in the Spanish police perfectly reasonably trying to enforce the law.
Granted to some extent it's necessary to treat that propaganda seriously, to the extent
that it has been successful in shaping some opinion, but it isn't necessary to restate it as
though it's objectively true, which suggests Saker for some reason actually believes that a
government has no right to order its police to arrest people who break the law, or that
police have no right to deal with people who obstruct them in performing their lawful
duty.
Try doing that in the US some time and see what it gets you.
I have inherent sympathy for the Catalan separatists as nationalists disrupting the Euro
establishment's cosy setup, and inherent antipathy for them as a bunch of globalist lefty
pro-immigration, pro-EU hypocrites, so I'm conflicted on my emotional response to the issue.
Perhaps that allows for more objectivity.
In practical terms, though, I can see no short term future for Catalan separatism. There
is almost zero possibility of any major world government recognising a unilaterally seceding
region in Spain, for obviously self-serving reasons, and a unilateral declaration of
independence leaves Catalonia in breach of Spanish law to the degree that it fails and
outside the EU and without any realistic way to organise its finances and economy to the
extent that it succeeds.
Far from making a mistake, I suspect the Madrid government did the right thing (from the
point of view of the Spanish central government and its tactical objective of frustrating the
Catalan separatists' goal on secession) in making it clear that the "referendum" was illegal
– it prevented it from being a much more credible mandate for independence, and the
hysterical response to a few robust police operations will soon fade as reality sets in.
Rationally, you would expect therefore that the noises the separatists are making about a
UDI within days should be a bluff. However, it's certainly possible that Puigdemont's
analysis is different and he will go ahead with one. In that case, it seems likely the
central government will suspend regional government and arrest the separatist leaders,
replace the senior ranks of the local police force and seek to ride out the likely mass
demonstrations, mob resistance and strikes that will follow.
The separatists can only lose from then on, since all they can do is make life unpleasant
for their own people in Catalonia while the central government tightens the noose. It doesn't
appear there is sufficient or sufficiently strong support for independence in Catalonia, nor
any strong foreign sponsor, to enable them to hold out long enough to bring Spain, backed by
the EU establishment, to its knees. As time goes on, more and more people in Catalonia,
starting with the strong opponents of separatism and moving on to neutrals and ultimately
even "soft" separatist supporters, will come to blame the UDI hotheads for their
situation.
The separatists will be left depending on a "hail Mary" to rescue them – a Spanish
government collapse or some kind of Euro crisis that, instead of causing the big EU powers to
tell Madrid to crack down harder and sort things out, somehow has the opposite effect.
Is there not a karmic beauty in the fact that Spain and the rest of the EU are now being
hit by the very same demon they unleashed in Kosovo? There is a definite Schadenfreude for
many Russians in seeing the pompous asses of EU politicians sitting on the red ants nest of
separatism – let's see how smart and "democratic" you guys truly are?!
The stupidity of the Spanish "politicians" both from Milan & Catalan in allowing this
situation to develop is almost unbelievable. The Nazi-like actions of Rajoy in particular has
generated huge sympathy for the Catalans, who did not previously have a majority for
independence. They will now be closer to a majority.
It's almost as though the dummy was conspiring WITH the Catalan dopes in the breakup of
his own country. Weird.
Israel is, reportedly, a huge investor in the Catalan area. The Separatist movement is
being driven by the Catalan elite, not from the grassroots. It's more Maidan than Wat
Tyler.
Only Israel is backing the Barzani Kurd separatists who have considerable Jewish heritage
& are as stupid as the Catalans in their greedy pursuit of autonomy.
The Israeli dream of Greater Israel, "from the Nile to the Euphrates" is at work in the
M.East.
The globalist dream of the destruction of every nation, including the mad U$Asylum Empire
& the Nazi state of Israehell is at work, again, in Europe.
Is there not a karmic beauty in the fact that Spain and the rest of the EU are now being
hit by the very same demon they unleashed in Kosovo? There is a definite Schadenfreude for
many Russians in seeing the pompous asses of EU politicians sitting on the red ants nest of
separatism – let's see how smart and "democratic" you guys truly are?!
@John Doran. The common denominators are stupidity & Israel.
The stupidity of the Spanish "politicians" both from Milan & Catalan in allowing this
situation to develop is almost unbelievable. The Nazi-like actions of Rajoy in particular has
generated huge sympathy for the Catalans, who did not previously have a majority for
independence. They will now be closer to a majority.
It's almost as though the dummy was conspiring WITH the Catalan dopes in the breakup of
his own country. Weird.
Israel is, reportedly, a huge investor in the Catalan area. The Separatist movement is
being driven by the Catalan elite, not from the grassroots. It's more Maidan than Wat
Tyler.
Only Israel is backing the Barzani Kurd separatists who have considerable Jewish heritage
& are as stupid as the Catalans in their greedy pursuit of autonomy.
The Israeli dream of Greater Israel, "from the Nile to the Euphrates" is at work in the
M.East.
The globalist dream of the destruction of every nation, including the mad U$Asylum Empire
& the Nazi state of Israehell is at work, again, in Europe.
John Doran.
The Nazi-like actions of Rajoy in particular has generated huge sympathy for the
Catalans
LOL!
It's as though the world has been taken over by a combination of 1970s hippies moaning
about "police brutality, man" because they got their weed confiscated and Marxist halfwits
going on about "fascist oppressors" – oh, hang on, that pretty much is what has
happened. They grew up into globalists and brought their children up as SJWs and antifa
thugs
The Nazi-like actions of Rajoy in particular has generated huge sympathy for the
Catalans
LOL!
It's as though the world has been taken over by a combination of 1970s hippies moaning
about "police brutality, man" because they got their weed confiscated and Marxist halfwits
going on about "fascist oppressors" - oh, hang on, that pretty much is what has happened.
They grew up into globalists and brought their children up as SJWs and antifa thugs
When did it become "Nazi-like" for police to enforce the law? (For grownups, I mean.
Obviously childish hippies have always had that view.) Your repetition of the jingo 'police
have a right to enforce the law' is laughably simplistic and at odds with reality
The right to peaceful assembly is an inalienable human right that is respected by pretty
much any non-authoritarian regime
The details that you overlook are fatal
The 'police' with jurisdiction for law enforcement are always local what you refer to as
'police' are the Spanish Civil Guard, described by wikipedia as being 'organised as a
military force' and with a long and bloody history during the authoritarian Franco era
especially, as political shock troops
The footage of what took place is there for everyone to see there was not one recorded
instance of the demonstrators resorting to violence, either against property or persons,
including the Civil Guard
This itself is remarkable, as police agent provocateurs starting trouble is a standard
tactic in any demonstration where authorities want to create an excuse for police violence
the fact that they were unable to deploy such provocateurs speaks volumes about the order
maintained by the demonstrators, supported by local police and first responders
Even US law enforcement with its penchant for violence has not behaved in this way
recently, as was seen in the massive anti-trump riots they only swung into action after
individuals initiated violence against property and persons
Every police department in civilized countries sticks to these rules, not least for their
own interests during any mass demonstration, the local police interest is always to keep
things from getting out of control and minimizing property damage and human casualties
What we saw in Catalonia was a non-local paramilitary force on a purely political mission
of violent assault
the Russians understand that Spain is supporting any and all US policies towards Russia
because it is a voiceless and totally subservient US colony.
Which Russians exactly?
Spaniards, like many Europeans, are as hostile to Russia as Americans. This absurd trope
that the AngloZionist Empire is suppressing Europeans' natural Russophilia needs to be done
away with.
... the Russians understand that Spain is supporting any and all US policies towards Russia
because it is a voiceless and totally subservient US colony.
Which Russians exactly?
Spaniards, like many Europeans, are as hostile to Russia as Americans. This absurd trope
that the AngloZionist Empire is suppressing Europeans' natural Russophilia needs to be done
away with.
... most Russians are sincerely appalled at the violence and at the hypocrisy of the EU
politicians.
Again, who are these mythical "most Russians"?
It's a sure bet that a good majority hasn't even heard about the Catalonian crisis, let
alone have any strong opinion on it.
It's a sure bet that a good majority hasn't even heard about the Catalonian crisis, let
alone have any strong opinion on it.
This is what I suspect as well. It might matter more if Spain was a major trading partner
with Russia, but I don't think that has been the case in recent history. I don't think there
is a significant expat community of either Spanish in Russia or vice versa, either.
Watching the EU step a few more steps, zombie-like, toward her inevitable end must be
faintly amusing, though.
@FB Your repetition of the jingo 'police have a right to enforce the law' is laughably
simplistic and at odds with reality...
The right to peaceful assembly is an inalienable human right that is respected by pretty
much any non-authoritarian regime...
The details that you overlook are fatal...
The 'police' with jurisdiction for law enforcement are always local...what you refer to as
'police' are the Spanish Civil Guard, described by wikipedia as being 'organised as a
military force'...and with a long and bloody history during the authoritarian Franco era
especially, as political shock troops...
The footage of what took place is there for everyone to see...there was not one recorded
instance of the demonstrators resorting to violence, either against property or persons,
including the Civil Guard...
This itself is remarkable, as police agent provocateurs starting trouble is a standard
tactic in any demonstration where authorities want to create an excuse for police
violence...the fact that they were unable to deploy such provocateurs speaks volumes about
the order maintained by the demonstrators, supported by local police and first
responders...
Even US law enforcement with its penchant for violence has not behaved in this way
recently, as was seen in the massive anti-trump riots...they only swung into action after
individuals initiated violence against property and persons...
Every police department in civilized countries sticks to these rules, not least for their
own interests...during any mass demonstration, the local police interest is always to keep
things from getting out of control and minimizing property damage and human casualties...
What we saw in Catalonia was a non-local paramilitary force on a purely political mission
of violent assault...
Bottom line is that police do have a duty to stop violent demonstrators who are breaking
the law, but not peaceful assemblies...
The right to peaceful assembly is an inalienable human right that is respected by pretty
much any non-authoritarian regime
Peaceful assembly does not include intentionally breaking the law as confirmed by a direct
court order, unless the law is an unreasonable one that precludes peaceful protest or
political expression or assembly, which the Spanish law self-evidently does not. Catalan
separatists in Spain have every right to speak and assemble freely, and they do so endlessly.
Might as well claim drug dealers can't be arrested in the US for meeting to buy and sell
drugs because it's a "breach of their inalienable human rights".
The 'police' with jurisdiction for law enforcement are always local
No they aren't. In the UK there are national police organisations that act on various
kinds of crime. In the US federal police enforce federal laws.
Whether it's local or national police enforcing a court's orders is in reality irrelevant,
except that local police might be more likely to abrogate their responsibility to enforce the
law through partisan loyalty to the lawbreakers, as happened with the Catalan police.
Even US law enforcement with its penchant for violence has not behaved in this way
recently
I don't know what world you live in, but in the real one the US and pretty much all police
forces regularly enforce court orders and remove and/or arrest those who impede their doing
so, with whatever level of violence is required to do so – usually not much in
practice.
Here are German police dealing with hippy squatters "exercising their right of free
assembly" in Berlin in June:
Here's how US police followed orders to clear leftists "exercising their right of free
assembly" in Zucotti Park in 2011:
And here's how US police dealt with treehuggers "exercising their right of free assembly"
in breach of the law in Montana last year:
At least 117 protesters were arrested after law enforcement Humvees and helicopters
began to flood the area to break up a protester encampment near the pipeline's path.
Calling themselves "water protectors," supporters of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe set
up tents and teepees on the land, about an hour south of Bismarck, which they said belongs
to the tribe under a 19-century treaty.
But authorities said they are trespassing on pipeline property. Officials brought in
reinforcements from seven states to remove protesters and dismantle roadblocks made of hay
bales and wood.
As the standoff continued, police deployed bean bag rounds and pepper spray gas and
unleashed a high-pitched siren to disperse the crowd.
Look, I'm not a blanket apologist for the police or for government repression. I recognise
that there are plenty of occasions when governments and police act repressively. But this
business in Catalonia was not one of those times, even if there might have been occasions
when individual officers or units got carried away – police are human beings, and those
might be disciplinary issues but they do not make either the Spanish government enforcing the
law nor the Spanish police carrying out their orders to do so somehow "Nazi-like", as the
post to which I was replying asserted.
Catalan separatists are an awful lot less repressed than traditionalists/nativists/racists
and other such dissident minorities of the traditionalist right are in Europe and the UK,
where the latter can have their political representation infiltrated and disrupted, their
meetings attacked, their sympathisers harassed and dismissed from employment, and their
freedom of expression suppressed, with the connivance or even active cooperation of
government. Catalan separatists as a matter of hard fact have all those freedoms that
nativists etc do not, and having those freedoms does not require being allowed to carry out a
specific illegal act that has been forbidden by court order, merely in order to try to flout
the law of the land.
At the very least, Russia ought to do everything in her power to encourage Turkey to
abandon its old ways and to follow Russia in her realization that her future is not with
the West, but with the South, East and North
.
Whatever.
You Can Take The Man Out Of The Ghetto, But You Can't Take The Ghetto Out Of The Man.
These are intractable issues. As much as you wish otherwise, both Russia and Turkey are
too big, too clumsy, and too backward to do much about any of this. Powerlessness. Get used
to it. At least Russia has oil.
And the future is over-rated.
The smarter citizens of the West began to see the illusory folly of the Myth of Progress
decades ago. You Russians are still trying to push Utopia. You would think you would have
learned something from the whole Communist experiment. "You Russians are still trying to push
Utopia."
What utopia is Russia still trying to push? The West wants the entire world filled with LGBT
and tolerance and human rights and free trade and everyone then will be happy.
... the Russians understand that Spain is supporting any and all US policies towards Russia
because it is a voiceless and totally subservient US colony.
Which Russians exactly?
Spaniards, like many Europeans, are as hostile to Russia as Americans. This absurd trope
that the AngloZionist Empire is suppressing Europeans' natural Russophilia needs to be done
away with.
... most Russians are sincerely appalled at the violence and at the hypocrisy of the EU
politicians.
Again, who are these mythical "most Russians"?
It's a sure bet that a good majority hasn't even heard about the Catalonian crisis, let
alone have any strong opinion on it.
Spaniards, like many Europeans, are as hostile to Russia as Americans.
In general, everybody is hostile to everybody else, particularly when the establishment
media are endlessly propagating hostile narratives, the US influence being (as the man said)
a major factor in that. The phony 'global attitude' survey shows the favorability of the US
in Germany dropping 20-30% in one year, and yet the US is exactly the same country. These
numbers are meaningless.
... the Russians understand that Spain is supporting any and all US policies towards Russia
because it is a voiceless and totally subservient US colony.
Which Russians exactly?
Spaniards, like many Europeans, are as hostile to Russia as Americans. This absurd trope
that the AngloZionist Empire is suppressing Europeans' natural Russophilia needs to be done
away with.
... most Russians are sincerely appalled at the violence and at the hypocrisy of the EU
politicians.
Again, who are these mythical "most Russians"?
It's a sure bet that a good majority hasn't even heard about the Catalonian crisis, let
alone have any strong opinion on it. Well, Spain allowed for some years the Russian Navy to
stop for provisions in Ceuta. Only last year they finally capitulated to NATO pressure.
Locals also noticed that Russian sailors and officers were always polite and ordered, never
entering into brawls or getting drunk in public, after a well-orchestrated worldwide
propaganda campaign like this:
"... It began with Israel's founding father, David Ben Gurion, who devised a strategy of "allying with the periphery" – building military ties to non-Arab states like Turkey, Ethiopia, India and Iran, then ruled by the shahs. The goal was to help Israel to break out of its regional isolation and contain an Arab nationalism led by Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser. ..."
"... Israeli general Ariel Sharon expanded this security doctrine in the early 1980s, calling for Israel to become an imperial power in the Middle East. Israel would ensure that it alone in the region possessed nuclear weapons, making it indispensible to the US. ..."
"... Sharon was not explicit about how Israel's empire could be realised, but an indication was provided at around the same time in the Yinon Plan, written for the World Zionist Organisation by a former Israeli foreign ministry official. ..."
"... Oded Yinon proposed the implosion of the Middle East, breaking apart the region's key states – and Israel's main opponents – by fuelling sectarian and ethnic discord. The aim was to fracture these states, weakening them so that Israel could secure its place as sole regional power. ..."
"... The strategy of "Balkanising" the Middle East found favour in the US among a group of hawkish policymakers, known as neoconservatives, who came to prominence during George W Bush's presidency. ..."
"... Heavily influenced by Israel, they promoted the idea of "rolling back" key states, especially Iraq, Iran and Syria, which were opposed to Israeli-US dominance in the region. They prioritised ousting Saddam Hussein, who had fired missiles on Israel during the 1991 Gulf war. ..."
"... Last month at the Herzliya conference, an annual jamboree for Israel's security establishment, justice minister Ayelet Shaked called for a Kurdish state. She has stated that it would be integral to Israeli efforts to "reshape" the Middle East. ..."
"... The unravelling of Britain and France's map of the region would likely lead to chaos of the kind that a strong, nuclear-armed Israel, with backing from Washington, could richly exploit. Not least, yet more bedlam would push the Palestinian cause even further down the international community's list of priorities. ..."
Palestinians and Israelis watched last week's referendum of Iraq's Kurds with special
interest. Israeli officials and many ordinary Palestinians were delighted – for very
different reasons – to see an overwhelming vote to split away from Iraq.
Given the backlash from Baghdad and anger from Iran and Turkey, which have restive Kurdish
minorities, the creation of a Kurdistan in northern Iraq may not happen soon.
Palestinian support for the Kurds is not difficult to understand. Palestinians, too, were
overlooked when Britain and France carved up the Middle East into states a century ago. Like
the Kurds, Palestinians have found themselves trapped in different territories, oppressed by
their overlords.
Israel's complex interests in Kurdish independence are harder to unravel.
Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was the sole world leader to back Kurdish independence,
and other politicians spoke of the Kurds' "moral right" to a state. None saw how uneasily that
sat with their approach to the Palestinian case.
On a superficial level, Israel would gain because the Kurds sit on plentiful oil. Unlike the
Arab states and Iran, they are keen to sell to Israel.
But the reasons for Israeli support run deeper. There has been co-operation, much of it
secret, between Israel and the Kurds for decades. Israeli media lapped up tributes from
now-retired generals who trained the Kurds from the 1960s. Those connections have not been
forgotten or ended. Independence rallies featured Israeli flags, and Kurds spoke of their
ambition to become a "second Israel".
Israel views the Kurds as a key ally in an Arab-dominated region. Now, with Islamic State's
influence receding, an independent Kurdistan could help prevent Iran filling the void. Israel
wants a bulwark against Iran transferring its weapons, intelligence and know-how to Shiite
allies in Syria and Lebanon.
Israel's current interests, however, hint at a larger vision it has long harboured for the
region – and one I set out at length in my book Israel and the Clash of
Civilisations.
It began with Israel's founding father, David Ben Gurion, who devised a strategy of
"allying with the periphery" – building military ties to non-Arab states like Turkey,
Ethiopia, India and Iran, then ruled by the shahs. The goal was to help Israel to break out of
its regional isolation and contain an Arab nationalism led by Egypt's Gamal Abdel
Nasser.
Israeli general Ariel Sharon expanded this security doctrine in the early 1980s, calling
for Israel to become an imperial power in the Middle East. Israel would ensure that it alone in
the region possessed nuclear weapons, making it indispensible to the US.
Sharon was not explicit about how Israel's empire could be realised, but an indication
was provided at around the same time in the Yinon Plan, written for the World Zionist
Organisation by a former Israeli foreign ministry official.
Oded Yinon proposed the implosion of the Middle East, breaking apart the region's key
states – and Israel's main opponents – by fuelling sectarian and ethnic discord.
The aim was to fracture these states, weakening them so that Israel could secure its place as
sole regional power.
The inspiration for this idea lay in the occupied territories, where Israel had contained
Palestinians in a series of separate enclaves. Later, Israel would terminally divide the
Palestinian national movement, nurturing an Islamist extremism that coalesced into Hamas and
Islamic Jihad.
In this period, Israel also tested its ideas in neighbouring southern Lebanon, which it
occupied for two decades. There, its presence further stoked sectarian tensions between
Christians, Druze, Sunni and Shiite Muslims.
The strategy of "Balkanising" the Middle East found favour in the US among a group of
hawkish policymakers, known as neoconservatives, who came to prominence during George W Bush's
presidency.
Heavily influenced by Israel, they promoted the idea of "rolling back" key states,
especially Iraq, Iran and Syria, which were opposed to Israeli-US dominance in the region. They
prioritised ousting Saddam Hussein, who had fired missiles on Israel during the 1991 Gulf
war.
Although often assumed to be an unfortunate side effect of the 2003 invasion of Iraq,
Washington's oversight of the country's bloody disintegration into Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish
fiefdoms looked suspiciously intentional. Now, Iraqi Kurds are close to making that break-up
permanent.
Syria has gone a similar way, mired in convulsive fighting that has left its ruler impotent.
And Tehran is, again, the target of efforts by Israel and its allies in the US to tear up the
2015 nuclear accord, backing Iran into a corner. Arab, Baluchi, Kurdish and Azeri minorities
there may be ripe for stirring up.
Last month at the Herzliya conference, an annual jamboree for Israel's security
establishment, justice minister Ayelet Shaked called for a Kurdish state. She has stated that
it would be integral to Israeli efforts to "reshape" the Middle East.
The unravelling of Britain and France's map of the region would likely lead to chaos of
the kind that a strong, nuclear-armed Israel, with backing from Washington, could richly
exploit. Not least, yet more bedlam would push the Palestinian cause even further down the
international community's list of priorities.
A version of this article first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi.
I speak as a former Jew, now an Orthodox Christian.
I grew up in an upper-middle class B'nai B'rith synagogue and believe me, MOST American
Jews support the warmongering program of the establishment Jewish Lobbies and think
tanks.
I speak with authority here having grown up INSIDE the Jewish community. Oh, many Jews
might say to the goyim, 'I'm against all this war talk.' BUT with their fellow Jewish
'lantsmen' BEHIND CLOSED DOORS they're ALL for war against Israel's perceived enemies.
Every Sabbath Shacharit (morning) service growing up in the 50′s we sang Hatikvah,
the Israeli National Anthem. It was part of our 'religion' that what's bad for Israel is bad
for all Jews.
Today that would include all the nations that oppose and/or countering the Zionist
project: Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and now Russia.
"... Some people in Catalonia, a rich and culturally distinct area in north-east of Spain, want to secede from the larger country. According to polls (pdf) less than half of the people in the area support the move. The local government prepared for a referendum and called for a local vote. ..."
"... Catalonia has a GDP per capita of some $33,580/year. For Spain as a whole the GDP per capita is $26,643/year. Many factors account for the difference. Catalonia has an advantages in climate, in the vicinity of the French border, the high attractiveness for tourists with its capital Barcelona and its beaches. It has a well developed industry. But the "rest of Spain" is also, by far, its biggest market. ..."
"... In general the splitting off of sub-states from the bigger, established nations weakens both. It is easier for outside forces to manipulated smaller states than larger ones. While the motives in this or that case are understandable, they are also, in my view, shortsighted. ..."
"... It's contradictory and ridiculous. Propagating for "independence" while staying within the gargantuan Borg-collective EU doesn't make any sense whatsoever. One also has to wonder were the usual suspects are in this case. Soros? ..."
"... It is possible that Madrid has sent in the police because other countries in Spain's neighbourhood (hint, hint) fear that Catalonian independence may be a precedent for moves towards self-government and separation in their own territories and are leaning on the Spanish to stop the Catalans. It is possible also that austerity programs adopted by governments in various European countries are helping to drive separation and independence movements. These movements potentially threaten EU unity. ..."
"... if this would be some ex-soviet county or Asian or African country all the hell broken loose for "right to vote" and for "independence". The world master's would call emergency meeting for the Security Council and unanimously vote in for demand of that "people". ..."
"... It'll be interesting to see if all the trolls agitating for Barzanistan independence will be out again in force here...and with the same level of hysteria... I wager they will be conspicuous by their absence... When it comes to secession movements, the key word is 'targeted'... Good for Kosovo...bad for South Ossetia and Abkhazia and Crimea... Good for Iraqi and Syrian Kurds...bad for Turkish Kurds... Good for Bosnia splitting from Yugoslavia...bad for Serbs splitting from Bosnia... Is anyone still fooled...? ..."
"... Actually it is 38.6% [youth unemployment] according to this: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266228/youth-unemployment-rate-in-eu-countries/ but you would not that from Eurostat. http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/macroeconomic-imbalances-procedure/youth-unemployment-rate ..."
"... "Then the U.S. came down like a sledgehammer again on Yugoslavia when on November 5, 1990 Congress passed the 1991 Foreign Operations Appropriations Law 101-513. A section of this law, without previous warning, cut off all aid, credits and loans from the U.S. to Yugoslavia within 6 months. Also, the law demanded separate elections in each of the republics that made up Yugoslavia, requiring State Department approval of election procedures and results before aid to the separate republics would be resumed. In February 1991 the Council of Europe also demanded that Yugoslavia hold multi-party elections or face an economic blockade." Death sentence has been made the US. Need more? ..."
"... Catalonian independence Referendum it is illegal (against the Spanish constitution) have no warranties of any kind, and will be cooked as needed in order to get more subsides and money from the government in Madrid. It is used by nationalistic politicians as a smoke curtain to hide behind in order not to be put to jail after 30 years of corruption. They are not called unofficially the 3% commission Party for nothing. ..."
"... Also say that Catalonian GDP it is actually 17% of Spain's GDP, with about 15% population of Spain. Who's subsidizing who's it is not clear. But related to Spain's External Debt, Catalonia account for about 25 % of it, not to mention 1000s of business have left (and are leaving the region every year) for other parts of Spain since at least 20 years. ..."
"... Before talking of secession check facts. The Catalans don't want to be out the EU, just to have a different relation with Spain. No big deal if not for big money. ..."
"... Ah, yes, than to support "independence" of the Yugoslav republics BND and CIA started to ship weapons trough Austria and Hungary. The Serbs had been already armed to the teeth from depot of ex army. ..."
"... Helmut Kohl and Genscher (US puppets) actively participated and hastily recognized independence of Slovenia. The US' puppet Milosevic (via Lawrence Eaagleburger) and Serbian establishment was all the way to dismantle Yugoslavia. ..."
"... It is funny word "legal" or "illegal". According to the west political philosophy, Vox Populi is Vox Dei so what is legal or illegal it is matter of the power and who has monopole on power (security forces), who interpreting the law. ..."
"... Second thing since the PP is typical capitalist party with only aim to serve foreign financial centers and looting own people I very much doubt they are into legality of any kind. This is power struggle, where perception and rhetoric and emotions are very important in order to "win". ..."
"... Rajoy is ex Lehman Brothers executive. Need to say more? ..."
"... It is even more disturbing considering direct similarities between Crimea and Donbass events of 2014 where Nazi central government violently suppressed local authorities responding to local people demand for autonomy or independence, freedom from fascism. ..."
"... Regardless of political advantages right of people to self determination is in the UN charter and unfortunate moral relativism expressed by b is not serving over all goal of ending global western hegemony of oligarchic class. ..."
"... Catalonia indeps. seek to become a 'new country' that would replicate the EU model: the rich country loves its folklore - language, costume, habits, etc.- and does not pay for the poor elsewhere through taxation, only thru negotiated contribution to 'solidarity' or other voluntary participatory funds. -- See e.g. in EU, Germany and Greece. ..."
"... At the same time, the EU has always had the aim of 'regionalising' areas for them to come under the remit of the new Central Command (EU Brussels), thus gradually diluting the power of the 'old' Nation-State(s), for now a stealthy process. ..."
"... Why has Spain has been so heavy handed? Perhaps because of what happened during the Greek crisis? Recall that Tsipras called a referendum whose result was surprisingly anti-EU. "There can be no democratic choice against the European treaties" - Jean-Claude Juncker, EU Commission President ..."
"... How would you know if US succumbed to "German pressure"? What I remember is the "international community" gave Yugoslavia an offer they could not possibly accept. Typical Mafia governance, per the Judeo-Roman (the actual correct term for the Western civilization, an not the incoherent Judeo-Christian) Regime. ..."
"... There is a saying in Iran: A fool throws a stone in a well and 40 wise men can't take it out. ..."
"... I did so for a very simple reason. The European nations had in the previous 25 years destroyed the nation of Yugoslavia. Then in 1999 NATO went to war against Serbia to give the province of Kosovo independence. Not only that but the Spaniard Javier Solana was the one who pushed NATO into attacking Serbia because it would not give independence to Kosovo. My reaction to Javier -- eat dirt asshole, what goes around comes around. Now it is Catalonias turn to gain independence. ..."
"... "If I remember correctly the U S was inclined originally to help keep Yugoslavia together but it was German pressure..." Very laughable, so client state an issue order to hegemonic power. Germans FP is not run by Germans, when we are talking about political strategic decisions that have affect on international order. Germany is not the creator it is followers. Secondly, Germany is no such power that can cause calamity of such proportion either in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Syria, Libya. Anywhere. ..."
"... As for US help, god help those who US is helping. The US started with dismantling of Yugoslavia in 1984 (or immediately after Tito death), and by cultivation of the Serbian elite (by Zimmmeran, Eagleburger, Scowcroft), investment in Serbia and exporting Yugo cars, handguns from Zastava etc. in the US. And wide "cooperation" of Universities from US with Serbian one. ..."
"... Does this equation hold? NATO + Stasi = NWO ..."
"... My guess is that politicians on both sides are doing what they do best - stay in power by wipping up nationalist feelings. ..."
"... Once again as is becoming far too apparent on this board we many posts from people arguing for what suits them personally. American posters whose slow indoctrination against a united Europe is from America's hypocrisy in enjoying the advantages of a simple market whilst fearing the huge economic and political power a truly united Europe will eventuate in, support Catalans because like Agent Orange they feel more secure when Europe is weakened. ..."
"... On the other hand euros who like united Europe in principle but rightly resent the neoliberal monolith the EU has morphed into, oppose the Catalan secession because they are concerned about further EU destabilization. That is foolish Catalonia would stay part of the EU and any reformed EU must decentralize some decision making to better reflect the local circumstances, while it does a much better job of becoming more 'unitary' in other ways. Yes many Germans hate that idea because they have been enjoying the German imperialism by stealth which is the current EU model, but unless they do become much more understanding of the economic injustices that current EU policies exacerbate, there will be no EU and if that happens these issues will stop being sorted by ballot and go back to the 'old way' of Europeans killing each other in the pursuit of economic advantage. ..."
Some people in Catalonia, a rich and culturally distinct area in north-east of Spain,
want
to secede from the larger country. According to
polls (pdf) less than half of the people in the area support the move. The local government
prepared for a referendum and called for a local vote.
Polling stations were set up for today. But Spanish laws do not allow for such polls or a
separation. Catalonia, like other Spanish regions, already has a good degree of autonomy. If
Catalonia were to secede the Basque areas in the north would likely follow. Spain would fall
apart. Under Spanish law the referendum is illegal. The central government sent police to
prevent the procedure. Street melees ensued.
A lot of mistakes have been made by the central government. It was stubborn in negotiations.
It reacted too late to - at least partially - reasonable demands. Its insensitivity only
incited resistance to it. But it is also responsible for the country as a whole. The behavior
of local government is not much better. It is just as conservative, in its own way, as the
government in Madrid.
Catalonia has a GDP per capita of some $33,580/year. For Spain as a whole the GDP per capita
is $26,643/year. Many factors account for the difference. Catalonia has an advantages in
climate, in the vicinity of the French border, the high attractiveness for tourists with its
capital Barcelona and its beaches. It has a well developed industry. But the "rest of Spain" is
also, by far, its biggest market.
A richer part of the country does not want to subsidize the poorer ones. But it still wants
to profit from them.
In general the splitting off of sub-states from the bigger, established nations weakens
both. It is easier for outside forces to manipulated smaller states than larger ones. While the
motives in this or that case are understandable, they are also, in my view,
shortsighted.
During the Spanish civil war in the 1930s Catalonia and Basque areas were the last
Republican strongholds against the winning right-wing Nationalists. That history lives on in
today's conflict. No one should wish to repeat it.
It is easier for outside forces to manipulated smaller states than larger ones.
I respectfully disagree. If memory serves, places like Switzerland, which is not in the
EU, or tiny Cuba defend themselves very well. And don't see that Russia has been particularly
easy to manipulate after the general plundering that followed the break-up of the Soviet
Union was stopped by Putin.
On the other hand, the EU countries bloc, which would count as one large country, is
mercilessly manipulated by its non-elected bureaucrats, corporate lobbies, and exterior
influences (see the recent CETA, which was imposed without any democratic process
whatsoever).
But yes, at least momentarily, the breaking-up of a country is bound to economically
weaken its seceded parts, which is something different. IMHO.
It's contradictory and ridiculous. Propagating for "independence" while staying within
the gargantuan Borg-collective EU doesn't make any sense whatsoever. One also has to wonder
were the usual suspects are in this case. Soros?
Unfortunately Madrid's reaction to the referendum - which the Spanish government should have
foreseen as early as the Scottish independence referendum back in 2015 - has probably helped
to legitimise the Catalonian referendum and made it look more important than it actually is
to the Catalonian public. Madrid should have advised the public that the referendum was
illegal under Spanish law, explained its case as to why, and left targeted would-be voters
pondering the consequences if they had chosen to participate.
I would like to say also that it's not like B to simply say that Madrid sent the police in
to disrupt the referendum and leave it at that, and that nations splitting into two or more
smaller states become more open to outside interference and manipulation. It is possible
that Madrid has sent in the police because other countries in Spain's neighbourhood (hint,
hint) fear that Catalonian independence may be a precedent for moves towards self-government
and separation in their own territories and are leaning on the Spanish to stop the Catalans.
It is possible also that austerity programs adopted by governments in various European
countries are helping to drive separation and independence movements. These movements
potentially threaten EU unity.
Separation and holding a referendum are two different things. Separation may not be allowed
according to the Spanish constitution, so the Spanish government could simply ignore the
result, just like referendum results are nearly always ignored by the government in my own
country (the Netherlands). But how can the mere act of placing pieces of paper in a box
itself be considered illegal, to be answered with by police batons and rubber bullets?
There were two interesting programs on France24 about the Catalan referendum. From what i
gathered, the president of Catalunya said the latest polls they had were not even giving a
majority to the yes, but the refusal of Madrid to let a democratic referendum was worsening
the situation. Catalunya has been trying to beg Madrid for discussions for years on several
issues but it seems that the king and the Madrid gov are just so corrupt they refuse to open
files normally.
"Catalonia has an advantages in climate, in the vicinity of the French border, the high
attractiveness for tourists of its capital Barcelona and its beaches." ???
oh really, you mean the Costa Brava etc do not attract millions of Brits/Germans/Scandinavian
countries? Not to mention the Saudis who land with a dozen of planes each year? But where is
the money going?
Don't believe the hype. Madrid (PP) and Catalunya (CiU) are equally corrupt. In fact CiU no
longer exists as all it's party offices have been embargoed by the judges. But jolly useful
for distracting people from austerity programmes. (People who lose jobs, on average, earn 12%
less in their new jobs in Spain).
The NWO plan is to bring down the nation states. Worked jolly well in Yugoslavia, nearly
worked in Syria. Glued to the telly, so can't give links, but recently Thierry Meyssan
reported on a speech by Princeling Macron. In the future we will no longer have nation
states, just city states. Germany and Italy became Nation States in the 19th century because
they realised that city states had no future, no defence, no "sovereignty".
One of my favourite places in the world to hang out is a former fishing village about I
dunno, 60 Kilometers north of Barcelona, a town called Cadaques and a staunchly Catalan
village. Many of the tourists who have flooded the joint speak better Spanish than the locals
who still prefer the Catalan language in their day to day conversations.
When I first visited, sometime in the 80's, France still banned Catalan festivals
(Catalonia per se is divided pretty much in half on the Mediterranean coast between
France & Spain), so French Catalans would come south to towns like Cadaques to celebrate
their culture. The locals ripped them off blind and took great amusement in doing so. Most of
the French Catalans had lost their language, so for many of them it was sorta like the way
the Scots families in Aotearoa celebrated "the Highland Games" a sort of dedicated hobby,
whereas for Catalans still held captive by the Madrid/Castillan oppressor who they last
fought less than 50 years before, this was no hobby, it was their life.
The similarities between england's conquest of Scotland Wales and Ireland, and Castile's
butchery and oppression of Catalonia and the Basque Country is strong.
The chief difference being that Culloden was fought 200 years ago and the Spanish Civil War
less than 100 years. The wounds are still fresh and as Catalans describe it, the portion of
the Constitution which prevents their self determination is thanks to General Franco who was
meant to have retired by then, but his meglomania had him insist the new constitution which
he was not meant to be involved in drafting, included provisions to keep Basque and Catalan
kissing Castile's arse.
The Catalans have always been more, shall we say indirect, when it comes to resisting than
the Basques, but they are no less determined, I have no doubt that Rajoy's stupidity in
cranking up opposition to the ballot in order to distract from investigations of widespread
corruption in the People's Party will guarantee an independent Catalonia sooner, rather than
later.
Just as I have no doubt that the englander's crazy decision to bolt from the EU rather
than fight to alter it will actually precipitate many of the changes the EU needs to make. A
reformed EU will mean that many of the artificial nation states put together by greedy
euroroyalty will wither and reduce to their constituent parts - because well run smaller
states are always more likely to provide a better more humanist way of life than the mega
nations with populations closing on 100 million, where even those states which claim to be
'democracies' are controlled by a political elite who rarely interact with those outside
their clique. Trying to communicate with functionaries of a mega state makes attempting to
get human service outta Microsoft, Apple or Google, a piece of piss in comparison.
if this would be some ex-soviet county or Asian or African country all the hell broken
loose for "right to vote" and for "independence". The world master's would call emergency
meeting for the Security Council and unanimously vote in for demand of that "people".
But the country in case is Spain, NATO member, EU member. The country that belong to the
Western and Cristian "civilization". Secession is no-no either as a word or an event.
Someone posted that this would jeopardize the EU. I would say to hell with EU if this
going to do harm to blood suckers that I am for Catalan independence.
Difference PP is Franco's party. It is fascists party. Second thing, that "B" posted about the Spain's GDP $33,580 is just nonsense. Globalist
love to post these figures as a measure of (fictional) wealth. Hey, B go and ask youth in Spain (~25%) what's their "GDP". "B" also mention the Constitution. I wonder who wrote that and when?
It'll be interesting to see if all the trolls agitating for Barzanistan independence will be
out again in force here...and with the same level of hysteria... I wager they will be conspicuous by their absence... When it comes to secession movements, the key word is 'targeted'... Good for Kosovo...bad for South Ossetia and Abkhazia and Crimea... Good for Iraqi and Syrian Kurds...bad for Turkish Kurds... Good for Bosnia splitting from Yugoslavia...bad for Serbs splitting from Bosnia... Is anyone still fooled...?
"Then the U.S. came down like a sledgehammer again on Yugoslavia when on November 5, 1990
Congress passed the 1991 Foreign Operations Appropriations Law 101-513. A section of this
law, without previous warning, cut off all aid, credits and loans from the U.S. to Yugoslavia
within 6 months. Also, the law demanded separate elections in each of the republics that made
up Yugoslavia, requiring State Department approval of election procedures and results before
aid to the separate republics would be resumed. In February 1991 the Council of Europe also
demanded that Yugoslavia hold multi-party elections or face an economic blockade." Death sentence has been made the US. Need more?
But you have no brain since you read and "understand" selectively.
"During the Spanish civil war in the 1930s Catalonia and Basque areas were the last
Republican strongholds against..."
you are falling into the independentist rethoric.
Pais basco was in the hands of nationalist as early as 1937 at the end of the first year of
war (more than half of the Pais Vasco was Pro Nationalist because of religion and ideology)
please inform yourself better before write thing like this.
Catalonia lasted till the end, because of geographical consideration (it was in the
rearguard, deep into Republican lines) but with its typical nationalistic ideology it just
made thing quite complicated for the republic to defend itself. Not to mention a a civil war
inside the civil war (see "sucesos de Mayo")
confronted with national troops it simply couldn't stand and fell apart after the Ebro
Offensive.
Catalonian independence Referendum it is illegal (against the Spanish constitution) have no
warranties of any kind, and will be cooked as needed in order to get more subsides and money
from the government in Madrid. It is used by nationalistic politicians as a smoke curtain to
hide behind in order not to be put to jail after 30 years of corruption. They are not called
unofficially the 3% commission Party for nothing.
Also say that Catalonian GDP it is actually 17% of Spain's GDP, with about 15% population
of Spain. Who's subsidizing who's it is not clear. But related to Spain's External Debt,
Catalonia account for about 25 % of it, not to mention 1000s of business have left (and are
leaving the region every year) for other parts of Spain since at least 20 years.
Things are not that clear, once you put an eye on the facts. Off course the Nationalist
rhetoric is that with independence will come a Golden Age for Catalonia, but when did a
politician tell the truth?
Before talking of secession check facts. The Catalans don't want to be out the EU, just to
have a different relation with Spain. No big deal if not for big money.
Ah, yes, than to support "independence" of the Yugoslav republics BND and CIA started to ship
weapons trough Austria and Hungary. The Serbs had been already armed to the teeth from depot
of ex army.
Helmut Kohl and Genscher (US puppets) actively participated and hastily recognized
independence of Slovenia. The US' puppet Milosevic (via Lawrence Eaagleburger) and Serbian
establishment was all the way to dismantle Yugoslavia.
22
That exactly is the problem.
Either there is a EU where countries redistribute income within the EU (as countries do
within as in richer regions supporting poorer ones), then Catalonian and others independence
is no problem. Or, as is, the exit of a region takes money out of the rest of the
country. The current mood in Germany for a common EU economy is "no way".
What I don't understand is why the Catalans did not apply a B plan since yesterday. Assange
say they blocked apps etc but why not distributing an envelope with a stamp, addressed to the
Brussel Commission or any other international party. A few millions envelopes cannot be
hidden under a carpet.
"Catalonian independence Referendum it is illegal (against the spanish
constitution)...."
It is funny word "legal" or "illegal". According to the west political philosophy, Vox
Populi is Vox Dei so what is legal or illegal it is matter of the power and who has monopole
on power (security forces), who interpreting the law.
Second thing since the PP is typical capitalist party with only aim to serve foreign
financial centers and looting own people I very much doubt they are into legality of any
kind. This is power struggle, where perception and rhetoric and emotions are very important
in order to "win".
The Spanish government has overreacted to the referendum. The question is why? They should
have let it go. The vote may have been no, and even if yes, it was unconstitutional and the
Catalan gov't could do nothing. No one would recognize them.
Obviously, the vote was/is a negotiation tactic for more autonomy, not separation. The
fascists in Madrid have made it a referendum on European democracy.
The economic driver is there, b. But not only. Spain is a complex nation of nations, that has
been hold together by force. The last time the Spanish people tried to deal with
democratically, through the Federal Republic of 1931 the army started a civil war whose
effects, in terms of murder, torture and prison lasted way long after they won the war.
People in Catalunya, Basque Country or Galicia were harassed and humiliated because of having
a different language and culture other than Spanish. The Constitution of 1978, that opened
the way to have a democratic Spain, was agreed between some formerly illegal political
parties and the Franquista establishment, leaving to the king and to the army the protection
of the unity of the country.
Since the politically-contral Constitutional Court mutilated the Catalan Stature if
Autonomy, the Spanish government has kept its door closed to all Catalonian REI indications.
Indeed, the Catalan government is plagued by corruption, as the Spanish ruling party is. But
the bottom of the question is the right of the people to decide who should be ruling them.
One can agree or not on the decision taken, but this right, to me, is undeniable and there
always be people ready to fight for it
B response seems disappointing. Completely ignores that Spain is a Catholic fascist country
since Franco coup and civil war ended in 1939 only because Hitler support and German
Luftwaffe , bombing civilians, before Nuremberg committing a war crime. should we forget
about it Orwellian style?
It is even more disturbing considering direct similarities between Crimea and Donbass
events of 2014 where Nazi central government violently suppressed local authorities
responding to local people demand for autonomy or independence, freedom from fascism.
Regardless of political advantages right of people to self determination is in the UN
charter and unfortunate moral relativism expressed by b is not serving over all goal of
ending global western hegemony of oligarchic class.
Well, suppose defenders of democracy in the west and worshipping elections to the level of
going to war in MENA to assure democratic elections and democratic rule , now eat their feces
of gigantic hypocrisy.
Police thugs beating up elderly people waiting to vote, Trump is silent, DEMS are silent, MSM
is silent.
What possible crime requiring police violence is casting a ballot?
Spain was and is a fascist state so is EU fascist emporium, those election looks identical
to April 1933 election under Hitler emergency rule, tens of thousands voters were beaten or
arrested by police at polling stations and that included various party members as well as the
very candidates running in the election who were beaten and arrested while trying to cast a
vote.(most still were elected while in prisoner)
All those phony defenders of democracy choked, only deafening silence, no word, no
condemnation of police violence, no defending right to vote revealing themselves all of
stooges of deep state run by oligarchic class set sim for mass extermination of population
and terror.
And all of that what for? When simple declaration of illegality of the vote by Madrid
would have suffice, why so desperate violent move that only will increase the number of
Catalonians voting yes.
Here is the answer.
What most are missing is the fact that Madrid panic response is not about Catalonia it is
about Basque country.
The Catalonia issue in fact stems more from 2008 crisis and their carrying most of cost of
Spanish recovery, they want to get better share of they money they send to Madrid and have
been utterly ignored and disrespected by Madrid de facto fascist regime.
In fact like Scotland, [what killed their referendum] they want to stay in EU and probably
last year referendum would have failed anyway so why not done then and got over with it last
year.
It is because it would set a precedent of region leaving the Spain peacefully while Basque
country was not able accomplish it for over several decades, as the only Spanish anti-fascist
force to fight Franco fascists [liberation struggle continued by ETA] before and after WWII
until 1975 and later fascists who just changed uniform for democrats.
The famous Picasso painting Guernica is about a Franco defiant Basque city leveled by
German Luftwaffe [air force, killed hundreds] sent by Hitler to destroy democratically
elected Republican government of Spain just a year or so before WWII stated in Sept 1939
while west was watching.
Why would any legal system centered around ensuring oligarchic control ever contain within it
a "legal" means from exiting that system?
Calling people to respect such laws is calling them to respect the rule of the master.
Yes b, the Central Gvmt. has been singularly rigid, disdainful and all-out dumb.
Creatitivity zero. They seem to have made many mis-steps, no doubt escalating the
pro-independence crowd.
Ex. A non-binding referendum is always a good idea, but was suspended by the Const. Court,
as was a new form of the same, called some "participatory process".. but it went ahead
anyway. (36% turnout, v. low, 80% for independ. 2014 see link.) The oppo to get some 'real'
numbers on board, and have all the issues 'aired' was lost.
Catalonia indeps. seek to become a 'new country' that would replicate the EU model: the
rich country loves its folklore - language, costume, habits, etc.- and does not pay for the
poor elsewhere through taxation, only thru negotiated contribution to 'solidarity' or other
voluntary participatory funds. -- See e.g. in EU, Germany and Greece.
At the same time, the EU has always had the aim of 'regionalising' areas for them to come
under the remit of the new Central Command (EU Brussels), thus gradually diluting the
power of the 'old' Nation-State(s), for now a stealthy process.
The Catalan indeps. are not radical pre-cursors here, prob. they were encouraged by the
'seeming' impact, success, of some color revolution play-books, the engineered identity or
'community' politics to split ppl, groups.
Rajoy is a Merkel pet and there is no way the EU will get involved with this potential
regional break-away. Were Catalonia to become independent, it would have to apply to join the
EU. Ouch.
see mia @ 5, jen @ 6, poster @ 7, mina, and el-sid @ 10 on city states.
Imho the breakaway impulse, like in many places, is fuelled in a large part by HIGH youth
unemployment. Another topic for another day.
Now the French Prime Minister has waded into the debate and suggested an independent
Catalonia could signal the end of Europe.
He said on the radio channel La Ser: "It means in a certain way the end of what Europe is,
which is a federation of nation states. "If one of these states decides to change its borders, the consequences can be very
important at a time where Europe is fragile."
Huh...according to ex French PM ramifications and consequences of Catalan independence are
way far reaching than the one would assume.
That's might explain extreme and repressive measure from Madrid.
1. I think that the Madrid government saw this as something they had to do in order to save
Spain from "being destroyed" (as they would see it, as if they did allow the previous
referendum a few years ago but this time the Catalan authorities had said they would
essentially declare independence and take control of borders if the vote was in favour of
independence).
2. I wouldn't be surprised if there was some pressure exerted by the Spanish military on
the Madrid government. The military is acutely aware that it is heir to a state which was
once the most powerful in the world (Charles V etc) and at its height ruled more territory
than the current Russia occupies. Spain lost the Americas but the Spanish state in Madrid was
always acutely aware of the fact that the part of Iberia which they ruled, excluding
Portugal, was comprised of different ethno-linguistic groups which could, like Portugal, seek
to secede.
This insecurity is what drove Franco's anti-Catalan policies of the mid-20th century.
A figure from the Spanish military did allude to military intervention a few years
earlier.
3. The EU is clearly supporting Madrid with its conspicuous silence, whereas (as others
had correctly pointed out) if it was in some ex-Soviet or non-white region, they would have
been the foremost champions of "freedom" and "the right to democracy".
France also has Catalans (though their identity has been heavily diluted) in its borders
but not only that Catalan is very similar to Occitan which was widely prevalent in the south
of France and would get strengthened with the emergence of a Catalan state.
France's separatist issues also extend to Brittany and Corsica.
4. Most Catalans are opposed to independence because whilst they view themselves as a
separate nation (culturally-linguistically) they still view themselves as part of Spain. They
holiday in other parts of Spain, have Spanish (non-Catalan) relatives, friends, spouses, have
studied and worked in other parts of Spain. However this issue is not merely about abstract
and altruistic concepts of freedom and self-determination it can also be seen as dirty
politicking by corrupt politicans from both Barcelona and Madrid.
The Catalan politicians most likely want to have the same sort of fiscal independence that
the Basques have and are using the threat of independence/secession as a bogeyman with which
to exact concessions from Madrid.
5. This doesn't detract from the fact that Madrid has been very irresponsible and due to
its insecurity about the dissolution of Iberia's largest state has been very insensitive and
harsh towards legitimate Catalan demands for greater freedom/autonomy which Catalans have
actually tried to acquire within the framework of the Spanish legal structure.
Catalan separatists have never used violence.
6. What will happen?
I think ultimately Madrid will be forced to speak to Barcelona and some sort of agreement
will have to be made whereby the Catalan region may get the same or slightly the same powers
and status as the highly decentralized Basque region.
7. The US (CIA) media seem to be somewhat sympathetic towards the Catalans, hence possibly
indicative of the often perceived US desire to weaken its EU rival.
"At least half of the members of my party are members of the Catalan Friends of Israel
Association. Israel is a democratic state, and we support the steps it takes for survival,
and the survival of the Jewish people. We have no intention of criticizing what its
government does. We seek cooperation with Israel, and we hope it will support our
independence movement. It is clear that an independent Catalonia will be a close friend of
Israel – there's no doubt about that."
read more:
https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/catalan-leader-predicts-independence-in-about-two-years-and-close-friendship-with-israel-1.468285
But I doubt that Rajoy has made such decision on its own. I doubt he has guts for it, nor
strength. He is just apparatchik. In addition he doesn't have loyalty except to globalists
and money. Barcelona is too lucrative and rich to be leave alone. Some foreign factor must be involved in his decision making process.
" Most Catalans are opposed to independence because whilst they view themselves as a separate
nation (culturally-linguistically) they still view themselves as part of Spain."
answering Chauncey Gardiner and comment 26
the questions is ...
1.- Do we live in a Country under the Rule of Law? or are we living in the Jungle...
if the answer is yes, there is a rule of Law, under which all citizens have equal rights
and are equally accountable for their acts, then the Referendum is Illegal, and the
politicians promoting it should be in jail. If the answer is that the rule of the Jungle is the good one, then there would be no
referendum because they would have been in Jail long time ago.
The actions in Catalonia today show the true colours of the EUSSR. They also show why the UK was so wise to vote for so-called "Brexit". I predict a Catalan declaration on Tuesday - and that is when the fun will really
start. First thing to look for would be La Liga expelling all Catalan clubs from the League
effective immediately - which will throw European football into chaos for a start! Then the markets will likely start going a little crazy - particularly in Spain
obviously!
After reading b's bit, I knew there would be comparisons to other "breakaway" attempts
especially from areas that are doing better economically or with resources like the Kurds in
Iraq or the Benghazi area of Libya. Flankerbit caught the double standards at play. It's
funny when some in the US suggest secession of either California or Texas or some other
state.
The point was that reading your post one believes he is the current FM and speaks about a
political issue, while the reality is that he spoke/was asked because he often mention his
roots (and is no longer FM)
This statement shares the skepticism about this secessionist movement:
Oppose the state crackdown on the Catalan independence referendum!
For working class unity! No to separatism in Spain!
Statement of the International Committee of the Fourth International, 30 September 2017
On the eve of the October 1 independence referendum in Catalonia, Spain is in the throes of
its deepest political crisis since the fall of the fascist Franco regime.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/09/30/cata-s30.html
and do the subjects of this article: "In Catalonia's 'red belt' leftwing veterans distrust the separatists"
"Nationalism is not the answer to Spain's problems, say an older generation who fought
against General Franco."
Excerpts (link at bottom):
"All four [interviewees] dismiss the independence movement as a distraction from more
pressing social issues, claiming it has proved a useful smokescreen for the Catalan
government's spending cuts.
""What's happening now is that everyone has been told that Spain is the origin of our
problems," says Salas. "They are being fed a version of Catalan history that has nothing to
do with reality and this has radicalised young people around independence..."
""It's about class. I don't have a problem with the person standing next to me, it's the
one above me who's the problem.""
They have announced this referendum for a year, have been supported by major figures (Savall,
the Barça); it is normal that the consultation can be held and the Spanish gov could
simply have said "we won't recognize the results". This demonstration of violence shows the
real face of the EU and will be one more nail in the coffin.
The Catalans were peacefully exercising their right to self-determination by coming out to
vote today. The Spanish national police behaved like the goons they are at the behest of the
EU & Spanish establishment. Yes, they are concerned that their precious EU project may
fall apart! It will. It is only a matter of time.
What happens if the Catalan government announces that the majority voted to secede and
declares independence? Are the EU goons gonna suppress it with military force?
Exactly! Since the Spanish national guard created the chaos by attacking voters and
stealing ballot boxes, a proper referendum with control of voting was not permitted. The
Catalan authorities were consequently forced to inform the people that they could print the
ballots at home and vote in any voting station. They can announce whatever result they want
now as all the counting systems have been disabled by the Spanish national guard.
What does anyone think the Catalan authorities conducting the referendum are going to
announce?
The proponents of the Catalonia referendum and independence present themselves as forces of
democracy but they are the opposite. They have consistently failed to get even 50% support
for independence and so they have proceeded with an illegal referendum on independence. Who
is going to vote on that and who is going to count the votes (the independence movement and
its supporters). The referendum is illegal and does not meet an criteria for fair voting.
They are opposing democracy because they consistently lose when they go the democratic
route.
That puts the Spanish government, which itself screwed up and handled this quite poorly, in a
very difficult position but i think many will disagree with the course the central government
has taken. Many Spaniards hate the Catalan independence seekers precisely for what they are
doing today and because at the basis of the independence movement is the same consistent
message: "We Catalan have more money than Spain so screw you Spain." Ah yes screw you Spain
but keep paying us. That seriously pisses off a lot of Spanish and many would love to see
Catalonia leave but sans the very beneficial relationship that Catalonia has with the rest of
Spain now. Net: i doubt there will be an outpouring of sympathy for those participating in
the referendum today from the rest of Spain.
@31, Libertarianism is a euphemism for Gangsterism. What's to stop someone seeking
"self-fulfilment" or "self-realization" from deciding that organizing and arming his own
militia is the path to enlightenment? Erik Prince comes to mind. Jim Jones, another eg. Bibi
Netanyahu fits the bill too.
And what the heck is bionicmosquito? toohipformyshirt?
I would guess that most of those troops are from outside of Catalonia and as i posted many
and perhaps most Spaniards are a wee bit annoyed with Catalonia's behavior which is seen as
rather self centered, arrogant and illegal (cause it is illegal). Tensions are running high
and the troops are probably going to behave in a less than kind manner. I really doubt the
voters are just allowing the troops to close down polling stations and take voting machines
sans a fight so I would ask what happened before the scenes in the video. The referendum is
Illegal and the vote lacks impartiality and validation. Nonetheless, the Spanish government
is handling this very, very poorly.
The best thing for the government would be to film what happens to police as they try to
peacefully close down polling stations and to completely refrain from violence. That takes a
pretty strong man to do because i bet the cops would get beaten up.
The Spanish press reporting on this is, as you might expect, very anti catalonia and they
are listing the numerous violations and lack of transparency in the vote. The government
should have allowed them to vote and refused to acknowledge the results.
Why has Spain has been so heavy handed? Perhaps because of what happened during the Greek crisis? Recall that Tsipras called a
referendum whose result was surprisingly anti-EU. "There can be no democratic choice against the European treaties" - Jean-Claude Juncker, EU Commission President
OR the Spanish government in Madrid could have followed Canada: Quebec twice voted to separate, in 1980 and 1995. Canada allowed the vote; National
politicians and notables participated in the Quebec campaigns, presenting the case to remain
in Canada. Madrid takes its orders from the Technocrats in Brussels. Today's brutality to stop the
vote guarantees Catalan's urge for independence won't go away.
Voting on
Independence, Quebec Style.
Unlike the UK or Canada which allowed the Scots and Quebecois their right to vote, Spain
did not. What should the Catalans have done? This did not happen overnight. They repeatedly
asked the Spanish government to allow them to vote. If the referendum was open then it is
quite possible the majority of Catalans would have voted to remain in Spain. With the
authoritarian response of Spain hiding behind "legalism" they have now screwed the pooch and
enabled Catalonia to claim the majority voted to secede.
Whomever supports the Catalan "independence" should think long , and hard, about its purpose,
as there a several Russian regions that could be instigated into doing the same. Also, if
Catalonia has a democratic right to secede, then what about the "Kurdish" regions of Iraq,
Iran, Turkey, and Syria ?
Democracy is longer what it seems, as people can be goaded into voting for their own
suicide. It has proven itself to be a easily manipulated, failed system of governance. Be
careful what you wish for.
If I remember correctly the US was inclined originally to help keep Yugoslavia together
but it was German pressure, largely on Croatia's part that tipped the US - I suspect
grudgingly - into her actions with Germany on the Balkans .
How would you know if US succumbed to "German pressure"? What I remember is the "international community" gave Yugoslavia an offer they could not
possibly accept. Typical Mafia governance, per the Judeo-Roman (the actual correct term for
the Western civilization, an not the incoherent Judeo-Christian) Regime.
There is a saying in Iran: A fool throws a stone in a well and 40 wise men can't take it
out.
A few years ago I attended a big Catalonian demonstration in Barcelona. This consisted of a
line, about 1000 miles long that snaked through Catalonia but the big demonstration was in
Barcelona. Very very impressive. What was very conspicuous was a large contingent of Basques
right in the middle of the main square, with about 500 of them. They were flying their flags
and most definitely supporting Catalonian independence. It was very inspirational. I joined
them with their chants.
I did so for a very simple reason. The European nations had in the previous 25 years
destroyed the nation of Yugoslavia. Then in 1999 NATO went to war against Serbia to give the
province of Kosovo independence. Not only that but the Spaniard Javier Solana was the one who
pushed NATO into attacking Serbia because it would not give independence to Kosovo. My reaction to Javier -- eat dirt asshole, what goes around comes around. Now it is
Catalonias turn to gain independence.
You are right, of course, that it is all a big heaping steaming pile of global hypocrisy.
It is pervasive and it is clearly the m.o. of Mb>every single one of these mafia regimes
ruling over us in the planet.
Some "Grieved" barfly the other day was moaning about "god bothered" folks like me. Permit
me to clear up the situation for you, dear grieved one:
There is a subset of humanity [presumed] that claims a "Natural Right to Rule". We the
"god bothered" assert, on the contrary, that "Only God Rules". We do not deny the uneven
distribution of Gifts, such as beauty, intelligence, capability, will power, discipline,
physical prowess, artistic ability, etc. We accept all that.
What we do NOT accept is that a certain class of [so-called] Humans on this planet have an
Inherent Right to Rule.
You, "grieved" one, are they one who drops all his weapons and armour before entering a
battle. Boo hoo for you and your lot.
"If I remember correctly the U S was inclined originally to help keep Yugoslavia together but
it was German pressure..." Very laughable, so client state an issue order to hegemonic power. Germans FP is not run
by Germans, when we are talking about political strategic decisions that have affect on
international order. Germany is not the creator it is followers. Secondly, Germany is no such
power that can cause calamity of such proportion either in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Syria, Libya.
Anywhere.
As for US help, god help those who US is helping. The US started with dismantling of
Yugoslavia in 1984 (or immediately after Tito death), and by cultivation of the Serbian elite
(by Zimmmeran, Eagleburger, Scowcroft), investment in Serbia and exporting Yugo cars,
handguns from Zastava etc. in the US. And wide "cooperation" of Universities from US with
Serbian one.
Indeed.
In fact, the utterly defeated, occupied, and civilizationally lobotomized Germans, needed
permission from that bitch Thatcher before they could reunify Nato-fatherland with
Stasi-fatherland.
Rusty-Bucket-Lady
on German unification. .
An ignorant post B. You should stick with what you know. I'm starting to wonder if this forum
has been taken over by some agency.
If you live with Catalans, you know that they are a distinct people. I know the French
side but they share the same distinct culture. Their wealth comes from a culture of hard work
and excellence, similar to the wealth of Northern Italy. If Spanish Catalonia separates they will exceed all expectations. French Catalonia, The
Basques, and Spanish Galicia will follow. If French Catalonia goes the whole of Languedoc and
probably Brittany will become more restive. Large governments are inherently parasitic and increasingly obsolete. We see this
everywhere.
Regarding the Kurd comparison: the Barzani mafia are crypto Jews and work for Israel. The
Catalans do not share this fatal defect.
I wonder how you will decide on Catalonyan citizenship, ius sanguinis or ius solis? Can
the "destinctive culture" be preserved by ius solis? Catalan language courses? Citizenship
for speaking the language? How will you draw the borders? By civil war?
My guess is that politicians on both sides are doing what they do best - stay in power by
wipping up nationalist feelings.
Rajoy is ex Lehman Brothers executive.
Need to say more?
Posted by: Chauncey Gardiner | Oct 1, 2017 9:20:14 AM | 29
WOW!
I dunno where you get that information, but he has nothing to do with Lehman Brothers...
please read his profile in Wikipedia, which is quite accurate.
I don't like him, I think he is one of the worst presidents ever Spain had. But seriously, he is no ex Lehman Brothers. he can not speak English for starters.
The easiest way to discern a weak argument is when a non-sequitur such as "it's illegal
because it's against the law" is dragged out and that is all I see from those hunting around
for an excuse to decry a bunch of people, totally unaided by any external support arguing for
freedom from oppression.
Once again as is becoming far too apparent on this board we many posts from people arguing
for what suits them personally. American posters whose slow indoctrination against a united
Europe is from America's hypocrisy in enjoying the advantages of a simple market whilst
fearing the huge economic and political power a truly united Europe will eventuate in,
support Catalans because like Agent Orange they feel more secure when Europe is weakened.
On the other hand euros who like united Europe in principle but rightly resent the neoliberal
monolith the EU has morphed into, oppose the Catalan secession because they are concerned
about further EU destabilization. That is foolish Catalonia would stay part of the EU and any
reformed EU must decentralize some decision making to better reflect the local circumstances,
while it does a much better job of becoming more 'unitary' in other ways.
Yes many Germans hate that idea because they have been enjoying the German imperialism by
stealth which is the current EU model, but unless they do become much more understanding of
the economic injustices that current EU policies exacerbate, there will be no EU and if that
happens these issues will stop being sorted by ballot and go back to the 'old way' of
Europeans killing each other in the pursuit of economic advantage.
It can never be wrong or illegal for people to seek change through ballot - if the 'law'
says it is then the law is an ass.
It is that simple especially in these circumstances when Catalans are voting in spite of the
external forces lining up against them - not because of them. A truly united Europe is the best way forward by far but there must be real change
throughout the 'sovereign states' and the unprincipled Brussels gang to accommodate this.
Leaving Spain and staying in EU is kind of neoliberal play, not exactly nationalism. Something
like Ukrainian Maydan. As for rich parts of the county want to secede from more poor parts,
the tale of Ukraine and Georgia which were more well-to-do parts of the USSR are interesting
examples what can happen in suchcases.
Kosovo opened the Pandora box of "parade of independence declarations" in Europe.
And now EU and, especially Germany, needs to eat its own dog food.
Notable quotes:
"... What you are saying is that the Spanish state has no rights to remain a coherent unitary state but, rather, must allow itself to be disintegrated by the political whims of this or that group. In such manner, every extant state could look forward to quick death at the ballot box. ..."
"... "The right in international law of a people to self-determination cannot be constrained by the domestic legislation of the larger state from which that people is seeking to secede. NATO itself went to war ostensibly to enforce the right to self-determination of the Kosovans, which Kosovan secession was claimed as illegal by Serbia in precisely the same terms the Spanish claim. The hypocrisy of NATO governments is breathtaking (as always)." Craig Murray https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/ Interesting comparisons with Scotland and Kosovo. This is another fight in which I have no dog. Thirdeye -> outthere... , 02 October 2017 at 02:35 AM Even worse, in the case of Kosovo the group claiming the right to self-determination were ethnic Albanians who migrated to Kosovo in the late Ottoman period and claimed the primacy of their group's collective rights over those of the Serbs, the original inhabitants. That situation is a lot like what's going on with the Rohingya who were brought to Burma by the Brits, with the same undercurrent of Islamist agitation. ..."
"... The Spanish government of Mariano Rajoy showed bad judgment in my opinion in preventing the referendum from taking place. The UK allowed the Scots to have their vote and campaigned on why the Scots would be better off in the UK. The Scots rejected independence. Similarly Canada permitted Quebec to vote and campaigned on the benefits. The Quebecois voted against separation. ..."
"... How about Ordoliberalim? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordoliberalism ..."
"... The Catalan and similar movements are going to become a feature of this century as a direct result of globalism. This was made plain at least twenty years ago. ..."
"... The downside of fragmentation is that the world is modeled on the Westphalian state concept, and all our treaties with each other are predicated on the state enforcing them on their citizens. As nation states lose that ability, the outcome is war. ..."
From the perspective of the post-liberal right, a little chaos is a small price to pay for
scuppering the globalist world order. I see no reason (outside of bourgeois considerations)
to hold sacred the existence of states who merely demarcate zones of competition between
disparate groups, or who serve the need of international capital for 'political stability.'
The 20th century was dominated by three political models, which arose in response to mass
society - Fascism, Communism, and managerial liberalism. A combination of institutional
instability and the alliance of the latter two took out the first one. The second collapsed
under the weight of a centrally managed economy. The latter thought it had 'won' because it
was the last man standing. But this model is accumulating irreparable system failures of its
own, because its fundamental premises are flawed too (endless growth, individuals are the
primary unit of society, freedom is 'doing whatever you like', the distribution of goods and
services is the sum of a stable society).
Whenever there is disorder in the universe, chaos clears a space for the natural order to
reassert itself given the contingencies of the time. Western thought has understood this
since Heraclitus ('flux'). The winds of change are blowing, and contra the the Scorpions
song, its not toward the universal brotherhood of man. We are in the beginning of a
transition, a liminal phase. The West is transmogrifying into a new forms, which cannot be
explained in the terms of the old models.
What you are saying is that the Spanish state has no rights to remain a coherent unitary
state but, rather, must allow itself to be disintegrated by the political whims of this or
that group. In such manner, every extant state could look forward to quick death at the
ballot box.
"The right in international law of a people to self-determination cannot be constrained by
the domestic legislation of the larger state from which that people is seeking to secede.
NATO itself went to war ostensibly to enforce the right to self-determination of the
Kosovans, which Kosovan secession was claimed as illegal by Serbia in precisely the same
terms the Spanish claim. The hypocrisy of NATO governments is breathtaking (as always)."
Craig Murray https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/
Interesting comparisons with Scotland and Kosovo.
This is another fight in which I have no dog.
Even worse, in the case of Kosovo the group claiming the right to self-determination were
ethnic Albanians who migrated to Kosovo in the late Ottoman period and claimed the primacy of
their group's collective rights over those of the Serbs, the original inhabitants. That
situation is a lot like what's going on with the Rohingya who were brought to Burma by the
Brits, with the same undercurrent of Islamist agitation.
The Spanish government of Mariano Rajoy showed bad judgment in my opinion in preventing
the referendum from taking place. The UK allowed the Scots to have their vote and campaigned
on why the Scots would be better off in the UK. The Scots rejected independence. Similarly
Canada permitted Quebec to vote and campaigned on the benefits. The Quebecois voted against
separation.
In the non-binding referendum done some years back nearly half the Catalans rejected an
independent state. If the Spanish had allowed an open referendum and campaigned against
secession the outcome would very likely have been that separation would have been rejected.
In an open referendum those opposed to secession would have been empowered to campaign and
vote against separation.
In this case the Spanish government chose to disrupt the referendum by using police force.
The separatists chose to come out in the streets to exercise their right of
self-determination. The videos of police violence are a public relations disaster for the
Spanish government and will only steel the resolve of the separatists. Since the Spanish
national police were attacking polling stations and taking away ballot boxes by force, this
created a pretext for the Catalonian authorities to tell their supporters they could print
their ballots at home and deposit at any polling station.
Additionally since the Spanish
police have disabled all vote counting software systems the Catalonians can count and come up
with any result they choose.
This situation can only escalate now. The lesson of the referenda in Scotland and Quebec
was not learned.
The EU project of a common currency and monetary policy is fundamentally flawed unless
they move towards a fiscal union as Macron is suggesting. Centrifugal forces are gathering
strength not only in Europe but also here in the US.
Centrifugal forces are gathering strength not only in Europe but also here in the US.
Perhaps, but in Catalonia's case (and Scotland's too) secession is planned with a view to
joining the EU in their own right.
I expect the authoritarian trend in some former COMECON countries will be a greater threat
to the EU.
I see much of the sentiments of the Catlonian independence movement as a major vote of no
confidence in the central Spanish government, which is a complete whore to the global bankers
and the EU's autocrats. The tyrannical attitudes of Junkers & Co. are driving the action
along these fault lines with the resulting seismic activity. The central governments have no
one to blame but themselves.
Of course, the EU might like to see this sort of unrest as an excuse to declare martial
law and establish themselves as the outright controllers of Europe.
Except the pro-independence leaders and supporters are also Pro-EU and have declared that
their newly formed free state will seek to join the EU and hope to be accepted with no
qualm (delusional) or some even argue that when they declare independence they won't actually
be leaving the EU.
So where that does leave your argument?
(disclaimer: I don't care one way or another about Spain nor Catalonia, I have no skin in
that game, though I generally lean towards favoring secessionist movements in principle.)
The early returns are showing a massive landslide victory for the Catalan separatists. I
have not seen any data yet on the turnout or the ratio of registered voters that actually
cast ballots.
" Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont says the region has won the right to statehood
following Sunday's contentious referendum which was marred by violence.
He said the door had been opened to a unilateral declaration of independence. "
How will the Spanish government now respond if the Catalan parliament declares
independence? Will they send in tanks? The media would have a field day with that. What will
the EU apparatchiks do?
Col. Lang, you are right. If the Catalans succeed in becoming independent, then it will
only embolden all the other separatist movements in Europe. The next few days will be
interesting to see how this escalates.
As you probably have figured out by now, my rhetorical positions in posts do not always
match my actual positions. It will, in fact be interesting to watch if Europe and North
America devolve into their natural fragments. I hope I am here to watch. BTW "The Vietnam
War" is available on Comcast "on demand." pl
IMO that ship has long sailed for Quebec at least. My father came here as an FOB immigrant in
the 80s and enthusiastically voted "Oui" in '95 along with his fellow transplants that had
accompanied him on scholarship way back then, all of whom along with him had by then picked
up native wives. The newer breed of immigrant is more in tune with "Multicultural Paradise"
vision of canada. And the younger quebecois generation couldnt care less, even as the
language itself continues to degenerate, especially in montreal.
This is a natural progression of the dismantling of the nation state supremacy over the past
30 years. The break-ups of Soviet Union and Yugoslavia established the precedent that the
constituent parts of a state can break off without a supporting referendum or agreement with
the central government. This culminated with the International Court of Justice ruling on
Kosovo independence that established that any group can declare independence. There is no
internationally recognized legal requirement for such declaration and the group does not have
to have any legitimacy through election or referendum. Enforcement of the territorial
integrity of a country depends solely on its monopoly of force, there is no legal recourse.
The issue Europe is facing now is that the economy is being driven off the cliff by the
German mercantilism, giving rise to populist nationalism. So now Europe, having supported the
principle of self-determination elsewhere (where convenient), will have to suppress it by
force at home while maintaining a veneer of democracy.
Britain and Canada managed to skirt the issue by relying on media and financial
inducements to obtain a favourable vote. Spain will be a real test as the referendum will be
inevitably followed by some sort of declaration of independence, leaving central government
with no choice but to escalate the into violent repression.
One way or the other, this will open a lot of rifts in Europe. Many people will see this
as illegal crackdown on democratic rights, while others will see it as legitimate suppression
of separatism. Countries with ethnic issues will likely side with Spain, but others will
likely side with Catalan self-determination rights. So far most EU governments are not
reacting, but the pressure to do so will increase quickly.
*****
About a decade ago slightly led by someone's core arguments on an issue surfacing here
repeatedly, I looked into self-determination and more recent academic debates. Legally it is
balanced by the right to territorial unity. Never mind my personal opinion concerning e.g.
Crimea. What about California?
******
You should update this term slightly, I had to smile, admittedly: The issue Europe is facing now is that the economy is being driven off the cliff by the
German mercantilism
That's at least the recurring critique by e.g. Yanis Varoufakis et all.
What about the idea of keeping some type of balance between what you earn/tax and what you
spent? Or redistribute? ... MRW seems to feel money only needs to be printed, debts don't
matter.
The Catalan and similar movements are going to become a feature of this century as a direct
result of globalism. This was made plain at least twenty years ago.
The cause is the weakening of the nation state as an organising principle because of the
weakening of national identity. People now have a multitude of choices about their identity
thanks to global information flows. For example you can now identify as LGBT, Jedi Night,
MS13, libertarian, etc. etc. The old 'brands" - English, Spanish, Italian, Australian, etc.
are now breaking down into a multitude of subsets with which people can identiify.
However its not just "identifying"; its organising around that identity that is the
problem. By way of example, it appears to me (and I may be wrong) that the entire BLM
movement is purveying a black American identity that is based on a "them and us" model that
views conflict as inevitable. In Australia we have a serious criminal gang problem with
members identifying as Hells Angels, Comancheros - imported American identities. Twenty years
ago that would have been quaint.
The downside of fragmentation is that the world is modeled on the Westphalian state concept,
and all our treaties with each other are predicated on the state enforcing them on their
citizens. As nation states lose that ability, the outcome is war.
Mike:
Only the province of Catalonia voted on it. Baleares and Valencia don't want to join them,
but of course you have plenty of foolish irredentists who want to take them back, and even
French Roussillon to boot.
That's even more reasons for EU countries to not recognize that process, because if they're
allowed to succeed, no current border will ever be safe in Europe; you'll always find some
goons ready to declare independence for their village, or for it to join the country next
door, or to want to annex the neighbouring town beyond the border, under any flimsy pretext.
Jack:
"As nation states lose that ability, the outcome is war."
Well, the outcome is more than war.
The obvious final outcome is the war of all these newly self-styled communities against all
the other communities.
Then, after immense bloodshed and suffering, when people will be fed up and depressed after
years of war, some major groups, ethnies, religions or leftover nations will stand and
regroup the bludgeoned and nearly destroyed smaller groups and populations, who will gladly
go under their umbrella if they can ensure peace at long last.
I defer to Col. Lang about the constitutional right of the Southern States. Here,
Catalonian independantist leaders clearly violated not only the Spanish Constitution, went
against Spanish Supreme Court rulings, they even went against their own Catalonian courts who
were opposed to the referendum and bypassed the Catalonian parliament, because they knew many
parties would opposed the referendum as well. To be blunt, that idiot Rajoy is acting out now
and relies on violence because Catalonian people couldn't be bothered to protest against
authoritarian leaders who don't give a damn about legality, both Spanish and Catalonian ones,
and Catalonian police couldn't be bothered to jail them.
And there's no way this is a backlash against "capitalist globalism" or whatever, the
current bunch of independantist leaders are just as corrupt as the Spanish ones, and the way
they did their wannabe referendum is proof enough they're ready to rule their future country
like Orban, or even Lukashenko.
I'm with Jack. Both Spain and Iraq should take lessons from the Scot and Quebec models.
Catalonia has never been truly Spanish, always repressed and treated with contempt by Madrid.
IIRC even Cervantes denigrated Catalonians 400 years ago, calling them thieves in his Don
Quixote novel.
What of Majorca and the other Balearics, was the referendum held there as well as in
Barcelona? Are they not all mostly of ethnic Catalan descent, or have they been Iberianized?
Or they may well prefer stability and the plentiful tourist euros and greenbacks instead of
the possible volatility of a referendum.
Europe is in such a state of uncertainty and tumult, I have to wonder how long people in the
periphery of some of these states will consider such stability as a net benefit. The slow
strangulation of Greece is an example to all.
The current Spanish Constitution made the peaceful transition from the Franco era possible,
at the price of denial of the legal right to secede. A more mature democracy, not needing to
look over its shoulder for the emergence of another Tejero (who threatened the Parliament)
from the ranks of the Army could have gone the same route as Quebec and Scotland. Not Spain.
There are plenty of "unresolved issues " out there. The most interesting, but depressing,
thing I've observed over the last 18 months or so has been the campaign to denigrate the
autonomous police force of Catalonia, culminating with a blame game over the recent terrorist
outrages. I'm not sure that there won't be telling responses to that, let alone the
hamfistedness of the central government over the past few months.
I will make a prediction that in 100 years, if there is a peaceful earth with a climate
that supports advanced civilizations, the world will be redefined into city states (or single
planet-wide nation aka star trek, but I think there were several global wars in between in
that future history).
Until fairly recently, empires with free movement within were the rule of the day. The EU
has attempted to resurrect empire, but in the world of good communication, the inevitable
inequalities are tearing the project apart (ignorance is bliss). The city and its surrounding
agricultural lands is a natural economic unit, and if you blob two city states into one
economic unit (e.g., a nation state), absent eternal subsidization (as in Rome versus Milan),
one city and its environs settles into terminal decline relative to the other. The end result
is that after a few hundred years, every country is dominated by one city with the rest on
economic life support (i.e., subsidization).
Current EU policy is optimal for Germany and thus by definition sub-optimal for all other
countries. The end result is the current state of affairs with the EU one Italian vote from
collapse. This would have happened eventually - for example, Italy has not had a good year of
economic growth since it joined the euro (but many good years before). However, the US
generated arc of instability and resultant refugee waves brought the chickens home to roost
in the now, not in a few decades.
Catalan is a symptom, and EU opposition is not a cure, its a band aid (as is the EU
treatment of Greece), but the EU repeatedly over-rules democracy (vote again until you get
the right vote), which as long as it also provided rising incomes (on debt) was accepted.
Many years ago I read a book that described the rise and decline of cities in different
countries but cant recall or google find the title (not Jane Jacobs' treatise).
Detroit is an excellent example - US economic policy matches that of the financial
centers. Only if Michigan was to separate, could Detroit reverse its fortunes - possibly but
unlikely given the quality of US political leadership - or more to the point, how bought they
are in our very expensive electoral system.
No, no, no. That model does not exist any longer, what relationship does Mexico City, Seoul,
Peking, Tehran, London, New York, DC have with the surrounding country side?
Since, as has been pointed out, Catalonia would remain in the EU, it seems on the surface to
make little difference whether Catalonia remains part of Spain anymore than if Bavaria
remains part of Germany or Lombardy part of Italy.
The real problem for Madrid's poobahs is how can they keep paying extortion money to German,
French and American banks if they lose a major urban center like Catalonia. I'm sure they
assume (and probably correctly) that Basque country would follow quickly in departure.
Aside from that, the extreme and rapidly accelerating centralizing tendencies of the
neoliberal world order (the Brussels brain trust throwing national sovereignty out the window
when issues of finance and immigration come up for instance) have created a reaction that
might look likely to undo the EU project, but in a way, create a crisis which could be
exploited by those seeking further centralization.
Catalonia would NOT remain in the EU. I stated that the pro-independence leaders and
supporters WANTED to remain in the EU but that is a pipe deam they are selling each other
because the EU would not recognise any unilateral declaration of independence and Spain would
never vote for Catalonia to join anyway.
Multiethnical states tend to fall apart see Sovietunion, Yugoslavia, or Czechoslovakia.
Wonder how long such anti-minority states like Greater Romania and Ukraine will last.
OTOH with such gigacompanies such as google, or microsoft the creation of small,
fragmented, and financially weak states clearly favor the masters of globalization.
'Double
standard & hypocrisy': Serbian president on EU denouncement of Catalan referendum
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic has accused the EU of hypocrisy and double-standards
following its denouncement of the Catalonian referendum as illegal, while acknowledging the
independence of the breakaway province of Kosovo.
" The question every citizen of Serbia has for the European Union today is: How come that in
the case of Catalonia the referendum on independence is not valid, while in the case of Kosovo
secession is allowed even without a referendum, " B92 quoted Vucic as saying during a news
conference.
" How did you proclaim the secession of Kosovo to be legal, even without a referendum, and
how did 22 European Union countries legalize this secession, while destroying European law and
the foundations of European law, on which the European policy and EU policy are based?
"
On Monday the European Commission echoed the Spanish government's stance that the referendum
held in Catalonia was illegal, describing the events on Sunday, which saw voters being beaten
by Spanish riot police, as an "internal matter". By contrast in 2010, the European Parliament
adopted a resolution urging its member states to recognize Kosovo's independence.
" This is the best example of the double standards and hypocrisy of the world politics,
" Vucic said.
The authors of The Israel Lobby went on
Chicago radio station WBEZ last week to reflect on their achievement after ten years. No, not
60 Minutes. Not The New York Times. Not MSNBC. But WBEZ radio.
It is a great interview by Jerome McDonnell about a stupendous achievement. As I wrote ten years
ago, this book is up there with Rachel Carsons Silent Spring, Upton Sinclairs The Jungle and Ralph
Naders Unsafe at Any Speed, as a bombshell that will help transform society.
Below are some choice bits from the interview.
Publication ruined both mens chances to serve in government or in university administration. Mearsheimer:
I had no interest whatsoever in a government position. But I did think that when we wrote the
piece, that it would mean that we would never get a high level government position. Even medium
level government position. It would also make it almost impossible for us to get any meaningful
administrative job in the academic world.
Mearsheimer was then 59 years old and in Chicago. But Steve Walt was a sprightly 50 and on I-95,
on the Harvard springboard to presidential elbows. The book forever changed his horizon:
I was academic dean in the Kennedy School. I think its fair to say that both universities did
stand by us in the sense that they didnt put any formal censure on us. There were various ways
of what you might call informal marginalization at least for a while, because the leaderships
in both universities were very nervous about the fallout. Universities dont really like controversy
very much.
I did understand that this was probably going to eliminate any possibility of government service
in my case, which is something I do regret, because its something I would have appreciated, had
that opportunity presented itself at some point down the road.
Walt went on to say that they had to do it. If we werent willing to do that, then hardly anybody
else would be. We couldnt lose our jobs. We didnt necessarily need government employment to pay the
mortgage.
The two men actually gave up on the article and book years before it was published because
doors kept closing. Here is some of the history.
Mearsheimer spoke about the idea first at the American Political Science Association meetings
in Boston in 2002; and a friend said the Atlantic wanted to commission an article on that very subject.
The Atlantic magazine assigned Walt and Mearsheimer in 2002. Then it got cold feet and killed the
piece in early 2005. At that time, Walt said, the two scholars thought that no other outlet in
the United States would publish it , but they could flesh it out as a short book, so they consulted
a number of publishers and a couple of literary agents.
We got what you would call polite interest but nothing you could call enthusiasm. At one point
we basically decided to drop the project entirely.
Jesus H. Christ.
After that, though, an editor who had a copy of the piece showed it to a scholar at UCLA who reached
out to Mearsheimer and said the London Review of Books might be interested. The LRB version
was eventually
published in March 2006 , and provoked an immediate firestorm, Walt said.
Ironically once it provoked that firestorm, suddenly publishers and literary agents recognized
that there was a product people were interested in and suddenly they were contacting us and offering
us book contracts.
Mearshimer said it was the internet that published that piece as much as the LRB:
The internet was indispensable for making this article available to people all over the world.
If this had been published in the London Review of Books in 1985 or 1990 when there was no internet,
hardly anybody would have taken notice. But in the age of the internet, this article just ricocheted
all over the world very, very quickly.
Rashid Khalidi at Columbia University told me that the morning after the piece had hit the
internet, 14 different people had sent him a link for the piece. It was such a big bombshell.
Now here is the sad conclusion. Mearsheimer:
I dont think we– or anyone else– has had much influence on policy. I think the lobby is still
as powerful as ever. Its now more out in the open, and thats not necessarily a good thing for
a lobby, but its still remarkably effective. This is why you saw all those Republicans falling
all over themselves in the 2016 Republican primaries to say how devoted they were to Israel, because
they understand that you dont want to cross the lobby.
Or to put that another way: This interview was not on 60 Minutes, MSNBC, or the New York Times!
The authors deal with the fact that the lobby failed on the Iran deal. They never said that the
lobby could not be defeated; but that delivering a defeat would require spending a lot of political
capital, as President Obama did. And P.S. the lobby isnt finished with the Iran deal! (Republished
from Mondoweiss
by permission of author or representative)
The academic courage of Mearsheimer and Walt brings to mind the late Richard Herrnstein who
in good conscience felt that his tenured position required him to defend and propagate the truth
even if not popular (what would now be classified as non-PC).
The Israel Lobby was a volume that fatefully examined the influence of the State of
Israel and its strength of power over broad aspects of money-driven American politics.
They (the IL) need to be put in their place. It cant be done without access to significant media
outlets who are intimidated by how the IL works.
Thank goodness they could not stop the Iran deal which caused the vilifying of Obama. Israel indicating
that the president was the new focus of antisemitism in the 21st century. Congrats to Walt-Mearsheimer
on their anniversary of a great book as we hope to gain traction in minimizing the foreign influence
in our policies and political figures.
The retweeted article by Phillip Giraldi itself contains the usual anti-Semitic tropes: Jews
are guilty of dual loyalty; they control politicians, the media and entertainment ; they
want the U.S. to fight wars for the country to which they have real allegiance – Israel; they
are dangerous to America. Giraldi has been pushing this garbage for years and Plame is one of
his fans.
Hard not to be an anti-Semitic troll in these circumstances because the truth about the Israel
Lobby IS anti-Semitic (to use the chosen gibberish terminology of those who use this term as a
weapon)..
Or to put that another way: This interview was not on 60 Minutes, MSNBC, or the New York
Times!
Reinforcing the fact that the most urgent problem is not really either antisemitism or jewish
dual loyalty, just as it is not racism or antiracism, but rather it is the fact that in each case
one side is largely successful in suppressing the free expression of the other, thus biasing the
public debate and therefore opinion and therefore policy. The result is policy warped out of true
in favour of the powerful identity and other lobbies behind the creation and maintenance of these
taboos, whether foreign policy (wars fought in the interests of foreign nations) or domestic (the
ongoing attempt to suppress free speech by creating a hate speech exception, active suppression
of traditionalist, nativist, Christian etc liberties, globalism, promotion of mass immigration,
etc).
The value of Unz is precisely that it stands against that suppression, to publish the Interesting,
Important, and Controversial Perspectives Largely Excluded from the American Mainstream Media.
One of the more controversial pieces here recently was Giraldis piece arguing that there is
a problem with dual loyalty amongst jewish nationalists in positions of influence in the US biasing
policy towards wars they see as favouring Israel (
Americas Jews Are Driving Americas Wars ). The details can be debated, though nobody yet has
come up with any convincing counter to the basic thrust of his piece and most criticisms have
been aimed at its tone or at straw men. But what is really important about that piece, and the
reason he and it should be supported even by those who do not necessarily agree with his point
or the way it was expressed, is precisely that it simply could not be published in any mainstream
media outlet, and indeed Giraldi was promptly sacked from even a fringe political publication
merely for having had it published elsewhere.
It has been argued persuasively that we cannot be confident of the truth of any position once
we have refused to allow the arguments against it to be heard. It may also be the case that genuine
freedom of political expression is an unachievable ideal, but at least we should try to get as
close as possible to that ideal, rather than meekly surrendering to the leftist position that
says some opinions are too dangerous to be heard.
@Avery{Dershowitz wrote on Fox News website:
Quote"The retweeted article by Phillip Giraldi itself contains the usual anti-Semitic tropes:
Jews are guilty of dual loyalty }
Dershowitz spearheaded years-long efforts to have Pollard released.
A Jewish-American man, born in Texas, who worked for the foreign State of Israel, spied on his
putative home country of US of America, and caused great harm and damage to United States.
Pretty hard not to conclude that Dershowitz's loyalty to his putative home country is somewhat
tarnished. If Deshowitz et al had any real smarts they'd throw the filthy traitor under the bus
and forget about him.
But obviously they can't: and the question is "Why?".
And the answer is 'The gentleman doth protest too much' .
If Deshowitz et al had any real smarts theyd throw the filthy traitor under the bus and
forget about him. But obviously they cant: and the question is Why?.
No, they know exactly what they are doing. There is a reason why Israel and its supporters
lobbied for leniency for Pollard. It is important for the continued recruitment of new spies that
the recruiter demonstrate loyalty to the old ones, even after they get caught – especially after
they get caught. The Russians did the same thing. Dershowitz, and the others who advocated Pollards
release, wanted Pollard to be well taken care of, because they want there to be more Pollards.
Accept in Jewishness of neocons is counterproductive. They perform their role because this is
what MIC which controls and pays them want them to perform. The fact that there are selected for
this role is no different then large percent of Jews in academia: they provide to be talented
propagandists.
Some commenters definitely mix effects of neoliberalism on the US society with the influence
of Jews. That's pathetic.
Notable quotes:
"... [Choose a single Handle and stick with it, or use Anonymous/Anon. Otherwise, your comments will be trashed.] ..."
...The recent example is a piece by Philip
Giraldi on the Unz.com, which still produces waves on the web. In his piece he rolled the
list of Jews who were keen on Iraq invasion, and who are pushing the US now into an attack on
Iran: "David Frum, Max Boot, Bill Kristol and Bret Stephens, Mark Dubowitz, Michael Ledeen And
yep, they're all Jewish, plus most of them would self-describe as neo-conservatives."
Giraldi proposed to keep Jews out of the positions of influence on the foreign affairs, in
order to keep the US out of wars it does not need. Giraldi wrote: "We don't need a war with
Iran because Israel wants one and some rich and powerful American Jews are happy to
deliver."
Actually, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz wrote at the time (in
April 2003): "The war in Iraq was conceived by 25 neoconservative intellectuals, most of them
Jewish, who are pushing President Bush to change the course of history. Two of them,
journalists William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer, say it's possible."
I also wrote things in the same vein during Iraq invasion, and it is good to see that this
thesis did not die but keeps resurging from time to time. One could add that these very persons
are pushing for conflict with Russia, demonise Putin and attack Trump, though the Orange Man
tries to fulfill their wishes as an eager Santa Claus of diligent Lizzie.
While agreeing with Giraldi on the malady, let us discuss the remedy. Would keeping Jews out
of foreign policy making actually help? Did the US keep out of wars before the Rise of Jews in
late 1960s? The Jews weren't specially prominent before that time, and certainly weren't
overrepresented in the establishment. A Jewish couple, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg has been
fried on the electric chair in 1953, and there were few objections. McCarthy terrorized Jews.
The word Holocaust had yet to make its first appearance (in 1968). Jews were still kept out of
clubs and out of high level politics. Israel had been threatened by the US (in 1956) rather
than assisted.
And still, the free-from-Jews US had fought in Korea the terrible three-year long war
(1950-1953), and in Vietnam (up to 1974), invaded and caused regime change in Guatemala and
Iran, violently interfered in elections in France and Italy, and had fought the fierce Cold War
against the USSR. In all these campaigns, the US Jews were actually for peace and against war.
The Jews were nowhere in power when the US fought its wars against Spain and Mexico. The
non-Jewish US made a coup in Iran, and non-Jewish and not-pro-Israel President Carter tried to
invade Iran. Jews weren't involved in the conquest of Panama, in Nicaragua intervention, in
Granada operation.
Perhaps the Jews had moved the arena of wars to the Middle East and out of Latin America.
Less Jewish-influenced America would rather invade Venezuela than Iraq or Iran. But is it so
wonderful?
The idea of correcting or channelling the excessive Jewish influence is a reasonable one,
but can this goal be achieved by keeping Kristol and Krauthammer out of media (an excellent
thought anyway)?
The Jewish prominence in the US is inbuilt in the US culture and tradition. Karl Marx
wrote that "in North
America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its
unambiguous and normal expression". He said that all Yankees are Jews, behave like Jews, aspire
to be Jews and even are circumcised like Jews. So it is natural that real Jews succeed better
in being Jews than their Gentile neighbours. Werner Sombart added that Jews were prominent from
the very dawn of America and they created American-style capitalism the way that fits them. The
Jews are prominent now because America is custom-built for Jews to fit and suit them, he
said.
This is what should be corrected, and then the Jewish scribes, these Krauthammers will be
out of business of inciting wars. Stop subscribing to Jewish success model, and the Jews won't
be able to influence the Senate. Make the US Christian as Christ taught, share labour and
wealth, aspire to God instead of Mammon, make the first last and the last first, love thy
neighbour and the problem will be solved.
If this is too tall an order, make it a smaller one. Unseating Ledeens and Frums (and I
think they deserve tar and feathers all right) will not do the trick unless the rich Jews are
un-wealthed. Without excessive Jewish wealth, there will be no excessive Jewish push for wars.
And provided that more than half of all US wealth is in few Jewish hands, freeing it will make
a colossal effect of improving life of every American, even every person on earth.
And why to stop there? The super-rich non-Jews are as Jewish as any Jew. They share the same
aspirations. Strip them of their assets. Why should we worry whether Jeff Bezos is a Jew by
blood or faith, or he is not? He behaves like a Jew, and that is enough. Establish a ceiling of
wealth, a counterpart of minimal wage. This idea has been mulled: Jeremy Corbyn called for the
maximum wage. Taxes can do it easily – in wonderful Sweden of 1950s, top tax rate was
102%. Or this can be achieved in a more festive way of stripping the richest men of their
ill-gotten wealth on the main square of Washington, DC on Mardi Gras Sunday. Do not say this is
a punishment for their diligence – other way around, this is assistance on their way to
spiritual improvement. Too many assets imprison the spirit.
This would be good for Jews and for all concerned: while the average Jewish wealth in the US
had been lagging below total average (that is as long as Jews were less wealthy than Gentiles),
the Jews acted in the interests of the people. Around 1968-1970 the Jews became more wealthy
than all Americans, and that was it: they ceased to strive for the common good.
Jews could be a force for good if their excessive tendency to collect material goods is
nipped in the bud. So it was in the USSR: as the Jews could not make money, they went into
science and worked for the common good. Even oligarchs could be good managers instead of pain
in the neck for the society.
This is not more complicated than booting Max Boot out of writing business. So why to go for
a palliative if you can go for the jugular?
Israel Shamir is an entertaining writer and sometimes informative (especially about Russia).
But he is prone to hyperbole. For example:
[N]on-Jewish and not-pro-Israel President Carter tried to invade Iran
Perhaps the Jews had moved the arena of wars to the Middle East and out of Latin America.
Less Jewish-influenced America would rather invade Venezuela than Iraq or Iran. But is it so
wonderful?
– Shamir
The Special Forces operation to extract USA's hostages in Iran fell way short of anything
that anyone would call an "invasion." As for Venezuela:
Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) fired back at President Trump on Friday, saying Congress
"obviously isn't authorizing war in Venezuela" after Trump said he wouldn't rule out using a
military option in the country.
"No, Congress obviously isn't authorizing war in Venezuela," Sasse, a member of the Senate
Armed Services committee, said in a statement. "Nicolas Maduro is a horrible human being, but
Congress doesn't vote to spill Nebraskans' blood based on who the Executive lashes out at
today."
– The Hill
This entire article is based on Shanir's exaggerationa: First, as I recall, Giraldi never
suggested any form of censorship of news media or commentary; more likely Giraldi would like to
see effectively less censorship, especially censorship on behalf of Israel and Zionism. Second,
Giraldi, as I recall, never made his suggestions as promising an end to war in general. Third,
Giraldi never suggested that removing Jews from positions of influence relating to USA's global
security/strategy would keep the USA out of all unnecessary wars, only that it would help in
getting the USA out of unnecessary wars in the ME -- wars that do not enhance and indeed detract
from our national security.
I feel certain that Giraldi knows as much as anyone about the evil influence of the Military
Industrial Congressional Complex -- which obviously includes major gentile players as well as
Zionist neocons. For me, the matter is simple: anyone whose loyalty is divided between the USA
and Israel should be barred from any position of influence in USA's military or related
governmental activities. The same is true for anyone whose loyalty is divided between the USA
and the People's Republic of China or Ireland or Russia or the Vatican or wherever.
It's been a week or so since I read Giraldi's piece, but I recall him saying keep Jews in
the US out of policy matters relating to Israel. "Put the Jewish members in
charge of Korea Policy. . . " I believe was Giraldi's example. You seem to be punching a straw
man with your otherwise pedestrian argument. But thanks for supporting Giraldi's basic
thesis!
Now these pitiful William-F-Buckley-tards should put Giraldi's article back up; Shamir
confirms that Giraldi is right.
While agreeing with Giraldi on the malady, let us discuss the remedy. Would keeping Jews
out of foreign policy making actually help? Did the US keep out of wars before the Rise of Jews
in late 1960s? The Jews weren't specially prominent before that time, and certainly weren't
overrepresented in the establishment.
This is an interesting question, but there is a difference between Then and Now.
In the past, US expansionism was part of the global norm. Imperialism was common and
accepted all over the world. Ottomans ruled over a giant empire. Russians kept expanding into
Siberia and Central Asia. It also swallowed parts of Central Europe. Manchus took over China
and gobbled up more territory as part of Chinese empire. There were native imperialist wars in
Africa before white man came. And Mexico was also the product of empire building. Spanish took
it from Aztec Imperialists, and the Conquis took more land. And Spanish also took Philippines.
Brits and French were creating vast empires. US was created out of empire-building and
continued as such.
So, US warmongering in the past was part of the world norm. Everyone did it. Also,
empire-building was seen as glorious for the Whole People. So, even though the elites benefited
the most, there was a sense of shared glory among all Britons over the British Empire. All
Frenchmen were to share the glory of the French Empire. And US expansion into SW territories
was great not only for elites but for Anglo settlers who built new lives in those areas. And it
was even good for Mexers in the region because Anglos did so much than Mexers had done before
when SW territories had belonged to Mexico. It's like Ramon has it pretty good working for
gringos. He was like the Guillermo of his day.
@Anonymous I
thought the ascent of Jewish power in America started in 1913?
One year after that, America entered WWI... WWI was planned and executed to plan by a
British elite – just like the 2 Boer wars. In all these wars, wealthy Jewish bankers
helped get them started – the Cassels and the Rothschilds principally. Many leading
British politicians – e.g. Winston Churchill and his father – were deeply in debt
to these people. The much touted "Balfour Declaration" was the product of a British prime
minister who was in debt to them – as was his uncle Lord Salisbury.
Randolph Churchill died with debts of the order of $8m in today's money to these bankers. It
is all well-documented.
Suggested reading:
"The Secret Origins of the First Wold War" by Gerry Docherty and Jim MacGregor
However, blaming ordinary Jews or American Jews for WWI is as ridiculous as blaming the
French for their corrupt Poincaré or the ordinary British for the warmonger
Churchill.
@Grandpa
Charlie It occurs to me that it's possible that Shamir intended the article as humor, as
camp, as a parody of ((anti-Jewish)) commentary here at UR. It's complicated.
This article is a mix of truths and bull. But the key problem with the article is that it
never mentions the main tool of the Zionists – the petrodollar and the main conduit of
the Zionist power in US – The Federal Reserve. Luckily, China and Russia are working on
dethroning FED by diminishing petrodollar. This will have the world-wide beneficial effect of
deglobalisation: removing the ability to print money indefinitely will curb the ambitions of
both "the rich Jews and the rich who want to be Jews" to rule the World. Power will become
distributed again and the Jews will have to compete with the Chinese for domination.
Diminishing petrodollar is a much healthier solution than the Marxist's solution of removing
wealth from the wealthy Jews and wannabe Jews. Once one starts removing wealth from
individuals, one does not know where and when to stop.
@Anonymous
It's quite hard to know such things for certain, since a lot of highly-paid professional effort
has gone into concealing them from public scrutiny.
For some reason I am reminded of George Carlin's weirdly logical observation, "One can never
know for sure what a deserted area looks like".
Around 1968-1970 the Jews became more wealthy than all Americans, and that was it: they
ceased to strive for the common good.
For the next 30 years through excessive debt the Jew Allen Greenspan, head of the Fed, put a
stake in the heart of America's economy – end of story.
Jew dominated corporate America turned its head away from its fiduciary responsibilities to
customers, employees, neighbors, investors, and country – they instead turned to raw,
naked, personal greed. Junk bonds got the ball rolling.
In America you no longer do business with your neighbors – you must do business with
Wall Street – Wall Street gets a slice of all your spending. Guess what – unlike
you neighbors – Wall Street doesn't give dam about you – PERIOD.
Companies change ownership with the tough of a keyboard creating great uncertainty for all
those invoved. This creates instability.
Ownership must be returned to local people. Then stability will return to culture.
Remember the old adage for success in the world of WASPs: "Think Yiddish, dress
British."
A serious case can be made for replacing the income tax, which has the potential to keep
people from becoming wealthy, with a wealth tax, which has the effect of making people pay in
proportion to their longer-term success and influence in the system. A millennial might say
that this would be a more sustainable way to run things.
This is not more complicated than booting Max Boot out of writing business. So why to go
for a palliative if you can go for the jugular?
If you think that imposing a general prohibitive wealth tax or somehow banning being rich is
"not more complicated" than simply recognising the problems of dual loyalty and ulterior group
motives, both in general and in particular relation to jewish elites, and addressing them in
some form, then you would seem rather unrealistic to me.
There has been no convincing argument raised against Giraldi's point – the closest to
a response so far seems to be the one you raise here – that jews aren't the only people
or groups pushing the US towards war, which is rather irrelevant, and the insistence that not
all jewish people do so, which is both obvious and likewise irrelevant.
Regardless, and whether or not one agrees with Giraldi's particular diagnosis of one aspect
of the ills of modern US sphere society (I do, broadly), one should support him and it anyway
simply because its expression is so obviously being punished by those who seek to suppress it.
His prompt dismissal by the contemptible American Conservative illustrates the truth of the
point made by those who complain of politically correct censorship being used by identity
lobbyists and those who kowtow to them to control dissent.
The latter is a far bigger problem in the societies of the modern US sphere than the
particular issue of foreign policy identified by Giraldi.
I like what is being said:
Before the 1960s the Jews in the US were not occupying the front stage but their influence was
far from being negligeable. They were acting like a fifth column and as such, they have been
active in triggering and supporting the Bolsheviks revolution, in getting the US to enter WW I
and latter on WW II.
It is also obvious that when they were not occupying the front stage, they were courting the
people in the US and in all the countries where they were living; to get accepted and their
contribution to the societies was important.
Today as they are running the show in the western world, they are acting like slaves drivers
and are treating others like they treat the Palestinians.
Having conquered the US and its dominions in Europe, they want to get the rest of the world.
They never have enough. It looks like they want to take a revenge against all the others like
they have done against the Russian during the revolution. They are no more working for
improving the world but for running it and wreaking a revenge for having living the Diaspora
.
The only way to stop them driving us to Armageddon is to have them bankrupted; the whole
world might be in jeopardy but that is the only way to avoid a nuclear apocalypse.
[Choose a single Handle and stick with it, or use Anonymous/Anon. Otherwise, your
comments will be trashed.]
I have never found Jews particularly cheap or materialistic. Maybe as a Scot I have a warped
perspective. Denied the chance at noble titles or churchly favor, money has been their only
path to power and distinction. What I do see as a problem is the combination of extreme ability
and extreme solidarity. Put that together with their adversarial relationship to the gentile
world developed over the centuries and you have a recipe for harmful culture war. Producing
sexy movies and violent rap, the war on Christmas, the attempt to limit free speech -- all are
forms of aggression or payback for aggression, as I see it. To be sure, not all Jews or even
most feel this emotion, but the ones that do work hard to promote it. According to Pew
Research, 94% of self-identified Jews identify as pro-choice. The next highest group is
mainline Protestants at 59%. Such a great disparity suggests to me that the issue is largely
symbolic for them. I suspect you would find similar disparities on gun rights, attitudes to
pornography, and religion in the public square. It's rare for Muslims or Hindus to complain
about having to hear Christmas carols, but many Jews want to sick the Homeland Security SWAT
Team on the school choir if a few syllables of Hark the Herald Angels are overheard. For that
reason, I feel more threatened by the billions of Adelson, Bezos, Saban, Soros, and Singer than
by Gates or Buffett, even though the latter are also quite liberal.
Why focus so much on Jewish wealth? The main problem of the American system has a simple
name: capitalism. It is wealth and excessively rich people as such, who are the problem, and
with a certain amount of wealth, you stop giving a fork about your religious, ethnic, national,
or other alliances. All you care about are interests rates. Rich people also have a tendency to
turn psychopath and get hooked on power – after all, you need to utilize that money, and
you can only buy so many yachts, ferraris and mansions, right?
Scratch capitalism by changing the monetary system from a debt money system to a full or
free money system, in which private banking based on loans and credits is called out for what
it is: criminal fraud. The debt of the many – including government – is the wealth
of a few. You wouldn't have this sick connection between wealth and poverty, if money creation
wasn't based on debt, and only allowed to a (computerized and automated) fourth state power
called the monetative. Read German thinkers to understand that, start with Karl Marx to
understand the social and spiritual errors of capitalism, read Silvio Gesell and, more
up-to-date, German economist Bernd Senf and Austrian economist Franz Hörmann to understand
the possible alternatives. Educate yourself about The Wörgl Experiment to get an
historical example from Austria where Free Money worked wonders before it was scrapped by the
bankster elite and their political servants during the Great Depression in the 1930s.
Only free money could guarantee free markets (and you wouldn't even need taxes anymore). In
capitalism with debt money, all you ever get is monopolies and corporate cartels.
Add to that a real democracy – no congress, no parliament, no parties, the
legislative shall only be the people based on direct democracy. We now have the technological
means to realize what has never been realized in human history: free markets, democracy, and
something which could be called communism. Don't flinch from reading this last word, the stuff
you commonly refer to as communism must be called bolshevism and has had nothing to do with
actual communist ideals, which can never be realized in a centralized fashion as in capitalism
(centralized wealth) or in bolshevism (centralized state power). But thanks to IT at our
disposal, it can now be realized in form of free money and direct democracy.
'Stop subscribing to Jewish success model, and the Jews won't be able to influence the
Senate. Make the US Christian as Christ taught, share labour and wealth, aspire to God instead
of Mammon, make the first last and the last first, love thy neighbour and the problem will be
solved.'
Would that this were possible. Great ideas in this article, but realistically, could any of
it be implemented? It would take great anti-Jewish fervency, which, as you note, Americans
don't have as they have always behaved as Jews.
What about the American Jewish bankers–like Schiff–that bankrolled Lenin and his
thugs to sneak back into Russia, then proceeded–with his Jewish buddies–to steal
the Revolution from Russians that had deposed the Czar?
Lenin's Bolshevik Jew radicals turned that Christian nation into a Commie nightmare,
murdering around 60 million Russians in the process and turned a Christian nation that had been
on friendly terms with the USA into an implacable foe, eventually leading to a five decades
long 'Cold War.'
The USSR Commies tried to export their madness to Europe, specifically Germany, which led to
the popularity and rise of Hitler and eventually WW II.
During WWII, FDR had a number of Jewish advisers, like Henry Morgenthau, Jr. whose post-WW II
plan for Germany was so punitive, it gave Germans the will to fight harder in the closing days
to prevent the plans implementation, thereby dragging out the war.
It was President Truman's support for creating Israel–by stealing it from
Palestine–and his recognition of that apartheid nightmare that led to many an ill,
including 9/11.
I like Mr. Shamir's writings, but I think he needs to hit the history books again and
refresh his memory.
Just stay away from Wikipedia, which publishes a lop-sided version of the past.
What I saw in the speech was a long-overdue redressing of the balance. Of course
nationalism is not an unqualified good; of course nationalism has its pathologies. But you can
say the same of globalism.
One thing Donald Trump's election victory last year demonstrated is that many of us think
globalism has gone too far, has over-reached, especially in the absurd and nation-destroying
doctrine of Open Borders.
We want to redress the balance. The good thing about Trump's speech; It sounds as though he
wants to redress that balance, too.
"... Despite the creation of a new global order, has not transnationalism led to the politicization of identity in the form of fundamentalism, xenophobia, and a fanatical espousal of tradition, as many critics observe? It is increasingly doubtful that transnational practices are generally counter-hegemonic. ..."
"... The dissemination of transnational practices entails the transterritorialization of various socioeconomic, political, and cultural practices and identities that frequently bolster the formation and reconstitution of the nation-state. ..."
"... As Arjun Appadurai observes in his book Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization ..."
"... Yet transnational politics often lead to cultural and religious fanaticism by emphasizing a conception of identity between the "authentic" and the "demonic." ..."
Despite the creation of a new global order, has not
transnationalism led to the politicization of identity in the form of fundamentalism,
xenophobia, and a fanatical espousal of tradition, as many critics observe? It is increasingly
doubtful that transnational practices are generally counter-hegemonic.
The dissemination of transnational practices entails the transterritorialization of
various socioeconomic, political, and cultural practices and identities that frequently bolster
the formation and reconstitution of the nation-state.
As Arjun Appadurai observes in his book Modernity at Large:
Cultural Dimensions of Globalization , diasporic communities such as the ones formed
through the phenomena of transnationalism in the West Indies, Malaya, Fiji, Mauritius, Eastern
and Western Africa, the U. K., and the U. S., "safe from the depredations of their home states
. . . become doubly loyal to their nations of origin" (49).
Transnationalism implies a process in which formations that have traditionally been
perceived as restricted to well-defined political and geographical formations have transgressed
national borders, producing new social formations. Yet transnational politics often lead to
cultural and religious fanaticism by emphasizing a conception of identity between the
"authentic" and the "demonic." It is important to offer a critical dialogue between the
works of transnational writers and the contemporary history they encounter, using history to
interrogate fiction and using fiction to think through historical issues.
All discussions of what nowadays fascism is, our could mean, end like rivers in the desert.
Poetic, jilles dykstra, but as an Italian given to bluntness, I'd state it somewhat differently:
Most people who sling the epithet "fascist" do not know what the hell they are talking about.
I suggest they read Giovanni Gentile's Origins and Doctrine of Fascism
It's going to require a bit of effort -- a lot of effort, in fact to fully understand Gentile
and what he/Mussolini hoped to achieve through Fascism -- The effort will likely tax the most
ambitious of our stenographer/journalist class: you'll have to take on board an understanding
of Italy's fragmented history, and especially of Italy's relationship to Catholicism: it's easy
for me, I lived it, but Brian Lamb was absolutely flummoxed when Maurizio Viroli tried to explain
to him that Italians incorporate within themselves holy-joe pious Catholic practices with utter
disdain for Church strictures --
https://www.c-span.org/video/?160904-1/niccolos-smile
As an Italian, I would, of course, play some beautiful music in the background. Tchaikovsky
gathered charming Italian folk music and composed the dynamic Capriccio Italien:
PS Our Jewish/zionist friends might find it intriguing that Jabotinsky centered his "spiritual
being" in Rome, and greatly admired Mussolini and sought to incorporate his ideas in Revisionist
Zionism.
So said Raghuram Rajan, the former governor of the Reserve Bank of India, during a keynote address
he gave at the Stigler Center's
conference on the political economy of finance that took place in June.
Rajan, a professor of finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, spoke about
the "concentrated and devastating" impact of technology and trade on blue-collar communities in
areas like the Midwest, the anger toward "totally discredited" elites following the 2008 financial
crisis, and the subsequent rise of populist nationalism, seen as a way to restore a sense of community
via exclusion.
In his talk, Rajan focused on three questions related to current populist discontent: 1. Why is
anger focused on trade? 2. Why now? 3. Why do so many voters turn to far-right nationalist movements?
"Pointing fingers at these communities and telling them they don't understand is not the right
answer," he warned. "In many ways, the kind of angst that we see in industrial countries today
is similar to the bleak times [of] the 1920s and 1930s. Most people in industrial countries used
to believe that their children would have a better future than their already pleasant present.
Today this is no longer true." ...
There's quite a bit more. I don't agree with everything he (Raghuram) says, but thought it might
provoke discussion.
The understanding of exploitation
Of wage earning production workers
Is a better base then the 18 th century liberal ideal of equality
Exploitation and oppression are obviously not the same
even if they make synergistic team mates oftener then not
So long as " them " are blatantly oppressed
It's easy to Forget you are exploited
Unlike oppression
Exploitation can be so stealthy
So not part of the common description of the surface of daily life
Calls for equality must include a careful answer to the question
" equal with who ? "
Unearned equality is not seen as fair to those who wanna believe they earned their status
Add in the obvious :
To be part of a successful movement aimed at Exclusion of some " thems " or other
Is narcotic
Just as fighting exclusion can be a narcotic too for " thems "
But fighting against exclusion coming from among a privileged rank among
The community of would be excluders
That is a bummer
A thankless act of sanctimony
Unless you spiritually join the " thems"
Now what have we got ?
Jim Crow thrived for decades it only ended
When black arms and hands in the field at noon ...by the tens of millions
were no longer necessary to Dixie
"Pointing fingers at these communities and telling them they don't understand is not the right
answer," he warned. "In many ways, the kind of angst that we see in industrial countries today
is similar to the bleak times [of] the 1920s and 1930s. Most people in industrial countries used
to believe that their children would have a better future than their already pleasant present.
Today this is no longer true." ...
I thought this sort of thinking was widely accepted only in 2016 we were told by the center
left that no it's not true.
"Rajan, a professor of finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, spoke
about the "concentrated and devastating" impact of technology and trade on blue-collar communities
in areas like the Midwest, the anger toward "totally discredited" elites following the 2008 financial
crisis, and the subsequent rise of populist nationalism, seen as a way to restore a sense of community
via exclusion."
Instead the center left is arguing that workers have nothing to complain about and besides
they're racist/sexist.
'"These communities have become disempowered partly for economic reasons but partly also because
decision-making has increasingly been centralized toward state governments, national governments,
and multilateral [agreements]," said Rajan. In the European Union, he noted, the concentration
of decision-making in Brussels has led to a lot of discontent.'
I'd suggest that this part is not true. Communities have become politically disempowered in
large part because they have become economically disempowered. A shrinking economy means a shrinking
tax base and less funds to do things locally. Even if the local government attempts to rebuild
by recruiting other employers, they end up in a race to the bottom with other communities in a
similar situation.
I'd also suggest that the largest part of the "discontent" in the EU is not because of any
"concentration of decision-making", but because local (and regional, and national) politicians
have used the EU as a convenient scapegoat for any required, but unpopular action.
"... By Alexey Kovalev, an independent journalist living and working in Moscow. Follow him on Twitter: @Alexey__Kovalev. Originally published at openDemocracy ..."
August 19, 2017 by
Yves Smith Yves here.
This is a well-argued debunking of various "evil Rooskie" claims and is very much worth circulating.
Stunningly, there actually are people asserting that white supremacists and the figurative and now
literal hot fights over Confederate symbols (remember that Confederate flags have been a big controversy
too?) are part of a Russian plot. Help me. Fortunately their views don't seem to have gotten traction
outside the fever-swamp corners of the Twitterverse.
Author Kovalev's bottom line: When you are doing the same thing Putin and his propaganda machine
does, you're doing something wrong.
By Alexey Kovalev, an independent journalist living and working in Moscow. Follow him on Twitter:
@Alexey__Kovalev. Originally published at
openDemocracy
On 11-12 August, violent clashes erupted between the far-right Unite the Right movement and anti-fascist
counter-protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia. One woman died when an alleged neo-Nazi sympathizer
rammed a car into a crowd of counter-protesters. There were numerous injuries and a major national
crisis erupted in the United States resulting from and inspired by the rapid rise of white nationalist,
neo-Nazi and other similar sentiments far to the right of the political spectrum.
As it often happens these days, numerous people on Twitter immediately jumped in, pitching the
so-called "hot takes" -- rapid, hastily weaved together series of tweets with often
outlandish theories of what really happened. These instant experts, who have come to prominence in
the wake of the Trump presidency, have carved out a niche for themselves by taking the most tangential
or non-existent connection to anything Russian and "connecting the dots" or "just asking questions".
The most egregious example is
Louise Mensch , a former UK conservative pundit (and sometime MP) now residing in the US. Mensch
is the
most extreme example of a Twitter-age conspiracy-mongering populist . But there are other people,
with more credible credentials, who are also prone to demanding that "ties with Russia" (via individuals,
events and institutions) be investigated.
Immediately following the events in Charlottesville, the writer and consultant
Molly McKew
and Jim Ludes of
the Pell Center , among others, chimed in with their "hot takes", repeating each other almost
word for word: "We need to closely examine the links between the American alt-right and Russia."
These particular expressions ("links between X and Russia", "ties with Russia", "Russian connections"
or "close to Putin/Russian government") are, essentially, weasel words, expressions so elastic that
they could mean anything -- from actively collaborating with senior Russian officials
and secretly accepting large donations from to the vaguest, irrelevant connections mentioned simply
for the sake of name-dropping Russia in an attempt to farm for more clicks.
Almost every person of Russian origin involved in the Trump drama is "Putin-connected", although
in Russia that definition only applies to a tiny power circle of trusted aides and advisors, a select
group of oligarchs running state-owned enterprises and close personal friends from before Putin's
presidency. The exaggerated tone of reporting often suggests something more far-reaching, coordinated
and sinister than a loose collection of unconnected factoids.
So, what do "links between the American alt-right and Russia" actually mean? Much of the allegations
of American alt-right's "collusion" with Putin's regime rely on the fact that Richard Spencer, a
divisive figure in this already quite loose movement, was
once married to a woman of Russian origin , Nina Kupriyanova. Their current marital status is
unclear and, frankly, irrelevant. Kupriyanova, a scholar of Russian and Soviet history with a PhD
from the University of Toronto, is also a follower of Alexander Dugin, a larger-than-life figure
in contemporary Russian media and politics. Because of Dugin's outsized presence in the western media
where he is often, and quite erroneously, presented as "Putin's mastermind" or "Putin's Bannon",
this connection is often enough to be declared the
smoking gun in the crowdsourced investigation .
Dugin has been many things to many people over his decades-long, zig-zagging career as an underground
occult practitioner in the Soviet years: philosopher, lecturer, one of the founding fathers of a
radical movement, public intellectual, flamboyant media personality. But he is not a "Putin advisor"
and never has been. Although Dugin is a vocal fan of the Russian president, has repeatedly professed
his loyalty to Putin and has orbited the halls of Russian power for more than a decade, he hasn't
accumulated enough influence to even keep a stable job.
In 2014, Dugin was fired from his position as a guest lecturer at the department of sociology
of Moscow State University. Students and academic staff had complained for years about the "anti-scientific,
obscurantist" atmosphere Dugin had created within the department (one petition filed by the students
mentions Dugin "performing extrasensory experiments" on them during lectures). But the final straw
was Dugin's interview where
he agitated to "kill, kill, kill" Ukrainians in June 2014 -- the early stages
of Russia's war campaign in Ukraine. Both Dugin and his patron, the dean of the sociology department,
were promptly fired after a major media scandal.
Later, Dugin was quite
unceremoniously removed from his position as a host on Tsargrad TV -- a right-wing,
reactionary private network funded by "Orthodox oligarch" Konstantin Malofeyev and launched with
the help of a former Fox News executive. All mentions of Dugin's show on Tsargrad simply disappeared
from the network's website.
Although Richard Spencer's own writings for his Radix Journal do have visible Dugin inspirations,
it's inconceivable that Dugin has any significant influence on the American right. His teachings
are just too eclectic, esoteric and over-intellectualised for an average American neo-Nazi who just
wants to see more white faces around him. In fact, Dugin's overarching idea of "Eurasianism" goes
against the grain of "keeping America white and ethnically pure": at its core is an obscure early
20th century Orientalist school of thought which accentuated Russia's civilisational continuity with
Mongolian and Turkic ancestors, as opposed to the spiritually alien West.
Russia's conservatives of all shades of right have indeed been long cultivating links with their
brethren to the west of Moscow -- well before Putin appeared on the scene. These
have been well documented by scholars of the far right such as
Anton Shekhovtsov . After Putin's onslaught
in Ukraine, Russia, in dire need of new allies,
intensified efforts to strengthen those links .
In the latter case, the dynamic is reversed: it's not Russia influencing the West and exporting
its values, but vice versa. It's Russia's parliamentary ultra-conservatives like
Yelena Mizulina (now a senator) who have been inspired and supported by the American religious
right.
Russia's last public attempt to unite the European and American far-right ended in a
major media scandal in early 2015 when the "International Russian Conservative Forum" in Saint
Petersburg was widely criticised in the press. The forum's Russian official supporters from the "traditionalist"
Rodina (Motherland) party allied with the ruling United Russia were forced to withdraw their endorsement,
and no further attempts to organise the forum have been made. Propaganda outlets like RT are quietly
shedding commentators with far-right sympathies like Manuel Ochsenreiter or Richard Spencer mentioned
above in an attempt to cleanse their image as a safe haven for Holocaust deniers and white power
enthusiasts. Only a couple of days after Charlottesville, Russian authorities
banned The Daily Stormer, a virulently anti-Semitic "alt-right" website, which had temporarily
sought refuge on Russian web space after having been refused service in the US.
There is little to no evidence that any of the above had anything to do with the tragic events
in Charlottesville. The resurgence of murderous, hateful ideologies in the United States is a home-grown
issue. Young men with identical haircuts and matching, uniform-like attires chanting "Blood and soil
-- " in the streets of American cities are inspired and influenced by many things, but a bearded
Russian mystic is hardly one of them. Attempting to explain internal strife in your country by "Russian
influences", hastily put together disjointed and exaggerated phenomena, is intellectually lazy. It
distracts from getting to the root of the problem by offering quick, easy answers to complicated
questions.
Ironically, it's also a very Putin thing to do. Explaining Russia's internal issues by blaming
the West's machinations is the Russian president's shtick. When you find yourself doing the same
thing Putin and his propaganda machine does, you're doing it wrong.
The only real quibble I have is with the (very loaded) term "white supremacy". I would
change it to "cultural supremacy" or "Western supremacy". As Barack Obama and others have
demonstrated, non-white people are welcome to join the Imperial Empire Club so long as they
accept the membership terms. Pale faces who reject the Club charter or cannot afford the
membership dues are deemed by the elite to be much lower than a more conformist darker
skinned applicant. Cf "basket of deplorables"
"... The US alternative to fascism and national socialism can be visualized by the movie "Rollerball" where the "corporations rule the world" and government is subservant to them (see David Korden's book by the same name. The circus' for the proles merely serve to distract them by providing a false identity politic associated with a particular "team". The history the Hanseatic-League also provides some inspiration for this system: http://www.bergen.hanseatic-league.com/history.html ..."
Fascism is a term that was originally referred to the fascists of Italy under Mussolini.
Nazism on the other hand, referred as National Socialism, is in an ideological concept of the
Nazi Party.
For Fascists, the state was the most important element. But Nazism emphasized on racism.
While fascism considered state as important, Nazism considered 'Aryanism' as more important."
The US alternative to fascism and national socialism can be visualized by the movie "Rollerball"
where the "corporations rule the world" and government is subservant to them (see David Korden's
book by the same name. The circus' for the proles merely serve to distract them by providing a
false identity politic associated with a particular "team". The history the Hanseatic-League also
provides some inspiration for this system: http://www.bergen.hanseatic-league.com/history.html
Cannot wait for football season to arrive so we can go back to the regularly scheduled sports
"programming"(go seahawks. sic).
"The brutal repression and dehumanization witnessed across Europe in the 1930s has not found
generalized expression in the U.S. and Europe, at least not yet. Nevertheless, large sectors of
the U.S. and European left appear to be unable to recognize that the U.S./NATO/EU axis that is
committed to maintaining the hegemony of Western capital is resulting in dangerous collaborations
with rightist forces both inside and outside of governments."
The impetus of that article was to critique the inherent danger of the Obama Administration's
cynical manipulation of right-wing elements in Ukraine to overthrow the democratically elected government
of Viktor Yanukovych. Not only was it dangerous and predictably disastrous for the Ukrainian people,
but because U.S. support for a neo-fascist movement in Ukraine took place within a context in which
the political right was gaining legitimacy and strength across Europe, the political impact of the
right gaining power in Ukraine could not be isolated from the growing power of the right elsewhere.
Which meant that the Obama Admiration's selfish, short-term objective to undermine Russia in Ukraine
had the effect of empowering the right and shifting the balance of forces toward the right throughout
Europe.
But because Obama was incorrectly seen as a liberal, he was able to avoid most criticism of his
policies in Ukraine, in Europe and domestically. In fact, liberals and the left both in the U.S.
and in Europe generally supported his Ukraine policies.
However, playing footsie with right-wing elements in the Ukraine and underestimating the growing
power of the right has resulted in powerful and dangerous right-wing movements on both sides of the
Atlantic who have effectively exploited endemic white racism and the contradictions of neoliberal
capitalist globalization. The ascendancy of Donald Trump cannot be decontextualized from the racial,
class and gender politics of this moment here and abroad.
Ethnic nationalism rises when the state and the nation experience economic difficulties. Weimar
republic is a classic example here.
Notable quotes:
"... That's exactly nationalism, for sure. The work of that wealth creation by the way is done by the all the classes below the rentier class, from working to middle class. The funneling upwards thing is actually theft. ..."
"... The middle class is shrinking and being pushed down closer to rage because the wealth-stealing mechanisms have become bigger and better, and saturated the entire national system, including its electoral politics. This real face of capitalism has driven out the iconic American Dream, which was the essence of upward mobility. ..."
"... Nationalism is an ugly word, but it's easily reached for when there aren't any better words around. In Russia, they already went through what faces the US, and they figured it out. ..."
"... "In our view, faster growth is necessary but not sufficient to restore higher intergenerational income mobility," they wrote. "Evidence suggests that, to increase income mobility, policymakers should focus on raising middle-class and lower-income household incomes." ..."
"... Advocating smoothed-out relations with Russia (for commercial perso reasons, Tillerson, etc. and a need to grade adversaries and accept some into the fold, like Russia, instead of Iran ), a more level playing field, multi-polar world, to actually become more dominant in trade (China etc.) and waste less treasure on supporting enemies, aka proxy stooges, to no purpose (e.g. Muslim brotherhood, Al Q kooks, ISIS) and possibly even Israel -- hmmm. ..."
"... The old guard will do much to get rid of the upstart and his backers (who they are exactly I'd quite like to know?) as all their positions and revenues are at risk ..."
"... The Trump crowd seems at the same time both vulnerable and determined and thus navigating ŕ vue as the F say, by sight and without a plan An underground internal war which is stalemated, leading to instrumentalising the ppl and creating chaos, scandals, etc. ..."
The US has no problem generating wealth, and has no need to force conflict with China. The
US's problem is that that wealth is funneled upwards. Wealth inequality is not a meme. "Shrinking
middle class" is a euphemism for downward-mobility of the middle class, an historical incubator
for Reaction. And that's what we have here, reactionaries from a middle class background who now
are earning less than their parents at menial jobs, or who are unemployed, becoming goons; aping
the klan, appropriating nazi icons, blaming the foreigner, the negro, the Jew, the Muslim, for
their circumstances. A "trade war" will not help them one iota, it will make their lives worse,
and Bannon will go out and say it's the fault of the foreigner and the immigrant, their numbers
wool swell. More terror, depper culture wars. I suppose that's nationalism to some people.
That's exactly nationalism, for sure. The work of that wealth creation by the way is done
by the all the classes below the rentier class, from working to middle class. The funneling
upwards thing is actually theft.
The middle class is shrinking and being pushed down closer to rage because the wealth-stealing
mechanisms have become bigger and better, and saturated the entire national system, including
its electoral politics. This real face of capitalism has driven out the iconic American Dream,
which was the essence of upward mobility.
Nationalism is an ugly word, but it's easily reached for when there aren't any better words
around. In Russia, they already went through what faces the US, and they figured it out.
Since we're looking for the grown-ups, let's turn to Vladimir Putin, always reliable for sanity
when direction is lost.
Putin recalled the words of outstanding Soviet Russian scholar Dmitry Likhachev that patriotism
drastically differs from nationalism. "Nationalism is hatred of other peoples, while patriotism
is love for your motherland," Putin cited his words.
"In our view, faster growth is necessary but not sufficient to restore higher intergenerational
income mobility," they wrote. "Evidence suggests that, to increase income mobility, policymakers
should focus on raising middle-class and lower-income household incomes."
Interventions worth considering include universal preschool and greater access to public
universities, increasing the minimum wage, and offering vouchers to help families with kids
move from poor neighborhoods into areas with better schools and more resources, they said.
Is there any political party or group in the US that suggests this?
The Corporate "fascist" - with grains of salt - USA. The 'democracy' part is fiction, camouflaged
via a fools theatre two-party system and ginormous social re-distribution, amongst others..
the Core (PTB) found itself through miscalculation and loss of power subject to a challenger
who broke thru the \organised/ fake elections, to attempt some kind of re-adjustement - renewal
- re-set - review...
Advocating smoothed-out relations with Russia (for commercial perso reasons, Tillerson,
etc. and a need to grade adversaries and accept some into the fold, like Russia, instead of Iran
), a more level playing field, multi-polar world, to actually become more dominant in trade (China
etc.) and waste less treasure on supporting enemies, aka proxy stooges, to no purpose (e.g. Muslim
brotherhood, Al Q kooks, ISIS) and possibly even Israel -- hmmm.
Heh, the profits of domination are to be organised, extracted and distributed, differently.
One Mafia-type tribe taking over from another! Ivanka will be The Sweet First Woman Prezzie! Style,
Heart, Love, Looks! Go!
The old guard will do much to get rid of the upstart and his backers (who they are exactly
I'd quite like to know?) as all their positions and revenues are at risk, so they are activating
all - anything to attack. The Trump crowd seems at the same time both vulnerable and determined
and thus navigating ŕ vue as the F say, by sight and without a plan An underground internal
war which is stalemated, leading to instrumentalising the ppl and creating chaos, scandals, etc.
In a few hours, I'll fly to Europe, my favorite
continent, and why not? Most of my intellectual and artistic heroes are Europeans,
Kakfa, Beckmann, Kippenberger, Siebald, Rabelais, Rimbaud, Celine, Orwell, Kundera,
Dostoievsky and Milosz, etc. I've spent significant time in Italy, England and Germany,
and have fond memories of a least a dozen other European countries, all very distinctive
from each other. Still.
White culture has dominated much of the world for
several centuries, but it is winding down through self hatred. The white left mostly
hate whites, while most of the white right are contemptuous of everybody else. Half of
whites, then, hate the other half, and contemporary white culture is a degraded mess.
Think Katy Perry being breaded, kneaded, garnished then cooked. Free of war and
colonialism, whites are doing a fine job of destroying themselves.
Many are cheering. It's about time! Susan Sontag in
1967, "The white race
is
the cancer of human history; it is the white race and
it alone!its ideologies and inventions!which eradicates autonomous civilizations
wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now
threatens the very existence of life itself."
After white hegemony comes Chinese leadership, many
whites themselves are hoping. When I was in Leipzig in 2015, a German friend insisted
that the Chinese were lifting up the Third World. It was a constructive partnership, he
said, unlike murderously exploitative white colonialism. Often citing
Andre Vltchek,
this man believed that a resurgent Communism would be led by Russia and China.
He
didn't care for my observation that the Russians and Chinese had regained their footing,
confidence and compass thanks to nationalism. Nationalism is reactionary, he believed.
He himself didn't feel German and could care less for the concept. Most tellingly, this
man had never been outside Germany. He didn't know how grounded to Germany he was.
No population anywhere needs a global ideology. Not
only is global solidarity unachievable, but undesirable.
Bereft of a homeland, many Jews dreamt of a
international brotherhood, thus the nightmarish chimera of Communism, which is defended
to this day by the most emotionally arrested, historically amnesiac or simply
hypocritical. Many who extol the virtues of international Communism will also rabidly
defend the ultra nationalist and racist state of Israel.
In the popular mind, the evilness of white culture is
epitomized by Nazi Germany, with Germans forever stigmatized as the worst of whites.
Contemporary Germany, however, is one that supposedly allowed 500+ German women to be
sexually assaulted by Muslims in Cologne during New Year's Eve of 2016. Germany is
really that neutered, goes the narrative.
Perhaps emboldened by such, Vietnam recently kidnapped
a Vietnamese asylum seeker from the Tiergarten, right in the heart of Berlin, then
smuggled him back to Hanoi to stand trial. A former head of the state-owned oil company,
Trinh Xuan Thanh is accused of pinching $150 million. Maybe Turkey will follow suit and
snatch a few of Edorgan's enemies?
I'll be in Barcelona by morning. Emerging from the
train onto the Placa de Catalunya in 2003, I encountered so many Africans and Chinese
peddling goods, I thought I was in, well, Naples or Belleville in Paris. My mind has
been in Spain for weeks. Reading Spanish newspapers, I learnt that a Senegalese had been
beaten to death by four other Africans in Salou, just a 15 minute drive from Taragona,
where I'll be staying with
Jonathan Revusky
.
In Salou in 2015, a Senegalese peddler of pirated
DVDs, counterfeit sunglasses and fake handbags jumped to his death from a third floor
balcony as police raided his apartment. This led to two days of clashes between 100+
Senegalese and police.
In Florence more than a decade ago, I often ran into
Africans selling bogus goods made by Chinese, often in nearby Prato. With a population
of 191,104, it has 45,000 Chinese.
Taragona and Bacerlona Provinces are 10% Muslims, the
highest in Spain. In Reus, a law was passed in 2014 banning burquas. When it was struck
down by the Spanish Supreme Court, this code was revised to ban all full-face coverings,
so you best not loiter in the Reus McDonald's while wearing a motorcycle helmet, baclava
or facekini.
I read that in Pizarra, population 8,990, a
three-year-old girl was hit by a train. What's most remarkable is that as news of her
disappearance spread around midnight, 300 locals immediately volunteered to search for
her. That's the kind of small town Europe I remember, having spent two years in
Certaldo, Italy, population 16,000.
You see, where every stone tells a story, people are
ardently loyal to their home turf. Shared history matters. Strip malls don't. Europe
will only be saved if the American empire, with its corrosive ideologies and madnesses,
collapses, and this will happen soon enough. There is hope.
Europe will only be saved if the American empire, with its corrosive ideologies
and madnesses, collapses, and this will happen soon enough. There is hope.
No, the contemporary "American empire" is a flailing, Jewish golem. Its "corrosive
ideologies" and "madnesses" will have to be addressed first. Both Europe and the US will
have to solve that problem before moving on to a better future.
Chances are we'll all die before that happens (40/60%). Western Europe is just a
lesser golem ATM.
Leftist / Zionist liars use the 'holocau$t' fraud as a cover to destroy white gentiles
and their cultures.
The problem is that belief in the 'holocaust' = belief in the
impossible, a la witchcraft where "eyewitnesses", "confessions" and courts of law
worldwide stated that witchcraft was a proven fact.
Science, rational thought, & logic simply demolish the 'holocaust' storyline.
And that's why there are Thought Crime Laws that imprison those who engage in free
speech about it.
When it comes to any topic that is known to be of special financial & political
interests to supremacist Jews, and certainly there is no cash cow & political tool quite
like the 'holocau$t' scam, you can bet the fix will be in. To them truth is irrelevant.
The '6M Jews, 5M others, & gas chambers' are scientifically impossible frauds.
see the 'holocaust' scam debunked here:
"One should not ask, how this mass murder was made possible. It was technically
possible, because it happened. This has to be the obligatory starting-point for any
historical research regarding this topic. We would just like to remind you: There is
no debate regarding the existence of the gas chambers, and there can never be one."
- endorsed by 34 "reputable historians" and published in the French daily Le Monde on
February 21, 1979
is one that supposedly allowed 500+ German women to be sexually assaulted by Muslims
in Cologne during New Year's Eve of 2016.
Not even supposedly. Change it before
Revusky finds out. Cologne never happened. Revusky's razor, proves it beyond any doubt.
It is the ultimate Wunderwaffe against any accusations tarnishing reputation of Muslims.
You see, where every stone tells a story, people are ardently loyal to their home
turf. Shared history matters. Strip malls don't. Europe will only be saved if the
American empire, with its corrosive ideologies and madnesses, collapses, and this
will happen soon enough. There is hope.
You're an incurable optimist. Probably not a bad thing to be, I suppose.
I fear that the triumphant internationalist left, with its firm grip on the
commanding political, social, academic and corporate heights of US sphere societies, is
managing to get its totalitarian institutions in place to suppress the inevitable
growing dissent – "hate speech" laws, institutional and corporate speech- and
thought-crime policies, sackings and blacklists, etc.
I believe we will rue the loss of our religion, Christianity, its tenets first
ridiculed and undermined and then its institutions infiltrated and corrupted, by the
same internationalist, materialist left, in particular.
To see where western European civilization is headed, take a look at Zimbabwe. That is
the destination the Left has in mind for us. Obama was the U. S.'s. Robert Mugabe the
First. There are more to come.
Doesn't sound like it. That whole last paragraph was non sequiturs.
You can't write a couple hundred words detailing why the white man is finished in Europe
–
and he is
– then tell an anecdote and reverse course for the close. That will
to band together to find a missing child in Certaldo is the same impulse to band
together and serve pasta to skinnies just off the boat in Ragusa. Europeans have
succumbed the voluptuous rapture of martyrdom: the end.
@Realist
Even if this were true in the utterly simplistic sense in which you mean it – i.e. that
white civilization is some sort of "glue" holding literally everything together, rather
than having been
the catalyst for the very forces now consuming it
– it might be
enormously helpful for this world for which you so blithely profess to care, if whites
along with their humanitarian and watchdog organizations actually disappear, leaving the
rest of mankind to revert a little to that essential barbarity – of which the altright
are so fond of reminding us! – that might at last allow Malthus to take his course
White culture has dominated much of the world for several centuries, but it is
winding down through self hatred. The white left mostly hate whites, while most of
the white right are contemptuous of everybody else. Half of whites, then, hate the
other half, and contemporary white culture is a degraded mess.
Utterly cryptic:
You see, where every stone tells a story, people are ardently loyal to their home
turf. Shared history matters. Strip malls don't. Europe will only be saved if the
American empire, with its corrosive ideologies and madnesses, collapses, and this
will happen soon enough. There is hope.
' In a few hours, I'll fly to Europe, my favorite continent '
' Europe will only be
saved if the American empire, with its corrosive ideologies and madnesses, collapses,
and this will happen soon enough. There is hope '
Probably good afternoon where you are. I am interested by your mention of Vltchek.
Used to think he was a more optimistic version of Pepe Escobar (whose writing I still
read, although I think he is wildly over-optimist re. BRICS at times, at least the parts
that aren't R and C).
I think his heart is in the right place.
With Vltchek, came to doubt any sincerity, a long rant he posted about how bad it was
to stay at the Imperial Hotel, i think it was on Counterpunch, it disgusted me. I never
stay there, because of having a flat here. Have met staff and managers from there when
eating and drinking in the area. They seem to be pleasant people.
Never stay in similar places on domestic travels (although there is only one Imperial
Hotel), because being not so privileged and entitled as Mr. Vltchek, much closer to and
from the
proletarii
, I can't afford it.
His extended whine about staying there finally convinced me that he is as phony as a
three-dollar bill.
@Randal
I agree that a world government is looking scarily possible but having already rued the
loss of my religion and returned to church I am faced with the following choices:
1. convert to Catholicism or orthodoxy
2. join a bunch of exhaustingly positive young people who like to sing nursery songs in
big crowds
3. join a very nice but small group of octogenarians seemingly oblivious to 21st century
society but with fab choral music
4. join an equally isolated group of younger people with dreary songs and food on their
clothing
So Europe's self-immolation is all America's fault? Funny, I thought Europe had a long
and glorious history of destroying itself. And other countries as well. Thankfully
historian Dinh is here to set us all straight.
@Glasgow
Ned
No, he doesn't. I'm Asian too. You can admire other cultures and wish them to be without
hating yourself.
I like marsupials and don't want them to be destroyed by an incoming
wave of rabbits, for example. Does that make you self-hating? Quite a few
environmentalists and animal conservationists wish to keep certain animals alive in
their habitat, does this make them anti-human?
Another superb "keeper" column.
What Mr. Dinh "gets" , unlike so many others here, is that the various outrages and
inanities of the assorted Them ( Blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, Jews, Trans-sexuals , etc.
) , are not The Problem- they are the symptom of an underlying spiritual collapse in the
Western world particularly among its elites who somehow seem to have lost all faith and
regard for their own identity and heritage.
The Daily Mail newspaper last week contained a video clip of Malia Obama ( the former
President's daughter ) literally rolling convulsively on the floor and banging her head
on it at a rock concert prior to beginning her freshman year at Harvard. Where is the
Problem- with young Ms. Obama or the admissions committee at Harvard ?
Fun facts about "white culture":
- It invented the entire modern world – cars, airplanes, computers, electricity,
antibiotics, telecommunications, industry, advanced agriculture, everything. Curiously,
people who complain about "cultural appropriation" never shy from using all of the many
fruits of "white culture".
- It invented and perfected science. (The Chinese had some inventions. The Europeans had
science. That's why the Europeans invented the modern world and the Chinese didn't.)
- It was the only major culture to destroy slavery. (Check for yourself.)
- For what they are worth, democracy and human rights are "white culture" things.
- And much more.
So yeah, haters of "white culture" should stop and think for a
moment.
That "white culture" has committed its share of crimes and atrocities is a separate
issue.
Mr. Dinh is quite right that many hate "white culture", which they don't understand,
with a passion. And many think that China will be some sort of an angelic new harbinger
of peace, prosperity and love. I much admire what the Chinese have achieved to better
themselves in recent decades; but surely to expect them to be any sorts of angels is
optimistic at the least.
@Randal
I agree. I do think that the major issue is a great spiritual crisis that has led to the
extremes that Dinh is speaking of, the increasing polarization of whites into goodthink
genderless SJWs or unironic Nazis.
So Europe's self-immolation is all America's fault?
Look at the evidence, Western civilization existed for centuries, it had multiple
wars but those wars did not destroy it. Then as soon as Western Europe became a vassal
of the USA there was an incredibly rapid decline, so much so that one can now basically
call Western civilization dead.
They were fighting to fight the white race, one cannot say the same about their
enemies such as Churchill or FDR. Since the establishment is hell bent on eliminating
whites and fascism is their number one enemy, I regard fascism as the correct ideology
to accept.
@Daniel
Chieh
Brilliant analogy there, Danny; but I really haven't met a lot of men who were envious
of something that carried it's children in a pouch
Well, the theory goes is that leftism had its initial plague in France where it did
indeed destroy its patient with fanatical vigor.
The disease moved to the Anglo culture, which was innately more robust and was thus
able to carry it in a less destructive way, allowing it to eventually evolve in America
until it reached an appropriate virulent stage where it has spread across the world.
It is shameful that Russia and China, AGAIN, cooperated 100% with an illiterate, old,
mass murderer zionist stooge to pass the sanction AGAINST NORTH KOREA. Down with
Chinese, Putin and illiterate zionist stooge who have committed CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY.
China and Russia Always have cooperated fully with the mass murderers at the Black House
to receive a bone as concessions. These two colonies two days ago pleased the mass
murderers in Washington by going after another victim, North Korea, but these criminals
NEVER called on their ambassadors when the ziofacists were burning the toddlers in
occupied Palestine with phosphorate BOMBS, but Venezuela did, that's why this beautiful
country is under attack by Clinton – Obama – Trump regime to topple the government.
Shame on you all.
These two petty countries always have cooperated with the mass American murderers in
Muslim countries for the benefit of the ziofacists because all three are in the pocket
of the zionoist bankers.
Putin, Trump and China have enriched themselves by selling others.
When China wants to stand for humanity? When China wants to stand up against EVIL?
China NEVER does because still has mentality of a colonized people.
Chinese economy is the largest in the world NOW. Russia has half the nuclear bombs in
the world. But both China and Russia still play it very
safeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
to receive a BONE as concession by voting along the mass murderes against nations that
are under attack. Shame on you all.
Russia and China SOLD Libya that's why these two countries have equal share in the
destruction of Libya and massacre of Libyan people by not voting against the Obama
regime.
Down with China, Russia and US,and their stooges.
Every one must boycott goods MADE IN CHINA. Don't buy their trash where these
servants are giving advantages to trump regime, by voting for the sanction against North
Korea to starve them to death. China has hundreds of nuclear weapons – like the criminal
Russia and US – but goes against a North Korea that is under attack by the criminal
Trump regime on daily basis. We spit at you all.
Assad must ask criminal putin to get out of Syria, because Russia is selling Syria,
like Libya, and is cooperating with trump regime and the kurdish terrorists trained by
the CIA/Mossad to steal part of Syrian territory and partition Syria according to Oded
Yinon, a criminal plan by the ziofascists in the region.
Down with the enemy of humanity – China – US – Russia.
@neutral
Ridiculous comment. Europe is hardly a "vassal" to the U.S. Most Europeans mock the U.S.
as a has-been country, floating the idea that China's the real world power. If the U.S.
is a "flailing zombie" in the unforgettable words of Linh Dinh, how can we be telling
Merkel what to do? And why wouldn't Hungary and Poland (also in Europe) be experiencing
the same nonsense? No, Western Europe's problems are entirely self-created, the result
of decades of Frankfurt School ideology. (Note: Frankfurt is not in America.)
Those who invent or try to advance this things (and often not so
advanced) were very few among "white people invent this".
And invent "modern world" also mean
- huge exploitation of working (and middle) classes .
- destruction of environment
- increasing the amount of human trash
- colonialism
- two extremely dumb world wars
And still today "religions" and "ideologies" governing in diverse wrong ways the mind of
millions/billion people.
It will be over for Whites before the end of this century. Everything bad for Whites
will escalate & grow. Pro immigration propaganda, anti-White propaganda, anti-White
policies, hatred of Whites in culture & education, immigration, legal and illegal, low
fertility (for Whites), race mixing etc.. The left will gain more & more power until
democracy & voting is futile. They'll become increasingly more radical & authoritarian.
Once White nations are overrun with low IQ coffee colored people the Jews will get their
world government. The minority of Whites left will be killed & imprisoned. Thats the
goal, put Whites worldwide in the same position as current White South Africans then
finish us off. This is where its headed, there is no hope. There will be reactionaries,
especially as Whites increasingly suffer as minorities in their own lands, many will
'wake up', but it will be too late, they will not be able to take on the world gov, they
will not have weapons to defend themselves & they'll be vastly out numbered. The Jews
are ready for the reactionaries, they will laugh..
"We are not ramping down. We're
just getting started. Nothing stops this train, nothing."
―Walter White
The Alt-Right reactionaries today are mostly degenerates, some Jew infiltrators
deflecting White indignation away from Jews. Their only avenue is the internet and that
will not last much longer. The ADL is pushing for internet speech regulation. UN
International Hate Speech Laws & they'll eventually get it.
As far as Trump is concerned, he's basically the White man's last hurrah. Right now he
serves to motivate and inflame the left. After Trump we'll get someone 10X worst than
Obama.
Honestly, only divine intervention can save the White race now.
@RadicalCenter
It is rather lovely, gold and incense, and a healthy link with feasting. But I'm not
keen on kissing objects previously kissed by other people and, I'm a big fan of the
filioque. I'm looking for something choral with shades of Salvation Army and a bit of
Taize!
@Jovetta
That's pretty much how I see it. Somewhere years ago I read that the last blond hair
blue eyes will be around the Baltic in 200yrs. I don't envy the Europeans who live
through the last stages. But I do think that European genes will be a huge part of
society in the future. And Red will never disappear!
I've had the experience of visiting other lands where non-whites are in charge of a
non-white culture. While whitebread America definitely has its share of problems due to
sin, crime, folly, and misrule, it's still •definitely• superior to any of the
alternatives I've witnessed.
China's corruption is worse than our own. Mexico is in an undeclared civil war with
drug lords who strive to outdo ISIS in beheadings. How could you exaggerate what a giant
pile of excrement Africa is? Arab rule is so bad that their refugees are overrunning
Europe, and not a few Arabs actually prefer to live in Israel! The Hindu-based
government in India presides over its empire of poverty and filth and enforces a caste
system so cruel it makes America's slave past look positively virtuous.
Truth is, you cannot find a country where non-whites rule over a non-white culture
where life is better there than here. What refugees from American oppression flee to any
land where non-whites rule over a non-white culture?
Now I just hope Thought Police don't hunt me down for saying this. But as Winston
said, "they'll shoot me i don't care they'll shoot me in the back of the neck i don't
care".
@The
Alarmist
Just like the British Empire fell, so will The United Snakes of America. Yes, it will be
just another country, without warmongers, and neocons' power to destabilize the planet.
It won't collapse. What should scare you is that the progressives and the technocrats
will actually succeed and the technocratic diverse global corporate dystopia will become
a reality
Perhaps the Spanish need to ban immigrants like Dinh and Revusky bearing divisive
poisons? They are already subjected to a large dollop of PC propaganda by the CIA
Not that long ago in Europe, one had to go to a church, a temple or a mosque to
imbibe industrial quantities of religious doctrine.
Since the beginning of the 21st century, however, it has become possible to access it
in a great and self-satisfied profusion on the editorial pages of the continent's
"serious" and nominally progressive dailies, papers like The Guardian, El País, La
Repubblica, Le Monde, and Suddeutsche Zeitung.
The particular brand of theology being pushed?
Neo-Liberal Imperialism, something the faith's leading clerics!people like Timothy
Garton-Ash, Niall Ferguson. Moisés Naim, Mario Vargas Llosa, Hermann Tertsch, Antonio
Cańo, Joseph Joffe, and that erstwhile philosopher-clown, Bernard Henry-Levi!prefer to
describe in terms of "promoting trans-Atlantic partnerships" and creating and
maintaining "Open Societies"
The Germans hate themselves so much that (after they became part of the Judeo-American
Empire) they embarked on a breeding program to turn the de facto national mascot (the
German Shepherd Dog)
into a grotesquely deformed and crippled wreck. People mostly hate and/or distrust or
simply exploit each other (as the historical record shows), but it takes a special kind
of masochism and self-hatred to maim your true best friend.
GSD exhibition in Germany in 1936:
Degeneration and planned torture of the GSD since 1945:
@RadicalCenter
Try the Society of St Pius X (SSPX). You may be pleasantly surprised. SSPX subscribes to
pre-Vatican II "ecumenical council" teachings. There are SSPX churches all over the
country
A month ago, after reading a desperate cry for help from the National Coalition of
Christian Organisations in Palestine (NCCOP) addressed to the World Council of Churches,
I emailed eight churches in my locality asking whether that heart-rending appeal had
trickled down to them at parish level ..
@Bragadocious
FRankfurt School was expelled from Germany in 1933 and went to US . Frankfurt School
ideology was imposed via on Germany by US occupation forces. Western Europe as a whole
has been part of the American Empire since 1945.
Paul Gottfried writes:
You should read my last three books, all of which stress that The Authoritarian
Personality profoundly affected American political thinking. It was essential to the
postwar reconstruction of German "civic culture' and the work was deeply admired by
SM Lipset, the sponsors of Commentary, and scads of Cold War liberals. It was not
necessarily viewed as the post-Marxist leftist source of moral corruption that I
suggest it was in The Strange Death of Marxism. What made The Authoritarian
Personality particularly insidious is that it was widely seen as a blueprint for
non-totalitarian democracy both here and in Europe; and leaders in government and in
universities read the book in that way. The fact that Adorno and Horkheimer (who
later backed away from the implications of the work he had co-edited) were at the
time Soviet sympathizers did not dampen the enthusiasm of the anti-Stalinist
secularist intellectuals who tried to defend the study. Although the Jewish identity
of the Frankfurt School may not have been the only factor leading to their
anti-Christian, anti-fascist pseudo-science, denying its influence on the formation
of Frankfort School ideas is simply silly. Adorno was only half-Jewish and raised as
a Catholic but nonetheless paraded his Jewish genes in explaining how he had arrived
at his critique of bourgeois, Christian society. It is furthermore is silly to
pretend that Jews have not played a DISPROPORTIONATE role in greasing the skids for
our moral and social disintegration. To recognize this is to recognize reality. What
is more dubious is that Jews have caused this ruin, without the enthusiastic support
or at least cowardly acquiescence of the white Christian majority. Although it is
correct to note the significant Jewish contribution to the present decadence, it is
naive to think that Jews are the only culprits in what you and I deplore.
Christopher Lash's True and Only Heaven includes a long section detailing the
mainstream liberal support for The Authoritarian Personality in the 1950s and 1960s.
Lipset, Hook, Daniel Bell, Arthur Schlesinger, Richard Hofstadter and the members of
American Jewish Committe, who sponsored Adorno and Commentary magazine, were among
the anti-Communist liberals who admired TAP and who thought that it had relevance for
our country. Although you and I may be to the right of these celebrants, it would be
hard to argue that no anti-Communist had any use for Adorno's ideas.
During the Second World War, three prominent members of the Frankfurt School–Franz
Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, and Otto Kirchheimer–worked as intelligence analysts for
the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime forerunner of the CIA This book brings
together their most important intelligence reports on Nazi Germany, most of them
published here for the first time.
These reports provide a fresh perspective on Hitler's regime and the Second World
War, and a fascinating window on Frankfurt School critical theory. They develop a
detailed analysis of Nazism as a social and economic system and the role of
anti-Semitism in Nazism, as well as a coherent plan for the reconstruction of postwar
Germany as a democratic political system with a socialist economy. These reports
played a significant role in the development of postwar Allied policy, including
denazification and the preparation of the Nuremberg Trials.
Nationalism is reactionary, he believed. He himself didn't feel German and could
care less for the concept. Most tellingly, this man had never been outside Germany.
He didn't know how grounded to Germany he was.
How did you find such a defective/oddball? Today's Germany is a small place, just a
short train or bus ride will get you to a different country. It's not like it's the 18th
Century and this guy is Immanuel
Kant.
I believe we will rue the loss of our religion, Christianity, its tenets first
ridiculed and undermined and then its institutions infiltrated and corrupted, by the
same internationalist, materialist left, in particular.
I don't know about that can you seriously believe in Christianity's core doctrines
(e.g. Original sin, Christ died for our sins/to reconcile us to God/to free us from the
dominion of the devil, the Trinity etc.) and regard them as relevant to the present, or
compatible with the vast increase in scientific knowledge since the 17th century? I
certainly can't, and it seems doubtful to me even most Christians today could make a
coherent, let alone persuasive case for them.
And even if one were to accept that the Christian churches have been subverted by
materialist left-wingers, I'd say Christianity by its very nature is susceptible to such
a takeover. It's a universalist religion with global aspirations, and there are many
elements in the Gospels that, if taken literally, would be deeply corrosive to order and
morality (e.g. Luke 14,26 where Jesus says "If you're not willing to hate your parents,
brothers, sisters etc., you can't be my disciple" not exactly compatible with "family
values"; also notable that the primitive church as described in Acts basically practiced
communism). There's little imo that's inherently conservative or compatible with
patriotism/nationalism in Christianity, and one way of understanding the present
situation is that the compromises with and accomodation to the world that it entered
during the Middle ages seem to be in the process of unraveling. In a way Christianity,
with its future in the Global South, might be returning to its roots and nationalists in
Europe are the pagans in the Christian narrative now, a satanic obstacle to the
realization of Christianity's full meaning.
@Marshall
Lentini
As I said when Western Civilization goes humanity is screwed.
'Civilizations' that 'developed' at or south of the equator are pretty much dumb ass.
@jimbojones
No, the idea that modern science and technology is a uniquely western creation is highly
contested, and will become more contested in future as rival societies increase in
wealth and power. You're naive if you think otherwise.
@Bragadocious
If you have permanent foreign soldiers in your country then you are a vassal, no amount
of rosy sounding terms (strategic partnership, allies, international community, blah
blah blah) can change that. The Frankfurt ideology could only have spread so rapidly if
there was the means to do it, that was clearly Hollywood and the other mass
entertainment/media outlets that were deployed in Western Europe.
As for the Hungary
and Poland you mentioned, it proves my point, whatever one can say about the USSR, it
was not anywhere near as destructive as the Western European states were under US
control. The USA was the single most destructive thing that has ever happened to Western
civilization.
@anonymous
The world is as it is, I am afraid, and so is politics. Because we live in this
imperfect world and need some politics or the other, the problems only get confounded.
You are right, the behaviour of Russia and China is shameful by the yardsticks of logic
and ethics. But then, you have to remember that Russia and China are (or at least view
themselves as) "Have countries" while the middle eastern basket cases and North Korea
are "Have-not" countries. There is plenty of in-fighting among the haves but, when
dealing with the have-nots, they present a similar face. All the "Haves" are convinced
that it is alright for them to possess enough nuclear weapons to blow up the planet 10
times over but how dare a pesky pipsqueak like North Korea aspire to have even a few? In
the realm of international politics some animals are more equal than others. At feeding
time, Russia and China, too, behave like 'more equal animals' just to keep up with the
most equal of them all. As long as the nuclear club remains a privilege of the few,
expect the members to close ranks to keep out new entrants. Entirely expected. Expect to
see this scenario to play out again over Iran.
"You see, where every stone tells a story, people are ardently loyal to their home turf.
Shared history matters. Strip malls don't. Europe will only be saved if the American
empire, with its corrosive ideologies and madnesses, collapses, and this will happen
soon enough. There is hope."
Every part of this paragraph is true.
Why must the American Empire die, or at least be greatly diminished, for European
cultures to survive?
Start with the obvious: we are the Anglo-Zionist Empire. We are Part 2 of the British
Empire, the 1st Anglo-Saxon Empire. And the foundational culture is Anglo-Saxon
Puritanism, which right as it crystalized as a culture made its alliance
with
Jews
against
all 'other' whites.
WASP culture is, and always has been, about Anglo-Saxon Elites in bed with Jews in
order to make war of various types on virtually all whites who are not WASP.
@jimbojones
"Fun facts about "white culture":
- It invented the entire modern world – cars, airplanes, computers, electricity,
antibiotics, telecommunications, industry, advanced agriculture, everything. Curiously,
people who complain about "cultural appropriation" never shy from using all of the many
fruits of "white culture"."
You do realize that a number of prominent Alt Right
thinkers, ranging from Mark Citadel to Brett Stevens, are opposed to modernity.
Furthermore, it wasn't "white people" who invented the modern world, but Americans,
the English, the Germans, etc., with contributions by the Chinese and Japanese.
Moreover, there were important discoveries made by the Nile River Valley,
Mesopotamian, and Yellow River civilizations that human beings, namely Europeans,
undoubtedly expanded upon.
"It invented and perfected science. (The Chinese had some inventions. The Europeans
had science. That's why the Europeans invented the modern world and the Chinese
didn't.)"
Again, not without key contributions from several societies.
"It was the only major culture to destroy slavery. (Check for yourself.)"
Actually, it was liberal Americans and Europeans who destroyed slavery, with these
two groups expanding this scourge like the world had never seen.
Begrudgingly.
"For what they are worth, democracy and human rights are "white culture" things."
No, they are human being constructs.
"Mr. Dinh is quite right that many hate "white culture", which they don't understand,
with a passion. And many think that China will be some sort of an angelic new harbinger
of peace, prosperity and love. I much admire what the Chinese have achieved to better
themselves in recent decades; but surely to expect them to be any sorts of angels is
optimistic at the least."
She is patently wrong. White people as a whole do not "hate" themselves, nor are they
"destroying" themselves. Rather, it has been the nature of human beings to love/hate and
create/destroy. The "evilness" of white culture is not represented by Nazi Germany, but
by individuals and groups of people REGARDLESS of race or ethnicity foolishly insist,
using God on their side, that they are superior. Pro-race, of course, is code for
anti-humanity.
Finally, when Dinh says "Europe will only be saved if the American empire, with its
corrosive ideologies and madnesses, collapses, and this will happen soon enough. There
is hope", most Americans will find that sentiment to be anti-human and pro-hate. Who
wishes for an entire nation to collapse? Who desires a civil war in which hordes of
people, especially babies and children, will be slaughtered? Do you?
@Grandpa
Charlie
I already watched and this video or this point of view, invariably correct, don't change
mine. Conservs luv "rationalize" their own historical faults. "their own".
@hyperbola
the faith's leading clerics!people like Timothy Garton-Ash, Niall Ferguson. Moisés
Naim, Mario Vargas Llosa, Hermann Tertsch, Antonio Cańo, Joseph Joffe, [...], Bernard
Henry-Levi
@Corvinus
You say "pro-humanity" like it has any meaning. Would womb machines cloning the maximal
number of humans be pro-human enough for you?
When humanity has become reduced to
soulless dregs of flesh devoid of any of the innate beauty and essence that arose from,
yes, among other things, a connection with blood and soil its not a humanity worth
saving.
Let the corruption die and take its soyflesh beings with it.
@German_reader
A rather poor understanding of Christianity. Somehow it reminded me of this, from
Chesterton, a 20th century english convert to Catholicism:
@in the
middle
You underestimate the Narcissistic Personality Disorder of the American Elite; if the
Indispensible Nation is going down, they're taking the world with them.
I only attend the Traditional Latin Mass. It is not at a chapel of
the SSPX, in part because when I began, there was no nearby weekly SSPX Mass. But now
that there is, I may soon be over there every week.
@The
Alarmist
Not bloody likely. Take a look here:
http://federal-budget.insidegov.com/l/119/2016
. the FY 20156 federal budget: a half
trillion dollar deficit; even eliminating the defense budget there'd be a deficit; the
biggest items, SS, Medicare, Medicaid, and interest on the debt are beginning
accelerating growth.
And higher tax rates will only make things worse. Corporate taxes
are screwing American competitiveness. The middle class has no savings. Taking away ALL
the wealth of the wealthiest 5% of private individuals would barely cover the deficit
from one year of federal spending.
The current federal debt is 17.4 Trillion dollars (over 100% of annual GDP) and
growing at an accelerating rate which is currently 3% per annum. THe federal debt will
almost inevitably double in about twenty years.
And politicians still insist we can magically increase spending, start new wars all
over creation, continue paying low IQ women for having bastards and paying those
bastards to go to colleges whose names they can't even spell, and yet hold steady or
reduce taxes.
@Anon
I don't care what Chesterton or some other intellectually mediocre 20th century Catholic
apologist wrote. If you think my understanding of Christian doctrines is defective,
you're free to point out so in detail with reference to the Gospels, the writings of the
church fathers, the decrees of councils or other relevant materials. Poems don't
qualify.
Yesterday, the A.P. reported on Madrid police having arrested the Turk-Swede writer,
Hamza Yalcan. This action was taken as a result of a "Turkish order, alleging
terrorism."
A.P. noted that President Erdogan is pleased with his ability to reach
"critical voices outside Turkey."
Mr. Erdogan did not have such success with our ZUSA police forces when he wanted the
Pocono Mountain (N.E. Pennsylvania) cleric apprehended for instigating a coup against
his government.
(Sigh) ZUSA and Russia can cooperate in outer space but not at sea.
I am fascinated by events in Spain. I recall how NATO lords became upset when the
Spanish government agreed to allow Russian war ships to refuel on their way to the east
Mediterranean basin.
At any rate, I'm pleased to know Linh and Mr. Revusky will tour west Europe & chances
of my becoming more aware are good.
Ridiculous comment. Europe is hardly a "vassal" to the U.S. If the U.S. is a
"flailing zombie" in the unforgettable words of Linh Dinh, how can we be telling
Merkel what to do?
Well, if we have the power to tell Merkel what to do, that would make her a vassal,
wouldn't it?
@Jovetta
Wow. I bet you're loads of fun at parties.
Seriously, though: although the situation
is indeed grave, you're being way too pessimistic -- defeatist, in fact. For openers, all
the nations of Europe are still overwhelmingly white, and even with current demographic
trends, probably will remain so for several generations more. As far as the US is
concerned, we will probably have to ditch one-man-one-vote democracy and embrace the old
Rhodesian model. Once the (((neocon empire))) is gone, and there's no longer need for
'democracy promotion' as a cover for their globalist ambitions, we could easily scrap
the current multi-culti model and establish white government.
@Daniel
Chieh
"You say "pro-humanity" like it has any meaning."
To religious minded folks, like
Christians, pro-humanity is oozing with meaning.
Matthew 6:26–Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into
barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?
"When humanity has become reduced to soulless dregs of flesh devoid of any of the
innate beauty and essence that arose from, yes, among other things, a connection with
blood and soil its not a humanity worth saving. Let the corruption die and take its
soyflesh beings with it."
You assume that today's humanity is wholly corrupt and ugly. No, there are elements
of our humanity that embody those vile traits. In essence, you are playing God here by
injecting what you think are "soulless dregs of flesh" who deserve to die.
@Jake
"Start with the obvious: we are the Anglo-Zionist Empire. We are Part 2 of the British
Empire, the 1st Anglo-Saxon Empire. And the foundational culture is Anglo-Saxon
Puritanism, which right as it crystalized as a culture made its alliance with Jews
against all 'other' whites."
No, some Americans are able to trace their ancestry to
the English. There were other colonists who came from various parts of Europe. There was
no "Anglo-Zionist Empire" or "1st Anglo-Saxon Empire", just the British Empire.
Furthermore, the North, Middle, and Southern colonies had distinct cultural traits, so
our foundational culture was not exclusively "Anglo-Saxon Puritanism". Furthermore, the
English were borne themselves out of a multicultural stew–Picts, Britons, Angles,
Saxons, Romans, Jutes, Danes, and Frisians.
You really need to study American and world history.
@Truth
No, and I'm not sure that I've improved all that much with the passing of a whole lot
more years than I care to think about
The point is, however, that in that long ago America entering Harvard didn't make you a
member of the cognitive elite- it signaled the recognition that you already were such
based primarily on very top of the curve SAT or ACT score ( being a straight A student
from a high school whose student body was composed almost exclusively of illiterates was
justifiably suspect ). It was, in other words, an individual merit selection.
Yes, I know about legacy admissions- Charles Murray covers this well in the Bell Curve.
It is entirely possible ( though not bloody likely ) that young Ms. Obama is both a top
2% scorer and a creator of truly creative dance which an over the hill philistine such
as I am is too limited in taste to savor.
None of this really relevant to the basic fact that thug and Social Justice infestation
at colleges and universities, the balkanization of American society Affirmative Action
set asides and quotas has all been done by American elites overwhelmingly white, male,
gentile and native born.
It still ain't Them.
@hyperbola
Speaking of "heart-rending appeal", on a previous thread you had insisted that "Remember
that ca. 90% of slave trading to the New World was carried out by British, Dutch and
Portuguese jews based in the respective colonies."
I asked kindly for a source. Sadly,
you neglected to provide one. Interesting how when you are confronted you conveniently
disappear. So, what is your source for that statistic?
Remember, of the Dutch West India Company 3,000,000 florins in original capital, Jews
contributed only 36,000, or 1.2 percent. In 1656, seven of 167 major shareholders were
Jews; in 1671, ten of 192.
And also consider that the 937 slaving voyages from Rhode Island launched from
1709-1807, Jews were responsible for only 21.
Furthermore, you insisted that the Brazilian economy was run by Jews. You supplied a
link, yet there was no indication that those two individuals were indeed Jewish. So do
you have another source to submit into evidence?
Konrad Lorenz, the great student of animal behavior, made the observation that animals
that form intimate pair bonds–friendship with the same and mating with the opposite
sex–also rear their young with love and care and passionately defend their territory. So
Love and Hate are opposite sides of the same coin.
Other animals like fishes school in
anonymous aggregations in which there is no intimacy between any two members. A herd of
reindeer, wildebeests, a flock of starlings; there is no personal bond of affection or
interaction on the basis of individual personality at all.
It is the second type of aggregation that our Fearless Leaders propose as the basis
for human societies. No one will be tied to a specific location or a particular neighbor
by bonds of affection. Instead human interactions will be regulated by the impersonal
contract of the "proposition nation". You see what they've done here? Turned a
description
of democracy into a
prescription
for democracy. The have mistaken
an effect for a cause.
The prediction suggests itself. In the future there will be little to no individual
expression of genius, since genius is grounded in passion and passion is for the
particular.
@German_reader
Good points all. That matches a lot of my thinking about Christianity, too.
But this
troubles me: even if today's Christianity is more part of the problem than the solution,
and so we chuck it, what do we replace it with? I personally feel no connection to the
religion beyond the cultural, but I think there will always be loads of people who need
to believe in something. There are plenty of people with advanced degrees and prestige
who never tire of laughing at all those 'dumb Christians' out there in Deplorable-land,
but who themselves will read horoscopes, do meditation or fall head-over-heels for
SJWism. I don't think Odin-worship is going to cut it here.
@Oldeguy
Well isn't that the issue now Old Buddy;
you good folks are constantly complaining about the watered-down standards the dusky
folks have brought to your favorite institutions
While simultaneously complaining
about the job the white people, who came from those institutions before the standards
were "lessened", have done in running this country, and the policies they crafted to
allow the duskies in in the first place.
I mean, Oldguy, were you this sage, brilliant, established, infallible, Socratic,
world-traveler, that you are now, at 19?
True enough, but nobody fell on the floor for head-banging in previous generations.
At least not in the places where I hung out.
It's a race to the bottom now, with stupid show-offs, and reckless nitwits striving
to outdo each other with various silly stunts even risky maneuvers to stream live, and
impress the world with their own special brand of idiotic folly.
In 1960, the most shocking thing was the Twist, a dance craze that swept the nation,
kicking off a wave of dance crazes, mostly of the stand-alone-and-wiggle variety. Who
knew then there would turn out to be so many different ways to wiggle?
Suddenly, the devious purpose of a previous craze became known -- the Hula Hoop got
everybody in shape for the Twist, and the succeeding wiggles like the Frug, Watusi,
Jerk, Fish -- whew! –and of course, almost everyone was thin then anyway, and a good
thing it was to be fit and able –and young! -- to do those kinds of dances.
@Seamus
Padraig
Um, this story was about immigration, not NATO. Obviously, immigration is an internal
German matter. Unless you have some evidence that the U.S.
forced
Merkel to bring
in thousands of refugees. Which I doubt you do. Of course, I can see Germans and
Europeans in general pointing fingers here. It's what they do best.
But this troubles me: even if today's Christianity is more part of the problem
than the solution, and so we chuck it, what do we replace it with?
I'm troubled by that as well and don't have a good answer. A return to paganism
probably isn't possible (and in its cruder forms wouldn't be desirable anyway); some
vague form of Deism probably isn't satisfying to most people. And being without religion
is pretty depressing in a way it amounts to admitting that there probably is no grand
story giving meaning to it all and that all our struggles may be entirely meaningless in
the end.
I suppose though the "problem" might correct itself anyway, with Europe at least being
overrun by the fertile masses from the Global South, who still seem very secure in their
religious beliefs maybe all the doubts that have plagued an increasingly secular West
since the 17th century will be just a forgotten historical footnote, when Nigerian
pentecostalists and Neo-crusaders battle against the forces of the caliphate in Europe's
ruins
@The
Alarmist
The phrase "United States" refers to two different entities. There is the country known
as the United States, which I know and (usually) love. Then there is the American
empire, which I despise. The sooner we ditch the American empire, both us Americans as
well as the rest of the world will be the better for it.
@Truth
Well, uh er no, not really.
The dead horse that I mercilessly continue to beat is all about agency, the capacity to
act in a given environment.
If those whose hands have a death grip on the levers of power are overwhelmingly white,
male, gentile native born U.S. citizens ( which is undeniably the case ) , shouldn't our
angst be directed at them as opposed to whatever sub-group way down on the power food
chain happens to be blissfully misbehaving due to the nonfeasance of the above societal
leaders ?
@Bragadocious
Vassals often are allowed to determine their own internal policies; it's control of
their
foreign
policy that makes them true vassals. In other words, your
counter-argument here is irrelevant.
@German_reader
Sadly, if we can't figure a reasonable answer to that question, then your dark prophecy
here stands a good chance of turning out to be true!
@Bragadocious
The US regime supports mass immigration, since Merkel was doing something that adhered
to US norms they would not need to get involved. Now if Merkel said all US troops must
leave, the reaction from the US would be predictable. Or how about she decided to
boycott Israel, yes I know this is not likely, but if she did, then it would be very
clear how the US would respond to their vassal.
@Daniel
Chieh
"A casual perusal of pop culture reveals this to be near universal. No point discussing
it with a liberal, however."
More assumptions made on your part. First, just because
there are elements of pop culture you personally distasteful does not mean that our
society is other than humane. Second, I'm not a liberal. I'm a white married American
man with children who makes his own decisions regarding race, politics, and society.
@Oldeguy
"If those whose hands have a death grip on the levers of power are overwhelmingly white,
male, gentile native born U.S. citizens ( which is undeniably the case ) , shouldn't our
angst be directed at them as opposed to whatever sub-group way down on the power food
chain happens to be blissfully misbehaving due to the nonfeasance of the above societal
leaders ?"
No, considering that these overwhelmingly white, male, gentile native born
U.S. citizens are merely exercising their life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. How
do propose denying them these fundamental freedoms?
If those whose hands have a death grip on the levers of power are overwhelmingly
white, male, gentile native born U.S. citizens ( which is undeniably the case ) ,
shouldn't our angst be directed at them as opposed to whatever sub-group way down on
the power food chain happens to be blissfully misbehaving due to the nonfeasance of
the above societal leaders ?
Oh absolutely, and how do you express such angst?
By voting for HIM (Drumpf)?
By reading HIS articles (the writers here are elite university/white guy types)?
By joining HIS fraternal organizations, and civic orders?
You see, this whole left/right paradigm thing is a carefuly crafted mirage, the same
folks who created the problem are the ones you are personally counting upon to fix it,
so is, in large part, racial and sexual animosity. If you looks sideways, you forget to
look upwards.
Basically, there are no heroes, only different degrees of saps and cowards in this
fight, and a teenager wirthing on the floor is just a symptom of the disease.
True enough, but nobody fell on the floor for head-banging in previous
generations. At least not in the places where I hung out.
So what they did; showing up for a military draft in wars intended to make Exxon and
The Bush Family rich, was better? Is being a simple-minded automaton, in your
estimation, superior to being a "stupid showoff" or a "reckless nitwit"?
The reason we have so many simpletons now, is because we had too many simpletons in
generations past. This is, at least, my opinion.
@Truth
Well, as an example, obviously what we know now about the evolution of humanity is hard
to reconcile with an understanding of the fall of man as an
event
that actually
happened (and this view of the fall as a real event that actually took place, not just a
metaphor for our depraved nature etc., was the view of at least the churches in the
Latin West – I don't know enough about the Eastern churches to make a judgement about
their position – for the vast majority of the last 2000 years, and in some form I'd
suppose still is the stance of the Catholic church at least; and indeed it's hard for me
to see how there could have been a need for reconciliation to God through Christ's
death, if there hadn't been an actual specific offense committed against God by
mankind).
when Nigerian pentecostalists and Neo-crusaders battle against the forces of the
caliphate in Europe's ruins
That is HBO-level Emmy Award winning stuff right there. Wait until GOT is over then
capitalize on those that need another series to latch onto. King in the North! King in
the North!
@helena
Have you heard of A Course in Miracles? If not,
look it up. It has millions of enthusiastic followers in the U.S.
and Europe. Many claim ACIM is the future of Christianity
@Daniel
Chieh
"With ideas that just happen to coincide with all liberal positions. Hilarious."
Fake
News Story. See, the problem with ideologues like yourself (and you are no different
than lefties in this regard) is that anyone who says they are a moderate, you
automatically label them as liberal OR that anyone who takes your positions to task, you
automatically label them–wait for it–a liberal.
I favor limiting immigration.
I am a 2nd Amendment advocate.
I support the death penalty.
Eminent domain in most cases is wrong.
Do you comprehend that these positions are NOT liberal, or are you going to be your
typical obtuse self?
@Corvinus
So which are you: NeoCon, or Liberal, Jew, or perhaps just average middle class WASP?
If you are not playing water muddier, then you need to learn that nations always have a
cultural Elite that sets standards. Various other groups either assimilate to the
standards and biases of that elite, or else they are persecuted until they poise no
threat.
In America, for example, the Civil War meant that the American Elite would be WASP,
which was the amalgam of New England Anglo-Saxon with PA Quaker. That is the source of
American WASP, as Philadelphia native and scholar Digby Baltzell designated.
Anglo-Saxon Puritanism was a Judaizing heresy, which lead naturally and inevitably to
Cromwell leading the Puritan Commonwealth to take Jewish loans and in return allow Jews
back into England, with more rights than the vast majority of British Isles natives had.
That was the start of Anglo-Zionism, which became the largest Empire in world history.
@Abelard
Lindsey
When we went from writing and saying 'these United States' to writing and saying 'the
United States,' we marked a new nation, one that was ready to explode into Empire.
A casual perusal of pop culture reveals this to be near universal.
Maybe you need to visit the streaming music site of your choice and download a Bach
concerto. Or some Benny Goodman, or some John Coltrane. Yeah, uplifting music can come
from anyone of any color.
Maybe you need to go to your local library and check out the exploits of Robinson
Crusoe, Cyrano, or Harry Potter, so you can regale in tales of heroism instead of
self-pity. Maybe Amy Tan will do the trick for you, I'm open-minded.
Maybe you need to rent blu-ray copies of
Casablanca
,
The Seven Samurai
,
or
Cry Freedom
, so you can see life-affirmations.
And maybe you can see that not everything is as ugly as you claim it to be.
As for me, the only thing I need to maybe do is leave you to decide which path to
take.
@Anon 2
I had a quick look. Thanks for the info. Not sure I'm looking for inner peace so much as
cultural sanity. I don't have a problem with racial mixing but I do have a problem with
subordinating the (global-minority) guilt-based European culture to the
(global-majority) Afro-Asian shame-based culture.
@anonymous
I think you have lost your mind. It happens when there is so much naked evil with people
not willing to confront it
But you must understand Putin is now the ONLY one who is
actually standing up to this menace for the sake of his own country but as a result has
rekindled hope in the other "lesser" nations of the world.
And China has always been militarily timid and only willing to use force at the
barest minimum
Nonetheless due to the crazed zombie behavior being displayed by DC (in cahoots with
Tel Aviv), it is painfully obvious to these two nations that they will have to confront
the hegemon some or the other time.
So they are waiting for it to become weaker not to mention someone sane takes charge
(just a glimmer of hope but hope nonetheless)
@Seamus
Padraig
Ah do you think the 'neo-con' empire will be gone with a whisper?? They will try to take
down the whole world with them. See how easily they sell "national security' to murder
and kill innocents in far away lands and have young kids die for them. As more and more
reactionary terrorism happens and add to it their own false flags, it only helps them
with even more control and power
The article forgets an important "detail": the leading role of a foreign element – a
very specific group, in the guilt and self hate anti White propaganda in the
intellectual sphere, the media and cinematography.
The elite of that group dominates
the Western culture for a long time now, and is actively working against White interests
by relentlessly brainwashing and conditioning the simple minds, which are always in the
majority.
On the other hand, those who try to resist, are demonized.
@Jake
"So which are you: NeoCon, or Liberal, Jew, or perhaps just average middle class WASP?"
I'm your typical American mutt.
"If you are not playing water muddier, then you need to learn that nations always
have a cultural Elite that sets standards."
The citizens of a nation establish norms, whether it be political, social, or
cultural. These people may or may come from elite backgrounds. Current trends found on
social media, for example, have been established by "normies".
"Various other groups either assimilate to the standards and biases of that elite, or
else they are persecuted until they poise no threat."
You are being overly broad here. Americans generally assimilate to our dominant
culture; it depends upon specifically what they are "persecuted" for. Remember, freedom
to choose does not mean freedom from consequence.
"In America, for example, the Civil War meant that the American Elite would be WASP,
which was the amalgam of New England Anglo-Saxon with PA Quaker. That is the source of
American WASP, as Philadelphia native and scholar Digby Baltzell designated."
The outcome of the Civil War actually resulted in a large immigration boom, with
people entering our shores who would be other than WASP, with a number of them
eventually gaining "elite" status due to their money making ventures.
"Anglo-Saxon Puritanism was a Judaizing heresy "
Evidence to support your assertion?
"which lead naturally and inevitably to Cromwell leading the Puritan Commonwealth to
take Jewish loans and in return allow Jews back into England, with more rights than the
vast majority of British Isles natives had."
Evidence to support your assertion?
Because it would appear that the Jews who returned to England had conditions placed
upon them, and thus did not gain "more rights".
@Captain
Nemo
"The article forgets an important "detail": the leading role of a foreign element – a
very specific group, in the guilt and self hate anti White propaganda in the
intellectual sphere, the media and cinematography."
You mean Jews, right?
"The elite of that group dominates the Western culture for a long time now, and is
actively working against White interests by relentlessly brainwashing and conditioning
the simple minds, which are always in the majority."
Who are these "simple minds"? Are you not part of this group? In what specific ways?
Did it ever occur to you that perhaps white Americans for the past 60 years have made
their own decisions based on their knowledge and personal preferences about politics,
race, and culture without being subject to "Jewish propaganda"?
"On the other hand, those who try to resist, are demonized."
So "good whites" are those who resist Jewish temptations, and "bad whites" are those
who befriend Jews and serve in their interests, right?
So "good whites" are those who demand that their fellow whites are Christian, refrain
from race mixing, and remove Muslim citizens from our nation by force, and "bad whites"
are those who seek to practice their own faith, marry and procreate outside of their
race, and oppose repatriation, correct?
@Corvinus
"Who wishes for an entire nation to collapse? Who desires a civil war in which hordes of
people, especially babies and children, will be slaughtered? Do you?"
I do. And I mean
that. Better than billions of neurotic apes cooped up in little boxes, ranting, jerking
off, and waiting to die. Let's revive the tragic. Let's roll the dice. Let's let the
weak finally perish, and may the best chimp win.
On the other hand, I admire your critical stance. So much simplistic, self-serving
dogma and infantile wishful thinking on the right. But you won't convince anyone. You
must know that. Your comments are good, but your reliance on humanism gives them a note
of bathos which ruins the whole.
I'm not saying a world without white people will be pleasant. I'm saying maybe the
reemergence of barbarism – and grand tragedy – is better than all of this.
It's hard for you alt-right guys to grasp because for the most part you've never been
anywhere or done anything but comment online and fetishize white civilization. In the
end, you're as reliant on modernity as the bluehairs and trannies.
Both sides would like to pick & choose the parts of modernity they like and totally
abolish what they don't. In other words, an infantile worldview.
Nonetheless, south of the equator, they do manage a semblance of muh white
civilization. It isn't America in the 50′s but it works. And that's all life as such
boils down to. There was never some cosmic guarantee that history is perfectable or that
"we" (not
me
or my people of course, always some other people) would be on top
forever, and it doesn't mean the world just stops spinning when we're not. Sorry, but
that's rank narcissism.
I did some editing. (Much of this might be redundant as I didn't read the entire comment
section)
contemporary ((white)) culture is a degraded mess.
((Many)) are cheering. It's about time! ((Susan Sontag)) in 1967, "The white race
is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone!its ideologies and
inventions!which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has
upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of
life itself."
In the popular mind, the evilness of white culture is epitomized by Nazi Germany,
with Germans forever ((stigmatized)) as the worst of whites. Contemporary Germany,
however, is one that supposedly allowed 500+ German women to be sexually assaulted by
Muslims in Cologne during New Year's Eve of 2016. Germany is really that neutered,
goes the narrative.
Europe will only be saved if the ((American empire)), with its corrosive
ideologies and madnesses, collapses, and this will happen soon enough. There is hope.
Interesting article
this is a conversation that's worth having, as we all have a ringside seat to the
death of the Western world, with all that will mean.
For ((some)), it's an imperative. For others, it's the genocide of their fellow
people and all hope for the future of their offspring and the preservation of our
culture. For yet others, they're simply content to feast on the carcass.
I have to say I'm also intrigued by Mr. Dihn's observations with JR vis-a-vis the
glaring realities as this tragicomedy plays out.
I recently asked one of the commenters here what he considered the definition of
'white nationalist' to be – when he spoke of some of the commenters on Unz being "white
nationalists".
Ok, what is that? Are the Germans who're apprehensive about massive Muslim and
African immigration into their countries, 'white nationalists'? Are the Swedes? Do they
qualify?
What I suspect, is that term is sort of reserved for
American
white men, for
whom much of the world seems to have a seething hatred and resentment for. Blaming them
not just for slavery and the treatment of the Amerindians, but also for all the wars and
atrocities that the ZUS fecal government is relentlessly guilty of, (and for whom the
white, American male is expected to kill and die in)
I suspect.. (and this is necessarily going to include some hyperbolic exaggeration),
but I suspect that what is being ((subtly done)), is that all the very real crimes and
enormities that are being visited upon the planet's people by the ((ZUS government and
Goldman Sachs types of corporate thieving,)), are subtly being turned into the singular
crimes of white, American men. Who are congenitally racist, unapologetic for slavery,
militant, flag-waving, USA! chanting, Mexican wall-building, woman hating, beer
drinking, pickup truck diving, causing all the global warming that will kill us all,
Trump voting, gun owning, Bambi shooting, homophobic, darky loathing; caricature that is
a constant meme coming out of ((Hollywood and Madison Ave, etc..)) seemingly daily,
hourly, and by the minute.
And, there's probably some truth to that. But I'd say very little. Rather I suspect
that most white American men are not too different than most Canadian or Australian men,
but because the Fiend has made its nest in NYC and DC, we American men have the pleasure
of hosting it, and therefor get to enjoy the brunt of its blowback on the world's stage.
And get to have our characters relentlessly maligned by ((Hollywood)) and ((ad
agencies)) as the cause of all the world's problems.
The wars are not being waged for Israel and Lockheed by Obama/Hillary, no they're
being waged by congenitally racist "white nationalist" American men hell bent on bombing
the darkies- or so it goes.
So when you ask someone what they mean by 'white nationalist', if they don't answer
you, I suspect that it's because the answer would be somewhat emotional-based.
'they're white American men who are bombing everyone because they're racists and
building walls on Mexico because they hate all brown people!!!!'
not
that 'white nationalists' are just like every other person on the planet,
who " are ardently loyal to their home turf. Shared history matters."
Just like everyone else.
But unlike everyone else, white (particularly
American) men are not entitled to want to see their offspring persevere, because we
alone are responsible for all the suffering in the world and all the wars and strife and
misery that our ((government)) perpetrates all over the planet.
Just like the hatred of the Germans as congenital Nazis, it serves a purpose to
deflect the crimes of ((some)), onto a convenient scapegoat. And therefor whitewash
their ((own)) bloody hands.
. In one area of what used to be Dutch Guyana, 40 Jewish-owned plantations were home
to a total population of at least 5,000 slaves, he says. Known as the Jodensavanne, or
Jewish Savannah, the area had a Jewish community of several hundred before its
destruction in a slave uprising in 1832. Nearly all of them immigrated to Holland,
bringing their accumulated wealth with them.
Some of that wealth was on display last year in the cellar of Amsterdam's Portuguese
Synagogue, part of an exhibition celebrating the riches of the synagogue's immigrant
founders. Van de Kamp says the exhibition sparked his interest in the Dutch Jewish role
in slavery, which was robust.
On the Caribbean island of Curacao, Dutch Jews may have accounted for the resale of
at least 15,000 slaves landed by Dutch transatlantic traders, according to Seymour
Drescher, a historian at the University of Pittsburgh. At one point, Jews controlled
about 17 percent of the Caribbean trade in Dutch colonies, Drescher said.
Jews were so influential in those colonies that slave auctions scheduled to take
place on Jewish holidays often were postponed, according to Marc Lee Raphael, a
professor of Judaic studies at the College of William & Mary ..
@Truth
Notwithstanding that I've never coded a day in my life, I was let go from an office job
literally minutes before writing that. Guess ya gotta revise your ad hom, kiddo.
The continued existence of Europe has nothing to do with whether America's empire
collapses and everything to do with Europe's own globalist traitors in political office.
Keep letting in Muslims and nothing will save it.
@helena
Hello Helena
I agree re: the guilt based European culture which seems to have gotten a foothold in
some parts of England as well. I wonder what religion can offer in a rearguard action,
when it seems to have been the avant-guard, seeking it out! At least to an extent.
Perhaps I conclude too much, but in my recent visits to the U.K., greater London
aside, Surrey, Kent and Essex seemed so nice. Quite English, culturally, I'd say.
I actually used "coding farm" as a synonym for "boring job
with no future" so I wasn't completely wrong, but in any event, now you are freed up to
persue your Passion, and Gift, RALLYING YOUR PEOPLES TO A BETTER TOMORROW!
@hyperbola
Arguably, those who were the most responsible for the slave trade were the Sephardic
Jews of Spain and Portugal. They knew where the slave markets of West Africa were,
having learned about them from the Moorish rulers of the Iberian peninsula -- that's
where the Moors and the Arabs got their slaves from. Ostensibly, these Jews were forced
to convert to Christianity after 1492 in order to be allowed to remain in Spain.
However, many of them became 'crypto-Jews' who continued to practice their religion in
secret, while only marrying other crypto-Jews in order to preserve their bloodlines.
Anyone who calls this an "American" empire is a blind fool. It is an empire of the point
one percent, an international collection of sociopaths, or sociopath-esque investors who
have been using US blood and treasure to enrich themselves. The Americans who comprise a
large share of that collection are no more American than the gd Saudis who are part of
it.
To paraphrase a famous tourist item: We enforced a global empire for the rich at the
cost of millions of lives, and all we got for it was an increasingly worthless
petrodollar, trade deficits, and all the gd debt.
So you know, as an American working person to the global riff raff: Up yours, losers.
The retraction of American power projection will make us richer and see you all robbing
and murdering each other like you always have.
@neutral
You might want to stop and think about how the United States became the political and
economic center of Western civilization before you claim it's all America's fault.
Here's a couple of clues. The United States didn't start the First and Second World Wars
and did everything they could to stay out of them, and the problems of the Mideast stem
in large part from British and French meddling in the regioin after both the World Wars.
After white hegemony comes Chinese leadership, many whites themselves are hoping.
So after peak White Man comes peak Yellow Man? The Jews are going to be none too
pleased about this, they consider the peak to be their rightful place on this planet.
@Alden
I read the OCC. I read Betty's ideas and noticed that no one on this website brings up
this point. I've read commentators on unz who are RCC and believe that the RCC is the
answer. Betty's comments are excellent and when I post them on unz, the RCCers are the
ones who can't refute my comments. Betty is correct in identifying the RCC as the worst
problem because of its "universality." Most comments are the same blather without
getting to the heart of the issue. I like Betty's comments because she always gets to
the point on what is really important: IQ and universalism. I modify them, so I hope she
doesn't mind. But I bet she won't mind, because the most important thing is to get these
ideas out to more and more people. She is absolutely correct in writing that the RCC is
a non-starter because of blacks/Asians.
RCC commentators can't deal with this stuff.
So they blame the "Jews." OCC blames the Jews too. But Betty is correct in that Jews are
minor issue in the struggle to save the West. It is the RCC and Zioevangizers who are
the problem. Did you read about that insane Zioevanger preacher Jeffress who said God
had given Trump permission to take out Kim in North Korea? Madness!!! Betty always
points to the Zioevangizers as evil degenerates.
The United States didn't start the First and Second World Wars and did everything
they could to stay out of them
FDR was the one mainly responsible for the outbreak of general European war in 1939.
He bullied Chamberlain into making the March 1939 blank check guarantees to Poland
(which the Brits knew they couldn't live up to) and encouraged the Poles to reject
negotiations with Germany. It's not like Hitler invented the Danzig and Corridor
questions-even the mildest Weimar Soc Dems complained about them. Neither did Hitler
create a fantasy of persecution of ethnic Germans by the Poles. Polish persecution of
its various ethnic minorities during the interwar period is well established. On Aug 17,
1939 there were 76,000 ethnic German refugees on the Polish-German border and another
18,000 in Danzig.
Sources on FDR's responsibility for the war:
Herbert Hoover:
Everything is fully documented and the sources are impeccable. The truth is readily
available, it's just that most people just swallow the govt, mass media and academic
industry propaganda.
@hyperbola
"Lots of research available that contradicts your statements. Here is one start about
the Dutch jews."
Of course Jews were involved in the slave trade. I never made a claim
to the contrary.
Let us provide context. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Netherlands allowed Jews
a much larger degree of freedom to participate in economic and cultural life, so it is
other than surprising that Dutch mercantile participation in the slave trade also had
some Jewish members. To complicate matters, early Jewish communities in the New World
were generally Portuguese and Spanish marranos who endured religious persecution.
Now recall YOU made a specific contention–"Remember that ca. 90% of slave trading to
the New World was carried out by British, Dutch and Portuguese jews based in the
respective colonies."
The link you just provided does NOT offer that particular statistic. Rather, it
discusses one Jewish settlement that contained slaves.
More importantly, the statistic given by a historian in that source is that Dutch
Jews reportedly controlled 17% of the Carribean trade. It was not noted that it was the
slave trade or non-slave trade. Regardless, there is no reference to the 90% statistic
YOU allege.
It would appear that you submitting Fake News.
Willie F. Page, professor of African American Studies at Brooklyn College, noted that
in Dutch Brazil, the Jews operated less than 6% of the plantations.
Seymour Drescher remarked in Immigrants And Minorities (July 1993) that Jews'
investment share in the Dutch West India Company "amounted to only 0.5 percent of the
company's capital". Dutch historians Pieter Emmer and Johanes Postma have argued that
"Jews had a very limited and subordinate roles even at the height of the Dutch slave
trade in the 17th century."
Are you prepared to retract your statement in light of the evidence here? Or do you
have a source that definitively proves your claim–"Remember that ca. 90% of slave
trading to the New World was carried out by British, Dutch and Portuguese jews based in
the respective colonies"?
White Manhood simply cannot co-exist with Black Manhood.
It wilts and withers at the Negro's feet.
In the end, it's about organicism, not ideology.
After all, Cuba is communist, but white men there are facing same problems vis-a-vis
the more muscular Negroes. Different ideology but same organic results.
Life exists because of sex. And whom white women have sex with will decide white
future. Jungle Fever is the most destructive force against whites.
I see it all over the place, even in National Parks.
Contrary to the view that the South is a land of segregationist rednecks, the fact is
lots of rednecks are actually interracist and have sisters or daughters with mulatto
kids. Rednecks are now Redcucks.
Afro and Freud = Afreudianism. It will destroy the white race. Sexual liberation
means women seek wildest sex with wildest men. And that means white women will run to
Negroes. White men are doomed unless they wake up and demand safe space for their
manhood to thrive again apart from the Negro.
A tree cannot grow under shades of bigger trees. It has to planted where there's
plenty of sunshine. Negro shadow will destroy white manhood, and that mans white women's
wombs will be shut off to white males.
Same fate in EU and US.
Since childhood, I've seen racial dynamics play out. Whites were scared of blacks.
Still, things were not so bad back then because whites had their own music/culture and
blacks had their own. But rise of hip hop changed all that. White girls began to dance
to black music by black thugs. End of history.
There is living culture and dead culture. Most of European Culture is dead. It is in
museums or for tourists. It no longer inspires. It's just legacy.
The living culture of the West is mostly worship of Negro and cuckery.
@Sam
Shama
Hi Sammy – my comment about guilt and shame was a reference to Frost's work. I miss him.
The hinterland is still English but the liberals have it in their sights; they are
determined to mix it up because as we all know, people who oppose immigration live in
areas where there are few migrants.
@Corvinus
A pretty devastating takedown of "hyperbola". Prediction: hyperbola will now retire its
Unz commenting handle and reappear under a fresh one, recycling the same unsupported
claims.
Susan Sontag in 1967, "The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white
race and it alone!
Sontag ?? From the dung beetle bloodline tribe --
I don't think so, no. I looked at where this supposedly happened and it just doesn't
look possible. Cologne main railway station, serves 280,000 passengers on an average
day. (As compared to Grand Central in NYC, which serves 750,000 a day, so it's over 1/3
that level.) Granted, the 280,000 people aren't all there at the same time, but it's a
crowded place.
You are apparently willing to believe that hundreds of women were sexually assaulted
there with no visual record of any sort. ZERO. Finally, you remind me of a little boy
who clings to his belief in Santa Claus, that Santa is going to come down the chimney
and bring gifts.
Except the little boy lives in an apartment building and there is no chimney!
It is the ultimate Wunderwaffe against any accusations tarnishing reputation of
Muslims.
Well, anybody with a functioning brain should realize that, what I dubbed Revusky's
Razor has nothing to do with defending Muslims
specifically
. As a practical
question, in the current day, a huge amount of the false accusations are being made
against Muslims, but in principle, it has nothing to do with defending Muslims, as
opposed to anybody else.
In any case, what vicious little punks like you seemingly never understand is a
concept that, in Eastern religions, is called "karma". We also have the more long-winded
formulation "What goes around comes around." "Reciprocity" is another word. In this
case, this amounts to understanding that if you advocate vicious tactics against others,
those same tactics can (and probably will) eventually be used against you.
So, if you think it's a wonderful thing for the State to be able to round up Muslims,
put them in some black hole like Guantanamo and torture them endlessly, with zero due
process, it does not occur you that if the State can do that to some Ay-rab, they can do
it to YOU too! Legally speaking, what's the difference?
The same little bitch who, for a few bucks, will claim that she was raped by the
dirty Ay-rabs, for an extra few bucks, will claim that you raped her or that I raped
her. What's the difference to her? I mean, for example, this false accuser:
An intelligent military man is going to be opposed to torturing people they take
prisoner because he realizes that he also could be taken prisoner and then would
inevitably be tortured.
Of course, you lack that intelligence, so your notion is that if I am standing up for
people who are falsely accused, who, in this case, are Muslims, that it must just mean
that I just have some agenda to defend Muslims, because I, for some reasons have some
special love of Muslims.
Well, anyway, the combination moral degeneracy, mendacity, and willful stupidity that
you engage in is truly nauseating. You (and a few other people around here) really do
make me want to puke.
The United States didn't start the First and Second World Wars and did everything
they could to stay out of them
Not
entirely
true. FDR was hard at work in the late 30s deliberately trying to
provoke the Japs into a war. The US had had designs on the far east going back as least
as far as the Spanish American War, when they took over the Philippenes from Spain, and
the Boxer Rebellion in China. And modern Washington still does harbor designs on E. Asia -- hence the constant Kabuki theater with N. Korea.
As far as Europe is concerned, you're mostly correct, though both Woody Wilson, and
later FDR, did game the situation as best they could to try and establish a beachhead on
that continent as well.
And in the ME, Franco-British meddling has not been a significant factor there since
the Suez Crisis in the 50s. The vast majority of the ME-meddling since then has come
from Washington. This goes back at least as far as the 'Carter Doctrine' of the late
70s, if not to the coup in Tehran in 1953.
That first "r" in "razor" is also to be capitalized, isn't it?
I suppose that's true, since, uncapitalized, it would refer, properly speaking, to
the Gillette shaver in my washroom. However, it is hard to imagine there would be many
cases where this would lead to ambiguity in an sentence, so I don't think it's that
important.
Revusky's Razor: If an event of sufficiently large scale is alleged to have taken
place in a wide open public space full of people, yet there is no corresponding video or
photographic evidence, then it must be fake news.
This refers to incidents that have happened in the last few years, when, to all
intents and purposes, everybody has a video camera in his or her pocket.
Even though I live not far from where it happened, I hadn't been aware of the
incidents with Senegalese migrants that Linh refers to in this article. So I looked for
some visuals. Unlike Cologne, I came up with things very quickly. Specifically:
This is from 2015, some months before the alleged Cologne event. Somehow there's
plenty of video of the incident in Salou with the Senegalese but none (and I mean really
NONE) of the hundreds of women being sexually assaulted in and around Cologne railway
station on New Year's Eve. Why is that? My explanation would be that the Salou incident
actually happened while the Cologne one did not.
Not only is this the simplest explanation, it is, as far as I can tell, the ONLY
explanation. The above is Revusky's Razor (capital R) in action.
@attilathehen
The RCC is too cucked to be of any use to us anymore. But having grown up in the Bible
Belt, I have to confess that I have been thoroughly unimpressed with Protestantism, too.
It seems that all of the many, many Protestant denominations in the US basically fall
into one of the following categories:
1. Liberal SJW churches, which are no less
cucked than the RCC.
2. ZioRapture Christians (like Hagee) who worship at the alter of the 'Chosen People',
and think the world's about end (so why bother to save our civilization?)
3. Get-rich-while-you-pray Prosperity Gospel types who basically worship Capitalism and
call it God
4. Obscurantists like the Jehovah's Witnesses, who have a powerful allergy to science
and logic.
Frankly, I don't see our salvation
as a civilization
coming from any of these.
As far as universalism is concerned, that's definitely not unique to the RCC.
Historically and presently, most Protestant denominations sought and made converts in
the Third World, too. After all, it does say in the New Testament, "He knoweth neither
Greek nor Jew." The only major exception to this that I can think of would be the
Orthodox churches. They accept converts from other nations, but generally don't
seek
them. Of course, this is probably just a consequence of not having had overseas
colonies.
So they blame the "Jews." OCC blames the Jews too. But Betty is correct in that
Jews are minor issue in the struggle to save the West.
Hmmm. So you're cool with the (((banksters))), (((media moguls))), (((zionists))),
and (((Cultural Marxists)))? Well then, keep on reading the OCC -- you'll wake up
eventually.
@Priss
Factor
Priss, where do you live? Detroit? I honest to God don't see all that many black/white
MRCs either in Europe or America. I don't deny that the Cultural Marxists are trying to
push this, but the only white chicks I see with black guys are massively overweight --
not the sort of chick a normal white man would be seen dead with.
Anyway, my main point was related to the White "self
hatred" underlined in the article.
I suggested that this hatred is not so "self" originated as implied, but has
significant outside causes in a specific foreign element promoting White guilt and "self
hatred" through its massive influence.
@Priss
Factor
"White Manhood simply cannot co-exist with Black Manhood.
It wilts and withers at the
Negro's feet.
etc "
I would say that this is not such a neutral, self developing phenomenon as you
suggest, but that there are significant political forces, dominating the modern Western
cultural space, actively and very intentionally destroying the image of a civilized but
patriarchal White masculinity, and promoting the general cultural frame of primitivism,
inside which, primitive Black masculinity consequently appears dominant.
Black masculine dominance over women (I hesitate to say "patriarchal", because it
implies an "archy", a social order nonexisting in that culturally promoted primitivistic
paradigm) is not questioned though in that anti White patriarcy propaganda.
At the same time, the affirmation of the patriarchal White masculinity is culturally
demonized.
A very specific foreign element plays the main role in this.
I will just supply a collage illustrating that influence through time, at the level
of small children:
@helena
There's a recording preserved at Harvard, of Frost reading
Acquainted With the Night
,
which I listened to only once, yet it still lingers, mostly when I catch that intonation
of speech in New Hampshire or at the Cape. I understand why you miss him. Have you had
occasion to visit his cottage at Beaconsfield?
@Jonathan
Revusky
Jonathan! Leave Priss alone!!
S/he may have a strident style but there is much
bioanthropological
intelligence
behind the long rambling comments.
@Sam
Shama
Robert? No, Peter, the bioanthropologist who had a column here for a while and got into
the same contretemps with Ron as Jonathan did regarding wanting to create a commentariat
that he could professionally engage with individually like in a schoolroom.
When I was
just as far as I could walk
From here today
There was an hour
All still
When leaning with my head against a flower
I heard you talk.
Don't say I didn't for I heard you say
You spoke from that flower on the window sill-
Do you remember what it was you said '
'First tell me what it was you thought you heard.'
'Having found the flower and driven a bee away
I leaned my head
And holding by the stalk
I listened and I thought I caught the word
What was it
Did you call me by my name
Or did you say
Someone
said "Come"
I heard it as I bowed.'
@Seamus
Padraig
Moldbug's Cathedral hypothesis laid the blame, I think, on the Unitarian churches. Did
you read that? The idea being that once the Trinitarian idea evaporated, it became
possible to dissolve all boundaries between people. Christianity became a force for
goodness stripped of (identifying) ritual and decoration. Quakers. Lego.
Humanitarianism.
I suspect that is just Prisses' way of saying what Thomas Jefferson said
not so long ago
"Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate, than that these people are
to be free; nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in
the same government. Nature, habit, opinion have drawn indelible lines of distinction
between them."
~ T. Jefferson
my problem isn't so much with the blacks (or Negros or whatever we're supposed to
call them) as with the white liberals.
I'd like to start a program called the' Amy Biehl Foundation', that will fund the
emigration of white liberals to go live in Johannesburg or Harare, where they can go
make their penance where it will do some real good.
I would spend good money to send guys like this over there, and pronto!
@helena
One winter I lived down the road from the Robert Frost Interpretive Trail in Vermont.
Always a good walk, especially useful in banishing a hangover.
I think he sucks and it
isn't real poetry, but the signs on the trail were really pleasant, and put it in
context.
@hyperbola
It's understandable that in America only Black slavery is talked about and historians
who brought up the prominent role of Jews in slavery trade limit themselves to the
period from 15 century and down when America was discovered and the largest demand for
African slaves was created. Many people are surprised about it and wonder where did
these Jews come from and why they happened to be involved in Slavery. They ddi not come
out of nowhere. They were involved in slavery trade for many centuries before the
discovery of America. One has to go back to the first millennium when Arab Muslims
established themselves Northern Africa and Spain. Already then Jews were their favorite
slavers, however the slaves were also white Europeans. They were getting slaves
throughout whole Europe particularly form countries that haven't become Christian yet
and thus could not be protected by the Church because Church at least technically forbid
slavery in some places. The largest slave markets were in Prague, Lyon, and Rome where
slaves were brought from Germany and countries east of Germany like Poland, Bohemia and
so on. At the slave markets males were usually castrated and together with women and
children were send further to North Africa and Spain. This practice ended with
Christianization of Bohemia, Hungary, Poland, Lithuania, Interesting is the story of
St. Adalbert (born 952) who fought against slavery in Prague. Later he had to escape to
Poland and got killed in Prussia in 997. In 1175 a bronze doors was erected in Gniezno
Cathedral in Poland depicting his life where among others you can find these two
stories:
He has a vision of Christ telling him to save Christians from slavery by the
Jewish traders
He pleads with the Duke of Bohemia for the release of Christians slaves by
their Jewish masters
Also later when Crimea became a part of Turkish Ottoman empire it became a great
center of slave trade where the slaves kidnapped usually by Tartars in Poland, Ukraine,
Russia and even Finland were traded via mostly Jewish slavers to Turks and Arabs.
Bagdad, Istanbul, Damascus and Cairo were full of Slavic and Finn slaves. There are
quite a few books about it.
I am bringing this up to broaden the scope and make those who did not know that
slavery business was very Jewish from the very beginning. The slaves were white European
pagans and Christians.
@Talha
demanding a safe space for one's manhood is about as unmanly as it gets. Do white
males really want to publicly make that statement?
Manhood isn't just about being
like some Hulk Hoganish he-man. It's the combination of sense and strengths.
Consider sports. Why do high school sports exist apart from college sports? High
school kids will get crushed by college athletes. And why do college sports exist apart
from professional sports?
Because pros will crush college athletes.
So, manhood in high school needs safe space from college, and manhood in college
needs safe space from professional sports.
Indeed, this is true of humanity itself. Manliness can exist ONLY IN SAFE SPACE from
wild animals that are bigger and stronger. This is true of African Negroes themselves.
In African tribes, the men act tough with spears and drums and do their dance and stuff.
But they do this in their own villages that are guarded from wild animals. Even the
toughest Negro is no match for a lion, buffalo, hyena, leopard, or a hippo. Most hippos
can outrun Negroes and stomp their heads into Aunt Jemima pancakes.
So, manhood isn't just about raw strength of brutal sort. It can only exist within a
certain condition and context. Take manhood among coyotes. Coyote males fight for turf
and sexual access. But they fight among their own kind. But when wolves appear on the
turf, coyotes run like a mothafuc*a.
Coyote manhood cannot exist among wolves. It can only exist among coyotes. So,
coyotes need safe space from wolves in order to be coyote men.
This is true enough in Greek mythology. Heroes are weaker than many monsters and
enemies. They must use guile and trickery to win or make it to safety. Theseus, Perseus,
and Odysseus all use guile. Theseus had the string. Perseus had the reflective shield.
Odysseus made the wooden horse. And Odysseus used trickery and teamwork to get away from
the One-eyed giant, Cyclops.
Man to Man, the white man cannot win against the more muscular and more aggressive
Negro. Negroes will dominate sports teams while white boy is reduced to cucky
benchwarmer who sees best-looking white girls run off with Negro and have mulatto
babies.
So, white manhood needs to use guile, unity, solidarity, and other means to gain
power and seek safe space from the Negro. It's like what wolves do. A lone wolf's
manhood is no match against big moose or big bear or ferocious cougar. Wolf power comes
from unity and cooperation. Wolves can have wolfmanhood only within the safety of the
pack.
White males are losing because their stupid pride prevented them from making that
statement
that you're talking about.
If white males had been honest during the Jack Johnson era, they would have said, "Look,
that Africa-evolved Negro whose ancestors got tough by chucking spears at hippos are
kicking white male butts in US, UK, and Australia. And look at all those white women who
reject white male losers and go off to have sex with Johnson the big tough Negro. We
can't compete with such Negroes. We need to send them to Africa or give them a separate
nation. Our white manhood need sanctuary from Negroes just like Negro manhood need
sanctuary from hippos and hyenas."
Then, whites wouldn't be facing the mess they are in.
Also, if EU blocks black colonization on those grounds, white men in Europe can have
manhood. But since white men are too 'proud' to say such and pretend races are equal,
more Negroes come, beat up white boys, take over sports, and colonize white wombs.
It's like Negro Truth whupped all the slow white boys and impregnated all the white
girls at his school. He be delighted in his mastery over the pitiful white boy.
@utu
"They were involved in slavery trade for many centuries before the discovery of America.
One has to go back to the first millennium when Arab Muslims established themselves
Northern Africa and Spain."
To what extent were Jews involved? Do you have any source
material to provide insight?
It's like Negro Truth whupped all the slow white boys and impregnated all the
white girls at his school. He be delighted in his mastery over the pitiful white boy.
Bro, did we go to school together? Are you from Queens?
@Corvinus
To what extent were Jews involved?
– Major, dominant. Muslims were not allowed to
operate within the Christian Europe but Jews were permitted.
By the turn of the 6th to
the 7th century, Jews had become
the chief slave traders
in Italy, and were
active in Gaelic territories. Pope Gregory the Great issued a ban on Jews possessing
Christian slaves, lest the slaves convert to Judaism. By the 9th and 10th centuries,
Jewish merchants, sometimes called Radhanites, were
a major force
in the slave
trade continent-wide Jews were
one of the few groups who
could move and trade
between the Christian and Islamic worlds.
@anonymous
Nice satire !!!!!
Very cleverly crafted . Judging by the comments that followed , you evidently trolled
plenty of people.
Godspeed and thanks for the laughs
A month ago, after reading a desperate cry for help from the National Coalition of
Christian Organisations in Palestine (NCCOP) addressed to the World Council of
Churches, I emailed eight churches in my locality asking whether that heart-rending
appeal had trickled down to them at parish level ..
I think that these examples are far worse than anything happening to Christians in
Israel. Did you inform your churches about this mass murder of Christians and burning of
churches in the Islamic world ?
The 25 worst places to be a Christian. Israel is not on the list but Iran , Egypt ,
Sudan , Somalia ,Iraq ,Pakistan and everyones favorite " Syria" are all on the list .
'I already watched and this video [Chinese engineer
disses African who is about to explain how the 'White Man' caused all the problems of
Black Africa] or this point of view, invariably correct, don't change mine. Conservs luv
[to] "rationalize" their own historical faults."
Every human loves to rationalize. It's one of many cognitive communicative behaviors
that characterize humanity. I guess that's what you are doing when you say that what the
Chinese critic of African culture says – although "invariably correct" – fails to change
your views? So you consider that the Chinese fellow in the video is a "conserv"? Or are
y9u just saying that you have already been of the opinion that when Africans blame
colonialist exploitation for their lack of progress or development, that that's a bogus
argument?
(traditional song, not attributed, but a
version of it appears in
The Fiddle Book
by Oklahoma fiddler, Marion Thede, which
has music and lyrics to more than 150 old time fiddle tunes)
from 1906. Please
note that the same source stated that despite Church rule, many Christians also partook
in the slave trade, with church officials in one part of Europe collecting taxes on this
endeavor.
How many Christians compared to Jews? I don't know. But consider that Jews were a much
smaller percentage of the total population in Christian Europe compared to Muslim
dominate regions in the Middle East. No one knows exact numbers, but 250,000 Jews in a
community of 10-15 million people has been a common estimate.
One could infer from this source that non-Jewish involvement was also "major,
dominant".
@German_reader
Well, you have proven that your understanding of Christianity is really poor. If one
starts wandering away from his area of expertise, well, one is bound to be exposed as
fool or iliterate. I guess that German education standards when it comes to the teaching
of history have sunk very low.
Starting with your rather poor or misleading interpretation of the verse where Jesus
states that whoever loves his family or kin more than HIM is not worthy of HIM. Your
statement is rather ironic if we were to apply it to the current situation of the West
where, if a revolution is to occur in order to save it, Europeans will have to start
purging from OUR OWN PEOPLE and families the filth that taints our societies BEFORE
expelling the invaders. There is no way out of it specially in a place like Germany.
By the way how a community that lives with the moto "if any man will not work,
neither let him eat" can be classified as communist? Specially by someone who comes from
a society that has forsaken reason and history and whose TV channels and media 24/7
bleat about how accepting Germany and Europe should be of immigrants that share nothing
with Europe but a long history of hatred? From country that feeds millions who don't
work through taxation of another dwindling group that still numbers in the millions (who
forcibly support able bodied people who don't work)? Sorry pal but in this discussion
you win the prize of the Irrational and/or iliterate argument of the day.
Um, this story was about immigration, not NATO. Obviously, immigration is an
internal German matter.
Not so fast, Braga.
A month into the bombing of Yugoslavia, SACEUR Wesley Clark notoriously told a CNN
reporter:
"Let's not forget what the origin of the problem is. There is no place in
Europe for ethnically pure states. That's a 19th century idea and we are trying to
transition into the 21st century and we are going to do it with multi-ethnic states."
It's unclear why a SACEUR would comment on immigration policy at all, much less
repeatedly use
"we"
if NATO had no say in the matter. If the patently criminal
bombing of Yugoslavia didn't "force" Merkel, it surely coloured the thinking of not only
German, but every other Euro politician. At any rate, his statement shows clearly that
NATO was an active participant in a program that had started well before 1999.
@Erebus
Interesting. I do not remember hearing this. What's ironic is that Yugoslavia was a
multi ethnic state at some point. Its disintegration with the help of NATO created
several mono-ethnic states. I could see him saying it when Kosovaars staged an exodus
claiming that they were being ethnically cleansed. Whether they were being cleansed is
another story. The end result was that mono-ethnic Kosovo was created.
@Anonymous
I'm not Middle Eastern. You compliment Derbyshire all the time (especially about his
writing – you did this recently for one of his articles) and I remember the comment
where you said you were 1/2 Jewish. Also, when I commented that Macron's wife was white
and not Asian (like Derbyshire's China woman) you told me to lay off Derbyshire and his
wife.
@Seamus
Padraig
I'm not cool with the banksters, cultural Marxists, etc. What I said is that I blame the
RCC/Zioevangizers for giving the "chosen" their supposed power. The RCC/Zioevangizers
think the Jews are smarter. They are not. But their universal Christianity keeps them
from addressing the JQuestion because then race would be involved. The RCC/Zioevangizers
will not criticize blacks/Asians. That's why I say, collapse the RCC/Zioevangizers and
you take care of the Jew/Muslim/black/Asian problems.
Its disintegration with the help of NATO created several mono-ethnic states.
Yeah, more than one pundit has commented on that unintended consequence.
Frankly, it's unclear to me what NATO's real purpose was. Their accusations against
Milosovic et al, via which they invoked their hypocritical R2P doctrine, were eventually
proved false. I never saw an analysis that explained it satisfactorily, but I haven't
looked very hard for one either.
@helena
The Unis are basically just another cuck church. But I really don't see them as the
driving force of SJWism. After all, is it they who control the banks, the media,
education and foreign policy? No, not really.
@Rurik
Very disturbing graphics, Rurik. But thanks for posting them. Sukant Chandan is an
especially vile POS. And BTW, I totally agree with your proposal!
@attilathehen
There are those of us in the Roman Catholic Church (RCC) that do not subscribe to the
current teachings on the supremacy of the jews. We are Catholics who,do not subscribe to
the changes that the Vatican II Ecumenical Council attempted to impose on us. It is no
secret that jews and Protestants were involved in this "Council" and wrought changes in
order to bring down the Church.
Jews DID take responsibility for the crucifixion and death of Jesus Christ. No amount of
"modernization" of the Catholic Church can change that fact.
Frankly, it's unclear to me what NATO's real purpose was. Their accusations
against Milosovic et al, via which they invoked their hypocritical R2P doctrine, were
eventually proved false. I never saw an analysis that explained it satisfactorily,
but I haven't looked very hard for one either.
this one from commenter Kiza is as good as I've seen:
the US goal in former Yugoslavia was primarily a rejuvenation of NATO which has
lost its meaning with the demise of SU. Also, the Demoncrats have a natural
propensity to package their imperialism into "humanitarian" interventions, the
Republicans are much less sleazy – the Republicans just say you are with us or
against us, no matter whether what we do is legal or illegal. Therefore, it was a
perfect little war for the Clintons:
1) breath a new life into NATO,
2) clean up the Southern Europe of any residual Russia and/or socialist influence and
3) do a dress rehearsal for attacking Russia (using NATO).
A final important reason was that the US intervention in the Balkans created a new
industry called Regime Change Industry (or should it be called an NGO Ecosystem).
This is the time when Gene Sharp finished his book on "non-violent" regime-change and
color-revolutions. Therefore, the illegal US intervention in the Balkans was the
first time this NGO Ecosystem was fully deployed. After the subsequent color
revolutions and regime changes , the travelling NGO EcoSystem now probably employs
around 300-500,000 people, the Westerners as management and consultants, the locals
on the coalface. This is why the regime-changes cannot stop – because there is now a
whole industry depending on them.
These are the positive outcomes for US from its interventions in the Balkans. We
should not forget also that Israel benefited greatly by taking focus off itself,
because the Bosnian war united temporarily both Shiites and Sunnis against the Serbs.
All of the subsequent US interventions and regime changes used experiences from
the wars in the Balkans, that is the benefit I am referring to.
I was talking about manhood. You are mixing up "manhood" and "maleness".
There are plenty of males running around, but a dearth of men.
Men recognize and honor the sanctity of other men – especially when it comes to the
women under their care and guardianship. This requires self-discipline and self-control.
The West lost much of this with the sexual revolution and thus is now dealing with
various males running around (including ours) trying to hump things like the wolves and
coyotes you speak about. And thus you need to cage the different breeds/species off from
each other.
In the past, men would recognize the role of the father and access to any of the
women under his care would have to proceed with his blessings. Men did this and knew
that it would be reciprocated when they became fathers and others came to seek the hand
of the women under their care. This is not ancient practice – there are people alive
today who saw these rules at work and the societies that these built. Whether black or
white, the suitor had to approach the father and, whether black or white, the father was
supposed to look out for his daughter's interest in making sure she wasn't going to get
into a detrimental relationship because the purpose was marriage – not sex. And society
honored that because they knew how important the family institution was.
Someone like Jack Johnson was an anomaly like Erol Flynn or any other man of fame.
What I keep hearing from you is that you don't necessarily want to roll back the
sexual revolution, you just don't want to share White women with the darkies – though I
don't hear you mentioning anything about White males colonizing darkie wombs (a couple
of my cousins are married to White men). Womb colonization only goes one way? That was
never a problem in the past because of the role of the father who could interdict a
pairing that he felt was culturally incompatible (White to Black, Italian to Irish, WASP
to Catholic, etc.) – but you don't want to bring that back because then no more fun
times for you in getting with their daughters left and right without consequences
because fathers might block you for not being serious or prepared enough or have enough
income, etc.
Eventually (I hope) some semblance of traditional manhood will arise again among the
Whites in the West (and the phrase "patriarchy" won't be considered a pejorative) and
the structures and institutions that it informs, and its arrival may resemble something
like this:
Well, Jefferson certainly had a more intellectual way to approach the
subject, eh? I got no problems with funding White liberals to help them resettle in the
third world if that'll help them finally deal with their guilt issues. I would however
also like to see a bunch of neo-cons and politicians prosecuted for destroying those
third world countries within our living memory and sent to the noose or to jail.
we'll advertise on moveon.ass and dailykos and offer trips to Liberia and Rwanda.
They can all get culturally equalized!
Parents whose daughters get Amy Biehl'd will have to pay more of course. You don't
get that kind of absolution for your guilt unless you pay for it. I mean if the church
can sell indulgences, then why can't we?!
It'll sort of be like the Christians making pilgrimages to Israel to bolster their
salvation. We'll use the 'Christians to Israel' as our fund-raising model. We can even
go straight to the churches and offer trips to Somalia. Just think, the Christians in
Minnesota won't have to settle all those Somalis in their communities, they can just
take a junket and purge their guilt in one fell swoop.
I can try to arrange for this Somali to be waiting, and we could advertise for
liberals and Christians both!
What I keep hearing from you is that you don't necessarily want to roll back the
sexual revolution, you just don't want to share White women with the darkies –
No Talha, as a Feller who enjoys the company of Fellers, I don't think that would be
in his best interest
White liberals to help them resettle in the third world if that'll help them
finally deal with their guilt issues.
Seamus and I are working on a venture and I think we're accepting partners. It's sure
to be a financial triumph, and save tones of souls and expunge unbearable guilt in the
process!
we're going to bridge the chasm between the religious right and the progressive left
and make lots and lots of sexually frustrated Somalis and guilt ridden liberals and
do-gooder Christians all manifestly happy (and
satisfied!
; ) all while we're
cashing in on the good works!
it isn't wrong to make money while you're 'doing good' in the world, is it?
I would however also like to see a bunch of neo-cons and politicians prosecuted
for destroying those third world countries within our living memory and sent to the
noose or to jail.
I've been told I harbor too much wrath for John McCain. That to wish suffering on
such a person is a sin, and I'll be worse off for it. True perhaps, but yet
I would have zero problem with sending every single neocon war pig criminal to meet
their fate at the hands of the people whom they've so diabolically wronged.
I'd send Bill O'Rielly to Fallujah
I'd send Hillary to Benghazi
I'd send Dick Cheney and W. Bush to hell itself if I could.
and all the rest of them too
they're a vile stain upon the character of America, (if anything's left of it) and an
affront to simple human decency. May their souls rot in hell for all eternity. And may
God have mercy on all of us who've watched with horror at what they have done (and why
they've done it), and on so terribly many innocent men, women and children.
It's beyond monstrous, and I only hope somehow we end this zio-madness in our time.
That is why, IMHO that the American people elected a guy like Trump, for whom there
isn't much respect as a noble paragon of virtue, but in whom we hold so much hope!
I pray he's an unlikely savior of sorts, who can leash the Fiend. If not him, who?
I would never get a deformed dog. So many the show psycho ring has ruined.
Would you bring into the world a dog that can't walk with ease and watch it suffer?
NO!
The white male is superior, he won't be wiped out, he won't disappear.
He is always under attack for the above reasons and he always rises to the occasion.
btw I am not a man, I am the natural mate of the white man.
@Seamus
Padraig
That is all true and probably sephardic groups were the main practitioners/purveyors of
slavery in the British, Dutch and Portuguese colonies. The "financiers" however were
mainly in London and Amsterdam (also partly sephardic).
Rothschild and Freshfields founders linked to slavery
Niall Ferguson, Laurence A.Tisch professor of history at Harvard and author of The
World's Banker: A History of the House of Rothschild, said the documents showed "how
pervasive slavery was in the structure of British wealth in 1830".
______________________________________
Remember also that Liverpool was probably the biggest shipping center involved in the
"three-way" trade.
@Stephen
Paul Foster
There is no "Left". The people you are referring to are those who have been manipulated
into service of the Jewish agenda.
Jews have controlled this demographic for centuries. ( Liberté, égalité, fraternité!)
Look for them wherever meritocratic Whites are being slaughtered.
"... " Hey, I'm a nationalist and a globalist ," Donald Trump recently declared, "I'm both". The only way in which the two (seemingly contradictory) positions can be reconciled is by introducing a third term, one that is absent from Trump's vocabulary: imperialism ..."
"... Trump defaults to what is common, established, and respected in the history of Washington politics. In other words, he turns to the only dominant understanding of American international politics that anyone socialized in the US would possess: "American leadership," that is, US global dominance. ..."
"... My thesis revolves around facts such as senior Goldman Sachs executives readily jumping aboard the engine of the "Trump train," after being denounced in Trump campaign advertising, which suggests that they do not see Trump's much touted nationalism as anything that needs to cause them any concern. There are now more Goldman Sachs figures in the Trump administration than in any previous administration. 1 This is perhaps the most fundamental "reversal" of Trump's course, that I argue points to the proper framework for assessing all of the other reversals that pile up with each passing day. That Trump plays to the media is a superficial sign of the deeper currents outlined below. ..."
"... A nationalism that extends itself globally, that projects its "interests" into other nations and then proclaims the right to defend those interests, is best understood as imperialism. ..."
"... As many others have argued, anthropologist Bruce Kapferer made the point that "the concept of globalization disguises the emergence to unchallenged (if momentary) global imperial dominance of the USA, whose own claim to international sovereignty reduces the sovereignty of many nation-states" (Kapferer, 2005, p. 286). ..."
"... Trump is now committed to a nationalist globalism ..."
"... That the US and Western mass media continue to lampoon Trump may thus unintentionally serve to undermine US foreign policy, since it is led by Trump. ..."
"... With his statement that he is both a nationalist and a globalist, Trump is making a major concession that contradicts a position he announced a year ago to the day: "We will no longer surrender our country or its people to the false song of globalism ". ..."
"... One of the more difficult questions involves explaining what moved Trump to abandon his promised foreign policy goals and his repeatedly stated anti-interventionist and anti-globalist principles that attracted significant support. ..."
"... state-subsidized ..."
"... shut up and keep working ..."
"... Trump may have reversed himself in terms of the opportunistic targeting of Goldman Sachs, as a symbol, but there is little point in evading the fact that he entered the electoral campaign as the owner of a large family corporation. What is more difficult to explain is why Trump, as a national capitalist, lent himself so quickly to supporting a transnational capitalist class with economic and financial interests different from his own, which was also ideologically opposed to his campaign. ..."
"... Ivanka's husband, Jared Kushner, may also be a key to the globalist push in the White House, with his reputed financial ties to George Soros . A strategist for a financial services firm recently exalted that what " stopped nationalism in the White House " was an assemblage of super-wealthy members of the transnational elite (globalists) within the administration. ..."
"
Hey, I'm a nationalist and a globalist ," Donald Trump recently declared, "I'm both". The only
way in which the two (seemingly contradictory) positions can be reconciled is by introducing a third
term, one that is absent from Trump's vocabulary: imperialism .
Trump might not be conscious of the implication of his statement (nor would he be the only one
sleepwalking toward regime change ), but that makes the explanation all the more powerful. In
the absence of both conviction that matches his campaign platform, and a well developed program for
an alternative US foreign policy that transforms the international "order" which the US underpins
-- a very tall order --
Trump defaults to what is common, established, and respected in the history of Washington
politics. In other words, he turns to the only dominant understanding of American international politics
that anyone socialized in the US would possess: "American leadership," that is, US global dominance.
The equipment to fulfill that vision is already in place and ready to produce instant results that
can then be cast as "winning," "standing strong," or as Fox News' Sean Hannity likes to inexplicably
exclaim, "America is back" (from what?). So why did Donald Trump, the so-called outsider, default
to the established course in US politics?
One question is whether Trump drifted into this position out of disorder, confusion, lack of conviction,
and a government undermined by factions. Another is whether he was "placed" in this position (by
others and/or himself), in what would then effectively amount to the corporate oligarchy's biggest
ever electoral heist. Others will instead point to Trump craving respect and adulation, and thus
playing to the media to improve his image. Some have made what I think are misleading and self-serving
arguments: that Trump's changes reflect an encounter with "reality," or represent "learning on the
job". The assumption here is that reality is somehow hard-coded with neoliberal principles. If learning
on the job meant learning to continue the imperial presidency, then they might have a point, even
if it's not the one they wanted to make.
Other questions to ask include (in no particular order of importance):
In which ways does nationalist globalism relate to imperialism?
How does Trump's newfound globalism connect to issues of conflict of interest and nepotism?
What role does class play in charting Trump's actual domestic and foreign policy directions?
Are the ostensible changes traceable to Trump's preexisting and underlying ambitions and interests,
or were the changes forced on him by circumstance?
Is this a story about the workings of the "deep state"?
Is Trump's presidency good news, after all, for extending the life of global liberal capitalism?
How might Trump's presidency end up strengthening the hands of anti-imperialists?
This article (long as it is, it has been significantly abridged), begins by examining "nationalist
globalism". I then focus on changes to Trump's stated positions seen from a domestic angle, and in
particular on his stances regarding Obama and the Clintons, his declared interest in turning the
Republican party into a "workers' party" while in fact returning it to the hold of Wall Street, and
thus I look at the ties between his cabinet, Goldman Sachs, and Wall Street broadly --
this is also where we discuss the nature of the "oligarchic corporate imperial state". After that,
we see how this mutated policy extends internationally, from Cuba to Russia, Syria, North Korea,
NAFTA, NATO, and WikiLeaks. I end the essay by discussing whether we can still proclaim the "end
of liberalism" (short answer: yes), and consider how Trump's presidency could aid the cause of anti-imperialism.
I considered some of the prospects of a Trump presidency with respect to US imperialism in an
equally lengthy article last October. In "
Donald Trump and Empire: An Assessment " I got some things right, and some things wrong, as is
true of everyone else. I asked: "how can Donald Trump make the decline in US global power 'beautiful,'
and how can he turn withdrawal into 'greatness'?". This question is now null and void. I also wrote
that, "on foreign policy, globalization, and military intervention, Donald Trump is a transitional
figure" -- that might hold some validity, but not in any straightforward sense: he may be inadvertently
setting the conditions for a truly transitional figure yet to come (but that could be true of any
representative of the power elite).
I was mistaken however in suggesting that, "Trump would be leading the equivalent of a perestroika
for US empire". I also argued that what Trump was offering was, "not so much radical change as an
intermediate passage, and a way of managing imperial decline" -- from where we now stand, the
last thing that seems to be on Trump's mind is anything remotely to do with "managing decline". Where
the analysis was on slightly less thin ice was when I said that Trump appeared to be, "not much of
one thing, not much of another, and somewhere in between . neither an anti-imperialist nor pro-imperialist,
nor even an absolute non-imperialist" -- but that is perhaps because, inside ambiguity, one
can hide anything. I also pointed out that,
"Nowhere, as far as I have seen, does Donald Trump ever proclaim himself an 'anti-imperialist'.
Apart from using the word 'Empire' for one of his fragrances, there is little evidence of the
word in his writings and speeches. Likewise, he never identifies himself as 'pro-imperialist'
either. Donald Trump certainly does advocate for American power, and 'American strength,' and
even calls himself a militarist on some occasions -- but with more caveats than his political
adversaries".
The above still largely holds, I think. It is also still truer than ever that "there are multiple
competing editions of Donald Trump" -- and one can find support for almost any argument about
Trump's stated intentions, by using Trump's own past words. Where I did point out that Trump had
taken decisively pro-imperialist positions in the past (regardless of his choice of words) was on
Iraq and its oil, on Libya, and on Cuba, Mexico, and Venezuela.
Matters have now become considerably simplified. We no longer need to debate where Trump stands
and what he might do once he became president. Now we know what , even if we still debate
why . However, understanding why might tell us something about what comes
next.
My thesis revolves around facts such as senior Goldman Sachs executives readily jumping aboard
the engine of the "Trump train," after being denounced in Trump campaign advertising, which suggests
that they do not see Trump's much touted nationalism as anything that needs to cause them any concern.
There are now more Goldman Sachs figures in the Trump administration than in any previous administration.
1 This is perhaps the most fundamental "reversal" of Trump's course, that I argue points
to the proper framework for assessing all of the other reversals that pile up with each passing day.
That Trump plays to the media is a superficial sign of the deeper currents outlined below.
What is Nationalist Globalism?
A nationalism that extends itself globally, that projects its "interests" into other nations
and then proclaims the right to defend those interests, is best understood as imperialism. Nationalism
and globalization are not striking contradictions, when referring to the ideology of an imperial
state that maximizes its power over globalization processes in order to gain at the expense of other
states. Besides the observation that what we know of as globalization was largely the product of
state action (legislation, economic incentives, building the infrastructures of global commerce and
communications, the creation of multilateral organizations, and so on), one state in particular can
claim a leading role in globalization. Barack Obama could thus declare in 2010, "no nation should
be better positioned to lead in an era of globalization than America -- the Nation that helped
bring globalization about" (quoted in Forte, 2015, p. 10). As many others have argued, anthropologist
Bruce Kapferer made the point that "the concept of globalization disguises the emergence to unchallenged
(if momentary) global imperial dominance of the USA, whose own claim to international sovereignty
reduces the sovereignty of many nation-states" (Kapferer, 2005, p. 286).
... ... ...
Trump is now committed to a nationalist globalism -- or imperialism --
one that is all too familiar and has been described by anthropologist Neil Smith (2005) as "Americanism".
We will need to keep analyzing Trump's policies as the months and years pass, but right now
we have an outline of the kinds of imperialism that Trump upholds. One is an economic imperialism
that goes back to the first premises of the US
"new empire" of the late 1800s: belligerently opening up foreign markets in order to absorb US
overproduction. So far, Trump is using political and economic means to achieve that goal --
as in trying to intimidate Canada into opening up its dairy market to an even greater number of US
imports, while punishing it for exporting cheap softwood lumber to the US. However, he is apparently
willing to trade economic goals for military ones, as in the case of dropping any antagonism toward
China about trade issues, in return for China's promise to somehow alter North Korea's foreign policy,
just as the US escalates military maneuvers with a possible military strike actively being considered.
(Confusingly, he reverses this pattern with South Korea, where military measures were then
clouded
by talk of
revising a trade agreement and extracting payment for US missile defense.)
Added to the corporate capitalist imperialism, and military imperialism , Trump is also toying
with liberal-humanitarian imperialism in the case of Syria. However -- and this is very important
-- what he lacks here is a "soft power" platform of any size or credibility. The ability of
Trump to preside over an effective program of cultural imperialism is diminished to the point of
zero, and is likely far less than even zero. That the US and Western mass media continue to lampoon
Trump may thus unintentionally serve to undermine US foreign policy, since it is led by Trump.
With his statement that he is both a nationalist and a globalist, Trump is making a major
concession that contradicts a position he announced a year ago to the day: "We will no longer surrender
our country or its people to
the false song of globalism ". A year later he effectively declared himself an adherent
to nationalism, plus something false. His statement also marks the new release of yet another edition
of Trump, such that we can set up extensive debates between various versions of Trump as published
in past books, speeches, and interviews. Just on the question of Syria alone, one could produce a
loud debate between
anti-interventionist
Trump of years past and pro-interventionist Trump of today. Explaining this apparent bifurcation,
and attempting to read it into his past statements on US regime change, is a complicated matter,
and those who make light of it with statements of having known with certainty that what we have today
would be the inevitable result, are being disingenuous. 2
The only promise made by Trump that still rings true is that of his "unpredictability". Being
unpredictable and flexible might be virtues in some situations, but when it comes to charting a course,
standing by a campaign platform, and committing oneself to a
contract with voters, such qualities are synonymous with being capricious, unreliable, unsteady,
opportunistic, and even treacherous. That would also hold true in business, and especially when living
up to commitments one makes in deals. That Trump tries to lighten the nature of his apparent deficit
of principles and conviction -- that he essentially admits he will not permit himself to be
fooled by his own words -- only aggravates the problem. A man with such little political accountability
to himself, can hardly be expected to be accountable to everyone else. For his independent-minded
supporters, this will not look like a problem of having a two-sided coin; rather, it's a problem
of having no coin at all if there is no value.
Renewing the Corporate Oligarchic State after November 8, 2016
Among those few who
predicted Trump's victory , few or none predicted that Trump would then move on to defeating
Trump. Some partisans have come up with slogans like "Love Trumps Hate," but no one to my knowledge
has ever exclaimed, "Trump Trumps Trump" -- thankfully. A recent list of the
monumental
ruin to which standard, corporate-fueled and media-driven machine politics fell thanks to the
Trump campaign, provides only an incomplete story of 2016. Now we have to rewrite even the story
of 2016. While a candidate could win a presidential campaign, as an "outsider," even as he was reviled
by his own party elite, demonized by the mass media, shunned by the mass of corporate donors, and
so forth, it also means that the status quo can win on the cheap. The establishment won, and all
without the usual investments, and not so much as a single compliment to the winning candidate who
would uphold their order -- at little or no cost to them. The next US political candidate to
campaign on being an "outsider" will face a greater challenge in being taken seriously; by the same
token, the dominant elites may disarm themselves, thinking the next outsider will be easy to co-opt
or browbeat into submission.
One of the more difficult questions involves explaining what moved Trump to abandon his promised
foreign policy goals and his repeatedly stated anti-interventionist and anti-globalist principles
that attracted significant support. For example, where trade is concerned, Trump has consistently
opposed free trade deals for nearly three decades. He would say that he believed in free trade, but
only if it was fair, and he did not believe any of the existing free trade deals were fair. Yet here
too he would alter course -- what was unfair was something he could generally tolerate for
now. That was not to be predicted, because there was no evidentiary basis for predicting it.
... ... ...
The Workers' Party (brought to you by Carl's Jr.)
Turning to the working class, and Trump's talk of transforming the Republican party into "
the party of the American worker " -- a claim he made both
before
and
after the election -- here two significant acts stand out, and they deserve a longer essay
in their own right. Trump's first choice for Secretary of Labor was none other than
Andrew Puzder , who at
the time was the chief executive officer of CKE Restaurants, which owns Hardee's and Carl's Jr. Puzder
was notoriously anti-union, and his opposition to raising the minimum wage, his
cheating CKE employees of their wages, support for automation, and employment of an undocumented
domestic servant while not paying taxes for her services, hardly represented the qualities of a leader
of some new workers' movement. This is the person Trump chose to supposedly enforce labour regulations.
Later, after Puzder withdrew himself from the nomination, Trump replaced him with
Alex Acosta , dean of the Florida International Law School, who also served on the National Labor
Relations Board and received the support of AFL-CIO leader Richard Trumka. This belated correction
-- imposed by circumstances beyond Trump's control -- was among the reasons some still
claim that
Trump should be taken seriously on wanting to make the GOP into the workers' party. I would prefer
to remind the reader about Trump's actual priorities, and consider the person he chose as his
number one preference.
That there is no accident in Trump's choices has a lot to do with his class prejudices and his
class ambitions. His choice of cabinet members, with a preference for billionaires (or generals),
shows who he tends to trust and respect. Some historians have said that Trump's cabinet is
the richest in US history , with a combined worth estimated as ranging from
$11 billion to
$14 billion
. One can attempt to remodel Trump as a "blue collar billionaire," but it seems futile. He would
tell his supporters on the campaign trail that "we need the rich" (a statement which can be ambiguous
in its implications) and "no poor man ever gave you a job" (which is unambiguous). The way his decision-making
apparatus has been structured also reveals Trump's interests: billionaires in actual positions of
power in his cabinet, but only
consultations with union officials .
When it comes to trade unions, Trump's first weeks since the election reinforce this tendency
toward a top-down, patronizing approach. On the one hand, he in fact won the
support of many key unions , primarily private-sector unions in construction and trades, and
secondarily among autoworkers, machinists, and steelworkers. On the other hand, one of Trump's earliest
skirmishes since he was elected was with
Chuck Jones , president of the United Steelworkers local 1999, over Trump's inflated claims about
saving jobs at the Carrier plant in Indiana that was to shut down as the company relocated to Mexico.
That planned move and the layoffs it entailed played an important part in the 2016 election, underscoring
both Trump's and Sanders' arguments against NAFTA. It seems that Trump, at most, scored half
of a victory in persuading Carrier to retain some jobs in Indiana, while still moving a substantial
portion to Mexico, only now with the blessing of millions of dollars in tax credits. The irony is
that Carrier is now performing a state-subsidized transfer of jobs to Mexico. Trump claimed
Carrier would keep 1,100 jobs in place -- but Jones argued that the number included 350 jobs
that were never scheduled to leave (yet 550 other union members would still lose their jobs), adding
that Trump completely ignored the fact that Carrier's parent company, United Technologies, still
planned to completely shut down and transfer 700 factory jobs from Huntington, Indiana, to Monterrey,
Mexico. Some of
Jones' statements to the press were very sharp. In response, Trump proceeded to lambast Jones
in Twitter, with a couple of apparently
vindictive and inflamed smears .
First, Trump appears to blame workers themselves for the loss of their own jobs, as if they were
the owners of capital, or had a direct role in corporate decision-making, or were to blame for NAFTA's
existence. It's the kind of spontaneous anti-worker outburst that demonstrates where Trump's allegiance
ultimately rests. The second message repeats the claim that workers are the ones responsible for
keeping their jobs in place, thus more victim blaming, while adding a chilling new twist: shut
up and keep working , plus unions should have less money (and thus less power). Jones is likely
right in thinking that if Trump had
blamed the loss of the jobs on the union and its workers during the campaign, he would have lost
some votes. Jones is likely also correct when he stated about Trump that, "I'm not naive enough to
think he's going to be a friend to
the working class people". 3
None of this can take away the fact that Trump's victory was thanks primarily to working-class
voters, especially women and members of ethnic minorities among them. Though the numbers are not
definitive, the best knowledge we have is that
54.4% of Trump's voters were women and minorities , and 66% of whites without a college degree,
who are typically working class, also supported Trump.
The Wall Street Party (brought to you by Goldman Sachs)
As widely recognized by many others, one of the most glaring shifts in Trump's positioning concerns
Goldman Sachs. In his last, and very memorable television advertisement ending his electoral campaign,
Trump took direct aim at Goldman Sachs (featuring its president and corporate logo), the New
York Stock Exchange, and George Soros, all as representatives of a corrupt global power structure
that has robbed millions of Americans of their livelihoods. After the election, Trump nominated at
least five former Goldman Sachs executives to high-level positions in his cabinet -- though
not necessarily because of their varied associations with Goldman Sachs.
Steve Bannon , Trump's Chief Strategist, is a millionaire and was a former vice president of
Goldman Sachs until he left in 1990, and is perhaps the one pick that was not aligned with Goldman
Sachs' support for globalization.
Steven Mnuchin , a former senior partner at Goldman Sachs, and a hedge fund manager, was selected
by Trump to be the Secretary of the Treasury.
Gary Cohn , former president of Goldman Sachs, was chosen by Trump to head the National Economic
Council.
Dina Habib Powell , President Trump's senior counselor for economic initiatives, was recently
appointed as a deputy national security adviser for strategy -- Powell works closely with Jared
Kushner, and was recently the president of the Goldman Sachs Foundation.
Jay Clayton , who did not work at Goldman Sachs, was a partner at the Manhattan law firm of Sullivan
& Cromwell, 4 which represents Goldman Sachs, and his wife Gretchen works for Goldman
Sachs. Others have also reported that Trump's reversals are due to the sway of the
"Wall Street wing" of the White House.
As another writer noted, "
not since the Eisenhower administration have so many business executives landed top government jobs
, making Trump's Cabinet the wealthiest in American history". (Also, as mentioned in Note #1 below,
this chart shows some of the key ties that dominated the Eisenhower administration .) The list
of corporate executives in Trump's cabinet exceeds those mentioned above. Rex Tillerson, now Secretary
of State, was the CEO of Exxon. Ross Wilbur, a billionaire investor, is the Commerce Secretary. Of
course, we must also include the presence of the Trump corporation itself at the apex of the administration.
As some observed, Trump's choices send "the most powerful signal yet that Mr. Trump plans to emphasize
policies friendly to Wall Street, like tax cuts and a relaxation of regulation .that approach has
been
cheered by investors ". For weeks on end the stock market boomed, reaching new records, as if
celebrating a major victory. The fact that stock markets reacted so positively, and so quickly, to
Trump assuming the presidency almost suggests something akin to a coup, with some having had the
benefit of advance, inside knowledge. These features bring to mind Kapferer's discussion of the "
corporate oligarchic imperial state ":
"Current configurations of global, imperial and state power relate to formations of oligarchic
control. A major feature of this is the command of political organizations and institutions by
close-knit social groups (families or familial dynasties, groups of kin, closed associations or
tightly controlled interlinked networks of persons) for the purpose of the relatively exclusive
control of economic resources and their distribution". (Kapferer, 2005, p. 285)
Trump may have reversed himself in terms of the opportunistic targeting of Goldman Sachs,
as a symbol, but there is little point in evading the fact that he entered the electoral campaign
as the owner of a large family corporation. What is more difficult to explain is why Trump, as a
national capitalist, lent himself so quickly to supporting a transnational capitalist class with
economic and financial interests different from his own, which was also ideologically opposed to
his campaign. I see many taking matters for granted, by resorting to easy assertions that "they
are all the one percent," or "they are all oligarchs". That is broadly accurate, but also facile,
because such commentary focuses (knowingly or not) on capital, in broad terms, and not on the capitalist
class which is divided into competing factions. The elite political class of experts, managers, technocrats
and legislators, certainly remains more united than ever against Trump since his victory --
but the capitalist class is seeing some remarkable reconciliation thanks to Trump (at least for now).
So why did Trump choose to perform this service?
One hypothesis we should consider is that Trump, ever so concerned about his brand, preoccupied
with the futures of his children and grandchildren, and the future of his family's corporate empire
-- matters that are first and foremost for Trump -- wants to make a transition away from
a position as a national capitalist in order to enter the transnational capitalist
class, where the real global power lies. 5 It was a gamble, but we can surmise that Trump
(consciously or not) sees the presidency of the most powerful state of the world -- power that
was conceivably (and now actually) within his reach -- as being also the most powerful way
to boost the fortunes of the Trump brand. (Remember, this is a man who took the time to hold a press
conference during the campaign just to defend Trump-branded products in what resembled an
infomercial , and as president took to Twitter to shame chain stores for blocking sales of Ivanka
Trump's branded product lines.)
With the inevitable global networking that a presidency affords, conducted within the surroundings
of the Trump resort at
Mar-a-Lago
, Trump seems to be looking at the global expansion of his corporate interests. He had already started
to dip his toe in the pool of transnational capitalism by building hotels in a dozen different countries
(Canada, the UK, the UAE, Turkey, India, Indonesia, Philippines, Panama, the Dominican Republic,
Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina). Arguably the Miss Universe pageant also fits within the circuit of transnational
capitalism. The neo-regal style of Trump's lifestyle and his hotels, aided like a royal patriarch
by the ambassadorial service of his daughter Ivanka, may all be part of an expansionist, globalist
sales pitch of the Trump empire and the family that leads it.
Ivanka's husband, Jared Kushner, may also be a key to the globalist push in the White
House, with his
reputed financial ties to George Soros . A strategist for a financial services firm recently
exalted that what "
stopped nationalism in the White House " was an assemblage of super-wealthy members of the transnational
elite (globalists) within the administration.
Trump's pleasure at the remarkable absence of legal constraints on the presidency regarding nepotism
and conflict of interest, does not mean that conflict of interest and nepotism do not mark his presidency,
according to the commonly understood meanings of these terms. Germany's foreign minister, Sigmar
Gabriel, thus really could not be countered when he recently exclaimed, "it always bothers me when
members of a family, who have never been elected, show up suddenly as official state representatives
and are treated almost as if they were members of
a royal family ". Trump will now essentially rent out the US military in order to extract tribute
to advance his quasi-monarchic ambitions.
Margnistsky was an accountant. He never has been a laywer.
Notable quotes:
"... "Foreign non-governmental pro-democracy groups" means absolutely different things than it is stated. We must read "foreign" as "American", "non-governmental" as "uncontroled by the Russian government, but sponsored by the US government", and "pro-democracy" as "pro-US". ..."
"... There is nothing democratic in these groups. Everything they say is a lie. They do not want at all democracy for Russians. Because if there were democracy in Russia, then Browder and other foreign carpetbaggers were shot dead by popular vote. Or at least they could never come to Russia and rob it as they have been doing. And they all know it. They do not want freedom and human right for Russians. By "freedom" these groups understand the freedom for THEM and THEIR friends, and by "human right" they understand the rights for THEM and THEIR friends. ..."
"... I've been reading the Western press for many years now, and when they write about Russia or the above-mentioned holy things, I constantly read only less than a dozen of names. Namely: Politkovskaya, Litvinenko, Magnitsky, Khodorkovsky and a couple of others. Everything that concerns the human rights violations in Russia is just about that privileged dozen of people. Nothing else bad happens in Russia with anybody else. Believe me if all the problems with human rights in Russia were only with that dozen of people I would be really happy. ..."
"... The yankee imperium has evolved into the inverted totalitarianism structure. The mainstream press and those inside the beltway are no more free agents than politburo members were during the Soviet era. Why would Nekrasov, prior to this film a known enemy of the Russian state, change his views unless he was an honourable man convinced by the evidence? The treatment of this film reveals the true nature of the contemporary yankee power structure. ..."
"... The latest neocon line is to use Brexit as an excuse to (a) blame Putin even more (b) expand NATO. Today's Washington Post had an editorial demanding that NATO be strengthened to ward off the enhanced Russian threat now that Britain will be leaving the EU. ..."
"... Here is the perfect moment to remember that it was antisemitism to question the western narrative on Iran nuclear program. David Brooks will conform if his mind is still sharp enough that he once suggested attacking George Bush war of 2003 was a also antisemitic . ..."
"... Dr. Giraldi, do you know there is a Jewish organization in UK, which gives "Sergei Magnitsky Human Rights Awards"? Last year, it awarded the honor on Israel-First Rep. Jim McGovern. Jim McGovern, a Democrat who co-chairs the influential 'Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission' – named after Jewish Rep. Tom Lantos (d. 2008). ..."
"... A famous quote springs to mind: "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American people believe is false." CIA director William Casey (CIA director, 1981-1987) ..."
"... According to Israel Shamir, both Browder himself and the Jewish community consider him to be Jewish. http://www.unz.com/ishamir/the-good-fortune-of-mr-browder/ ..."
"... Putin said 'enough!' And has stopped them in Syria (for now) when everyone else was wringing their hands, Putin showed them all how a man with integrity must act, when faced with a thug and a bully. You stand up to them. Or you cower, and place your fate in their hands, as Gadhafi had done. ..."
"... And from that you all have a problem. You get information about Russia either from the Washington-centric quasi-independent ("independent" in the American political doublespeak always means independent from everyone but Washington) outlets, like NYT, WP, Fox, CNN, you name it, and their view of Russia for the past 90 years is quite predictable if not annoying, and I understand why you do not believe them and interpret everything they say in the opposite way, so you have formed a habit that when they say something is black you understand it as something is white. ..."
"... On the other hand you have the Kremlin propaganda state machine like RT who obviously do the same thing as the Washington propaganda machine, but in the opposite direction; or Russophilic individuals (usually emigres with nostalgia), lone wolf voices like the Saker or Karlin, but whose voice anyway is irrelevant and illusional because, as I've said, they are outsiders and know little about the actual Russian life, but they rather might be characterized as positive interpreters of open sources (and neither the sources nor their interpretations ought to be true). ..."
"... Also we have local "opposition" outlets either in Russian like the radio station "Ekho Moskvy", the TV station "Dozhd", "Novaya Gazeta" and so on, or in English like "The Moscow Times", but I do not even take them seriously, I consider them as virtually subsidiaries of the Western MSM (though there is one irony that furiously anti-government "Ekho Moskvy" is owned by Gazprom). ..."
"... What I wanted to say, that even if many who are not hopelessly brainwashed understand that the demonizing of Russia is a lie, it does not make the opposite view automatically right, and your over-positive opinion is generally illusional. I tried to bring you around, but seemed to fail, though to change anybody's opinion was not my goal, I was just trying to say my opinion, be it right or wrong. ..."
"... It works in the opposite direction as well. When people have not enough means, they have no much time left to think about and to follow good moral, they are simply surviving as they can, often doing very ugly things. In most cases a society in strong need ends up in a chaos as we can see it in Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. ..."
"... And then out of the blue came Putin, who wrested Russia away from the Fiend, and gave her hope, (and an ascendant middle class and pride in Russia's heritage). For the Fiend, this was an abomination, and ironically enough; Putin was now a new Hitler – especially when he jailed on of their own (and for hard labor -- It was another Holocaust!). But as long as he played ball with the West by letting most of the Jewish oligarchs keep their ill-gotten billions, and went along with atrocities like the savage rape of Iraq, the oligarchs were willing to ignore what Putin had done to their designs and fun up to a degree. ..."
"... I would say that Putin certainly does care about Iran. It doesn't take a genius to know which nations have been declared evil and targeted by the US, they are frequently named by traitorous whores like Hillary, Obuma, Biden etc, along with the treacherous neo-cons who bear responsibility for fomenting wars in the ME. ..."
"... Putin is smart enough to know that if any nation sits back and waits its turn to be attacked it will surely be destroyed. He went out on a limb to arrest the destruction of Syria and it has paid off. He appears to have played his cards remarkably well to date. I can't imagine that the stratospheric level of approval and support that he receives in Russia is fictional. ..."
"... I would believe RT News before I would the BBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, DW, Fox and all the other discredited western "news" outlets. ..."
"... To like/dislike Putin is not a political stance but rather a personal opinion. But it does not explain nor imply any other view. To be precise, several persons can dislike Putin, but one may be a pro-Western ultra-liberal, another a Stalinist, other a National-Bolshevik, other a Christian Monarchist, other a racist Nazi, other a pro-Ukrainian Nazi, and so on. It is difficult to list them all. And they all may have totally different views on many subjects, but just one thing in common, as you said, a dislike to Putin. ..."
"... Russia is on the fall . The crisis of the past two years has just nullified any achievements of the previous 2004-2014 decade. Russia has practically returned to its starting position. And nothing says about its rise, everything says the contrary . Russians have entered a difficult time. They will be remembering 2000-2014 with bitter nostalgia. ..."
"... Actually, for the past 25 years Russia is becoming "a multi-culture, failing state, with grinding poverty where the different factions of the population hate each other while a corrupt and incompetent elite rules over them" . I will add that that elite is in the West in their minds, and they have to be physically located in Russia just for the sake of "earning" money. ..."
The documentary began with the full participation of American born UK citizen William Browder,
who virtually served as narrator for the first section that portrayed the widely accepted story
on Magnitsky. Browder portrays himself as a human rights campaigner dedicated to promoting the
legacy of Sergei Magnitsky, but he is inevitably much more complicated than that. The grandson
of Earl Browder the former General Secretary of the American Communist Party,
William Browder studied
economics at the University of Chicago, and obtained an MBA from Stanford.
From the beginning, Browder concentrated on Eastern Europe, which was beginning to open up
to the west. In 1989 he took a position at highly respected Boston Consulting Group dealing with
reviving failing Polish socialist enterprises. He then worked as an Eastern Europe analyst for
Robert Maxwell, the unsavory British press magnate and Mossad spy, before joining the Russia team
at Wall Street's Salomon Brothers in 1992.
He left Salomons in 1996 and partnered with the controversial Edmond Safra, the Lebanese-Brazilian-Jewish
banker who died in a mysterious fire in 1999, to set up Hermitage Capital Management Fund. Hermitage
is registered in tax havens Guernsey and the Cayman Islands. It is a hedge fund that was focused
on "investing" in Russia, taking advantage initially of the
loans-for-shares
scheme under Boris Yeltsin, and then continuing to profit greatly during the early years of Vladimir
Putin's ascendancy. By 2005 Hermitage was the largest foreign investor in Russia.
Browder had renounced his U.S. citizenship in 1997 and became a British citizen apparently
to avoid American taxes, which are levied on worldwide income. In
his bookRed Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder and One Man's Fight for Justice
he depicts himself as an honest and honorable Western businessman attempting to function in a
corrupt Russian business world. That may or may not be true, but the loans-for-shares scheme that
made him his initial fortune has been correctly characterized as the epitome of corruption, an
arrangement whereby foreign investors worked with local oligarchs to strip the former Soviet economy
of its assets paying pennies on each dollar of value. Along the way, Browder
was reportedly involved in making false representations on official documents and bribery.
As a consequence of what came to be known as the Magnitsky scandal, Browder was eventually
charged by the Russian authorities for fraud and tax evasion. He was banned from re-entering Russia
in 2005, even before Magnitsky died, and began to withdraw his assets from the country. Three
companies controlled by Hermitage were eventually seized by the authorities, though it is not
clear if any assets remained in Russia. Browder himself was convicted of tax evasion in absentia
in 2013 and sentenced to nine years in prison.
Browder has assiduously, and mostly successfully,
made his case that he and Magnitsky have been the victims of Russian corruption both during
and since that time, though there have been
skeptics regarding many details of his personal narrative. He has been able to sell his tale
to leading American politicians like Senators John McCain, Ben Cardin and ex-Senator Joe Lieberman,
always receptive when criticizing Russia, as well as to a number of European parliamentarians
and media outlets. But there is, inevitably, another side to the story, something quite different,
which Andrei Nekrasov presents to the viewer.
Nekrasov has discovered what he believes to be holes in the narrative that has been carefully
constructed and nurtured by Browder. He provides documents and also an interview with Magnitsky's
mother maintaining that there is no clear evidence that he was beaten or tortured and that he
died instead due to the failure to provide him with medicine while in prison or treatment shortly
after he had a heart attack. A
subsequent investigation
ordered by then Russian President Dimitri Medvedev in 2011 confirmed that Magnitsky had not received
medical treatment, contributing to this death, but could not confirm that he had been beaten even
though there was suspicion that that might have been the case.
Nekrasov also claims that much of the case against the Russian authorities is derived from
English language translations of relevant documents provided by Browder himself. The actual documents
sometimes say something quite different. Magnitsky is referred to as an accountant, not a lawyer,
which would make sense as a document of his deposition is apparently part of a criminal investigation
of possible tax fraud, meaning that he was no whistleblower and was instead a suspected criminal.
Other discrepancies cited by Nekrasov include documents demonstrating that Magnitsky did not
file any complaint about police and other government officials who were subsequently cited by
Browder as participants in the plot, that the documents allegedly stolen from Magnitsky to enable
the plotters to transfer possession of three Hermitage controlled companies were irrelevant to
how the companies eventually were transferred and that someone else employed by Hermitage other
than Magnitsky actually initiated investigation of the fraud.
In conclusion, Nekrasov believes there was indeed a huge fraud related to Russian taxes but
that it was not carried out by corrupt officials. Instead, it was deliberately ordered and engineered
by Browder with Magnitsky, the accountant, personally developing and implementing the scheme used
to carry out the deception.
To be sure, Browder and his international legal team have presented documents in the case that
contradict much of what Nekrasov has presented in his film. But in my experience as an intelligence
officer I have learned that documents are easily forged, altered, or destroyed so considerable
care must be exercised in discovering the provenance and authenticity of the evidence being provided.
It is not clear that that has been the case. It might be that Browder and Magnitsky have been
the victims of a corrupt and venal state, but it just might be the other way around. In my experience
perceived wisdom on any given subject usually turns out to be incorrect.
Given the adversarial positions staked out, either Browder or Nekrasov is essentially right,
though one should not rule out a combination of greater or lesser malfeasance coming from both
sides. But certainly Browder should be confronted more intensively on the nature of his business
activities while in Russia and not given a free pass because he is saying things about Russia
and Putin that fit neatly into a Washington establishment profile. As soon as folks named McCain,
Cardin and Lieberman jump on a cause it should be time to step back a bit and reflect on what
the consequences of proposed action might be.
One should ask why anyone who has a great deal to gain by having a certain narrative accepted
should be completely and unquestionably trusted, the venerable Cui bono? standard. And
then there is a certain evasiveness on the part of Browder. The film shows him huffing and puffing
to explain himself at times and he has
avoided being served with subpoenas on allegations connected to the Magnitsky fraud that are
making their way through American courts. In one case he can be seen on YouTube
running away from a
server, somewhat unusual behavior if he has nothing to hide.
A number of Congressmen and staffers were invited to the showing of the Nekrasov
Magnitsky was a sleazy accountant, not a lawyer and among his activities one was about getting
tax breaks for Browder, using fictitious hiring of disabled people to get a tax break.
Browder was one of the very bold and very suspicious "gold-diggers" in xUSSR space, who
tried to participate in the "economic rape of Russia".
During this time of gangster capitalism in Russia under drunk Yeltsin such a person, especially
a foreign one, could easily get a six grams of led if he stepped on some oligarchs foot, but
this did not stopped him. He was really reckless. I wonder why. Who protected him in Russia?
Here is pretty interesting and educational reading
"Ties with Russia run deep in his family; his grandfather was General Secretary of the US
Communist Party and, according to documents released in 1995, worked for the NKVD, running
a spy ring. Bill himself specialized in Eastern European markets, and when he felt the time
was right, he founded Hermitage Capital Management in 1996, along with the main investor, Edmond
Safra."
His real connection and why he renounced US citizenship and is hiding in UK suggest that
some influential British structures were behind his activities.
In a way Browder was very interested in Magnitsky death as dead Magnitsky was much more
useful for him that alive. Magnitsky knew way too much about Brower activities in Russia and
already started talking.
It's a pity that doublespeak and doublethink rule the world. Every time you read something
you now must decipher.
"Foreign non-governmental pro-democracy groups" means absolutely different things than
it is stated. We must read "foreign" as "American", "non-governmental" as "uncontroled by the
Russian government, but sponsored by the US government", and "pro-democracy" as "pro-US".
There is nothing democratic in these groups. Everything they say is a lie. They do not
want at all democracy for Russians. Because if there were democracy in Russia, then Browder
and other foreign carpetbaggers were shot dead by popular vote. Or at least they could never
come to Russia and rob it as they have been doing. And they all know it. They do not want freedom
and human right for Russians. By "freedom" these groups understand the freedom for THEM and
THEIR friends, and by "human right" they understand the rights for THEM and THEIR friends.
But the real problem is the Russian government do not want good for Russians as well. This
entire conflict is between the native colonial administration and the foreign carpetbaggers.
And the main point is who'll get the cash, either Browder and his friends or some unknown Russian
oligarchs and corrupt officials. But both the results are bad for Russians.
the Short Version: Putin's Russia is a large White pebble in the open-borders Judeo-globalist
shoe. The Zionists/neo-conz/cucks will do anything – even upbrink to a nuclear WW III – to
destroy Nationalist Russia
And something else about democracy, freedom, human rights and so on hypocritical demagogy
of the West.
I've been reading the Western press for many years now, and when they write about Russia
or the above-mentioned holy things, I constantly read only less than a dozen of names. Namely:
Politkovskaya, Litvinenko, Magnitsky, Khodorkovsky and a couple of others. Everything that
concerns the human rights violations in Russia is just about that privileged dozen of people.
Nothing else bad happens in Russia with anybody else. Believe me if all the problems with human
rights in Russia were only with that dozen of people I would be really happy.
But the fact is that everyday for the last 25 years thousands of common Russians are faced
with the violations of their rights. But nobody in the West worry about them, nobody mention
them, they simply do not exist for the West. The only people that exist are those who are directly
or indirectly connected with the Western establishment. That is the Western establishment and
their tame press are concerned only about their personal interests.
And when another Western (or Russian) journalist or human rights "activist", while writing
another article about Russia, mention again and again just only that half a dozen of the names,
I just cannot help but despise those hypocrites.
The yankee imperium has evolved into the inverted totalitarianism structure. The mainstream
press and those inside the beltway are no more free agents than politburo members were during
the Soviet era. Why would Nekrasov, prior to this film a known enemy of the Russian state,
change his views unless he was an honourable man convinced by the evidence? The treatment of
this film reveals the true nature of the contemporary yankee power structure.
Sergei Magnitsky like the US and EU was a Zionist clown whose strings were held by the Organized
Jewry.
In November 2015, in an interview with UK's No.1 Israeli propaganda media outlet, 'Jewish
Chronicle', William Browder, the American-born Jewish tycoon who describes himself as Putin's
"number one enemy" in his book: Red Notice, claimed that though Putin had met Netanyahu, Avigdor
Lieberman, and local Jewish leaders; supports Israel and donated $1 million to Moscow's Holocaust
Museum – his heart is filled with hatred towards Jews. Why? Because he tortured and killed
Magnitsky and supports Iran's ally Assad.
Madeleine Albright, who found her Jewish family roots while holding post of US secretary
of state, in a recent interview she gave to Austrian newspaper DiePress.com called Russian
president Vladimir Putin "a smart but a truly evil man." She claimed that Putin is trying his
best to destroy European Union and NATO, two of Israel's allies.
"He is smart but truly an evil man. An officer of KGB, who wants to exercise power and believes
that every body has come together to conspire against Russia. This is not true. Putin is playing
bad cards well, for the time being at least. I believe his goal is to undermine and split EU.
He want NATO to disappear from his sphere of influence," She said.
Thanks. The latest neocon line is to use Brexit as an excuse to (a) blame Putin even
more (b) expand NATO. Today's Washington Post had an editorial demanding that NATO be strengthened
to ward off the enhanced Russian threat now that Britain will be leaving the EU.
You omit taking notice of the author's shrewd observation that there might still be available
some large amount of money that even Nekrasov might find irresistable as way to quickly achieved
financial independence. Even if he is basically an honest man he might be able to rationalise
selling out if he knows that Browder is, anyway, a crook.
But the real problem is the Russian government do not want good for Russians as well.
in your opinion, is the Putin government just as corrupt as the Zio-West? From here in the
(dying and looted) West, it looks like Russia's middle class is ascendant, while ours is being
systematically murdered off
Personally, for me, what it feels like is that the worst elements in the population that
were in Russia (and Eastern Europe) during the 20th century have now emigrated over to the
West. And that just as Russia and Eastern Europe suffered unimaginable horrors during the last
century, under cruel and sadistic Bolsheviks (and the Cheka and NKVD), they are now over here,
fomenting genocide and looting the place blind.
It's as if when Putin came to power, the Fiend slithered over the Berlin wall into the West,
where it now molders in the assorted banking houses and think tanks plotting its next iniquitous
atrocity, whether financial or military or social/cultural.
That's how it seems to me anyways.
(thank you PG for your superlative and informative articles. They're very much appreciated)
I guess he doesn't have to be anti Jewish ,but being a proponent of prosperity at home and
peace abroad does create a monster out of a decent man in today's garbage land which defines
the western minds . It sure doesn't help the warmongering war readiness war friendly Zio
In some way Zio are doing what they did to other peace makers through the ages. Being against
war and being for peace automatically ensures extended definition of antisemitism will be attached
Here is the perfect moment to remember that it was antisemitism to question the western
narrative on Iran nuclear program. David Brooks will conform if his mind is still sharp enough
that he once suggested attacking George Bush war of 2003 was a also antisemitic .
Dr. Giraldi, do you know there is a Jewish organization in UK, which gives "Sergei Magnitsky
Human Rights Awards"? Last year, it awarded the honor on Israel-First Rep. Jim McGovern. Jim
McGovern, a Democrat who co-chairs the influential 'Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission' – named
after Jewish Rep. Tom Lantos (d. 2008).
During his acceptance speech Jim McGovern said that he was a staunch supporter of Israel
and supported the US-Iran nuclear agreement because it would be good for Israel in long-term.
During his stay in London, Jim McGovern was interviewed by Israeli mouthpiece, Jewish Chronicle
– published on November 27.
"I understand the security concerns, but I also believe that ultimately, the way forward
in Israel is for there to be real negotiations with the Palestinians -- a two-state solution.
People need to learn to live with each other -- that's the solution all over the world," McGovern
said.
When asked does that include Hamas? McGovern replied: "I don't need to negotiate with my
friends. I need to negotiate with the people I consider my adversaries and my enemies."
He also criticized Israel's human rights abuses and warned such actions are isolating Israel
from the international community. "I think Israel does not have a perfect human rights record.
I think the settlement policies are very troublesome," he said.
@Anonymous
As Anonymous says,"
Q: Who is guilty of lying, Nekrasov or Browder?
A: Which one is the Jew?"
Agreed. Frequently you will find that to find the truth just see what the Jew is saying
and the opposite will be the truth or what they say will be so convoluted as to twist the truth
into a blaspheme of some sort.
Last year, it awarded the honor on Israel-First Rep. Jim McGovern. Jim McGovern, a
Democrat who co-chairs the influential 'Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission' – named after
Jewish Rep. Tom Lantos (d. 2008).
God help us, that Jew jerk Lantos is still screwing over America. Wonder how many Palestinians
he is responsible for murdering?
@Anonymous
Are you just idly polluting UR with your prejudices or do you have some faintly relevant information?
The Browders who are descended from (non-Jewish) Communist Earl Browder seem to have good
mathematical brains which may be inherited from Earl Browder's Russian Jewish wife. But it
appears the Jewishness ended with her. The younger Bill Browder (who has a mathematician uncle
also called Bill) is the son of mathematician Felix who doesn't appear to have married a Jew.
Over to you to research Nekrasov. Will your brain suffer spasms or paraysis if you find that
neither of them are Jews.
A famous quote springs to mind: "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when
everything the American people believe is false." CIA director William Casey (CIA director,
1981-1987)
If this is an accurate quote, and I assume that it is, .what is the point of it? I mean
what goals should the CIA have ? Shouldn't OUR CIA be doing everything in its power, (like
every other government agency which we employ) to shore up the health ,wealth and security
of our nation.? Every action it takes, clandestine or otherwise, should be designed to ensure
the safety, freedom , and prosperity of our nation and its citizens .
Period. End of story. If they are not doing that .Fire the bums.
I still don't get what the cute girl in the pic is all about? She doesn't look Jewish
or anything.
That cute girl is Elena Servettaz who edited the book, the cover of which is behind her.
Here's a lot more photos of her for your viewing pleasure. Including one with her and Crazy
John McCain, which probably tells you all you need to know.
@Greasy
William Without going into a lot of unnecessary detail, Elena Servettaz is a Russian Jew
who serves basically the same role in the international journalistic world as Pamela Gellar
serves in the right-wing talk-show host/U-tube world based in Jew York City.
@Wizard
of Oz Don't be ridiculous, Bill Browder is Jewish and has always strongly identified as
such. He has a mezuzah on his office door and only hires Jewish employees. I knew him personally
back in the 90s and 00s.
@Boris
N I agree with you wholeheartedly, Boris, with the comments you made on democracy in Russia,
as well as the role the foreign (US) carpetbaggers had played in Russian society.
However, you failed to mention Russian President Vladimir Putin, who had succeeded the drunken,
incompetent Boris Yeltsin, who had been installed by the Jewish Oligarchs, who were – during
his Presidency – looting the Russian Treasury and bleeding the nation dry. It was Putin who
salvaged the Russian economy by imprisoning and/or exiling these Oligarchs and seizing all
of their assets. He also restored Orthodox Christianity in Russia after 70 years of it being
underground under Bolshevik Communism. The magnificent Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer, which
had been built in the 19th Century, then demolished by Lazar Kaganovich under Josef Stalin's
orders, was restored (rebuilt) after Yeltsin became President in the 1990′s.
Democracy also came to Russia under Putin, along with the revival of Orthodox Christianity.
As a result, the Russian people are experiencing more freedom than people are in Western countries,
including the US. In a way, these two nations – Russia and the US – have switched ideologies.
Even as I type this reply, Boris, Christianity in the US has just come under attack by the
Federal Courts which, btw, is a gross violation of the 1st Amendment to the US Constitution,
which guarantees, along with freedoms of speech, press and peaceable assemply, freedom of religion.
@Wizard
of Oz "as amongst the Jews what anti-Semites (and some Jews) would regard as "typically
Jewish"."
Don't be ridiculous. Jewish people define themselves as an ethnic group. The
fact that the ethnic group has considerably admixed is not the fault of those who merely observe
that fact.
@Eileen
Kuch A friend who ran a very big charity funded by Khodorkovsky told me that he is not
Jewish but Russian Orthodox and, indeed, his mother Marins seems to be Orthodox Christian,
so why would the Jerusalem Post online refer to him as Jewish? Did he convert?
I guess its just that, on balance, any group likes to claim the rich unless they are too
disreputable.
A related question is whether people with Jewish fathers, like K, got into the habit of
associating with others who were at least part Jewish because of the viciousness or at least
weight of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. After all one can get an idea of what it was like
from the mad snti-Semitism in UR comments where even Rupert Murdoch can be called Jewish out
of spite and envy even though he doesn't have a drop of known Jewish ancestry – pure Anglo-Celt
it seems in case some twisted mind picks on that "known".
in your opinion, is the Putin government just as corrupt as the Zio-West?
Yes, absolutely. It is not just my mere assumption, and it is not a conspiracy either, but
clear open facts that anybody can see if one wants to see. It is not "as corrupt as", it IS
controled by the West. We must not be deceived by the trickery red herring play of the official
Kremlin (I do not like the cliche "Kremlin propaganda", but this is exactly it; unfortunately
the Western MSM use this term for absolutely different things; the Western MSM play in the
same duo, by the way).
Who is Putin and where has he come from in the first place? Apart from that he is a former
KGB officer, and, as they say, "there aren't former KGB officers" (and this is important as
a great deal of Russian oligarchs came from that organization), he has not come from anywhere
and suddenly but fairly won the presidential campaign in 2000. During the 1990s he was moving
around in the Russian oligarchic and Kremlin circles, in fact he once was the right hand of
the first mayor of St.-Petersburg Sobchak, which in turn was a friend of Yeltsin. You think
Putin is different, but he is the same, he is from the same circles, you has been tricked by
the made-up image of Putin, a fiend for oligarchs and a friend of people, whereas he is, in
fact, a friend of oligarchs, literally.
Then, what is more important. Even if we know little about Putin's life in the 1990s (everything
is deliberately hidden), we know, hey, the entire world knows, how Putin has come to power.
Putin was a protege of Yeltsin, and this Yeltsin's protectionism was not hidden, but absolutely
public and official. Putin is the successor of Yeltsin, directly appointed by Yeltsin, a "legacy
president" whose main goal is to maintain the status quo from the 1990s. I would rater call
him a CEO under the control of the real masters, than an independent leader of the state. How
can one at all believe "Putin is not Yeltsin", when it is contrary to the facts. And again
we know which circles Yeltsin represented, and we know that those circles have had close connections
with the West if not controled by the West, and here we've come to the most interesting part.
The entire post-Soviet Russian elite (oligarchs and government officials) has come come
from the Communist nomenklatura, from the KGB and from the Soviet black market mafia structures
(usually run by Jews, Ukrainians and Asiatics like Georgians, Armenians, Azeris and Uzbeks).
And everybody of them have had many connections with the West, particularly with London, thousands
of Russian oligarchs, higher officials or at least their families live in London, London is
a second (true?) capital of Russia.
So there is no reason, why we must take the Kremlin and the West at face value. Why must
we believe there is a conflict of the planetary scale, when there is none.
Well, I've said much enough (I hope MI6 will not find me; joke), but you can dig further
yourself, everything is in open, the Russian ruling clique does not much hide itself, you do
not need to be a secret agent trying to acquire the secret Kremlin (or rather Westminster?)
documents, you just need to know the right directions of your searches. Just don't allow them
to confuse yourself with the information noise, both from the Kremlin and the West. Sift attentively
thousands of articles about a good Putin and a bad Putin from both the direction, because their
real goal is just to hide the real truth.
from here in the (dying and looted) West, it looks like Russia's middle class is ascendant,
while ours is being systematically murdered off
As for the Russian middle class. Of course, since 2000 the living standards of Russians
have improved greatly. We could argue if it is due magical Putin or high prices of natural
resources. But this only if we compare it with the Sovet pitiful existence and the extreme
poverty of the 1990s. But Even if Russians have now more money, cars, things and all, Russia
outside of Moscow and St.-Petersburg is still and will be for many decades a Second Word country,
in many places even a Third World one. I lived in Western Europe and I can tell the difference.
This is absolutely another different planet. Every bit there is better than in Russia, so Russia
seems quite backward. It is just simply pleasant to live in a First World country. You constantly
complain how bad the life in the West is, but you do not understand your luck that you were
born or live there.
And nothing much have changed since the 1990s, if not since the Soviet times. The entire
country is still ruled by the former Soviet nomenklature, the oligarchs of the 1990s and Western
companies still own and pwn Russia, gigantic bulks of the Russian wealth flow to off-shore
havens, the state budget still consist of >60% of the "natural rent", the high level corruption
is flourishing, a great deal of the budget is embezzled by officials. Maybe the reason why
the average Russians still live decent lives is Russia's wealth so immense, that even if half
of it is stolen by the upper 5-10%, the remaining half is enough for the well-being of the
other 90%. But imagine how well the Russians would live without the robbery by the Kremlin
oligarchic clique.
And don't take official Russian statistics at face value. The Russian middle class hardly
exists. And after 2014 the income of people has been dropping steadily. For the most provincial
cities the picture is following (at 70 roubles per USD):
Lowest 30% earn below $200 per month
Low Middle 40% – $200-$400
High Middle 20% – $400-$600
Upper 5% – $600-$1200
In Moscow, St.-Petersburg and some northern regions these number are 2 times higher, but
they comprise barely 15% of the population.
And we're left with 5%, the clique and their servants.
I can hardly name the people who earns under $400 the "middle class", and the country where
70% earns below that can hardly be called rich (though it is quite developed, comparing with
the Third World). So there are just 5%, max 25%, of the real middle class. And the average
pensions are around $200/month, so no less than 40 mln of senior Russians live for that small
amount of money, and with constantly rising prices it is very difficult to make both ends meet.
And the last. You will complain that Europe is being flooded with immigrants, but Russia
is a last stronghold. But I'll tell you what. Russia is on the second place by immigrant population
after the USA! And they are coming in. Russia has officially 10 mln and unofficially close
to 25 mln of immigrants from Asia. Moscow, in fact, must compete with London by the percentage
of Asiatic immigrants. The Muslim population is rising and the Kremlin openly favours Muslims
and Muslim immigrants.
@Eileen
Kuch You just reproduce the idealized image (either good or bad) of Putin that has been
created by the propaganda machine from both the sides during the past 15 years. As I said above,
Putin is hardly a threat to the oligarchs. Putin hardly persecute any oligarch. There are up
to 100 Russian billionaires, and some thousands of millionaires, but only Khodorkovsky, Lebedev
and maybe a couple of others were really imprisoned. No any other oligarchs have been persecuted.
Never the privatisation of the 1990s was questioned. Never the legacy of Yeltsin was questioned,
rather he is a "hero", an entire Yeltsin museum has been built. The very same oligarchs from
the 1990s, except for maybe some outcasts, are continuing to loot and rob Russian wealth. They
buy entire castles somewhere in England or France, they buy enormous luxury yachts, they have
bought a great deal of the London luxury realty, etc., etc. They roll in money, Russian money.
The only reason the average Russians still live decent is the enormous size of the Russian
wealth, that even scraps are enough for the entire nation to live.
And I'm not that religious, I do not think that the renaissance of religiosity in Russia
is any good, I rather agree with (a rare case) the Marx's opinion about "opium for the people".
It just makes Russian people stupid, superstitious and easy to manipulate. We live in the 21th
century, we do not need 2000-year old fairy tales to be good. Anyway, I have a great respect
for the PAST Russian Christian tradition, I think it is an important part of the Russian culture
and mentality, so I'm strongly against any destruction of it.
However, with both the economics and the culture you seem to present a false dilemma. You
imply that the only alternative to Yeltsin and Putin are Kaganovich and Stalin, whereas I strongly
believe there are many better alternatives.
@Boris
N The overall quality of life in any country and in any generation depends on much more
than annual income, reflected in the amount of money people have at their disposal. In fact,
it's becoming increasingly evident that the more money people have to spend on "toys" and other
unnecessary items, leads to major social problems including atomized families, wide-spread
drug addiction, high suicide rates, mental problems, obesity, and homelessness. Not to speak
of a lowering of moral standards that's simply off the charts – in the wrong direction. It's
obvious that rural Americans (in particular) in the 1920s and 30s, although having little money
at their disposal, enjoyed a much higher quality of life including extended and close knit
families, than the majority of Americans today. I could be mistaken, but I suspect the same
would be true for the average Russian today.
We all know Putin plays footsie with the oligarchs. We all know he pretends to like Bibi
and is a master at realpolitik. But the impression I get is of a man who wrested control of
Russia away from the worst of the oligarchs, while playing nice with the rest of them. That's
how it looked to us from thousands of miles away in the dying West, and firmly under the Zio/Rothschild
boot, that this was/is a great man. A world-class statesman and nationalist who crushed the
fanatical terrorists in Chechnya and mollified the moderate ones with reasonable policies,
and he returned the resources of Russia back the Russian state.
Sure there is massive corruption, and other problems, but considering what the Russian people
have endured with decades of (Jewish imposed) genocidal commie slavery, and then having it
all do a 180 and then being impoverished even worse under the cruel destitution of crony Jewish
'capitalism' that simply handed Russia over to a few Jewish and Russian minions of Rothschild-
to lord it over the dying and starving Russian people- for Putin to have turned this around
is incomprehensible. It's nothing less than an historic accomplishment of a truly great man.
A giant on the world's stage.
He has, it seems to me, nearly single handedly reined in the drooling, frothing Fiend, ripping
to shreds everything it could get its blood dripping teeth on. Libya was the final straw for
Putin, and he alone stood up to the beast when all of Europe were counting their shekels and
tossing their citizens and their nation's dignity onto the Moloch's pyres of war and slaughter
and cowardly appeasement of the Fiend.
Putin said 'enough!' And has stopped them in Syria (for now) when everyone else was
wringing their hands, Putin showed them all how a man with integrity must act, when faced with
a thug and a bully. You stand up to them. Or you cower, and place your fate in their hands,
as Gadhafi had done.
That's sort of how I see it. Yes, he plays ball with some very unsavory types, and corruption
is rampant. But he has done something wonderful Boris.. he has given the Russian people back
their dignity. They have something today that I don't think they've had for generations..
Hope. A shred of pride at being who and what they are; Russians.
How do you put a price on that? How do you quantify that kind of thing. Sure, Americans
may be able to afford more flat screen TVs, with which to watch their culture and heritage
being relentlessly maligned, their identities excoriated as evil, and their culture turned
into a sewer. Oh joy. But how do you put a value on giving to your people a quiet sense of
personal dignity? Vs. pitting them endlessly against each other with raging identity politics
and a race down to the moral abyss of spiritual feculence, writ large.
That is our lot over here in the West Boris, and the SUVs and flat screen TVs just aren't
all that, when you consider the soul and the doomed future of your people.
I will strongly disagree. We have a lot of examples all around the world where the lack
of money and low living standards lead to the same bad things that you have listed. You do
not need to go far, just look at your neighbour countries in Central America, or else you even
might go to your own American poor minority (Black or Hispanic) neighbourhood, where the people
will strongly disagree with you that their living on $10,000/year gives them a great virtue,
like if they have no money to buy "toys" (in fact, first-necessity goods) then they live better
"spiritual" lives. When the poor speak about the spirituality of poverty, this usually means
a getaway from the harsh reality with the help of self-illusion. When the rich speak about
the spirituality of poverty, this usually means they try to cheat the poor.
We all know he pretends to like Bibi and is a master at realpolitik .
1. He's not pretending. There is a reason that Russian nationalists absolutely despise him.
He completely betrayed Iran when he refused to sell them the s-300 until they accepted Obama's
deal.
2. He is extremely conscious of Russian public opinion, and yet still has no problem having
publicly good relations with Netanyahu. That tells you all you need to know about how indifferent
the Russian people are towards the Palestinians. Contrary to your delusions, Russia is not
some sort of alt right paradise as any of the nationalists who actually live in Russia would
be quick to tell you.
He completely betrayed Iran when he refused to sell them the s-300 until they accepted
Obama's deal.
Jesus Greasy, that the realpolitik I was talking about that you even highlighted
in your quote! What he doesn't want is an all out war with the Zio-West!
2. He is extremely conscious of Russian public opinion, and yet still has no problem
having publicly good relations with Netanyahu.
again, he's pretending to like Bibi because Bibi is the king of the Jews and therefore the
default king of the West today. He's Rothschild's number one stooge. Of course Putin has to
play nice with him. But be honest Greasy, no one on this planet actually likes Bibi. That's
like saying you like hemorrhoids. You deal with things like hemorrhoids or Bibi, as the case
may be, but sure as shit don't like them.
Russia is not some sort of alt right paradise as any of the nationalists
no, certainly not. But it's also not a cultural sewer of the Jewish id, that we in the West
all have to marinate in, thankyouverymuch.. not
Bibi rules purely by default. He's not the king of anything. Nasrallah knew what he was
talking about when he said that Sharon was the last King of Israel.
Jesus Greasy, that the realpolitik I was talking about that you even highlighted in your
quote!
But Putin is democratically elected. The only reason he can engaged in realpolitik in the
middle east is because the Russia public doesn't give a rat's ass what happens to the Iranians
or Palestinians. The only people in Russia who care about those groups are the nationalists,
who, as I have said, hate Putin's guts.
@Boris
N Moral always come first, with money being secondary. Of course It takes a certain amount
of money for people to live, but in practically every case, the more money immoral people have
at their disposal the lower they sink and the sorrier they get. With Hollywood pukes being
living examples of what money without morals produces. I'm surprised you haven't figured this
out.
@Rurik
I can understand why you have a distorted view of Putin and the Russian life. Because Westerners
simply lack important sources of information about the reality in Russia, you simply do not
live in Russia, do not meet and hear the people everyday, you are not insiders. This is why
I always say that the voice for Russia in the Western media (at least in the non-mainstream
one, because I have no illusion about the MSM) must be given not to West-based either Russophobes
or Russophiles, who practically know nothing, but to middle-aged, middle-class Russians, who
love and understand best their own home. But even in such a case we must have many voices because
no two Russians have a similar point of view, for example, even if I become one of the voices
(I've written quite much here, that many of my comments deserve to become articles on their
own, ha-ha) many Russians will agree with me, many will disagree, and many may have totally
different third, forth, and so on views. The Russian political spectrum is much diverse, there
is no false dichotomy like in the West.
And from that you all have a problem. You get information about Russia either from the
Washington-centric quasi-independent ("independent" in the American political doublespeak always
means independent from everyone but Washington) outlets, like NYT, WP, Fox, CNN, you name it,
and their view of Russia for the past 90 years is quite predictable if not annoying, and I
understand why you do not believe them and interpret everything they say in the opposite way,
so you have formed a habit that when they say something is black you understand it as something
is white.
On the other hand you have the Kremlin propaganda state machine like RT who obviously
do the same thing as the Washington propaganda machine, but in the opposite direction; or Russophilic
individuals (usually emigres with nostalgia), lone wolf voices like the Saker or Karlin, but
whose voice anyway is irrelevant and illusional because, as I've said, they are outsiders and
know little about the actual Russian life, but they rather might be characterized as positive
interpreters of open sources (and neither the sources nor their interpretations ought to be
true).
Also we have local "opposition" outlets either in Russian like the radio station "Ekho
Moskvy", the TV station "Dozhd", "Novaya Gazeta" and so on, or in English like "The Moscow
Times", but I do not even take them seriously, I consider them as virtually subsidiaries of
the Western MSM (though there is one irony that furiously anti-government "Ekho Moskvy" is
owned by Gazprom).
What I wanted to say, that even if many who are not hopelessly brainwashed understand
that the demonizing of Russia is a lie, it does not make the opposite view automatically right,
and your over-positive opinion is generally illusional. I tried to bring you around, but seemed
to fail, though to change anybody's opinion was not my goal, I was just trying to say my opinion,
be it right or wrong.
Maybe our opinions are heavily influenced by our lives, both you and I may have been disappointed
by our lives in our respective countries, but you believe that there is somewhere a better
land, and it's Russia, while I, in turn, believe the life in the West is better. But there
is one distinction. I've been in both the places and I can compare, but I bet if you come to
Russia and do not become one of the high-paid Western expats who live luxury lives in Moscow,
you'll very soon run off home and your Putinism will fade immediately (though your love to
Russia itself may strengthen, as it has been with many Westerners).
@Greasy
William I do not know what sort of Russian nationalists you are speaking about, simply
because there are not THE Russian nationalists, but one or two dozens of diffused different
small groups with different if not opposite views, who may call themselves or other may call
them "Russian nationalists". Not to mention thousands of common non-partisan Russians who may
call themselves nationalists as well but as well may have thousands of different personal opinions
about the past and the current affairs.
Among those nationalists I know personally, most of them absolutely do not care about Iran,
Israel and Palestine and about the Middle East in general. The interest has only aroused since
the Syrian intervention, but the general opinion about it is negative, because many think that
the war in Syria is utterly inappropriate, when just at the border there is an ongoing unfinished
war with Ukraine. And some nationalists even have a positive view of both Israel and Iran as
good examples of national states, of what Russia must become. And unlike many commenters here,
most (with some exemptions) are not so much obsessed with Israel and Jews, and they do not
care if Putin loves either Israel or Iran, they dislike Putin not for that, but for other mostly
internal problems.
I do not deny the need and the role of good moral, but I have a more materialistic
view of the world, an important if not the fundamental condition for good moral is the full
stomach. Again no need to go far for examples, there is Latin America where people theoretically
have good moral, they all are devoted Catholics, but they live in a chaotic criminal frenzy,
when Detroit would look like a safe haven compared to San Salvador. Do you really think that
if the USA will be as poor as but as "spiritual" as Latin America, the US life will improve?
It works in the opposite direction as well. When people have not enough means,
they have no much time left to think about and to follow good moral, they are simply surviving
as they can, often doing very ugly things. In most cases a society in strong need ends up in
a chaos as we can see it in Africa, the Middle East and Latin America.
In both the cases wealth does not guarantee good moral, but good moral is not an inevitable
result of poverty. Where do you choose to live, in wealthy but "immoral" Geneva or in poor
but "spiritual" San Salvador?
Where do you choose to live, in wealthy but "immoral" Geneva or in poor but "spiritual"
San Salvador?
But San Salvador is just as spiritually sick as the West, just in a different way. A spiritually
healthy society will have low corruption, low violence, respect for women's rights and concern
for the welfare of the weak (the poor, the disabled, the sick). Poverty *can* breed evil, but evil always ultimately breeds poverty.
I do not know what sort of Russian nationalists you are speaking about
The one's who show off their gorgeous girlfriends who have "88″ and bladed swastikas tattooed
on their asses.
And some nationalists even have a positive view of both Israel and Iran as good examples
of national states, of what Russia must become.
They want Russia to become multi culture, failing states, with grinding poverty where the
different factions of the population hate each other while a corrupt and incompetent elite
rules over them? That is what they want Russia to become?
Have you ever read the Kreutzer Sonata? It is the only piece of Russian literature I have
ever read and I really liked it a lot.
The Russian political spectrum is much diverse, there is no false dichotomy like in the
West.
well from what I can glimmer, the 'dichotomy' in Russia seems to go something like either
'we/I like Putin', or 'we/I don't like Putin'.
Perhaps it has something to do with hard politics on the ground, and the reality that it's
this guy that is running things today in Russia, for better or worse.
I understand why you do not believe them and interpret everything they say in the opposite
way, so you have formed a habit that when they say something is black you understand it
as something is white.
I wouldn't quite characterize it in this way. It's true I never believe them, but that doesn't
mean they never tell the truth. Sometimes they mix a little truth in with the lies,
and sometimes they say what's really going on, because by doing so it suits their agenda(s).
When they say the Olympics are happening in Sochi, I believe them. When they say Putin shot
down MH17, I think they're lying. And then with most things in between, I think it's a combination
of lies and truth, always with an agenda in mind. If Putin were assisting with the destruction
of Syria today, like they (the occupied West) did to Iraq and Libya, I think they'd be calling
him a great statesman, and partner in freedom and democracy. It all depends on if he toes the
line.
but you believe that there is somewhere a better land, and it's Russia, while I, in turn,
believe the life in the West is better. But there is one distinction. I've been in both
the places and I can compare
It's true I've never been to Russia, at least not yet. The closest I've came is Slovakia
and Hungary, (but I did meet a beautiful Russian girl when I visited Cuba a few years ago!)
I've never thought life was better in Russia. We do have many blessings in the West. But
today I consider the government of Russia (with all of it's well known corruption and
chicanery) as hands down a thousand times better than what we now have in the West. And the
trajectory of Putin's Russia vs. the US or Germany for instance, I consider as like a country
on the rise, vs. a civilization in rapid (free-fall) decline.
My short take is that after the revolution and the murder of the Tsar and his family, the
Fiend took control of Russia, and set about slaughtering the best of the Russians (and everyone
else they could get their feculent hands on), and imposing a genocidal slavery on those people
for generations. And then one day when they (Rothschild) decided that commie slavery was too
expensive (you had to feed and house the people), they decided to impose a system even more
cruel and fiendish. They'd simply use their puppet, quisling government in Moscow to loot the
wealth and resources of Russia outright, and make Rothschild's minions some of the richest
men in the world overnight, while impoverishing the Russian people to the point of near starvation.
(it's what the do ; )
And then out of the blue came Putin, who wrested Russia away from the Fiend, and gave her
hope, (and an ascendant middle class and pride in Russia's heritage). For the Fiend, this was
an abomination, and ironically enough; Putin was now a new Hitler – especially when he jailed
on of their own (and for hard labor -- It was another Holocaust!). But as long as he
played ball with the West by letting most of the Jewish oligarchs keep their ill-gotten
billions, and went along with atrocities like the savage rape of Iraq, the oligarchs were willing
to ignore what Putin had done to their designs and fun up to a degree.
But then came Libya, and Putin saw that the Fiend was in absolute control of the
West, and must not be fed anymore, lest the Fiend grow and fester and become a dire threat
to Russia itself, (again). So Putin put the kibosh on Syria, and now he's locked in a death
struggle with the Fiend, who is insane with power-lust.
It's a difficult situation to be sure. And that's how I see the West vs. Putin's Russia,
and why I like Putin even with all his warts and faults. At least he's trying to make Russia
great again, and that's why there are many of us in the West who pine for a man like him to
take on the Fiend that has its fangs locked deeply into the jugular of the West.
The only reason he can engaged in realpolitik in the middle east is because the Russia
public doesn't give a rat's ass what happens to the Iranians or Palestinians.
I think they do care what happens to Iran, since it's a close trading partner. And the Palestinians
are just a distant, tragic people to the Russians. Why should they wring their hands, it isn't
them who're foisting the evils upon the Pals, it's us Americans that are doing that.
The only people in Russia who care about those groups are the nationalists, who, as I
have said, hate Putin's guts.
how many Russian nationalists do you know or speak to who are not Jewish, Greasy?
From what I understand, the IDF is chock full of Russian émigrés, and their take on things
must be skewed by Putin's thwarting of Israel's designs on the Golan.
here's a forum run by an ultra-Russian nationalist
Without spiritual health, economic health is not only meaningless, it's unsustainable.
As we here in America are about to learn the hard way.
having linked to the Pravda forum, I just took a moment to peruse the Pravda front page.
This from an article on Russia today:
Putin has saved the country before and he is saving the country now. We despise all the
fifth column "dissent" that is based on your taxpayer money. Russia will never behave like
Soros, who maintains institutions to overthrow governments, because our leaders are Orthodox
Christians. Capitalism is not our religion. You are addicted to a beautiful body, and we
are addicted to a beautiful soul.
more:
Our aggressiveness exists only in your imagination. The reunification of the Russian
people with the Crimea passed without one single shot, because Russia is more than just a country.
Russia is a territory, which shares a common language, history and culture. We see any attempt
to "reprogram" Russians in Ukraine as a hybrid warfare against us. One can welcome the Scottish
Premier and discuss the likelihood for the UK to fall apart, but one can not support the population
of southern lands of the former Russian Empire in their aspiration to withdraw from Ukraine?
Is this not a double standard?
.. we do not like your determination to make us be like you. We change. Moscow has become
one of the most beautiful capitals in Europe. We do not live up to Western lifestyles, and
we do not "give a damn" if you do not like our way.
I would say that Putin certainly does care about Iran. It doesn't take a genius
to know which nations have been declared evil and targeted by the US, they are frequently named
by traitorous whores like Hillary, Obuma, Biden etc, along with the treacherous neo-cons who
bear responsibility for fomenting wars in the ME.
Putin is smart enough to know that if any nation sits back and waits its turn to be attacked
it will surely be destroyed. He went out on a limb to arrest the destruction of Syria and it
has paid off. He appears to have played his cards remarkably well to date. I can't imagine
that the stratospheric level of approval and support that he receives in Russia is fictional.
I would believe RT News before I would the BBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, DW, Fox and all the
other discredited western "news" outlets.
the 'dichotomy' in Russia seems to go something like either 'we/I like Putin', or 'we/I
don't like Putin'.
To like/dislike Putin is not a political stance but rather a personal opinion. But it does
not explain nor imply any other view. To be precise, several persons can dislike Putin, but
one may be a pro-Western ultra-liberal, another a Stalinist, other a National-Bolshevik, other
a Christian Monarchist, other a racist Nazi, other a pro-Ukrainian Nazi, and so on. It is difficult
to list them all. And they all may have totally different views on many subjects, but just
one thing in common, as you said, a dislike to Putin.
I cannot say for sure for the Western public but I hardly saw such a variety of views. Maybe
the reason why Russians cannot unite and change something, because they are so disintegrated
on many issues.
It's true I never believe them, but that doesn't mean they never tell the truth.
OK, I did not mean that. Of course, when they say that somewhere there has been a tornado,
or, as in your example, a sporting event, or some other trivial factual thing they simply cannot
not to say truth. But when they are trying to create some sort of analysis about hot global
political affairs they usually back up the agenda of their Washington-Brussels masters.
But the agenda of the Kremlin is hardly better . The best option is not to listen them
both.
But today I consider the government of Russia (with all of it's well known corruption
and chicanery) as hands down a thousand times better than what we now have in the West.
Again, you say this because you simply has a very limited range of sources of information.
You just repeat a made-up image of the Russian government or, precisely, of just one person,
Putin. But this is just an image for the outside (non-Russian) public . You need know
more, much more, form a variety of Russian sources, for a long period of time, and then you
might have not the right, but at least a less distorted view. The actual Russian government,
if we put Putin (pun) aside, is comprised of very ugly, greedy, treacherous, hypocritical people,
I simply cannot find the right words for those bastards. They are utterly disgusting. They
have been ruining the country for the past 25 years.
And the trajectory of Putin's Russia vs. the US or Germany for instance, I consider as
like a country on the rise, vs. a civilization in rapid (free-fall) decline.
Russia is on the fall . The crisis of the past two years has just nullified any achievements
of the previous 2004-2014 decade. Russia has practically returned to its starting position.
And nothing says about its rise, everything says the contrary . Russians have entered
a difficult time. They will be remembering 2000-2014 with bitter nostalgia.
And then out of the blue came Putin, who wrested Russia away from the Fiend, and gave
her hope,
Putin did not turn out of blue, he was a member of the 1990s robbing elite, he is a continuation
of Yeltsin, I explained it in my other comments colorfully. Not to mention Putin's "team"
are the very same people from the 1990s. Take anybody and they all were doing some ugly things
in the 1990s, but now they are "respected" officials and "businessmen". The only thing he has
done is to hide this ugly truth under the cover. And millions around the world believe his
deceit, how naive.
The one's who show off their gorgeous girlfriends who have "88″ and bladed swastikas
tattooed on their asses.
If you speaking seriously, what I doubt, then they are a very small, marginal minority.
Since the 2000s being 1488 is a mauvais ton in the Russian national circles, nobody take those
Racial Holy Warriors and fans of Hitler seriously, they are just nutheads.
They want Russia to become multi culture, failing states, with grinding poverty where
the different factions of the population hate each other while a corrupt and incompetent
elite rules over them? That is what they want Russia to become?
Actually, for the past 25 years Russia is becoming "a multi-culture, failing state,
with grinding poverty where the different factions of the population hate each other while
a corrupt and incompetent elite rules over them" . I will add that that elite is in the
West in their minds, and they have to be physically located in Russia just for the sake
of "earning" money.
Of course, no Russian nationalists want this, even the Nazi nuthead minority. When I said
Israel was taken as an example I meant something like
that .
lot's of chafe on that one but you can at least glimmer a nuanced inkling of what the
Russian nationalists are on about
(they love Putin ; )
No, you cannot accidentally pick up some obscure bulletin boards, hosted on a free-hosting
site, which boards nobody knows and cares about.
The actual whole Russian national movement has been being thought through, discussed and
constructed for many years entirely in Russian, in the Russian part of the internet, and not
in English by some pro-Russian foreigners or Russian emigres.
Vyatrovich has announced the complete de-Russification of Ukraine
The warnings of many experts, namely, that de-communization is just an excuse, the first
preparatory stage or a smokescreen for the principle action, namely the de-Russification of the
Ukraine, has acquired real and official confirmation.
The Director of the so-called Institute of National Memory, Vladimir Vyatrovich, who is,
in fact, the main ideologist of the current regime in Kiev, has announced that the end of
de-communization will conjoin with the start of a campaign for the complete de-Russification of
the Ukraine. De-communization does not solve the basic problem of the Kiev regime, that of a
complete separation from Russia. De-Russification, if it is successful, will make the process
complete.
"We understand that for the formation of the Ukraine as a strong, independent state not
only is de-communization necessary, but also de-Russification", he said.
In 2004 Vyatrovich, a graduate of L'vov University and true son of Galitsia, defended his
doctoral thesis:
"UPA raids beyond the Ukrainian borders as part of the creation of an anti-totalitarian
national-democratic revolution among the nations of East-Central Europe".
He had already had a book published on the same subject in 2001.
It seems that butchering Poles and Jews -- including men, women and children -- was, according
to him, part and parcel of an "anti-totalitarian national-democratic revolution among the
nations of East-Central Europe".
I wonder if he has ever tried to present his thesis in Poland?
I enjoyed this post, Outis, even though I'm going to be a bit critical of it. I am pleased
to just to be able to talk about this stuff from time to time.
In Asimov's original
Foundation
stories, Hari Seldon devised an actual plan for the
future history of an empire.
But historical dialectical materialism is not a plan. It is a theory which one may use to
develop hypotheses.
Does Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection determine which species happen to
survive? Would evolution by natural selection fail to happen, if nobody ever wrote about
it?
So why would Marx's theory of class struggle alter the course of history?
If one reads the
Communist Manifesto
, one finds that the work is almost entirely
devoted to the bourgeoisie and to the history of capitalism.
The bourgeoisie, after centuries of struggle against the nobility, the clergy, and the
petty bourgeoisie, at length became the dominant class in society. Obviously the bourgeoisie
didn't need Marx to help them do that!
Marx hypothesizes that for as long as the bourgeois class is what it is, and does what it
does, a class struggle will result in which proletarians will assume power.
Marx points out that the vast majority of the job of obliterating private property is
actually being performed by the bourgeois class themselves. Marx points out that most of the
job of reducing differences between nations is actually done by the bourgoisie. Marx points
that it's the bourgeoisie who dissolve traditional family institutions.
But that's observation and extrapolation, not a plan. For a revolutionary programme of the
proletariat, Marx only offers a short list of points to consider.
Little of the
Manifesto
is devoted to the subject of the proletariat. That's not
surprising, since proletarian history had scarcely begun.
For the sake of argument, ask yourself how much could one write about bourgeois history,
or bourgeois political prospects, in the 12th century? At that time the Occidental
bourgeoisie was in its political infancy. Few would imagine that these harried, oppressed,
vulgar little burghers would eventually become the dominant class in society. I mean, the
whole notion would seem "not even wrong."
It was difficult for Marx, and it is still difficult for us, to contemplate what a society
would look like, or what life would feel like, if the proletariat were the politically and
culturally dominant class. One only gets tantalizing glimpses, half-fanciful, such as
Orwell's first impression of Barcelona.
To extend my 12th century bourgeois analogy, it would be like trying to envision Planet
Bourgeois, based on a day trip to 12th century Venice.
Marx does offer brief critiques of those socialist programmes which do not focus on the
proletarian class.
For our present purposes, the most interesting of them is Marx's anticipation of the
welfare state, which he refers to as "bourgeois socialism."
For decades after WWII, many in the developed nations thought that the welfare states had
solved the worst problems of capitalism. I used to be one of them. But it took Marx just a
single page of the
Communist Manifesto
to raise, evaluate, and dismiss the idea.
"But historical dialectical materialism is not a plan. It is a theory which one may use
to develop hypotheses.
Does Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection determine which species happen to
survive? Would evolution by natural selection fail to happen, if nobody ever wrote about
it?"
Well said! This is very close to the sort of defense that most MMT theorists deploy–
when critics decry the possible negative consequences of "adopting" their theory. "We are not
proposing, merely describing" is the refrain. I myself have never been a Marxist, yet I find
the historical analysis of some Marxist scholars quite perceptive. In my former life as a
medievalist I often relied heavily on excellent work, authored by conservative Catholics,
without ever feeling the urge to become one myself!
"We are not proposing, merely describing"
Actually, based on what I've seen about it here on NC, that is a misleading half-truth. It's
true that the theory itself is descriptive, and I think true on its face, though I might
quibble with some emphases.
OTOH, the theory is Keynesian: in most examples, at least that we see, it comes with
policy prescriptions – in particular, deficit spending to stimulate the economy
(environmentally a losing proposition) and serve human needs.
What makes the theory interesting and new is that fiat currency, in the modern sense,
hasn't existed very long. I remember when Nixon (a Republican!) took us off the gold standard
– in the 70s, wasn't it. That was when the shackles came off. So people are still
figuring out what it all means.
I suspect that the biggest objection to the theory is that it would delegitimize,
especially, taxation, which depends on largely voluntary compliance. Would people go along
with it if they really thought it didn't "pay for the government," but instead served to
regulate the amount of money in circulation, plus some useful social engineering?
"... Postcards from the End of America has just been released by Seven Stories Press. He maintains an active photo blog . ..."
"... You cannot have nationalism without nation states and nation-states raison d'etre is conflict with each other. This crazy old world has got on rather well with all the scarcity and resultant wars and selfishness and religious or national myths . It wont last long with peace (because there is) plenty . Technology powerful enough to give lifestyles even beyond John Lennon's imaginings to the Western population. I speak of the Singularity. When there is nothing to fight about, there will soon be nothing, or no one, at all. Progress is greasing the skids toward humanity's tomb. ..."
"... Are you aware that Prez Trump ran as an opponent of American empire and pointless intrusion into other nations? ..."
An empire, by nature, must trample on nationhood, even its own, for it presents the empire's
ambitions as the nation's necessities, for how else can you get Americans, for example, to go
die and fight in Afghanistan or Iraq? Though citing love of nation constantly, our Washington
rulers are essentially anti-American, and that's why a genuine nationalist like Edward Snowden
must flee to Russia.
Nationalism is simply the love of one's language, culture, history and heritage, one's very
identity in short, but as wielded by an empire, nationalism becomes a murderous tool to violate
one nation after another. The American empire is destroying the American nation.
Good point about egregious John Lennon and his spaced-out partner Yoko.
When JL was assassinated I mentioned to a class that the same Beatles who preached
forbearance and non-acquisitiveness broke up over petty jealousies and money squabbles. The
class was devastated – for my callousness toward their premier modern day saint!
Your article covered a lot of ground and made many good points- very much appreciated
@Dan
Hayes I like the article, Linh particularly the last sentence and the anti-mixmaster
world sentence in general. 'There is no here' is asinine.
I prefer Brett Ellis, 'Disappear here.'
Ono may be a drip, but some of her pre-Lennon art is very good, I am not talking about Cut
Piece, but sculpture and her mail art, among others.
A few of her early seventies tracks, too.
Arguably, parts of her more recent 'dance' outing.
It is funny, she was very much disliked in Japan (thinking being not 'she broke up the
Beatles' but 'if Lennon had to marry a Japanese woman, why did he not have the good taste to
avoid a spoilt brat drama queen with a couple of fake suicide attempts behind her?')
Don't forget, she was born with a set of golden chopsticks, i.e, very wealthy, which is
why she could afford to live as she did before she met Lennon. Never a day of work.
That has all changed, with her John Lennon museum in Saitama and all, media are non-stop
positive nowadays.
His relationship with her, a little sick, vis. the photo of him naked in foetal pose in
front of clothed and unbent Ono.
Nationalism is simply the love of one's language, culture, history and heritage, one's
very identity in short, but as wielded by an empire, nationalism becomes a murderous tool
to violate one nation after another. The American empire is destroying the American
nation.
You cannot have nationalism without nation states and nation-states raison
d'etre is conflict with each other. This crazy old world has got on rather well with all
the scarcity and resultant wars and selfishness and religious or national myths . It wont
last long with peace (because there is) plenty . Technology powerful enough to give
lifestyles even beyond John Lennon's imaginings to the Western population. I speak of the
Singularity. When there is nothing to fight about, there will soon be nothing, or no one, at
all. Progress is greasing the skids toward humanity's tomb.
You gonna dox me again? Not that it matters. I'm retired and can't be blacklisted. Nor can
I be easily found. Sold out everything in retirement and virtually vanished from recorded
existence.
Religion is also part of the deal. Religion is the oral history of our fathers and their
fathers. It is the story of where we come from.
Are you aware that Prez Trump ran as an opponent of American empire and pointless
intrusion into other nations?
"Imagine no possessions"
You can only completely disdain materialism if you are absurdly rich. Lennon had a
refrigerated room for his fur coats. I've only seen the attitude of "wouldn't it be great if
we could live without money" among the rich. It's especially common in upper middle class
students. The most anti-materialist religion – Buddhism – came from a bored
prince.
"Imagine there's no countries"
I'm imagining it, John, and it's pretty horrific. Borders are the last thing protecting
countries from being a mush of multiculturalist capitalist slop protecting us from selling
our inheritance for a globalist mess of pottage. Starbucks and Sharia. This 'no countries'
idea can only come from a transnational elite. It can only be believed by natives who are
deracinated from their own culture, or newcomers who are escaping some shithole.
You are absolutely dead on with this essay. I point out to "nationalist" friends who like
this song and then they change their minds "Imagine no country" or "nothing to die for"? I
may as well ignore my chain of ancestry "god willing!"
Ukraine periodically tries sweet talk to lure the east back, but the time to do that was immediately
after the Maidan – instead, nationalist fervor gripped the capital and giddy nationalists went
hard the other way with proclamations that they would delegitimize the Russian language. If anything
about those lunatic days can be said to have been the catalyst which set subsequent events in
motion, the fatal mistake, that was it. The mayor of Lvov, no less, made a speech the very next
day – in perfect colloquial Russian – in which he tried to walk back the disaster and reassure
the easterners that there would not be legal action to discriminate against them because of their
habitual language, but the die was cast and it was too late.
Had the nationalists not had their way or had they not given in to the temptation to indulge
their hatred of Russia and everything about it, there is every chance regime change would have
succeeded in gathering Ukraine to the EU's bosom. Russia might still have made a grab for Crimea,
and for me it would still have been legitimate since it was once part of Russia and was never
ceded legally to Ukraine as its other territories were. But the stab in the back over the use
of Russian, which once again was only a treat the nationalists foolishly allowed themselves as
a reward for victory, provided a perfect catalyst for rebellion and the rapid decision-making
it entails. I would be willing to bet Washington and the State Department are still cursing over
that tactical blunder, since they are now lumbered with the great corrupt mass of Ukraine, with
an active rebellion simmering on its eastern edge, but without the sparkling prize of Crimea.
I don't know if Putin actually said he did not want to be welcomed by NATO sailors in Sevastopol,
as he is reputed to have done, but that most certainly was part of the plan.
This is a very good comment. I think you caught the essence of what happened. Nationalists first
destroyed the country territorial integrity, and after that, they destroyed its economics. Essentially
acting as US stooges, helping the USA to achieve its geopolitical goals (and Ukraine remains the
major geopolitical victory of Obama administration).
Now the majority of Ukrainians exist on around $2 a day. So the social explosion is possible.
And they continue digging the hole deeper and deeper. This is a real Ukrainian tragedy: they managed
to replicate all the horrors of 90th again.
Also, idealization of the West promoted by nationalists serves as a trap, consequences of which
are yet to come. Being Germany resource base is not a walk in the park. Ask Bulgarians about this
experience. Or Greece.
At the same time Donbas tragedy was partially the result of Putin's policy (or lack thereof)
because there was a vague promise that if on the referendum they vote for joining Russia they
will be accepted like Crimea. But he decided not do that. Or, most probably, somebody helped Putin
to decide that way. Of course, after Yeltsin drunk orgy Russia remains weak and can't challenge
the USA directly. And that would do just that. But truth be told after Odessa civilians burning
in the building all Eastern Ukraine up to Kiev was probably ready to accept Russians as liberators.
At least nationalists in Kharkov felt that the city has been already lost.
I talked with a couple of Ukrainian refugees from Donbas area and they were not actually too
exited about Putin's policy and think that he shares the blame with nationalists.
This was a trap that helped to provoke the civil war: the USA pushed for the military solution.
May be in order to destabilize the region, and by extension, Russia, which they incorrectly consider
the main geopolitical enemy after China. But as a result, they destroyed remnants of Ukrainian
economics, and now somebody needs to pick the bill. This process of deindustrialization is continuing
as Ukraine lost the major market for its production. 300% devaluation of grivna reflects just
that. Just think about it: 300% in three years: from 8 to a dollar to 26
In essence, the USA position on Donbas conflict was to the right of Ukrainian nationalists.
Especially US neocons like Nuland and McCain. I remember Yatsenyuk speech (in Russian) at this
time in which he backtracked from "Ukrainian language uber alles" position; might be a tactical
maneuver, but still
In any case, Ukraine remains the worst defeat of Putin in foreign policy area for his whole
term in office (Libya was under Medvedev). And the major geopolitical victory for the USA. Nobody
cares if Ukrainians will starve. And if Russia stops transiting of gas as they plan to do, the
economic situation in Ukraine will become much worse. At this point they might arrive as close
to the failed state as one can get.
Thank you, likbez. Yes, Putin several times referred carelessly to 'Novorossiya', which created
the impression that Russia was considering accepting it. Also, he obtained the advance approval
of the Duma to conduct military operations as he saw fit in order to protect eastern-Ukrainian
ethnic Russians. That was perhaps the biggest mistake he ever made, and he withdrew it, but it
was too late and it very much played into western hands. Washington was able to portray Russia
as ready to invade Ukraine, and it was convincing.
I think Putin has known all along that eastern
Ukraine would be an asset as a frozen conflict, like Abkhazia and South Ossetia are in Georgia,
whereas if Russia were to take them in they would be a liability, as Russia would be forced to
defend them. But those former Donbas residents who grumble because Putin did not absorb eastern
Ukraine should ask themselves if they would be better off if Kiev won and subjugated them, and
they joined the people who are living on a couple of bucks a day. Russian commerce still goes
on with the east, but not with the rest of Ukraine.
And it's true Ukraine represents a major defeat for Russia, but there was little Russia could
have done to stop it. Russia was not going to go to war against NATO to prevent it from seizing
Ukraine, but NATO is not likely to go to war to hold on to it, either. Russia played by the rules
and stayed out of what it labeled Ukraine's business, but the west had no such scruples, and it
meddled, meddled, meddled and instigated a coup. Only a coup will take it back.
"... And even given that, I would have to qualify the nature of the threats. Russia and China are best described as adversaries or competitors rather than enemies as they have compelling interests to avoid war, even if Washington is doing its best to turn them hostile. Neither has anything to gain and much to lose by escalating a minor conflict into something that might well start World War 3. Indeed, both have strong incentives to avoid doing so, which makes the actual threat that they represent more speculative than real. And, on the plus side, both can be extremely useful in dealing with international issues where Washington has little or no leverage, to include resolving the North Korea problem and Syria, so they U.S. has considerable benefits to be gained by cultivating their cooperation. ..."
"... Cohen-Watnick is thirty years old and has little relevant experience for the position he holds, senior director for intelligence on the National Security Council. But his inexperience counts for little as he is good friend of son-in-law Jared Kushner. He has told the New York Times ..."
"... Both Cohen-Watnick and Harvey share the neoconservative belief that the Iranians and their proxies in Syria and Iraq need to be confronted by force, an opportunity described by Foreign Policy ..."
"... What danger to the U.S. or its actual treaty allies an Iranian influenced land corridor would constitute remains a mystery but there is no shortage of Iran haters in the White House. Former senior CIA analyst Paul Pillar sees "unrelenting hostility from the Trump administration" towards Iran and notes "cherry-picking" of the intelligence to make a case for war, similar to what occurred with Iraq in 2002-3. And even though Secretary of Defense James Mattis and National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster have pushed back against the impulsive Cohen-Watnick and Harvey, their objections are tactical as they do not wish to make U.S. forces in the region vulnerable to attacks coming from a new direction. Otherwise they too consider Iran as America's number one active enemy and believe that war is inevitable. Donald Trump has unfortunately also jumped directly into the argument on the side of Saudi Arabia and Israel, both of which would like to see Washington go to war with Tehran on their behalf. ..."
"... You forgot the third significant potential threat from a friendly nation, i.e. Israel. Israel will sabotage any effort to normallize relations with Russia or even Iran. They will resort to false flag operations to start a war with Iran. ..."
"... The problem with this White House, as well as the previous ones, is that none of the so-called experts really understand the Middle East. The US is not interested in having friendly relations with all nations. All her efforts are towards one goal, the world domination. Even if President Trump wanted to normalize relations with Russia, the MSM, the democrats, as well as, his republican opponents will not let him. ..."
"... That is why the constan drumbeat of Russia's meddling in the 2016 election despite the fact that no proof has been given so far. Similarly, the "Iran has nuclear weapons" narrative is constantly repeated, the reports by IAEA and the 17 Intelligence Agencies to the contrary not withstanding. ..."
"... The elevation of Muhammad bin Salman to the Crown Prince position will only make the Middle East situation worse. Israel will be able to manipulate him much more easily than the old guard. ..."
"... Trump has no control of most government functions, particularly foreign affairs. The Deep State takes care of that for him. The Deep State has been calling the shots for decades and all Presidents who weren't assassinated have complied. Democracies never work and ours quit long ago. ..."
"... The BIGGEST threat to the USA is from within, as we are nothing more than an occupied colony of Apartheid Israel, paying that bastard state tributes each year in the form of free money and weapons, political backing at the UN, and never tire of fighting her wars of conquest. ..."
"... The also have a choke-hold on Congress, which is always eager to wag their tail and hope their Yid Overlord gives them a treat and not a dressing-down in the Jew MSM, which is a career killer. ..."
"... Israel's current "agreements" and its "kowtowing" to Saudi Arabia speaks VOLUMES. Once again, Israel is about to get others to do their "dirty work" for them. ..."
"... There's no alternative to Saudi royal family rule of the peninsula. Who's there to replace them? Any other group, assuming there might be one somewhere waiting in the wings, would probably be anti-American and not as compliant as the Saudis. They've spent gigantic sums in the endless billions buying military equipment from the US, weapons they can't even fully use, as a way of making themselves indispensable customers. Many other billions of petrodollars find their way westward into our financial systems. They collaborate with the US in various schemes throughout the Muslim world using their intelligence services and money in furtherance of US goals. ..."
"... Mattis still seems stuck with his Iran obsession. Shame I thought he had the intellectual curiosity to adapt. Trump has good instincts, I hope Tillerson comes to the fore, and Bannon stays influential. ..."
"... Iran is US enemy #1 not only because it is against that country smaller than New Jersey with less people (Israel) but also because Iran has been a model for other countries to follow because of its intransigence to US oppression and attacks, financial political and cyber. As the world becomes multi-polar, Iran's repeated wise reactions to the world hegemon have been an inspiration to China and others to go their own way. The US can't stand that. ..."
"... Contrary to the popular view, Wahabism is necessary to keep the local population under control. Particularly the minority Shia population who live along the eastern coast, an area, which incidentally also has the all the oil reserves. USA fully understands this. Which is why they not only tolerated Wahabism, but strongly promoted it during Afghan jihad. The operation was by and large very successful btw. It was only during the '90s when religion became the new ideology for the resistance against the empire across the Muslim world. Zero surprise there because the preceding ideology, radical left wing politics was completely defeated. Iran became the first country in this pattern. The Iranian left was decimated by the Shah, another vassal. So the religious right became the new resistance. ..."
"... And as far as the KSA is considered, Wahabi preachers aren't allowed to attack the USA anyway. If any individual preacher so much as makes a squeak, he will be bent over a barrel. There won't be any "coming down very hard on Saudi Arabia" because USA already owns that country. ..."
"... The British Empire 'made' the House of Saud. Thinking it wise to use Wahhabism to control Shia Islam is like thinking it wise to use blacks to control the criminal tendencies of Mexicans. ..."
It is one of the great ironies that the United States, a land mass protected by two broad oceans
while also benefitting from the world's largest economy and most powerful military, persists in viewing
itself as a potential victim, vulnerable and surrounded by enemies. In reality, there are only two
significant potential threats to the U.S. The first consists of the only two non-friendly countries
– Russia and China – that have nuclear weapons and delivery systems that could hit the North American
continent and the second is the somewhat more amorphous danger represented by international terrorism.
And even given that, I would have to qualify the nature of the threats. Russia and China are
best described as adversaries or competitors rather than enemies as they have compelling interests
to avoid war, even if Washington is doing its best to turn them hostile. Neither has anything to
gain and much to lose by escalating a minor conflict into something that might well start World War
3. Indeed, both have strong incentives to avoid doing so, which makes the actual threat that they
represent more speculative than real. And, on the plus side, both can be extremely useful in dealing
with international issues where Washington has little or no leverage, to include resolving the North
Korea problem and Syria, so they U.S. has considerable benefits to be gained by cultivating their
cooperation.
Also, I would characterize international terrorism as a faux threat at a national level, though
one that has been exaggerated through the media and fearmongering to such an extent that it appears
much more dangerous than it actually is. It has been observed that more Americans are killed by falling
furniture than by terrorists in a year but terrorism has a particularly potency due to its unpredictability
and the fear that it creates. Due to that fear, American governments and businesses at all levels
have been willing to spend a trillion dollars per annum to defeat what might rationally be regarded
as a relatively minor problem.
So if the United States were serious about dealing with or deflecting the actual threats against
the American people it could first of all reduce its defense expenditures to make them commensurate
with the actual threat before concentrating on three things. First, would be to establish a solid
modus vivendi with Russia and China to avoid conflicts of interest that could develop into
actual tit-for-tat escalation. That would require an acceptance by Washington of the fact that both
Moscow and Beijing have regional spheres of influence that are defined by their interests. You don't
have to like the governance of either country, but their national interests have to be appreciated
and respected just as the United States has legitimate interests within its own hemisphere that must
be respected by Russia and China.
Second, Washington must, unfortunately, continue to spend on the Missile Defense Agency, which
supports anti-missile defenses if the search for a modus vivendi for some reason fails.
Mutual assured destruction is not a desirable strategic doctrine but being able to intercept incoming
missiles while also having some capability to strike back if attacked is a realistic deterrent given
the proliferation of nations that have both ballistic missiles and nukes.
Third and finally, there would be a coordinated program aimed at international terrorism based
equally on where the terror comes from and on physically preventing the terrorist attacks from taking
place. This is the element in national defense that is least clear cut. Dealing with Russia and China
involves working with mature regimes that have established diplomatic and military channels. Dealing
with terrorist non-state players is completely different as there are generally speaking no such
channels.
It should in theory be pretty simple to match threats and interests with actions since there are
only a handful that really matter, but apparently it is not so in practice. What is Washington doing?
First of all, the White House is deliberately turning its back on restoring a good working relationship
with Russia by insisting that Crimea be returned to Kiev, by blaming Moscow for the continued unrest
in Donbas, and by attacking Syrian military targets in spite of the fact that Russia is an ally of
the legitimate government in Damascus and the United States is an interloper in the conflict. Meanwhile
congress and the media are poisoning the waters through their dogged pursuit of Russiagate for political
reasons even though nearly a year of investigation has produced no actual evidence of malfeasance
on the part of U.S. officials and precious little in terms of Moscow's alleged interference.
Playing tough to the international audience has unfortunately become part of the American Exceptionalism
DNA. Upon his arrival in Warsaw last week, Donald Trump
doubled down on the Russia-bashing,
calling on Moscow to "cease its destabilizing activities in Ukraine and elsewhere and its support
for hostile regimes including Syria and Iran." He then recommended that Russia should "join the community
of responsible nations in our fight against common enemies and in defense of civilization itself."
The comments in Warsaw were unnecessary, even if the Poles wanted to hear them, and were both
highly insulting and ignorant. It was not a good start for Donald's second overseas trip, even though
the speech has otherwise been interpreted as a welcome defense of Western civilization and European
values. Trump also followed up with a two hour plus discussion with President Vladimir Putin in which
the two apparently agreed to differ on the alleged Russian hacking of the American election. The
Trump-Putin meeting indicated that restoring some kind of working relationship with Russia is still
possible, as it is in everyone's interest to do so.
Fighting terrorism is quite another matter and the United States approach is the reverse of what
a rational player would be seeking to accomplish. The U.S. is rightly assisting in the bid to eradicate
ISIS in Syria and Iraq but it is simultaneously attacking the most effective fighters against that
group, namely the Syrian government armed forces and the Shi'ite militias being provided by Iran
and Hezbollah. Indeed, it is becoming increasingly clear that at least some in the Trump Administration
are seeking to use the Syrian engagement as a stepping stone to war with Iran.
As was the case in the months preceding the ill-fated invasion of Iraq in 2003, all buttons are
being pushed to vilify Iran. Recent reports suggest that two individuals in the White House in particular
have been pressuring the Trump administration's generals to escalate U.S. involvement in Syria to
bring about a war with Tehran sooner rather than later. They are Ezra Cohen-Watnick and Derek Harvey,
reported to be holdovers from the team brought into the White House by the virulently anti-Iranian
former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.
Cohen-Watnick is thirty years old and
has little relevant experience for the position he holds, senior director for intelligence on
the National Security Council. But his inexperience counts for little as he is good friend of son-in-law
Jared Kushner. He has told the New York Times that "wants to use American spies to help
oust the Iranian government," a comment that reflects complete ignorance, both regarding Iran and
also concerning spy agency capabilities. His partner in crime Harvey, a former military officer who
advised General David Petraeus when he was in Iraq, is the NSC advisor on the Middle East.
Both Cohen-Watnick and Harvey share the neoconservative belief that the Iranians and their
proxies in Syria and Iraq need to be confronted by force,
an opportunity described by Foreign Policy magazine as having developed into "a pivotal
moment that will determine whether Iran or the United States exerts influence over Iraq and Syria."
Other neocon promoters of conflict with Iran have described their horror at a possible Shi'ite "bridge"
or "land corridor" through the Arab heartland, running from Iran itself through Iraq and Syria and
connecting on the Mediterranean with Hezbollah in Lebanon.
What danger to the U.S. or its actual treaty allies an Iranian influenced land corridor would
constitute remains a mystery but there is no shortage of Iran haters in the White House. Former senior
CIA analyst Paul Pillar
sees "unrelenting hostility from the Trump administration" towards Iran and notes "cherry-picking"
of the intelligence to make a case for war, similar to what occurred with Iraq in 2002-3. And even
though Secretary of Defense James Mattis and National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster have pushed
back against the impulsive Cohen-Watnick and Harvey, their objections are tactical as they do not
wish to make U.S. forces in the region vulnerable to attacks coming from a new direction. Otherwise
they too consider Iran as America's number one active enemy and believe that war is inevitable. Donald
Trump has unfortunately also jumped directly into the argument on the side of Saudi Arabia and Israel,
both of which would like to see Washington go to war with Tehran on their behalf.
The problem with the Trump analysis is that he has his friends and enemies confused. He is actually
supporting Saudi Arabia, the source of most of the terrorism that has convulsed Western Europe and
the United States while also killing hundreds of thousands of fellow Muslims. Random terrorism to
kill as many "infidels and heretics" as possible to create fear is a Sunni Muslim phenomenon, supported
financially and doctrinally by the Saudis. To be sure, Iran has used terror tactics to eliminate
opponents and select targets overseas, to include several multiple-victim bombings, but it has never
engaged in anything like the recent series of attacks in France and Britain. So the United States
is moving seemingly inexorably towards war with a country that itself constitutes no actual terrorist
threat, unless it is attacked, in support of a country that very much is part of the threat and also
on behalf of Israel, which for its part would prefer to see Americans die in a war against Iran rather
that sacrificing its own sons and daughters.
Realizing who the real enemy actually is and addressing the actual terrorism problem would not
only involve coming down very hard on Saudi Arabia rather than Iran, it would also require some serious
thinking in the White House about the extent to which America's armed interventions all over Asia
and Africa have made many people hate us enough to strap on a suicide vest and have a go. Saudi financing
and Washington's propensity to go to war and thereby create a deep well of hatred just might be the
principal causative elements in the rise of global terrorism. Do I think that Donald Trump's White
House has the courage to take such a step and change direction? Unfortunately, no.
Saudi Arabia is THE worst nation in the Middle East.
Why does the US follow along blindly? Well, it is a WASP thing. We are the new Brit Empire.
By the height of the Victorian era, virtually all English Elites were philoSemitic. Roughly half
of the UK WASP Elite philoSemitism was pro-Jewish and half was pro-Arabic/Islamic. And by the
time of WW1, the English Elite pro-Arabic/Islamic faction came to adore the house of Saud. So,
our foreign policy is merely WASP culture continuing to ruin most of the rest of the world, including
all the whites ruled by WASP Elites.
In reality, there are only two significant potential threats to the U.S. The first consists
of the only two non-friendly countries – Russia and China – that have nuclear weapons and delivery
systems that could hit the North American continent and the second is the somewhat more amorphous
danger represented by international terrorism.
No, the only threats are the following three:
Too many Meso-Americans invading from the border. These people have totally changed the SW
and may drastically alter parts of US as well. This is an invasion. Meso-Americans are lackluster,
but Too Many translates into real power, especially in elections.
The other threat is Hindu-Indian. Indians are just itching to unload 100s of millions of their
kind to Anglo nations. Unlike Chinese population that is plummeting, Indian population is still
growing.
The other threat, biggest of all, is the Negro. It's not Russian missiles or Chinese troops
that turned Detroit into a hellhole. It is Negroes. And look at Baltimore, New Orleans, Selma,
Memphis, Oakland, St. Louis, South Side Chicago, etc.
Afromic Bomb is more hellish than atomic bomb. Compare Detroit and Hiroshima.
Also, even though nukes are deadly, they will likely never be used. They are for defensive
purposes only. The real missiles that will destroy the West is the Afro penis. US has nukes to
destroy the world, but they haven't been used even during peak of cold war. But millions of Negro
puds have impregnanted and colonized white wombs to kill white-babies-that-could-have-been and
replaced them with mulatto Negro kids who will turn out like Colin Kapernick.
The real missile gap is the threat posed by negro dong on white dong. The negro dong is so
potent that even Japanese women are going Negroid and having kids with Negro men and raising these
kids as 'Japanese' to beat up real Japanese. So, if Japan with few blacks is turning like this,
imagine the threat posed by Negroes on whites in the West.
Look at youtube of street life and club life in Paris and London. Negro missiles are conquering
the white race and spreading the savage genes.
Look how Polish women welcomed the Negro missile cuz they are infected with jungle fever. ACOWW
will be the real undoing of the West.
Besides what Priss Factor said above the following is to be reinforced with every real
American man, woman and child.
Israel , which for its part would prefer to see Americans die in a war against
Iran rather that sacrificing its own sons and daughters.
Israel, the REAL enemy! ,
@K India is looking to unload hindus to U.S? Quite the opposite. India is 'losing' its
best brains to the U.S so its trying to attract them back to their country. For eg: The
chief- architect of IBM's watson is a hindu indian and so is the head of IBM's neuro-morphic
computing. These people are advancing western technology.... civilian and also defense (IBM
is collaborating with the american defense organisation DARPA) instead of helping india
achieve technological competence. And most of other super intelligent indians also india
is losing them to the west.
(i dont hate the west for doing that. Any country in amercia's place would have done
the same. It is india's job to keep its best brains working for it and not for others. And
india is trying its best to do that albeit unsuccessfully.)
100 Words #UNRIG adds AMERICA FIRST, NOT ISRAEL to Agenda.
."A.I.P.A.C.. you're outta business!"
Due to slanderous attacks by a Mossad internet psy-op,
Steele now prioritizes Israeli malign influence on US. Also, check out Cynthia McKinney's twitter.
#UNRIG – Robert David Steele Weekly Update
@Durruti Nice action approach to cure ills of society.
Enclosing copy of flier we have distributed - with a similar approach at a cure.
*Flier distributed is adjusted & a bit more attractive (1 sheet - both sides).
The key is to Restore the Republic, which was definitively destroyed on November 22, 1963.
Feel free to contact.
Use this, or send me a note by way of a response.
For THE RESTORATION OF THE REPUBLIC
"We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal governments are instituted
among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form
of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish
it and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles "
The above is a portion of the Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson.
We submit the following facts to the citizens of the United States.
The government of the United States has been a Totalitarian Oligarchy since the military
financial aristocracy destroyed the Democratic Republic on November 22, 1963 , when they assassinated
the last democratically elected president, John Fitzgerald Kennedy , and overthrew his
government. All following governments have been unconstitutional frauds. Attempts by Robert
Kennedy and Martin Luther King to restore the Republic were interrupted by their murder.
A subsequent 12 year colonial war against Vietnam , conducted by the murderers of Kennedy,
left 2 million dead in a wake of napalm and burning villages.
In 1965, the U.S. government orchestrated the slaughter of 1 million unarmed Indonesian
civilians.
In the decade that followed the CIA murdered 100,000 Native Americans in Guatemala .
In the 1970s, the Oligarchy began the destruction and looting of America's middle class, by
encouraging the export of industry and jobs to parts of the world where workers were paid bare
subsistence wages. The 2008, Bailout of the Nation's Oligarchs cost American taxpayers
$13trillion. The long decline of the local economy has led to the political decline of our hard
working citizens, as well as the decay of cities, towns, and infrastructure, such as education.
The impoverishment of America's middle class has undermined the nation's financial stability.
Without a productive foundation, the government has accumulated a huge debt in excess of $19trillion.
This debt will have to be paid, or suffered by future generations. Concurrently, the top 1% of
the nation's population has benefited enormously from the discomfiture of the rest. The interest
rate has been reduced to 0, thereby slowly robbing millions of depositors of their savings, as
their savings cannot stay even with the inflation rate.
The government spends the declining national wealth on bloody and never ending military adventures,
and is or has recently conducted unconstitutional wars against 9 nations. The Oligarchs maintain
700 military bases in 131 countries; they spend as much on military weapons of terror as the rest
of the nations of the world combined. Tellingly, more than half the government budget is spent
on the military and 16 associated secret agencies.
The nightmare of a powerful centralized government crushing the rights of the people, so feared
by the Founders of the United States, has become a reality. The government of Obama/Biden, as
with previous administrations such as Bush/Cheney, and whoever is chosen in November 2016, operates
a Gulag of dozens of concentration camps, where prisoners are denied trials, and routinely tortured.
The Patriot Act and The National Defense Authorizations Act , enacted by both Democratic
and Republican factions of the oligarchy, serve to establish a legal cover for their terror.
The nation's media is controlled, and, with the school systems, serve to brainwash the population;
the people are intimidated and treated with contempt.
The United States is No longer Sovereign
The United States is no longer a sovereign nation. Its government, The Executive, and Congress,
is bought, utterly owned and controlled by foreign and domestic wealthy Oligarchs, such as the
Rothschilds, Rockefellers, and Duponts , to name only a few of the best known.
The 2016 Electoral Circus will anoint new actors to occupy the same Unconstitutional Government,
with its controlling International Oligarchs. Clinton, Trump, whomever, are willing accomplices
for imperialist international murder, and destruction of nations, including ours.
For Love of Country
The Restoration of the Republic will be a Revolutionary Act, that will cancel all previous
debts owed to that unconstitutional regime and its business supporters. All debts, including Student
Debts, will be canceled. Our citizens will begin, anew, with a clean slate.
As American Founder , Thomas Jefferson wrote, in a letter to James Madison:
"I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be self evident, 'that the earth belongs in usufruct
to the living':"
"Then I say the earth belongs to each of these generations, during it's course, fully, and
in their own right. The 2d. Generation receives it clear of the debts and incumberances of the
1st. The 3d of the 2d. and so on. For if the 1st. Could charge it with a debt, then the earth
would belong to the dead and not the living generation."
Our Citizens must restore the centrality of the constitution, establishing a less powerful
government which will ensure President Franklin Roosevelt's Four Freedoms , freedom of
speech and expression, freedom to worship God in ones own way, freedom from want "which means
economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peace time life for its inhabitants
" and freedom from fear "which means a world-wide reduction of armaments "
Once restored: The Constitution will become, once again, the law of the land and of a free
people. We will establish a government, hold elections, begin to direct traffic, arrest criminal
politicians of the tyrannical oligarchy, and, in short, repair the damage of the previous totalitarian
governments.
For the Democratic Republic!
Sons and Daughters of Liberty [email protected]
In reality, there are only two significant potential threats to the U.S. The first consists
of the only two non-friendly countries – Russia and China – that have nuclear weapons and delivery
systems that could hit the North American continent and the second is the somewhat more amorphous
danger represented by international terrorism.
You forgot the third significant potential threat from a friendly nation, i.e. Israel.
Israel will sabotage any effort to normallize relations with Russia or even Iran. They will resort
to false flag operations to start a war with Iran.
The problem with this White House, as well as the previous ones, is that none of the so-called
experts really understand the Middle East. The US is not interested in having friendly relations
with all nations. All her efforts are towards one goal, the world domination. Even if President
Trump wanted to normalize relations with Russia, the MSM, the democrats, as well as, his republican
opponents will not let him.
That is why the constan drumbeat of Russia's meddling in the 2016 election despite the
fact that no proof has been given so far. Similarly, the "Iran has nuclear weapons" narrative
is constantly repeated, the reports by IAEA and the 17 Intelligence Agencies to the contrary not
withstanding.
The elevation of Muhammad bin Salman to the Crown Prince position will only make the Middle
East situation worse. Israel will be able to manipulate him much more easily than the old guard.
The western world is dependent on oil, especially ME oil. Saudi Arabia was made the USA's main
oil supplier at the end of 1944. The Saud dynasty depends on the USA. That the Sauds would sponsor
terrorism, why would they ? And which terrorism is Muslim terrorism ?
Sept 11 not, Boston not,
Madrid and London very questionably. We then are left with minor issues, the Paris shooting the
biggest. That Saudi Arabia is waging war in Yemen certainly is with USA support. The Saudi army
does what the USA wants them to do.
Mr. Giraldi, you forgot to mention Israel as one of America's biggest liabilities besides Saudi
Arabia. But with such amateur dramatics in the White House and on the Security Council, the US
is destined for war but only against the wrong enemy such as Iran. If the Saudis and the right-wing
Netanyahu regime want to get after Iran they should do it alone. They surely will get a bloody
nose. Americans have shed enough blood for these rascal regimes. President Trump should continue
with his rapprochement towards Russia because both nation states have more in common than expected.
I'm a little disappointed in this article. Not that it's a bad article per se: perfectly rational,
reasonable, academic even. But unfortunately, it's simply naive.
"Realizing who the real enemy actually is and addressing the actual terrorism problem would not
only involve coming down very hard on Saudi Arabia rather than Iran, it would also require some
serious thinking in the White House about the extent to which America's armed interventions all
over Asia and Africa have made many people hate us enough to strap on a suicide vest and have
a go."
Realize who the real enemy is ? Come down hard on the Saud's ? No -- really ?
The titanic elephant in the room -- that US foreign policy is not governed by "rationality"
but by "special interests" seems .missing. Israel, the Saudi's themselves, the MIC & so on & so
forth ARE the special interests who literally "realise" US Policy.
200 Words Well, the real enemy of the people are the real terrorists behind the scenes. Those
who planned the 9/11 false flag. Those who sent the Anthrax letters to resisting congress members.
Those who pre-planned the wars of aggression in the whole middle east.
So any appeal to the
"White House" is almost pointless since the White House is one element of the power structure
captured by the war-criminal lunatics.
To change something people in the US should at first stop buying their war criminal lying mass
media.
Then they should stop supporting ANY foreign intervention by the US and should stop believing
any of the preposterous lies released by the media, the state dept., or any other neocon outlet.
Actually Trump was probably elected because he said he was anti-intervention and anti-media.
But did it help?
The US needs mass resistance (demonstrations, strikes, boycotts, non-participation, sit-ins,
grass-root information, or whatever) against their neocon/zionist/mafia/cia power groups or nothing
will change.
We need demonstrations against NATO, against war, against false flag terrorism, against using
terrorists as secret armies, against war propaganda!
B.t.w. Iran has always been one of the main goals. Think of it: Why did the US attack Afghanistan
and Iraq? What have those two countries in common? (Hint: a look on the map helps to answer this
question.)
I am beginning to get interested in why some people are sure 9/11 was a false flag affair
covered up by a lot of lies. So may I try my opening question on you. How much, if any of
it, have you read of the official 9/11 commission report? ,
"The White House is targeting Iran but should instead focus on Saudi Arabia"
Trump has no control of most government functions, particularly foreign affairs. The Deep
State takes care of that for him. The Deep State has been calling the shots for decades and all
Presidents who weren't assassinated have complied. Democracies never work and ours quit long ago.
I fully agree that attacking Iran would be yet another disaster but I don't understand why Saudi
Arabia is portrayed as an 'enemy', the 'real' one, no less, in alt-media circles like this.
I mean let's be honest with ourselves. KSA is the definition of a vassal state. Has been
so since the state established established relations with the USA in the 1940s and the status
was confirmed during the 1960s under King Faisal. Oil for security.
Why pretend that they have any operational clearance from the US?
Contrary to the popular view, Wahabism is necessary to keep the local population under control.
Particularly the minority Shia population who live along the eastern coast, an area, which incidentally
also has the all the oil reserves.
USA fully understands this. Which is why they not only tolerated Wahabism, but strongly promoted
it during Afghan jihad. The operation was by and large very successful btw.
It was only during the '90s when religion became the new ideology for the resistance against
the empire across the Muslim world. Zero surprise there because the preceding ideology, radical
left wing politics was completely defeated. Iran became the first country in this pattern. The
Iranian left was decimated by the Shah, another vassal. So the religious right became the new
resistance.
And as far as the KSA is considered, Wahabi preachers aren't allowed to attack the USA anyway.
If any individual preacher so much as makes a squeak, he will be bent over a barrel. There won't
be any "coming down very hard on Saudi Arabia" because USA already owns that country.
So what's the answer? Well, props to Phillip as he understood – "it would also require some
serious thinking in the White House about the extent to which America's armed interventions all
over Asia and Africa have made many people hate us enough to strap on a suicide vest and have
a go."
Your analysis starts too late. The US supports Wahhabism and the House of Saud because
the pro-Arabic/Islamic English Elites of 1910 and 1920 and 1935 supported Wahhabism and
the House of Saud.
The British Empire 'made' the House of Saud,
Thinking it wise to use Wahhabism to control Shia Islam is like thinking it wise to use
blacks to control the criminal tendencies of Mexicans.
In reality, there are only two significant potential threats to the U.S. The first consists
of the only two non-friendly countries – Russia and China – that have nuclear weapons and delivery
systems that could hit the North American continent and the second is the somewhat more amorphous
danger represented by international terrorism.
No, the only threats are the following three:
Too many Meso-Americans invading from the border. These people have totally changed the SW
and may drastically alter parts of US as well. This is an invasion. Meso-Americans are lackluster,
but Too Many translates into real power, especially in elections.
The other threat is Hindu-Indian. Indians are just itching to unload 100s of millions of their
kind to Anglo nations. Unlike Chinese population that is plummeting, Indian population is still
growing.
The other threat, biggest of all, is the Negro. It's not Russian missiles or Chinese troops
that turned Detroit into a hellhole. It is Negroes. And look at Baltimore, New Orleans, Selma,
Memphis, Oakland, St. Louis, South Side Chicago, etc.
Afromic Bomb is more hellish than atomic bomb. Compare Detroit and Hiroshima.
Also, even though nukes are deadly, they will likely never be used. They are for defensive
purposes only. The real missiles that will destroy the West is the Afro penis. US has nukes to
destroy the world, but they haven't been used even during peak of cold war. But millions of Negro
puds have impregnanted and colonized white wombs to kill white-babies-that-could-have-been and
replaced them with mulatto Negro kids who will turn out like Colin Kapernick.
The real missile gap is the threat posed by negro dong on white dong. The negro dong is so
potent that even Japanese women are going Negroid and having kids with Negro men and raising these
kids as 'Japanese' to beat up real Japanese. So, if Japan with few blacks is turning like this,
imagine the threat posed by Negroes on whites in the West.
Look at youtube of street life and club life in Paris and London. Negro missiles are conquering
the white race and spreading the savage genes.
Look how Polish women welcomed the Negro missile cuz they are infected with jungle fever. ACOWW
will be the real undoing of the West.
Replies:
@Sowhat And what grudge is that? The only two I can find are connected. The deposing of our
puppets, the Assads and the nationalization of their natural resources. I have the impression
that it removes around future hegemon and the rich gas reserves off their coast and the decades
long desire to run a pipeline west to the Mediterranean.
The BIGGEST threat to the USA is from within, as we are nothing more than an occupied
colony of Apartheid Israel, paying that bastard state tributes each year in the form of free money
and weapons, political backing at the UN, and never tire of fighting her wars of conquest.
You
won't see Israeli troops in the streets, since their confederates control the economy thru their
control of the FED and US Treasury and most of those TBTF banks, which we always bail out, no
matter the cost.
The also have a choke-hold on Congress, which is always eager to wag their tail and hope their
Yid Overlord gives them a treat and not a dressing-down in the Jew MSM, which is a career killer.
The WH is also Israeli territory, especially now with a Jew NYC slumlord now Trump's top adviser
and his fashion model faux Jew daughter egging Daddy on to kill more Arab babies, since she can't
stand the sight of dead babies
@Paul Well, the real enemy of the people are the real terrorists behind the scenes. Those
who planned the 9/11 false flag. Those who sent the Anthrax letters to resisting congress members.
Those who pre-planned the wars of aggression in the whole middle east.
So any appeal to the
"White House" is almost pointless since the White House is one element of the power structure
captured by the war-criminal lunatics.
To change something people in the US should at first stop buying their war criminal lying mass
media.
Then they should stop supporting ANY foreign intervention by the US and should stop believing
any of the preposterous lies released by the media, the state dept., or any other neocon outlet.
Actually Trump was probably elected because he said he was anti-intervention and anti-media.
But did it help?
The US needs mass resistance (demonstrations, strikes, boycotts, non-participation, sit-ins,
grass-root information, or whatever) against their neocon/zionist/mafia/cia power groups or nothing
will change.
We need demonstrations against NATO, against war, against false flag terrorism, against using
terrorists as secret armies, against war propaganda!
B.t.w. Iran has always been one of the main goals. Think of it: Why did the US attack Afghanistan
and Iraq? What have those two countries in common? (Hint: a look on the map helps to answer this
question.) I am beginning to get interested in why some people are sure 9/11 was a false flag
affair covered up by a lot of lies. So may I try my opening question on you. How much, if any
of it, have you read of the official 9/11 commission report?
@eah The WH should focus on the USA. And what grudge is that? The only two I can find are
connected. The deposing of our puppets, the Assads and the nationalization of their natural resources.
I have the impression that it removes around future hegemon and the rich gas reserves off their
coast and the decades long desire to run a pipeline west to the Mediterranean.
Israel's current "agreements" and its "kowtowing" to Saudi Arabia speaks VOLUMES. Once again,
Israel is about to get others to do their "dirty work" for them.
The point that everybody seems
to miss is the fact that Judaism and Islam are inextricably linked. In fact, one could safely
argue that Islam is an arabicized form of Judaism.
1. Both Judaism and Islam promote their own forms of supremacy, relegating non-adherents as
"lesser human beings", or in Judaism's take "no better than livestock, albeit with souls, to be
used for the advantage of the jew".
2. Both systems proscribe lesser (or no) punishment for those of each respective "tribe" who
transgress against "outsiders"–goyim or infidels. Both systems proscribe much harsher punishments
against "outsiders" who transgress against those of each respective "tribe".
3. When it comes to "equality under law", Israel is no better than Saudi Arabia, as a jew who
has a disagreement with an "outsider" will always have the advantage of a judicial system which
almost always rules for the jew.
4. Both Judaism and Islam have taken it upon themselves to be arbiters of what the rest of
the world should follow, demanding that "outsiders" conform to what THEY believe, thinking that
they know what is best (for the rest of us). Just look at the demands moslems (who are guests
in western Europe) make of local non-moslem populations.
Read the jewish Talmud and islamic Koran you will find virtually identical passages that demonize
and marginalize those of us who are "goyim" or "infidels".
A pox on both their houses
Now before I say what I'm going to say I want to say that Israel has the right to define
and defend her interests just as China, Russia and USA do, as Geraldi says above. No nation
or people can be denied this (without force).
Having said that, I am grateful to you, anarchyst, for having pointed out the familial
similarities between Islam and Judaism. In addition to what you say there is the fact that
the Jewish genome is virtually identical to that of the Palestinians--except for that of
Ashkenazi Jews who are more than half European.
As far as I can see, Ashkenazi Jews have an existential choice. They can identify with
their European half whereby they acknowledge that the Greeks and not Moses made the greatest
contributions to humanity (and more particularly, their humanity) or they can go with their
atavistic Semitic side and regress to barbarism. Science, Logic, Math, History, Architecture,
Drama and Music or blowing up Buddhas and shrouding your women. Take your pick.
Of course, this is sorta unfair in as much as they were kicked out of Europe and now
dwell in the ME where if they try to act like Europeans they will be persecuted by their
neighbors as apostates. The Jews do indeed have a tough row to hoe. ,
@bjondo Jews/Judaism bring death, destruction, misery.
Muslims/Islam (minus Western creation of "Muslim"terrorists) brought golden ages to many
areas.
Christianity and Islam elevate the human spirit. Judaism degrades.
June 7, 2017 We Have Met the Evil Empire and It Is Us
Life in America was pure injustice, the
lash and the iron boot, despite the version of history we have been given by the Ford and Rockefeller
Foundations who "re-invented" America and its history through taking control of public education
in the late 1940s. You see, the multi-generational ignorance we bask in today is not unplanned.
The threat represented by advances in communications and other technology was recognized and dealt
with, utterly quashed at birth.
@anarchyst Israel's current "agreements" and its "kowtowing" to Saudi Arabia speaks VOLUMES.
Once again, Israel is about to get others to do their "dirty work" for them.
The point that everybody seems to miss is the fact that Judaism and Islam are inextricably linked.
In fact, one could safely argue that Islam is an arabicized form of Judaism.
1. Both Judaism
and Islam promote their own forms of supremacy, relegating non-adherents as "lesser human beings",
or in Judaism's take "no better than livestock, albeit with souls, to be used for the advantage
of the jew".
2. Both systems proscribe lesser (or no) punishment for those of each respective "tribe" who
transgress against "outsiders"--goyim or infidels. Both systems proscribe much harsher punishments
against "outsiders" who transgress against those of each respective "tribe".
3. When it comes to "equality under law", Israel is no better than Saudi Arabia, as a jew who
has a disagreement with an "outsider" will always have the advantage of a judicial system which
almost always rules for the jew.
4. Both Judaism and Islam have taken it upon themselves to be arbiters of what the rest of
the world should follow, demanding that "outsiders" conform to what THEY believe, thinking that
they know what is best (for the rest of us). Just look at the demands moslems (who are guests
in western Europe) make of local non-moslem populations.
Read the jewish Talmud and islamic Koran...you will find virtually identical passages that
demonize and marginalize those of us who are "goyim" or "infidels".
A pox on both their houses... Now before I say what I'm going to say I want to say that Israel
has the right to define and defend her interests just as China, Russia and USA do, as Geraldi
says above. No nation or people can be denied this (without force).
Having said that, I am grateful to you, anarchyst, for having pointed out the familial similarities
between Islam and Judaism. In addition to what you say there is the fact that the Jewish genome
is virtually identical to that of the Palestinians–except for that of Ashkenazi Jews who are more
than half European.
As far as I can see, Ashkenazi Jews have an existential choice. They can identify with their
European half whereby they acknowledge that the Greeks and not Moses made the greatest contributions
to humanity (and more particularly, their humanity) or they can go with their atavistic Semitic
side and regress to barbarism. Science, Logic, Math, History, Architecture, Drama and Music or
blowing up Buddhas and shrouding your women. Take your pick.
Of course, this is sorta unfair in as much as they were kicked out of Europe and now dwell
in the ME where if they try to act like Europeans they will be persecuted by their neighbors as
apostates. The Jews do indeed have a tough row to hoe.
Trump is torn between Israel's permanent need to weaken its powerful neighbors (Iraq, Iran) and
the necessity to protect the USA from terrorists attacks.
Iran is an hypothetical threat to
Israel, Saudi Arabia has proven to be a threat to the world.
In Tehran and other Iranian cities including Iran's holiest, that is, most conservative cities
like Mashad. there are taxi companies owned and run by women.
Tehran traffic makes NYC look like Mayberry RFD; many Iranians use small motorcycles to commute
and take care of daily chores. It's not at all uncommon to see an Iranian woman in full chador
driving a motorcycle with a child and parcels in tow.
Iranian women could offer to teach the women of Saudi Arabia to drive.
@Wizard of Oz I am beginning to get interested in why some people are sure 9/11 was a false
flag affair covered up by a lot of lies. So may I try my opening question on you. How much, if
any of it, have you read of the official 9/11 commission report? A better question: Have YOU read
The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation by Phillip Shenon?
There's no alternative to Saudi royal family rule of the peninsula. Who's there to replace them?
Any other group, assuming there might be one somewhere waiting in the wings, would probably be
anti-American and not as compliant as the Saudis. They've spent gigantic sums in the endless billions
buying military equipment from the US, weapons they can't even fully use, as a way of making themselves
indispensable customers. Many other billions of petrodollars find their way westward into our
financial systems. They collaborate with the US in various schemes throughout the Muslim world
using their intelligence services and money in furtherance of US goals.
They live the royal life thanks to being able to use the money from their nation's resource
wealth as their own personal kitty, living in palaces, buying obscene amounts of jewelry and other
luxury goods, and so on. They'll never give that up and being a close ally of the US affords them
protection which of course they pay for. They may be seen as an enemy by the average person but
not at the elite level with whom they all consort and roll around in the money with.
Mattis still
seems stuck with his Iran obsession. Shame I thought he had the intellectual curiosity to adapt.
Trump has good instincts, I hope Tillerson comes to the fore, and Bannon stays influential.
Iran is US enemy #1 not only because it is against that country smaller than New Jersey
with less people (Israel) but also because Iran has been a model for other countries to follow
because of its intransigence to US oppression and attacks, financial political and cyber. As the
world becomes multi-polar, Iran's repeated wise reactions to the world hegemon have been an inspiration
to China and others to go their own way. The US can't stand that.
@Paul Well, the real enemy of the people are the real terrorists behind the scenes. Those
who planned the 9/11 false flag. Those who sent the Anthrax letters to resisting congress members.
Those who pre-planned the wars of aggression in the whole middle east.
So any appeal to the "White House" is almost pointless since the White House is one element
of the power structure captured by the war-criminal lunatics.
To change something people in the US should at first stop buying their war criminal lying mass
media.
Then they should stop supporting ANY foreign intervention by the US and should stop believing
any of the preposterous lies released by the media, the state dept., or any other neocon outlet.
Actually Trump was probably elected because he said he was anti-intervention and anti-media.
But did it help?
The US needs mass resistance (demonstrations, strikes, boycotts, non-participation, sit-ins,
grass-root information, or whatever) against their neocon/zionist/mafia/cia power groups or nothing
will change.
We need demonstrations against NATO, against war, against false flag terrorism, against using
terrorists as secret armies, against war propaganda!
B.t.w. Iran has always been one of the main goals. Think of it: Why did the US attack Afghanistan
and Iraq? What have those two countries in common? (Hint: a look on the map helps to answer this
question.) "Well, the real enemy of the people are the real terrorists behind the scenes. Those
who planned the 9/11 false flag."
Saudi Arabia is THE worst nation in the Middle East.
Why does the US follow along blindly? Well, it is a WASP thing. We are the new Brit Empire.
By the height of the Victorian era, virtually all English Elites were philoSemitic. Roughly half
of the UK WASP Elite philoSemitism was pro-Jewish and half was pro-Arabic/Islamic.
And by the time of WW1, the English Elite pro-Arabic/Islamic faction came to adore the house
of Saud.
So, our foreign policy is merely WASP culture continuing to ruin most of the rest of the world,
including all the whites ruled by WASP Elites. SECOND worst,my friend.
@Chad I fully agree that attacking Iran would be yet another disaster but I don't understand
why Saudi Arabia is portrayed as an 'enemy', the 'real' one, no less, in alt-media circles like
this.
I mean let's be honest with ourselves. KSA is the definition of a vassal state. Has
been so since the state established established relations with the USA in the 1940s and the status
was confirmed during the 1960s under King Faisal. Oil for security.
Why pretend that they have any operational clearance from the US?
Contrary to the popular view, Wahabism is necessary to keep the local population under control.
Particularly the minority Shia population who live along the eastern coast, an area, which incidentally
also has the all the oil reserves. USA fully understands this. Which is why they not only tolerated Wahabism, but strongly promoted
it during Afghan jihad. The operation was by and large very successful btw. It was only during the '90s when religion became the new ideology for the resistance against
the empire across the Muslim world. Zero surprise there because the preceding ideology, radical
left wing politics was completely defeated. Iran became the first country in this pattern. The
Iranian left was decimated by the Shah, another vassal. So the religious right became the new
resistance.
And as far as the KSA is considered, Wahabi preachers aren't allowed to attack the USA anyway.
If any individual preacher so much as makes a squeak, he will be bent over a barrel. There won't
be any "coming down very hard on Saudi Arabia" because USA already owns that country.
So what's the answer? Well, props to Phillip as he understood - "it would also require some
serious thinking in the White House about the extent to which America's armed interventions all
over Asia and Africa have made many people hate us enough to strap on a suicide vest and have
a go."
Bingo. Your analysis starts too late. The US supports Wahhabism and the House of Saud because
the pro-Arabic/Islamic English Elites of 1910 and 1920 and 1935 supported Wahhabism and the House
of Saud.
The British Empire 'made' the House of Saud. Thinking it wise to use Wahhabism to control Shia Islam is like thinking it wise to use blacks
to control the criminal tendencies of Mexicans.
1,000 Words
@RobinG#UNRIG adds AMERICA FIRST, NOT ISRAEL to Agenda.
..................."A.I.P.A.C.. you're outta business!"
Due to slanderous attacks by a Mossad internet psy-op, Steele now prioritizes Israeli malign
influence on US. Also, check out Cynthia McKinney's twitter.
#UNRIG - Robert David Steele Weekly Update Nice action approach to cure ills of society.
Enclosing copy of flier we have distributed – with a similar approach at a cure.
*Flier distributed is adjusted & a bit more attractive (1 sheet – both sides).
The key is to Restore the Republic, which was definitively destroyed on November 22, 1963.
Feel free to contact.
Use this, or send me a note by way of a response.
For THE RESTORATION OF THE REPUBLIC
"We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal governments are instituted
among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form
of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish
it and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles "
The above is a portion of the Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson.
We submit the following facts to the citizens of the United States.
The government of the United States has been a Totalitarian Oligarchy since the military
financial aristocracy destroyed the Democratic Republic on November 22, 1963 , when they assassinated
the last democratically elected president, John Fitzgerald Kennedy , and overthrew his
government. All following governments have been unconstitutional frauds. Attempts by Robert
Kennedy and Martin Luther King to restore the Republic were interrupted by their murder.
A subsequent 12 year colonial war against Vietnam , conducted by the murderers of Kennedy,
left 2 million dead in a wake of napalm and burning villages.
In 1965, the U.S. government orchestrated the slaughter of 1 million unarmed Indonesian
civilians.
In the decade that followed the CIA murdered 100,000 Native Americans in Guatemala .
In the 1970s, the Oligarchy began the destruction and looting of America's middle class, by
encouraging the export of industry and jobs to parts of the world where workers were paid bare
subsistence wages. The 2008, Bailout of the Nation's Oligarchs cost American taxpayers
$13trillion. The long decline of the local economy has led to the political decline of our hard
working citizens, as well as the decay of cities, towns, and infrastructure, such as education.
The impoverishment of America's middle class has undermined the nation's financial stability.
Without a productive foundation, the government has accumulated a huge debt in excess of $19trillion.
This debt will have to be paid, or suffered by future generations. Concurrently, the top 1% of
the nation's population has benefited enormously from the discomfiture of the rest. The interest
rate has been reduced to 0, thereby slowly robbing millions of depositors of their savings, as
their savings cannot stay even with the inflation rate.
The government spends the declining national wealth on bloody and never ending military adventures,
and is or has recently conducted unconstitutional wars against 9 nations. The Oligarchs maintain
700 military bases in 131 countries; they spend as much on military weapons of terror as the rest
of the nations of the world combined. Tellingly, more than half the government budget is spent
on the military and 16 associated secret agencies.
The nightmare of a powerful centralized government crushing the rights of the people, so feared
by the Founders of the United States, has become a reality. The government of Obama/Biden, as
with previous administrations such as Bush/Cheney, and whoever is chosen in November 2016, operates
a Gulag of dozens of concentration camps, where prisoners are denied trials, and routinely tortured.
The Patriot Act and The National Defense Authorizations Act , enacted by both Democratic
and Republican factions of the oligarchy, serve to establish a legal cover for their terror.
The nation's media is controlled, and, with the school systems, serve to brainwash the population;
the people are intimidated and treated with contempt.
The United States is No longer Sovereign
The United States is no longer a sovereign nation. Its government, The Executive, and Congress,
is bought, utterly owned and controlled by foreign and domestic wealthy Oligarchs, such as the
Rothschilds, Rockefellers, and Duponts , to name only a few of the best known.
The 2016 Electoral Circus will anoint new actors to occupy the same Unconstitutional Government,
with its controlling International Oligarchs. Clinton, Trump, whomever, are willing accomplices
for imperialist international murder, and destruction of nations, including ours.
For Love of Country
The Restoration of the Republic will be a Revolutionary Act, that will cancel all previous
debts owed to that unconstitutional regime and its business supporters. All debts, including Student
Debts, will be canceled. Our citizens will begin, anew, with a clean slate.
As American Founder , Thomas Jefferson wrote, in a letter to James Madison:
"I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be self evident, 'that the earth belongs in usufruct
to the living':"
"Then I say the earth belongs to each of these generations, during it's course, fully, and
in their own right. The 2d. Generation receives it clear of the debts and incumberances of the
1st. The 3d of the 2d. and so on. For if the 1st. Could charge it with a debt, then the earth
would belong to the dead and not the living generation."
Our Citizens must restore the centrality of the constitution, establishing a less powerful
government which will ensure President Franklin Roosevelt's Four Freedoms , freedom of
speech and expression, freedom to worship God in ones own way, freedom from want "which means
economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peace time life for its inhabitants
" and freedom from fear "which means a world-wide reduction of armaments "
Once restored: The Constitution will become, once again, the law of the land and of a free
people. We will establish a government, hold elections, begin to direct traffic, arrest criminal
politicians of the tyrannical oligarchy, and, in short, repair the damage of the previous totalitarian
governments.
For the Democratic Republic!
Sons and Daughters of Liberty [email protected]
are studying US states and ranking them according to financial stability measures. The states
with biggest problems -- Illinois, California, New Jersey, Connecticut -- are in the mess they are
in largely because of pension liability issues: some pensions are unfunded or underfunded.
I recall that ten years ago about a dozen Jewish organizations formed the "Iran Task Force,"
** whose primary activity was to persuade managers of State pension funds to divest from Iran-connected
companies; that is, corporations & banks, etc. that did business with Iran. I recall very clearly
that Arnold Schwartznegger was the poster child for California's vanguard role in divesting from
such nasty nasty companies, in accord with the wishes of Jewish Israel-firsters.
Perhaps the Mercatus scholars could prepare an exercise in alternative financial history: What
shape would the US economy, and the various States's economies, be in if the US were NOT so overwhelmingly
influenced by Israel firsters, and were NOT persuaded, Against Our Better Judgment, to
entangle themselves in Israel's nefarious activities?
____
** The 2007 Iran Task Force is NOT the same as the group formed in 2015 or so, embedded
in US House/Senate, with Joe Lieberman and Michael Hayden playing prominent roles in attempting
to influence the Iran Deal.
The 2007 initiative was sponsored by groups such as ZOA, RJC, AIPAC, etc., and / or spun off
groups such as Foundation for Defense of Democracy, United Against Nuclear Iran.
As any fule kno, the way to get a good grade in higher education is to buy it.
Or so it seems in Lviv, ground zero for Ukrainian nationalism, where
a recent survey and study found that 48% of undergraduates had paid bribes to get a better
grade or to falsify attendance, while nearly all (the data sample was pretty small, 600) admitted
to cheating on exams or tests.
When a Briton or American speaks about a "four-letter word", he means a vulgar sexual term, a
word not to be mentioned in polite society. In Israel we also have such a word, a word of four letters.
A word not to mention. This word is "Shalom", peace. (In Hebrew, "sh" is one letter, and the "a"
is not written.)
For years now this word has disappeared from intercourse (except as a greeting). Every politician
knows that it is deadly. Every citizen knows that it is unmentionable. There are many words to replace
it. "Political agreement". "Separation". "We are here and they are there". "Regional arrangement".
To name a few.
And here comes Donald Trump and brings the word up again. Trump, a complete ignoramus, does not
know that in this country it is taboo.
He wants to make peace here. SH-A-L-O-M. So he says. True, there is not the slightest chance that
he really will make peace. But he has brought the word back into the language. Now people speak again
about peace. Shalom.
Peace? What is peace?
There are all kind of peaces. Starting from a little peace, a baby-peace, to a large, even mighty
peace.
Therefore, before opening a serious debate about peace, we must define what we mean. An intermission
between two wars? Non-belligerence? Existence on different sides of walls and fences? A prolonged
armistice? A Hudna (in Arabic culture, an armistice with a fixed expiry date)?
Something like the peace between India and Pakistan? The peace between Germany and France – and
if so, the peace before World War I or the peace prevailing now? The Cold War between the Soviet
Union and the United States, or the Hot Peace between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump?
There are all kinds of peace situations. What kind of Israeli-Palestinian peace are we talking
about? The peace between a horse and its rider? The peace between a people of masters and a people
of slaves? Something like the peace between the South African Apartheid regime and the Bantustans
it had created for the Blacks? Or a quite different kind of peace, a peace between equals?
It's about this peace I would like to speak. Not "real" peace. Not "perfect" peace. Not "complete"
peace.
About peace. Peace pure and simple. Without qualifications, please.
When did it all start? The conflict that now dominates the lives of the two peoples, when did
it begin?
Hard to say.
It is easy to say: it started when the first Jewish immigrant reached these shores.
Sounds simple. But it is not altogether true.
It seems that the pre-Zionist Bilu immigrants, who came here in the early 1800s, did not arouse
hostility.
I have a theory about that: some time before the Bilu (short for "House of Jacob, Go!") came here,
a religious German sect, the Templers, settled in this country. They had no political aims, just
a religious vision. They set up model villages and townships, and the locals were grateful. When
the first Jews arrived, the locals assumed that this was more of the same.
Then came the Zionist movement, which definitely had political aims. They spoke only about a "national
home", but the founder, Theodor Herzl, had previously written a book called "The Jewish State" (or,
more accurately, "The Jewstate"). The aim was hidden for a time, because the country belonged to
the Ottoman Empire.
Only very few of the local population realized right from the beginning that this was a mortal
danger for them. A large majority of the Muslims saw the Jews only as an inferior religious community,
which the Prophet had commanded them to protect.
So when did the conflict start? There are various theories about that. I adhere to the theory
of the almost-forgotten historian Aharon Cohen, who pointed to a particular event. In 1908, the revolution
of the "Young Turks" broke out. The Islamic Ottoman Empire turned into a nationalist state. As a
reaction, there arose in Palestine and the neighboring countries an Arab national movement, which
called for the "decentralization" of the empire, giving autonomy to its many peoples.
A local Arab leader approached the Zionist representative in Jerusalem with a tempting offer:
if the Jews support the Arab movement, the Arabs will support Zionist immigration.
In great excitement, the Zionist representative rushed to the then leader of the Zionist world
movement, Max Nordau, a German Jew, and urged him to accept the offer. But Nordau treated the offer
with contempt. After all, it was the Turks who were in possession of the country. What did the Arabs
have to offer?
It is difficult to know how history would have evolved if such a Zionist-Arab cooperation had
come into being. But a European Jew could not even imagine such a turn of events. Therefore the Zionists
cooperated with the Turkish – and later with the British – colonial regime against the local Arab
population.
Since then, the conflict between the two peoples has intensified from generation to generation.
Now peace is further away than ever.
But what is peace?
The past cannot be obliterated. Anyone who suggests that the past should be ignored and that we
"start again from the beginning" is dreaming.
Each of the two peoples lives in a past of its own. The past shapes their character and their
behavior every day and every hour. But the past of one side is totally different from the past of
the other.
This is not just a war between two peoples. It is also a war between two histories. Two histories
which contradict each other in almost every particular, though they concern the very same events.
For example: Every Zionist knows that until the 1948 war, the Jews acquired land with good money,
money contributed by Jews around the world. Every Arab knows that the Zionists bought the land from
absentee landlords who lived in Haifa, Beirut or Monte Carlo, and then demanded that the Turkish
(and later the British) police evict the fellahin who had tilled the land for many generations. (All
the land had originally belonged to the Sultan, but when the empire was bankrupt the Sultan sold
it to Arab speculators.)
Another example: Every Jew is proud of the Kibbutzim, a unique achievement of human progress and
social justice, which were frequently attacked by their Arab neighbors. For the Arabs, the Kibbutzim
were just sectarian instruments of displacement and deportation.
Another example: Every Jew knows that the Arabs started the 1948 war in order to exterminate the
Jewish community. Every Arab knows that in that war, the Jews evicted half the Palestinian people
from their homeland.
And so forth: nowadays the Israelis believe that the Palestinian Authority, which pays a monthly
salary to the families of "murderers", supports terrorism. The Palestinians believe that the Authority
is duty-bound to support the families whose sons and daughters have sacrificed their lives for their
people.
And so forth, without end.
(By the way, I am very proud of having invented the only scientifically sound definition of "terrorist",
which both sides can accept: "Freedom fighters are on my side, terrorists are on the other side.")
There will never be peace if the two peoples do not know the historical narrative of the other
side. There is no need to accept the narrative of the opponent. One can deny it totally. But one
has to know it, in order to understand the other people and respect it.
Peace does not have to be based on mutual love. But it must be based on mutual respect. Mutual
respect can arise only when each people knows the historical narrative of the other side. When it
understands that, it will also understand why the other people acts the way it does, and what is
needed for peaceful co-existence.
That would be much easier if every Israeli Jew learned Arabic, and every Palestinian Arab learned
Hebrew. That would not solve the problem, of course, but it would bring the solution much closer.
When each of the two peoples understands that the other side is not a bloodthirsty monster, but
acts from natural motives, it will discover many positive points in the culture of the other side.
Personal contacts will be established, perhaps even friendships.
This is already happening in Israel, though on a small scale. In the academic world, for example.
And in the hospitals. Jewish patients are often surprised to discover that their nice and competent
doctor is an Arab and that Arab male nurses are frequently more gentle than the Jewish ones.
That cannot replace dealing with the real problems. Our two peoples are divided by real, weighty
controversies. There is a problem about land, about borders, about refugees. There are problems of
security and innumerable other issues. A war of more than a hundred years will not end without painful
compromises.
When there is a basis for negotiations between equals, a basis of mutual respect, insoluble problems
will suddenly become soluble problems.
But the precondition for this process is the return of the four-letter-word to the language.
It is impossible to do something big, something historic, if there is no belief that it is possible.
A person will not plug an electric cord into a wall if they do not believe that they will be connected
to electricity. They must believe that the lights will go on.
Nobody will start peace negotiations if they believe that peace is impossible.
The belief in peace will not make peace certain. But at least it will make peace possible.
Uri Avnery is a peace activist, journalist, writer, and former member of the Israeli Knesset.
Read other articles
by Uri , or visit Uri's
website .
As far as Europe's far right is concerned, Trump is a loser.
He is the nemesis of
an intensifying European far right movement that has suddenly turned sour. Like the
Black Plague of mid-14th century Europe, whatever happens, stay away from him! Poll
numbers as well as voting for far right candidates throughout Europe drop with a
hair-trigger when candidates associate with Trump.
Conversely, Trump may be the best that ever happened to establishment policies,
like neoliberalism. Unwittingly, he's pulling neoliberalism out of a very deep hole;
i.e., a failure to perform for the public at large both economically and socially. As
it happens, hopelessness describes neoliberalism's impact on much of the bourgeoisie
and all of the proletariat, as modern-day society reverts to an awkward form of
economic feudalism but without fancy titles. Still, the serf count remains about the
same.
Back in the day, meaning 2016 and during the initial months of 2017, the far right
in Europe gravitated to Trump's right side or hardnosed libertarianism,
unaffectionately known as Los Destructo, under direction of Bannon, which leaves
little or no room for those who voted for Trump in the first place. Remarkably,
comatose bewildered American voters in November 2016 essentially bequeathed votes to
reality TV flat screens nestled in their basement family rooms.
Did they waste votes?
Nowadays, but not in 2016, Europe's far right would likely say: "Yes, they wasted
their votes."
Whereas, only a few short months ago on November 9, 2016:
Cas Mudde, a Dutch political scientist at the University of Georgia, says,
'Trump's win gives a narrative of success, of possibility, to far-right parties in
Europe, because Trump won despite all the predictions. So they can say to people,
'You're not wasting your vote if you come out and vote for us. We will actually do
much better than what everyone says.'
1
How quickly things change once reality exposes delusion. As of today throughout
Europe Trump's burgeoning affliction is like an outbreak of small pox, stay away. The
hard evidence is found in polling and voting data. Continent-wide anybody associated
with Trump is standing in a deep pile of doo-doo. Proof: Since Trump won the White
House, every major European election crushes far right candidates. The true reality
of Trump has turned the world to the value of neoliberalism as a safety valve, warts
and all.
For example, in France, Marine Le Pen's National Front only won 13% of the vote in
the French legislative elections, a crushing defeat that seriously underperformed her
prior standings in the polls. Without reservation, Trump mentioned Le Pen favorably.
More telling than Le Pen getting hammered so badly, Austria's liberal candidate
Van der Bellen, a month after Trump won the presidency, in a revote for the
presidency, beat the daylights out of far right Freedom Party's Norbert Hofer. Six
months earlier the candidates were neck-in-neck with only 0.6% separating them. Hofer
cited Trump as "inspirational." Hofer got creamed.
Not surprisingly, the Trump factor is AC/DC; it goes both ways, wide right or near
left. For example, Germany's Chancellor Merkel is no fan of Trump.
Ipso facto
,
Merkel is rising fast in the polls. In fact, her advisors refer to her newfound
popularity as the "Trump Factor." Today, 64% of Germans are satisfied with Merkel's
job. Thanks to Trump, she's the most popular politician in Germany.
Meanwhile, Germany's far-out right wing-nuts, known as Alternative for Germany,
which sympathizes with Trump, has lost 50% in the polls since Trump's November
election victory. If Alternative for Germany, that advocated shooting immigrants, do
not follow the Trump bandwagon, then who's left?
Interestingly, the Trump affliction seemingly has no boundaries. For example,
establishment neoliberals that show affection for Trump, like PM Theresa May of the
UK, plummet in popularity, same as far right extremists. She was the first head of
state to visit Trump and the only head of state seen holding hands with him while
walking along the corridors of the White House. Her conservative party blew apart a
commanding 17% lead in the polls, losing its majority in Parliament and deleveraging
their influence at the very moment when strong leadership is required for Brexit
negotiations.
Meanwhile, Dutch voters crushed the Netherlands far right leader Geert Wilders
aka: #WeWillMakeOurCountriesGreatAgain, the Party for Freedom, who praised Trump's
example as the second coming in Europe but dropping almost 50% in poll numbers after
Trump's win.
"By mid-February, when the race in the Netherlands began, Trump had been in office
for several weeks, and Dutch voters had gotten a chance to observe him as president.
They didn't like what they saw."
2
Nate Silver's Fivethirtyeight.com article "Donald Trump is Making Europe Liberal
Again" carries a list of far right parties that have fallen since Trump was elected,
no victories, thus providing strong empirical evidence that association with Trump is
a kiss of death.
Fortunately for Trump, his constituency ends in America where cartoons reflect
politics.
While U.S. intelligence agencies investigate claims that Russia secretly hacked
emails to help tip last year's elections in favor of Donald Trump, Russia's push
to bolster far-right populist politicians in Europe has been far more blatant.
Under President Vladimir Putin, Russia is working to empower Europe's far-right
and Eurosceptic parties with offers of cooperation, loans, political cover and
propaganda. Such love has not gone unrequited: European populists are answering
back with fulsome praise for Russia, its foreign policy and its strongman leader.
If Russia blatantly, in the raw, offered "loans, political cover and propaganda"
to Europe's far right, then what of America's far right?
Eleanor Beardsley, "Trump's Election
Gives Hope To Europe's Far Right", NPR, November 9, 2016. [
]
David A. Graham, "Is Trump Dragging
Down the European Far-Right?"
The Atlantic
, March 16, 2017. [
]
Robert Hunziker (MA, economic history, DePaul University) is a
freelance writer and environmental journalist whose articles have been translated
into foreign languages and appeared in over 50 journals, magazines, and sites
worldwide. He can be contacted at:
[email protected].
Read other articles by Robert
.
"Where most people would consider "antisemitism" to mean bigotry against Jewish people (and
rightly consider it abhorrent)"
This is laughable, the term "anti-semitism" was invented in the first place to silence criticism,
this whole surprise about the broadening of the definition to include Israel is nothing.
You know what are other "shut-up" words? Racist, Islamophobic, Homophobic, Xenophobic, Sexist,
etc that along with "Anti-Semitic" make up the bulk of the Capital Sins of the new Globalist Religion
(of course, made by and for Jews).
I have the right to hate, speak badly and denounce anyone I want. It would be a crime if I
infringed one's rights, which means, physical violence – but then again, physical violence alone
is enough of a crime without motive, so it doesn't discriminate and doesn't need special snowflake
groups and orwellian newspeech laws.
I have little patience for Jewish victimization propaganda, but Israel does have a right to
exist: there were a substantial number of Jews in the Ottoman Empire, and when it was broken up
after WWI, everybody got their own country, except the Kurds and the Jews.
Antisemitism is a logical absurdity. It creates an offense that relies solely on the identity
of the victim for its definition.
This is an anomaly for it can be committed against only one class of human beings, regardless
of their behavior. Thus it differs from prejudice against gender or class.
In actuality, the offense referred to is fully described by the term "racism", for all practical
purposes Although many Jews do not claim to be a "race", by claiming antisemitism they are self-identifying
as such. Singling out a race for special treatment defines racism.
What is being proposed here is a consequence of a greater absurdity – a State that claims special
status for one class of human being and that, like the World-bearing Elephants on a Turtle, is
dependent on another absurdity – a chosen race. From there, it is turtles (absurdities) all the
way down.
The jewish identity is 'eternal innocent victim'.
Therefore any criticism of jews, jewry, or the judaic religion, is antisemitism.
It is like the Armenians, their identity is the genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman
regime...
Likewise, the present German identity is guilt about two world wars, no chance to make them
understand that the great majority of Germans never wanted any war.
The USA identity is saviours of the world, that all over the world people have quite other
ideas about the USA, they simply are wrong.
Terrorism by Muslims, they must be 'deradicalised', this means make them think that western
atrocities against Muslims are for their own good, or caused by bad Muslims.
As John Maynard Keynes long ago already knew, ideas are the most powerful in the world, even
if they have no relation with reality whatsoever.
CO2 is a very weak greenhouse gas, yet people all over the world believe that CO2 does great
harm to us, despite the simple fact that climate changed as long as the earth exists, when humans
had little influence, except when they began agriculture.
Its unbelievable.
Makes the term "Örwellian" look weak.
Words that come to mind are " ďnsidious", "sneaky", "fascistic", "devious", ëvil".
Ironically - sadly ? - this "new" antisemitism seems perfectly designed to inspire traditional
antisemitism. Such a cynical manipulation of nation states by another state & a particular ethnic/cultural
group (often working against the interests of their own citizens/nations) seems perfectly adapted
to generating hate & fear in the recipients of this wholly anti-democratic, anti-humanistic program.
International Campaign Is Criminalizing Criticism of Israel as 'Antisemitism'
Yes, this is certainly true as a matter of observable fact and personal experience, but this
is merely one aspect of a much broader societal trend, exploited in this particular case by the
supporters of Israel.
It is not the fact that the enemies of liberty are falsely conflating criticism of Israel with
antisemitism that is the problem, but the fact that they seek to define antisemitism as inherently
evil and illegitimate, to ban the expression of any opinions classed as antisemitism from the
public sphere, and wherever possible to criminalise it. The former would not be a problem were
it not for the latter.
Spreading the New Definition Under Cover of "Anti-Racism" Movement
In the never-ending war on liberty waged by the powerful, for whom the freedom of ordinary folk
to say and do things that annoy or offend them, or that threaten their position, is an eternal
impertinence, the most vital front is freedom of speech. To the extent that freedom of speech
is restricted, to that same extent is democracy negated. That front is also currently the most
active in the war against liberty, and the attempt to separate and suppress "hate speech" is the
schwerpunkt of the efforts by the enemies of liberty.
Those who call people or their opinions racist or anti-Semite or homophobic or islamophobic
or whatever, and thereby seek to define their opinions as illegitimate per se, are the most dangerous
enemies of liberty in the societies of the modern US sphere.
The apposition of 'antisemitism' to any 'phobias' has a long history (it was just the list
of phobias that grew overtime):
"The International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism-or Ligue Internationale Contre le
Racisme et l'Antisémitisme (LICRA) in French-was established in 1927, and is opposed to intolerance,
xenophobia and exclusion.
In 1927, French journalist Bernard Lecache created "The League Against Pogroms", and launched
a media campaign in support of Sholom Schwartzbard who assassinated Symon Petliura on 25 May 1926
in the Latin Quarter of Paris. Schwartzbard viewed Petliura as responsible for numerous pogroms
in Ukraine. After Schwartzbard's acquittal, the league evolved into LICA (Ligue internationale
contre l'antisémitisme-or international league against anti-semitism). Schwartzbard was a prominent
activist in this organization
The LICRA keeps fighting neonazism and Holocaust denial. This was demonstrated when it supported
the Klarsfeld couple (Serge and Beate Klarsfeld), and during Klaus Barbie's trial in 1987.
In the last few years, LICRA intensified its international actions by opening sections abroad,
in Switzerland, in Belgium, in Luxembourg, in Germany, in Portugal, in Quebec and more recently
in Congo Brazzaville and in Austria.
Since 1999, with the arrival of president Patrick Gaubert, LICRA has extended its area of action.
It now addresses social issues such as work discrimination, citizenship, and disadvantaged youth".
"Likewise, anti-Semitism is a universally accepted notion, but goy-hatred is not.
These are just two amongst many other such 'one-way mental blocks" Friends, this is not a coincidence.
This is a *system* designed to make us all stupid and gullible."
This is how Jews always get themselves into trouble. They have no "off" switch on advantage-seeking.
They can't not press an advantage. Someone needs to tell them that bullying people into assent
isn't the same as making them forget – people do tend to remember this stuff.
The mechanism of this crackdown is the redefinition of "antisemitism"[1] to include criticism
of Israel, and the insertion of this definition into the bodies of law of various countries.
And what if, as has been the norm at a great many points in history, humanity decides to redefine
"anti-semitism" as "good"?
Where most people would consider "antisemitism" to mean bigotry against Jewish people (and
rightly consider it abhorrent)
Not if Jews get their way, apparently. I am reminded of a (very memorable) book title: Jews and the State: the Fatal Embrace.
Second, Sharansky declared that it's antisemitic to apply a "double standard" to Israel
- in other words, to criticize Israel for actions that other states may also take. However,
if one could never criticize, protest or boycott abuses without calling out every single other
similar abuse, no one would ever be able to exercise political dissent at all.
If it's bigotry to apply double standards (it's a double standard to limit the conversation
to anti-semitism, by the way), then Jews have been the world's greatest bigots beyond living memory. This was a long piece, I hope I have time to read it all closely at some point.
Criticizing Israel or Jewish organizations is a hate crime because, you see, Israel and Jews
acting collectively have never and can never do anything wrong.
This follows from those purported
standards of proof being textbook examples of logical fallacies and thinly veiled hate crimes
themselves, requiring us to look elsewhere for the implicit justification. Jewish martyrology
and absolute goodness, therefore, must become the one, supreme ontological truth before which
all peoples, nation states, and religions must genuflect. Maybe Chris Smith has the courage to
introduce a new preamble to the Constitution enshrining this as the ultimate law of the land.
"Where most people would consider "antisemitism" to mean bigotry against Jewish people (and
rightly consider it abhorrent), for two decades a campaign has been underway to replace that definition
with an Israel-centric definition."
I pretty much wrote this piece off as soon as I read the above quote. Any non-Jew, especially
white Christians in America and Europe, who doesn't at least have a prejudiced or bigoted view
of Jewish organizations or power is an idiot. If Jews want less antisemitism, then they need to
police their own for signs of hostility, bigotry, racism and corruption towards others, but I
doubt that will happen, since the hostility, bigotry, racism and corruption seem organic to Jews
in general.
Maybe if "activists" like Ms. Weir would concentrate on taking on Jewish power of all kinds,
then the West could reform and Israel would be forced to reform, go extinct, or whatever. As it
is, they just play a shell game with "Palestinian rights," while going full SJW on the rest of
us. I don't give a damn about Israel, neocon Jews, Palestinians or leftist Jews. I care about
my people and my country, and Jews of all political stripes are far more of a threat to both than
Palestinians or whatever Muslims who are allowed to infiltrate will ever be.
I state everything above understanding full well that Palestinians are the victims of Jewish
power and the world-wide Jewish community. Unfortunately, outside of the Israel issue, most Palestinians
and Muslims side with the multicult, anti-Western, heavily Jewish (phony) left. In the end, I
can't see how Jews will be able to play all the different groups against each other for their
own benefit, and I don't care. I just want to be rid of Jewish influence and Jewish power.
Jews always forget basic Newton laws:
"For every action there is an equal or opposite reaction".
In a long run you can not silence people, it will backfire.
Feb 24, 2017 Israeli Spying in the US: A Brief History
NOTE: This video was produced for BoilingFrogsPost com on April 11, 2012. It is being made
available in its entirety here for the first time.
The knowledge that Israeli-connected companies and intelligence agents have been involved in
detailed and elaborate spying operations in the US is of course nothing new. The phenomenon has
been painstakingly documented over the years by numerous journalists and sources. Indeed, the
documented cases of Israeli spying on their supposed ally - the self-same American government
that is supplying it with $3 billion in grants each year - are nearly too numerous to document.
"... America's NeoCons are a combination of two cultures: Germanic (in Anglo-Saxon form) and Rabbinic Jewish. The cultural Germans always have Gotterdammerrung to fall back on, and the globe nuked would turn that trick. The Jews, even the atheists, always think like Pharisses and assume that if they do something totally insane, that God will send their idea of a messiah to save them. ..."
"... I think the US elites are incapable of such grandiose strategic thinking. Their policies just happen as a result of general guidelines (like, weaken Russia, strengthen US capabilities relative to Russia, push for wars that might benefit Israel or weaken Russia, etc.), without anyone thinking through what would happen later ..."
"... A lot of "decisions" are probably made by institutional inertia, for example I find it possible that the whole anti-Russian thing in the 1990s was the result of such. Why did they feel the need to bomb Serbia, when Russia was ruled by Yeltsin? Obviously, it could only have led to the alienation of the Russian elites, which did happen as a result. Did anyone think it through? I don't think so. ..."
"... Similar thing with immigration. It's obvious that France will be majority nonwhite by the end of the century. It's likely that the UK will be majority nonwhite by that time as well. Germany, probably, too. The US will be minority white by mid-century. Was this policy thought out in terms of how it would affect the power-projection capabilities of these countries? How it would affect their elites? I don't think so. ..."
"... Considering the role of Russian federation in stopping the ziocons from destroying Syria (and therefore from an immediate annexation of the Golan Heights by Israel), the Israelis do indeed feel somewhat unfriendly towards Russians. There is also a much deeper "dissatisfaction" with Russians on a part of Israelis, which takes its roots in the history of the USSR; for this deeper level you need to read "200 years together." ..."
The US nuclear forces modernization program has been portrayed to the public as an effort
to ensure the reliability and safety of warheads in the US nuclear arsenal, rather than to enhance
their military capabilities. In reality, however, that program has implemented revolutionary new
technologies that will vastly increase the targeting capability of the US ballistic missile arsenal.
This increase in capability is astonishing - boosting the overall killing power of existing US
ballistic missile forces by a factor of roughly three - and it creates exactly what one would
expect to see, if a nuclear-armed state were planning to have the capacity to fight and win a
nuclear war by disarming enemies with a surprise first strike.
It continues:
Because the innovations in the super-fuze appear, to the non-technical eye, to be minor, policymakers
outside of the US government (and probably inside the government as well) have completely missed
its revolutionary impact on military capabilities and its important implications for global security.
This study was co-authored by America's top three scientists specializing in analysis of weaponry
and especially of the geostrategic balance between nations: Hans Kristensen, Matthew McKinzie, and
Theodore Postol. Their report continues:
This vast increase in US nuclear targeting capability, which has largely been concealed from
the general public, has serious implications for strategic stability and perceptions of US nuclear
strategy and intentions.
Russian planners will almost surely see the advance in fuzing capability as empowering an increasingly
feasible US preemptive nuclear strike capability - a capability that would require Russia to undertake
countermeasures that would further increase the already dangerously high readiness of Russian
nuclear forces. Tense nuclear postures based on worst-case planning assumptions already pose the
possibility of a nuclear response to false warning of attack. The new kill capability created
by super-fuzing increases the tension and the risk that US or Russian nuclear forces will be used
in response to early warning of an attack - even when an attack has not occurred.
The authors explain why an accidental start of World War III or global annihilation would be
likeiier from Russia than from the U.S.:
Russia does not have a functioning space-based infrared early warning system but relies primarily
on ground-based early warning radars to detect a US missile attack. Since these radars cannot
see over the horizon, Russia has less than half as much early-warning time as the United States.
(The United States has about 30 minutes, Russia 15 minutes or less.)
In other words: whereas Trump would have about 30 minutes to determine whether Putin had launched
a blitz-first-strike attack, Putin would have less than 15 minutes to determine whether Trump had
- and if at the end of that period, on either side, there is no certainty that no blitz-first-strike
attack had been launched by the other, then that person would be obligated to launch a blitz attack
against the other, upon the assumption that not to do so would result not only in a toxic planet
with nuclear winter and universal starvation, but also in a humiliating and scandalous absence of
retaliation against that perpetrator, which would be a humiliation on top of an annihilation, and
thus a sharing of blame along with the actual perpetrator, which sharing, for whatever term might
remain during that passive party's continued existence, would probably be an unbearable shame and
result quickly in suicide, if that national leader's own surviving countrymen don't execute him before
he kills himself.
Inevitably, the strictly personal morality and self-image of a nation's leader in that type of
situation are factors other than the very public global consequences that will determine the person's
decision; but, with only (at most) 15 minutes to decide on the Russian side, and 30 minutes to decide
on the American side, there is an inestimably high chance now, that a nuclear war will terminate
the lives of everyone who currently exists and who doesn't soon die from the ordinary causes before
then. Even the most dire projections of the dangers from global warming come nowhere close to matching
that danger.
The question, now, then, is: How did the world come to this extraordinarily ominous stage? The
co-authors repeatedly refer to the secretiveness at the top of the American government as one essential
source, such as " which has largely been concealed from the general public " and " policymakers
outside of the US government (and probably inside the government as well) have completely missed
," and these passages refer to an ordinary phenomenon in conspiracies at the top of a large criminal
operation such as corporate criminality, where only a very small circle of individuals, commonly
a half-dozen or even less, are made aware of the operation's chief strategic objective and of the
main tactical means that are being put into place so as to execute the plan. In this particular instance,
it wouldn't include the head of every Cabinet department, nor anything nearly so broad as that; but,
clearly, since the key decision, to implement the "super-fuze" on "all warheads deployed on US ballistic
missile submarines" was made by Obama, he is the principal person reasonably to be blamed for this
situation. However, Trump as the person who has inherited this situation from his predecessor has,
as yet, given no indication at all of reversing and eliminating the now-operative top U.S. strategic
objective of conquering Russia. The more time that passes without Trump's announcing to the public
that he has inherited this morally repulsive operation from his predecessor and is removing all of
the super-fuses, the more that Trump himself is taking ownership of Obama's plan. Typically in such
a situation, the leader who has inherited such a plan will be assassinated if he gives any clear
indication of an intention to reverse or cancel it (the key insiders are typically obsessive about
'success', especially at so late a stage in it); and, so, if Trump were to try to do that, he would
almost certainly try to hide that fact until the inherited plan has already become effectively deactivated
and no longer a threat.
The key turning-point that led up to the present crisis was the gradual and increasing acceptance,
on the American side, of the concept of using nuclear weapons for conquest instead of only for deterrence
- the prior system, for deterrence, having been called "MAD" for Mutually Assured Destruction, the
idea that if the two nuclear superpowers were to go to war against each other, then the entire world
would be destroyed so catastrophically as to make any idea of a 'winner' and a 'loser' in such a
conflict a grotesque distortion of the reality: that reality being mutual annihilation and an unlivable
planet. A landmark event in the process of reconceptualizing such a war as being 'winnable', was
the publication in 2006 of two articles in the two most prestigious journals of international relations,
Foreign Affairs and International Security , both formally introducing the concept
of "Nuclear Primacy" or the (alleged) desirability for the U.S. to plan a nuclear conquest of Russia
. Until those two articles (both of which were co-authored by the same two authors), any such
idea was considered wacky, but since then it has instead been mainstream. As the final link above
(the article that's linked-to immediately before) explains, the source even prior to George W. Bush
goes all the way back to 24 February 1990 when his father, then also the U.S. President, secretly
initiated the operation ultimately to conquer Russia, and within that article are links to the ultimate
source-documents about that origin of the path toward world-ending nuclear war; so, getting to the
original causes of the steady progression after 24 February 1990 in the direction of a conquest of
Russia by the U.S. (assisted by its allies) can now be addressed by historians, even though only
now is it finally being revealed to the public as news, though 27 years after it had actually begun
in a very fateful decision by George Herbert Walker Bush, which has already cost American taxpayers
trillions of dollars for no good purpose and resulting perhaps in the ghastliest ultimate end.
This article is being submitted for publication to all news-media without charge, in the hope
that the current U.S. President will comment publicly upon it, even if only to ridicule it so as
to avoid being assassinated for referring to it at all. This is an extremely dangerous time in history,
and Donald Trump is now on a very hot seat, which any intelligent and accurately informed person
recognizes to be the case. If ever the world needed courageous great leadership, now is the time;
because, without that, we might all soon be entering hell. To avoid it, starting now 27 years after
the U.S. government initiated this path, would be enormously difficult, but not yet totally impossible.
This is where we are at the present time; and,
ever since the coup in Ukraine in 2014, the purchases of 'nuclear-proof' bunkers have been soaring
as a result.
This extreme danger is the new global reality. If the elimination of the threat does not come
from the U.S. White House, the culmination of the threat will - regardless of which side strikes
first. The decision - either to invade Russia, or else to cancel and condemn America's decade-plus
preparation to do so - can be made only by the U.S. President. If he remains silent about the matter,
then Putin can reasonably proceed on the assumption that he'll have to be the one to strike first.
He didn't place himself in that position; the U.S. regime did. Let's hope that the U.S. will stand
down the threat, now.
100 Words What our media overlooks is that the USA blatantly violated arms agreements with
Russia by building missile bases in Poland and Romania with MK-41 launchers, capable of launching
nuclear tipped cruise missiles to quickly strike key targets in Russia. The Pentagon promises
to only place SM-3 anti-missile missiles in these silos. Trust us, our Generals proclaim!
Read More
100 Words I do not doubt that the Deep State's objective is to destroy Russia, but I' skeptical
that this "super-fuze" amounts to any kind of decisive step in that direction. The Pentagon's
claimed effectiveness for its gosh-wow gadgetry has latterly been orders of magnitude above the
reality of the situation. We've just spent the better part of two decades being unable to make
meaningful progress in freaking Afghanistan , for crying out loud.
Frankly, I do not think that America's transgendered military could so much as conquer Costa
Rica, let alone take on a nuclear armed Russia. Read
More
300 Words It's hard to disagree with this article but the missing background is the US public.
Americans have shown no remorse whatsoever for the murder of 100.000′s of civilians in the
Middle East. They are indifferent to the WMD lies, don't care about the destruction they have
caused, and show zero empathy for their victims. Also keep in mind that young Americans ARE prepared
to spend a lot of time on the rights and wrongs of so called campus "micro-aggression" and transgender
"toilet rights".
If Russia was destroyed overnight and 50 million Russians killed, no doubt the reaction would
be the same – indifference. The US public has truly disconnected from moral responsibility , and
only has interest in things that affect it directly, either physically or financially.
If for example, the public had had to pay a supplementary war tax of $2000 per person for each
Middle East war, there would no doubt have been a major outcry, and the wars would probably never
have happened, but in the event, the FED was there to quietly provide the funding and unobviously
put the public in debt. Their grandchildren will pay the bill, and truthfully, they're not really
bothered about that either.
Equally, as an extra precaution, the public is carefully sheltered from the reality of bombed
cities and murdered and homeless families. The war party MSM excludes every trace of human interest
related to the wanton murder of Arabs – calling them "Terrorists" which the dumb American public
accepts while "nuke em" seems to be the even dumber and brainless reaction.
If a nuclear bomb did actually explode on Washington D.C. the public would be as helpless as
a crowd of babies, same as after the New Orleans disaster.
It seems that Joseph de Maistre wrote, "toute nation a le gouvernement qu'elle mérite". Translated,
this means "Every country has the government it deserves" but now it's a true disaster for the
whole world, not just America. Read More
A global coalition of former military leaders and diplomats who had responsibility over
nuclear weapons is launching a "shadow security council" to offer advice to world leaders on
how to reduce what they consider to be the growing danger of a nuclear conflict fueled by the
rhetoric of President Donald Trump and destabilizing moves by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
I wonder what these "destabilizing moves" are. Today we have launch-on-warning, precise nukes,
stealth delivery services, hacks in hardware and software, weird stuff in orbit, and "missile
defense against Iran" in Europe which can be repurposed in a second to attack Russia. Unless the
airheads notice that the "destabilizing moves" come from the US, there won't be much progress.
We survived the MAD phase only through tremendous luck, there were more computer errors, brown
pants moments and lost nukes than one would like to think possible. Let's not waste this break
that God has given us.
100 Words Or rather than have the US destroy Russia, or Russia destroy the US, it would be
preferable to root out the activist Jewish Neo Bolshevik war party that is behind it all. They
have their own agenda, and regard themselves as above the law.
They gave the US the WMD lies, 9/11 and destroyed the Middle East. They've also taken ownership
of the US media to push their war agenda, apart from attacking Anglo America, sowing discord and
promoting their financial interest (e.g. forcing the US public to bail out their 2008 loses at
full $ while they kept their bonuses).
If the US public can't wake up soon and deal with this cancer they've had it.
Read More Agree:
Z-man
200 Words If you think the President makes final decisions on all matters, I have a beach
front property to sell you in Iowa. He is the public face of career Pentagon, State Department,
and other Deep State proxies. Not a capstone critical thinker but a fall man.
Nuclear war isn't a reality, it's a game of chess bluffs and the winner defeats the loser when
there is only a logical option of loss. Because when supremacy is achieved, and understood by
the opponent, you don't suddenly nuke them – you take its periphery (Ukraine, Baltics and E. Europe,
and other color revolution hot-spots), you destabilize it's source of income (oil), you cut her
off from the financial world (sanctions), you ostracize them politically (media/hacking), and
you deny them future income (Syria) while cementing their future (denying the New Silk Road by
local animosity – maritime disputes, arming India, etc).
Real sudden catastrophic loss never materializes because we live in a non-zero sum situation
– called living on the same planet – where abrupt destabilization backfires onto you from nuclear
fallout and global market failure. It's just a check-mate scenario understood by both parties
that begets a slow suffocation due to 'pawn sacrifice'.
Unless you don't have nuclear weapons then your country and lore is up for the taking on a
whim. Read More
200 Words Well. Now we know what constitutes the true Obama legacy: "The new kill capability
created by super-fuzing increases the tension and the risk that US or Russian nuclear forces will
be used in response to early warning of an attack - even when an attack has not occurred."
This is in addition to the Obama-approved mess on the Russian borders with Ukraine ("ever since
the coup in Ukraine in 2014, the purchases of 'nuclear-proof' bunkers have been soaring as a result")
and the Israel-pimped war in Syria where Russians have been fighting ISIS along with the legitimate
government of Syria, while Israel and the US were caught on helping the ISIS- and Al Qaeda-affiliated
"freedom fighters."
Is there any honest and knowledgeable person in a vicinity of the "deciders" to explain them the
consequences of a high-level radiation for their grandkids? The deciders care not about the hundreds
of thousands of other-peoples' children that died as a result of US-led "humanitarian interventions,"
but maybe they could get some resemblance of empathy rush when picturing their own progeny hit
by a nuclear force? Idiots. Read More
Reply
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All Comments Quartermaster
,
May 5, 2017 at 12:10 pm GMT \n
100 Words Is the NeoCon foreign policy establishment, which rules both Democrats and Republicans,
insane enough to think it can pull of a nuclear first strike against Russia without any significant
damage to the US or the world?
Probably. Many of the individuals are bluffing, but mob mentality inside military intelligence
is the same basic mess it is on the inner city streets.
America's NeoCons are a combination of two cultures: Germanic (in Anglo-Saxon form) and Rabbinic
Jewish. The cultural Germans always have Gotterdammerrung to fall back on, and the globe nuked
would turn that trick. The Jews, even the atheists, always think like Pharisses and assume that
if they do something totally insane, that God will send their idea of a messiah to save them.
Put that pair together, and the entire world should fear.
Read More
100 Words The other requirement to make a counterforce first strike viable is missile defences
which, although not effective enough to see off a full Russian launch, would be very capable of
"mopping up" the much smaller numbers of missiles launched in response to an incomplete disarming
first strike.
So we don't need to worry too much about this kind of improvement to the US capability so long
as we don't see the US regime simultaneously installing missile defences everywhere they can on
the pretext, say, of defending against non-existent, propagandist third party regional "threats"
Read More
200 Words A great article by Eric Zuesse, the best I have seen on the subject. A devastating
nuclear war is almost inevitable if the situation is allowed to persist. There were several nearly
catastrophic incidents in the last cold war when warning times were much more generous. Similar
incidents, in the near future would likely be game over for human civilisation and even the human
race itself.
It really doesn't matter whether the US/European oligarchy is really planning to nuke Russia
and/or China or not, the situation is just as dangerous either way. The setting up of what is
evidently a first strike capability while simultaneously degrading their potential opponents warning
times is well nigh suicidal. One could hope that there is someone in the US/NATO military who
is not too functionally autistic to see things from the other guys point of view but I doubt it.
If such a person existed, they might reflect on the fact that if the roles were reversed, most
of their colleagues would be clamouring for a first strike of their own before the missile "defence"
is fully operational.
Finally, it doesn't even matter whether the missile "defence" works or not. Unless both sides
know it doesn't work, and can also be sure that the other side knows that it doesn't work, and
also that it can't be made to work, it is just as dangerous.
Read More
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All Comments
@Miro23 It's hard to disagree with this article but the missing background is the US public.
Americans have shown no remorse whatsoever for the murder of 100.000's of civilians in the Middle
East. They are indifferent to the WMD lies, don't care about the destruction they have caused,
and show zero empathy for their victims. Also keep in mind that young Americans ARE prepared to
spend a lot of time on the rights and wrongs of so called campus "micro-aggression" and transgender
"toilet rights".
If Russia was destroyed overnight and 50 million Russians killed, no doubt the reaction would
be the same - indifference. The US public has truly disconnected from moral responsibility , and
only has interest in things that affect it directly, either physically or financially.
If for example, the public had had to pay a supplementary war tax of $2000 per person for each
Middle East war, there would no doubt have been a major outcry, and the wars would probably never
have happened, but in the event, the FED was there to quietly provide the funding and unobviously
put the public in debt. Their grandchildren will pay the bill, and truthfully, they're not really
bothered about that either.
Equally, as an extra precaution, the public is carefully sheltered from the reality of bombed
cities and murdered and homeless families. The war party MSM excludes every trace of human interest
related to the wanton murder of Arabs - calling them "Terrorists" which the dumb American public
accepts while "nuke em" seems to be the even dumber and brainless reaction.
If a nuclear bomb did actually explode on Washington D.C. the public would be as helpless as a
crowd of babies, same as after the New Orleans disaster.
@Miro23 It's hard to disagree with this article but the missing background is the US public.
Americans have shown no remorse whatsoever for the murder of 100.000's of civilians in the Middle
East. They are indifferent to the WMD lies, don't care about the destruction they have caused,
and show zero empathy for their victims. Also keep in mind that young Americans ARE prepared to
spend a lot of time on the rights and wrongs of so called campus "micro-aggression" and transgender
"toilet rights".
If Russia was destroyed overnight and 50 million Russians killed, no doubt the reaction would
be the same - indifference. The US public has truly disconnected from moral responsibility , and
only has interest in things that affect it directly, either physically or financially.
If for example, the public had had to pay a supplementary war tax of $2000 per person for each
Middle East war, there would no doubt have been a major outcry, and the wars would probably never
have happened, but in the event, the FED was there to quietly provide the funding and unobviously
put the public in debt. Their grandchildren will pay the bill, and truthfully, they're not really
bothered about that either.
Equally, as an extra precaution, the public is carefully sheltered from the reality of bombed
cities and murdered and homeless families. The war party MSM excludes every trace of human interest
related to the wanton murder of Arabs - calling them "Terrorists" which the dumb American public
accepts while "nuke em" seems to be the even dumber and brainless reaction.
If a nuclear bomb did actually explode on Washington D.C. the public would be as helpless as a
crowd of babies, same as after the New Orleans disaster.
100 Words Frankly, it's about time "compellence" replaced deterrence in dealing with Russia.
For all his faults, Putin seems more or less sane, but he's already 64 years old. When Russia
has its next succession crisis (they're good at this stuff), the new incumbent may be much less
tractable and dangerous.
100 Words Is this article mis-information or dis-information? I get those two confused.
We have been able to put a nuke in a 100 ft circle anywhere on earth for a long time. The "super-fuze"
has nothing to do with the guidance system or speed of delivery but enhances perhaps the yield
and the accuracy (elevation of detonation) of an already devastating weapon.
How is this destabilizing? How does this yield a first-strike capability?
Read More
Restraint? Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill
the bastards. At the end of the war if there are two Americans and one Russian left alive,
we win!
Thomas S. Power, CIC, Strategic Air Command
Apparently, breathing the cold, dry air of madness takes you to the top of Washington's pyramid
of skulls. Read More
@Seraphim Conquest of Russia (the 'Heartland' of the 'World-Island') was the single minded
obsession, followed with uncanny determination, of the 'Anglo-Zionist' Empire (supposed successor
of the not so mythical 'Arthurian Atlantic British Empire') from its bastard birth in the glorious
days of the 'Gloriana', the hideous 'Virgin Queen' witch and her 'Magus' John Dee, to the theories
of Mackinder ("Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the Heartland commands
the World Island; Who rules the World Island commands the World."), masked by the 'collateral
damages' of the 'colonization' (i.e. conquest) of 'The Indies' (America and India proper), steps
towards the encirclement of the 'Heartland'. The 'Great Game' the Viking merchant-adventurers
cum pirates (financed by the Jewish money lenders and receivers) played against the Powers that
blocked their way to the gold and spices of the Eldorado of East Asia and the inexhaustible source
of slaves that was 'East Europe'. That block was the Orthodox Russia since the 'betrayal' of the
Baptism of the Viking Vladimir. The 'Vikings' and the receivers of stolen goods never forgave
it. They realize that as long as the 'Heartland' is not conquered none of their other conquests
is secure. Ah, now some of the stranger things you have said become a little less puzzling as
you reveal your romantic Russian mythmaking soul.
Read More Pandos
,
May 5, 2017 at 2:12 pm GMT \n
@Miro23 It's hard to disagree with this article but the missing background is the US public.
Americans have shown no remorse whatsoever for the murder of 100.000's of civilians in the Middle
East. They are indifferent to the WMD lies, don't care about the destruction they have caused,
and show zero empathy for their victims. Also keep in mind that young Americans ARE prepared to
spend a lot of time on the rights and wrongs of so called campus "micro-aggression" and transgender
"toilet rights".
If Russia was destroyed overnight and 50 million Russians killed, no doubt the reaction would
be the same - indifference. The US public has truly disconnected from moral responsibility , and
only has interest in things that affect it directly, either physically or financially.
If for example, the public had had to pay a supplementary war tax of $2000 per person for each
Middle East war, there would no doubt have been a major outcry, and the wars would probably never
have happened, but in the event, the FED was there to quietly provide the funding and unobviously
put the public in debt. Their grandchildren will pay the bill, and truthfully, they're not really
bothered about that either.
Equally, as an extra precaution, the public is carefully sheltered from the reality of bombed
cities and murdered and homeless families. The war party MSM excludes every trace of human interest
related to the wanton murder of Arabs - calling them "Terrorists" which the dumb American public
accepts while "nuke em" seems to be the even dumber and brainless reaction.
If a nuclear bomb did actually explode on Washington D.C. the public would be as helpless as a
crowd of babies, same as after the New Orleans disaster.
200 Words
@Intelligent Dasein I do not doubt that the Deep State's objective is to destroy Russia, but
I' skeptical that this "super-fuze" amounts to any kind of decisive step in that direction. The
Pentagon's claimed effectiveness for its gosh-wow gadgetry has latterly been orders of magnitude
above the reality of the situation. We've just spent the better part of two decades being unable
to make meaningful progress in freaking Afghanistan , for crying out loud.
Frankly, I do not think that America's transgendered military could so much as conquer Costa Rica,
let alone take on a nuclear armed Russia. I was sceptical about super-fuses until I read a detailed
explanation of how they work. Then I realised how dangerous this is. It would not be terribly
hard for the Russians and the Chinese to replicate this development, however their possession
of the same technology would NOT reduce the likelihood of US using it first.
In briefest, super-fusing makes the First Strike much more effective and thus likely. The idea
of super-fusing is relatively simple – unlike cruise and hypersonic missiles, the ballistic missiles
have one huge weakness – once the rocket fuel is spent the ballistic missiles fly like thrown
rocks – there is little trajectory correction. Super-fusing activates explosion within a predefined
envelope of optimum destruction for the target, thus increasing the likelyhood of destroying the
target several times over. For example, instead of the nuclear bomb overshooting the target, it
is activated when the closest to the target. Super-fusing against land based silos and mobile
launchers, combined with much better ABMD than exists now, especially against submarine launched
ballistic missiles, would enable the First Strike with very low payback – in single digit percent.
This means a First Strike that could destroy up to 99% of enemy's retaliatory capability and leaving
more than enough missiles to threaten direct strikes on enemy's major cities.
As I explained, ABMD is the weak link in this – it is far from effective yet, but give it unlimited
$ printing and another 10 years or so and this scenario could become reality.
Read More
100 Words This "investigative historian" confects his bad dream out of very little substance.
Quotes from the respectable enough Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists plus a great deal of imagination
and major omissions allow him to paint a fantastic picture of raving lunatics thinking of "conquering"
or "invading" Russia. (Yes he did use those words despite positing a scenario in which the Dr.
Strangeloves would wipe out Rusdia with a first strike! His psychic medium clearly has forgotten
to consilt the ghosts of Napoleon and Hitler).
One major omission is to note what a quick search for "super fuze" immediately discloses, namely
that the US Navy's upgrade is already old news and largely complete so far as the increase in
capacity that Zuesse describes is concerned.
Restraint? Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the
bastards. At the end of the war if there are two Americans and one Russian left alive, we win!
Thomas S. Power, CIC, Strategic Air Command
Apparently, breathing the cold, dry air of madness takes you to the top of Washington's pyramid
of skulls. Useless quote without a believable source and still needs to have the context provided.
Read More Anonymous
White Male ,
May 5, 2017 at 2:37 pm GMT \n
100 Words
@Miro23 It's hard to disagree with this article but the missing background is the US public.
Americans have shown no remorse whatsoever for the murder of 100.000's of civilians in the Middle
East. They are indifferent to the WMD lies, don't care about the destruction they have caused,
and show zero empathy for their victims. Also keep in mind that young Americans ARE prepared to
spend a lot of time on the rights and wrongs of so called campus "micro-aggression" and transgender
"toilet rights".
If Russia was destroyed overnight and 50 million Russians killed, no doubt the reaction would
be the same - indifference. The US public has truly disconnected from moral responsibility , and
only has interest in things that affect it directly, either physically or financially.
If for example, the public had had to pay a supplementary war tax of $2000 per person for each
Middle East war, there would no doubt have been a major outcry, and the wars would probably never
have happened, but in the event, the FED was there to quietly provide the funding and unobviously
put the public in debt. Their grandchildren will pay the bill, and truthfully, they're not really
bothered about that either.
Equally, as an extra precaution, the public is carefully sheltered from the reality of bombed
cities and murdered and homeless families. The war party MSM excludes every trace of human interest
related to the wanton murder of Arabs - calling them "Terrorists" which the dumb American public
accepts while "nuke em" seems to be the even dumber and brainless reaction.
If a nuclear bomb did actually explode on Washington D.C. the public would be as helpless as a
crowd of babies, same as after the New Orleans disaster.
It seems that Joseph de Maistre wrote, "toute nation a le gouvernement qu'elle mérite". Translated,
this means "Every country has the government it deserves" but now it's a true disaster for the
whole world, not just America. "If Russia was destroyed overnight and 50 million Russians killed,
no doubt the reaction would be the same – indifference. The US public has truly disconnected from
moral responsibility , and only has interest in things that affect it directly, either physically
or financially."
@Miro23 It's hard to disagree with this article but the missing background is the US public.
Americans have shown no remorse whatsoever for the murder of 100.000's of civilians in the Middle
East. They are indifferent to the WMD lies, don't care about the destruction they have caused,
and show zero empathy for their victims. Also keep in mind that young Americans ARE prepared to
spend a lot of time on the rights and wrongs of so called campus "micro-aggression" and transgender
"toilet rights".
If Russia was destroyed overnight and 50 million Russians killed, no doubt the reaction would
be the same - indifference. The US public has truly disconnected from moral responsibility , and
only has interest in things that affect it directly, either physically or financially.
If for example, the public had had to pay a supplementary war tax of $2000 per person for each
Middle East war, there would no doubt have been a major outcry, and the wars would probably never
have happened, but in the event, the FED was there to quietly provide the funding and unobviously
put the public in debt. Their grandchildren will pay the bill, and truthfully, they're not really
bothered about that either.
Equally, as an extra precaution, the public is carefully sheltered from the reality of bombed
cities and murdered and homeless families. The war party MSM excludes every trace of human interest
related to the wanton murder of Arabs - calling them "Terrorists" which the dumb American public
accepts while "nuke em" seems to be the even dumber and brainless reaction.
If a nuclear bomb did actually explode on Washington D.C. the public would be as helpless as a
crowd of babies, same as after the New Orleans disaster.
It seems that Joseph de Maistre wrote, "toute nation a le gouvernement qu'elle mérite". Translated,
this means "Every country has the government it deserves" but now it's a true disaster for the
whole world, not just America. "Americans have shown no remorse whatsoever for the murder "
Apparently you haven't heard of what England, France and other colonial nations had been doing
in centuries past, and heck, even up till now (Libya, anyone?).
200 Words
@another fred Is this article mis-information or dis-information? I get those two confused.
We have been able to put a nuke in a 100 ft circle anywhere on earth for a long time. The "super-fuze"
has nothing to do with the guidance system or speed of delivery but enhances perhaps the yield
and the accuracy (elevation of detonation) of an already devastating weapon.
How is this destabilizing? How does this yield a first-strike capability? For an explanation,
read my previous comment and this one.
START treaties have limited the number of missiles on both sides, at a time when super-fusing
did not exist. This means that each side had enough missiles to destroy a percentage of the missiles
of the other side (probably around 40-50%), but not all of them, thus MAD. With super-fusing,
the side which strikes first can destroy a much higher percentage of retaliatory missiles on fixed
and mobile launchers (90-95%) and still have some left over to threaten civilians in large cities,
especially if ABMD can destroy all of the remaining 5-10% of retaliatory missiles.
The hardest to destroy will remain the submarine launched missiles, but US military feel confident
that they are tracking all Russian nuclear missile submarines with their attack submarines (and
all the new and noisy Chinese submarines as well) and they could destroy them all on command.
On top of all this, the US intelligence has been tasked with collecting psychological profiles
of all Russian commanders of nuclear missile submarines. The plan is to try convince them not
to launch, once the Russian command has been destroyed by the First Strike – once they have no
command any more. Read More
In this particular instance, it wouldn't include the head of every Cabinet department, nor
anything nearly so broad as that; but, clearly, since the key decision, to implement the "super-fuze"
on "all warheads deployed on US ballistic missile submarines" was made by Obama, he is the
principal person reasonably to be blamed for this situation. However, Trump as the person who
has inherited this situation from his predecessor has, as yet, given no indication at all of
reversing and eliminating the now-operative top U.S. strategic objective of conquering Russia.
The more time that passes without Trump's announcing to the public that he has inherited this
morally repulsive operation from his predecessor and is removing all of the super-fuses, the
more that Trump himself is taking ownership of Obama's plan.
Reading statements like this one, and other observations by Philip Giraldi, have reluctantly
made me into a conspiracy minded person when it comes to politics. After all, does anyone seriously
believe that the pretentious, metro-sexual Barry Obama entertained any such "Dr. Evil" like plots
to concur the world prior to being sworn in as POTUS? Of course he didn't. He, even less than
Trump, probably had no idea what he was getting himself into by running for president. It must've
been a shocker for both of these men when they found out just how much potentially damaging intel
that the CIA and NSA has on them through perfectly legal NSA spying. Would the CIA assassinate
a president who got in the way of America's interests (as defined by them)? Maybe, but why would
they need to?
The Deep State is in complete control of our foreign policy now. Our democracy and freedom
were already largely lost due to giant asymmetries in knowledge between the US Citizenry and elected
officials on the one hand, and the Deep State on the other. "Knowledge is power" as they say.
This state of affairs was gradually imposed on an unsuspecting public through such legislative
gems as the Omnibus Counterterrorism Act of 1995 and the Patriot Act.
Read More
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100 Words
@Pandos Russia ;and China must target Israel and Saudi as the primary targets in any nuke
exchange. It is their fault.
Russia should release the soviet archives to show the holocaust is a giant exaggeration - a lie.
Rip that shield from their hands. You have hit upon something that is extremely important, and
studiously avoided by most: the Israeli-Saudi alliance. The worst of the Arabs are Saudi Arabians.
The worst of the Sunnis are Saudi Arabians (and on average, Sunnis are worse than Shites). No
doubt, the worst ruling caab in the Middle East,. whether royal family or political party (such
as Likud), is the House of Saud.
200 Words One of the WWII planners was Frankfurter, also the writer of the Lend Lease Law
that enabled Roosevelt to give war aid to any country.
Bruce Allen Murphy, 'The Brandeis/Frankfurter Connection, The Secret Political Activities of Two
Supreme Court Justices', New York, 1983
After Hitler began deporting jews to concentration camps, one of them escaped, and was smuggled
tot the USA, the Vichy France, Spain, Portugal route.
This jew told Frankfurter what was going on.
Frankfurter answered 'I do not believe one word you're saying'.
Much later Frankfurter explained 'I did not say he was lying, I said I did not believe him'.
In 1939 Hitler threatened jews with 'ausrottung', the exact meaning of this word then is debated,
'if they again started a world war'.
My interpretation of the Frankfurter statements is that he had not expected Hitler to carry
out his threat.
100 Words
@Jake Is the NeoCon foreign policy establishment, which rules both Democrats and Republicans,
insane enough to think it can pull of a nuclear first strike against Russia without any significant
damage to the US or the world?
Probably. Many of the individuals are bluffing, but mob mentality inside military intelligence
is the same basic mess it is on the inner city streets.
America's NeoCons are a combination of two cultures: Germanic (in Anglo-Saxon form) and Rabbinic
Jewish. The cultural Germans always have Gotterdammerrung to fall back on, and the globe nuked
would turn that trick. The Jews, even the atheists, always think like Pharisses and assume that
if they do something totally insane, that God will send their idea of a messiah to save them.
300 Words Here is a simplified First Strike plan by US on Russia and China, in my opinion.
China is more of the same as Russia, just at a lower level of military sophistication right now
(but advancing in leaps and bouts).
The First Strike starts with the launch of nuclear tipped cruise missiles from the "ABMD sites"
in Poland, Romania, Ukraine, Japan, South Korea and any other new ones in the future. These cruise
missiles are launched against Russian military communications, command and control sites, as well
as early warning radars. The second wave are the ballistic missiles from the silos in US, which
target the Russian silo based missiles and the mobile platforms (truck and train based) discovered
by US satellites. Simultaneously, the US bombers with nuclear bombs on board are launched, to
target any remaining Russian military infrastructure. Also, a command is issued to destroy any
on-duty Russian ballistic and cruise nuclear missile submarines. The ABMD sites on land (at least
two in Canada in the future) and on ships now switch to defence to try to destroy any Russian
missiles that got launched. At the same time US propaganda to dissuade the commanders of the Russian
submarines, not destroyed already by the US attack submarines, fills the radio. Apparently, Russia
has only eight nuclear missile submarines, and not more than 4-6 would be on active duty at any
given time.
Ok this could be the US plan, but what do Russians have to counter it? The Russians have at
least two tools in development. The first is the Bulawa MIRV, which is virtually impossible to
shoot down with ABMD. The second are the submarine launched hypersonic cruise missiles, which
are also almost impossible to shoot down by ABMD. Neither of these two are ready yet, but nor
is the US ABMD. Therefore, the Russian approach is to make ABMD never effective, which would make
even a partial retaliatory strike too expensive to US.
Read More
100 Words
@Sebastian Puettmann Well, in their defense, Russia is pretty fascist. "Russia is pretty fascist."
Is this a voice from the Kagans' clan' sinecures (AEI, Brookings) or directly from the land
of the "chosen" handlers?
For your information, even the Israel-occupied US Congress accepted an obvious truth and made
a decision re real fascists: " US Congress ends funding for Ukraine's neo-Nazi Azov Battalion:"
https://theduran.com/us-congress-ends-funding-for-ukraines-neo-nazi-azov-battalion/
One wonders when the US Congress will finally discover that it was a leader of the Ukrainian Jewish
Community Mr. Kolomojsky who had been financing the Ukraine's neo-Nazi Azov Battalion when the
Azov's thugs were burning the civilians alive in Odessa:
https://www.liveleak.com/view?i=1d0_1462104943&comments=1
Similar to you, The Wall Street Journal (the nest of ziocons) cries in unison with Mrs. Clinton
that "Putin is Hitler." The same WSJ published a fawning article about Mr. Kolomojsky, a Ukrainian/Israeli
citizen and financier of the neo-Nazis:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/ukraines-secret-weapon-feisty-oligarch-ihor-kolomoisky-1403886665
Read More
@Seraphim Conquest of Russia (the 'Heartland' of the 'World-Island') was the single minded
obsession, followed with uncanny determination, of the 'Anglo-Zionist' Empire (supposed successor
of the not so mythical 'Arthurian Atlantic British Empire') from its bastard birth in the glorious
days of the 'Gloriana', the hideous 'Virgin Queen' witch and her 'Magus' John Dee, to the theories
of Mackinder ("Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the Heartland commands
the World Island; Who rules the World Island commands the World."), masked by the 'collateral
damages' of the 'colonization' (i.e. conquest) of 'The Indies' (America and India proper), steps
towards the encirclement of the 'Heartland'. The 'Great Game' the Viking merchant-adventurers
cum pirates (financed by the Jewish money lenders and receivers) played against the Powers that
blocked their way to the gold and spices of the Eldorado of East Asia and the inexhaustible source
of slaves that was 'East Europe'. That block was the Orthodox Russia since the 'betrayal' of the
Baptism of the Viking Vladimir. The 'Vikings' and the receivers of stolen goods never forgave
it. They realize that as long as the 'Heartland' is not conquered none of their other conquests
is secure. I wish we Brits really were the evil geniuses we are supposed to be.
Read More SolontoCroesus
,
May 5, 2017 at 4:13 pm GMT \n
200 Words Zuesse's very important essay could be improved immeasurably by identifying the
authors of these dire policy statements:
Keir Lieber, professor in the Edmund Walsh school at Georgetown, is son of Robert Lieber, also
a professor of foreign policy studies at Georgetown -
For 2
Professors, Like Father, Like Son
Based on a quick review of Robert Lieber's dozen appearances on C Span, the description,
Like Father like Son is apt: the senior Lieber is a an unabashed zionist and Israel firster
who has operated behind the scenes to implement neoconservative policies that favor Israel, to
be carried out at the expense of American blood and treasure, under the mendacious gloss that
they are "in America's interest." Those policies date back at least to the Clinton administration
bombing of Kosovo
https://www.c-span.org/video/?100370-1/bosnia-russia-gulf-beyond
; then the Persian Gulf war to "liberate" Kuwait
https://www.c-span.org/video/?23811-1/anniversary-persian-gulf-war
and the war in Afghanistan where "Afghanis welcomed our liberation of Afghanis from the Taliban."
https://www.c-span.org/video/?168019-4/postcold-war-conflicts
Read More
@Kiza I was sceptical about super-fuses until I read a detailed explanation of how they work.
Then I realised how dangerous this is. It would not be terribly hard for the Russians and the
Chinese to replicate this development, however their possession of the same technology would NOT
reduce the likelihood of US using it first.
In briefest, super-fusing makes the First Strike much more effective and thus likely. The idea
of super-fusing is relatively simple - unlike cruise and hypersonic missiles, the ballistic missiles
have one huge weakness - once the rocket fuel is spent the ballistic missiles fly like thrown
rocks - there is little trajectory correction. Super-fusing activates explosion within a predefined
envelope of optimum destruction for the target, thus increasing the likelyhood of destroying the
target several times over. For example, instead of the nuclear bomb overshooting the target, it
is activated when the closest to the target. Super-fusing against land based silos and mobile
launchers, combined with much better ABMD than exists now, especially against submarine launched
ballistic missiles, would enable the First Strike with very low payback - in single digit percent.
This means a First Strike that could destroy up to 99% of enemy's retaliatory capability and leaving
more than enough missiles to threaten direct strikes on enemy's major cities.
As I explained, ABMD is the weak link in this - it is far from effective yet, but give it unlimited
$ printing and another 10 years or so and this scenario could become reality. This just sounds
like an air burst detonation. Is this one of those American things where they relabel something
and remarket it? Read More
100 Words
@Kiza Here is a simplified First Strike plan by US on Russia and China, in my opinion. China
is more of the same as Russia, just at a lower level of military sophistication right now (but
advancing in leaps and bouts).
The First Strike starts with the launch of nuclear tipped cruise missiles from the "ABMD sites"
in Poland, Romania, Ukraine, Japan, South Korea and any other new ones in the future. These cruise
missiles are launched against Russian military communications, command and control sites, as well
as early warning radars. The second wave are the ballistic missiles from the silos in US, which
target the Russian silo based missiles and the mobile platforms (truck and train based) discovered
by US satellites. Simultaneously, the US bombers with nuclear bombs on board are launched, to
target any remaining Russian military infrastructure. Also, a command is issued to destroy any
on-duty Russian ballistic and cruise nuclear missile submarines. The ABMD sites on land (at least
two in Canada in the future) and on ships now switch to defence to try to destroy any Russian
missiles that got launched. At the same time US propaganda to dissuade the commanders of the Russian
submarines, not destroyed already by the US attack submarines, fills the radio. Apparently, Russia
has only eight nuclear missile submarines, and not more than 4-6 would be on active duty at any
given time.
Ok this could be the US plan, but what do Russians have to counter it? The Russians have at least
two tools in development. The first is the Bulawa MIRV, which is virtually impossible to shoot
down with ABMD. The second are the submarine launched hypersonic cruise missiles, which are also
almost impossible to shoot down by ABMD. Neither of these two are ready yet, but nor is the US
ABMD. Therefore, the Russian approach is to make ABMD never effective, which would make even a
partial retaliatory strike too expensive to US. "and the mobile platforms (truck and train based)
discovered by US satellites."
Forget about it, the real ones can be parked in any farm, the inflatable ones cannot be distinghuised
from the real ones.
Even in Saddam's Irak USA planes were unable to find Saddam's mobile V2′s.
Iran's underground silo's are even atomic bomb proof.
Read More SolontoCroesus
,
May 5, 2017 at 4:45 pm GMT \n
100 Words
@Proud_Srbin US goal is conquest and enslavement of mankind.
Adolf shared that goal, humanity will prevail, again.
Russia, China, DPRK are not Serbia, Iraq, Libya, Siria.
US goal is conquest and enslavement of mankind.
Adolf shared that goal
Adolf did NOT "share the goal" of "conquest and enslavement of mankind."
Adolf's goal was nationalistic, not global; the clue is hidden in plain sight:
National sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP)
Is this a voice from the Kagans' clan' sinecures (AEI, Brookings) or directly from the land
of the "chosen" handlers?
For your information, even the Israel-occupied US Congress accepted an obvious truth and made
a decision re real fascists: " US Congress ends funding for Ukraine's neo-Nazi Azov Battalion:"
https://theduran.com/us-congress-ends-funding-for-ukraines-neo-nazi-azov-battalion/
One wonders when the US Congress will finally discover that it was a leader of the Ukrainian Jewish
Community Mr. Kolomojsky who had been financing the Ukraine's neo-Nazi Azov Battalion when the
Azov's thugs were burning the civilians alive in Odessa: https://www.liveleak.com/view?i=1d0_1462104943&comments=1
Similar to you, The Wall Street Journal (the nest of ziocons) cries in unison with Mrs. Clinton
that "Putin is Hitler." The same WSJ published a fawning article about Mr. Kolomojsky, a Ukrainian/Israeli
citizen and financier of the neo-Nazis: https://www.wsj.com/articles/ukraines-secret-weapon-feisty-oligarch-ihor-kolomoisky-1403886665
If you ever need money, you'd make a good Russian propagandist. You seem to have internalized
every of their talking point. May you have the power to investigate the other side as well, once
in a while.
By the way, maybe you have not noticed that Israel is not talking the Russia to joining their
Russian Federation. But Israel is talking to the Western establishment about the possibility to
joining NATO or the EU. What could be the reason for this, since Russia, according to your oppinion,
is not more fascist than the US? Read More
200 Words
@Randal The other requirement to make a counterforce first strike viable is missile defences
which, although not effective enough to see off a full Russian launch, would be very capable of
"mopping up" the much smaller numbers of missiles launched in response to an incomplete disarming
first strike.
So we don't need to worry too much about this kind of improvement to the US capability so long
as we don't see the US regime simultaneously installing missile defences everywhere they can on
the pretext, say, of defending against non-existent, propagandist third party regional "threats"
...... Even that wouldn't be enough.
Even if the US government was installing a huge global missile system while simultaneously
building a potent first-strike capability, we'd only have to worry if they also had a history
of attacking many other countries without provocation. Also if their political elite was pushing
for military confrontation with Russia, like proposing to implement no-fly zones in Syria where
Russian planes are flying missions (legally), with some members of the US establishment (people
like Senator McCain) even calling for the downing of Russian planes if needed to accomplish that.
Even in that hypothetical scenario it would only be really really dangerous if in the past some
random senior US general (someone like General Wesley Clark) had already proposed to attack Russian
troops – otherwise we could rely on the sanity of the generals to prevent such insanity.
300 Words I actually think there is no master plan to attack Russia. There is, however, a
plan to create capabilities for the US which would enable the US government to attack Russia
with the possibility of winning such a war.
I think the US elites are incapable of such grandiose strategic thinking. Their policies
just happen as a result of general guidelines (like, weaken Russia, strengthen US capabilities
relative to Russia, push for wars that might benefit Israel or weaken Russia, etc.), without anyone
thinking through what would happen later , or what would be the logical consequence of the
actions which they take. A lot of "decisions" are probably made by institutional inertia,
for example I find it possible that the whole anti-Russian thing in the 1990s was the result of
such. Why did they feel the need to bomb Serbia, when Russia was ruled by Yeltsin? Obviously,
it could only have led to the alienation of the Russian elites, which did happen as a result.
Did anyone think it through? I don't think so.
Similar thing with immigration. It's obvious that France will be majority nonwhite by the
end of the century. It's likely that the UK will be majority nonwhite by that time as well. Germany,
probably, too. The US will be minority white by mid-century. Was this policy thought out in terms
of how it would affect the power-projection capabilities of these countries? How it would affect
their elites? I don't think so.
The most frightening thought is that they have no idea what they are doing.
Read More
" Israel is talking to the Western establishment about the possibility to joining NATO or the
EU. What could be the reason for this, since Russia, according to your oppinion, is not more fascist
than the US?"
Are you serious? Israel has been caught red-handed on cooperating with ISIS. Following your logic,
ISIS is much, much better than Russian Federation. Though in this case you are actually in agreement
with Israeli brass.
" maybe you have not noticed that Israel is not talking the Russia to joining their Russian
Federation."
A truly amazing observation! Considering the role of Russian federation in stopping the ziocons from destroying Syria (and
therefore from an immediate annexation of the Golan Heights by Israel), the Israelis do indeed
feel somewhat unfriendly towards Russians. There is also a much deeper "dissatisfaction" with
Russians on a part of Israelis, which takes its roots in the history of the USSR; for this deeper
level you need to read "200 years together."
Read More
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100 Words I am very much appreciating this article and many comments.
Having some military time, at peace, thankfully, and interest in arcane English words, I am
knowing the diff.between material and materiel, fuze and fuse, etc.
What this article and all of the comments are to lacking is a definition of 'super-fuze'.
I am suspecting that it is just a mis-use of the word 'fuze'.
@Miro23 Or rather than have the US destroy Russia, or Russia destroy the US, it would be preferable
to root out the activist Jewish Neo Bolshevik war party that is behind it all. They have their
own agenda, and regard themselves as above the law.
They gave the US the WMD lies, 9/11 and destroyed the Middle East. They've also taken ownership
of the US media to push their war agenda, apart from attacking Anglo America, sowing discord and
promoting their financial interest (e.g. forcing the US public to bail out their 2008 loses at
full $ while they kept their bonuses).
If the US public can't wake up soon and deal with this cancer they've had it. Absolutely right.
Read More
Britain's Lee Child created superhero Jack Reacher. In "Night School" Child locates Reacher
in Hamburg, where he beats up young Germans who call out that they are fed up with being occupied
by USA; having delivered the characteristic chops to the face then kick to the nuts, Reacher taunts
the downed German patriots, er, neo-Nazis, "how does it feel to lose a war?"
When, still in Hamburg, Reacher ultimately confronts the head of a group of Germans attempting
to revitalize German identity and culture, Reacher shoots him in the heart and then the head,
carrying out the ideals he had learned in West Point Military Academy bull sessions. For Reacher
- Child - British propagandists - New York publishers, a German who is not fully on board with
USA (Anglo-zionist) demands is, by definition, a Nazi deserving only to be extrajudicially exterminated.
American (Anglo-zionist) popular culture reinforces "lack of remorse" at every turn and by
numerous venues –
We'll put a boot in your eye, It's the American way . . .
As Ron Unz and Dr. Stephen Sniegoski revealed on this forum, British propaganda has a long
history: it was their efforts that lied the American people into World War II
@annamaria This is a long and passionate anti-war article by Michel Chossudovsky, which includes
a nice picture of Bin Laden teaching Brzezinski how to handle a rifle, Afghanistan:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/reversing-the-tide-of-war-say-no-to-nuclear-war/21866
The neocons used the mujahaddins with great success, particularly on the US soil on 9/11.
In short, "America's biggest foreign policy problem is that the U.S. cannot be trusted."
100 Words Nov 29, 2016 The Map That Shows Why Russia Fears War With USA
DECEMBER 25, 2015 NATO: Seeking Russia's Destruction Since 1949
In 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, U.S. president George H. W. Bush through his secretary
of state James Baker promised Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev that in exchange for Soviet cooperation
on German reunification, the Cold War era NATO alliance would not expand "one inch" eastwards
towards Russia.
100 Words
@Sebastian Puettmann If you ever need money, you'd make a good Russian propagandist. You seem
to have internalized every of their talking point. May you have the power to investigate the other
side as well, once in a while.
By the way, maybe you have not noticed that Israel is not talking the Russia to joining their
Russian Federation. But Israel is talking to the Western establishment about the possibility to
joining NATO or the EU. What could be the reason for this, since Russia, according to your oppinion,
is not more fascist than the US?
But Israel is talking to the Western establishment about the possibility to joining NATO
or the EU.
comedygold.jpg
NATO brings obligations, and Israel already get all the dough they demand directly from the
US without going through the "US occupation forces Europe" gentleman's club. In case of integration,
imagine that there would be Israeli forces in islamic countries far away from the homeland? That
would be awkward.
While Israel would be happy to be in some new model European Trading Zone (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_trade_areas_in_Europe
), being "in the EU" is another kettle of fish entirely. First, Israel is not European. And
then again, obligations. In particular to stop shooting people held in reservations. Nyet, not
happening. Read More
This is not Bin Laden on this picture with Brzezinski! It looks like a guy with Pakistani or Indian
paratrooper markings demonstrating the use of Russian RPD machine gun.
But Israel is talking to the Western establishment about the possibility to joining NATO or
the EU.
comedygold.jpg
NATO brings obligations, and Israel already get all the dough they demand directly from the
US without going through the "US occupation forces Europe" gentleman's club. In case of integration,
imagine that there would be Israeli forces in islamic countries far away from the homeland? That
would be awkward.
While Israel would be happy to be in some new model European Trading Zone (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_trade_areas_in_Europe),
being "in the EU" is another kettle of fish entirely. First, Israel is not European. And then
again, obligations. In particular to stop shooting people held in reservations. Nyet, not happening.
In fact NATO already trains jointly with Israel, and Israel has narrow ties with the EU.
Israel also participates in the European Song Contest.
El Al uses Schiphol, Amsterdam airport, as its main base in Europe.
Read More
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100 Words
@Nils If you think the President makes final decisions on all matters, I have a beach front
property to sell you in Iowa. He is the public face of career Pentagon, State Department, and
other Deep State proxies. Not a capstone critical thinker but a fall man.
Nuclear war isn't a reality, it's a game of chess bluffs and the winner defeats the loser when
there is only a logical option of loss. Because when supremacy is achieved, and understood by
the opponent, you don't suddenly nuke them - you take its periphery (Ukraine, Baltics and E. Europe,
and other color revolution hot-spots), you destabilize it's source of income (oil), you cut her
off from the financial world (sanctions), you ostracize them politically (media/hacking), and
you deny them future income (Syria) while cementing their future (denying the New Silk Road by
local animosity - maritime disputes, arming India, etc).
Real sudden catastrophic loss never materializes because we live in a non-zero sum situation
- called living on the same planet - where abrupt destabilization backfires onto you from nuclear
fallout and global market failure. It's just a check-mate scenario understood by both parties
that begets a slow suffocation due to 'pawn sacrifice'.
Unless you don't have nuclear weapons...then your country and lore is up for the taking on
a whim. US is losing military ground in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan to the Russian, while USA
is losing economic ground in SE Asia, Africa, South America and North America to the Chinese,
are you saying the super-fuze is a fake news? And the American understood they are being check-mated
by the Russian and Chinese? Read More
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100 Words
@SolontoCroesus Zuesse's very important essay could be improved immeasurably by identifying
the authors of these dire policy statements:
Keir Lieber, professor in the Edmund Walsh school at Georgetown, is son of Robert Lieber, also
a professor of foreign policy studies at Georgetown --
For 2
Professors, Like Father, Like Son
Papa Lieber is one of the driving forces behind creating -- rather, demanding that Georgetown
agree to create-- the department for Jewish Civilizational Studies at Georgetown. https://www.georgetown.edu/center-for-jewish-civilization-launch
Based on a quick review of Robert Lieber's dozen appearances on C Span, the description, Like
Father like Son is apt: the senior Lieber is a an unabashed zionist and Israel firster who
has operated behind the scenes to implement neoconservative policies that favor Israel, to be
carried out at the expense of American blood and treasure, under the mendacious gloss that they
are "in America's interest." Those policies date back at least to the Clinton administration bombing
of Kosovo https://www.c-span.org/video/?100370-1/bosnia-russia-gulf-beyond ; then the Persian
Gulf war to "liberate" Kuwait https://www.c-span.org/video/?23811-1/anniversary-persian-gulf-war
and the war in Afghanistan where "Afghanis welcomed our liberation of Afghanis from the Taliban."
https://www.c-span.org/video/?168019-4/postcold-war-conflicts Good to know, SolontoCroesus. I'm
sure we'll remember to thank that cuddly pair of parasites when they manage to kill a few tens
of millions of Russians to get their 21st century war groove going. It's really too bad about
Christianity having bred the spirit of vengeance out of the white man. Do Russians thirst for
revenge? Does anyone? Read More
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Comments Randal
,
May 5, 2017 at 8:44 pm GMT \n
100 Words
@reiner Tor I actually think there is no master plan to attack Russia. There is, however,
a plan to create capabilities for the US which would enable the US government to attack
Russia with the possibility of winning such a war.
I think the US elites are incapable of such grandiose strategic thinking. Their policies just
happen as a result of general guidelines (like, weaken Russia, strengthen US capabilities relative
to Russia, push for wars that might benefit Israel or weaken Russia, etc.), without anyone thinking
through what would happen later, or what would be the logical consequence of the actions which
they take. A lot of "decisions" are probably made by institutional inertia, for example I find
it possible that the whole anti-Russian thing in the 1990s was the result of such. Why did they
feel the need to bomb Serbia, when Russia was ruled by Yeltsin? Obviously, it could only have
led to the alienation of the Russian elites, which did happen as a result. Did anyone think it
through? I don't think so.
Similar thing with immigration. It's obvious that France will be majority nonwhite by the end
of the century. It's likely that the UK will be majority nonwhite by that time as well. Germany,
probably, too. The US will be minority white by mid-century. Was this policy thought out in terms
of how it would affect the power-projection capabilities of these countries? How it would affect
their elites? I don't think so.
The most frightening thought is that they have no idea what they are doing. Probably correct,
but as the events surrounding Able Archer in 1983 highlight it's not whether the Yanks have such
intentions that matters, but whether the Russians think they might have them.
Why did they feel the need to bomb Serbia, when Russia was ruled by Yeltsin? Obviously,
it could only have led to the alienation of the Russian elites, which did happen as a result.
Did anyone think it through?
The ones who thought it through, like Kissinger, cautioned against it and were proved correct.
100 Words
@Proud_Srbin US goal is conquest and enslavement of mankind.
Adolf shared that goal, humanity will prevail, again.
Russia, China, DPRK are not Serbia, Iraq, Libya, Siria.
Adolf shared that goal, humanity will prevail, again.
Where did you hear that?
FYI: "Adolph" faced some real threats, not phony ones like we use as excuses to go to war.
Since yer on a first name basis with the dude, you oughta know the truth.
Here's a primer.:
" this entire myth, so prevalent then and even now about Hitler, and about the Japanese,
is a tissue of fallacies from beginning to end. Every plank in this nightmare evidence is either
completely untrue or not entirely the truth.
If people should learn this intellectual fraud about Hitler's Germany, then they will begin
to ask questions, and searching questions "
I wish we Brits really were the evil geniuses we are supposed to be.
From where do you think many Americans internalized the characteristic that Miro23 pegged:
"Americans have shown no remorse whatsoever for the murder of 100.000′s of civilians in the
Middle East. They are indifferent to the WMD lies, don't care about the destruction they have
caused, and show zero empathy for their victims." http://www.unz.com/article/americas-top-scientists-confirm-u-s-goal-now-is-to-conquer-russia/#comment-1860779
Britain's Lee Child created superhero Jack Reacher. In "Night School" Child locates Reacher in
Hamburg, where he beats up young Germans who call out that they are fed up with being occupied
by USA; having delivered the characteristic chops to the face then kick to the nuts, Reacher taunts
the downed German patriots, er, neo-Nazis, "how does it feel to lose a war?"
When, still in Hamburg, Reacher ultimately confronts the head of a group of Germans attempting
to revitalize German identity and culture, Reacher shoots him in the heart and then the head,
carrying out the ideals he had learned in West Point Military Academy bull sessions. For Reacher
-- Child -- British propagandists -- New York publishers, a German who is not fully on board with
USA (Anglo-zionist) demands is, by definition, a Nazi deserving only to be extrajudicially exterminated.
American (Anglo-zionist) popular culture reinforces "lack of remorse" at every turn and by numerous
venues --
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9r0haVPDAo
We'll put a boot in your eye, It's the American way . . .
As Ron Unz and Dr. Stephen Sniegoski revealed on this forum, British propaganda has a long history:
it was their efforts that lied the American people into World War II
I can't think of anything more evil than lying to an entire population in order to induce them
to hate, and then kill, another entire population.
"Who sins not with the tongue sins not at all." -
As Ron Unz and Dr. Stephen Sniegoski revealed on this forum, British propaganda has a long
history: it was their efforts that lied the American people into World War II
200 Words
@Sebastian Puettmann If you ever need money, you'd make a good Russian propagandist. You seem
to have internalized every of their talking point. May you have the power to investigate the other
side as well, once in a while.
By the way, maybe you have not noticed that Israel is not talking the Russia to joining their
Russian Federation. But Israel is talking to the Western establishment about the possibility to
joining NATO or the EU. What could be the reason for this, since Russia, according to your oppinion,
is not more fascist than the US? This post was intended for you, Sebastian:
" Israel is talking to the Western establishment about the possibility to joining NATO or the
EU. What could be the reason for this, since Russia, according to your oppinion, is not more fascist
than the US?"
Are you serious? Israel has been caught red-handed on cooperating with ISIS. Following your logic,
ISIS is much, much better than Russian Federation. Though in this case you are actually in agreement
with Israeli brass.
http://news.antiwar.com/2016/06/21/israeli-intel-chief-we-dont-want-isis-defeated-in-syria/
" maybe you have not noticed that Israel is not talking the Russia to joining their Russian
Federation."
A truly amazing observation!
Considering the role of Russian federation in stopping the ziocons from destroying Syria (and
therefore from immediate annexation of the Golan Heights by Israel), the Israelis do indeed feel
somewhat unfriendly towards Russians. There is also a much deeper "dissatisfaction" with Russians
on a part of Israelis, which takes its roots in the history of the USSR; for this deeper level
you need to read "200 years together." Read More
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@reiner Tor I actually think there is no master plan to attack Russia. There is, however,
a plan to create capabilities for the US which would enable the US government to attack
Russia with the possibility of winning such a war.
I think the US elites are incapable of such grandiose strategic thinking. Their policies just
happen as a result of general guidelines (like, weaken Russia, strengthen US capabilities relative
to Russia, push for wars that might benefit Israel or weaken Russia, etc.), without anyone thinking
through what would happen later, or what would be the logical consequence of the actions which
they take. A lot of "decisions" are probably made by institutional inertia, for example I find
it possible that the whole anti-Russian thing in the 1990s was the result of such. Why did they
feel the need to bomb Serbia, when Russia was ruled by Yeltsin? Obviously, it could only have
led to the alienation of the Russian elites, which did happen as a result. Did anyone think it
through? I don't think so.
Similar thing with immigration. It's obvious that France will be majority nonwhite by the end
of the century. It's likely that the UK will be majority nonwhite by that time as well. Germany,
probably, too. The US will be minority white by mid-century. Was this policy thought out in terms
of how it would affect the power-projection capabilities of these countries? How it would affect
their elites? I don't think so.
The most frightening thought is that they have no idea what they are doing. "The most frightening
thought is that they have no idea what they are doing."
Their sick psychopathic heads could well contain the "grandiose strategic thinking" for attacking
Russia and China with nuclear weaponry, on some opportunistic impulse.
Read More
100 Words
@Intelligent Dasein I do not doubt that the Deep State's objective is to destroy Russia, but
I' skeptical that this "super-fuze" amounts to any kind of decisive step in that direction. The
Pentagon's claimed effectiveness for its gosh-wow gadgetry has latterly been orders of magnitude
above the reality of the situation. We've just spent the better part of two decades being unable
to make meaningful progress in freaking Afghanistan , for crying out loud.
Frankly, I do not think that America's transgendered military could so much as conquer Costa Rica,
let alone take on a nuclear armed Russia. " We've just spent the better part of two decades being
unable to make meaningful progress in freaking Afghanistan, for crying out loud."
The idea is not to win the war in Afghanistan, but to prolong it for ever if possible. Thus
making billions for the power elite And in this country of dumb bastards it's a snap.
Read More
100 Words
@Max Payne This just sounds like an air burst detonation. Is this one of those American things
where they relabel something and remarket it? Not exactly. The super-fuse is an envelope around
the target which is underground, in which the explosion results in the destruction of the target
even if the missile has not hit the ground within the radius of destruction for its potency. The
optimum destruction envelope around the target looks like a church bell, as one would expect.
Therefore, it is in air-burst detonation, but this is not the essence of the super-fusing technique.
An air-burst too early or too late, still does not destroy the target . The essence is
to "save" a missile which would have missed the target and still destroy the underground silo.
A computer on-board the missile decides when to detonate the missile for its existing trajectory.
Read More
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,
May 5, 2017 at 11:07 pm GMT \n
400 Words
@El Dato Is this a plot for a new Spielberg movie.
Is this a plot for a new Spielberg movie.
No, it's the prequel:
Mackinder -> Mahan (who taught the theory to West Pointers)
Walter McDougall on Mahan (among other things - listen to the whole thing (skip the intros)
In this insightful paper, Walter McDougall explores the options and outcomes facing Japan,
Germany, Italy, USA, and the British in their interpretations, or misinterpretations, of Mahan's
theories.
The most pertinent quote from McDougall's paper recites that:
"Thus, Germany's naval program might be a weapon designed to overthrow the world order or
a tool to help her forge a larger (responsible) stake in that order. But Sir Thomas Sanderson,
a brilliant veteran just retired from Whitehall, responded to Crowe with a sigh. He bade him
(and by extension his chief, Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Gray) to see world politics from
Germany's point of view:
It has sometimes seemed to me that to a foreigner reading our press ** the British Empire
must appear in the light of some huge giant sprawling over the globe, with gouty fingers
and toes stretching in every direction, which cannot be approached without eliciting a scream.
In short, Sanderson argued that Britain's empire and its maritime lifelines could be secured
better through accommodation of a rising peer competitor than by arrogant outrage and dogged
defense of the status quo. The parallels to the United States and China today are obvious."
Finally, in the next-best-thing-to-Spielberg, Frank Capra devotes much of the second film in
the 7-part Why We Fight series to projecting upon Germany - and Germany alone - the "militaristic"
desire to "control the (Mackinder) World Island." Capra succumbed to the British propaganda dominating
the American populace as well as agents of influence and decision-makers; in the clutch of the
"huge giant sprawling over the globe, with gouty fingers and toes stretching in every direction,"
Capra responded to competition with amped up "arrogant outrage and dogged defense of the status
quo," a status quo that was, by the way, ludicrously sanitized in Capra's saccharine portrayal
of the unalloyed virtue of American life.
{ ~4 min, Capra claims that Germany seeks control of the World Island.
In the first installment of the Why We Fight series, Capra has Germany plotting the conquest of
the entire world.)
** Once again, the British, masters of propaganda, can't control their tongues –
Read More
On top of all this, the US intelligence has been tasked with collecting psychological profiles
of all Russian commanders of nuclear missile submarines. The plan is to try convince them not
to launch, once the Russian command has been destroyed by the First Strike – once they have
no command any more.
I won't even go into the loony ideas of this article or your understanding of the super fuses.
How the hell do you know what U.S. intelligence is being "tasked with?" Are these intelligence
agencies or your personal informers? Have these "tasks" been reported to the general public? And
if so where is the intelligence value in such?
Are you a movie script writer? Have you ever heard of counter-intelligence? Yes, maybe, never?
Who cares if you "won't even go into the loony ideas of this article or your understanding
of the super fuses"? You have made zero contribution to the debate on his topic and I recognise
a troll who is too ready for personal insults from the peak of his/her superior knowledge which
does not exist.
200 Words
@jilles dykstra "and the mobile platforms (truck and train based) discovered by US satellites."
Forget about it, the real ones can be parked in any farm, the inflatable ones cannot be distinghuised
from the real ones.
Even in Saddam's Irak USA planes were unable to find Saddam's mobile V2's. Iran's underground
silo's are even atomic bomb proof. I do not dispute what you wrote – the Russians would not be
keeping their mobile launchers in plain sight, certainly not parading them around the country
ready for photo- and video-shoot, just like the BUK battery according to the utterly ridiculous
Dutch-lead Investigation of MH17 shoot-down.
However, the issue is always – how much of "own" damage are the US/NATO leaders ready to accept?
Somehow, my feeling is that if the bombs are not falling on Tel Aviv the damage becomes acceptable.
Lately, there has been a very powerful push in the media to disapprove nuclear winter and radiation
damage to the population. Some commenters here are trying the same tack. In other words, if
you are not killed by the nuclear explosion, you will be ok , so say the warmongers, those
who claim the destruction of the planet are fools , again so say the warmongers. I have no
doubt that "someone" is trying to sell the advantages of the nuclear war to the population.
Read More
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100 Words
@annamaria "The most frightening thought is that they have no idea what they are doing."
Their sick psychopathic heads could well contain the "grandiose strategic thinking" for attacking
Russia and China with nuclear weaponry, on some opportunistic impulse. Let us look at it this
way – MAD was a destruction of the two opponents, were the one which strikes first is destroyed
say 60% and the one which was struck first is destroyed 90%. This is looking only at the effect
of the explosions, not at any residual effects.
On top of all this, the US intelligence has been tasked with collecting psychological profiles
of all Russian commanders of nuclear missile submarines. The plan is to try convince them not
to launch, once the Russian command has been destroyed by the First Strike – once they have
no command any more.
I won't even go into the loony ideas of this article or your understanding of the super fuses.
How the hell do you know what U.S. intelligence is being "tasked with?" Are these intelligence
agencies or your personal informers? Have these "tasks" been reported to the general public? And
if so where is the intelligence value in such?
Mackinder ---> Mahan (who taught the theory to West Pointers)
Walter McDougall on Mahan (among other things -- listen to the whole thing (skip the intros)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKGSq2rvucQ
In this insightful paper, Walter McDougall explores the options and outcomes facing Japan,
Germany, Italy, USA, and the British in their interpretations, or misinterpretations, of Mahan's
theories.
http://www.fpri.org/article/2011/11/history-and-strategies-grand-maritime-and-american/
The most pertinent quote from McDougall's paper recites that:
"Thus, Germany's naval program might be a weapon designed to overthrow the world order or a
tool to help her forge a larger (responsible) stake in that order. But Sir Thomas Sanderson,
a brilliant veteran just retired from Whitehall, responded to Crowe with a sigh. He bade him
(and by extension his chief, Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Gray) to see world politics from
Germany's point of view:
It has sometimes seemed to me that to a foreigner reading our press** the British Empire
must appear in the light of some huge giant sprawling over the globe, with gouty fingers
and toes stretching in every direction, which cannot be approached without eliciting a scream.
In short, Sanderson argued that Britain's empire and its maritime lifelines could be secured
better through accommodation of a rising peer competitor than by arrogant outrage and dogged
defense of the status quo. The parallels to the United States and China today are obvious."
Finally, in the next-best-thing-to-Spielberg, Frank Capra devotes much of the second film in the
7-part Why We Fight series to projecting upon Germany -- and Germany alone -- the "militaristic"
desire to "control the (Mackinder) World Island." Capra succumbed to the British propaganda dominating
the American populace as well as agents of influence and decision-makers; in the clutch of the
"huge giant sprawling over the globe, with gouty fingers and toes stretching in every direction,"
Capra responded to competition with amped up "arrogant outrage and dogged defense of the status
quo," a status quo that was, by the way, ludicrously sanitized in Capra's saccharine portrayal
of the unalloyed virtue of American life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaiXs_e-ekI
{ ~4 min, Capra claims that Germany seeks control of the World Island.
In the first installment of the Why We Fight series, Capra has Germany plotting the conquest of
the entire world.)
**Once again, the British, masters of propaganda, can't control their tongues -- I would recommend
the longest piece of video that you quoted, the one by Walter McDougall. I do not agree with all
his explanations of the beginnings of US Imperialism, but it is still a very, very interesting
lecture, well worth more than an hour of our time. It helps understand better the non-partisan,
non-propagandist US historians and their views.
Great assembly of proofs of your points, thank you for broadening my perspectives.
Read More
@Wizard of Oz Ah, now some of the stranger things you have said become a little less puzzling
as you reveal your romantic Russian mythmaking soul. Again your ignorance of history tricks you
into talking nonsense. Read More Anon 2
,
May 6, 2017 at 1:52 am GMT \n
300 Words
@Carlton Meyer What our media overlooks is that the USA blatantly violated arms agreements
with Russia by building missile bases in Poland and Romania with MK-41 launchers, capable of launching
nuclear tipped cruise missiles to quickly strike key targets in Russia. The Pentagon promises
to only place SM-3 anti-missile missiles in these silos. Trust us, our Generals proclaim! A little
history: Despite the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia refused to withdraw from the Kaliningrad
Region in the early 1990s, and to this day it effectively remains a Russian colony. Russia also
initially refused to withdraw its troops from western Poland, and finally did so in stages until
all troops were withdrawn by 1994-5. The conclusion is: Russia cannot be trusted, which, of course,
is something that any child in Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine learns
based on the Russian behavior in the last 300 years.
The area known today as Kaliningrad Oblast' was conquered by the (predominantly Germanic) Teutonic
Knights in the 13th century from Sambians (related to Lithuanians) who were then effectively ethnically
cleansed. The upshot is that neither Russia nor Germany can make the original claim to that piece
of land (located between Poland and Lithuania). In a sane and rational world the Kaliningrad region
would be demilitarized and made into an independent country (with Lithuania perhaps having the
greatest claim to the territory) but when was the last time humans behaved rationally in foreign
affairs?
The U.S./NATO has over 300 military installations in Germany, incl. nuclear weapons. It makes
little difference whether missiles are in western Poland or eastern Germany. The territory is
so small that Berlin lies right next to the Polish border. Russia correspondingly placed Iskander
missiles in Kaliningrad which are capable of hitting Berlin. So now we have a balance of terror.
This seems to be the highest solution that humans in our current primitive state of consciousness
are capable of. To quote Trump: sad Read More
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@Kiza I was sceptical about super-fuses until I read a detailed explanation of how they work.
Then I realised how dangerous this is. It would not be terribly hard for the Russians and the
Chinese to replicate this development, however their possession of the same technology would NOT
reduce the likelihood of US using it first.
In briefest, super-fusing makes the First Strike much more effective and thus likely. The idea
of super-fusing is relatively simple - unlike cruise and hypersonic missiles, the ballistic missiles
have one huge weakness - once the rocket fuel is spent the ballistic missiles fly like thrown
rocks - there is little trajectory correction. Super-fusing activates explosion within a predefined
envelope of optimum destruction for the target, thus increasing the likelyhood of destroying the
target several times over. For example, instead of the nuclear bomb overshooting the target, it
is activated when the closest to the target. Super-fusing against land based silos and mobile
launchers, combined with much better ABMD than exists now, especially against submarine launched
ballistic missiles, would enable the First Strike with very low payback - in single digit percent.
This means a First Strike that could destroy up to 99% of enemy's retaliatory capability and leaving
more than enough missiles to threaten direct strikes on enemy's major cities.
100 Words
@Realist " We've just spent the better part of two decades being unable to make meaningful
progress in freaking Afghanistan, for crying out loud."
The idea is not to win the war in Afghanistan, but to prolong it for ever if possible. Thus making
billions for the power elite And in this country of dumb bastards...it's a snap. The war in Afghanistan
is all about preventing / disrupting Eurasian integration. Afghanistan is a good spot to do that
as, in addition to being centrally located it is also militarily weak. It borders the important
'Stans into which disruption could exported, and even offers a corridor to China.
The US saw success there, but it's fleeting. It did temporarily disrupt Eurasian integration,
but this is overshadowed by its failure to set up a political structure capable of sustaining,
much less expanding the disruption in its absence. Unless the US invests a politically unacceptable
amount of resources, it's stuck there playing a spoiler's game and will continue to do so until
something happens to oust it. Read More
@Kiza I would recommend the longest piece of video that you quoted, the one by Walter McDougall.
I do not agree with all his explanations of the beginnings of US Imperialism, but it is still
a very, very interesting lecture, well worth more than an hour of our time. It helps understand
better the non-partisan, non-propagandist US historians and their views.
Great assembly of proofs of your points, thank you for broadening my perspectives. thank you for
reading.
"... "We control America." -Former Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon ..."
"... IDF vs Hezbollah round 2 should be interesting. All the Pauly Shores and Jared Kushners in uniform shat their panties when they faced a tough disciplined adversary immune to air superiority. Asymmetrical warfare is the 21st century's antidote to gunboat diplomacy. ..."
"... Actually, Shel Adelson put all his casino chips in Rubio's corner, and considered Trump unreliable at best. Until Trump won. Then I guess Adelson did support him, though I doubt Trump is bought and paid for to the extent Rubio would have been. ..."
"... Trump, at the order of Netanyahu, will destroy Iran in order to establish Israel as the only hegemonic power over the whole Middle East and Northern Africa. That's why they are destroying one country after another according to sectarian and religious lines such as the Yinon Plan outlined. The whole chaos in the Middle East serves only Israel. Just recently, Netanyahu said that Israel is one of the superpowers. How right he is. ..."
"... Mr. Margolis. Everything in Trumpland has to be magnified to huge. The attack on the Iran agreement fits nicely in Trump's idiosyncrasy that every achievement of president Obama must be dragged through the mud and declared the worst thing ever done by a US president. As in the case of NAFTA Trump may actually do nothing after he has talked to two women: May and Merkel. There is even an outside chance that he will talk to a third: Le Pen. ..."
"... Kushner and the military have the foreign policy portfolio. Trump has no idea whats going on. All of a sudden everybody likes him. That's enough for Trump. So "we" have gone full Zio. Duck and cover! ..."
Maybe the president believes he's won a great victory over the wicked Syrians by lobbing cruise
missiles at one of their underused air bases. Maybe Trump believes that he's scared the evil Russians
and the too big for their sampans Chinese into obedience.
His 22,000 lb MOAB terror bomb on Afghanistan should keep those pesky Taliban quiet for a while
even though the Pentagon claimed the intended target was a group- Khorosan – that may not actually
exist.
Those major malefactors, the crazy North Koreans, could be about to feel America's full military
might if they so much as twitch.
Not content with nearly stirring up a new war with North Korea, President Donald Trump is now
waving the big stick at another of Washington's favorite bogeymen, Iran. For the Trumps, Iran is
poison.
In recent days, President Trump has threatened to renounce the six-power nuclear agreement to
freeze or shrink Iran's nuclear infrastructure. This sensible pact was signed during the Obama administration
by the great powers: US, Britain, France, Russia, Germany and China. Trump appears willing to abrogate
the treaty and outrage the other great powers just because he hates Iran for some reason and, it
appears, Muslims in general.
The Trump administration seems increasingly influenced by Israel's far right Netanyahu government.
In fact, PM Netanyahu often appears the most moderate member of his rightist coalition which is dominated
by militant West Bank settlers.
Trump has surrounded himself with ardent supporters of Israel's right. One of his major bankrollers
is casino mogul Sheldon Adelson who is a key supporter of Jewish expansion on the illegally occupied
West Bank.
Israel's right has made a hate fetish of Iran and incessantly calls for war against the Islamic
Republic. However, the mighty US Israel lobby twice failed to push the Obama administration to attack
Iran. The US Congress, by contrast, is totally under the thumb of Israel's American lobby and pays
more respect to PM Netanyahu than the president. He who pays the piper .
In fact, Congress sought to block sales of Boeing civilian airliners to Iran worth $16.6 billion
even though it would have cost thousands of American jobs. Congress has been trying to sabotage the
Iran nuclear deal ever since it was signed, putting American national interests on a collision course
with those of Israel's right.
But now President Trump says he's found a new reason to sabotage the six-power deal: Iran, insists
Trump, supports 'terrorism' and has bad intentions. This charge has been around for decades, cited
by Israel as a compelling reason to attack Iran because Tehran supports the 'terrorist' Lebanese
movement Hezbollah and the Palestinian movement Hamas.
The 'terrorist' label is slapped onto all enemies of Israel and the United States. It's a handy,
meaningless sobriquet that automatically denies those so named political or moral justice.
I was with the Israel army when it invaded Lebanon in 1982 and saw first-hand how its arrogance
turned formerly pro-Israel Shia Lebanese in the south into anti-Israel fighters. Israel actually
encouraged and may have secretly financed the growth of Hezbollah and Hamas hoping they would drain
support from the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and Lebanon's Amal militia.
Israel hates Hamas and Hezbollah and is determined to eradicate them. The principal supporter
of Hamas and Hezbollah has long been Syria. Large parts of Syria have now been destroyed by a US-engineered
uprising and bands of Saudi-financed mercenaries. That has left Iran as the main supporter of Hamas
and Hezbollah, and a principal backer of Syria's Assad government. The PLO has become a puppet of
Israel and the US.
So Israel is now determined to destroy Hezbollah in its strongholds in Lebanon and then crush
Hamas with Trump's blessing, so ending any dreams of a Palestinian state. Iran is now being blamed
for all Washington's problems in the Mideast. So war fever against Iran is again mounting.
IDF vs Hezbollah round 2 should be interesting. All the Pauly Shores and Jared Kushners
in uniform shat their panties when they faced a tough disciplined adversary immune to air superiority.
Asymmetrical warfare is the 21st century's antidote to gunboat diplomacy.
We in the west got scant information of the drubbing the Edomites got in that scrap. If you
read between the lines of major media coverage (as obviously should be done) one got the distinct
impression that they ran out of euphemisms to try to paint that conflict as anywhere near positive.
It turns out that the mighty Israeli army had feet of clay. And hurt feelings too judging by
the massive 48 hour air assault they conducted before the peace agreement came into effect.
My prediction is that the next time around the IDF will use all modern MOAB and fuel air ordnance
weapons (gifted by Uncle Sugar) to clear the ground before their snowflake grunts appear on the
scene. A real holocaust (by dictionary definition) as it were. Of course militarily it is the
proper thing to do but politically problematic. If Hezbollah has accounted for this by burrowing
ever more deeply, there will be dragons. Israel cannot allow for any kind of casualty count domestically.
It is written that the French killed 75,000 0f their own due to artillery barrages in WW1.
Those days are long over.
It looks like Trump hasn't gotten Eric's memo. He's also not afraid to think really big. Besides,
Trump is one of those people who double down and try to prove anyone wrong who says he can't do
something, so we should prepare for war with Iran, Syria, N. Korea, and Russia no matter the consequences.
The Trump administration seems increasingly influenced by Israel's far right Netanyahu government.
Ditto that. Trump is a Judaized white man who was surrounded by many American Jews with longstanding
ties to the Likud party, so I always thought his talk of non-interventionism and "America first"
seemed fanciful and merely designed to ensnare "deplorabes". It was only a matter of time before
his court Jews employed their wiles to change Trump from populist with a humble foreign policy
into a cross between George W. Bush and Bibi Netanyahu bent on regime change and more reckless
and insane than both combined.
Actually, Shel Adelson put all his casino chips in Rubio's corner, and considered Trump
unreliable at best. Until Trump won. Then I guess Adelson did support him, though I doubt Trump
is bought and paid for to the extent Rubio would have been.
Let's look at the alternatives here. Any other Republican except for Rand Paul wanted confrontation
with Iran, and on a faster timetable than Trump. Hillary was more hawkish than Trump, on that
nearly everyone agrees. So really, the odds of any other major candidate starting a war
with Iran were greater than they are with Trump.
But what of this?
Trump is a Judaized white man who was surrounded by many American Jews with longstanding
ties to the Likud party, so I always thought his talk of non-interventionism and "America first"
seemed fanciful and merely designed to ensnare "deplorabes."
Again, it would be nearly impossible for anyone to serve as President without "American Jews with
longstanding ties to the Likud Party" to be lurking around somewhere. They are everywhere
, in both parties, and at a synagogue near you. But if Trump gets into the morass of regime
change, he's a one-term President and a massive failure. I think he knows that.
Donald Trump's rhetorical bravado in Syria and Afghanistan is a prelude of a looming attack
on Iran that will evolve, at the end, into an outright war across the Middle East. Such a war
of aggression will break America's neck and will be the beginning of the end of the State of Israel.
Both crazy states have nuclear weapons and they will use them. Both, Israel and the US, don't
have any ethics. They are driven by a domination of other peoples. The US have been waging wars
since its establishment, except for 17 (!) years. A real peace-loving nation. The same holds true
for Israel. Since 1948, Israel has been at war with its neighbors and threatens Iran with war.
Trump, at the order of Netanyahu, will destroy Iran in order to establish Israel as the
only hegemonic power over the whole Middle East and Northern Africa. That's why they are destroying
one country after another according to sectarian and religious lines such as the Yinon Plan outlined.
The whole chaos in the Middle East serves only Israel. Just recently, Netanyahu said that Israel
is one of the superpowers. How right he is.
@Anonymous By all means sell all the guided missiles, sorry... airliners, that Persian hearts
desire! They will go up in smoke, torched by 500 lb bombs, or maybe by Standard missiles while
trying to hit a high-rise building in the civilized world.
And Israel wins without fighting yet again. Sun Tzu is smiling, but looks a bit tired. Sorry,
911, inside job!
Hey Eric- in your list of threats by Trump, you skip his threats to Mexic0, China, Australia,
Germany, Sweden, Britain, the EU, and most recently South Korea. And not to forget: Canada.
Of course, he's not threatening war against any of those. Just trade war.
Except China.
It's hard to tell whether he knows the difference between friends and foes.
Oh, wait, there is one country and one leader he has never threatened, never spoken a bad word
of, and never so much as hinted at being any sort of issue for the United States.
Only sure cure, to get Americans to stop terrorizing the planet earth-Remove/relocate UN into
Palestine (West Bank).
Didi
,
May 2, 2017 at 12:30 pm GMT \n
Mr. Margolis. Everything in Trumpland has to be magnified to huge. The attack on the Iran
agreement fits nicely in Trump's idiosyncrasy that every achievement of president Obama must be
dragged through the mud and declared the worst thing ever done by a US president. As in the case
of NAFTA Trump may actually do nothing after he has talked to two women: May and Merkel. There
is even an outside chance that he will talk to a third: Le Pen. mr meener
,
May 2, 2017 at 12:46 pm GMT \n
head rabbi in Israel .goyim were born to serve Israel. trump has been kosherized by
all the traitor jews around him with the master of them all kosher Kushner. the Syrian air force
base was bombed because Syria did shoot down an Israeli jet. even the NK fiasco is tied to Israel.
when Israel bombed the Syrian reactor in 2006 they killed 10 north Korean scientists who they
knew were there. EVERY foreign policy war blockades sanctions bombing are ALL for israel. there
is utterly no hope for this country
mr meener
,
May 2, 2017 at 12:48 pm GMT \n
@Proud_Srbin Thank you for frankness Mr. Margolis. Humanity always prevails, terrorists always
lose!
God Bless Mankind! when the terrorist army is ISIS Israel's private army they will not lose.
they have the backing of the whole west and saudia arbia. keep dreaming evil never loses in a
world controlled by satan and his spawn
China and Russia, both bordering Korea, have not yet drawn their redlines to any attack on
NK.
And why not? Is it because they know or feel sure that US dares not wage a full scale war against
NK?
Surely, surely mad US generals, fake MSM, fake Congress are not that mad to attack a country
like Korea.
How about by a pinprick; similar to that on the Shayrat airbase?
Israel hates Hamas and Hezbollah and is determined to eradicate them. The principal supporter
of Hamas and Hezbollah has long been Syria. Large parts of Syria have now been destroyed by
a US-engineered uprising and bands of Saudi-financed mercenaries. That has left Iran as the
main supporter of Hamas and Hezbollah, and a principal backer of Syria's Assad government.
The PLO has become a puppet of Israel and the US.
I've said all along that the war being waged by the US against Syria is for the purpose of
destroying the supply line used to transfer advanced weapons from Iran to Hezbollah. Israel simply
cannot abide the thought of being unable to invade Lebanon at will, and will never, ever get over
having their plow cleaned by Hezbollah in 2006.
Obama has left an indelible mark with his signing on of the US to the deal on Iran's nuclear
program. It's irreversible now because Russia is a party to the deal. As is the Syria war because
of Russia's influence and it's MAD deterrent. And North Korea is safe because of China's influence.
Throughout the world the situation is going to be different now for the US. Russia and China
have stood up and drawn a line in the sand. The deterrent to US aggression that was missing since
the fall of the Soviet Union is now back.
@bob balkas China and Russia, both bordering Korea, have not yet drawn their redlines to any
attack on NK.
And why not? Is it because they know or feel sure that US dares not wage a full scale war against
NK?
Surely, surely mad US generals, fake MSM, fake Congress are not that mad to attack a country
like Korea.
How about by a pinprick; similar to that on the Shayrat airbase? Make no mistake Bob, the red
lines have been drawn by China and Russia that forbid a US strike against North Korea. Much goes
on in the background that is not fed to the US media. This is why the US media is useless for
letting us know what is really happening in foreign affairs that include the US. It's also the
reason why 90% of what we read on antiwar.com is useless too.
It's a good idea to avoid military action against Iran. No matter how many military victories
you chalk up on the battlefield, you can't win in the long run fighting in an area in which the
vast majority of the population does not want you there. WorkingClass
,
May 2, 2017 at 8:27 pm GMT \n
Kushner and the military have the foreign policy portfolio. Trump has no idea whats going
on. All of a sudden everybody likes him. That's enough for Trump. So "we" have gone full Zio.
Duck and cover! eric
siverson ,
May 2, 2017 at 9:45 pm GMT \n
I think a lot of people are confusing the little independent State of Israel with the international
bankers often referred to as the new world order NWO I don't agree they are the same force and
Israel has been and will continue to be as much of a victim as all the rest of us .
Carroll
Price ,
May 3, 2017 at 2:52 am GMT \n
@eric siverson I think a lot of people are confusing the little independent State of Israel
with the international bankers often referred to as the new world order NWO I don't agree they
are the same force and Israel has been and will continue to be as much of a victim as all the
rest of us . With American tax payers forking over in excess of 5 billion dollars per year to
Israel (and that's only what we know about) you could hardly refer to that shitty little aberration
as an independent state.
"In some ways I've been disheartened by the election of Trump
and the fact so many fellow citizens would vote for him. "
I disagree. Voting for Trump was not so much voting for Trump
as voting against Hillary, voting against the Washington
neoliberal/neocon establishment.
Trump was just a flag bearers of the discontent against
neoliberalism in the USA (and first of all destruction of
jobs and redistribution of wealth up ) and neoliberal
globalization as well as never ending wars for the expansion
of neoliberal empire led by the USA.
And it is under him part of the protest movement coalesce.
In this sense his success mirror the success of Bernie
Sanders, and I believe a part of voters who intended to vote
for Bernie voted for Trump as "the lesser evil",
As one respondent, a 34-year-old male IT technician, put
it: "Bernie and Trump agree a lot on healthcare, Iraq war,
campaign finance and trade. I really want to move on to
something new, new ideas from outside the box. Maybe Donald
Trump can provide that."
The fact that such discontent is appropriated by far right
in not new historically. And the fact that Trump was forced,
or from the beginning intended to betray his supporters is
nothing new. This is a standard practice of both Democratic
Party since Clinton. Although it is too early to tell, it
might well be that Trump is already neutered and we got
Hillary II.
My grandmother spoke perfect, accent free English. She told me, in her late 60's, of her still
vivid memories of being taunted for lack of English, and shared her recollections of all the anti-Semitic
epithets she heard growing up in poverty in Manhattan. She was apparently a terrific student.
But in her senior year of high school, she was told by her principal that she was too poor to
go to college and that her responsibility was to get a job and support her family. These barriers
did not stop her from having a rich and fascinating life, including taking night courses from
Will Durant at the New School for Social Research (as it was then called) and working as a close
secretary to Margaret Sanger, so she was present at the beginning of Planned Parenthood.
And her grandchildren (my sister and me) have lived extraordinarily privileged lives and my
father grew up in middle class comfort.
yuan -> Peter K.... March 19, 2017 at 06:45 PM
what linkage?
the usa had been a corporate fascist kleptocracy for generations. the usa has also been a fundamentally
racist nation since its founding.
please stop apologizing for the deplorables (and neo-fascists) who make up the core of trump's
base.
Neoliberals continue attack who they see as their enemies, the civil left. All the while the
barbarians mass at the gates. I don't quite know what to make of the rage the neoliberals have
towards progressives. I think it's because they think if the progressives weren't stabbing them
in that back they could fend off the fascists.
Progressives know better though. If the neoliberals continue as usual we can't help, fascism
will win out.
You would think that the Trump family would have some awareness of the persecution that German-Americans
were subjected to during WWI. His parents and grandparents certainly would have know about it.
You would think that the Trump family would have some awareness of the persecution that German-Americans
were subjected to during WWI....
[ Interesting, I however have no idea of the family background of the president and wonder
whether much was made of the persecution in American history classes, say, in the 1950s or 1960s.
]
Trump victory was almost 30 years in the making, and I think all presidents starting from Carter
contributed to it.
Even if Hillary became president this time, that would be just one term postponement on
the inevitable outcome of neoliberal domination for the last 30 years.
I think anybody with dictatorial inclinations and promise to "drain the swamp" in Washington,
DC now has serious changes on victory in the US Presidential elections. So after Trump I, we
might see Trump II.
So it people find that Trump betrays his election promised they will turn to democratic
Party. They will turn father right, to some Trump II.
Due to economic instability and loss of jobs, people are ready to trade (fake) two party
"democracy" (which ensures the rule of financial oligarchy by forcing to select between two
equally unpalatable candidates) that we have for economic security, even if the latter means
the slide to the dictatorship.
That's very sad, but I think this is a valid observation. What we experience is a new variation
of the theme first played in 1930th, after the crash of 1928.
The story of working class and lower middle class turning to the far right for help after
financial oligarchy provoke a nationwide crisis and destroy their "way of life" and standards
of living is not new. In 1930th the US ruling class proved to be ready to accept the New Deal
as the alternative. In Germany it was not.
"... During the inflationary crisis of the 1970s, elite policymakers in Western Europe came to the conclusion that it was no longer possible for the welfare state to operate as it had since 1945. Their project thereafter has been twofold: to convince the public that their diagnosis is right, and to enact (what they consider) necessary neoliberal reforms by any means necessary. ..."
"... The first task proved difficult with certain reforms (notably liberalizing labor markets) and easier with others (implementing a fixed exchange rate regime, effectively blocking full employment macroeconomic policy, though not explicitly described as such by its proponents). ..."
"... Gradually, elites shifted their emphasis toward the second strategy. Their primary means of forcing through reform has been the non-democratic policymaking machinery that the European Union put in place in the 1980s and '90s to straitjacket national political actors. (A policymaking machinery that national actors have largely gone along with, since they too are convinced that their domestic policies need a heavy dose of neoliberal reform.) ..."
"... The European far right has existed continuously since World War II, with outbreaks in different countries at different times, each of which is an interesting political phenomenon in its own right. ..."
"... Le Pen's first appearance on the French political scene: the 1956 general election, when Le Pen was elected as part of a wave of followers of the lower-middle-class, xenophobic, populist tax-revolter Pierre Poujade. ..."
"... The center-left establishment is disdained because it tried to bypass national politics and become the high priest-caste of a regressive European order. ..."
"... The reason this political moment feels different - the threat of the far right more threatening, the wan protection offered by the political establishment least reassuring - has nothing to do with the far right itself, nor with the failure of traditional social-democratic policies. Indeed, since Beauchamp assumes that social democracy has been static since 1945, it cannot possibly have caused a political phenomenon that only thrust itself upon us in the last few years. ..."
"... The difference - the critical break - lies in the behavior of the establishment near-right in the aftermath of the financial crisis. It perceived, far sooner than the hapless social democrats of the European mainstream, that the consensus economic policies of the post-1970s era were doomed in the public mind. Having no other acceptable economic program to fall back on, they moved to assimilate xenophobia and use it as both an offensive and defensive weapon for the coming populist onslaught. That is what Cameron did when he acceded to a Brexit referendum, and that is what the Republican Party did when it nominated Donald Trump for the presidency. ..."
"... In short, Trump cannot simply have been caused by white supremacy, because we have always had white supremacy. What we haven't always had is the breakdown of elite consensus and the center-left's veneration of procedural norms and reliance on "non-partisan" third-party validators to fight what is in fact an ideological power struggle. ..."
Again it's interesting that Sanjait and PGL usually agree with Krugman, Bible and verse but they
didn't agree with his most recent blog post which was about populism and leftwing/Sanders-type
economic policy.
Titled "Populism and the Politics of Health"
And yet they didn't want to talk about! Very odd...
Here's a good rejoiner to Vox and Krugman about a subject Sanjait and PGL don't want to talk
about:
A Vox writer sets out to prove social-democratic policies aided the far right. He fails.
by Marshall Steinbaum
Several weeks before Hillary Clinton's bitter defeat at the hands of Donald Trump, Vox's Zack
Beauchamp waded into the simplistic debate about whether "economic anxiety" or racism was to blame
for Trump's political success with a salvo on behalf of the racism explanation. Although that
effort made some worthwhile points, it ultimately failed to explain why long-existing latent racism
manifested in the sudden increase in xenophobia in formal politics.
This week Beauchamp returned to the breach, which has only grown wider since Trump's victory.
Now the battle is about whether economic populism offers a way to stop Trump and the international
march of the far right, rather than whether economic dislocation caused that march in the first
place.
Beauchamp doesn't think Bernie Sanders–style economic populism can foil the far right. But
his argument is much more ambitious: he sets out to prove that economically populist policies
stoke, rather than ameliorate, far-right political tendencies. To do that, he deploys the following
claims:
*European countries that adopted more generous redistributive policies in the post–World War
II era were more vulnerable to far-right politics than those that adopted less generous ones.
*The far right's rise occurred over the past several decades and continues despite the Left's
efforts to buy its supporters off with socialism. The reason why is that continuous immigration
has run up against an electorate that is irredeemably racist and only becomes more so as it perceives
immigrants to be the beneficiaries of the welfare state.
*Recent cases in which once-center-left parties swung decisively to the left - notably, the
UK Labour Party - have proved politically disastrous and only further exacerbated the loss of
political ground to the far right.
*American history is replete with white supremacy, and that fact is probably the major reason
why politics in the US has consistently been several notches to the right of our European counterparts.
Of these claims, only the last one resembles reality. All the others are blatant misreadings
of recent and not-so-recent history.
According to Beauchamp's stylized view of European politics, social democracy exists along
a one-dimensional continuum, with variation in the degree to which it was enacted into policy
in different countries after 1945. Combining the rising tide of immigration since the 1970s with
the ex-ante degree of social generosity, Beauchamp concludes that redistribution is perceived
as a giveaway to outsiders, and hence motivates backlash politics.
What's missing here is an understanding of what actually happened to European social democracy
along the way. So let me supply a hopefully slightly better potted history.
During the inflationary crisis of the 1970s, elite policymakers in Western Europe came to the
conclusion that it was no longer possible for the welfare state to operate as it had since 1945.
Their project thereafter has been twofold: to convince the public that their diagnosis is right,
and to enact (what they consider) necessary neoliberal reforms by any means necessary.
The first task proved difficult with certain reforms (notably liberalizing labor markets) and
easier with others (implementing a fixed exchange rate regime, effectively blocking full employment
macroeconomic policy, though not explicitly described as such by its proponents).
Gradually, elites shifted their emphasis toward the second strategy. Their primary means of
forcing through reform has been the non-democratic policymaking machinery that the European Union
put in place in the 1980s and '90s to straitjacket national political actors. (A policymaking
machinery that national actors have largely gone along with, since they too are convinced that
their domestic policies need a heavy dose of neoliberal reform.)
This hollowing out of national politics has had a profound effect on European social democracy.
As power shifted from democratically accountable to democratically unaccountable institutions
through privatization and European integration, the state's capacity to do anything about popular
(as opposed to elite) grievances eroded and discontent exploded.
The ideal end goal of contemporary European social democratic parties is perhaps best embodied
by Germany's Hartz Reforms. Enacted by a Social Democratic government in the early to mid 2000s
over the objections of the country's labor unions, the labor market reforms occasioned a split
in the party that has not been bridged since. According to the consensus narrative, the measures
left Germany in better shape than ever, allowing it to weather the Great Recession and become
a haven for economic and political refugees.
Beauchamp buys this assessment, endorsing - without evidence - the view that too much redistribution
and regulation causes economic problems. Yet the Hartz Reforms are not responsible for Germany's
relative macroeconomic success. In fact, they've worsened its labor market outcomes.
Beauchamp's point is not to conduct a policy evaluation, of course, but to presuppose that
such an evaluation has already been conducted. And that serves his real rhetorical aim: to discredit
the notion that social-democratic policies offer a solution to an emboldened far right. That it
might be exactly the failure of these neoliberal reforms and the disrepute they've brought the
leaders and factions who spearheaded them that caused social democracy's parlous state is nowhere
entertained. The sea change in social democracy goes entirely unmentioned in Beauchamp's piece.
Which brings us to the parallel potted history of the European far right. Beauchamp's method
is to recount a series of dates and country names: Jen-Marie Le Pen's creation of the Front National
in France in 1972; its electoral breakthrough in the 1984 European elections (which Beauchamp
doesn't note immediately followed a round of fiscal austerity inflicted by a Socialist government);
Jorg Haider's takeover of the Freedom Party in Austria in 1986; Pim Fortuyn's 2002 assassination
on the cusp of winning an outsized share of the vote in a Dutch parliamentary election; and Le
Pen's success at reaching the French presidential election's second round that year. The narrative
here is of a transnational, steady rise to power.
That telling is almost wholly false. The European far right has existed continuously since
World War II, with outbreaks in different countries at different times, each of which is an interesting
political phenomenon in its own right.
Beauchamp doesn't mention, for instance, Le Pen's first appearance on the French political
scene: the 1956 general election, when Le Pen was elected as part of a wave of followers of the
lower-middle-class, xenophobic, populist tax-revolter Pierre Poujade. Why omit that election?
Because it would hinder Beauchamp's claim, pointing as it does to a social movement that has long
existed on the fringes of politics and society and comes closest to power only when the political
establishment is most discredited in the public mind. And that is exactly where we are now.
The reason the European political establishment, particularly of the center-left variety, is
held in contempt is not because it tried making the welfare state more generous, only to have
the electorate turn against them out of the racist belief that foreigners were vacuuming up all
the benefits. The center-left establishment is disdained because it tried to bypass national politics
and become the high priest-caste of a regressive European order.
Which brings us to the UK Labour Party and Jeremy Corbyn's election as its leader. Beauchamp's
move here is to conflate Corbyn with his hapless predecessor, Ed Miliband, and thereby link Labour's
poor performance since 2010 to one big move to the left. In truth, Miliband inherited a party
burned by its association with the financial crisis and its willingness to go along with the Iraq
War, and steered it through treacherous waters with a mix of Blairite and more populist rhetoric
(his greatest success being a proposal to regulate power companies).
Although Beauchamp paints the 2015 general election result as a disaster for Labour, the incumbent
Tory-led coalition government came very close to losing, and the current Tory government enjoys
the slimmest parliamentary majority since the 1970s. Labour netted seats at Conservative and Liberal
Democrat expense in England; its total count suffered because the Scottish electorate deserted
the party in favor of the Scottish National Party - a move driven by Scotland's overwhelming disgust
for the incumbent government and hostility to the Westminster Labour faction's record under Blair
and Brown. Far from being a failure of the left, these results were further evidence of the establishment's
tarnished legitimacy.
This is the environment that propelled Corbyn to the top of Labour. His candidacy in the leadership
election later that year was given a crucial boost by the parliamentary party's failure to oppose
the reelected Tory government's cuts to social welfare early in the parliament's term - feeding
the perception of a hapless, ideologically adrift party leadership in need of a drastic shake
up.
Notably, the name "David Cameron" appears not once in Beauchamp's account of recent British
political history. Yet the reason Cameron won the 2015 election was the big giveaway he made to
shore up his right flank: the Brexit referendum. When Brexit ended up passing - despite the opposition
of every major party - it was a gigantic slap in the face to the incumbent establishment. (Oddly,
Beauchamp portrays Brexit as discrediting Corbyn - mirroring the way that Corbyn's intraparty
opponents blamed his leadership for the vote, even though the Labour electorate overwhelmingly
opposed Brexit and its winning margin was drawn from the English middle class, long the Tories'
electoral backbone.)
The reason this political moment feels different - the threat of the far right more threatening,
the wan protection offered by the political establishment least reassuring - has nothing to do
with the far right itself, nor with the failure of traditional social-democratic policies. Indeed,
since Beauchamp assumes that social democracy has been static since 1945, it cannot possibly have
caused a political phenomenon that only thrust itself upon us in the last few years.
The difference - the critical break - lies in the behavior of the establishment near-right
in the aftermath of the financial crisis. It perceived, far sooner than the hapless social democrats
of the European mainstream, that the consensus economic policies of the post-1970s era were doomed
in the public mind. Having no other acceptable economic program to fall back on, they moved to
assimilate xenophobia and use it as both an offensive and defensive weapon for the coming populist
onslaught. That is what Cameron did when he acceded to a Brexit referendum, and that is what the
Republican Party did when it nominated Donald Trump for the presidency.
Which brings us, finally, back home. The last section of Beauchamp's article draws upon the
great work of Eric Foner and his many disciples. American democracy and American government, Foner
argues, have been stained by white supremacy from the country's founding right up through the
present. The disenfranchisement of a large segment of what would have been a core constituency
for an American social-democratic party - southern blacks - helps explain twentieth- and twenty-first
century political and policy outcomes, well beyond the dire consequences for disenfranchised blacks
themselves. This is a basic, ineluctable fact of American politics.
That's not where Beauchamp ends up, however. Instead he blames the victim for social democracy's
failure in the US: by advocating economic egalitarianism in hostile political territory, he argues,
economic populists brought defeat upon themselves as a racist electorate interpreted that agenda
as a bid to overturn the racial hierarchy.
As Matt Bruenig has written, the unspoken implication of Beauchamp's narrative is that any
left economic agenda must first make it clear that the racial hierarchy will under no circumstances
be threatened. "You can have diversity or you can have economic justice, but you can't have both,"
to use Bruenig's characterization. The acceptance of that false dichotomy, of course, is what
gave us "super-predators," "the end of welfare as we know it," and the Obama administration's
absolute prohibition on uttering the word "poverty" in public prior to its 2012 reelection.
Yet if Beauchamp's interpretation is correct, then the US should never have seen anything other
than reactionary economic policy. And that's obviously not the case.
Interracial, interethnic social movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century
won major reforms in the face of implacable hostility from both white supremacists and capitalist
interests. And insofar as Progressive Era politicians betrayed the integrated coalitions that
brought them to power, the sellout took place behind the closed doors of the statehouses and the
United States Capitol. They most certainly did not reflect the impossibility of forming a class-based,
multiracial political coalition.
Then there was the period from 1940 to 1970, which witnessed the greatest progress in closing
the racial wealth and earnings gaps since Reconstruction, thanks to the strength of the New Deal
coalition and the labor movement, which integrated the federal government's military-industrial
supply chain (as well as the military itself, following the war), and the Civil Rights Movement,
which successfully pressed the federal government to intervene in the South on behalf of equal
rights. That advance was eventually turned back the same way it was during Reconstruction: through
an alliance of white supremacy and implicitly racialized "free market" ideology, the latter of
which came to dominate both major political parties.
In short, Trump cannot simply have been caused by white supremacy, because we have always had
white supremacy. What we haven't always had is the breakdown of elite consensus and the center-left's
veneration of procedural norms and reliance on "non-partisan" third-party validators to fight
what is in fact an ideological power struggle.
Insofar as Beauchamp has a rhetorical opponent rather than a straw man, it is the Left's backlash
against this retrograde, apologetic politics, which comes at a time when the latter has finally
and abjectly failed to win or hold power at the federal, state, or local level. And that failure
has occurred because centrist apologetics are up against the real thing: far-right xenophobia,
shoulder to shoulder with plutocracy, dominating our national politics and threatening the lives
and wellbeing of millions of our American and immigrant brethren.
Winning justice for those oppressed groups, if it is to happen, will owe nothing to the politics
for which Beauchamp fights his rearguard action.
Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid: Palestine and
the Israeli Occupation
By United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia
This report examines, based on key instruments of international law, whether Israel has established
an apartheid regime that oppresses and dominates the Palestinian people as a whole. Having established
that the crime of apartheid has universal application, that the question of the status of the
Palestinians as a people is settled in law, and that the crime of apartheid should be considered
at the level of the State, the report sets out to demonstrate how Israel has imposed such a system
on the Palestinians in order to maintain the domination of one racial group over others.
A history of war, annexation and expulsions, as well as a series of practices, has left the
Palestinian people fragmented into four distinct population groups, three of them (citizens of
Israel, residents of East Jerusalem and the populace under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza)
living under direct Israeli rule and the remainder, refugees and involuntary exiles, living beyond.
This fragmentation, coupled with the application of discrete bodies of law to those groups, lie
at the heart of the apartheid regime. They serve to enfeeble opposition to it and to veil its
very existence. This report concludes, on the basis of overwhelming evidence, that Israel is guilty
of the crime of apartheid, and urges swift action to oppose and end it. *
Oh, the irony. The usual set of posts on how great China is, followed by an attack on Israelis
for apartheid(justified I think). Meanwhile, in Tibet..............
"The usual set of posts on how great China is, followed by an attack on Israelis for apartheid(justified
I think)."
The difference is that we give billions in military aid to Israel and are mucking about the
Middle East on their behalf, to keep the peace ostensibly and to keep the oil flowing. But I agree
Tibet is a crime and John Oliver gave a good deep dive on it recently. The abuse of civil liberties
in occupied Tibet is ranked worse than in North Korea.
One can be objective about America's rivals just as one can be objective about America's allies.
You don't have to spin against our enemies and for our allies, just as it's folly to spin for
Democrats and for Republicans.
Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid: Palestine and
the Israeli Occupation
By United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia
Executive Summary
This report concludes that Israel has established an apartheid regime that dominates the Palestinian
people as a whole. Aware of the seriousness of this allegation, the authors of the report conclude
that available evidence establishes beyond a reasonable doubt that Israel is guilty of policies
and practices that constitute the crime of apartheid as legally defined in instruments of international
law.
The analysis in this report rests on the same body of international human rights law and principles
that reject anti-Semitism and other racially discriminatory ideologies, including: the Charter
of the United Nations (1945), the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), and the International
Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (1965). The report relies
for its definition of apartheid primarily on article II of the International Convention on the
Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (1973, hereinafter the Apartheid Convention):
The term "the crime of apartheid", which shall include similar policies and practices of racial
segregation and discrimination as practiced in southern Africa, shall apply to inhuman acts committed
for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over
any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.
Although the term "apartheid" was originally associated with the specific instance of South
Africa, it now represents a species of crime against humanity under customary international law
and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, according to which:
"The crime of apartheid" means inhumane acts committed in the context of an institutionalized
regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group
or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.
Against that background, this report reflects the expert consensus that the prohibition of
apartheid is universally applicable and was not rendered moot by the collapse of apartheid in
South Africa and South West Africa (Namibia).
The legal approach to the matter of apartheid adopted by this report should not be confused
with usage of the term in popular discourse as an expression of opprobrium. Seeing apartheid as
discrete acts and practices (such as the "apartheid wall"), a phenomenon generated by anonymous
structural conditions like capitalism ("economic apartheid"), or private social behaviour on the
part of certain racial groups towards others (social racism) may have its place in certain contexts.
However, this report anchors its definition of apartheid in international law, which carries with
it responsibilities for States, as specified in international instruments.
The choice of evidence is guided by the Apartheid Convention, which sets forth that the crime
of apartheid consists of discrete inhuman acts, but that such acts acquire the status of crimes
against humanity only if they intentionally serve the core purpose of racial domination. The Rome
Statute specifies in its definition the presence of an "institutionalized regime" serving the
"intention" of racial domination. Since "purpose" and "intention" lie at the core of both definitions,
this report examines factors ostensibly separate from the Palestinian dimension - especially,
the doctrine of Jewish statehood as expressed in law and the design of Israeli State institutions
- to establish beyond doubt the presence of such a core purpose.
That the Israeli regime is designed for this core purpose was found to be evident in the body
of laws, only some of which are discussed in the report for reasons of scope. One prominent example
is land policy. The Israeli Basic Law (Constitution) mandates that land held by the State of Israel,
the Israeli Development Authority or the Jewish National Fund shall not be transferred in any
manner, placing its management permanently under their authority. The State Property Law of 1951
provides for the reversion of property (including land) to the State in any area "in which the
law of the State of Israel applies". The Israel Lands Authority (ILA) manages State land, which
accounts for 93 per cent of the land within the internationally recognized borders of Israel and
is by law closed to use, development or ownership by non-Jews. Those laws reflect the concept
of "public purpose" as expressed in the Basic Law. Such laws may be changed by Knesset vote, but
the Basic Law: Knesset prohibits any political party from challenging that public purpose. Effectively,
Israeli law renders opposition to racial domination illegal....
Dear Red-State Trump Voter, Let's face it, guys: We're done.
For more than 80 years now, we-the residents of what some people like to call Blue America, but
which I prefer to think of as the United States of We Pay Our Own Damn Way-have shelled out far more
in federal tax monies than we took in. We have funded massive infrastructure projects in your rural
counties, subsidized your schools and your power plants and your nursing homes, sent you entire industries,
and simultaneously absorbed the most destitute, unskilled, and oppressed portions of your populations,
white and black alike.
All of which, it turns out, only left you more bitter, white, and alt-right than ever.
Some folks here in self-supporting America like to believe that there must be a way to bring you
back to your senses and to restore rational government, if not liberal ideals, sometime in the foreseeable
future. Everyone seems to have an answer for how to do this. Every day another earnest little homily
finds its way to me over my internet transom: "Think locally, act globally," or "Make art and fight
the power," or the old Joe Hill standby-"Don't mourn. Organize."
To which I say: Don't organize. Pack.
Not literally, of course. Not even the good people of Canada should have to stomach a mass migration
of moping American liberals mumbling, "Live locally make art." What I mean is that it's time for
blue states and cities to effectively abandon the American national enterprise, as it is currently
constituted. Call it the New Federalism. Or Virtual Secession. Or Conscious Uncoupling-though that's
already been used. Or maybe Bluexit.
Truth is, you red states just haven't been pulling your weight. Not for, well, forever. Red states
are nearly twice as dependent on the federal government as blue states. Of the twelve states that
received the least federal aid in return for each tax dollar they contribute to the U.S. Treasury,
ten of them voted for Hillary Clinton-and the other two were Michigan and Wisconsin, your newest
recruits. By the same count, 20 of the 26 states most dependent on federal aid went to Trump.
Take Mississippi (please!), famous for being 49th or 50th in just about everything that matters.
When it comes to sucking at the federal teat, the Magnolia State is the undisputed champ. More than
40 percent of Mississippi's state revenue comes from federal funding; one-third of its GDP comes
from federal spending; for every dollar it pays out in federal taxes, it takes in $4.70 in federal
aid; one in five residents are on food stamps-all national highs. You people-your phrase, not mine-liked
to bash Obama for turning America into what you derisively referred to as "Food Stamp Nation." In
reality, it's more like Food Stamp Red America-something your Trump-loving congressmen will discover
if and when they fulfill their vow to gut the program.
Trump's characterization of "American carnage" in our urban centers aside, cities now generate
the vast majority of America's wealth-the cities, that is, where blue folks live. It's true that
Hillary Clinton carried just 487 counties in 2016. It's also true that those 487 counties generate
almost two-thirds of the nation's economic activity. ...
Dear Red-State Trump Voter,
Let's face it, guys: We're done.
For more than 80 years now, we-the residents of what some
people like to call Blue America, but which I prefer to think
of as the United States of We Pay Our Own Damn Way-have
shelled out far more in federal tax monies than we took in.
We have funded massive infrastructure projects in your rural
counties, subsidized your schools and your power plants and
your nursing homes, sent you entire industries, and
simultaneously absorbed the most destitute, unskilled, and
oppressed portions of your populations, white and black
alike.
All of which, it turns out, only left you more bitter,
white, and alt-right than ever.
Some folks here in self-supporting America like to believe
that there must be a way to bring you back to your senses and
to restore rational government, if not liberal ideals,
sometime in the foreseeable future. Everyone seems to have an
answer for how to do this. Every day another earnest little
homily finds its way to me over my internet transom: "Think
locally, act globally," or "Make art and fight the power," or
the old Joe Hill standby-"Don't mourn. Organize."
To which I say: Don't organize. Pack.
Not literally, of course. Not even the good people of
Canada should have to stomach a mass migration of moping
American liberals mumbling, "Live locally make art." What I
mean is that it's time for blue states and cities to
effectively abandon the American national enterprise, as it
is currently constituted. Call it the New Federalism. Or
Virtual Secession. Or Conscious Uncoupling-though that's
already been used. Or maybe Bluexit.
Truth is, you red states just haven't been pulling your
weight. Not for, well, forever. Red states are nearly twice
as dependent on the federal government as blue states. Of the
twelve states that received the least federal aid in return
for each tax dollar they contribute to the U.S. Treasury, ten
of them voted for Hillary Clinton-and the other two were
Michigan and Wisconsin, your newest recruits. By the same
count, 20 of the 26 states most dependent on federal aid went
to Trump.
Take Mississippi (please!), famous for being 49th or 50th
in just about everything that matters. When it comes to
sucking at the federal teat, the Magnolia State is the
undisputed champ. More than 40 percent of Mississippi's state
revenue comes from federal funding; one-third of its GDP
comes from federal spending; for every dollar it pays out in
federal taxes, it takes in $4.70 in federal aid; one in five
residents are on food stamps-all national highs. You
people-your phrase, not mine-liked to bash Obama for turning
America into what you derisively referred to as "Food Stamp
Nation." In reality, it's more like Food Stamp Red
America-something your Trump-loving congressmen will discover
if and when they fulfill their vow to gut the program.
Trump's characterization of "American carnage" in our
urban centers aside, cities now generate the vast majority of
America's wealth-the cities, that is, where blue folks live.
It's true that Hillary Clinton carried just 487 counties in
2016. It's also true that those 487 counties generate almost
two-thirds of the nation's economic activity. ...
The "thirty-year crisis" of capitalism, which encompassed two world wars and the Great Depression,
was followed by a period that some economists call the Golden Age of capitalism. Today, however,
capitalism is once again enmeshed in a crisis that portends far-reaching consequences. I am not referring
here to the mere phenomenon of the generally slower average growth that has marked the system since
the mid-1970s. Rather, I am talking specifically of the crisis that started with the collapse of
the U.S. housing bubble in 2007-8 and which, far from abating, is only becoming more pronounced.
The Western media often give the impression that the capitalist world is slowly emerging from
this crisis. Since the Eurozone continues to be mired in stagnation, this impression derives entirely
from the experience of the United States, where there has been talk of raising the interest rate
on the grounds that the crisis is over, and inflation is now the new threat. There are, however,
two points about the U.S. "recovery" that need to be noted.
First, the so-called recovery has been greatly influenced by the boost in consumer demand, which
in turn was stimulated by the drastic fall in oil prices. However, this increased demand has not
been accompanied by any notable increase in investment activity, despite the fact that long-term
interest rates are near zero-that is, despite a monetary policy that has been as supportive as it
can be. We have, in other words, a repeat of the situation of the late 1930s, prior to the U.S. rearmament
drive, when capacity utilization improved in the consumption goods sector without much recovery in
the capital goods sector.
1
Secondly, even this limited recovery in the United States has coincided with an extraordinarily
high rate of unemployment. Official statistics show an exactly opposite picture, of a decline in
unemployment to just 5 percent at present. But what is missed in these figures is the large exodus
from the labor force: millions have become too discouraged to continue seeking work, and are therefore
no longer counted as unemployed. In fact, if one takes the labor force to working-age population
ratio (the labor force participation rate) from 2007, when the Great Recession began, and recalculates
the size of the current labor force on that basis, then the current unemployment rate would be around
11 percent.
2 Many would put the figure even higher, on the grounds that the official size of the labor force
is an underestimate even for the base date.
To claim, therefore, that the United States is experiencing a full recovery is, in terms of working
class well-being and economic security, wrong. And if we consider the rest of the world, especially
recent developments in the "emerging economies," the situation is much worse.
II
The most significant of these developments is the slowing down of the growth rate in countries
like India and China-that is, the spread of the crisis to the so-called emerging economies, especially
China. Let us locate this slowdown in its proper context.
Since 2005, the trade-weighted exchange rate (TWER) of China-its exchange rate vis-ŕ-vis a basket
of currencies, where the weight of each currency depends upon its relative importance in China's
trade-has appreciated by 50 percent. Even between 2009, when the TWER spiked, and 2015, the extent
of appreciation was 20 percent. This basically meant that the Chinese economy was creating more room
for the rest of the world to compete with it, and hence, in effect, to grow at China's own expense.
China could afford to do so because an asset price bubble was then sustaining its domestic growth
rate. In a sense, therefore, China was supporting the growth rate of the rest of the world, in much
the same way that the United States had done decades earlier-though of course the stimulus provided
by China was not as large. This Chinese support explains why the crisis continued, but not in as
accentuated a form as it would have otherwise.
But the asset price bubble in China has now collapsed, which, together with the effect of global
stagnation on Chinese exports, has slowed the nation's growth rate. This explains the recent devaluation
of the yuan by a little less than 4 percent, and the Chinese government's apparent willingness to
effect greater devaluation in the future, camouflaged as a commitment to make the yuan more "market-determined."
In a number of ways, the devaluation of the yuan, and official hints that further devaluations
cannot be ruled out, constitutes the start of a whole new dynamic. First, it marks the beginning
of a spate of competitive currency depreciations-apparently effected by the market but with the connivance
of their respective governments-and hence of "beggar-thy-neighbor" policies, another echo of the
1930s, after the collapse of the gold standard. Indeed, after the devaluation of the yuan, several
currencies have also depreciated vis-ŕ-vis the dollar. This is because the "market"-that is, speculators-have
expected such depreciations and hence behaved in a way that actually brings them about. Meanwhile,
goverments have been either unwilling to intervene to support their currencies, since that would
hurt competitiveness and reduce net exports, or unable to do so, in cases where they lack adequate
foreign exchange reserves.
This spate of currency depreciations, which are likely to recur, represents, in effect, a struggle
between countries for a larger share in a non-expanding world market. I discuss the issue of non-expansion
below, but two points about this struggle over markets should be noted here. First, the United States
is at a disadvantage in this struggle, since the currency depreciations are all vis-ŕ-vis the U.S.
dollar. This means that there is no way that the dollar itself can be made to depreciate relative
to other currencies. The United States has predictably postponed the increase in its interest rate,
which the Fed has been promising for some time, since such an increase would only have appreciated
the value of the dollar still further. Unfortunately, the Fed cannot lower its interest rates any
further since they are already close to zero, and monetary policy is incapable of pushing them into
negative digits.
Thus, while the United States cannot use monetary policy to defend its net exports and hence prevent
the additional unemployment arising from a reduction in net exports, it also cannot even hope that
the value of the dollar vis-ŕ-vis other currencies will stabilize at their current level. When other
currencies fall relative to the dollar, it only strengthens the tendency of wealth-holders around
the world to flock to the dollar. This means that the undermining of the United States' net-exports
position will continue, thereby exacerbating U.S. unemployment. In short, the dollar's role as a
universal medium of wealth-holding, which has allowed the United States to finance massive current
account deficits, will act as an albatross at the level of domestic activity and employment.
To defend its domestic activity, the United States therefore has no alternative policy measure
but to impose implicit or explicit trade restrictions, such as those in the Bring Jobs Home Act introduced
in the Senate in July 2014. For even if the United States were to overcome the neoliberal aversion
to fiscal activism in pursuit of larger employment and actually undertake a fiscal stimulus, without
trade restrictions, the employment-generating effects of such a stimulus would leak out abroad even
more than before. But any imposition of trade restrictions would undermine the neoliberal order,
presided over by international finance capital, which the United States is committed to defending.
The second point to note about this struggle over a non-expanding world market is that it would
no longer just remain "non-expanding" in the weak sense of the term, but would actually begin to
contract. This is because in a situation of widespread currency depreciation all currencies do not
move up or down exactly synchronously. Consequently the calculation of profitability on projects
becomes more difficult, as costs and revenues can fluctuate over any arbitrary stretch of time. Hence,
the risks associated with investment increase, causing everywhere a shrinking of investment below
what it otherwise would have been, and with it an overall contraction in the world market.
This brings us to the second aspect of the new dynamic. The recent fall in China's growth rate
has led to a collapse in world commodity prices (though some, like oil, began falling even earlier).
This has already affected the growth rates of a whole range of countries dependent on commodity exports,
like Australia, Chile, and Brazil, with the latter now "officially" declared to be suffering from
a recession. The generalized fall in commodity prices will serve to shrink the world market still
further.
True, I said earlier that the fall in oil prices was a factor in boosting demand in the
United States and hence provided a demand stimulus for the world economy. But there is a difference
between the effect of a fall in oil prices alone and that of a fall in commodity prices in general.
In the case of oil, the mean "marginal propensity" to spend-to use a Keynesian term-is higher for
the buyers than for the sellers (since the latter are dominated by kings and sheikhs), while the
opposite is likely to be true for other commodities.
Though the fall in commodity prices in itself constitutes an additional cause of the worsening
crisis, it poses a still greater threat through another channel, namely the prospect of what the
early twentieth-century economist Irving Fisher called "debt deflation."
3 Fisher argued that if primary commodity prices, and consequently manufactured goods prices,
fall, then the real burden of debt goes up for those for whom such goods appear on the asset side,
against money-denominated debt obligations on the liability side. To improve their balance sheets,
therefore, they try selling these assets, which only makes things worse, leading to huge falls in
asset prices and hence to bankruptcies that deepen the recession. The advanced capitalist countries
have been on the brink of deflation for a long time; current developments may push them over the
edge and compound the crisis greatly.
The third feature of the current crisis is the tendency toward falling stock prices. This can
be part of the above-mentioned process of a commodity price fall-induced debt deflation itself. And
insofar as the prospect of slower growth leads to stock price falls, independent of any fall in commodity
prices, it can be an autonomous source of debt deflation. Falling stock prices, in other words, would
also increase the pressure for balance sheet adjustments, which result in further falls in stock
prices-and so on.
What is particularly noteworthy here is that these three aspects-falls in exchange rates (vis-ŕ-vis
the U.S. dollar), in commodity prices, and in stock prices-are likely to reinforce one another, as
is happening now. World capitalism, in short, is poised for a serious accentuation of the crisis.
And at the core of this crisis is the fact that there are no expansionary factors working towards
an increase in the size of the world market. On the contrary, even the long-run tendency is now in
the opposite direction, toward contraction. Let us now examine this latter issue.
III
A long line of argument going back to Rosa Luxemburg and Michał Kalecki states that a capitalist
economy requires exogenous stimuli, as distinct from endogenous stimuli, for its sustained growth.
4 "Endogenous stimuli" are those stimuli for increased productive capacity that arise from the
very fact that the economy has been growing. Their inadequacy for explaining sustained growth arises
from the following problem: just as an economy subject to growth generates expectations of future
growth, and hence induces capitalists to add to capacity in anticipation of such expansion, thereby
keeping the momentum of growth going, so any slackening must work in the opposite direction. Capitalists
must cut back on additions to productive capacity, and this will exacerbate such slowing of growth.
And if an economy is caught in stagnation with no expansion at all, then capitalists have no reason
to expect any growth (if endogenous stimuli are all that exist), and hence will not add to productive
capacity, which in turn, by suppressing demand, would tether the economy to stagnation.
Since this has not been the actual experience of capitalist economies, then there must be exogenous
stimuli that bring forth investment, or autonomous additions to demand, quite independently of whether
the economy has been growing. Exogenous stimuli, in short, prevent the economy from remaining trapped
in stagnation and explain sustained long-term growth.
This argument follows quite simply from a rejection of Say's Law, that is, from a recognition
of the possibility of a deficiency of aggregate demand. The fact that aggregate demand may be deficient
is what makes capitalists assess demand prospects before deciding to increase capacity, and this
in turn is what makes endogenous stimuli insufficient for explaining growth, and giving rise to the
need for exogenous stimuli.
5
Among exogenous stimuli, three in particular have received attention from economists: pre-capitalist
markets, state expenditure, and innovations. I use the last term in its widest sense: advances which
make capitalists, with access to some new process or product, undertake additions to capacity in
the hope of stealing a march over their rivals (or at least of not falling behind). However, the
role of innovations as exogenous stimuli has been questioned, in my view legitimately, by a number
of writers.
6 In oligopolistic markets, where price cuts to sell at the expense of rivals are generally eschewed,
capitalists tend to give whatever investment they would have otherwise undertaken the form
that innovation demands, rather than actually undertaking additional investment (that is, adding
further to capacity), and in that case innovations cease to be genuinely exogenous stimuli. This
is also confirmed by economic historians, who show that during the interwar Great Depression, the
available innovations, instead of helping capitalism overcome its crisis, actually remained unused,
and were introduced only in the postwar period of high aggregate demand.
Pre-capitalist markets, or more generally the phenomenon of capital pushing outwards from its
metropolitan core, played an important role as an exogenous stimulus in the pre-First World War period.
The picture, however, was not as straightforward as Rosa Luxemburg suggested, in which capitalism
simply selling at the expense of the pre-capitalist producers in the colonies. It was much more complex.
Both labor and capital migrated from the metropoles of Europe toward the temperate regions of white
settlement, such as the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Argentina.
Over four-fifths of all capital exports went to these regions. But the goods produced in the metropolis,
especially in Britain, the largest capital exporter of the period, were not necessarily the ones
most in demand in these developing "new regions," which rather required raw materials and foodstuffs
from the tropical zones. Metropolitan goods were sold in the tropical colonies, and the tropical
goods were exported to the new regions.
The important point is that the tropical goods exported from the tropical colonies to the new
regions in this system, which was dominated by the British, were not just equal in value to the metropolitan
goods imported to the tropical colonies. That is, the tropical colonies were not merely used to change
the form of the goods exported to the new white settler regions. The tropical exports to the "new
world" were of much greater value than the goods the tropical countries received as imports from
the metropolis, and while the domestic currency payment to the local producers of this export surplus
came out of the colonial government's tax revenue (extracted largely from the very same producers),
the gold and foreign exchange earnings from this export surplus were appropriated by the metropolitan
country, without the tropical colony acquiring any claims upon the metropolis. This difference
therefore constituted a gratuitous extraction by the metropolis from the tropical colonies without
any quid pro quo (an imbalance that Indian nationalist writers, who were the first to uncover it,
called a "drain of surplus" from the colonies).
The exogenous stimulus in the pre-First World War period, in other words, came from the colonial
system, which incorporated both the colonies of conquest, like India, and the colonies of settlement,
like the United States, through a complex mechanism. This mechanism had three interlinked elements:
a process of "deindustrialization," that is, displacement of pre-capitalist producers, notably textile
manufacturers, inflicted upon the colonies of conquest by imports from the metropolis, which Rosa
Luxemburg highlighted; the drain of surplus described above; and through this drain the ability of
the metropolis to export capital for developing regions of recent settlement, in the commodity-form
of tropical primary commodities, which these regions needed. The largest colony of conquest, India,
posted the second largest merchandise trade surplus in the world for fifty years before 1928-second
only to the United States-but its exchange earnings were entirely appropriated for supporting the
metropolitan balance of payments.
7
This entire arrangement, which underlay the secular boom spanning the Victorian and Edwardian
eras, fell apart after the First World War. We need not enter here in detail into the reasons for
this collapse, which included, inter alia , the "closing of the frontier"; the encroachment
by Japan on the Asian colonial markets of Britain; and the world agricultural crisis, which led to
a collapse of the colonies' exchange earnings, undermining the triangular system of payments.
8
The subsequent interwar period was thus one when capitalism was without any exogenous stimulus,
with the colonial system no longer effective and state intervention in "demand management" not yet
even part of the theoretical discourse.
9 Is it any surprise then that the Great Depression of the 1930s occurred precisely during this
period?
State intervention to boost aggregate demand was tried first in Japan under Finance Minister Takahashi
in 1931, but was extended by the Japanese militarists far beyond what Takahashi had wanted-to the
point of having him murdered when he objected to higher military spending. It was introduced in Germany
in 1933 with the Nazi rearmament drive. In the liberal bourgeois economies, it came on the eve of
the war itself, with a stepping up of military expenditure necessitated by the fascist threat. It
became a normal feature of capitalism, as distinct from a mere contingent necessity, only in the
postwar years when, under the twin impact of the socialist threat from outside and of working-class
restiveness from within, metropolitan capitalism was forced to abandon for the moment the principles
of "sound finance." Such working-class agitation within the metropolis arose because workers who
had made great sacrifices during the war were unwilling to return to their pre-war situation of unemployment
and poverty.
The postwar years of state intervention in demand management, which produced low levels of unemployment
unprecedented in the history of capitalism, and hence high levels of growth (in response to the high
demand), high levels of growth in labor productivity, and high levels of growth in real wages, have
been described as a Golden Age of capitalism. While state intervention occurred in nearly every nation,
the entire system was also buttressed by massive military expenditure by the United States, which
opened (and maintains) a string of military bases all over the globe. As the Vietnam War escalated
and U.S. military expenditure swelled, financed by printed dollars-decreed to be as good as gold
under the Bretton Woods system-the rest of the world was obliged to hold on to these dollars, even
as excess demand generated inflation. This inflation prompted a shift to commodities, and later to
gold, resulting in the abandonment of the Bretton Woods system. An engineered recession followed,
made worse by the fact that the price of one crucial commodity, oil, was kept up by a cartel, OPEC,
even as other prices subsided.
But if the mid-1970s recession in the capitalist world was the start of the dismantling of state
intervention in demand management, the basis for this dismantling lay elsewhere. It lay in the phenomenon
of the globalization of capital, especially finance capital, which had been occurring since the late
1960s and which had since gathered momentum. The regime of globalized finance meant that while finance
was international, the state remained a nation-state. All nation-states therefore had to bow before
the demands of finance capital in order to prevent any capital flight.
This in turn meant controlling fiscal deficits, because, as we have seen, finance capital favors
"sound finance" and dislikes fiscal deficits; it also meant reducing the tax burden on capitalists.
These together snuffed out the scope for state intervention in demand management. Any stimulation
of activity, either through a fiscal deficit or through a balanced budget multiplier (where revenues
are raised to match increased state expenditure by taxing the rich) became well-nigh impossible.
10 Subsequently, of course, austerity in government spending was projected as a virtue on the
purported grounds that private investment was crowded out by government "profligacy," an argument
which was only Say's Law (supply creates its own demand) in a new guise.
The point of this disquisition is to suggest that capitalism in the present era, the era of globalization
which entails above all the globalization of finance, is without either of its two main exogenous
stimuli-pre-capitalist markets and state spending to boost demand. The only stimulus for a boom therefore,
apart from debt-financed enhancement of consumer expenditure (which can only be transient), arises
from the formation of occasional asset-price bubbles. But such bubbles, even though they may produce
occasional booms, inevitably collapse, so that the average level of activity through booms and slumps
is lower than under the regime of state intervention. Besides, asset-price bubbles cannot be made
to order; the system cannot hold a gun to the heads of speculators and force them to feel the kind
of euphoric expectations that underlie bubbles. Consequently there may be long intervals, even during
this period of general slow growth, when the system is submerged in prolonged stagnation and recession.
There is, however, an additional factor of great importance that makes matters even worse in the
era of globalization. Let us turn to it now.
IV
In the period before the current globalization, the world economy was deeply segmented. Labor
from the South was not allowed to move freely to the North. As W. Arthur Lewis pointed out, there
were two great streams of migration in the nineteenth century: a migration of labor from tropical
and subtropical regions like India and China, which went as "coolie" or indentured labor to other
tropical or subtropical regions; and a migration of labor from temperate zones of Europe, which went
to other temperate regions like the United States, Canada, and Australia.
11 Once the era of slavery had run its course, these two streams were kept strictly separate
through severe restrictions on tropical migration to the temperate lands.
But while tropical labor was not free to move into the temperate regions, capital from the latter
was free to move into the former. Yet despite this formal freedom, capital chose not to
do so except in specific spheres like mines, plantations, and external trade. In particular, it did
not move manufacturing to the tropical regions, despite the very low wages prevailing there-a result
of the process of deindustrialization mentioned earlier. Capital from the temperate regions generally
moved into other countries within the temperate region itself, complementing the flow of labor migration.
The world economy was therefore segmented between the tropical and the temperate regions. In this
segmented universe, the labor reserves of the South did not restrain the rise of real wages in the
North when labor productivity increased. There was consequently, on the one hand, a widening of inequalities
between the North and the South that encompassed even the workers, and on the other hand, a boost
to demand in the North from rising wages that would not have occurred in the absence of this segmentation.
12
Contemporary globalization has brought this segmentation to an end. Even though labor from the
South is still not free to move to the North, capital from the North is now far more willing than
before to locate manufacturing and service-sector activities-the latter largely through outsourcing-in
the South. This now makes real wages in the North subject to the baneful influence of the massive
labor reserves of the South. Not that real wages in the United States or any other advanced country
are anywhere near parity with Southern real wages. However, they tend to remain stagnant even as
labor productivity increases in the North. In fact, in the period of globalization, while the vector
of real wages across the world remains more or less unchanged owing to the restraining influence
of third-world labor reserves, the vector of labor productivities increases across the world. Both
in individual countries and in the world as a whole, therefore, the tendency is for the share of
surplus in output to increase. It is this context which explains Joseph Stiglitz's finding that even
as the labor productivity in the United States has increased substantially between 1968 and 2011,
the real wage rate of an American male worker has not increased during this period; indeed if anything
it has marginally declined.
13
This has two major implications. First, the increase in inequality now is not so much between
two geographical parts of the globe (indeed, several third-world countries have experienced faster
per capita income growth than the advanced capitalist world) as between the working people of the
world on the one side and the capitalists of the world and others living off the surplus on the other.
It is this increase in "vertical" as distinct from "horizontal" inequality that is reflected in recent
works by several mainstream economists, like those of Thomas Piketty, though they attribute this
inequality to altogether different and unpersuasive reasons.
The second implication is that, since the "marginal propensity to consume"-again to use a Keynesian
expression-is higher from wage income than from incomes derived from economic surplus, this growing
vertical inequality in incomes (or, more precisely, the tendency toward a rise in the share of surplus
in world output) produces a tendency toward a deficiency of aggregate demand and the problem of surplus
absorption.
This of course is an ex ante tendency, which could be kept in check if-as Baran and Sweezy
argued, noting a tendency toward such stagnation in the United States a half-century ago-state expenditure
could be appropriately increased to counteract it.
14 But what is noteworthy about the current period of globalization is that it both produces
an ex ante tendency towards global demand deficiency and also prevents any
possible counteracting state expenditure to overcome this tendency, due to the opposition of the
vested interests to fiscal deficits and taxes on the rich. (It should be noted that larger state
expenditure financed through taxes on the poor and the working class, who have a high propensity
to consume anyway, does not boost aggregate demand, and so cannot counteract the tendency toward
deficient demand.)
The only offset against this trend toward demand deficiency, therefore, can come from the occasional
asset price bubbles discussed earlier. Unfortunately, since they cannot be made to order, and since
they inevitably collapse, the world economy in the era of globalization becomes particularly vulnerable
to crises of recession and stagnation, which is exactly what we are now experiencing.
In other words, when we combine these two features of the current globalization-namely the absence
of any exogenous stimuli together with the endogenous tendency toward a global demand deficiency-we
get an inkling of the structural susceptibility of contemporary capitalism to protracted stagnation.
Either of these two features, i.e., the internal and external contradictions, would produce a tendency
toward stagnation on its own. In the current period, however, the two features act together, and
it is this fact which underlies the travails of contemporary capitalism.
V
The economic implications of protracted stagnation, and the possible systemic responses to it
at the macroeconomic level, are matters I shall not enter into here. I shall, however, end by drawing
attention to an obvious political implication, one that relates to the threat to democracy that this
protracted stagnation poses, of particular significance in the case of my own country, India.
The general incompatibility between capitalism and democracy is too obvious to need repetition
here: capitalism is a spontaneous system driven by its own immanent tendencies, while the essence
of democracy lies in people intervening through collective political praxis to shape their destinies,
including especially their economic destinies, which militates against this spontaneity. The fate
of Keynesianism, which thought that capitalism could be made to operate at close to full employment,
and thereby be made into a humane system through state intervention in demand management, shows the
impossibility of the project of retaining capitalism while overcoming its spontaneity.
This conflict becomes particularly acute in the era of globalization, when finance capital becomes
globalized, while the state, which remains the only possible instrument through which the people
could intervene on their own behalf, remains a nation-state. Here, as already mentioned, the state
accedes to the demands of finance capital, so that no matter whom the people elect, the same policies
remain in place, as long as the country remains within the vortex of globalized finance. Greece is
only the latest example to underscore this point.
But once we reckon with the tendency of the system in the era of globalization to fall into a
protracted crisis, this incompatibility becomes even more serious. In the context of crisis-induced
mass unemployment, the corporate-financial oligarchies that rule many countries actively promote
divisive, fascist, and semi-fascist movements, so that while the shell of democracy is preserved,
their own rule is not threatened by any concerted class action. And the governments formed by such
elements, even when they do not move immediately towards the imposition of a fascist state as in
the case of classical fascism, move nonetheless towards a "fascification" of the society and the
polity that constitutes a negation of democracy. In third-world societies such fascification not
only continues but even increases the scope for "primitive accumulation of capital" at the expense
of petty producers (which also ensures that the world labor reserves are not exhausted).
But that is not all. Since such fascism invites retaliation in the form of counter-fascistic movements,
as in the case of Hindu supremacism in India, which is starting to encourage a Muslim fundamentalist
response, the net result is social disintegration. This disintegration is the denouement of the current
globalization in societies like mine, and no doubt in many others. It is important, of course, to
struggle against this, but at the current juncture, when there are no international workers' movements,
let alone any international peasant movements, and hence no prospects for any synchronized transcendence
of capitalist globalization, any such struggles must necessarily be informed by an agenda of "delinking"
from capitalist globalization. This delinking should entail capital controls, management of foreign
trade, and an expansion of the domestic market through the protection and encouragement of petty
production, including peasant agriculture; through larger welfare expenditure by the state; and through
a more egalitarian distribution of wealth and income.
Notes
↩ For a discussion on this point, see Harry Magdoff, "Militarism and Imperialism," reprinted
in his collection
Imperialism Without Colonies (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2003).
↩ This is calculated from the U.S. Labor Statistics, Department of Labor. If we divide the
number of persons employed in October 2015 (when the unemployment rate was 5 percent) by the workforce
as it would have stood if the employment-population ratio in June 2007 were the same in October
2015, then the employment rate comes to 89.4 percent. This gives an unemployment rate of 10.6
percent, or 11 percent in round numbers. This is pretty close to the U-6 unemployment rate of
the BLS (10 percent), even though the latter is calculated differently.
↩ Irving Fisher, "The Debt-Deflation Theory of Great Depressions," Econometrica
1, no. 4 (1933): 337–57.
↩ See Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press,
1951 [1913]), and Michał Kalecki, "Observations on the Theory of Growth," The Economic Journal
285 (1962): 134–53.
↩ A detailed discussion of this issue can be found in Prabhat Patnaik, Accumulation
and Stability under Capitalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
↩ See for instance Joseph Steindl,
Maturity and Stagnation in American Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press,
1976); Joan Robinson, introduction to Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital ; and
Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy,
Monopoly Capital
(New York: Monthly Review, 1966). For a discussion of this point in an historical context,
see W. A. Lewis, Growth and Fluctuations 1870–1913 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1978).
↩ For a detailed discussion of the issues involved, see Utsa Patnaik, "The Free Lunch: Transfers
from the Tropical Colonies and Their Role in Capital Formation in Britain During the Industrial
Revolution," in K. S. Jomo, ed., Globalization under Hegemony: The Long Twentieth Century
(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006); and "India in the World Economy 1900–1935:
The Inter-War Depression and Britain's Demise as World Capitalist Leader," Social Scientist
42 (2014): 488–89.
↩ While the first of these factors was emphasized by Alvin Hansen in his book Full Recovery
or Stagnation? (New York: Norton, 1938); the second factor, the role of Japanese competition,
is discussed in Prabhat Patnaik, Accumulation and Stability ; and the third, the
world agricultural crisis, in Utsa Patnaik, "India in the World Economy."
↩ Lloyd George's proposal in 1929 for a public works program financed by a fiscal deficit
to provide jobs to the unemployed, whose numbers had by then already risen to a million in Britain,
was shot down by the British Treasury on the basis of an utterly erroneous argument that Joan
Robinson, in her book Economic Philosophy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), calls "the
humbug of finance." The famous article by Richard Kahn on the "multiplier" effect ("The Relation
of Home Investment to Unemployment," Economic Journal 41, no. 162 [1931]: 173–98),
which provided the theoretical core of the Keynesian revolution, was written as a refutation of
this Treasury view. For a discussion of the arguments involved, see Prabhat Patnaik, "The Humbug
of Finance," in The Retreat to Unfreedom (New Delhi: Tulika, 2002).
↩ The United States no doubt constitutes an exception here: since its currency is still taken
to be "as good as gold," increases in U.S. fiscal deficits do not cause any capital flight and
are therefore sustainable. But at the same time, the consideration that the demand expansion caused
by such an increase would significantly leak out abroad through higher imports, which would mean
greater external indebtedness of the U.S. for generating jobs abroad, stands in the way. The closeness
of the U.S. government to financial interests that frown on fiscal deficits, and the pervasive
prevalence of the ideology of "sound finance," also work in the same direction.
↩ W. A. Lewis, The Evolution of the International Economic Order , (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978).
↩ This demand aspect is emphasized by Joan Robinson in her introduction to Luxemburg,
The Accumulation of Capital , 26–27.
↩ Joseph Stiglitz, remarks to the AFL-CIO Convention on April 8, 2013.
↩ Indeed, this was the crux of their argument in Monopoly Capital .
Nationalism is natural. You either have nations or you have one big all-powerful world government.
Caring about your own nation first is common sense. Incredible that Trump even has to say it.
But in this crazy political environment, it has to be said.
If you don't put yourself first, you will stop existing. If you don't put your nation first,
it will stop existing.
All software developers understand modular design. Nature is designed modularly, and human
society is part of nature.
We have nations because we are part of nature.
Sure you can love the whole world if you want. But if you care more about the rest of the world
than your own nation, you are nuts. And yes, it is normal to be nuts these days.
DrDick -> realpc... , -1
"Nationalism is natural"
Proving once again that you are an idiot who knows nothing. Nationalism is an artificial construct
which only emerges in the late 18th-early 19th centuries, and does not spread widely until the
late 19th-early 20th centuries.
"Nationalism is an artificial construct which only emerges in the late 18th-early 19th centuries,
and does not spread widely until the late 19th-early 20th centuries."
Nationalism is not something fixed. There are various flavors of nationalism. Old flavor was
so called "ethnic nationalism". Now so called "cultural nationalism" (the idea that the language
and culture defines the belonging to the particular nation, not so much ethnicity ) is pretty
widespread, if not dominant.
As for your "late 18th" century origin, I have doubts. What Napoleon empire represented, if
not the Triumph of French nationalism. And Waterloo was fought when? Right, 18 June 1815. This
is the date when "old continental powers" defeated French nationalism.
Can you explain to me this discrepancy, please?
== quote from Wikipedia ==
Napoleon Bonaparte promoted French nationalism based upon the ideals of the French Revolution
such as the idea of "liberty, equality, fraternity" and justified French expansionism and French
military campaigns on the claim that France had the right to spread the enlightened ideals of
the French Revolution across Europe, and also to expand France into its so-called "natural borders."
Napoleon's invasions of other nations had the effect of spreading the concept of nationalism outside
France.[3]
== end of quote ==
My impression is that French nationalism emerged from wars with England which produced a great
icon of French nationalism, Joan of Arc. And that happened much earlier then late 18th century.
And that American exceptionalism is nothing but a variation of this version of French nationalism.
So here is some quick Google information about native American tribes who fought over limited
resources. I wonder if that was an artificial construct as well? Or if one tribe fought other
tribes to help their own families out. I wonder if a starving neanderthal would share the meat
off of a recent kill with a neanderthal not part of his tribe? Would that be an artificial construct?
Surely Germany came into existence in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, but before that,
the groups that became Germany were just as nationalistic as they were after they became Germany
. . . they just defined their nation in more limited terms.
Sorry, I am just a stupid engineer, and make sure that the building that you live and work in
will stand up in an earthquake, yet, I am probably too stupid to ever know what you know. But
that said, I didn't know that I am stupid, so I will probably ask a question that will make a
genius like yourself roll their eyes in disgust that I was ever awarded a degree from an american
university . . . but I don't have time to read four different authors on the subject of a simple
blog post, so I am going to ask it anyways . . .
you said that nationalism is an artificial construct that only came around about 200 years
ago, and I came back with some ideas about, if that were the case, then why did different indian
tribes battle over scarce resources (and also simply assumed that ancient humans behaved very
similar to native american tribes). You rebutted that by insulting my intelligence, pointing me
to four obscure academic authors (if I was as cool and as smart as Good Will Hunting, I am sure
I would have read and remembered all the authors that you are pointing me to already, but alas,
I am not), and then said that up until 20,000 years ago, there was surprisingly little conflict
among people.
So, what is it, was nationalism something that came about 20,000 years ago, or was it something
that came about 200 years ago. And did indian tribes wage wars against each other? If they did,
is that a form of nationalism, or is it different? If it is different, explain how.
IF you are not smart enough to be able to answer these simple questions that support what you
have asserted, then I would suggest that you don't go on message boards and insult the intelligence
of others!
I strongly disagree with Cowen's assertion. U.S. Presidential elections tend to closely follow
the economy.
Simply knowing whether or not the U.S. Was in recession in the 3rd quarter of the election
year will give you the popular vote winner 80% of the time, going all the way back to the 1850s
-- and includes the 2016 result.
Econometric models forecast a very close 2016 election result, typically giving the incumbent
party about a 2% victory -- which was exactly the actual result.
If Trump and the GOP deliver a recession, that will mean real wage growth and employment, especially
goods-producing employment, will decline. And the voters will turn on them.
Good point, but in recent years it has been the populist right who has really been the beneficiary
in the U.S. and Europe, with their scapegoating of globalization and immigrants.
"If the national Democratic Party had more cultural appeal to working-class whites, they might
have been able to stop the bleeding enough to hold states like Pennsylvania, Florida, Michigan,
Wisconsin or North Carolina."
Yeah you won't cultural appeal but not so much that you abandon your principles. Calling them
deplorable doesn't help.
I feel the Democrats need to better appeal to them more on the economic front. Instead of giving
speeches at Goldman Sachs functions, campaign in Michigan and Wisconsin.
Instead of an infrastructure proposal of $275 billion over 5 years, go big like Bernie or the
Senate Democrats with $1 trillion over 10 years. Trump went big with his rhetoric. We'll see if
he delivers anything.
I think move to the right might continue for some time. Clinton Democrats betrayal of working
class give far right a huge boost, to say nothing about paving way to Caesarism and discarding
the Democratic governance like used shoe box.
From comments:
"what is termed the Right is pretty much what would have been [neoliberal] centre leftism not
that long ago.
In practical terms there is nothing between the governments of Cameron or May vs those of Blair.
"The center left will still need to do something about low wages"
I would love to see the Greens win but, with all due respect, I think this is a complete pipe
dream. Right-wing democrats and the handful of democratic centrists (e.g. Sanders, Warren, Grijalva)
lack any evidence of backbone and have, thus far, proven utterly incapable of functioning as an
effective opposition party.
I expect the extreme right to cement their control of the federal and (most) state legislatures
in 2018. I also expect them to utilize every tool in their disposal to repress the votes of the
lumpenproletariat -- and especially people of color.
As a union member, organizer, and genuine leftist I am very glad that I am a tri-national and
am not tied to the USA by citizenship.
"Right-wing democrats and the handful of democratic centrists (e.g. Sanders, Warren, Grijalva)
lack any evidence of backbone and have, thus far, proven utterly incapable of functioning as an
effective opposition party.
I expect the extreme right to cement their control of the federal and (most) state legislatures
in 2018."
A very, very good point. I am fully with you on that. Moreover I think the country political
climate as whole is now favorable to the further move to the right. A kind of replay of 1920th
on a new level with neoliberalism instead of "robber barons capitalism" under attack from the
right.
"... Trump may be a Nationalist, but he is also an anti-regulatory elite with no regard for business ethics or accountability to the community. He is also for "greedy take all" and against fair distribution of profits in the economy. ..."
"... The key point here is that as long as there is no viable alternative to neoliberalism, nationalism is the only game in town for the opposition forces. That's why trade union members now abandoned neoliberal (aka Clintonized ) Democratic Party. ..."
"... Traditionally, Neoliberalism espouses privatization, fiscal austerity, deregulation, free trade and reduction in government spending. ..."
"... One way to sum up neoliberalism is to say that everything-everything-is to be made over in the image of the market, including the state, civil society, and of course human beings. Democracy becomes reinterpreted as the market, and politics succumbs to neoliberal economic theory, so we are speaking of the end of democratic politics as we have known it for two and a half centuries. ..."
"... As the market becomes an abstraction, so does democracy, but the real playing field is somewhere else, in the realm of actual economic exchange-which is not, however, the market. We may say that all exchange takes place on the neoliberal surface. ..."
"... Neoliberalism is often described-and this creates a lot of confusion-as "market fundamentalism," and while this may be true for neoliberal's self-promotion and self-presentation, i.e., the market as the ultimate and only myth, as were the gods of the past, I would argue that in neoliberalism there is no such thing as the market as we have understood it from previous ideologies. ..."
"... it seeks to leave no space for individual self-conception in the way that classical liberalism, and even communism and fascism to some degree, were willing to allow. ..."
"... I am suggesting that the issue is not how strong the state is in the service of neoliberalism, but whether there is anything left over beyond the new definition of the state. Another way to say it is that the state has become the market, the market has become the state, and therefore both have ceased to exist in the form we have classically understood them. ..."
I will go with worth reading. I don't think that is controversial at all and there is way more
than an element of truth in it. But knowing is one thing and organizing politically in a manner
sufficient to bring about change is entirely another.
They are correct. We need an alternative to Nationalism and Trump.
They are not correct about mysterious elites controlling things.
The elites pursued anti-regulatory policies that allowed them to reap short term profits without
regard for stability or sustainability. It is not government control but lack of regulation that
allowed BIgF to run wild and unaccountable.
Trump may be a Nationalist, but he is also an anti-regulatory elite with no regard for
business ethics or accountability to the community. He is also for "greedy take all" and against
fair distribution of profits in the economy.
The plant closures are headlined and promote the mistaken belief that globalization is the
prime cause of job loss. These large closures are only 1/10th of the job losses and dislocations
due to automation and transformation from manufacturing to service economies. Wealthy elites are
allowed to greedily hoard all the profits from automation and not enough is being invested in
the service economy. Austerity is not a policy to control the masses, it is a policy to protect
the wealth accumulated by elites from fair distribution.
Trump is not going to bring manufacturing plants back to American rural backwaters. Those left
behind must build their own service economy or relocate to a sustainable region that is making
the transition.
The key point here is that as long as there is no viable alternative to neoliberalism,
nationalism is the only game in town for the opposition forces. That's why trade union members
now abandoned neoliberal (aka Clintonized ) Democratic Party.
All Western societies now, not only the USA, experience nationalist movements Renaissance.
And that's probably why Hillary lost as she represented "kick the can down the road" neoliberal
globalization agenda.
An important point also is that nationalism itself is not monolithic. There are at least two
different types of nationalism in the West now:
ethnic nationalism (old-style), where the "ethnicity" is the defining feature of belonging
to the "in-group"
cultural nationalism (new style), where the defining traits of belonging to the "in-group"
is the language and culture, not ethnicity.
As for your statement
"Trump may be a Nationalist, but he is also an anti-regulatory elite with no regard for
business ethics or accountability to the community. He is also for "greedy take all" and against
fair distribution of profits in the economy."
This might be true, but might be not. It is not clear what Trump actually represents. Let's
give him the benefit of doubt and wait 100 days before jumping to conclusions.
Traditionally, Neoliberalism espouses privatization, fiscal austerity, deregulation, free
trade and reduction in government spending.
What exactly did Clinton want to privatize? What budget did she propose slashing? Did
she want to deregulate banks or environmental regulations?
She supported some trade liberalization, but also imposing sanctions. What government spending
did she want to reduce?
Fact: She supported the opposite of most of these policies.
Donald Trump promised to pursue all of these Neoliberal policies. The GOP and their propaganda
megaphone is very good at tarring the opposition as supporting the very policies they are enacting.
They made Al Gore into a liar, John Kerry into a coward with a purple band aid and Hillary into
a Wall Street shill. None of this is true. But Trump and his GOP are doing all the things you
accuse Democrats of doing.
You are wrong. Your definition of neoliberalism is formally right and we can argue along those
lines that Hillary is a neoliberal too (Her track record as a senator suggests exactly that),
it is way too narrow. There is more to it:
"One way to sum up neoliberalism is to say that everything-everything-is to be made over
in the image of the market, including the state, civil society, and of course human beings."
(see below)
"Another way to say it is that the state has become the market, the market has become the
state, and therefore both have ceased to exist in the form we have classically understood them."
"In the current election campaign, Hillary Clinton has been the most perfect embodiment
of neoliberalism among all the candidates, she is almost its all-time ideal avatar, and I believe
this explains, even if not articulated this way, the widespread discomfort among the populace
toward her ascendancy. People can perceive that her ideology is founded on a conception of
human beings striving relentlessly to become human capital (as her opening campaign commercial
so overtly depicted), which means that those who fail to come within the purview of neoliberalism
should be rigorously ostracized, punished, and excluded.
This is the dark side of neoliberalism's ideological arm (a multiculturalism founded on
human beings as capital), which is why this project has become increasingly associated with
suppression of free speech and intolerance of those who refuse to go along with the kind of
identity politics neoliberalism promotes.
And this explains why the 1990s saw the simultaneous and absolutely parallel rise, under
the Clintons, of both neoliberal globalization and various regimes of neoliberal disciplining,
such as the shaming and exclusion of former welfare recipients (every able-bodied person should
be able to find work, therefore under TANF welfare was converted to a performance management
system designed to enroll everyone in the workforce, even if it meant below-subsistence wages
or the loss of parental responsibilities, all of it couched in the jargon of marketplace incentives)."
In this sense Hillary Clinton is 100% dyed-in-the-wool neoliberal and neocon ("neoliberal with
the gun"). She promotes so called "neoliberal rationality" a perverted "market-based" rationality
typical for neoliberalism:
== quote ==
When Hillary Clinton frequently retorts-in response to demands for reregulation of finance,
for instance-that we have to abide by "the rule of law," this reflects a particular understanding
of the law, the law as embodying the sense of the market, the law after it has undergone a
revolution of reinterpretation in purely economic terms.
In this revolution of the law persons have no status compared to corporations, nation-states
are on their way out, and everything in turn dissolves before the abstraction called the market.
One way to sum up neoliberalism is to say that everything-everything-is to be made over
in the image of the market, including the state, civil society, and of course human beings.
Democracy becomes reinterpreted as the market, and politics succumbs to neoliberal economic
theory, so we are speaking of the end of democratic politics as we have known it for two and
a half centuries.
As the market becomes an abstraction, so does democracy, but the real playing field
is somewhere else, in the realm of actual economic exchange-which is not, however, the market.
We may say that all exchange takes place on the neoliberal surface.
Neoliberalism is often described-and this creates a lot of confusion-as "market fundamentalism,"
and while this may be true for neoliberal's self-promotion and self-presentation, i.e., the
market as the ultimate and only myth, as were the gods of the past, I would argue that in neoliberalism
there is no such thing as the market as we have understood it from previous ideologies.
The neoliberal state-actually, to utter the word state seems insufficient here, I would
claim that a new entity is being created, which is not the state as we have known it, but an
existence that incorporates potentially all the states in the world and is something that exceeds
their sum-is all-powerful, it seeks to leave no space for individual self-conception in
the way that classical liberalism, and even communism and fascism to some degree, were willing
to allow.
There are competing understandings of neoliberal globalization, when it comes to the question
of whether the state is strong or weak compared to the primary agent of globalization, i.e.,
the corporation, but I am taking this logic further, I am suggesting that the issue is
not how strong the state is in the service of neoliberalism, but whether there is anything
left over beyond the new definition of the state. Another way to say it is that the state has
become the market, the market has become the state, and therefore both have ceased to exist
in the form we have classically understood them.
Of course the word hasn't gotten around to the people yet, hence all the confusion about
whether Hillary Clinton is more neoliberal than Barack Obama, or whether Donald Trump will
be less neoliberal than Hillary Clinton.
The project of neoliberalism-i.e., the redefinition of the state, the institutions of society,
and the self-has come so far along that neoliberalism is almost beyond the need of individual
entities to make or break its case. Its penetration has gone too deep, and none of the democratic
figureheads that come forward can fundamentally question its efficacy.
"... The Democratic Party as a Party (Sanders was an outlier) has nothing to do with "fair and equal
play for all". This is a party of soft neoliberals and it adheres to Washington consensus no less then
Republicans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Consensus ..."
"... If you read the key postulates it is clear that that they essentially behaved like an occupier
in this country. In this sense "Occupy Wall street" movement should actually be called "Liberation from
Wall Street occupation" movement. ..."
"... Bill Clinton realized that he can betray working class with impunity as "they have nowhere
to go" and will vote for Democrat anyway. In this sense Bill Clinton is a godfather of the right wing
nationalism in the USA. He sowed the "Teeth's of Dragon" and now we have, what we have. ..."
You guys should wake up and smell what country you live in. Here is a good place to start.
"Campaigning for president in 1980, Ronald Reagan told stories of Cadillac-driving "welfare
queens" and "strapping young bucks" buying T-bone steaks with food stamps. In trumpeting these
tales of welfare run amok, Reagan never needed to mention race, because he was blowing a dog
whistle: sending a message about racial minorities inaudible on one level, but clearly heard
on another. In doing so, he tapped into a long political tradition that started with George
Wallace and Richard Nixon, and is more relevant than ever in the age of the Tea Party and the
first black president.
In Dog Whistle Politics, Ian Haney L?pez offers a sweeping account of how politicians and
plutocrats deploy veiled racial appeals to persuade white voters to support policies that favor
the extremely rich yet threaten their own interests. Dog whistle appeals generate middle-class
enthusiasm for political candidates who promise to crack down on crime, curb undocumented immigration,
and protect the heartland against Islamic infiltration, but ultimately vote to slash taxes
for the rich, give corporations regulatory control over industry and financial markets, and
aggressively curtail social services. White voters, convinced by powerful interests that minorities
are their true enemies, fail to see the connection between the political agendas they support
and the surging wealth inequality that takes an increasing toll on their lives. The tactic
continues at full force, with the Republican Party using racial provocations to drum up enthusiasm
for weakening unions and public pensions, defunding public schools, and opposing health care
reform.
Rejecting any simple story of malevolent and obvious racism, Haney L?pez links as never
before the two central themes that dominate American politics today: the decline of the middle
class and the Republican Party's increasing reliance on white voters. Dog Whistle Politics
will generate a lively and much-needed debate about how racial politics has destabilized the
American middle class -- white and nonwhite members alike."
Reading the above posts I am reminded that in November there was ONE Election with TWO Results:
Electoral Vote for Donald Trump by the margin of 3 formerly Democratic Voting states Michigan,
Ohio, and Pennsylvania
Popular Vote for Hillary Clinton by over 2.8 Million
The Democratic Party and its Candidates OBVIOUSLY need to get more votes in the Electoral States
that they lost in 2016, not change what they stand for, the principles of fair and equal play
for all.
And, in the 3 States that turned the Electoral Vote in Trump's favor and against Hillary, all
that is needed are 125,000 or more votes, probably fewer, and the DEMS win the Electoral vote
big too.
It is not any more complex than that.
So how does the Democratic Party get more votes in those States?
PANDER to their voters by delivering on KISS, not talking about it.
That is create living wage jobs and not taking them away as the Republican Party of 'Free Trade'
and the Clinton Democratic Party 'Free Trade' Elites did.
Understand this: It is not the responsibility of the USA, or in its best interests, to create
jobs in other nations (Mexico, Japan, China, Canada, Israel, etc.) that do not create jobs in
the USA equivalently, especially if the gain is offset by costly overseas confrontations and involvements
that would not otherwise exist.
"The Democratic Party and its Candidates OBVIOUSLY need to get more votes in the Electoral
States that they lost in 2016, not change what they stand for, the principles of fair and equal
play for all. "
The Democratic Party as a Party (Sanders was an outlier) has nothing to do with "fair and
equal play for all". This is a party of soft neoliberals and it adheres to Washington consensus
no less then Republicans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Consensus
If you read the key postulates it is clear that that they essentially behaved like an occupier
in this country. In this sense "Occupy Wall street" movement should actually be called "Liberation
from Wall Street occupation" movement.
Bill Clinton realized that he can betray working class with impunity as "they have nowhere
to go" and will vote for Democrat anyway. In this sense Bill Clinton is a godfather of the right
wing nationalism in the USA. He sowed the "Teeth's of Dragon" and now we have, what we have.
"... I am among those who think tribalism as a organizing pattern for partisan mobilization is extending neoliberalism's reign rather than displacing it. ..."
"... What rankles me is the implication that "tribalism" is more or less synonymous with the right's reliance on racism as a primary rally cry, while the left's anti-racist stance exempts the left's identity politics from being a species of tribalism as well. ..."
"... It seems to me that the emergence of "tribalism" in organizing and motivating partisan identity is driven by forces of partisan reaction in the context of increasing social atomization and the decline of social affiliation in all areas of life. ..."
"... The "tribalism" of left identity politics has been very real and has contributed mightily in organizing a reactionary right "tribalism" around resentment and repulsion at being the left's outgroup, the poorly educated flyover people. ..."
"... The division over Brexit demonstrated the extent to which social membership in actual social organizations like clubs, unions, churches no longer matters as much as personal worldview, as the authoritarians divided from the cosmopolitans. ..."
"... One reason "tribalism" seems appropriate to characterize the eruption on right is that there is no coherent policy program corresponding to the resentments or grievances. It is voting on the basis of something personal, an emotional identification cum perception of sorts. ..."
I do not object to the word, tribalism, though I am among those who think tribalism as a organizing
pattern for partisan mobilization is extending neoliberalism's reign rather than displacing it.
What rankles me is the implication that "tribalism" is more or less synonymous with the right's
reliance on racism as a primary rally cry, while the left's anti-racist stance exempts the left's
identity politics from being a species of tribalism as well.
It seems to me that the emergence of "tribalism" in organizing and motivating partisan identity
is driven by forces of partisan reaction in the context of increasing social atomization and the
decline of social affiliation in all areas of life.
In an American context, a long-standing theme of right-wing televised and on-line propaganda has
aimed at motivating people on the basis of their resentments against the supposed contempt the hated
libruls have for "God and guns" and the self-regarding moral superiority of those driving a Prius
and listening to National Public Radio.
I would not want to be understood as saying that tribalism is symmetric between right and left;
I do think what has been happening on the right has been driven by social reaction to what has been
happening on the left, and the interpretation the left has of the right is just as driven by motivated
reasoning, even if the motivations are different. The left's sometime focus on language, micro aggression
and personal experience cum personal justification thru enlightened attitudes is a manifestation
of the decline of social affiliation, so there is an irony in naming the pseudo in-group conformity
that results, "tribalism". The "tribalism" of left identity politics has been very real and has
contributed mightily in organizing a reactionary right "tribalism" around resentment and repulsion
at being the left's outgroup, the poorly educated flyover people.
The division over Brexit demonstrated the extent to which social membership in actual social
organizations like clubs, unions, churches no longer matters as much as personal worldview, as the
authoritarians divided from the cosmopolitans. The angry, uncomprehending reaction to the vote
from cosmopolitans reinforced the "tribalism" of both, but to see that requires a modicum of detachment
from the angry accusation that racism and lies was the whole case and denies the legitimacy of economic
grievance.
One reason "tribalism" seems appropriate to characterize the eruption on right is that there
is no coherent policy program corresponding to the resentments or grievances. It is voting on the
basis of something personal, an emotional identification cum perception of sorts.
I am not so certain that the left, as it has sunk into a denial laden defense of the status
quo, has not also been shedding its attachment to a policy program, Hillary's proverbial website
notwithstanding. Democrats associated with the party establishment especially in the 2016 campaign
talked policy futility and never acted as if a concerted effort to, say, capture the Senate with
an eye on opening a policy agenda mattered to them. And, many ordinary supporters of the Democrats
seemed to be blithely unaware or apathetic about the policy record of war, economic predation, et
cetera.
Without a policy agenda, the tribes cannot be proper constituencies demanding delivery on promises,
which fits a continuation of neoliberal policy agenda just fine, but foretells, it seems to me, disillusion,
apathy, violence and loss of legitimacy becoming acute. If mobilizing the tribes substitutes for
a politics of coherent policy, it is hard to imagine any but ineffectual albeit authoritarian governance.
"... As Mr. Buffet so keenly said it, There is a war going on, and we are winning. ..."
"... Just type `TPP editorial' into news.google.com and watch a toxic sludge of straw men, misdirection, and historical revisionism flow across your screen. And the `objective' straight news reporting is no better. ..."
"... "Why is it afraid of us?" Because we the people are perceived to be the enemy of America the Corporation. Whistleblowers have already stated that the NSA info is used to blackmail politicians and military leaders, provide corporate espionage to the highest payers and more devious machinations than the mind can grasp from behind a single computer. 9/11 was a coup – I say that because looking around the results tell me that. ..."
"... The fourth estate (the media) has been purchased outright by the second estate (the nobility). I guess you could call this an 'estate sale'. All power to the markets! ..."
Free Trade," the banner of Globalization, has not only wrecked the world's economy, it has left Western
Democracy in shambles. Europe edges ever closer to deflation. The Fed dare not increase interest
rates, now poised at barely above zero. As China's stock market threatened collapse, China poured
billions to prop it up. It's export machine is collapsing. Not once, but twice, it recently manipulated
its currency to makes its goods cheaper on the world market. What is happening?
The following two
graphs tell most of the story. First, an overview of Free Trade.
Capital fled from developed countries to undeveloped countries with slave-cheap labor, countries
with no environmental standards, countries with no support for collective bargaining. Corporations,
like Apple, set up shop in China and other undeveloped countries. Some, like China, manipulated its
currency to make exported goods to the West even cheaper. Some, like China, gave preferential tax
treatment to Western firm over indigenous firms. Economists cheered as corporate efficiency unsurprisingly
rose. U.S. citizens became mere consumers.
Thanks to Bill Clinton and the Financial Modernization Act, banks, now unconstrained, could peddle
rigged financial services, offer insurance on its own investment products–in short, banks were free
to play with everyone's money–and simply too big to fail. Credit was easy and breezy. If nasty Arabs
bombed the Trade Center, why the solution was simple: Go to the shopping mall–and buy. That remarkable
piece of advice is just what freedom has been all about.
Next: China's export machine sputters.
China's problem is that there are not enough orders to keep the export machine going. There comes
a time when industrialized nations simply run out of cash–I mean the little people run out of cash.
CEOs and those just below them–along with slick Wall Street gauchos–made bundles on Free Trade, corporate
capital that could set up shop in any impoverished nation in the world.. No worries about labor–dirt
cheap–or environmental regulations–just bring your gas masks. At some point the Western consumer
well was bound to run dry. Credit was exhausted; the little guy could not buy anymore. Free trade
was on its last legs.
So what did China do then? As its markets crashed, it tried to revive its export model, a model
based on foreign firms exporting cheap goods to the West. China lowered its exchange rates, not once
but twice. Then China tried to rescue the markets with cash infusion of billions. Still its market
continued to crash. Manufacturing plants had closed–thousands of them. Free Trade and Globalization
had run its course.
And what has the Fed been doing? Why quantitative easy–increase the money supply and lower short
term interest rates. Like China's latest currency manipulation, both were merely stop-gap measures.
No one, least of all Obama and his corporate advisors, was ready to address corporate outsourcing
that has cost millions of jobs. Prime the pump a little, but never address the real problem.
The WTO sets the groundwork for trade among its member states. That groundwork is deeply flawed.
Trade between impoverished third world countries and sophisticated first world economies is not merely
a matter of regulating "dumping"-not allowing one country to flood the market with cheap goods-nor
is it a matter of insuring that the each country does not favor its indigenous firms over foreign
firms. Comparable labor and environmental standards are necessary. Does anyone think that a first
world worker can compete with virtual slave labor? Does anyone think that a first world nation with
excellent environmental regulations can compete with a third world nation that refuses to protect
its environment?
Only lately has Apple even mentioned that it might clean up its mess in China. The Apple miracle
has been on the backs of the Chinese poor and abysmal environmental wreckage that is China.
The WTO allows three forms of inequities-all of which encourage outsourcing: labor arbitrage,
tax arbitrage, and environmental arbitrage. For a fuller explanation of these inequities and the
"race to the bottom," see
here.
Of course now we have the mother of all Free Trade deals –the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)–
carefully wrapped in a black box so that none of us can see what finally is in store for us. Nothing
is ever "Free"–even trade. I suspect that China is becoming a bit too noxious and poisonous. It simply
has to deal with its massive environmental problems. Time to move the game to less despoiled and
maybe more impoverished countries. Meanwhile, newscasters are always careful to tout TPP.
Fast Tracking is a con man's game. Do it so fast that the marks never have a chance to watch their
wallets. In hiding negotiations from prying, public eyes, Obama, has given the con men a bigger edge:
A screen to hide the corporations making deals. Their interest is in profits, not in public good.
Consider the media. Our only defense is a strong independent media. At one time,
newsrooms were not required to be profitable. Reporting the news was considered a community service.
Corporate ownership provided the necessary funding for its newsrooms–and did not interfere.
But the 70′s and 80′s corporate ownership required its newsrooms to be profitable. Slowly but
surely, newsrooms focused on personality, entertainment, and wedge issues–always careful not to rock
the corporate boat, always careful not to tread on governmental policy. Whoever thought that one
major news service–Fox–would become a breeding ground for one particular party.
But consider CNN: It organizes endless GOP debates; then spends hours dissecting them. Create
the news; then sell it–and be sure to spin it in the direction you want.
Are matters of substance ever discussed? When has a serious foreign policy debate ever been allowed
occurred–without editorial interference from the media itself. When has trade and outsourcing been
seriously discussed–other than by peripheral news media?
Meanwhile, news media becomes more and more centralized. Murdoch now owns National Geographic!
Now, thanks to Bush and Obama, we have the chilling effect of the NSA. Just whom does the NSA
serve when it collects all of our digital information? Is it being used to ferret out the plans of
those exercising their right of dissent? Is it being used to increase the profits of favored corporations?
Why does it need all of your and my personal information–from bank accounts, to credit cards, to
travel plans, to friends with whom we chat .Why is it afraid of us?
jefemt, October 23, 2015 at 9:43 am
As Mr. Buffet so keenly said it, There is a war going on, and we are winning.
If 'they' are failing, I'd hate to see success!
Isn't it the un-collective WE who are failing?
failing to organize,
failing to come up with plausible, 90 degrees off present Lemming-to-Brink path alternative plans
and policies,
failing to agree on any of many plausible alternatives that might work
Divided- for now- hopefully not conquered ..
I gotta scoot and get back to Dancing with the Master Chefs
allan, October 23, 2015 at 10:03 am
Just type `TPP editorial' into news.google.com and watch a toxic sludge of straw men, misdirection,
and historical revisionism flow across your screen. And the `objective' straight news reporting
is no better.
Vatch, October 23, 2015 at 10:36 am
Don't just watch the toxic sludge; respond to it with a letter to the editor (LTE) of the offending
publication! For some of those toxic editorials, and contact information for LTEs, see:
A few of the editorials may now be obscured by paywalls or registration requirements, but most
should still be visible. Let them know that we see through their nonsense!
TedWa, October 23, 2015 at 10:38 am
"Why is it afraid of us?" Because we the people are perceived to be the enemy of America
the Corporation. Whistleblowers have already stated that the NSA info is used to blackmail politicians
and military leaders, provide corporate espionage to the highest payers and more devious machinations
than the mind can grasp from behind a single computer. 9/11 was a coup – I say that because looking
around the results tell me that.
TG, October 23, 2015 at 3:27 pm
The fourth estate (the media) has been purchased outright by the second estate (the nobility).
I guess you could call this an 'estate sale'. All power to the markets!
Pelham, October 23, 2015 at 8:32 pm
Even when newsrooms were more independent they probably would not, in general, have reported
on free trade with any degree of skepticism. The recent disappearance of the old firewall between
the news and corporate sides has made things worse, but at least since the "professionalization"
of newsrooms that began to really take hold in the '60s, journalists have tended to identify far
more with their sources in power than with their readers.
There have, of course, been notable exceptions. But even these sometimes serve more to obscure
the real day-to-day nature of journalism's fealty to the corporate world than to bring about any
significant change.
"... "confronted with the Pivot to Asia and the construction of new US naval and air bases to ensure Washington's control of the South China Sea, now defined as an area of American National Interests." ..."
"... "for the crisis that Washington has created in Ukraine and for its use as anti-Russian propaganda." ..."
"... "How America Was Lost" ..."
"... "aggression and blatant propaganda have convinced Russia and China that Washington intends war, and this realization has drawn the two countries into a strategic alliance." ..."
"... "vassalage status accepted by the UK, Germany, France and the rest of Europe, Canada, Japan and Australia." ..."
"... "price of world peace is the world's acceptance of Washington's hegemony." ..."
"... "On the foreign policy front, the hubris and arrogance of America's self-image as the 'exceptional, indispensable' country with hegemonic rights over other countries means that the world is primed for war," ..."
"... "unless the dollar and with it US power collapses or Europe finds the courage to break with Washington and to pursue an independent foreign policy, saying good-bye to NATO, nuclear war is our likely future." ..."
"... "historical turning point," ..."
"... "the Chinese were there in their place," ..."
"... "Russian casualties compared to the combined casualties of the US, UK, and France make it completely clear that it was Russia that defeated Hitler," ..."
"... "in the Orwellian West, the latest rewriting of history leaves out of the story the Red Army's destruction of the Wehrmacht." ..."
"... "expressed gratitude to 'the peoples of Great Britain, France and the United States of America for their contribution to the victory.'" ..."
"... "do not hear when Russia says 'don't push us this hard, we are not your enemy. We want to be your partners.'" ..."
"... "finally realized that their choice is vassalage or war," ..."
"... "made the mistake that could be fateful for humanity," ..."
The White House is determined to block the rise of the key nuclear-armed nations, Russia and China, neither of whom will join the
"world's acceptance of Washington's hegemony," says head of the Institute for Political Economy, Paul Craig Roberts.
The former
US assistant secretary of the Treasury for economic policy, Dr Paul Craig Roberts, has written on his
blog
that Beijing is currently "confronted with the Pivot to Asia and the construction of new US naval and air bases to ensure Washington's
control of the South China Sea, now defined as an area of American National Interests."
Roberts writes that Washington's commitment to contain Russia is the reason "for the crisis that Washington has created in
Ukraine and for its use as anti-Russian propaganda."
The author of several books, "How America Was Lost" among the latest titles, says that US "aggression and blatant
propaganda have convinced Russia and China that Washington intends war, and this realization has drawn the two countries into a strategic
alliance."
Dr Roberts believes that neither Russia, nor China will meanwhile accept the so-called "vassalage status accepted by the UK,
Germany, France and the rest of Europe, Canada, Japan and Australia." According to the political analyst, the "price of
world peace is the world's acceptance of Washington's hegemony."
"On the foreign policy front, the hubris and arrogance of America's self-image as the 'exceptional, indispensable' country
with hegemonic rights over other countries means that the world is primed for war," Roberts writes.
He gives a gloomy political forecast in his column saying that "unless the dollar and with it US power collapses or Europe
finds the courage to break with Washington and to pursue an independent foreign policy, saying good-bye to NATO, nuclear war is our
likely future."
Russia's far-reaching May 9 Victory Day celebration was meanwhile a "historical turning point," according to Roberts
who says that while Western politicians chose to boycott the 70th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany, "the Chinese were
there in their place," China's president sitting next to President Putin during the military parade on Red Square in Moscow.
A recent poll targeting over 3,000 people in France, Germany and the UK has recently revealed that as little as 13 percent of
Europeans think the Soviet Army played the leading role in liberating Europe from Nazism during WW2. The majority of respondents
– 43 percent – said the US Army played the main role in liberating Europe.
"Russian casualties compared to the combined casualties of the US, UK, and France make it completely clear that it was Russia
that defeated Hitler," Roberts points out, adding that "in the Orwellian West, the latest rewriting of history leaves out
of the story the Red Army's destruction of the Wehrmacht."
The head of the presidential administration, Sergey Ivanov, told RT earlier this month that attempts to diminish the role played
by Russia in defeating Nazi Germany through rewriting history by some Western countries are part of the ongoing campaign to isolate
and alienate Russia.
Dr Roberts has also stated in his column that while the US president only mentioned US forces in his remarks on the 70th anniversary
of the victory, President Putin in contrast "expressed gratitude to 'the peoples of Great Britain, France and the United States
of America for their contribution to the victory.'"
The political analyst notes that America along with its allies "do not hear when Russia says 'don't push us this hard, we
are not your enemy. We want to be your partners.'"
While Moscow and Beijing have "finally realized that their choice is vassalage or war," Washington "made the mistake
that could be fateful for humanity," according to Dr Roberts.
It is the end of neoliberalism and the start of the era of authoritarian nationalism, and we all
need to come together to stamp out the authoritarian part.
Notable quotes:
"... Neoliberalism has been disastrous for the Rust Belt, and I think we need to envision a new future for what was once the country's industrial heartland, now little more than its wasteland ..."
"... The question of what the many millions of often-unionized factory workers, SMEs which supplied them, family farmers (now fully industrialized and owned by corporations), and all those in secondary production and services who once supported them are to actually do in future to earn a decent living is what I believe should really be the subject of debate. ..."
"... two factors (or three, I guess) have contributed to this state of despair: offshoring and outsourcing, and technology. ..."
"... Medicaid, the CHIP program, the SNAP program and others (including NGOs and private charitable giving) may alleviate some of the suffering, but there is currently no substitute for jobs that would enable men and women to live lives of dignity – a decent place to live, good educations for their children, and a reasonable, secure pension in old age. Near-, at-, and below-minimum wage jobs devoid of any benefits don't allow any of these – at most, they make possible a subsistence life, one which requires continued reliance on public assistance throughout one's lifetime. ..."
"... In the U.S. (a neoliberal pioneer), poverty is closely linked with inequality and thus, a high GINI coefficient (near that of Turkey); where there is both poverty and a very unequal distribution of resources, this inevitably affects women (and children) and racial (and ethnic) minorities disproportionately. The economic system, racism, sexism, and xenophobia are not separate, stand-alone issues; they are profoundly intertwined. ..."
"... But really, if you think about it, slavery was defined as ownership, ownership of human capital (which was convertible into cash), and women in many societies throughout history were acquired as part of a financial transaction (either through purchase or through sale), and control of their capital (land, property [farmland, herds], valuables and later, money) often entrusted to a spouse or male guardian. All of these practices were economically-driven, even if the driver wasn't 21st-century capitalism. ..."
"... Let it be said at once: Trump's victory is primarily due to the explosion in economic and geographic inequality in the United States over several decades and the inability of successive governments to deal with this. ..."
"... Both the Clinton and the Obama administrations frequently went along with the market liberalization launched under Reagan and both Bush presidencies. At times they even outdid them: the financial and commercial deregulation carried out under Clinton is an example. What sealed the deal, though, was the suspicion that the Democrats were too close to Wall Street – and the inability of the Democratic media elite to learn the lessons from the Sanders vote. ..."
"... Regional inequality and globalization are the principal drivers in Japanese politics, too, along with a number of social drivers. ..."
"... The tsunami/nuclear meltdown combined with the Japanese government's uneven response is an apt metaphor for the impact of neo-liberalism/globalization on Japan; and on the US. I then explained that the income inequality in the US was far more severe than that of Japan and that many Americans did not support the export of jobs to China/Mexico. ..."
"... I contend that in some hypothetical universe the DNC and corrupt Clinton machine could have been torn out, root and branch, within months. As I noted, however, the decision to run HRC effectively unopposed was made several years, at least, before the stark evidence of the consequences of such a decision appeared in sharp relief with Brexit. ..."
"... Just as the decline of Virginia coal is due to global forces and corporate stupidity, so the decline of the rust belt is due to long (30 year plus) global forces and corporate decisions that predate the emergence of identity politics. ..."
"... It's interesting that the clear headed thinkers of the Marxist left, who pride themselves on not being distracted by identity, don't want to talk about these factors when discussing the plight of their cherished white working class. ..."
"... The construction 'white working class' is a useful governing tool that splits poor people and possible coalitions against the violence of capital. Now, discussion focuses on how some of the least powerful, most vulnerable people in the United States are the perpetrators of a great injustice against racialised and minoritised groups. Such commentary colludes in the pathologisation of the working class, of poor people. Victims are inculpated as the vectors of noxious, atavistic vices while the perpetrators get off with impunity, showing off their multihued, cosmopolitan C-suites and even proposing that their free trade agreements are a form of anti-racist solidarity. Most crucially, such analysis ignores the continuities between a Trumpian dystopia and our satisfactory present. ..."
"... Race-thinking forecloses the possibility of the coalitions that you imagine, and reproduces ideas of difference in ways that always, always privilege 'whiteness'. ..."
"... Historical examples of ethnic groups becoming 'white', how it was legal and political decision-making that defined the present racial taxonomy, suggest that groups can also lose or have their 'whiteness' threatened. CB has written here about how, in the UK at least, Eastern and Southern Europeans are racialised, and so refused 'whiteness'. JQ has written about southern white minoritisation. Many commentators have pointed that the 'white working class' vote this year looked a lot like a minority vote. ..."
"... Given the subordination of groups presently defined as 'white working class', I wonder if we could think beyond ethnic and epidermal definition to consider that the impossibility of the American Dream refuses these groups whiteness; i.e the hoped for privileges of racial superiority, much in the same way that African Americans, Latin Americans and other racialised minorities are denied whiteness. Can a poor West Virginian living in a toxified drugged out impoverished landscape really be defined as a carrier of 'white privilege'? ..."
"... I was first pointed at this by the juxtapositions of racialised working class and immigrants in Imogen Tyler's Revolting Subjects – Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain but this below is a useful short article that takes a historical perspective. ..."
"... In a 1990 essay, the late Yale political scientist Juan Linz observed that "aside from the United States, only Chile has managed a century and a half of relatively undisturbed constitutional continuity under presidential government - but Chilean democracy broke down in the 1970s." ..."
"... Linz offered several reasons why presidential systems are so prone to crisis. One particularly important one is the nature of the checks and balances system. Since both the president and the Congress are directly elected by the people, they can both claim to speak for the people. When they have a serious disagreement, according to Linz, "there is no democratic principle on the basis of which it can be resolved." The constitution offers no help in these cases, he wrote: "the mechanisms the constitution might provide are likely to prove too complicated and aridly legalistic to be of much force in the eyes of the electorate." ..."
"... In a parliamentary system, deadlocks get resolved. A prime minister who lacks the backing of a parliamentary majority is replaced by a new one who has it. If no such majority can be found, a new election is held and the new parliament picks a leader. It can get a little messy for a period of weeks, but there's simply no possibility of a years-long spell in which the legislative and executive branches glare at each other unproductively.' ..."
"... In any case, as I pointed out before, given that the US is increasingly an urbanised country, and the Electoral College was created to protect rural (slave) states, the grotesque electoral result we have just seen is likely to recur, which means more and more Presidents with dubious democratic legitimacy. Thanks to Bush (and Obama) these Presidents will have, at the same time, more and more power. ..."
"... To return to my original question and answer it myself: I'm forced to conclude that the Democrats did not specifically address the revitalization – rebirth of the Rust Belt in their 2016 platform. Its failure to do so carried a heavy cost that (nearly) all of us will be forced to pay. ..."
"... This sub seems to have largely fallen into the psychologically comfortable trap of declaring that everyone who voted against their preferred candidate is racist. It's a view pushed by the neoliberals, who want to maintain he stranglehold of identity politics over the DNC, and it makes upper-class 'intellectuals' feel better about themselves and their betrayal of the filthy, subhuman white underclass (or so they see it). ..."
"... You can scream 'those jobs are never coming back!' all you want, but people are never going to accept it. So either you come up with a genuine solution (instead of simply complaining that your opponents solutions won't work; you're partisan and biased, most voters won't believe you), you may as well resign yourself to fascism. Because whining that you don't know what to do won't stop people from lining up behind someone who says that they do have one, whether it'll work or not. Nobody trusts the elite enough to believe them when they say that jobs are never coming back. Nobody trusts the elite at all. ..."
"... You sound just like the Wiemar elite. No will to solve the problem, but filled with terror at the inevitable result of failing to solve the problem. ..."
"... One brutal fact tells us everything we need to know about the Democratic party in 2016: the American Nazi party is running on a platform of free health care to working class people. This means that the American Nazi Party is now running to the left of the Democratic party. ..."
"... Back in the 1930s, when the economy collapsed, fascists appeared and took power. Racists also came out of the woodwork, ditto misogynists. Fast forward 80 years, and the same thing has happened all over again. The global economy melted down in 2008 and fascists appeared promising to fix the problems that the pols in power wouldn't because they were too closely tied to the existing (failed) system. Along with the fascists, racists gained power because they were able to scapegoat minorities as the alleged cause of everyone's misery. ..."
"... None of this is surprising. We have seen it before. Whenever you get a depression in a modern industrial economy, you get scapegoating, racism, and fascists. We know what to do. The problem is that the current Democratic party isn't doing it. ..."
"... . It is the end of neoliberalism and the start of the era of authoritarian nationalism, and we all need to come together to stamp out the authoritarian part. ..."
"... This hammered people on the bottom, disproportionately African Americans and especially single AA mothers in America. It crushed the blue collar workers. It is wiping out the savings and careers of college-educated white collar workers now, at least, the ones who didn't go to the Ivy League, which is 90% of them. ..."
"... Calling Hillary an "imperfect candidate" is like calling what happened to the Titanic a "boating accident." Trump was an imperfect candidate. Why did he win? ..."
"... "The neoliberal era in the United States ended with a neofascist bang. The political triumph of Donald Trump shattered the establishments in the Democratic and Republican parties – both wedded to the rule of Big Money and to the reign of meretricious politicians." ..."
"... "It is not an exaggeration to say that the Democratic Party is in shambles as a political force. Not only did it just lose the White House to a wildly unpopular farce of a candidate despite a virtually unified establishment behind it, and not only is it the minority party in both the Senate and the House, but it is getting crushed at historical record rates on the state and local levels as well. Surveying this wreckage last week, party stalwart Matthew Yglesias of Vox minced no words: `the Obama years have created a Democratic Party that's essentially a smoking pile of rubble.' ..."
"... "One would assume that the operatives and loyalists of such a weak, defeated and wrecked political party would be eager to engage in some introspection and self-critique, and to produce a frank accounting of what they did wrong so as to alter their plight. In the case of 2016 Democrats, one would be quite mistaken." ..."
"... Foreign Affairs ..."
"... "At the end of World War II, the United States and its allies decided that sustained mass unemployment was an existential threat to capitalism and had to be avoided at all costs. In response, governments everywhere targeted full employment as the master policy variable-trying to get to, and sustain, an unemployment rate of roughly four percent. The problem with doing so, over time, is that targeting any variable long enough undermines the value of the variable itself-a phenomenon known as Goodhart's law. (..) ..."
"... " what we see [today] is a reversal of power between creditors and debtors as the anti-inflationary regime of the past 30 years undermines itself-what we might call "Goodhart's revenge." In this world, yields compress and creditors fret about their earnings, demanding repayment of debt at all costs. Macro-economically, this makes the situation worse: the debtors can't pay-but politically, and this is crucial-it empowers debtors since they can't pay, won't pay, and still have the right to vote. ..."
"... "The traditional parties of the center-left and center-right, the builders of this anti-inflationary order, get clobbered in such a world, since they are correctly identified by these debtors as the political backers of those demanding repayment in an already unequal system, and all from those with the least assets. This produces anti-creditor, pro-debtor coalitions-in-waiting that are ripe for the picking by insurgents of the left and the right, which is exactly what has happened. ..."
"... "The global revolt against elites is not just driven by revulsion and loss and racism. It's also driven by the global economy itself. This is a global phenomenon that marks one thing above all. The era of neoliberalism is over. The era of neonationalism has just begun." ..."
"... They want what their families have had which is secure, paid, benefits rich, blue collar work. ..."
"... trump's campaign empathized with that feeling just by focusing on the factory jobs as jobs and not as anachronisms that are slowly fading away for whatever reason. Clinton might have been "correct", but these voters didn't want to hear "the truth". And as much as you can complain about how stupid they are for wanting to be lied to, that is the unfortunate reality you, and the Democratic party, have to accept. ..."
"... trump was offering a "bailout" writ large. Clinton had no (good) counteroffer. It was like the tables were turned. Romney was the one talking about "change" and "restructuring" while Obama was defending keeping what was already there. ..."
"... "Without that bailout, Detroit will need to drastically restructure itself. With it, the automakers will stay the course - the suicidal course of declining market shares, insurmountable labor and retiree burdens, technology atrophy, product inferiority and never-ending job losses. Detroit needs a turnaround, not a check." http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/19/opinion/19romney.html ..."
"... Clinton toward the end offered tariffs. But the trump campaign hit back with what turned out to be a pretty strong counter attack – ""How's she going to get tough on China?" said Trump economic advisor Peter Navarro on CNN's Quest Means Business. He notes that some of Clinton's economic advisors have supported TPP or even worked on it. "" ..."
The question is no longer her neoliberalism, but yours. Keep it or throw it away?
I wish this issue was being seriously discussed. Neoliberalism has been disastrous for
the Rust Belt, and I think we need to envision a new future for what was once the country's industrial
heartland, now little more than its wasteland (cf. "flyover zone" – a pejorative term which
inhabitants of the zone are not too stupid to understand perfectly, btw).
The question of what the many millions of often-unionized factory workers, SMEs which supplied
them, family farmers (now fully industrialized and owned by corporations), and all those in secondary
production and services who once supported them are to actually do in future to earn a decent
living is what I believe should really be the subject of debate.
As noted upthread, two factors (or three, I guess) have contributed to this state of despair:
offshoring and outsourcing, and technology. The jobs that have been lost will not return,
and indeed will be lost in ever greater numbers – just consider what will happen to the trucking
sector when self-driving trucks hit the roads sometime in the next 10-20 years (3.5 million truckers;
8.7 in allied jobs).
Medicaid, the CHIP program, the SNAP program and others (including NGOs and private charitable
giving) may alleviate some of the suffering, but there is currently no substitute for jobs that
would enable men and women to live lives of dignity – a decent place to live, good educations
for their children, and a reasonable, secure pension in old age. Near-, at-, and below-minimum
wage jobs devoid of any benefits don't allow any of these – at most, they make possible a subsistence
life, one which requires continued reliance on public assistance throughout one's lifetime.
In the U.S. (a neoliberal pioneer), poverty is closely linked with inequality and thus,
a high GINI coefficient (near that of Turkey); where there is both poverty and a very unequal
distribution of resources, this inevitably affects women (and children) and racial (and ethnic)
minorities disproportionately. The economic system, racism, sexism, and xenophobia are not separate,
stand-alone issues; they are profoundly intertwined.
I appreciate and espouse the goals of identity politics in all their multiplicity, and also
understand that the institutions of slavery and sexism predated modern capitalist economies.
But really, if you think about it, slavery was defined as ownership, ownership of human capital
(which was convertible into cash), and women in many societies throughout history were acquired
as part of a financial transaction (either through purchase or through sale), and control of their
capital (land, property [farmland, herds], valuables and later, money) often entrusted to a spouse
or male guardian. All of these practices were economically-driven, even if the driver wasn't 21st-century
capitalism.
Also: Faustusnotes@100
For example Indiana took the ACA Medicaid expansion but did so with additional conditions that
make it worse than in neighboring states run by democratic governors.
And what states would those be? IL, IA, MI, OH, WI, KY, and TN have Republican governors. Were
you thinking pre-2014? pre-2012?
To conclude and return to my original point: what's to become of the Rust Belt in future? Did
the Democratic platform include a New New Deal for PA, OH, MI, WI, and IA (to name only the five
Rust Belt states Trump flipped)?
" Let it be said at once: Trump's victory is primarily due to the explosion in economic
and geographic inequality in the United States over several decades and the inability of successive
governments to deal with this.
Both the Clinton and the Obama administrations frequently went along with the market liberalization
launched under Reagan and both Bush presidencies. At times they even outdid them: the financial
and commercial deregulation carried out under Clinton is an example. What sealed the deal, though,
was the suspicion that the Democrats were too close to Wall Street – and the inability of the
Democratic media elite to learn the lessons from the Sanders vote. "
What should have been one comment came out as 4, so apologies on that front.
I spent the last week explaining the US election to my students in Japan in pretty much the
terms outlined by Lilla and PIketty, so I was delighted to discover these two articles.
Regional inequality and globalization are the principal drivers in Japanese politics, too,
along with a number of social drivers. It was therefore very easy to call for a show of hands
to identify students studying here in Tokyo who are trying to decide whether or not to return
to areas such as Tohoku to build their lives; or remain in Kanto/Tokyo – the NY/Washington/LA
of Japan put crudely.
I asked students from regions close to Tohoku how they might feel if the Japanese prime minister
decided not to visit the region following Fukushima after the disaster, or preceding an election.
The tsunami/nuclear meltdown combined with the Japanese government's uneven response is an
apt metaphor for the impact of neo-liberalism/globalization on Japan; and on the US. I then explained
that the income inequality in the US was far more severe than that of Japan and that many Americans
did not support the export of jobs to China/Mexico.
I then asked the students, particularly those from outlying regions whether they believe Japan
needed a leader who would 'bring back Japanese jobs' from Viet Nam and China, etc. Many/most agreed
wholeheartedly. I then asked whether they believed Tokyo people treated those outside Kanto as
'inferiors.' Many do.
Piketty may be right regarding Trump's long-term effects on income inequality. He is wrong,
I suggest, to argue that Democrats failed to respond to Sanders' support. I contend that in
some hypothetical universe the DNC and corrupt Clinton machine could have been torn out, root
and branch, within months. As I noted, however, the decision to run HRC effectively unopposed
was made several years, at least, before the stark evidence of the consequences of such a decision
appeared in sharp relief with Brexit.
Also worth noting is that the rust belts problems are as old as Reagan – even the term dates
from the 80s, the issue is so uncool that there is a dire straits song about it. Some portion
of the decline of manufacturing there is due to manufacturers shifting to the south, where the
anti Union states have an advantage. Also there has been new investment – there were no Japanese
car companies in the us in the 1980s, so they are new job creators, yet insufficient to make up
the losses. Just as the decline of Virginia coal is due to global forces and corporate stupidity,
so the decline of the rust belt is due to long (30 year plus) global forces and corporate decisions
that predate the emergence of identity politics.
It's interesting that the clear headed thinkers of the Marxist left, who pride themselves
on not being distracted by identity, don't want to talk about these factors when discussing the
plight of their cherished white working class. Suddenly it's not the forces of capital and
the objective facts of history, but a bunch of whiny black trannies demanding safe spaces and
protesting police violence, that drove those towns to ruin.
And what solutions do they think the dems should have proposed? It can't be welfare, since
we got the ACA (watered down by representatives of the rust belt states). Is it, seriously, tariffs?
Short of going to an election promising w revolution, what should the dems have done? Give us
a clear answer so we can see what the alternative to identity politics is.
basil 11.19.16 at 5:11 am
Did this go through?
Thinking with WLGR @15, Yan @81, engels variously above,
The construction 'white working class' is a useful governing tool that splits poor people
and possible coalitions against the violence of capital. Now, discussion focuses on how some of
the least powerful, most vulnerable people in the United States are the perpetrators of a great
injustice against racialised and minoritised groups. Such commentary colludes in the pathologisation
of the working class, of poor people. Victims are inculpated as the vectors of noxious, atavistic
vices while the perpetrators get off with impunity, showing off their multihued, cosmopolitan
C-suites and even proposing that their free trade agreements are a form of anti-racist solidarity.
Most crucially, such analysis ignores the continuities between a Trumpian dystopia and our satisfactory
present.
I get that the tropes around race are easy, and super-available. Privilege confessing is very
in vogue as a prophylactic against charges of racism. But does it threaten the structures that
produce this abjection – either as embittered, immiserated 'white working class' or as threatened
minority group? It is always *those* 'white' people, the South, the Working Class, and never the
accusers some of whom are themselves happy to vote for a party that drowns out anti-war protesters
with chants of USA! USA!
Race-thinking forecloses the possibility of the coalitions that you imagine, and reproduces
ideas of difference in ways that always, always privilege 'whiteness'.
--
Historical examples of ethnic groups becoming 'white', how it was legal and political decision-making
that defined the present racial taxonomy, suggest that groups can also lose or have their 'whiteness'
threatened. CB has written here about how, in the UK at least, Eastern and Southern Europeans
are racialised, and so refused 'whiteness'. JQ has written about southern white minoritisation.
Many commentators have pointed that the 'white working class' vote this year looked a lot like
a minority vote.
Given the subordination of groups presently defined as 'white working class', I wonder
if we could think beyond ethnic and epidermal definition to consider that the impossibility of
the American Dream refuses these groups whiteness; i.e the hoped for privileges of racial superiority,
much in the same way that African Americans, Latin Americans and other racialised minorities are
denied whiteness. Can a poor West Virginian living in a toxified drugged out impoverished landscape
really be defined as a carrier of 'white privilege'?
I was first pointed at this by the juxtapositions of racialised working class and immigrants
in Imogen Tyler's Revolting Subjects – Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain but
this below is a useful short article that takes a historical perspective.
The 'racialisation' of class in Britain has been a consequence of the weakening of 'class'
as a political idea since the 1970s – it is a new construction, not an historic one.
.
This is not to deny the existence of working-class racism, or to suggest that racism is
somehow acceptable if rooted in perceived socio-economic grievances. But it is to suggest that
the concept of a 'white working class' needs problematizing, as does the claim that the British
working-class was strongly committed to a post-war vision of 'White Britain' analogous to the
politics which sustained the idea of a 'White Australia' until the 1960s.
Yes, old, settled neighbourhoods could be profoundly distrustful of outsiders – all outsiders,
including the researchers seeking to study them – but, when it came to race, they were internally
divided. We certainly hear working-class racist voices – often echoing stock racist complaints
about over-crowding, welfare dependency or exploitative landlords and small businessmen, but
we don't hear the deep pathological racial fears laid bare in the letters sent to Enoch Powell
after his so-called 'Rivers of Blood' speech in 1968 (Whipple, 2009).
But more importantly, we also hear strong anti-racist voices loudly and clearly. At Wallsend
on Tyneside, where the researchers were gathering their data just as Powell shot to notoriety,
we find workers expressing casual racism, but we also find eloquent expressions of an internationalist,
solidaristic perspective in which, crucially, black and white are seen as sharing the same
working-class interests.
Racism is denounced as a deliberate capitalist strategy to divide workers against themselves,
weakening their ability to challenge those with power over their lives (shipbuilding had long
been a very fractious industry and its workers had plenty of experience of the dangers of internal
sectarian battles).
To be able to mobilize across across racialised divisions, to have race wither away entirely
would, for me, be the beginning of a politics that allowed humanity to deal with the inescapable
violence of climate change and corporate power.
*To add to the bibliography – David R. Roediger, Elizabeth D. Esch – The Production of Difference
– Race and the Management of Labour, and Denise Ferreira da Silva – Toward a Global Idea of Race.
And I have just been pointed at Ian Haney-López, White By Law – The Legal Construction of Race.
FWIW 'merica's constitutional democracy is going to collapse.
Some day - not tomorrow, not next year, but probably sometime before runaway climate change
forces us to seek a new life in outer-space colonies - there is going to be a collapse of the
legal and political order and its replacement by something else. If we're lucky, it won't be violent.
If we're very lucky, it will lead us to tackle the underlying problems and result in a better,
more robust, political system. If we're less lucky, well, then, something worse will happen .
In a 1990 essay, the late Yale political scientist Juan Linz observed that "aside from
the United States, only Chile has managed a century and a half of relatively undisturbed constitutional
continuity under presidential government - but Chilean democracy broke down in the 1970s."
Linz offered several reasons why presidential systems are so prone to crisis. One particularly
important one is the nature of the checks and balances system. Since both the president and the
Congress are directly elected by the people, they can both claim to speak for the people. When
they have a serious disagreement, according to Linz, "there is no democratic principle on the
basis of which it can be resolved." The constitution offers no help in these cases, he wrote:
"the mechanisms the constitution might provide are likely to prove too complicated and aridly
legalistic to be of much force in the eyes of the electorate."
In a parliamentary system, deadlocks get resolved. A prime minister who lacks the backing
of a parliamentary majority is replaced by a new one who has it. If no such majority can be found,
a new election is held and the new parliament picks a leader. It can get a little messy for a
period of weeks, but there's simply no possibility of a years-long spell in which the legislative
and executive branches glare at each other unproductively.'
Given that the basic point is polarisation (i.e. that both the President and Congress have
equally strong arguments to be the the 'voice of the people') and that under the US appalling
constitutional set up, there is no way to decide between them, one can easily imagine the so to
speak 'hyperpolarisation' of a Trump Presidency as being the straw (or anvil) that breaks the
camel's back.
In any case, as I pointed out before, given that the US is increasingly an urbanised country,
and the Electoral College was created to protect rural (slave) states, the grotesque electoral
result we have just seen is likely to recur, which means more and more Presidents with dubious
democratic legitimacy. Thanks to Bush (and Obama) these Presidents will have, at the same time,
more and more power.
nastywoman @ 150
Just study the program of the 'Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschland' or the Program of 'Die
Grünen' in Germany (take it through google translate) and you get all the answers you are looking
for.
No need to run it through google translate, it's available in English on their site. [Or one
could refer to the Green Party of the U.S. site/platform, which is very similar in scope and overall
philosophy. (www.gp.org).]
I looked at several of their topic areas (Agricultural, Global, Health, Rural) and yes, these
are general theses I would support. But they're hardly policy/project proposals for specific regions
or communities – the Greens espouse "think global, act local", so programs and projects must be
tailored to individual communities and regions.
To return to my original question and answer it myself: I'm forced to conclude that the
Democrats did not specifically address the revitalization – rebirth of the Rust Belt in their
2016 platform. Its failure to do so carried a heavy cost that (nearly) all of us will be forced
to pay.
This sub seems to have largely fallen into the psychologically comfortable trap of declaring
that everyone who voted against their preferred candidate is racist. It's a view pushed by the
neoliberals, who want to maintain he stranglehold of identity politics over the DNC, and it makes
upper-class 'intellectuals' feel better about themselves and their betrayal of the filthy, subhuman
white underclass (or so they see it).
I expect at this point that Trump will be reelected comfortably. If not only the party itself,
but also most of its activists, refuse to actually change, it's more or less inevitable.
You can scream 'those jobs are never coming back!' all you want, but people are never going
to accept it. So either you come up with a genuine solution (instead of simply complaining that
your opponents solutions won't work; you're partisan and biased, most voters won't believe you),
you may as well resign yourself to fascism. Because whining that you don't know what to do won't
stop people from lining up behind someone who says that they do have one, whether it'll work or
not. Nobody trusts the elite enough to believe them when they say that jobs are never coming back.
Nobody trusts the elite at all.
You sound just like the Wiemar elite. No will to solve the problem, but filled with terror
at the inevitable result of failing to solve the problem.
One brutal fact tells us everything we need to know about the Democratic party in 2016:
the American Nazi party is running on a platform of free health care to working class people.
This means that the American Nazi Party is now running to the left of the Democratic party.
Folks, we have seen this before. Let's not descend in backbiting and recriminations, okay?
We've got some commenters charging that other commenters are "mansplaining," meanwhile we've got
other commenters claiming that it's economics and not racism/misogyny. It's all of the above.
Back in the 1930s, when the economy collapsed, fascists appeared and took power. Racists
also came out of the woodwork, ditto misogynists. Fast forward 80 years, and the same thing has
happened all over again. The global economy melted down in 2008 and fascists appeared promising
to fix the problems that the pols in power wouldn't because they were too closely tied to the
existing (failed) system. Along with the fascists, racists gained power because they were able
to scapegoat minorities as the alleged cause of everyone's misery.
None of this is surprising. We have seen it before. Whenever you get a depression in a
modern industrial economy, you get scapegoating, racism, and fascists. We know what to do. The
problem is that the current Democratic party isn't doing it.
Instead, what we're seeing is a whirlwind of finger-pointing from the Democratic leadership
that lost this election and probably let the entire New Deal get rolled back and wiped out. Putin
is to blame! Julian Assange is to blame! The biased media are to blame! Voter suppression is to
blame! Bernie Sanders is to blame! Jill Stein is to blame! Everyone and anyone except the current
out-of-touch influence-peddling elites who currently have run the Democratic party into the ground.
We need the feminists and the black lives matter groups and we also need the green party people
and the Bernie Sanders activists. But everyone has to understand that this is not an isolated
event. Trump did not just happen by accident. First there was Greece, then there was Brexit, then
there was Trump, next it'll be Renzi losing the referendum in Italy and a constitutional crisis
there, and after that, Marine Le Pen in France is going to win the first round of elections. (Probably
not the presidency, since all the other French parties will band together to stop her, but the
National Front is currently polling at 40% of all registered French voters.) And Marine LePen
is the real deal, a genuine full-on out-and-out fascist. Not a closet fascist like Steve Bannon,
LePen is the full monty with everything but a Hugo Boss suit and the death's heads on the cap.
Does anyone notice a pattern here?
This is an international movement. It is sweeping the world . It is the end of neoliberalism
and the start of the era of authoritarian nationalism, and we all need to come together to stamp
out the authoritarian part.
Feminists, BLM, black bloc anarchiest anti-globalists, Sandernistas, and, yes, the former Hillary
supporters. Because it not just a coincidence that all these things are happening in all these
countries at the same time. The bottom 90% of the population in the developed world has been ripped
off by a managerial and financial and political class for the last 30 years and they have all
noticed that while the world GDP was skyrocketing and international trade agreements were getting
signed with zero input from the average citizen, a few people were getting very very rich but
nobody else was getting anything.
This hammered people on the bottom, disproportionately African Americans and especially
single AA mothers in America. It crushed the blue collar workers. It is wiping out the savings
and careers of college-educated white collar workers now, at least, the ones who didn't go to
the Ivy League, which is 90% of them.
And the Democratic party is so helpless and so hopeless that it is letting the American Nazi
Party run to the left of them on health care, fer cripes sake! We are now in a situation
where the American Nazi Party is advocating single-payer nationalized health care, while the former
Democratic presidential nominee who just got defeated assured everyone that single-payer "will
never, ever happen."
C'mon! Is anyone surprised that Hillary lost? Let's cut the crap with the "Hillary
was a flawed candidate" arguments. The plain fact of the matter is that Hillary was running mainly
on getting rid of the problems she and her husband created 25 years ago. Hillary promised criminal
justice reform and Black Lives Matter-friendly policing policies - and guess who started the mass
incarceration trend and gave speeches calling black kids "superpredators" 20 years ago? Hillary
promised to fix the problems with the wretched mandate law forcing everyone to buy unaffordable
for-profit private insurance with no cost controls - and guess who originally ran for president
in 2008 on a policy of health care mandates with no cost controls? Yes, Hillary (ironically, Obama's
big surge in popularity as a candidate came when he ran against Hillary from the left, ridiculing
helath care mandates). Hillary promises to reform an out-of-control deregulated financial system
run amok - and guess who signed all those laws revoking Glass-Steagal and setting up the Securities
Trading Modernization Act? Yes, Bill Clinton, and Hillary was right there with him cheering the
whole process on.
So pardon me and lots of other folks for being less than impressed by Hillary's trustworthiness
and honesty. Run for president by promising to undo the damage you did to the country 25 years
ago is (let say) a suboptimal campaign strategy, and a distinctly suboptimal choice of presidential
candidate for a party in the same sense that the Hiroshima air defense was suboptimal in 1945.
Calling Hillary an "imperfect candidate" is like calling what happened to the Titanic a
"boating accident." Trump was an imperfect candidate. Why did he win?
Because we're back in the 1930s again, the economy has crashed hard and still hasn't recovered
(maybe because we still haven't convened a Pecora Commission and jailed a bunch of the thieves,
and we also haven't set up any alphabet government job programs like the CCC) so fascists and
racists and all kinds of other bottom-feeders are crawling out of the political woodwork to promise
to fix the problems that the Democratic party establishment won't.
Rule of thumb: any social or political or economic writer virulently hated by the current Democratic
party establishment is someone we should listen to closely right now.
Cornel West is at the top of the current Democratic establishment's hate list, and he has got
a great article in The Guardian that I think is spot-on:
"The neoliberal era in the United States ended with a neofascist bang. The political triumph
of Donald Trump shattered the establishments in the Democratic and Republican parties – both wedded
to the rule of Big Money and to the reign of meretricious politicians."
Glenn Greenwald is another writer who has been showered with more hate by the Democratic establishment
recently than even Trump or Steve Bannon, so you know Greenwald is saying something important.
He has a great piece in The Intercept on the head-in-the-ground attitude of Democratic
elites toward their recent loss:
"It is not an exaggeration to say that the Democratic Party is in shambles as a political
force. Not only did it just lose the White House to a wildly unpopular farce of a candidate despite
a virtually unified establishment behind it, and not only is it the minority party in both the
Senate and the House, but it is getting crushed at historical record rates on the state and local
levels as well. Surveying this wreckage last week, party stalwart Matthew Yglesias of Vox minced
no words: `the Obama years have created a Democratic Party that's essentially a smoking pile of
rubble.'
"One would assume that the operatives and loyalists of such a weak, defeated and wrecked
political party would be eager to engage in some introspection and self-critique, and to produce
a frank accounting of what they did wrong so as to alter their plight. In the case of 2016 Democrats,
one would be quite mistaken."
Last but far from least, Scottish economist Mark Blyth has what looks to me like the single
best analysis of the entire global Trump_vs_deep_state tidal wave in Foreign Affairs magazine:
"At the end of World War II, the United States and its allies decided that sustained mass
unemployment was an existential threat to capitalism and had to be avoided at all costs. In response,
governments everywhere targeted full employment as the master policy variable-trying to get to,
and sustain, an unemployment rate of roughly four percent. The problem with doing so, over time,
is that targeting any variable long enough undermines the value of the variable itself-a phenomenon
known as Goodhart's law. (..)
" what we see [today] is a reversal of power between creditors and debtors as the anti-inflationary
regime of the past 30 years undermines itself-what we might call "Goodhart's revenge." In this
world, yields compress and creditors fret about their earnings, demanding repayment of debt at
all costs. Macro-economically, this makes the situation worse: the debtors can't pay-but politically,
and this is crucial-it empowers debtors since they can't pay, won't pay, and still have the right
to vote.
"The traditional parties of the center-left and center-right, the builders of this anti-inflationary
order, get clobbered in such a world, since they are correctly identified by these debtors as
the political backers of those demanding repayment in an already unequal system, and all from
those with the least assets. This produces anti-creditor, pro-debtor coalitions-in-waiting that
are ripe for the picking by insurgents of the left and the right, which is exactly what has happened.
"In short, to understand the election of Donald Trump we need to listen to the trumpets blowing
everywhere in the highly indebted developed countries and the people who vote for them.
"The global revolt against elites is not just driven by revulsion and loss and racism.
It's also driven by the global economy itself. This is a global phenomenon that marks one thing
above all. The era of neoliberalism is over. The era of neonationalism has just begun."
You don't live here, do you? I'm really asking a genuine question because the way you are framing
the question ("SPECIFICS!!!!!!) suggests you don't. (Just to show my background, born and raised
in Australia (In the electoral division of Kooyong, home of Menzies) but I've lived in the US
since 2000 in the midwest (MO, OH) and currently in the south (GA))
If this election has taught us anything it's no one cared about "specifics". It was a mood,
a feeling which brought trump over the top (and I'm not talking about the "average" trump voter
because that is meaningless. The average trunp voter was a republican voter in the south who the
Dems will never get so examining their motivations is immaterial to future strategy. I'm talking
about the voters in the Upper Midwest from places which voted for Obama twice then switched to
trump this year to give him his margin of victory).
trump voters have been pretty clear they don't actually care about the way trump does (or even
doesn't) do what he said he would do during the campaign. It was important to them he showed he
was "with" people like them. They way he did that was partially racialized (law and order, islamophobia)
but also a particular emphasis on blue collar work that focused on the work. Unfortunately these
voters, however much you tell them they should suck it up and accept their generations of familial
experience as relatively highly paid industrial workers (even if it is something only their fathers
and grandfathers experienced because the factories were closing when the voters came of age in
the 80s and 90s) is never coming back and they should be happy to retrain as something else, don't
want it. They want what their families have had which is secure, paid, benefits rich, blue
collar work.
trump's campaign empathized with that feeling just by focusing on the factory jobs as jobs
and not as anachronisms that are slowly fading away for whatever reason. Clinton might have been
"correct", but these voters didn't want to hear "the truth". And as much as you can complain about
how stupid they are for wanting to be lied to, that is the unfortunate reality you, and the Democratic
party, have to accept.
The idea they don't want "government help" is ridiculous. They love the government. They just
want the government to do things for them and not for other people (which unfortunately includes
blah people but also "the coasts", "sillicon valley", etc.). Obama won in 2008 and 2012 in part
due to the auto bailout.
trump was offering a "bailout" writ large. Clinton had no (good) counteroffer. It was like
the tables were turned. Romney was the one talking about "change" and "restructuring" while Obama
was defending keeping what was already there.
"Without that bailout, Detroit will need to drastically restructure itself. With it, the
automakers will stay the course - the suicidal course of declining market shares, insurmountable
labor and retiree burdens, technology atrophy, product inferiority and never-ending job losses.
Detroit needs a turnaround, not a check." http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/19/opinion/19romney.html
So yes. Clinton needed vague promises. She needed something more than retraining and "jobs
of the future" and "restructuring". She needed to show she was committed to their way of life,
however those voters saw it, and would do something, anything, to keep it alive. trump did that
even though his plan won't work. And maybe he'll be punished for it. In 4 years. But in the interim
the gop will destroy so many things we need and rely on as well as entrench their power for generations
through the Supreme Court.
But really, it was hard for Clinton to be trusted to act like she cared about these peoples'
way of life because she (through her husband fairly or unfairly) was associated with some of the
larger actions and choices which helped usher in the decline.
Clinton toward the end offered tariffs. But the trump campaign hit back with what turned
out to be a pretty strong counter attack – ""How's she going to get tough on China?" said Trump
economic advisor Peter Navarro on CNN's Quest Means Business. He notes that some of Clinton's
economic advisors have supported TPP or even worked on it. ""
"... it seems to me that the effort to differentiate race-based from culturally based ultranationalism is still tangled in the weeds of a colloquial understanding of "race" and "racism". ..."
"... Populations can be racialized according to literally any conceivable physical, social, or cultural characteristic ..."
"... unlike with Quiggin's definition of tribalism @ 32, racism is explicitly a political and economic phenomenon to use a particular ingroup/outgroup differentiation as a way to systematically disenfranchise and subjugate the outgroup ..."
it seems to me that the effort to differentiate race-based from culturally based ultranationalism
is still tangled in the weeds of a colloquial understanding of "race" and "racism".
Populations can be racialized according to literally any conceivable physical, social, or
cultural characteristic - the idea that it can only depend on specific differentiating factors
like one's melanin count or descent from Charlemagne or whatever is itself a racist idea, an attempt
to reify particular forms of racism as rooted in some immutable aspect of "the way things are".
Although from my understanding Ukrainian citizenship like that in most of Europe is primarily
determined by jus sanguinis, and like most of Europe it's still deep in the muck of racial discrimination
toward e.g. the Roma, so unless I'm misreading things it seems like a stretch to put too much distance
between Ukraine (or Europe in general) and even a very colloquial sense of "ethnonationalism".
It can be articulated more explicitly by outright fascists or more obliquely by mainstream
centrist parties, but it's still there.
And as long as we're talking about academic definitions of racism (I'm partial to the definition
proffered by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, "the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation
of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death", although
Emmett Rensin's obnoxiously thorough definition is also good) funnily enough they tend to point
at something pretty much identical to what Quiggin appears to mean by "tribalism".
Except unlike with Quiggin's definition of tribalism @ 32, racism is explicitly a political
and economic phenomenon to use a particular ingroup/outgroup differentiation as a way to systematically
disenfranchise and subjugate the outgroup
Which seems like the only reason we'd bother talking about it as a specific mass political movement
at all.
And again, as annoying as it is to have pigheaded reactionaries accuse us of twisting language
and "playing the race card" and so on, putting up with this noise is preferable to sacrificing useful
concepts like racism and fascism from one's everyday understanding of the world, and it's certainly
preferable to swapping out the terms in question for a racially charged term like "tribalism".
"... The problem with racism underground has been clear for sometime: the racists tell themselves that they're clear-thinkers resisting the group think of the politically-correct mob. ..."
Cynically: is there a need to do anything? As long as the right is the (now out of the closet)
home of racism, they've marginalized themselves. Open question: does the neoliberal-lite party
have any incentive to cater to the left?
The problem with racism underground has been clear for sometime: the racists tell themselves
that they're clear-thinkers resisting the group think of the politically-correct mob.
I've thought for some time that there would be some value in an anti-racism FAQ: no one bothers
to argue against racists (beyond shouting "racist!") so everyone is rusty on what the data actually
shows.
The point of this is not necessarily to convince racists that they're wrong (good luck with
that), but to shake their conviction that the anti-racists are the ones out of touch with reality.
I would start with the excellent "Intelligence, Genes & Success" (subtitled: "Scientists Respond
to _The Bell Curve_").
Cynically: is there a need to do anything? As long as the right is the (now out
of the closet) home of racism, they've marginalized themselves.
Open
question: does the neoliberal-lite party have any incentive to cater to the
left?
The problem with racism underground has been clear for sometime:
the racists tell themselves that they're clear-thinkers resisting the group
think of the politically-correct mob.
I've thought for some time that there would be some value in an anti-racism
FAQ: no one bothers to argue against racists (beyond shouting "racist!") so
everyone is rusty on what the data actually shows.
The point of this is not necessarily to convince racists that they're wrong
(good luck with that), but to shake their conviction that the anti-racists are
the ones out of touch with reality.
I would start with the excellent "Intelligence, Genes & Success" (subtitled:
"Scientists Respond to _The Bell Curve_").
"... Do we acknowledge that the soft neoliberals in control of the coalition that includes the inchoate left also "exploit racist and tribalist political support while pursuing the interests of wealth and capital, at the expense of the (disproportionately non-white) poor."? They do it with a different style and maybe with some concession to economic melioration, as well as supporting anti-racist and feminist policy to keep the inchoate left on board, but . . . ..."
"... I seriously doubt a human social phenomenon as broad and universal as "identifying with an in-group against an out-group", if this is how y'all intend to define "tribalism", can be made narrow enough to usefully describe a specific tendency in modern capitalist politics. ..."
"... According to a study of Alan Krueger that examined prime-age men (ages 25–54) who are not working or looking for work – there are alone about 7 million (lost) workers -- (and their wives and relatives) – many of them supposedly dropped out of the labor force altogether and reporting 'pain' that keeps them from taking jobs. ..."
"... "The soft neoliberals, it seems to me, are using anti-racism to discredit economic populism and its motivations, using the new politics of the right as a foil." ..."
"... I think the notion that racism is somehow regional in the US ..."
"... Populations can be "racialized" according to literally any conceivable physical, social, or cultural characteristic - the idea that it can only depend on specific differentiating factors like one's melanin count or descent from Charlemagne or whatever is itself a racist idea, an attempt to reify particular forms of racism as rooted in some immutable aspect of "the way things are". ..."
"... As in voting behavior the dividing lines are NOT so much anymore between left and right, but more between a liberal, cosmopolitan bourgeoisie in the center and on both edges populists who are propagating partitioning and protectionism. ..."
John, I agree that tribalism is a huge force in politics, but the way you have defined it describes
a huge portion of how people on all sides vote. All sorts of research shows that a majority of
people seem to use the rubric "what do people of my affiliation believe" to reach conclusions
and then defend them rather than following any particular chain of logic about the actual question.
So I'm not sure what kind of differentiation work the term is doing.
On the other hand I think you're definitely on to something about the change of formerly stable
political orders, and I'm not sure I can identify what it is either. I sort of see what you are
trying to do with the in-group/out-group thing. Those impulses always existed, so I wonder what
has changed? Is it assimilation norms that have weakened? Economic loss or the fear of it in the
'in group'? Fear of going from an 'in group' to an 'out group'? Combination of those?
bruce wilder 10.30.16 at 9:34 pm
The success of [civil rights and anti-apartheid] movements did not end racism, but drove
it underground, allowing neoliberals to exploit racist and tribalist political support while
pursuing the interests of wealth and capital, at the expense of the (disproportionately non-white)
poor.
That coalition has now been replaced by one in which the tribalists and racists are dominant.
For the moment at least, [hard] neoliberals continue to support the parties they formerly controlled,
with the result that the balance of political forces between the right and the opposing coalition
of soft neoliberals and the left has not changed significantly.
There's an ambiguity in this narrative and in the three-party analysis.
Do we acknowledge that the soft neoliberals in control of the coalition that includes the
inchoate left also "exploit racist and tribalist political support while pursuing the interests
of wealth and capital, at the expense of the (disproportionately non-white) poor."? They do it
with a different style and maybe with some concession to economic melioration, as well as supporting
anti-racist and feminist policy to keep the inchoate left on board, but . . .
The new politics of the right has lost faith in the hard neoliberalism that formerly furnished
its policy agenda of tax cuts for the rich, war in the Middle East and so on, leaving the impure
resentment ungoverned and unfocused, as you say.
The soft neoliberals, it seems to me, are using anti-racism to discredit economic populism
and its motivations, using the new politics of the right as a foil.
The problem of how to oppose racism and tribalism effectively is now entangled with soft neoliberal
control of the remaining party coalition, which is to say with the credibility of the left party
as a vehicle for economic populism and the credibility of economic populism as an antidote for
racism or sexism. (cf js. @ 1,2)
The form of tribalism used to mobilize the left entails denying that an agenda of economic
populism is relevant to the problems of sexism and racism, because the deplorables must be deplored
to get out the vote. And, because the (soft) neoliberals in charge must keep economic populism
under control to deliver the goods to their donor base.
"That doesn't mean that we should maintain the long-standing taboo on using the word
"racist" to describe such people."
Whether you 'should' or 'shouldn't' largely depends on which country you are in; the US has
sufficient minorities able to vote that a 'wide' definition of racism is almost certainly a net
vote-winner.
The UK, Australia, etc. don't. So they have to rely on opposition to racism on moral grounds,
which in turn depends on using a narrow definition.
Alternatively, you could be talking in an academic context, independent of any particular country's
politics, in which case I would imagine that using different words for different things would
be minimally confusing.
LFC 10.30.16 at 10:50 pm Alesis @19
Race is the foundational organizing principle of American life
There is no such thing as "the foundational organizing principle of American life." There are
conflicting ideologies, a conflicting set of histories, and a conflicting set of regional traditions,
plus founding documents that are subject to conflicting interpretations. There are certain experiences
that might be presumed to shape some sort of common collective memory, but nowadays even that
is debatable.
As one who has lived for more than fifty years in the United States, rather than just a few
years here and there as John Quiggin has, I assure him that racism has not been driven underground
here. It has died as a mass sentiment capable of serving as a power base for such figures as Lyndon
Johnson, George Wallace, or Jimmy Carter.
All had to change their tune to retain or increase their power, and that was about half
a century ago. No aspiring politician could get started today making the kind of racial appeals
they did at the beginning of their political careers, and in the cases of Johnson and Wallace
for a long time thereafter.
There is no mass sentiment for re-establishing separate drinking fountains, toilets, dining
areas, schools, etc. by race or for repealing the Civil War-era amendments to the Constitution.
I even hear rumors that Americans may be receptive to the idea of electing a black President.
My suggestion is to tackle the pandering by the rich party for the poor's votes by appealing
to racism, rather than the racism itself. "You're being played" may work better than "you're wrong".
I also think that the severity continuum of racism needs to be emphasized. We pretty much all
exhibit minor solecisms as we overcome features of our culture and upbringing. When a gentle correction
triggers complaints about monstrous PC allegations, I recommend a response like "Hey, it's no
biggie. You're not Hitler. Why are you taking a dive?"
"Tribalism" in the sense it's being used here has nothing to do with "primitive" tribes; it's
a reference to the ancient Roman tribes (the origin of the word) and the similar Greek phylai,
which were essentially arbitrary groupings of citizens which struggled amongst each other because
of group identification despite all being of the same ethnic group and nation. If there's a better
word for this, it isn't ethnonationalism or fascism.
Omega Centauri 10.31.16 at 1:19 am
I think poor to outright horrific epistemology in public discussion creates the basis for a
lot of bad politics. Many have described our current time as a post-truth era. There have been
some efforts towards fact-checking, but these seem to be simple refutations of facts, like Trump
saying
that he didn't say X, when we can play a two-day old tape of him in fact saying X. Part of the
manifestation of "tribalism", is the holding of in-group shibboleths, and the failure to critically
examine them -- for fear that that might weaken their role as weaponized-memes. That and our
politics has severely degenerated into character assassination, much of it unfounded. So we can't
even have a semi-rational discussion about issues, as political actors have to expend all their
efforts fending off attempts to assassinate their reputation, and to level even more damaging
attacks against their enemies.
So we have to start reclaiming decent epistemological practices in our public discussion. I
don't think this is going to be an easy or a quick process. But without it, we are highly vulnerable
to emotion based movements and their demagogues. Graham's conspiracy theory observations, as well
as those of bob@4 and loki@12, are symptoms of this degeneration of epiestemology.
John Quiggin 10.31.16 at 1:44 am
nastywoman @21 The idea that "the working class" has gone over to Trump is oversold. In US
political discussion, "working class" is used to mean "no college degree" which isn't at all the
same thing: it includes lots of small business owners, for example, and is also correlated with
age.
The terminology appears to be driven by data. Education level is objective and easily elicited,
whereas social class is not.
Mike Furlan 10.31.16 at 1:50 am
Racism (and sexism), something described by Tom Magliozzi's "Non Impediti Ratione Cogitationis-Unencumbered
by the Thought Process" is impervious to argumentation. I've lost a lot of friends driven mad
first by the Kenyan, and now by that "nasty woman."
Imagine a future scenario of yet another financial crisis the pushes unemployment above 30%
and mere words will certainly fail you.
My hope is to build communities of loving people, so that we are not picked off one at a time
as we compose blog posts.
The great problem progressives face is that many , if not most of the working class really
don't want social justice , they want to be the fat cats. And when they don't join the ranks
of the fat cats they are easily convinced that this is because the liberals are stealing from
them to give to the "welfare" people. Trump has expanded to include hordes of invading Mexicans
and Muslims.
Bob Zannelli 10.31.16 at 2:20 am
"There is no such thing as "the foundational organizing principle of American life." There
are conflicting ideologies, a conflicting set of histories, and a conflicting set of regional
traditions, plus founding documents that are subject to conflicting interpretations. There
are certain experiences that might be presumed to shape some sort of common collective memory,
but nowadays even that is debatable."
the credibility of the left party as a vehicle for economic populism and the credibility
of economic populism as an antidote for racism or sexism. (cf js. @ 1,2)
1. I have no fucking idea what you got out of my comments, but just to be very clear, I would
almost certainly support, and strongly, almost all _policies_ that you're likely to classify as
"economically populist". (I prefer a term like "socially equitable"-in a material sense, not talking
about symbolic stuff or the politics of recognition here. But e.g. I think repeal of the Hyde
Amendment should go under exactly the same heading as minimum wage increases, trade deals with
strong labor protections, etc.-which kind of thing gets lost when people talk about "economic
populism".)
On the _politics_ you and I each think the other one is dead wrong, and both of us already
know this, and neither of us is about to give half an inch, so I don't think there's much point
in pursuing the argument. But…
2. …Entirely leaving aside racism for a minute, when has it ever seemed plausible that "economic
populism" would be an effective counter to entrenched sexism? This makes no sense to me whatsoever.
--
Re WLGR
In contrast to a true petite bourgeoisie, which has no historical memory of the full
trauma of capitalist expropriation, a labor aristocracy on some level is aware that its economically
secure position relative to the still-fully-dispossessed global working class depends on accepting
and defending the racist/nationalist logic of imperial expropriation
I'll have to think about more. My first instinct is to say - there's something to this, but
the contrast is significantly less sharp than that (in both directions), but I need to think it
out more.
WLGR 10.31.16 at 4:18 am
I seriously doubt a human social phenomenon as broad and universal as "identifying with
an in-group against an out-group", if this is how y'all intend to define "tribalism", can be made
narrow enough to usefully describe a specific tendency in modern capitalist politics.
It would be absurd to claim that nobody who isn't a fascist/racist/ethnonationalist/etc. determines
their political priorities on some level according to ingroup/outgroup morality - speaking from
experience in a US context, cosmopolitan liberals' disdain for "rubes"/"hicks"/"rednecks" from
"flyover country" (probably the very people "tribalist" is intended to denote) could itself be
described as "tribalist" in the sense you mean it, as for that matter could many socialists' disdain
for liberals, or economists' disdain for sociologists, or old-money politicos' disdain for nouveau-riche
boors like Donald Trump, or whatever.
People seem to be shying away from the idea that what defines so-called "tribalists" as a political
force in developed capitalist nation-states is "tribalism" regarding a particular aspect of their
worldview, namely race and nationality. I get that this is a contortion to avoid the politically
charged act of calling people "racists" or "fascists" (although it's perplexing that so many people
here have surrendered to reactionaries' bizarre contention that using these terms even when they're
suitably descriptive is somehow foul play) but insinuating a categorical deficiency of basic human
social consciousness compared to the categorically more enlightened social consciousness of the
accuser is hardly any less insulting, even before you get into the racial implications of the
term itself.
The best comparison I can think of is the way so-called "New Atheists" tend to group their
ideological taxonomy according to the distinction between "rational" and "irrational": both of
these are such thoroughly universal aspects of human thought and behavior that it can only be
monumental hubris to characterize "rationality" as the very cornerstone of one's worldview and
"irrationality" as the very cornerstone of an opponent's. A weaker and more defensible claim of
rationality about a very particular aspect of one's worldview, such as the existence of deities,
leaves open the possibility of irrationality in other aspects of their worldview, such as the
alleged existential threat of Islam (about which many "rationalist" "New Atheists" are famously
paranoid and reactionary). Now imagine the term "irrational" has been used for centuries as a
sloppily interchangeable pejorative for various targets of systematic marginalization, oppression,
enslavement, and genocide.
I would say that after talking to people the republican base is the coalition of
1. Plutocrats
2. Single issue abortion voters
3. Conspiracy theorists and religious conspiracy theorists (end times prophecy mixed with conspiracy)
4. True believers – that is free market types who believe that top end tax cuts and cutting minimum
wage actually help the poor
5. Basket of deplorables you racist/mysoginest you name it
Type 1, 4 and some of 2 have been pealed off the R coalition during the trump campaign due
to how shocking a candidate Trump is. However, type 3 and 5 are more energized than ever. If there
was an effective way to counter type 3 republican voters their coalition would reduce by maybe
half. I know that sounds like a lot but I've lived in the south and have a lot of friends there.
Conspiracy is more powerful than people realize
nastywoman 10.31.16 at 4:57 am
'The idea that "the working class" has gone over to Trump is oversold.'
Not if we count all 'the workers' – who follow and will vote for Trump because he promised
them to bring their jobs back -(with fascistic solutions)
According to a study of Alan Krueger that examined prime-age men (ages 25–54) who are not
working or looking for work – there are alone about 7 million (lost) workers -- (and their wives
and relatives) – many of them supposedly dropped out of the labor force altogether and reporting
'pain' that keeps them from taking jobs.
These workers – a lot of them who had lost their jobs by US companies outsourcing or terminating
their jobs altogether after the economical collapse of 2008 – are a 'traditional constituency'
of the left – and they should have been supported much better and NOT 'picked up' by Trump.
The link actually takes you to page 2 of the Grenville article. He cites Hochschild on page
1: 'Arlie Hochschild's "Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right"
captures the intractability of the discontent: "'You are patiently standing in a long line' for
something you call the American dream. You are white, Christian, of modest means, and getting
along in years. You are male. There are people of color behind you, and 'in principle you wish
them well.' But you've waited long, worked hard, 'and the line is barely moving.'
Then 'Look! You see people cutting in line ahead of you!' Who are these interlopers? 'Some
are black,' others 'immigrants, refugees.'
They get affirmative action, sympathy and welfare - 'checks for the listless and idle.' The government
wants you to feel sorry for them."
@50 WLGR "….rational" and "irrational": both of these are such thoroughly universal aspects
of human thought and behavior that it can only be monumental hubris to characterize "rationality"
as the very cornerstone of one's worldview and "irrationality" as the very cornerstone of an opponent's."
Agreed. Happens here all the time, or used to.
I tend to agree with what WLGR is saying about 'tribalists'. What porpoise @43 said is
interesting historically, but I don't think it removes the overlay from later colonial and imperial
associations of 'tribes' with 'primitives'/inferiors. So I don't think tribalism is a good word
here, but not sure what would be a better one.
'Cultural nationalism' seems to come closest, at least in the Australian and British contexts
I'm familiar with, because the so-called 'tribalists' seem to be people who have a strong idea
about who are the 'right kind' of Australians (or Britons), and it is a mixture of cultural and
racial/ethnic characteristics.
Here in Australia, it is certainly possible for people from non-Anglo backgrounds to be at
least conditionally accepted by the 'tribalists' if they appear to embrace the tribalists' idea
of Aussie culture (although it's conditional because the 'tribalists' who are 'accepting' the
non-Anglo immigrants unconsciously see their ability to pass judgement as related to their own
Anglo/white background, I think). Complicated, I am getting tied in knots, but I agree tribalist
isn't the best word.
Porpoise @43: I'm slightly puzzled by your version of classical history.
Yes, the Romans had tribes, dating from the very beginning of their history; these *were* seen
as relating to what you refer to as "primitive tribes", and according to at least one ancient
source reflected the original composition of the Roman people from Latins, Sabines and Etruscans.
Yes, by the late Republic these were largely (not entirely) arbitrary divisions of more or
less homogeneous citizens – but by that date there's no evidence that I'm aware of that they served
any purpose other than organising voting in the comitia tributa; certainly no struggles because
of group identification.
ZM 10.31.16 at 7:45 am bruce wilder,
"The soft neoliberals, it seems to me, are using anti-racism to discredit economic populism
and its motivations, using the new politics of the right as a foil."
I think economic populism is problematic really, depending on what policy settings you mean
by "economic populism" I guess.
I remember thinking Australia could have more protectionist policies and that would be a solution
to some of our economic issues, but then I did an economics group project with a woman from Singapore,
and I realised a country like Singapore would be much worse off if other countries resorted to
protectionism as a response to the financial crisis, and I was being unfair thinking more protectionist
policy was the answer.
I don't think that the economic populism of the post-war era is really something we want
to return to - in Australia at least it was connected to the racist White Australia Policy which
was dismantled over time by 1973 and also to sexist policies that benefited male wage earners
with the "living wage" but prevented women from taking up certain jobs or from working after marriage
and that sort of thing.
Also in the post-war era Australia benefitted from trade networks with the UK as part of the
Commonwealth, but I presume that some other countries didn't benefit from that set of international
trade agreements (although I have never looked into what the international trade settings were
to know which countries overall benefited and which countries disbenefited).
I don't think returning to economic populism is a solution. There were a lot of problems,
both within countries with racism and sexism, and also between countries with unfair international
trade agreements.
Any solution to current problems has to be equitable within the nation, and fair between
nations. If economic populism is the answer it has to be a transformed economic populism that
is capable of that, and also of managing our global and local environmental problems.
Also at the moment the Australian federal government is doing the "Racism. It Stops With Me" campaign
around Australia trying to encourage everyday Australians to speak out against racism when they
encounter it in their daily lives. I hope the US government does something similar if Trump loses
the election, I really think anti-racism is better off being bi-partisan, and its a bad long term
strategy by either main party in America to use race to divide voters.
I think the notion that racism is somehow regional in the US or that their are "conflicting
histories" is pitch perfect example of the difficulty of keeping race in American life in focus
I mentioned in my comment.
There is no region of the US in which race did not play a foundation role. No history of the
US which does not rest in the disenfranchisement of "lower races". From Oregon to Florida. From
New York to California.
From 1700 to 2016 this is an American constant and we will continue to the "Shocked! Shocked!"
That more Trump's arise until we recognize that.
> The terminology appears to be driven by data. Education level is objective and easily elicited,
whereas social class is not.
Race too, of course.
It doesn't seem like it would be beyond the power of a single guy who wanted to write a book
to bring a torch and see if there is anything interesting hidden where the lampposts don't shine.
The raw data seems to be available[1], it just needs correlating with polls. That's a 2-3 man
year project, probably doable within a 5 digit budget.
I think I agree that "conspiracy theory" is a strong element in current politics. It
has been for a while, of course. See for example Richard Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style in
American Politics .
In a democratic system, any party hoping to win has to somehow persuade the voters to vote
for them and not the other party. Hence impugning the judgment or moral character of the opposing
party is one of the obvious strategies. Accusing the other party of actually being crooks (as
opposed to merely making poor decisions, or decisions that benefit some group other than the voters
one wishes to court) takes this a step further. Once a party had taken the "they're a bunch of
crooks" move, it would be surprising if they didn't leap at the chance when they can make a credible
and specific allegation of lawbreaking by their opponent, instead of just relying on non-specific
"would you buy a used car from this man?" rhetoric. ("man" -> "woman" if we're talking about Hilary
Clinton rather than Richard Nixon, but the same principle holds)
The current round of populism seems to go further still, in attributing crookedness not just
to their political opponents but to just about everyone involved in the entire system, e.g. by
alleging that the election might be fraudulent.
The term "conspiracy theory" often has rather dismissive or perjorative connotations, but I
think this basic political pattern could exist even if the opposing party were actually in fact
crooks.
[And over here in the UK, it's also a kind of conspiracy theory that Tony Blair lied to the
people about the case for going to war in Iraq. It's less obvious what Blair could actually be
charged with criminally (as opposed to Hilary Clinton), but that hasn't stopped people calling
for his head … possibly in a literal, rather than metaphorical, sense]
Omega Centauri 10.31.16 at 1:19 am (#44): great comment, puts the finger on the problem, and deserves
engagement. Unfortunately, all I have to offer are solutions from science-fiction: reliable lie-detectors
and benign A.I. government. But how to avoid the obvious misuses and bad side-tracks on the way
to utopian deployment of such technologies is beyond me. The Internet already gives us the ability
to do our own fact-checking and analysis of issues, but it seems more effective at spreading lies.
MPAVictoria 10.31.16 at 2:29 pm
Unions, unions, and more unions are the answer to the question of what the left should be doing
going forward. Union members are more likely to:
– Vote
– Volunteer in support of progressive campaigns and causes
– Support progressive economic AND social policies
The left's strategy going forward MUST include efforts to increase union density.
js, I guess the most important caveat re: the US (along with other settler societies) is that
many Euro-Americans never actually went through proletarianization themselves, but probably would
have been pushed into the working class they'd stayed in Europe through the heyday of capitalist
industrialization, so they left Europe and joined the metaphorical shock troops of settler-colonialism
in order to avoid it. The important point is that the combined spoils of settler-colonial expropriation,
racial/national hierarchy, and continuing imperialist exploitation in the Third World have largely
spared the much-ballyhooed "white working class" (i.e. labor aristocracy) from the abject poverty
capitalism invariably wreaks on the working class proper - and on some level these people realize
that as long as capitalism exists, this economic safety net is only really justifiable if there's
some fundamental hierarchy of humanity dictating that they as a group deserve to be offered better
lives than the people trying to "steal their jobs" and so on. The extent to which different people
in different situations are compelled to articulate this ideology in fully conscious ways is another
matter, but when they are, terms like "racist", "ethnonationalist", and "fascist" are entirely
descriptive and not the least bit inappropriate.
For anybody who hasn't heard of it, the book Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat
is an accessible exposition of this kind of viewpoint (and for anybody who takes a glance
and can't get past smarming at the crude typesetting and nonstandard semantic choices e.g. "Amerika",
just grow up).
WLGR 10.31.16 at 3:52 pm
likbez @ 16,
it seems to me that the effort to differentiate race-based from culturally based ultranationalism
is still tangled in the weeds of a colloquial understanding of "race" and "racism".
Populations can be "racialized" according to literally any conceivable physical, social,
or cultural characteristic - the idea that it can only depend on specific differentiating factors
like one's melanin count or descent from Charlemagne or whatever is itself a racist idea, an attempt
to reify particular forms of racism as rooted in some immutable aspect of "the way things are".
Although from my understanding Ukrainian citizenship like that in most of Europe is primarily
determined by jus sanguinis, and like most of Europe it's still deep in the muck of racial discrimination
toward e.g. the Roma, so unless I'm misreading things it seems like a stretch to put too much
distance between Ukraine (or Europe in general) and even a very colloquial sense of "ethnonationalism".
It can be articulated more explicitly by outright fascists or more obliquely by mainstream centrist
parties, but it's still there.
And as long as we're talking about academic definitions of racism (I'm partial to the definition
proffered by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, "the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation
of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death", although
Emmett Rensin's obnoxiously thorough definition is also good) funnily enough they tend to
point at something pretty much identical to what Quiggin appears to mean by "tribalism". Except
unlike with Quiggin's definition of tribalism @ 32, racism is explicitly a political and economic
phenomenon to use a particular ingroup/outgroup differentiation as a way to systematically
disenfranchise and subjugate the outgroup , which seems like the only reason we'd bother talking
about it as a specific mass political movement at all. And again, as annoying as it is to have
pigheaded reactionaries accuse us of twisting language and "playing the race card" and so on,
putting up with this noise is preferable to sacrificing useful concepts like racism and fascism
from one's everyday understanding of the world, and it's certainly preferable to swapping out
the terms in question for a racially charged term like "tribalism".
Mike Furlan 10.31.16 at 1:50 am @ 46: '… My hope is to build communities of loving people, so that we are not picked off one at a
time as we compose blog posts.'
Or at least tolerant people who are positive about relationships with the Others even though
they may err. Surely this would be a requirement for achieving equality, because otherwise you
have the good people and the bad people, and the good people would have to defeat, rule over,
or maybe even exterminate the bad people. P. J. O'Rourke once wrote that the reason Evangelicals
adhere to the Republican Party (and Black people to the Democrats) is that that is the party which,
while it doesn't do much for them, doesn't hate them. We have seen that expressed in the recent
past not only with Trump's success but with the 'basket of deplorables'. Even a petrochemical
plant poisoning your back yard may be preferable to submitting to the power of those who openly
despise you and your kind.
But a lot of people want to fight.
John Quiggin 10.31.16 at 8:33 pm
Kurt Schuler @41 This seems an odd choice of post on which to claim special authority as a
US resident, given that it's about developments common throughout the developed world, and refers
to Australia and the UK, as well as the US.
The idea that "the working class" has gone over to Trump is oversold. In US political discussion,
"working class" is used to mean "no college degree" which isn't at all the same thing: it includes
lots of small business owners, for example, and is also correlated with age.
Right. This is why I think petty bourgeois (petit bourgeois if you want to be all fancy
and French about it) is a better term.
nastywoman 10.31.16 at 9:43 pm
In conclusion this analysis is still based on a traditional understanding of left and right
which doesn't exist anymore in most European countries – as concerning the most important issues
like globalization and protectionism the radical left and the radical right seem to agree.
And so the the traditional understanding of left and right is often used for justification
of the own political position, while it is less and less helpful to explain voting behavior.
As in voting behavior the dividing lines are NOT so much anymore between left and right,
but more between a liberal, cosmopolitan bourgeoisie in the center and on both edges populists
who are propagating partitioning and protectionism.
This is true not only for Europe but also for the United States of Trump – aka the once 'United
States of America' -(if this currently very popular joke in Europe is allowed?)
"... Few dispute that a significant subset of any given population is going to regard in-group/out-group distinctions along the highly imprecise lines of 'race' and ethnicity, or religion. The question, for some, is what percentage? ..."
"... Grenville regards understanding the opposition to globalization by the Trump constituency as essential. If we are discussing America, we do not need to look to illegal immigration, or undocumented workers to find hostility to out-group immigrants along religious and ethnic lines. ..."
"... These tendencies are thrown into sharper relief when this hostility is directed towards successfully assimilated immigrants of a different color who threaten the current occupants of a space – witness the open racism and hostility displayed towards Japanese immigrants on the west coast 1900-1924, or so. A similar level of hostility is sometimes/often displayed towards Koreans. The out-grouping in Japan is tiered and extends to ethnicity and language of groups within the larger Japanese community, as it does in the UK, although not as commonly along religious lines as it does elsewhere. ..."
I read an interesting piece in the Nikkei, hardly an left-leaning publication citing Arlie
Hochschild's "Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right."
Doubtless some here would like to see more misery heaped upon those who do not look to the
Democratic party as saviors, but Hochschild is rarely regarded as a defender of the American right.
Few dispute that a significant subset of any given population is going to regard in-group/out-group
distinctions along the highly imprecise lines of 'race' and ethnicity, or religion. The question,
for some, is what percentage?
The Nikkei article by Stephen Grenville concludes: Over the longer term, the constituency for
globalization has to be rebuilt, the methodology for multilateral trade agreements has to be revived…"
Grenville regards understanding the opposition to globalization by the Trump constituency
as essential. If we are discussing America, we do not need to look to illegal immigration, or
undocumented workers to find hostility to out-group immigrants along religious and ethnic lines.
These tendencies are thrown into sharper relief when this hostility is directed towards
successfully assimilated immigrants of a different color who threaten the current occupants of
a space – witness the open racism and hostility displayed towards Japanese immigrants on the west
coast 1900-1924, or so. A similar level of hostility is sometimes/often displayed towards Koreans.
The out-grouping in Japan is tiered and extends to ethnicity and language of groups within
the larger Japanese community, as it does in the UK, although not as commonly along religious
lines as it does elsewhere.
Generally, I think John is right. The term 'racist' no longer carries any of the stigma
it once held in part because the term is deployed so cynically and freely as to render it practically
meaningless. HRC and Bill and their supporters (including me, at one time) are racists for as
long as its convenient and politically expedient to call them racists. Once that moment has passed,
the term 'racist' is withdrawn and replaced with something like Secretary of State, or some other
such title.
I've no clear 'solution' other than to support a more exact and thoughtful discussion of the
causes of fear and anxiety that compels people to bind together into in-groups and out-groups,
and to encourage the fearful to take a few risks now and again.
"... A key justification of the Bush administration's purported strategy of 'democratising' the Middle East is the argument that democracies are pacific, and that Muslim democracies will therefore eventually settle down peacefully under the benign hegemony of the US. ..."
"... The president's title of 'commander-in-chief' is used by administration propagandists to suggest, in a way reminiscent of German militarists before 1914 attempting to defend their half-witted Kaiser, that any criticism of his record in external affairs comes close to a betrayal of the military and the country. ..."
"... The new American militarism is the handiwork of several disparate groups that shared little in common apart from being intent on undoing the purportedly nefarious effects of the 1960s. Military officers intent on rehabilitating their profession; intellectuals fearing that the loss of confidence at home was paving the way for the triumph of totalitarianism abroad; religious leaders dismayed by the collapse of traditional moral standards; strategists wrestling with the implications of a humiliating defeat that had undermined their credibility; politicians on the make; purveyors of pop culture looking to make a buck: as early as 1980, each saw military power as the apparent answer to any number of problems. ..."
"... Two other factors have also been critical: the dependence on imported oil is seen as requiring American hegemony over the Middle East; and the Israel lobby has worked assiduously and with extraordinary success to make sure that Israel's enemies are seen by Americans as also being those of the US. ..."
"... And let's not forget the role played by the entrenched interests of the military itself and what Dwight Eisenhower once denounced as the 'military-industrial-academic complex'. ..."
"... The security elites are obviously interested in the maintenance and expansion of US global military power, if only because their own jobs and profits depend on it. ..."
"... To achieve wider support in the media and among the public, it is also necessary to keep up the illusion that certain foreign nations constitute a threat to the US, and to maintain a permanent level of international tension. ..."
"... They would include the element of messianism embodied in American civic nationalism, with its quasi-religious belief in the universal and timeless validity of its own democratic system, and in its right and duty to spread that system to the rest of the world. ..."
"... Wall Street Journal ..."
"... Important sections of contemporary US popular culture are suffused with the language of militarism. ..."
"... Red Storm Rising ..."
"... Indeed, a portrait of US militarism today could be built around a set of such apparently glaring contradictions: the contradiction, for example, between the military coercion of other nations and the belief in the spreading of 'freedom' and 'democracy'. Among most non-Americans, and among many American realists and progressives, the collocation seems inherently ludicrous. But, as Bacevich brings out, it has deep roots in American history. Indeed, the combination is historically coterminous with Western imperialism. Historians of the future will perhaps see preaching 'freedom' at the point of an American rifle as no less morally and intellectually absurd than 'voluntary' conversion to Christianity at the point of a Spanish arquebus. ..."
"... Today, having dissolved any connection between claims to citizenship and obligation to serve, Americans entrust their security to a class of military professionals who see themselves in many respects as culturally and politically set apart from the rest of society. ..."
"... British power was far from unlimited. The British Empire could use its technological superiority, small numbers of professional troops and local auxiliaries to conquer backward and impoverished countries in Asia and Africa, but it would not have dreamed of intervening unilaterally in Europe or North America. ..."
"... As Iraq – and to a lesser extent Afghanistan – has demonstrated, the US can knock over states, but it cannot suppress the resulting insurgencies, even one based in such a comparatively small population as the Sunni Arabs of Iraq. ..."
"... Recognizing this, the army is beginning to imitate ancient Rome in offering citizenship to foreign mercenaries in return for military service – something that the amazing Boot approves, on the grounds that while it helped destroy the Roman Empire, it took four hundred years to do so. ..."
"... The fact that the Democrats completely failed to do this says a great deal about their lack of political will, leadership and capacity to employ a focused strategy. ..."
The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War by
Andrew Bacevich
Oxford, 270 pp, Ł16.99, August 2005, ISBN 0 19 517338 4
A key justification of the Bush administration's purported strategy of 'democratising' the
Middle East is the argument that democracies are pacific, and that Muslim democracies will therefore
eventually settle down peacefully under the benign hegemony of the US. Yet, as Andrew Bacevich
points out in one of the most acute analyses of America to have appeared in recent years, the United
States itself is in many ways a militaristic country, and becoming more so:
at the end of the Cold War, Americans said yes to military power. The skepticism about arms
and armies that informed the original Wilsonian vision, indeed, that pervaded the American experiment
from its founding, vanished. Political leaders, liberals and conservatives alike, became enamoured
with military might.
The ensuing affair had, and continues to have, a heedless, Gatsby-like aspect, a passion pursued
in utter disregard of any consequences that might ensue.
The president's title of 'commander-in-chief' is used by administration propagandists to suggest,
in a way reminiscent of German militarists before 1914 attempting to defend their half-witted Kaiser,
that any criticism of his record in external affairs comes close to a betrayal of the military and
the country. Compared to German and other past militarisms, however, the contemporary American
variant is extremely complex, and the forces that have generated it have very diverse origins and
widely differing motives:
The new American militarism is the handiwork of several disparate groups that shared little
in common apart from being intent on undoing the purportedly nefarious effects of the 1960s. Military
officers intent on rehabilitating their profession; intellectuals fearing that the loss of confidence
at home was paving the way for the triumph of totalitarianism abroad; religious leaders dismayed
by the collapse of traditional moral standards; strategists wrestling with the implications of
a humiliating defeat that had undermined their credibility; politicians on the make; purveyors
of pop culture looking to make a buck: as early as 1980, each saw military power as the apparent
answer to any number of problems.
Two other factors have also been critical: the dependence on imported oil is seen as requiring
American hegemony over the Middle East; and the Israel lobby has worked assiduously and with extraordinary
success to make sure that Israel's enemies are seen by Americans as also being those of the US.
And let's not forget the role played by the entrenched interests of the military itself and
what Dwight Eisenhower once denounced as the 'military-industrial-academic complex'.
The security elites are obviously interested in the maintenance and expansion of US global
military power, if only because their own jobs and profits depend on it. Jobs and patronage
also ensure the support of much of the Congress, which often authorizes defense spending on weapons
systems the Pentagon doesn't want and hasn't asked for, in order to help some group of senators and
congressmen in whose home states these systems are manufactured. To achieve wider support in
the media and among the public, it is also necessary to keep up the illusion that certain foreign
nations constitute a threat to the US, and to maintain a permanent level of international tension.
That's not the same, however, as having an actual desire for war, least of all for a major conflict
which might ruin the international economy. US ground forces have bitter memories of Vietnam, and
no wish to wage an aggressive war: Rumsfeld and his political appointees had to override the objections
of the senior generals, in particular those of the army chief of staff, General Eric Shinseki, before
the attack on Iraq. The navy and air force do not have to fight insurgents in hell-holes like Fallujah,
and so naturally have a more relaxed attitude.
To understand how the Bush administration was able to manipulate the public into supporting the
Iraq war one has to look for deeper explanations. They would include the element of messianism
embodied in American civic nationalism, with its quasi-religious belief in the universal and timeless
validity of its own democratic system, and in its right and duty to spread that system to the rest
of the world. This leads to a genuine belief that American soldiers can do no real wrong because
they are spreading 'freedom'. Also of great importance – at least until the Iraqi insurgency rubbed
American noses in the horrors of war – has been the development of an aesthetic that sees war as
waged by the US as technological, clean and antiseptic; and thanks to its supremacy in weaponry,
painlessly victorious. Victory over the Iraqi army in 2003 led to a new flowering of megalomania
in militarist quarters. The amazing Max Boot of the Wall Street Journal – an armchair commentator,
not a frontline journalist – declared that the US victory had made 'fabled generals such as Erwin
Rommel and Heinz Guderian seem positively incompetent by comparison'. Nor was this kind of talk restricted
to Republicans. More than two years into the Iraq quagmire, strategic thinkers from the Democratic
establishment were still declaring that 'American military power in today's world is practically
unlimited.'
Important sections of contemporary US popular culture are suffused with the language of militarism.
Take Bacevich on the popular novelist Tom Clancy:
In any Clancy novel, the international order is a dangerous and threatening place, awash with
heavily armed and implacably determined enemies who threaten the United States. That Americans
have managed to avoid Armageddon is attributable to a single fact: the men and women of America's
uniformed military and its intelligence services have thus far managed to avert those threats.
The typical Clancy novel is an unabashed tribute to the skill, honor, extraordinary technological
aptitude and sheer decency of the nation's defenders. To read Red Storm Rising is to
enter a world of 'virtuous men and perfect weapons', as one reviewer noted. 'All the Americans
are paragons of courage, endurance and devotion to service and country. Their officers are uniformly
competent and occasionally inspired. Men of all ranks are faithful husbands and devoted fathers.'
Indeed, in the contract that he signed for the filming of Red October, Clancy stipulated
that nothing in the film show the navy in a bad light.
Such attitudes go beyond simply glorying in violence, military might and technological prowess.
They reflect a belief – genuine or assumed – in what the Germans used to call Soldatentum:
the pre-eminent value of the military virtues of courage, discipline and sacrifice, and explicitly
or implicitly the superiority of these virtues to those of a hedonistic, contemptible and untrustworthy
civilian society and political class. In the words of Thomas Friedman, the ostensibly liberal foreign
affairs commentator of the ostensibly liberal New York Times, 'we do not deserve these people.
They are so much better than the country they are fighting for.' Such sentiments have a sinister
pedigree in modern history.
In the run-up to the last election, even a general as undistinguished as Wesley Clark could see
his past generalship alone as qualifying him for the presidency – and gain the support of leading
liberal intellectuals. Not that this was new: the first president was a general and throughout the
19th and 20th centuries both generals and more junior officers ran for the presidency on the strength
of their military records. And yet, as Bacevich points out, this does not mean that the uniformed
military have real power over policy-making, even in matters of war. General Tommy Franks may have
regarded Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense, as 'the stupidest fucking guy on the planet',
but he took Feith's orders, and those of the civilians standing behind him: Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld
and the president himself. Their combination of militarism and contempt for military advice recalls
Clemenceau and Churchill – or Hitler and Stalin.
Indeed, a portrait of US militarism today could be built around a set of such apparently glaring
contradictions: the contradiction, for example, between the military coercion of other nations and
the belief in the spreading of 'freedom' and 'democracy'. Among most non-Americans, and among many
American realists and progressives, the collocation seems inherently ludicrous. But, as Bacevich
brings out, it has deep roots in American history. Indeed, the combination is historically coterminous
with Western imperialism. Historians of the future will perhaps see preaching 'freedom' at the point
of an American rifle as no less morally and intellectually absurd than 'voluntary' conversion to
Christianity at the point of a Spanish arquebus.
Its symbols may be often childish and its methods brutish, but American belief in 'freedom' is
a real and living force. This cuts two ways. On the one hand, the adherence of many leading intellectuals
in the Democratic Party to a belief in muscular democratization has had a disastrous effect on the
party's ability to put up a strong resistance to the policies of the administration. Bush's messianic
language of 'freedom' – supported by the specifically Israeli agenda of Natan Sharansky and his allies
in the US – has been all too successful in winning over much of the opposition. On the other hand,
the fact that a belief in freedom and democracy lies at the heart of civic nationalism places certain
limits on American imperialism – weak no doubt, but nonetheless real. It is not possible for the
US, unlike previous empires, to pursue a strategy of absolutely unconstrained Machtpolitik.
This has been demonstrated recently in the breach between the Bush administration and the Karimov
tyranny in Uzbekistan.
The most important contradiction, however, is between the near worship of the military in much
of American culture and the equally widespread unwillingness of most Americans – elites and masses
alike – to serve in the armed forces. If people like Friedman accompanied their stated admiration
for the military with a real desire to abandon their contemptible civilian lives and join the armed
services, then American power in the world really might be practically unlimited. But as Bacevich
notes,
having thus made plain his personal disdain for crass vulgarity and support for moral rectitude,
Friedman in the course of a single paragraph drops the military and moves on to other pursuits.
His many readers, meanwhile, having availed themselves of the opportunity to indulge, ever so
briefly, in self-loathing, put down their newspapers and themselves move on to other things. Nothing
has changed, but columnist and readers alike feel better for the cathartic effect of this oblique,
reassuring encounter with an alien world.
Today, having dissolved any connection between claims to citizenship and obligation to
serve, Americans entrust their security to a class of military professionals who see themselves
in many respects as culturally and politically set apart from the rest of society.
This combination of a theoretical adulation with a profound desire not to serve is not of course
new. It characterized most of British society in the 19th century, when, just as with the US today,
the overwhelming rejection of conscription – until 1916 – meant that, appearances to the contrary,
British power was far from unlimited. The British Empire could use its technological superiority,
small numbers of professional troops and local auxiliaries to conquer backward and impoverished countries
in Asia and Africa, but it would not have dreamed of intervening unilaterally in Europe or North
America.
Despite spending more on the military than the rest of the world combined, and despite enjoying
overwhelming technological superiority, American military power is actually quite limited. As
Iraq – and to a lesser extent Afghanistan – has demonstrated, the US can knock over states, but it
cannot suppress the resulting insurgencies, even one based in such a comparatively small population
as the Sunni Arabs of Iraq. As for invading and occupying a country the size of Iran, this is
coming to seem as unlikely as an invasion of mainland China.
In other words, when it comes to actually applying military power the US is pretty much where
it has been for several decades. Another war of occupation like Iraq would necessitate the restoration
of conscription: an idea which, with Vietnam in mind, the military detests, and which politicians
are well aware would probably make them unelectable. It is just possible that another terrorist attack
on the scale of 9/11 might lead to a new draft, but that would bring the end of the US military empire
several steps closer. Recognizing this, the army is beginning to imitate ancient Rome in offering
citizenship to foreign mercenaries in return for military service – something that the amazing Boot
approves, on the grounds that while it helped destroy the Roman Empire, it took four hundred years
to do so.
Facing these dangers squarely, Bacevich proposes refocusing American strategy away from
empire and towards genuine national security. It is a measure of the degree to which imperial thinking
now dominates US politics that these moderate and commonsensical proposals would seem nothing short
of revolutionary to the average member of the Washington establishment.
They include a renunciation of messianic dreams of improving the world through military force,
except where a solid international consensus exists in support of US action; a recovery by Congress
of its power over peace and war, as laid down in the constitution but shamefully surrendered in recent
years; the adoption of a strategic doctrine explicitly making war a matter of last resort; and a
decision that the military should focus on the defense of the nation, not the projection of US power.
As a means of keeping military expenditure in some relationship to actual needs, Bacevich suggests
pegging it to the combined annual expenditure of the next ten countries, just as in the 19th century
the size of the British navy was pegged to that of the next two largest fleets – it is an index of
the budgetary elephantiasis of recent years that this would lead to very considerable spending reductions.
This book is important not only for the acuteness of its perceptions, but also for the identity
of its author. Colonel Bacevich's views on the military, on US strategy and on world affairs were
profoundly shaped by his service in Vietnam. His year there 'fell in the conflict's bleak latter
stages long after an odor of failure had begun to envelop the entire enterprise'. The book is dedicated
to his brother-in-law, 'a casualty of a misbegotten war'.
Just as Vietnam shaped his view of how the US and the US military should not intervene in the
outside world, so the Cold War in Europe helped define his beliefs about the proper role of the military.
For Bacevich and his fellow officers in Europe in the 1970s and 1980s, defending the West from possible
Soviet aggression, 'not conquest, regime change, preventive war or imperial policing', was 'the American
soldier's true and honorable calling'.
In terms of cultural and political background, this former soldier remains a self-described Catholic
conservative, and intensely patriotic. During the 1990s Bacevich wrote for right-wing journals, and
still situates himself culturally on the right:
As long as we shared in the common cause of denouncing the foolishness and hypocrisies of the
Clinton years, my relationship with modern American conservatism remained a mutually agreeable
one But my disenchantment with what passes for mainstream conservatism, embodied in the Bush
administration and its groupies, is just about absolute. Fiscal irresponsibility, a buccaneering
foreign policy, a disregard for the constitution, the barest lip service as a response to profound
moral controversies: these do not qualify as authentically conservative values.
On this score my views have come to coincide with the critique long offered by the radical
left: it is the mainstream itself, the professional liberals as well as the professional conservatives,
who define the problem The Republican and Democratic Parties may not be identical,
but they produce nearly identical results.
Bacevich, in other words, is skeptical of the naive belief that replacing the present administration
with a Democrat one would lead to serious changes in the US approach to the world. Formal party allegiances
are becoming increasingly irrelevant as far as thinking about foreign and security policy is concerned.
Bacevich also makes plain the private anger of much of the US uniformed military at the way in
which it has been sacrificed, and its institutions damaged, by chickenhawk civilian chauvinists who
have taken good care never to see action themselves; and the deep private concern of senior officers
that they might be ordered into further wars that would wreck the army altogether. Now, as never
before, American progressives have the chance to overcome the knee-jerk hostility to the uniformed
military that has characterized the left since Vietnam, and to reach out not only to the soldiers
in uniform but also to the social, cultural and regional worlds from which they are drawn. For if
the American left is once again to become an effective political force, it must return to some of
its own military traditions, founded on the distinguished service of men like George McGovern, on
the old idea of the citizen soldier, and on a real identification with that soldier's interests and
values. With this in mind, Bacevich calls for moves to bind the military more closely into American
society, including compulsory education for all officers at a civilian university, not only at the
start of their careers but at intervals throughout them.
Or to put it another way, the left must fight imperialism in the name of patriotism. Barring a
revolutionary and highly unlikely transformation of American mass culture, any political party that
wishes to win majority support will have to demonstrate its commitment to the defense of the country.
The Bush administration has used the accusation of weakness in security policy to undermine its opponents,
and then used this advantage to pursue reckless strategies that have themselves drastically weakened
the US. The left needs to heed Bacevich and draw up a tough, realistic and convincing alternative.
It will also have to demonstrate its identification with the respectable aspects of military culture.
The Bush administration and the US establishment in general may have grossly mismanaged the threats
facing us, but the threats are real, and some at least may well need at some stage to be addressed
by military force. And any effective military force also requires the backing of a distinctive military
ethic embracing loyalty, discipline and a capacity for both sacrifice and ruthlessness.
In the terrible story of the Bush administration and the Iraq war, one of the most morally disgusting
moments took place at a Senate Committee hearing on 29 April 2004, when Paul Wolfowitz – another
warmonger who has never served himself – mistook, by a margin of hundreds, how many US soldiers had
died in a war for which he was largely responsible. If an official in a Democratic administration
had made a public mistake like that, the Republican opposition would have exploited it ruthlessly,
unceasingly, to win the next election. The fact that the Democrats completely failed to do this
says a great deal about their lack of political will, leadership and capacity to employ a focused
strategy.
Because they are the ones who pay the price for reckless warmongering and geopolitical megalomania,
soldiers and veterans of the army and marine corps could become valuable allies in the struggle to
curb American imperialism, and return America's relationship with its military to the old limited,
rational form. For this to happen, however, the soldiers have to believe that campaigns against the
Iraq war, and against current US strategy, are anti-militarist, but not anti-military. We have needed
the military desperately on occasions in the past; we will definitely need them again.
"... Even if experience has shown it's futile, I still feel compelled to repeat the point that "tribalism" is a racist and imperialist pejorative ..."
"... "tribalism" is used to describe the very same racist ideological currents that give the term its rhetorical power in the first place. ..."
"... In essence, anything that relies on identification with an in-group against those outside the group. In that sense, nearly all of Trump's support base is tribalist, while only some could be described as racist/white nationalist. ..."
"... The term "Tribalism" implicitly stresses the ethnic/racial component in the complex phenomena that modern nationalism represents. That's a major weakness. ..."
"... Even in modern Ukrainian nationalism cultural elements are stronger then ethnic. ..."
"... 'Cultural nationalism' seems to come closest, at least in the Australian and British contexts I'm familiar with, because the so-called 'tribalists' seem to be people who have a strong idea about who are the 'right kind' of Australians (or Britons), and it is a mixture of cultural and racial/ethnic characteristics. ..."
"... Populations can be racialized according to literally any conceivable physical, social, or cultural characteristic - the idea that it can only depend on specific differentiating factors like one's melanin count or descent from Charlemagne or whatever is itself a racist idea, an attempt to reify particular forms of racism as rooted in some immutable aspect of "the way things are". ..."
"... "the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death" ..."
"... Except unlike with Quiggin's definition of tribalism @ 32, racism is explicitly a political and economic phenomenon to use a particular ingroup/outgroup differentiation as a way to systematically disenfranchise and subjugate the outgroup , which seems like the only reason we'd bother talking about it as a specific mass political movement at all. ..."
Even if experience has shown it's futile, I still feel compelled to repeat the point that
"tribalism" is a racist and imperialist pejorative (basically
this imagery condensed into a single signifier) that shouldn't play such a pivotal role in
any remotely serious understanding, let alone one in which "tribalism" is used to describe
the very same racist ideological currents that give the term its rhetorical power in the first
place.
As described in an earlier thread about all of this, my preference would be not to beat around
the bush and go with "fascism" plain and simple, and even if one isn't comfortable making that
assertion directly, "ethnonationalism" seems like it could play an equivalent role to "tribalism"
in this analysis with little or no extra clarification needed. Call me crazy but this seems like
a pretty minor lexical sacrifice to make for combating racist imagery in one's own language.
Call me crazy but this seems like a pretty minor lexical sacrifice to make for combating
racist imagery in one's own language.
likbez 10.30.16 at 12:05 pm
@16
"ethnonationalism" seems like it could play an equivalent role to "tribalism" in this analysis
with little or no extra clarification needed.
While I agree that "tribalism" a bad term that clouds the issue, I think the form of nationalism
that prevails now can be called "cultural nationalism" not "ethnonationalism". In a sense "cultural
nationalism" is more inclusive, but it can be as radical as national socialism in the past. American
exceptionalism is a good example of this type of nationalism.
John Quiggin 10.30.16 at 7:33 pm
@WLGR I'm happy to reconsider terminology. But I've been using "tribalism" for a kind of politics
that's not necessary as extreme as ethno-nationalism, let alone fascism.
In essence, anything that relies on identification with an in-group against those outside
the group. In that sense, nearly all of Trump's support base is tribalist, while only some could
be described as racist/white nationalist.
likbez 10.30.16 at 7:39 pm
@20
The term "Tribalism" implicitly stresses the ethnic/racial component in the complex phenomena
that modern nationalism represents. That's a major weakness.
Even in modern Ukrainian nationalism cultural elements are stronger then ethnic.
I tend to agree with what WLGR is saying about 'tribalists'.
What porpoise @43 said is interesting historically, but I
don't think it removes the overlay from later colonial and
imperial associations of 'tribes' with
'primitives'/inferiors. So I don't think tribalism is a good
word here, but not sure what would be a better one.
'Cultural nationalism' seems to come closest, at least in
the Australian and British contexts I'm familiar with,
because the so-called 'tribalists' seem to be people who have
a strong idea about who are the 'right kind' of Australians
(or Britons), and it is a mixture of cultural and
racial/ethnic characteristics.
Here in Australia, it is certainly possible for people
from non-Anglo backgrounds to be at least conditionally
accepted by the 'tribalists' if they appear to embrace the
tribalists' idea of Aussie culture (although it's conditional
because the 'tribalists' who are 'accepting' the non-Anglo
immigrants unconsciously see their ability to pass judgement
as related to their own Anglo/white background, I think).
Complicated, I am getting tied in knots, but I agree
tribalist isn't the best word.
WLGR
10.31.16 at
3:52 pm
likbez @ 16,
It seems to me that the effort to differentiate race-based from
culturally based ultranationalism is still tangled in the weeds of a colloquial
understanding of "race" and "racism".
Populations can be racialized
according to literally any conceivable physical, social, or cultural
characteristic - the idea that it can only depend on specific differentiating
factors like one's melanin count or descent from Charlemagne or whatever is
itself a racist idea, an attempt to reify particular forms of racism as rooted
in some immutable aspect of "the way things are".
Although from my understanding Ukrainian citizenship like that in most of
Europe is primarily determined by jus sanguinis, and like most of Europe it's
still deep in the muck of racial discrimination toward e.g. the Roma, so unless
I'm misreading things it seems like a stretch to put too much distance between
Ukraine (or Europe in general) and even a very colloquial sense of "ethnonationalism".
It can be articulated more explicitly by outright fascists or more obliquely by
mainstream centrist parties, but it's still there.
And as long as we're talking about academic definitions of racism (I'm
partial to the definition proffered by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, "the
state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of
group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death", although
Emmett Rensin's obnoxiously thorough definition
is also good) funnily
enough they tend to point at something pretty much identical to what Quiggin
appears to mean by "tribalism".
Except unlike with Quiggin's definition of tribalism @ 32, racism is
explicitly a political and economic phenomenon to use a particular ingroup/outgroup
differentiation as a way to systematically disenfranchise and subjugate the
outgroup , which seems like the only reason we'd bother talking about it as
a specific mass political movement at all.
And again, as annoying as it is to have pigheaded reactionaries accuse us of
twisting language and "playing the race card" and so on, putting up with this
noise is preferable to sacrificing useful concepts like racism and fascism from
one's everyday understanding of the world,
"... There are a variety of potential threats around the world today: tensions in the South China Seas, a nuclear North Korea, conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and civil wars in the Middle East are just a few. In order to better think about these challenges and how they relate to U.S. national security, the Center for the National Interest partnered with the Charles Koch Institute to host a foreign policy roundtable which addressed the question: What is the most pressing issue for America's foreign policy? ..."
"... Mearsheimer argues that the second problematic dimension of U.S. foreign policy is that the United States is "heavily into transformation." By "transformation," Mearsheimer means that "We believe that what we should do in the process of running the world is topple governments that are not liberal democracies and transform them into [neo]liberal democracies." ..."
"... according to Mearsheimer, the United States is pursuing "a hopeless cause; there is a huge literature that makes it clear that promoting democracy around the world is extremely difficult to do, and doing it at the end of a rifle barrel is almost impossible." ..."
"... "It's remarkably difficult to understand why we still continue to think we can dominate the world and pursue the same foreign policy we've been pursuing at least since 2001, when it has led to abject failure after abject failure." ..."
"... Andrew Bacevich opines that the United States needs to "come to some understanding of who we are and why we do these things – a critical understanding of the American identity." Notre Dame's Michael Desch agrees: "That cuts to the core of American political culture. I think the root of the hubris is deep in the software that animates how we think about ourselves, and how we think about the world." ..."
There are a variety of potential threats around the world today: tensions in the South China
Seas, a nuclear North Korea, conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and civil wars in the Middle East
are just a few. In order to better think about these challenges and how they relate to U.S. national
security, the Center for the National Interest partnered with the Charles Koch Institute to host
a foreign policy roundtable which addressed the question: What is the most pressing issue for America's
foreign policy?
Watch the rest of the videos in the "Grand Strategy" series.
John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago doesn't shy away from a bold answer: The most pressing
issue is that the United States has a "fundamentally misguided foreign policy." Mearsheimer argues
that there are two dimensions to U.S. foreign policy that get the United States into "big trouble."
First, he says, "We believe that we can dominate the globe, that we can control what happens in every
nook and cranny of the world." The problem with this is that "the world is simply too big and nationalism
is much too powerful of a force to make it possible for us to come close to doing that."
Mearsheimer argues that the second problematic dimension of U.S. foreign policy is that the United
States is "heavily into transformation." By "transformation," Mearsheimer means that "We believe
that what we should do in the process of running the world is topple governments that are not liberal
democracies and transform them into [neo]liberal democracies."
The United States has engaged in numerous international military interventions over the past fifteen
years, primarily in the Middle East. Proponents of these interventions argue that they are necessary
in order to build stable democracies in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. However, according to Mearsheimer,
the United States is pursuing "a hopeless cause; there is a huge literature that makes it clear that
promoting democracy around the world is extremely difficult to do, and doing it at the end of a rifle
barrel is almost impossible."
So why has the United States continued to pursue policies and strategies that fail to convert
U.S. military might into political ends?
Eugene Gholz of the University of Texas at Austin suggests that the root of the issue could be
American hubris. The United States has made the mistake of "thinking we can control things we can't
control." Mearsheimer agrees with Gholz, although he finds the situation perplexing: "It's remarkably
difficult to understand why we still continue to think we can dominate the world and pursue the same
foreign policy we've been pursuing at least since 2001, when it has led to abject failure after abject
failure."
Several other scholars chime in to offer their own thoughts on this thorny issue. Boston University's
Andrew Bacevich opines that the United States needs to "come to some understanding of who we are
and why we do these things – a critical understanding of the American identity." Notre Dame's Michael Desch agrees: "That cuts to the core of American political culture. I think the root of the hubris
is deep in the software that animates how we think about ourselves, and how we think about the world."
Harvard University's Stephen Walt offers yet another possibility. Walt asks if the U.S. commitment
to its current misguided and damaging foreign policy is due to "deep culture" or if it is result
of "the national security apparatus we built after World War II." Walt thinks it is the latter: the
United States "was not a highly interventionist country until after the Second World War." After
World War II, "we built a large national security state, we had bases everywhere, and then we discovered
that we can't let go of any of that, even though the original reason for building it is gone."
Did the other panelists agree with Walt? Did anyone suggest a different problem as a candidate
for the most pressing issue? Watch the full video above to see and be sure to check out the other
videos of CNI and CKI's panel of nationally acclaimed foreign policy scholars addressing additional
questions.
...let's roll the counters back to September 18, 2013 – almost exactly three years ago. Just before,
of course, the glorious Maidan which freed Ukrainians from the oppressive yoke of Russia. At that
moment in history, western analysts were trembling with eagerness to vilify Yanukovych, but were
still hopeful that he would stick his head out of his shell long enough to sign the Deep and Comprehensive
Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA) with the European Union. Washington maintains a kind of ongoing paternal
affection for revolution – which is always less painful and noisy when it's a continent or two away
– but is practical enough to accept an easy victory if that's the way it plays out.
It didn't play out like that, of course, and an American-backed coup ensued in which Yanukovych
offered to give the revolutionary political figures everything they had asked for – early elections,
a provisional coalition government with the egghead among the revolutionaries as Prime Minister,
the works. They were a little taken aback at how easy it was, and then decided it wasn't enough –
Yanukovych must be holding back something if he gave in that easily, and therefore he must be tricking
them, since the script called for the dictator-president to cower in fear and to be flung into the
street in disgrace. So they went ahead with the traditional revolution, gaining nothing at all thereby
except the ushering-in of a self-appointed revolutionary junta, and the empowerment of fervent fascist
nationalists who had previously had to keep their admiration for the Nazis on the down-low.
It is worth mentioning here – because whenever it is brought up, the response ranges from amnesia
to outright denial it ever happened – that the pre-revolutionary government went into it with its
eyes wide open and a good working awareness of the probable consequences. Yanukovych and Azarov,
at least, were briefed that cutting off trade with Russia, which Brussels and Washington insisted
upon, would likely be disastrous for the Ukrainian economy. Deputy Prime Minister Yuriy Boiko announced
that Ukraine was not blowing off the deal entirely; it was
just suspending it
until the state could be sure that increased trade with Europe would compensate for the loss
of the Russian market. Before that, Yanukovych and Azarov
tried energetically to broker a triumvirate coalition of Ukraine, Russia and the EU, to sort
out the trade issues that Brussels insisted made such an arrangement impossible. Not to put too fine
a point on it, Russia and Ukraine proposed a tripartite forum which would see Ukraine as a bridge
between the Eurasian Economic Union and the European Union. Brussels emphatically rejected it, confident
that it could pry Ukraine away from Russia, because the initiative was always strategic rather
than economic .
The government of the day in Ukraine saw fairly clearly what was likely going to happen – and
so did we, didn't we? Yes, we did,
as detailed here . We pointed out that nearly half those Ukrainians who answered a survey that
they wanted Ukraine to join the EU did so because it would strengthen and grow the Ukrainian economy,
but that it was difficult to see how that would come about considering 60% of Ukraine's trade was
with the former Soviet market, and highlighted the unlikelihood that Europe was going to pick up
60%-plus of Ukraine's trade, resulting in prosperity. We pointed out that only half as many people
who responded to the survey that Ukraine's relations with Russia were characterized as 'friendly'
said the same of relations with the EU. So, you could kind of see how (a) a failure to see rapid
economic benefits as a result of signing the agreement, coupled with (b) the opposite effect, a precipitate
drop in trade, plus (c) severing of relations with a country nearly a quarter of Ukrainians considered
a friend, in exchange for a necrophiliac relationship with a trade union few cared much for except
for the usual percentage of lapdog dissidents, was very likely to result in widespread dissatisfaction
and an explosive situation. Did it? It sure did.
Anyway, as much fun as tooting our own horn is, that's not exactly what I wanted to talk about.
I want to review, in exquisite detail, the panorama of failure that is Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's
(RFE/RL) feelgood
graphic presentation for the rubes and dimwits on how association with the EU was going to be
better than sex in warm chocolate for Ukraine. And that forecast has turned out to be about as accurate
as a prediction that Justin Bieber would be nominated UN Secretary-General by popular acclaim.
But let's not leave it at that. Because you know that if those who forecast disaster for Ukraine
– based on, I think, the ability to read and to add – had somehow been wrong, and Ukraine had sprinted
into double-digit economic growth and taken over the role of driving engine of the European economy,
we would never have been allowed to forget it. Turnabout, then, being fair play…
1. The cream-skimming oligarchy, accustomed to riding to wealth on the backs of its panting workforce,
will be out – swept away by a new era of small-business confidence. Did that happen? Hardly. The
President Ukraine eventually elected was fingered for
starting up a new offshore shell corporation even as his troops were being driven into a disastrous
encirclement at Ilovaisk. The
same old oligarchs continue to control more than 70% of Ukraine's GDP. The Anti-Corruption Committee
appointed by Poroshenko, unsurprisingly,
declined to investigate him for corruption . Now more than two years into his presidency, Poroshenko
still has not sold his assets as he promised to do if elected, and his businesses continue to fatten
his personal bottom line in
direct
contravention of Ukrainian law and the Constitution. Never a peep of protest about that, though,
from Poroshenko's
International
Advisory Council , which includes former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, former Australian
Prime Minister Tony Abbott, former Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, former Swedish Prime
Minister Carl Bildt, former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili and make-believe-economist wooden-head
Anders Aslund. This council continues to advise the President of what remains
the most corrupt country in Europe .
2. The boss at the company where you work will have to learn different ways to lead, because screaming
and ranting are not acceptable in Europe. In many European countries, the boss is just a senior worker
who you can call by his first name. This sort of rolls into the first point, but it seems sort of
self-evident that if Ukrainian companies do not do more business with Europe and replace their lost
Russian markets, and the same oligarchs still own the same companies, little will change about employee-employer
dynamics.
According to Eurostat , Ukraine's trade with the EU was down sharply in 2015 in both imports
and exports. A decrease in imports is not particularly surprising – Ukraine is
living
on handouts from the international community while it continues to pour funding into its armed
forces so that it can pursue the game of civil war, and hasn't any money. Not to mention thousands
of Ukrainian working stiffs are employed by Roshen, owned by the President, so I wouldn't be trying
out, "Morning, Petro – how's it hanging?" on my tongue any time soon if I were you. The new Prime
Minister, Vladimir Groysman, is unlikely to be 'Vova' to very many workers, either. He's quite wealthy
in his own right, at least part of that wealth
shunted from EU development funds to his father's cement and asphalt company. However, as an
unnamed Ukrainian politician is said to have quipped to a Ukrainskaya Pravda reporter when
Groysman received his new appointment, "Do you know what the difference is between Groysman and Yatsenyuk?
When Volodymir [Groysman] will start stealing, he will steal off the profit. Yatsenyuk was doing
it off the loss." It's good to see Ukrainians haven't lost their sense of humour.
3. As the standard of living improves in Ukraine, people will begin to trust each other. In Yanukovych's
Ukraine, people tended to trust only their own small circle, but in the New Ukraine, the doormat
will be changed from "Beat It, Shyster!" to "Come On In, Friend!" I'll let Thomas C. Theiner take
over on the subject of trust in Ukraine, post-Maidan. A committed Atlanticist neoconservative and
former cheerleader for Ukraine, Theiner lived in Kiev for 5 years, and has the advantage of personal
knowledge. In his assessment, if you are the type who likes to throw away money,
go to Vegas instead of Kiev – that way, at least there's a chance you'll see a return. Thomas?
"Even today, it's impossible for a foreign businessman to start a company in Ukraine without
being harassed for bribes. If you pay, they just demand more; if you don't pay, you won't succeed
at all. The only way out is to hire a local to help you navigate the bureaucracy and grease the correct
wheels. But whomever you hire will charge a 400-500 percent premium. Hiring a foreign law company
with offices in Kyiv, which charges Western prices, is the only alternative."
Expectations of a dramatic change were not realized, and the changing of the guard only brought
in different crooks. No significant progress has been made on corruption. If your company is successful
without the correct palms being greased, an expedient will be found for getting you out of town for
a few days. When you come back, the company will be under new ownership, and like George Thorogood
in "Move it on Over" ,
your key won't fit no more. Move over, little dog, a big ol' dog's movin' in. All puffickly legal,
as well, by Ukrainian courts.
4. Without gross, horrible, corrupt Yanukovych in charge, trust in the police will rise and pretty
soon they will be rescuing kitties from trees instead of taking bribes and roughing people up. Just
last month, at least three police officers in western Ukraine
beat Oleksandr Tsukerman and shot him dead in front of his relatives, including his mother. Around
200 local residents gathered in front of the police station, and uniformed officers had to keep them
back when the detained police officers who are accused of the crime were brought out. In case you
were thinking the dead man was a violent criminal who somehow invited his own death, the Ukrainian
Police Chief ordered the entire station disbanded. A group of people in the same region were
beating up passers-by right in front of the police , and officers involved in a wrongful death
and four officers who raped a woman and fractured her skull were not dismissed from their jobs. Call
me a pessimist, but that doesn't sound encouraging to me.
5. The difference in social status between the very wealthy and the middle class will gradually
disappear, and rich people will no longer be VIP's. It's pretty easy to show this one up for the
epic piece of optimistic stupidity it was. The President of Ukraine is also an active businessman
and multimillionaire, while per-capita GDP adjusted for purchasing power, for the ordinary folk,
has collapsed
and the unemployment rate is
leaping upward
in great jagged peaks. Yet according to the State Statistics of Ukraine, wage growth has been
steady and touched a record
high in July 2016. A month later, a Ukrainian miner on live TV
set himself afire at a press conference to protest wage arrears. This desperate protest is alleged
to have taken place after industrial action and hunger strikes failed to move the government. How
can these two realities co-exist? I guess it's easy for wages to be at a record high if you don't…you
know…pay them.
6. Women's rights; in the European Parliament, a third of the members are women. In the Verkhovna
Rada under jerky Yanukovych, only 10% were women. Well, folks, the glorious Maidan was not for nothing.
The current Rada is
12.02% women – only 87.98% are men. The gain is mostly illusory, as only 416 seats of the Rada's
statutory 450 are occupied due to the
banning of certain political parties . But a third of 416 would be 138 women rather than the
current 50, so women's rights groups should not relax just yet, as some work obviously remains to
be done.
7. In Yanukovych's Russia-friendly Ukraine, intolerance was the rule and blacks and homosexuals
mostly stayed hidden. Most Ukrainians would not vote for a Jewish presidential candidate, and even
fewer for a black one. How things have changed! Now Nazi symbology in public is
commonplace in Ukraine , whilst the government ostentatiously banned Communist symbology and
recognized Nazi-era collaborators as Freedom Fighters. As best I recall, the Nazis were not known
for their tolerance. How many Ukrainians in the new Europe-ready Ukraine would vote for a black or
a gay presidential candidate? A Gay Pride march in Kiev scheduled for 2014
was canceled when authorities refused to police the event and said they could not guarantee the
participants' safety from homophobic violence. At
another attempt in 2015 , international supporters from Canada had to cross three lines of police
to get to the meeting point, and were given a list of things to not do: Don't wear bright colours.
Don't kiss or hold hands. Don't speak to the police unless spoken to. The bus company which was approached
by Kiev Pride to take the marchers to and from the march allegedly refused, saying, "We'll take the
diplomats, we'll take the journalists, but we're not taking any faggots." Clearly, tolerance not
only has not improved, but is in full retreat and is not a priority for the new government.
8. Life expectancy. In
2010 , the year Yanukovych was elected president, it was 70.2 years. In
2016 ,
it's 69.6. I'm having a hard time seeing that as an improvement.
9. Health. Sports clubs encourage a healthier lifestyle. Most of Ukraine's sports clubs and facilities
were inherited from the Soviet Union. A search for "Poroshenko opens new sports club" yielded nothing
much except the news – I guess I shouldn't be surprised – that
he owns one : (search for "Poroshenko's
allies show up on website listing tax-haven firms") Fifth Element, at 29A Electrykiv St. in Kiev.
That's also the registered address of Intraco Management, owned by deputy head of Roshen Sergey Zaitsev.
Intraco Management showed up in Mossack-Fonseca's records, which came to be better known as the Panama
Papers. Meanwhile, health care in Ukraine
remains deplorable
and there has been no noticeable improvement.
In fact, although you can find the occasional bright spot if your business is finding bright spots
and spinning them into a tapestry of success, Ukraine is a nation in free-fall. The currency is
trading at 26.33 UAH to
the US greenback , slowly edging up to that truly scary record spike of 33.5 to the dollar in
February of last year. Pre-Maidan, the rate was about 7 hryvnia to the dollar. When Poroshenko assumed
his present office, it was 12 to the dollar. The president's approval rating has
corkscrewed down to around 10% . Believe it or not – and I frankly find it incomprehensible there
can be an electorate anywhere, whose fingers must be nothing but scar tissue now from being burnt
so many times, that so adamantly will not change its ways – the
current leader in the polls is… Yulia Tymoshenko. Yes, indeed; if anything can save the floundering
country, it's another stinking-rich oligarch. Yulia Tymoshenko, multi-millionaire.
Ukrainian family
living wage , 9,950 UAH per month, about $383.00 USD. Per month. And the reduced price for gas
for households was
canceled in May , as an anti-corruption measure.
By the benchmarks set in the happy-time graphic, Ukraine is failing catastrophically in every
metric, gasping for breath like a fish on the kitchen floor with someone standing on it. There is
zero chance of any kind of peace deal this year, since Poroshenko arbitrarily decided to reverse
the agreed-upon terms and announce no moves toward autonomy for the east could take place until Russia
returned control of the border to Ukraine – causing Russia to withdraw from the Normandy format,
since negotiations with such a fucking blockhead are a complete waste of everyone's time.
To be completely fair to RFE/RL, they did not originate the graphic; that came from the highly-imaginative
Institute of World Politics in Ukraine. But it fits perfectly with RFE/RL's style; it's hard for
a one-time CIA-funded leopard to change its spots, and many of it columnists seem to rely far more
on imagination themselves when they are writing their material. So they can own it.
As Europeans assess the fallout from the U.K.'s
Brexit referendum
, they face a series of elections that could equally shake the political establishment. In the
coming 12 months, four of Europe's five largest economies have votes that will almost certainly mean
serious gains for right-wing populists and nationalists. Once seen as fringe groups, France's National
Front, Italy's Five Star Movement, and the Freedom Party in the Netherlands have attracted legions
of followers by tapping discontent over immigration, terrorism, and feeble economic performance.
"The Netherlands should again become a country of and for the Dutch people," says Evert Davelaar,
a Freedom Party backer who says immigrants don't share "Western and Christian values."
... ... ....
The populists are deeply skeptical of European integration, and those in France and the Netherlands
want to follow Britain's lead and quit the European Union. "Political risk in Europe is now far more
significant than in the United States," says Ajay Rajadhyaksha, head of macro research at Barclays.
... ... ...
...the biggest risk of the nationalist groundswell: increasingly fragmented parliaments that will
be unable or unwilling to tackle the problems hobbling their economies. True, populist leaders might
not have enough clout to enact controversial measures such as the Dutch Freedom Party's call to close
mosques and deport Muslims. And while the Brexit vote in June helped energize Eurosceptics, it's
unlikely that any major European country will soon quit the EU, Morgan Stanley economists wrote in
a recent report. But they added that "the protest parties promise to turn back the clock" on free-market
reforms while leaving "sclerotic" labour and market regulations in place. France's National Front,
for example, wants to temporarily renationalise banks and increase tariffs while embracing cumbersome
labour rules widely blamed for chronic double-digit unemployment. Such policies could damp already
weak euro zone growth, forecast by the International Monetary Fund to drop from 2 percent in 2015
to 1.5 percent in 2017. "Politics introduces a downside skew to growth," the economists said.
On September 28 the French mission to the UN claimed that two hospitals in east-Aleppo had been bombed.
It documented this in a tweet with
a picture of destroyed buildings in Gaza. The French later deleted that tweet.
It is not the first time such false claims and willful obfuscations were made by "western" officials.
But usually they shy away from outright lies.
Not so the US Secretary of State John Kerry. In a press event yesterday, before talks with the French
Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault about a new UN resolution,
he said (vid
@1:00) about Syria:
Last night, the regime attacked yet another hospital, and 20 people were killed and 100 people
were wounded. And Russia and the regime owe the world more than an explanation about why they
keep hitting hospitals and medical facilities and children and women.These are acts that beg for
an appropriate investigation of war crimes. And those who commit these would and should be held
accountable for these actions.
No opposition group has claimed that such an extremely grave event happened. None. No press agency
has a record of it. The MI-6 disinformation outlet SOHR in Britain, which quite reliably notes every
claimed casualty and is frequently cited in "western" media", has not said anything about such an
event anywhere in Syria.
The grave incident Kerry claimed did not happen. Kerry made it up. (Was it supposed to happen, got
canceled and Kerry missed the memo?) Kerry used the lie to call for war crime investigations and
punishment. This in front of cameras, at an official event with a foreign guest in the context of
a United Nations Security Council resolution.
This is grave. This is nearly as grave as Colin Powell's false claims of WMD in Iraq in front of
the UN Security Council.
Early reports, like
this one at CBSNEWS, repeat the Kerry claim:
Kerry said Syrian forces hit a hospital overnight, killing 20 people and wounding 100, describing
what would be the latest strike by Moscow or its ally in Damascus on a civilian target.
But the New York Times write up of the event, which includes Kerry's demand for war crime investigations,
does not mention the hospital bombing claim. Not at all. For the self-acclaimed "paper of record",
Kerry's lie did not happen. Likewise the Washington Post which in its own write up
makes no mention of the false Kerry claim.
The latest AP write up by Matthew Lee
also omits the lie. This is curious as Matt Lee is obviously aware of it. The State Departments
daily press briefing yesterday
had a whole section
on it. Video (@3:30)
shows that it is Matt who asks these questions:
QUESTION: Okay. On to Syria and the Secretary's comments earlier this morning, one is: Do you
know what strike he was talking about in his comments overnight on a hospital in Aleppo?
MR KIRBY: I think the Secretary's referring actually to a strike that we saw happen yesterday
on a field hospital in the Rif Dimashq Governorate. I'm not exactly positive that that's what
he was referring to, but I think he was referring to actually one that was --
QUESTION: Not one in Aleppo?
MR KIRBY: I believe it was – I think it was – I think he – my guess is – I'm guessing here that
he was a bit mistaken on location and referring to one --
...
QUESTION: But you don't have certainty, though?
MR KIRBY: I don't. Best I got, best information I got, is that he was most likely referring to
one yesterday in this governorate, but it could just be an honest mistake.
QUESTION: If we could – if we can nail that down with certainty what he was talking about --
MR KIRBY: I'll do the best I can, Matt.
...
This goes on for a while. But there was no hospital attack in Rif Dimashq nor in Aleppo. Later on
DoS spokesman Kirby basically admits that Kerry lied: "I can't corroborate that."
It also turns out that Kerry has no evidence for any war crimes and no plausible way to initiate
any official international procedure about such. And for what? To bully Russia? Fat chance, that
would be a hopeless endeavor and Kerry should know that.
Kerry is desperate. He completely lost the plot on Syria. Russia is in the lead and will do whatever
needs to be done. The Obama administration has, apart from starting a World War, no longer any way
to significantly influence that.
Kerry is only one tool of the Obama administration. Later that day the US Director of National Intelligence,
James Clapper, made other
accusations against Russia:
The US Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directedthe recent
compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations.
The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by
the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed
efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process.
Such activity is not new to Moscow-the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across
Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. We believe, based on the scope
and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia's senior-most officials could have authorized
these activities.
Translation: "WE DO NOT KNOW at all ("we are confident", "we believe", "directed") who did these
hacks and WE DO NOT HAVE the slightest evidence ("consistent with","based on the scope and sensitivity")
that Russia is involved, so let me throw some chaff and try to bamboozle you all."
The former British ambassador Craig Murray calls it
a
blatant neocon lie. It was obviously the DNC that manipulated the US election by, contrary to
its mandate, promoting Clinton over Sanders. The hackers only proved that. It is also easy to see
why these accusations are made now. Murray:
That the Obama administration has made a formal accusation of Russia based on no evidence is,
on one level, astonishing. But it is motivated by desperation. WikiLeaks have already announced
that they have a huge cache of other material relating to Hillary's shenanigans. The White House
is simply seeking to discredit it in advance by a completely false association with Russian intelligence.
The Obama administration is losing it. On Syria as well as on the election it can no longer assert
its will. Trump, despite all dirty boy's club talk he may do, has a significant chance to catch the
presidency. He (-44%) and Clinton (-41%) are
more disliked by the U.S electorate, than Putin (-38%). Any solution in Syria will be more in
Russia's than the Washington's favor.
Such desperation can be dangerous. Kerry is gasping at straws when he lies about Russia. The president
and his colleagues at the Pentagon and the CIA have more kinetic means to express themselves. Could
they order up something really stupid?
"... 'End of Growth' Sparks Wide Discontent By Alastair Crooke (October 14, 2016, consortiumnews): The global elites' false promise that neoliberal economics would cure all ills through the elixir of endless growth helps explain the angry nationalist movements ripping apart the West's politics. ..."
"... Yes, that would seem transparently obvious to anyone who doesn't have a vested interest in defending the neoliberal programme. ..."
"... The last thing that powerful elites and their court economists want to talk about is the relationship between an increasingly unequal distribution of income and wealth and the rise of ethnic nationalism...it might force the elites to do something about it. One would think that that would entail redistribution. Unfortunately, increasing militarization of the police seems to be a far cheaper solution...for the short term. ..."
"... The elites used religious, tribal and ethnic, conflict to keep a lid on the rabble for thousands of years. They are supremely comfortable with this, it's part of the toolbox. ..."
"... However I think they are overly complacent because it appears to me that in an industrial society such conflicts now involve a lot more than a few hundred peasants going after each other with random farm implements. ..."
"... The media is shocked -- just shocked -- that a foreign government would tamper with US elections...such behavior is supposed to be off limits to anyone but the CIA and National Endowment for Democracy or their deputies... ..."
"... I'm not sure that Putin has a preference. It may be enough for him to show that Russia can play the destabilization card as well as NED. Displaying the profound corruption of the US political system also serves to undermine the US abroad, since much of its standing is based on the myth of its taking the moral high ground. International elites will have a harder time garnering support for pro-US policies, if those policies are seen as morally bankrupt. ..."
"... Establishment economists are making excuses for slow growth and poor policy by pointing at things like demographics and technology. Excuse-making isn't going to stem the rising tide of ethnic nationalism. Thomas Friedman's Flat World is turning into Tribalistic World. ..."
"... Many of the "Rich" love to push the dialectics of "ethnic nationalism" where none is to be found in reality ..."
"... the pointless destruction of the manufacturing sector of Western economies because of their decision to have private banking systems and eschew tariffs - no surprises here folks ..."
"... Of course economy plus consequences of the state of the economy, i.e. many people being treated like shit, without recourse, except turning away from mainstream politics (which isn't much of a recourse usually). ..."
"... external factors are much more significant in determining success or lack of it than any personal virtues or failings the individual may have. It is not even luck. ..."
"... People do not blame the actual causes of their lack of success. Instead, they seek and find scapegoats. Most Trumpista have heard all their lives from people they respect that black and latino people unfairly get special treatment. That overrides the reality. ..."
"... The comment started with: "When things aren't going as you expect or want, people always have to find someone to blame... since the ego works to prevent you blaming yourself." ..."
In the United States, despite his attempts to woo minority voters, Donald J. Trump appears
to derive support from such sentiment. In Moscow, Vladimir V. Putin has used Russian nationalist
sentiment to inspire many of his countrymen. And we see growing ethnic political parties inspired
by national identity in countless other countries.
It is natural to ask whether something so broad might have a common cause, other than the obvious
circumstantial causes like the gradual fading of memories about the horrors of ethnic conflict
in World War II or the rise in this century of forms of violent ethnic terrorism.
Economics is my specialty, and I think economic factors may explain at least part of the trend.
...
'End of Growth' Sparks Wide Discontent By Alastair Crooke (October 14, 2016, consortiumnews):
The global elites' false promise that neoliberal economics would cure all ills through the elixir
of endless growth helps explain the angry nationalist movements ripping apart the West's politics.
The last thing that powerful elites and their court economists want to talk about is the relationship
between an increasingly unequal distribution of income and wealth and the rise of ethnic nationalism...it
might force the elites to do something about it. One would think that that would entail redistribution.
Unfortunately, increasing militarization of the police seems to be a far cheaper solution...for
the short term.
The elites used religious, tribal and ethnic, conflict to keep a lid on the rabble for thousands
of years. They are supremely comfortable with this, it's part of the toolbox.
However I think they are overly complacent because it appears to me that in an industrial
society such conflicts now involve a lot more than a few hundred peasants going after each other
with random farm implements.
The media is shocked -- just shocked -- that a foreign government would tamper with US
elections...such behavior is supposed to be off limits to anyone but the CIA and National Endowment
for Democracy or their deputies...
Paradoxically Pravda in old times did have real insights into the US political system and for
this reason was widely read by specialists. Especially materials published by the Institute
of the USA and Canada -- a powerful Russian think tank somewhat similar to the Council
on Foreign Relations.
As for your remark I think for many people in the USA Russophobia is just displaced Anti-Semitism.
JohnH remark is actually very apt and you should not "misunderestimate" the level of understanding
of the US political system by Russians. They did learn a lot about machinations of the neoliberal
foreign policy, especially about so called "color revolutions." Hillary&Obama has had a bloody
nose when they tried to stage a "color revolution" in 2011-2012 in Russia (so called "white revolution).
A typical US citizen probably never heard about it or heard only about "Pussy riot", Navalny and
couple of other minor figures. At the end poor ambassador Michael McFaul was recalled. NED was
expelled. Of course Russia is just a pale shadow of the USSR power-wise, so Obama later put her
on sanctions using MH17 incident as a pretext with no chances of retaliation. They also successfully
implemented regime change in Ukraine -- blooding Putin nose in return.
But I actually disagree with JohnH. First of all Putin does not need to interfere in a way
like the USA did in 2011-2012. It would be a waist of resources as both candidates are probably
equally bad for Russia (and it is the "deep state" which actually dictates the US foreign policy,
not POTUS.)
The US political system is already the can of worms and the deterioration of neoliberal society
this time created almost revolutionary situation in Marxists terms, when Repug elite was not able
to control the nomination. Democratic establishment still did OK and managed to squash the rebellion,
but here the level of degeneration demonstrated itself in the selection of the candidate.
Taking into account the level of dysfunction of the US political system, I am not so sure the
Trump is preferable to Hillary for Russians. I would say he is more unpredictable and more dangerous.
The main danger of Hillary is Syria war escalation, but the same is true for Trump who can turn
into the second John McCain on a dime.
Also the difference between two should not be exaggerated. Both are puppets of the forces the
brought them to the current level and in their POTUS role will need to be subservient to the "deep
state". Or at least to take into account its existence and power. And that makes them more of
prisoners of the position they want so much.
Trump probably to lesser extent then Hillary, but he also can't ignore the deep state. Both
require the support of Republican Congress for major legislative initiatives. And it will very
hostile to Hillary. Which is a major advantage for Russians, as this excludes the possibility
of some very stupid moves.
Again, IMHO in no way any of them will control the US foreign policy. In this area the deep
state is in charge since Allen Dulles and those who try to deviate too much might end as badly
as JFK. I think Obama understood this very well and did not try to rock the boat. And there are
people who will promptly explain this to Trump in a way that he understands.
In other words, neither of them will escape the limit on their power that "deep state" enforces.
And that virtually guarantee the continuity of the foreign policy, with just slight tactical variations.
So why Russians should prefer one to another? You can elect a dog as POTUS and the foreign
policy of the USA will be virtually the same as with Hillary or Trump.
In internal policy Trump looks more dangerous and more willing to experiment, while Hillary
is definitely a "status quo" candidate. The last thing Russians needs is the US stock market crush.
So from the point of internal economic policy Hillary is also preferable.
A lot of pundits stress the danger of war with Russia, and that might be true as women in high
political position try to outdo men in hawkishness. But here Hillary jingoism probably will be
tightly controlled by the "deep state". Hillary definitely tried to be "More Catholic then the
Pope" in this area while being the Secretary of State. That did not end well for her and she might
learn the lesson.
But if you think about the amount of "compromat" (Russian term ;-) on Hillary and Bill that
Russians may well already collected, in "normal circumstances" she might be a preferable counterpart
for Russians. As in "devil that we know". Both Lavrov and Putin met Hillary. Medvedev was burned
by Hillary. Taking into account the level of greed Hillary displayed during her career, I would
be worried what Russians have on her, as well as on Bill "transgressions" and RICO-style actions
of Clinton Foundation.
And taking into account the level of disgust amount the government officials with Hillary (and
this is not limited to Secret Service) , new leaks are quite possible, which might further complicate
her position as POTUS. In worst case, the first year (or two) leaks will continue. Especially
if damaging DNC leaks were the work of some disgruntled person within the USA intelligence and
not of some foreign hacker group. That might be a plus for Russians as such a constant distraction
might limit her possibility to make some stupid move in Syria. Or not.
As you know personal emails boxes for all major Web mail providers are just one click away
for NSA analysts. So "Snowden II" hypothesis might have the right to exist.
Also it is quite probably that impeachment process for Hillary will start soon after her election.
In the House Republicans have enough votes to try it. That also might be a plus for s for both
Russia and China. Trump is extremely jingoistic as for Iran, and that might be another area were
Hillary is preferable to Russians and Chinese over Trump.
Also do not discount her health problems. She does have some serious neurological disease,
which eventually might kill her. How fast she will deteriorate is not known but in a year or two
the current symptoms might become more pronounced. If Bill have STD (and sometime he looks like
a person with HIV;
http://joeforamerica.com/2016/07/bill-clinton-aids/)
that further complicates that picture (this is just a rumor, but he really looks bad).
I think that all those factors make her an equal, or even preferable candidate for such states
as Russia and China.
I'm not sure that Putin has a preference. It may be enough for him to show that Russia can
play the destabilization card as well as NED. Displaying the profound corruption of the US political
system also serves to undermine the US abroad, since much of its standing is based on the myth
of its taking the moral high ground. International elites will have a harder time garnering support
for pro-US policies, if those policies are seen as morally bankrupt.
Procopius -> likbez... October 16, 2016 at 05:01 AM
Your analysis does give me some comfort. My greatest fear is that the Deep State seems to currently
be in disarray. Their actions in Syria are divided, contradictory, foolish, counterproductive,
and without direction.
Obama has mostly obviously obeyed the Deep State but has seemed to sometimes "nudge" them in
a direction that seems to me better for the country. The deal with Iran is an exception. It's
significant, but it is both sensible and pragmatic. It's hard to believe anything as important
as that was not sanctioned by the Deep State, in defiance of Israel, and yet it is quite uncharacteristic
of the Deep State's behavior over the last fifteen years.
Walker Connor, perhaps the leading student of the origins and dynamics of ethnonationalism,
has consistently stressed the importance of its political implications. In these essays, which
have appeared over the course of the last three decades, he argues that Western scholars and policymakers
have almost invariably underrated the influence of ethnonationalism and misinterpreted its passionate
and nonrational qualities....
[ I do appreciate the reference, which strikes me as fine since I would like to read older
essays or essays extending over a few decades for perspective on the matter. I will begin here.
]
Brexit. Theresa May's recent speeches at the Conservative conference was very nationalistic and
Little Englander. See Benjamin Friedman's book The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth.
Establishment economists are making excuses for slow growth and poor policy by pointing
at things like demographics and technology. Excuse-making isn't going to stem the rising tide
of ethnic nationalism. Thomas Friedman's Flat World is turning into Tribalistic World.
Your usual theatrics, but I largely agree with you lattermost statement. Things are always best
when we share. Tribesman can be especially selfish, even amongst themselves.
Frankly, I am not seeing it. Many of the "Rich" love to push the dialectics of "ethnic nationalism"
where none is to be found in reality or manipulated like half-jew Donald Trump, who is being
run by the rothschild flank in Russia due to his disaster when he went with fellow jews during
the post-Soviet Oligarch scam. Much like all his businesses, it flopped. He owes the bank of russia(owned
by rothschild) 100's of millions of dollars. They own him.
The point? The "monied elite" tell you what they want you to believe. The dialectical illusion
and collision of the duelism is how they stay in power. I feel bad for Trump supporters, most
are old and not very smart. But I also feel bad for Trump opposition who refuse to bring this
up, mainly because they are financed by the same crowd(aka the Clinton have worked with Rothschild
as well, they come from the same cloth).
Growth adjusted for population was not overly impressive in the 70's or 90's. Yet...............
Neoliberalism creates an impulse for nationalism in several ways:
1. It destroys human solidarity. And resorting to nationalism in a compensational mechanism
to restore it in human societies. that's why the elite often resorts to foreign wars if it feels
that it losing the control over peons.
2. Neoliberalism impoverishes the majority of population enriching top 1% and provokes the
search for scapegoats. Which in the past traditionally were Jews. Now look like MSM are trying
to substitute them for Russians
3. Usually the rise of nationalism is correlated with the crisis in the society. There
is a crisis of neoliberalsm that we experience in the USA now: after 2008 neoliberalism entered
zombie state, when the ideology is discredited, but forces behind it are way too strong for any
social change to be implemented. Much like was the case during "Brezhnev socialism" in the USSR.
So those who claim that we are experiencing replay of late 1920th on a new level might be partially
right. With the important difference that it does not make sense to establish fascist dictatorship
in the USA. Combination of "Inverted totalitarism" and "national security state" already achieved
the same major objectives with much less blood and violence.
the pointless destruction of the manufacturing sector of Western economies because of their
decision to have private banking systems and eschew tariffs - no surprises here folks
cm -> cm... , -1
Of course economy plus consequences of the state of the economy, i.e. many people being treated
like shit, without recourse, except turning away from mainstream politics (which isn't much of
a recourse usually).
cm -> Longtooth... October 15, 2016 at 02:19 PM
This analysis totally misses the point that often external factors are much more significant
in determining success or lack of it than any personal virtues or failings the individual may
have. It is not even luck.
Procopius -> cm... October 16, 2016 at 05:22 AM
I think you miss Longtooth's point. You are, of course, right that personal virtues or failings
usually have no effect on success or lack of it, but if I understand Longtooth correctly, he is
saying that's irrelevant. People do not blame the actual causes of their lack of success.
Instead, they seek and find scapegoats. Most Trumpista have heard all their lives from people
they respect that black and latino people unfairly get special treatment. That overrides the reality.
cm -> Procopius...
The comment started with: "When things aren't going as you expect or want, people always
have to find someone to blame... since the ego works to prevent you blaming yourself."
Robert Shiller is a talented guy who is pretty sleazy. Note that he never mentions neoliberalism
as the real reason we got into the current situation.
"Substantial fiscal stimulus might be helpful, but
it has been blocked." Blocked by whom? Elves and fairies? Klingons?
Instead he tried deceive along the lines of behavioral economics: " If they realize that they
are doing less well than their forebears, they become anxious... Ethnic nationalism creates an
ego-preserving excuse for self-perceived personal failure: Other groups are blamed for bad behavior
and conspiracies.
Notable quotes:
"... The rise in inequality in our time represents a seismic shift in economic power away from the working class. Its cause is many-faceted, including globalization, the decline of labor unions, changes in political alignments and advancing information technology that is replacing jobs. ..."
"... A 2015 study published in The American Economic Review by Michael Kumhof of the Bank of England, Romain Rancičre of the International Monetary Fund and Pablo Winant of the Bank of England found that both the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Recession of 2007-9 had their origins, in part, in rising inequality. ..."
"... Both were accompanied by increases in borrowing by low- to middle-income people, who tried to maintain their standards of living. High-income people, described by the authors as desiring wealth for its own sake, did the lending. The loans attracted investors because high rates of interest compensated them for the risk of default. ..."
Global economic weakness and a rise in inequality appear to be causing a
disturbing growth in ethnic nationalism.
Leaders today often do not openly declare themselves to be ethnic nationalists -
in which identity is defined by perceived genetic, religious or linguistic
heritage rather than democratic ideals or principles. But political appeals to
such forms of identity are nevertheless widespread.
In the United States, despite his attempts to woo minority voters, Donald J.
Trump appears to derive support from such sentiment. In Moscow, Vladimir V. Putin
has used Russian nationalist sentiment to inspire many of his countrymen. And we
see growing ethnic political parties inspired by national identity in other
countries.
It is natural to ask whether something so broad might have a common cause, other
than the obvious circumstantial causes like the gradual fading of memories about
the horrors of ethnic conflict in World War II or the rise in this century of
forms of violent ethnic terrorism. Economics is my specialty, and I think
economic factors may explain at least part of the trend.
Yet economic growth continues, though at a reduced pace, and not just in the United
States. According to the
International
Monetary Fund
, real world gross domestic product was 29 percent higher in 2015 than
it was just before the recession, in 2007. It has just grown at a lower rate than
before, 3.2 percent a year in the eight years after 2007 compared with 4.5 percent a
year in the eight years ending in 2007. Perhaps that doesn't sound like a big enough
difference to affect political outcomes.
But the modest slowdown could be a big part of the explanation for the apparent rise of
ethnic nationalism, if combined with another factor: rising inequality, along with
considerable fear about future inequality.
The numbers are stark. According to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics,
earnings have been basically static. In the bureau's language, "median usual weekly
earnings - in constant (1982-84) dollars (employed full time)" has hardly grown in a
generation. The total increase since this data series began in 1979 has been only 1.2
percent, or 0.03 percent a year. The increase has been less than 1 percent since 2007.
Even such paltry economic growth is going to the very top, not to the median wage
earner. That means that roughly half of full-time wage earners are doing less well in
real terms than their parents were.
Benjamin M. Friedman
of Harvard
University, in his book "The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth"
(Knopf, 2005)
,
said that at a deep level people make judgments about the economic progress that they
see in their own lifetimes, and in comparison with the progress made by the previous
generation, especially their own parents. Few people study economic growth statistics.
But nearly everyone knows what they are being paid. If they realize that they are doing
less well than their forebears, they become anxious. And if they can't see themselves
and others in their cohort as progressing over a lifetime, their social interactions
often become angry, resentful and even conspiratorial.
Ethnic nationalism creates an ego-preserving excuse for self-perceived personal failure:
Other groups are blamed for bad behavior and conspiracies. Often, ethnic, racial or
religious conflict follows. Among the horrific examples are the atrocities committed in
the name of nationalism during World War II - not coincidentally following
the Great Depression
. Mr. Friedman provides other such instances from the last two
centuries in which ethnic conflict followed slow economic growth.
He does point out many exceptions to these generalizations: Some poor and unequal
societies experience very little violence. But it appears that a sense of falling behind
economically among a substantial segment of a population does encourage ethnic
nationalism and conflict.
The rise in inequality in our time represents a seismic shift in economic power away
from the working class. Its cause is many-faceted, including globalization, the decline
of labor unions, changes in political alignments and advancing information technology
that is replacing jobs.
Even those who have not lost out yet in terms of economic power are fearful that they
might. The causes of inequality, particularly advances in information technology, are
not going away soon. These perceptions have damaged people's sense of economic security,
even beyond what economic data reveal to be objectively true.
A 2015 study published in The
American Economic
Review
by
Michael Kumhof
of the Bank of England,
Romain Rancičre
of the International Monetary Fund and
Pablo Winant
of the Bank of England found that both the Great Depression of the
1930s and the Great Recession of 2007-9 had their origins, in part, in rising
inequality.
Both were accompanied by increases in borrowing by low- to middle-income people, who
tried to maintain their standards of living. High-income people, described by the
authors as desiring wealth for its own sake, did the lending. The loans attracted
investors because high rates of interest compensated them for the risk of default.
Linking these causes to the rise of ethnic nationalism is imprecise; these factors
reflect a long-term loss of confidence. Such fears are often vague and ill formed, but
their effects are powerful.
There are some remedies, even if they are not popular or easily executed.
Hillary Clinton's proposals to raise taxes on those with the very highest incomes to
fund programs for lower-income people, for example, may not generate much enthusiasm
from those whose incomes have not grown as expected and who may be doing less well than
their parents. That is because many people do not like the sound of a proposed handout
even if it might help them; they aspire to prove their own worth by earning a good
income, and yet that prospect eludes them.
But something has to be done about the two trends of rising inequality and weak economic
growth, for if they continue we may see more unhappiness, discontent and political
disruption. Substantial fiscal stimulus might be helpful, but it has been blocked.
Making the tax system progressive enough to break the trend toward ever greater income
inequality has also been beyond our grasp, yet it may be the best option we have.
Small countries are just pawns in a bigger Washington geopolitical game, the game conducted with
the level of determination and cruelty that would bestow on them an approving nod from Mussolini. And
actually they do not shun allies in far right forces. As long as they promote pro-American pro-neoliberalism
policies. As in saying "He may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch
" (attributed to FDR about Somoza). Since the dissolution of the USSR the US has been the world
hegemon, sponsoring a world order on neoliberal principles and making the world safe for an often
rapacious multinationals. Political disinterest in foreign military adventures at home due to absence
of draft allowed hijacking the US military for racketeering abroad. The privatizing of the military-industrial
complex has converted it into formidable political force: arms sales follow a Says Law that motivates
perpetual war as a marketing tool. American foreign policy has long been the special province of transnational
corporations, which were allowed to use US naval and military power for penetration into markets of
the countries without paying for it.
Notable quotes:
"... With regard to the issue of "first use," every president since Harry Truman has subscribed to the same posture: the United States retains the prerogative of employing nuclear weapons to defend itself and its allies against even nonnuclear threats. ..."
"... Yet whatever reassurance was to be found in Trump's vow never to order a first strike-not the question Lester Holt was asking-was immediately squandered. The Republican nominee promptly revoked his "no first strike" pledge by insisting, in a cliché much favored in Washington , that "I can't take anything off the table." ..."
"... Hillary Clinton chose a different course: she changed the subject. She would moderate her own debate. Perhaps Trump thought Holt was in charge of the proceedings; Clinton knew better. ..."
"... What followed was vintage Clinton: vapid sentiments, smoothly delivered in the knowing tone of a seasoned Washington operative. During her two minutes, she never came within a country mile of discussing the question Holt had asked or the thoughts she evidently actually has about nuclear issues. ..."
"... It was as if Clinton were already speaking from the Oval Office. Trump had addressed his remarks to Lester Holt. Clinton directed hers to the nation at large, to people the world over, indeed to history itself. Warming to her task, she was soon rolling out the sort of profundities that play well at the Brookings Institution, the Carnegie Endowment, or the Council on Foreign Relations, causing audiences to nod-or nod off. ..."
"... With that, she reverted to platitudes. "So we need to be more precise in how we talk about these issues. People around the word follow our presidential campaigns so closely, trying to get hints about what we will do. Can they rely on us? Are we going to lead the world with strength and in accordance with our values? That's what I intend to do. I intend to be a leader of our country that people can count on, both here at home and around the world, to make decisions that will further peace and prosperity, but also stand up to bullies, whether they're abroad or at home." ..."
"... In contrast to Trump, however, Clinton did speak in complete sentences, which followed one another in an orderly fashion. She thereby came across as at least nominally qualified to govern the country, much like, say, Warren G. Harding nearly a century ago. And what worked for Harding in 1920 may well work for Clinton in 2016. ..."
"... Of Harding's speechifying, H.L. Mencken wrote at the time, "It reminds me of a string of wet sponges." Mencken characterized Harding's rhetoric as "so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash." So, too, with Hillary Clinton. She is our Warren G. Harding. In her oratory, flapdoodle and balderdash live on. ..."
"... Trump was incredibly naďve or stupid for even answering that question. He should have asked Holt to state what he understood "the nation's longstanding policy" to be and define the term "first use." Rule one in debating: If you don't fully understand the question, demand a definition of any premises essential to the question. ..."
"... I note, however, that Trump is a builder and Clinton is a destroyer. ..."
"... Bill Clinton authorized bombing a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan in 1998 to divert attention away from his sex scandals in a 'wag-the-dog' operation for gratuitous purposes. Hillary supported the Muslim Brotherhood to take over Egypt in a rigged election in 2012 after the Brotherhood murdered countless police, prosecutors, judges and Coptic Priests and children and has enriched herself from advance bribes through her Foundation. The Clintons indisputably use "evil" for gratuitous purposes and have sold out the interests of the nation. ..."
"... Trump advocates waterboarding and stop and frisk as necessary policies to protect lives. But this is what a leader is elected to do – to use power and coercion to protect the people. He does not advocate torture or aggressive policing for political or egotistical purposes or to intimidate the public into totalitarian submission. He opposes political correct and totalitarian control of speech. ..."
"... So Bacevich can say Trump is unqualified but based purely on empirical grounds, the Clintons have disqualified themselves from the presidency by their gratuitous use of power and influence peddling; while Trump prefers to do deals (treaties) but would use aggressive tactics to protect the public but only when absolutely necessary as a last resort. ..."
"... So it is Bacevich who is unqualified to render an opinion that helps us judge which candidate is qualified for the presidency because he believes he has greater knowledge on issues such as nuclear proliferation. Bacevich is another know-it-all elite who knows better based on his superior knowledge. But no one has such God like knowledge. What would Bacevich do if he could drop an A-bomb and save countless lives on both sides of a war? He doesn't tell us and instead prefers to bash the candidates as to not telling the truth to the American public. The records of the candidates, summarized above, give us a glimpse of how they would use "evil". ..."
"... The irony is Bacevich lost a son in a war Trump opposed but Hillary voted for. He is to be respected for his loss but not for his unqualified opinion as to which candidate would use evil-for-good or evil-for-ill. ..."
You may have missed it. Perhaps you dozed off. Or wandered into the kitchen to grab a snack. Or by
that point in the proceedings were checking out Seinfeld reruns. During the latter part
of the much hyped but excruciating-to-watch first presidential debate, NBC Nightly News anchor Lester
Holt posed a seemingly straightforward but cunningly devised question. His purpose was to test whether
the candidates understood the essentials of nuclear strategy.
A moderator given to plain speaking might have said this: "Explain why the United States keeps
such a large arsenal of nuclear weapons and when you might consider using those weapons."
What Holt actually said was: "On nuclear weapons, President Obama reportedly considered changing
the nation's longstanding policy on first use. Do you support the current policy?"
The framing of the question posited no small amount of knowledge on the part of the two candidates.
Specifically, it assumed that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton each possess some familiarity with
the longstanding policy to which Holt referred and with the modifications that Obama had contemplated
making to it.
If you will permit the equivalent of a commercial break as this piece begins, let me explain why
I'm about to parse in detail each candidate's actual answer to Holt's question. Amid deep dives into,
and expansive punditry regarding, issues like
how "fat" a former Miss Universe may have been and
how high an imagined future wall on our southern border might prove to be, national security
issues likely to test the judgment of a commander-in-chief have received remarkably little attention.
So indulge me. This largely ignored moment in last week's presidential debate is worth examining.
With regard to the issue of "first use," every president since Harry Truman has subscribed
to the same posture: the United States retains the prerogative of employing nuclear weapons to defend
itself and its allies against even nonnuclear threats.
In other words, as a matter of policy, the United States rejects the concept of "no
first use," which would prohibit any employment of nuclear weapons except in retaliation for a nuclear
attack. According to press reports, President Obama had
toyed with but then rejected the idea of committing the United States to a "no first use" posture.
Holt wanted to know where the two candidates aspiring to succeed Obama stood on the matter.
Cruelly, the moderator invited Trump to respond first. The look in the Republican nominee's eyes
made it instantly clear that Holt could have been speaking Farsi for all he understood. A lesser
candidate might then have begun with the nuclear equivalent of "
What is Aleppo? "
Yet Trump being Trump, he gamely-or naively-charged headlong into the ambush that Holt had carefully
laid, using his allotted two minutes to offer his insights into how as president he would address
the nuclear conundrum that previous presidents had done so much to create. The result owed less to
early Cold War thinkers-of-the-unthinkable like Herman Kahn or Albert Wohlstetter, who created the
field of nuclear strategy, than to Dr. Strangelove. Make that Dr. Strangelove on meth.
Trump turned first to Russia, expressing concern that it might be gaining an edge in doomsday
weaponry. "They have a much newer capability than we do," he said. "We have not been updating from
the new standpoint." The American bomber fleet in particular, he added, needs modernization. Presumably
referring to the recent employment of Vietnam-era bombers in the wars in
Afghanistan ,
Iraq , and Syria, he continued somewhat opaquely, "I looked the other night. I was seeing B-52s,
they're old enough that your father, your grandfather, could be flying them. We are not - we are
not keeping up with other countries."
Trump then professed an appreciation for the awfulness of nuclear weaponry. "I would like everybody
to end it, just get rid of it. But I would certainly not do first strike. I think that once the nuclear
alternative happens, it's over."
Give Trump this much: even in a field that tends to favor abstraction and obfuscating euphemisms
like "fallout" or "dirty bomb," classifying Armageddon as the "nuclear alternative" represents something
of a contribution.
Still, it's worth noting that, in the arcane theology of nuclear strategy, "first strike" and
"first use" are anything but synonymous. "First strike" implies a one-sided, preventive war of annihilation.
The logic of a first strike, such as it is, is based on the calculation that a surprise nuclear attack
could inflict the "nuclear alternative" on your adversary, while sparing your own side from suffering
a comparable fate. A successful first strike would be a one-punch knockout, delivered while your
opponent still sits in his corner of the ring.
Yet whatever reassurance was to be found in Trump's vow never to order a first strike-not
the question Lester Holt was asking-was immediately squandered. The Republican nominee promptly revoked
his "no first strike" pledge by insisting, in a cliché
much favored in
Washington , that "I can't take anything off the table."
Piling non sequitur upon non sequitur, he next turned to the threat posed by a nuclear-armed North
Korea, where "we're doing nothing." Yet, worrisome as this threat might be, keeping Pyongyang in
check, he added, ought to be Beijing's job. "China should solve that problem for us," he insisted.
"China should go into North Korea. China is totally powerful as it relates to North Korea."
If China wouldn't help with North Korea, however, what could be more obvious than that Iran, many
thousands of miles away, should do so-and might have, if only President Obama had incorporated the
necessary proviso into the Iran nuclear deal. "Iran is one of their biggest trading partners. Iran
has power over North Korea." When the Obama administration "made that horrible deal with Iran, they
should have included the fact that they do something with respect to North Korea." But why stop with
North Korea? Iran "should have done something with respect to Yemen and all these other places,"
he continued, wandering into the nonnuclear world. U.S. negotiators suitably skilled in the Trumpian
art of the deal, he implied, could easily have maneuvered Iran into solving such problems on Washington's
behalf.
Veering further off course, Trump then took a passing swipe at Secretary of State John Kerry:
"Why didn't you add other things into the deal?" Why, in "one of the great giveaways of all time,"
did the Obama administration fork over
$400 million in cash? At which point, he promptly threw in another figure without the slightest
explanation-"It was actually
$1.7 billion in cash"-in "one of the worst deals ever made by any country in history."
Trump then wrapped up his meandering tour d'horizonby decrying the one
action of the Obama administration that arguably has reduced the prospect of nuclear war, at least
in the near future. "The deal with Iran will lead to nuclear problems," he stated with conviction.
"All they have to do is sit back 10 years, and they don't have to do much. And they're going to end
up getting nuclear." For proof, he concluded, talk to the Israelis. "I met with Bibi Netanyahu the
other day," he added for no reason in particular. "Believe me, he's not a happy camper."
On this indecipherable note, his allotted time exhausted, Trump's recitation ended. In its way,
it had been a Joycean performance.
Bridge Over Troubled Waters?
It was now Clinton's turn to show her stuff. If Trump had responded to Holt like a voluble golf
caddy being asked to discuss the finer points of ice hockey, Hillary Clinton chose a different
course: she changed the subject. She would moderate her own debate. Perhaps Trump thought Holt was
in charge of the proceedings; Clinton knew better.
What followed was vintage Clinton: vapid sentiments, smoothly delivered in the knowing tone
of a seasoned Washington operative. During her two minutes, she never came within a country mile
of discussing the question Holt had asked or the thoughts she
evidently actually has about nuclear issues.
"[L]et me start by saying, words matter," she began. "Words matter when you run for president.
And they really matter when you are president. And I want to reassure our allies in Japan and South
Korea and elsewhere that we have mutual defense treaties and we will honor them."
It was as if Clinton were already speaking from the Oval Office. Trump had addressed his remarks
to Lester Holt. Clinton directed hers to the nation at large, to people the world over, indeed to
history itself. Warming to her task, she was soon rolling out the sort of profundities that play
well at the Brookings Institution, the Carnegie Endowment, or the Council on Foreign Relations, causing
audiences to nod-or nod off.
"It is essential that America's word be good," Clinton continued. "And so I know that this campaign
has caused some questioning and worries on the part of many leaders across the globe. I've talked
with a number of them. But I want to - on behalf of myself, and I think on behalf of a majority of
the American people, say that, you know, our word is good."
Then, after inserting a tepid, better-than-nothing endorsement of the Iran nuclear deal, she hammered
Trump for not offering an alternative. "Would he have started a war? Would he have bombed Iran?"
If you're going to criticize, she pointed out, you need to offer something better. Trump never does,
she charged. "It's like his plan to defeat ISIS. He says it's a secret plan, but the only secret
is that he has no plan."
With that, she reverted to platitudes. "So we need to be more precise in how we talk about
these issues. People around the word follow our presidential campaigns so closely, trying to get
hints about what we will do. Can they rely on us? Are we going to lead the world with strength and
in accordance with our values? That's what I intend to do. I intend to be a leader of our country
that people can count on, both here at home and around the world, to make decisions that will further
peace and prosperity, but also stand up to bullies, whether they're abroad or at home."
Like Trump, she offered no specifics. Which bullies? Where? How? In what order? Would she start
with Russia's Putin? North Korea's Kim Jong-Un? Perhaps Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines? How about
Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan? Or Bibi?
In contrast to Trump, however, Clinton did speak in complete sentences, which followed one
another in an orderly fashion. She thereby came across as at least nominally qualified to govern
the country, much like, say, Warren G. Harding nearly a century ago. And what worked for Harding
in 1920 may well work for Clinton in 2016.
Of Harding's speechifying, H.L. Mencken wrote at the time, "It reminds me of a string of wet
sponges." Mencken characterized Harding's rhetoric as "so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into
it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of
posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash." So, too, with Hillary
Clinton. She is our Warren G. Harding. In her oratory, flapdoodle and balderdash live on.
The National Security Void
If I've taxed your patience by recounting this non-debate and non-discussion of nuclear first
use, it's to make a larger point. The absence of relevant information elicited by Lester Holt's excellent
question speaks directly to what has become a central flaw in this entire presidential campaign:
the dearth of attention given to matters basic to U.S. national security policy.
In the nuclear arena, the issue of first use is only one of several on which anyone aspiring to
become the next commander-in-chief should be able to offer an informed judgment. Others include questions
such as these:
What is the present-day justification for maintaining the U.S. nuclear "triad," a strike force
consisting of manned bombers and land-based ballistic missiles and submarine-launched
ballistic missiles?
Why is the Pentagon embarking upon a decades-long,
trillion-dollar program to modernize that triad, fielding a new generation of bombers, missiles,
and submarines along with an arsenal of
new warheads ? Is that program necessary?
How do advances in non-nuclear weaponry-for example, in the realm of cyberwarfare-affect theories
of nuclear deterrence devised by the likes of Kahn and Wohlstetter during the 1950s and 1960s?
Does the logic of those theories still pertain?
Beyond the realm of nuclear strategy, there are any number of other security-related questions
about which the American people deserve to hear directly from both Trump and Clinton, testing their
knowledge of the subject matter and the quality of their judgments. Among such matters, one in particular
screams out for attention. Consider it the question that Washington has declared off-limits: What
lessons should be drawn from America's costly and disappointing post-9/11 wars and how should those
lessons apply to future policy?
With Election Day now merely a month away, there is no more reason to believe that such questions
will receive serious consideration than to expect Trump to come clean on his
personal finances or Clinton to release the transcripts of her
handsomely compensated Goldman Sachs speeches.
When outcomes don't accord with his wishes, Trump reflexively
blames a "rigged" system. But a system that makes someone like Trump a finalist for the presidency
isn't rigged. It is manifestly absurd, a fact that has left most of the national media grasping wildly
for explanations (albeit none that tag them with having facilitated the transformation of politics
into theater).
I'll take a backseat to no one in finding Trump unfit to serve as president. Yet beyond the outsized
presence of one particular personality, the real travesty of our predicament lies elsewhere-in the
utter shallowness of our political discourse, no more vividly on display than in the realm of national
security.
What do our presidential candidates talk about when they don't want to talk about nuclear war?
The one, in a vain effort to conceal his own ignorance, offers rambling nonsense. The other, accustomed
to making her own rules, simply changes the subject.
The American people thereby remain in darkness. On that score, Trump, Clinton, and the parties
they represent are not adversaries. They are collaborators.
Trump was incredibly naďve or stupid for even answering that question. He should have asked
Holt to state what he understood "the nation's longstanding policy" to be and define the term
"first use." Rule one in debating: If you don't fully understand the question, demand a definition
of any premises essential to the question.
For God's sake, most Americans generally believe that the nation's police on nukes is that
we won't use them first. Introducing this kind of mixture of jargon and terms of art is good and
sufficient reason for rejecting the format of these awful "debates."
Dr. Bacevich is always insightful and worth reading. I wish we had a better choice of candidates.
I note, however, that Trump is a builder and Clinton is a destroyer.
Sounds like the Colonel will be voting for the Democrat for the third time in a row (maybe fourth,
he probably voted for Kerry, too). Although the Democrats have been marginally better on foreign
policy, they totally devoted to open borders.
Mass immigration will lead to more attacks at home which will lead to more wars overseas. Invite
the world/invade the world go hand in hand.
"Of Harding's speechifying, H.L. Mencken wrote at the time, "It reminds me of a string of wet
sponges." Mencken characterized Harding's rhetoric as "so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into
it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle
of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash." So, too, with
Hillary Clinton. "
Clinton's approach makes sense. She knows that the general public knows little and cares less
about nuclear minutiae, so she laid out her platitudes-which the public does understand-and raised
legitimate doubts about whether Trump would adopt a foreign policy as Joycean as his reply.
What did Bacevich tell us other than he is an expert in nuclear proliferation policy but the two
presidential candidates aren't. So what? We don't elect presidents to be nuclear war policy experts.
We elect them on how they use the monopoly that government grants them for the legitimate use
of power, coercion, deception and violence (we might call this "evil") . Do they use "evil" gratuitously
or for partisan purposes or self gain; or do they only use "evil" only as a last resort when there
is no other choice such as when Truman authorized dropping A-bombs on Japan? The self righteous
and arrogant Bacevich doesn't tell us which candidate would use evil-for-good or evil-for-bad
or gratuitous outcomes.
Bill Clinton authorized bombing a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan in 1998 to divert attention
away from his sex scandals in a 'wag-the-dog' operation for gratuitous purposes. Hillary supported
the Muslim Brotherhood to take over Egypt in a rigged election in 2012 after the Brotherhood murdered
countless police, prosecutors, judges and Coptic Priests and children and has enriched herself
from advance bribes through her Foundation. The Clintons indisputably use "evil" for gratuitous
purposes and have sold out the interests of the nation.
Trump advocates eminent domain but offered a widow four times the market value of her property
and lifetime occupancy in one of his luxury condos. The property was a rooming house the widow
never lived in on commercial zoned land. The property was foreclose on 20 years later for half
of what Trump offered her and the property was never acquired. Trump shows he does not use evil
gratuitously and is a generous person who nevertheless advocates the legal use of eminent domain
where necessary as a last resort.
Trump advocates waterboarding and stop and frisk as necessary policies to protect lives.
But this is what a leader is elected to do – to use power and coercion to protect the people.
He does not advocate torture or aggressive policing for political or egotistical purposes or to
intimidate the public into totalitarian submission. He opposes political correct and totalitarian
control of speech.
In sum, the Clintons put no limits on their use of "evil" for self gain or selling out to other
nations interests; while Trump wants to use soft power and voluntary market deals where possible
(eminent domain) or would use aggressive tactics to protect the public but in a limited and lawful
way.
So Bacevich can say Trump is unqualified but based purely on empirical grounds, the Clintons
have disqualified themselves from the presidency by their gratuitous use of power and influence
peddling; while Trump prefers to do deals (treaties) but would use aggressive tactics to protect
the public but only when absolutely necessary as a last resort.
So it is Bacevich who is unqualified to render an opinion that helps us judge which candidate
is qualified for the presidency because he believes he has greater knowledge on issues such as
nuclear proliferation. Bacevich is another know-it-all elite who knows better based on his superior
knowledge. But no one has such God like knowledge. What would Bacevich do if he could drop an
A-bomb and save countless lives on both sides of a war? He doesn't tell us and instead prefers
to bash the candidates as to not telling the truth to the American public. The records of the
candidates, summarized above, give us a glimpse of how they would use "evil".
The irony is Bacevich lost a son in a war Trump opposed but Hillary voted for. He is to
be respected for his loss but not for his unqualified opinion as to which candidate would use
evil-for-good or evil-for-ill.
"... "Hillary is not the only individual with Libyan and Syrian blood on her hands. She's simply the only individual directly involved in Iraq, Libya, and Syria running to the 45th president of the US." ..."
"... The danger of Hillary is the danger of yet another neocon administration in power for the next four years. We probably need to think in term of Cheney and Rumsfeld, because this is the policies that Hillary will bring to the table. ..."
"... I think that experience with US neocons in Ukraine also makes Russia position on Syria quite different and less accommodating for the US neoliberal empire expansion projects. ..."
"... One of the things that Lupita likes to point out is how strange it is that somehow Americans are the decider of military intervention everywhere (LFC again) and how American exceptionalism is part of our imperial setup. ..."
"... Americans may like empire, but for the people who actually have to fight, very few of them really like being foot soldiers for empire. ..."
"... Left agitation in the early part of the 20th century and in the 60s was in large part anti-war agitation, and it was one of the main reasons why the government actually crushed left organizations. One of the main reasons why you can tell that HRC supporters are not really on the left in any important sense is the easy way that they switched from opposing Bush's war to approving of Democratic "humanitarian" wars. ..."
"... So why should we have to care about any of this foreign policy nonsense? What critical interest does any American have in Asia, Ukraine, etc.? The vast and lofty left sentiments that we are citizens of the world and that an injury to one is an injury to everyone - do these have any meaning outside of an imperial context? ..."
"... Russian foreign policy IMHO is mostly reactive and defensive. It is directed mainly on preservation of (currently rapidly shrinking) Russia's economic and political and cultural influence in xUSSR space. ..."
"... Obama administration was very aggressive toward Russia and attempted to implement "regime change" in 2011-2012 to prevent Putin re-election (so called "White revolution" with McFaul as the key player and the network on NGO as the coordination / training / recruiting / propaganda centers). This attempt to stage a "color revolution" in Russia backfired making Russian political establishment more hostile to the USA. It also led to expulsion of several NGO from Russia. Later events in Ukraine led to deterioration of political standing of Russian neoliberals as a political force. They lost all the legitimacy among the population and now viewed by-and-large as US stooges. ..."
"... Hillary as the Secretary of State was even more jingoistic neocon then Obama and has during her term in the office an outsize influence on the US foreign policy including the attempt to stage a "white revolution" in Russia in which State Department played an outsize role, essentially taking many functions formerly performed by CIA ..."
"... It also tried to oppose the "encirclement" - the creation of the belt of hostile states around Russia with US or NATO forces/bases - Ukraine is just the most recent example of this policy. Missile defense bases in Rumania and Poland belong to the same script. Actually the US Department of Defense on those issues has its own outsize influence on the US foreign policy and works in close coordination with the State Department (alliance started under Bush II and forged under Hillary Clinton). ..."
"... ZM: "But I wish there was some sort of international protocol about it." There was supposed to be one - the whole apparatus of U.N. intervention. We've seen how that played out. ..."
"... The sentiments have certainly been a useful pretext for imperial interventions, going well beyond 'interest' to intimations of existential crisis, etc. I remember when, if we did not 'help' the Vietnamese by bombing them back into the Stone Age, bad people from there were going to invade California. So it was both to 'our' interest and theirs to kill millions of them. You see the same thinking in Syria, Libya, Iraq, Serbia, Panama, and the rest of the list. ..."
"... Well with technology there is the possibility of that, Australia is part of the Five Eyes alliance with the USA, which is where the English speaking countries all share intelligence, then there is a larger group that gets a bit less intelligence, and maybe others like an onion or something. ..."
"... To me this is the wierdest and most hypocritical aspect of the whole "Putin stooge!" narrative, since part of the core ethos of US-aligned liberal discourse in settings like this is precisely a willingness and eagerness to voluntarily assume the role of stooge for whatever ruling-class figure one has decided to back. Look at the core message liberals here seem to be trumpeting: we may not like the faction of the ruling class embodied in someone like Hillary Clinton, but since we've decided to back this faction over another faction we consider worse, we'll suspend our earnest search for truth and understanding so we can add our voices into the fight. ("We know Hillary is bad, but save it for after Trump!") ..."
"... But the kicker re: Putin is that somehow, these same liberals can't fathom the idea that ordinary Russians might be gripped by precisely the same kind of dynamic ("we know Putin is bad but save it for after Syria!") especially when it comes to nationalist fervor stirred up by global military/economic power struggles. ..."
"... And to the extent that they see such people not as the Russian ideological equivalents of themselves but as literal agents of the Kremlin, precisely the way one might imagine all the Hillary defenders on this thread as COINTELPRO plants and/or paid Clinton campaign PR operatives, they're able to see this obsequious defense of ruling-class power for the creepy authoritarian servility it is. One could call the double standards closed-minded or even xenophobic, but I'll settle for just calling it bizarre. ..."
"... American foreign policy has long been the special province of deeply interested portions of the elite, which were allowed to use U.S. naval and military power without paying for it. ..."
"... Since the First World War, the U.S. has been the hegemon, sponsoring a world order on liberal principles in theory and making the world safe for an often rapacious commercial order in practice. Popular disinterest at home has preserved the tradition of hijacking the U.S. military for racketeering abroad, but the privatizing of the military-industrial complex has converted it from sideline into a reason for being: arms sales follow a Says Law that motivates perpetual war as a marketing tool. ..."
"... ZM is ridiculously wrong about one thing: "No one wants one country to rule the world" I think there is actually quite a demand for exactly that. That the U.S. capacity to satisfy that demand is diminishing rapidly is creating a gathering world crisis. ..."
"... Americans seem to have some difficulty understanding just how competent Putin has been. Putin is a consummately gifted gambler, who has played a weak hand aggressively at home and abroad. He is popular in Russia, because he has been successful by being phenomenally good at his job - so good that any Russian who isn't dead stupid is worried about what comes after. ..."
"... Obama, the most gifted politician I've seen in my lifetime, has played his hand very conservatively. I rail against him, because I think he should have taken much bigger chances on a radical reform agenda, using the crisis he was gifted to take apart the oligarchies choking the American political economy. ..."
"... Both Americans and Russians, I think, are inclined to see their roles in the world as more benign than they are. The Americans, though, have better PR and a lot of people abroad still want to believe. ..."
"... Ch. 1: The Advent of Semiwar. ..."
"... Ch. 2: Illusions of Flexibility and Control ..."
"... Ch. 3: The Credo Restored. ..."
"... "In fact, Clinton has shown a number of indications that she is not competent at all, that she is, unlike Obama, going to unleash the U.S. foreign policy establishment and military-industrial complex in all its decadent schizophrenia without any governor or restraint at all." ..."
"... The raving chorus of criticism of Clinton's foreign policy on ostensibly leftist grounds that falsifies the current state of affairs is viciously reactionary, especially when indissolubly mixed with openly reactionary criticisms. The falsification of what exactly is different about Trump's candidacy is also part and parcel. It's all very like the fake leftists who said defeating the Scottish referendum wasn't an endorsement of English imperialism, then pretended to act surprised when the rightward surge they helped to build led to a racist campaign for Brexit. ..."
"... Putin is weak. He sacrificed a struggle against fascism in Ukraine for a naval base, rather than call on popular support. Then he doubled down on another naval base in Syria, despite having no idea how to reach a solution. He can't cope with the economic warfare the US is waging, he only tries to use simple repression of the population at large and an elaborate combination of select repression and appeasement of the oligarchs he ultimately serves. ..."
"... Putin is popular I think largely because he appears to be the human face of capitalism. He's falsely sold himself as the corrective to Yeltsin, when in truth he is just the normalization of Yeltsinism. Yetltsin did the dirty work of attacking the people of Russia in the name of capitalist restoration. Now, Putin is just business as usual. ..."
"... It's the insidious ideology of the Uncle Sam poster, where a slightly-less-evil form of ruling-class power needs you not just to passively submit to its dictates but to actively defend its position against its slightly-more-evil ideological enemies, even at the expense of your own independent moral compass and political thought. ..."
"... If you need an eloquent summary of how the dysfunction of the American political system has become manifest in a foreign policy of perpetual and costly failure . ..."
"Hillary is not the only individual with Libyan and Syrian blood on her hands. She's
simply the only individual directly involved in Iraq, Libya, and Syria running to the 45th
president of the US."
Very true. The danger of Hillary is the danger of yet another neocon administration in
power for the next four years. We probably need to think in term of Cheney and Rumsfeld, because
this is the policies that Hillary will bring to the table.
But I think it is a mistake to view Syria regime change actions of US neocons in isolation
from the same actions in Ukraine. Those are closely interconnected events.
And Nuland action in Ukraine for the installation of far right nationalist regime (and virtual
occupation of the rest of Ukraine by Western Ukrainian nationalists) virtually guarantee economic
and military alliance of China and Russia. Russia will not forget and will not forgive Nuland's
valiant efforts of installing far right nationalists in Kiev instead of corrupt Yanukovich regime,
despite the fact that they were not very sympathetic to Yanukovich (and refused to play the card
of "legitimate president in exile", which they easily can making US position in Kiev untenable).
I think that experience with US neocons in Ukraine also makes Russia position on Syria
quite different and less accommodating for the US neoliberal empire expansion projects.
IMHO with the level of dysfunction of Obama administration there is some level of threat of
direct military confrontation in case one of three competing arms of US government overstep the
boundaries. Quite possible in case of CIA and supported by them al Qaeda affiliated groups (which
are mercilessly wiped out by Syrians army), probably less possible for Pentagon with their Kurds
militia.
And I think that any direct confrontation in Syria will automatically lead to confrontation
in Ukraine, were large part of Eastern regions might greet Russians as liberators.
If you add to China-Russia alliance cemented by events in Ukraine Pakistan, where anti-American
feelings are also quite strong you can see the net result of Barack foreign policy efforts.
Actually I think that one on key ideas of Trump foreign policy agenda is to reverse this alliance
and split Russia from China by treating it differently then Obama administration (bad cop, good
cop approach).
I'm starting to believe that there may be a Putin troll operation and that with the commenter
Ze K gone, the operation has sent commenter likbez to the Crooked Timber plate as pinch-hitter.
(Sorry for the baseball metaphor. Turning off computer now.)
"IMHO with the level of dysfunction of Obama administration there is some level of threat
of direct military confrontation in case one of three competing arms of US government overstep
the boundaries. Quite possible in case of CIA and supported by them al Qaeda affiliated groups
(which are mercilessly wiped out by Syrians army), probably less possible for Pentagon with
their Kurds militia.
And I think that any direct confrontation in Syria will automatically lead to confrontation
in Ukraine, were large part of Eastern regions might greet Russians as liberators."
I don't really understand Russian foreign policy at the moment. I think the Obama foreign policy
has been an improvement on the Bush government's foreign policy, and Obama inherited a very bad
situation if you look at him coming to the Presidency in 2008.
What does Russian foreign policy want now that the Cold War is over? America power is on the
decline with the rise of other countries, and Russian power is on the decline too. Both countries
had a lot of power due to the Cold War after WWII ended and the lack of development in many countries,
and Europe needing to rebuild so much after the war.
But why does Syria need to be a proxy war between America and Russia when the Cold War is over?
Someone from Afghanistan was telling me recently that in Afghanistan they consider they have had
war ongoing for 50 years now, since they had the wars with Russia years ago, and then they have
had the wars with America now, plus the country is riven by splits now after wars for so long.
The Middle East is going to need a lot of help to rebuild after these wars, they don't need
Russia and America fighting over power in the region.
"Actually I think that one on key ideas of Trump foreign policy agenda is to reverse this
alliance and split Russia from China by treating it differently then Obama administration (bad
cop, good cop approach)."
Also, I live in Australia so we have more coverage of Asian politics, and Obama has been pretty
good with China overall I think. China got cross about the pivot to Asia, and gave The Philippines
a very sharp warning in the official newspaper, and gave Australia a caution in the newspaper,
since then its all gone reasonably well I think.
Ah, foreign policy. I think that LFC should consider that while some commenter may well be a Putin
troll operation, the style is pretty much indistinguishable from strongly held local ethnic commitments,
and LFC's own writing sounds similarly weird and overcommitted to someone who doesn't share LFC's
assumptions.
I'll write some more about populism. One of the things that Lupita likes to point out is
how strange it is that somehow Americans are the decider of military intervention everywhere (LFC
again) and how American exceptionalism is part of our imperial setup.
One of the things that people forget about populism is that it's generally a revolt against
that - Americans may like empire, but for the people who actually have to fight, very few
of them really like being foot soldiers for empire.
Left agitation in the early part of the 20th century and in the 60s was in large part anti-war
agitation, and it was one of the main reasons why the government actually crushed left organizations.
One of the main reasons why you can tell that HRC supporters are not really on the left in any
important sense is the easy way that they switched from opposing Bush's war to approving of Democratic
"humanitarian" wars.
So why should we have to care about any of this foreign policy nonsense? What critical
interest does any American have in Asia, Ukraine, etc.? The vast and lofty left sentiments that
we are citizens of the world and that an injury to one is an injury to everyone - do these have
any meaning outside of an imperial context?
"I don't really understand Russian foreign policy at the moment. "
Russian foreign policy IMHO is mostly reactive and defensive. It is directed mainly on
preservation of (currently rapidly shrinking) Russia's economic and political and cultural influence
in xUSSR space.
Obama administration was very aggressive toward Russia and attempted to implement "regime
change" in 2011-2012 to prevent Putin re-election (so called "White revolution" with McFaul as
the key player and the network on NGO as the coordination / training / recruiting / propaganda
centers). This attempt to stage a "color revolution" in Russia backfired making Russian political
establishment more hostile to the USA. It also led to expulsion of several NGO from Russia. Later
events in Ukraine led to deterioration of political standing of Russian neoliberals as a political
force. They lost all the legitimacy among the population and now viewed by-and-large as US stooges.
The USA also try to play Islamic insurgence card via proxies and hurt economics of Russia via
sanctions and low oil prices (which simultaneously decimated US own shale/LTO oil industry). Obama
actually bragged about the latter.
My impression is that this is just a part of the more general plan of expansion of global neoliberal
empire led by the USA, enforcing neoliberal globalization and crushing all opposing regimes (including
"resource nationalists" like Russia ) that Obama administration is hell bent on (neocon vision
of "Pax Americana"). Obama (or, more correctly, forces behind him) proved to be a staunch neoliberal
(and neocon) on par with Bush II and Bill Clinton and he essentially continued Bush II "muscular"
foreign policy.
Hillary as the Secretary of State was even more jingoistic neocon then Obama and has during
her term in the office an outsize influence on the US foreign policy including the attempt to
stage a "white revolution" in Russia in which State Department played an outsize role, essentially
taking many functions formerly performed by CIA
I think that Russia foreign policy can be understood as not always successful attempts to counter
the attempts of the USA to subdue it and survive in the situation when then the major power using
affiliated with it states tries to deny its sovereignty and wants to convert into vassal state
(and Russia were the US vassal under Yeltsin regime), or, if possible, to dismember it into smaller
and weaker states using the rising wave of nationalism in the regions.
It also tried to oppose the "encirclement" - the creation of the belt of hostile states
around Russia with US or NATO forces/bases - Ukraine is just the most recent example of this policy.
Missile defense bases in Rumania and Poland belong to the same script. Actually the US Department
of Defense on those issues has its own outsize influence on the US foreign policy and works in
close coordination with the State Department (alliance started under Bush II and forged under
Hillary Clinton).
As Russophobia replaced anti-Semitism for the US elite, I see nothing good for Russia in this
respect in the future.
So the rearmament attempts and the attempts to develop alternatives to Western strategic products
and services (which at any time can be included under sanctions) as well as more deep political
and military alliance with China might well be their only options.
But China has its own geopolitical aspirations in xUSSR region and wants to play a leading
role in this alliance using Russia's difficult situation for its own advantage.
So Russian situation is not enviable and might soon became worse, in Hilary is elected.
Moreover, Putin in not eternal, and at some point needs to leave his position and that, taking
into account the amount of power he concentrated in his hands, might create the leadership vacuum
that will be very dangerous taking into consideration the level of hostility of the USA. Coming
to power of more nationalistically oriented politicians on the wave of anti-American sentiments
produced by sanctions also can't be excluded.
I am not a specialist in Russian affairs, so please take those considerations with a grain
of salt.
ZM: "But I wish there was some sort of international protocol about it." There was supposed
to be one - the whole apparatus of U.N. intervention. We've seen how that played out.
'So why should we have to care about any of this foreign policy nonsense? What critical
interest does any American have in Asia, Ukraine, etc.? The vast and lofty left sentiments
that we are citizens of the world and that an injury to one is an injury to everyone - do these
have any meaning outside of an imperial context?'
The sentiments have certainly been a useful pretext for imperial interventions, going
well beyond 'interest' to intimations of existential crisis, etc. I remember when, if we did
not 'help' the Vietnamese by bombing them back into the Stone Age, bad people from there were
going to invade California. So it was both to 'our' interest and theirs to kill millions of
them. You see the same thinking in Syria, Libya, Iraq, Serbia, Panama, and the rest of the
list.
But on the other side, at the business end of the stick:
Cet animal est trčs méchant;
Quand on l'attaque, il se défend.
"No one wants one country to rule the world as if its Lord Of The Rings"
Oh, come on. I'd completely vote for Sauron. That all-seeing eye would spy out all foreign
armies and spies, except for hobbits of course. Regretfully, in our own defense, we'd have to
bomb all hobbit terrorist villages.
Well with technology there is the possibility of that, Australia is part of the Five Eyes
alliance with the USA, which is where the English speaking countries all share intelligence, then
there is a larger group that gets a bit less intelligence, and maybe others like an onion or something.
But its not really what anyone hardly wants as far as I can tell.
I had no idea there even was that much information collected by the government on people until
the Snowdon whistleblower revelations about the NSA.
Rich @ 348: "I think that LFC should consider that while some commenter may well be a Putin
troll operation, the style is pretty much indistinguishable from strongly held local ethnic commitments,
and LFC's own writing sounds similarly weird and overcommitted to someone who doesn't share LFC's
assumptions."
To me this is the wierdest and most hypocritical aspect of the whole "Putin stooge!" narrative,
since part of the core ethos of US-aligned liberal discourse in settings like this is precisely
a willingness and eagerness to voluntarily assume the role of stooge for whatever ruling-class
figure one has decided to back. Look at the core message liberals here seem to be trumpeting:
we may not like the faction of the ruling class embodied in someone like Hillary Clinton, but
since we've decided to back this faction over another faction we consider worse, we'll suspend
our earnest search for truth and understanding so we can add our voices into the fight. ("We know
Hillary is bad, but save it for after Trump!")
There's probably a lot more that can be said about this, but at least as far as the non-ruling-class
public is concerned, what Americans call "partisanship" in this Inside-Baseball sense can be read
as a political analogue of the apocryphal Steinbeck line about temporarily embarrassed millionaires,
absurdly overinflating the importance of their own little Machiavellian calculations to maintain
a pathetically optimistic political self-image, not as the depoliticized and socially atomized
ideological consumers they actually are, but as temporarily embarrassed technocratic insiders.
But the kicker re: Putin is that somehow, these same liberals can't fathom the idea that
ordinary Russians might be gripped by precisely the same kind of dynamic ("we know Putin is bad
but save it for after Syria!") especially when it comes to nationalist fervor stirred up by global
military/economic power struggles.
And to the extent that they see such people not as the Russian ideological equivalents
of themselves but as literal agents of the Kremlin, precisely the way one might imagine all the
Hillary defenders on this thread as COINTELPRO plants and/or paid Clinton campaign PR operatives,
they're able to see this obsequious defense of ruling-class power for the creepy authoritarian
servility it is. One could call the double standards closed-minded or even xenophobic, but I'll
settle for just calling it bizarre.
bruce wilder , 10.03.16 at 2:51 pm
American foreign policy has long been the special province of deeply interested portions of
the elite, which were allowed to use U.S. naval and military power without paying for it.
Early in the 19th century, it was Yankee traders in China and South America paddling their
boats in the British Empire's wake. The Americans were there, junior partners and useful instruments
of British foreign policy: Monroe Doctrine, founding Hong Kong, opening Japan and Korea, disciplining
unruly or bankrupt Latin American states. The U.S. nearly matched the British in the race to build
Dreadnoughts before the First World War, proclaimed the Open Door in China, neutralized the German
Navy in Morocco and in the Venezuela Crisis, and finally settled the First World War.
Since the First World War, the U.S. has been the hegemon, sponsoring a world order on liberal
principles in theory and making the world safe for an often rapacious commercial order in practice.
Popular disinterest at home has preserved the tradition of hijacking the U.S. military for racketeering
abroad, but the privatizing of the military-industrial complex has converted it from sideline
into a reason for being: arms sales follow a Says Law that motivates perpetual war as a marketing
tool.
ZM is ridiculously wrong about one thing: "No one wants one country to rule the world"
I think there is actually quite a demand for exactly that. That the U.S. capacity to satisfy that
demand is diminishing rapidly is creating a gathering world crisis.
Will G-R: liberals can't fathom the idea that ordinary Russians might be gripped by precisely
the same kind of dynamic ("we know Putin is bad but save it for after Syria!")
I'm not sure that's the relevant analogue.
Americans seem to have some difficulty understanding just how competent Putin has been.
Putin is a consummately gifted gambler, who has played a weak hand aggressively at home and abroad.
He is popular in Russia, because he has been successful by being phenomenally good at his job
- so good that any Russian who isn't dead stupid is worried about what comes after.
Obama, the most gifted politician I've seen in my lifetime, has played his hand very conservatively.
I rail against him, because I think he should have taken much bigger chances on a radical reform
agenda, using the crisis he was gifted to take apart the oligarchies choking the American political
economy. But, he chose not to play the game at that level of risk, and I think history will
judge him to be weak because of the consequences, though he has not been politically weak and
he has been remarkably successful in terms of his chosen agenda.
Both Americans and Russians, I think, are inclined to see their roles in the world as more
benign than they are. The Americans, though, have better PR and a lot of people abroad still want
to believe. No one believes the Russians are a benign force, especially in Russia's Near
Abroad.
The scary thing is that Americans have been propagandized into thinking Clinton is competent,
that she will be the adult in the room, the experienced leader who will take the call at 3 am
(and not tweet out some link to a porn tape).
In fact, Clinton has shown a number of indications that she is not competent at all, that she
is, unlike Obama, going to unleash the U.S. foreign policy establishment and military-industrial
complex in all its decadent schizophrenia without any governor or restraint at all.
That Clinton is so cavalier about making Putin the scapegoat for her email problems is an early
indication that she doesn't know what she is doing.
I know that it's a digression, but I really should write some more about hobbits. The one thing
that would shake my convictions as an anarchist would be a political leader who promises to wipe
out their barbaric "mathom culture".
First of all, they never can get ahead economically because of this premodern habit of putting
their economic surplus into items that they pass around aimlessly. And the way they waste food
- has anyone seen the depravity of their so-called wedding parties? I know that drones are a harsh
remedy, but really.
And of course the feminist case for bombing hobbits is as strong as it ever was. Has anyone
even heard of a female hobbit? Of course you haven't, because they keep them in those primitive
holes, and they only appear in brief cameos when the hobbits have to conceal their unadmitted
homosocial orientation. Strong hobbit women will be much better off if we kill the men keeping
them down as well as some of their children.
And lastly, genocide. Are their even any members of other racial groups living in the Shire?
Where did they all go? Hobbit society is deeply racist, and those holes are dumping groups for
bodies as well as potential storehouses for chemical weapons. I know that some people say that
we shouldn't bomb them, but that's only because those people can't even imagine what it's like
not to have the privilege that they do.
likbez 10.03.16 at 3:48 pm
Bruce,
@ 358
"ZM is ridiculously wrong about one thing: "No one wants one country to rule the world"
I think there is actually quite a demand for exactly that. That the U.S. capacity to satisfy
that demand is diminishing rapidly is creating a gathering world crisis."
As president, Barack Obama's efforts to change the U.S.'s exercise of power "have seldom risen
above the cosmetic"(20). He made clear he subscribes to the "catechism of American statecraft,"
viz. that 1) the world must be organized, 2)only the U.S. can do it, 3) this includes dictating
principles, and 4) not to accept this is to be a rogue or a recalcitrant (20-21).
It follows that the U.S. need not conform to the norms it sets for others and that it should
maintain a worldwide network of bases (22-23).
Imagine if China acted in a comparable manner (23-25). The extraordinary American military
posture in the world (25-27). To call this into question puts one beyond the pale(27). James Forrestal
called this a permanent condition of semiwar, requiring high levels of military spending(27-28).
American citizens are not supposed to concern themselves with it (29-30). As to how this came
about, the "standard story line" presents as the result of the decisions of a "succession of presidential
administrations," though this conceals as much as it reveals (30-32).
Eisenhower's 1961 Farewell Address on the "military-industrial complex" was a rare exception
(32-34). More important than presidents were Allen Dulles [1893-1969] and Curtis Lemay [1906-1990]
(34-36).
Bacevich attributes the vision for an American-dominated post-World War II world with the CIA
playing an active role to the patrician Dulles (36-43). The development of the U.S. military into
a force capable of dominating the world, especially in the area of strategic weapons, he attributes
to the hard-bitten Curtis LeMay, organizer of the StrategicAir Command (SAC) (43-52). Dulles and
LeMay shared devotion to country, ruthlessness, a certain recklessness (52-55). They exploited
American anxieties and insecurities in yin (Dulles's CIA) yang(LeMay's SAC) fashion, leaving the
mainstay of American military power, the U.S. Army, in a relatively weak position(55-58).
Ch. 2: Illusions of Flexibility and Control
Kennedy kept Dulles and LeMay to signal continuity, but there was a behind-the-scenes struggle
led by Gen. Maxwell Taylor to reassert the role of the U.S. Army by expanding and modernizing
conventional forces that was "simultaneously masked by, and captured in, the phrase flexible response
" (60; 59-63).
This agenda purported to aim at "resisting aggression" but really created new options for limited
aggressive warfare by the U.S. (63-66).
McNamara engaged in a struggle with LeMay to control U.S. policy on nuclear weapons, but he embraced
the need for redundancy based on a land-sea-air attack "triad" and LeMay et al. "got most of what
they wanted" (66-72).
In the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy instituted the morally and legally "indefensible"
Operation Mongoose," in effect, a program of state-sponsored terrorism" against Cuba (80; 72-82
[but Bacevich is silent on its wilder elements, like Operation Northwoods]).
U.S. recklessness caused the Cuban Missile Crisis, and to his credit Kennedy acknowledged this
(albeit privately) and "suspended the tradition" in defusing the crisis (82-87).
Bacevich rejects as a romantic delusion the view that in the aftermath of this crisis Kennedy
turned against the military-industrial complex and the incipient Vietnam war and shows no interest
in Kennedy's assassination itself (87-92).
He sees a parallel between escalation in Vietnam and post-9/11 aggression as "fought to sustain
the Washington consensus" (107; 92-107).
Ch. 3: The Credo Restored.
William Fulbright's The Arrogance of Power (1966) urged a rethinking of the Washington rules
(109-15). A radicalized David Shoup, a Medal of Honor winner and former commandant of the MarineCorps,
argued in "The New American Militarism" (Atlantic, April 1969) that the U.S. had become "a militaristic
and aggressive nation" (120; 115-21). The 1960s Zeitgeist shift made LeMay "an embarrassment,
mocked and vilified rather than venerated," which showed that the Washington rules had incurred
serious damage in Vietnam; the Army was in dire shape (122; 121-27).
Yet astonishingly, in the subsequent decade the "sacred trinity" (cf. 11-15) was "fully restored"
(127). As in post-1918 Germany, élites looked for scapegoats and worked to reverse "the war's
apparent verdict" (128). The Council on Foreign Relations 1976 volume entitled The Vietnam Legacy:
The War, American Society, and the Future of American Foreign Policy is an expression of élite
consensus that the Vietnam war was insignificant, an anomaly (129-34).
By 1980, Democrats and Republicans were again on the same page (134-36).Reagan's election "sealed
the triumph of Vietnam revisionism" (136; 136-38). And the end of the Cold War posed no challenge
to the Washington rules, as Madeleine Albright's pretentious arrogance exemplifies (138-45).
stevenjohnson 10.03.16 at 3:55 pm
"In fact, Clinton has shown a number of indications that she is not competent at all, that
she is, unlike Obama, going to unleash the U.S. foreign policy establishment and military-industrial
complex in all its decadent schizophrenia without any governor or restraint at all."
Backing away from openly bombing the Syrian government when the English PM couldn't get the
vote from Parliament is not restraint. Signing a booby trapped pact with the Iranian government
which will not end sanctions is not restraint. Endorsing the Indian attack on Pakistan is not
restraint. Endorsing the Saudi invasion of Yemen is not restraint. A trillion dollar upgrade of
nuclear weapons is not restraint. Supporting IS all the time and bombing it some time is not restraint.
The raving chorus of criticism of Clinton's foreign policy on ostensibly leftist grounds
that falsifies the current state of affairs is viciously reactionary, especially when indissolubly
mixed with openly reactionary criticisms. The falsification of what exactly is different about
Trump's candidacy is also part and parcel. It's all very like the fake leftists who said defeating
the Scottish referendum wasn't an endorsement of English imperialism, then pretended to act surprised
when the rightward surge they helped to build led to a racist campaign for Brexit.
Putin is weak. He sacrificed a struggle against fascism in Ukraine for a naval base, rather
than call on popular support. Then he doubled down on another naval base in Syria, despite having
no idea how to reach a solution. He can't cope with the economic warfare the US is waging, he
only tries to use simple repression of the population at large and an elaborate combination of
select repression and appeasement of the oligarchs he ultimately serves.
Putin is popular I think largely because he appears to be the human face of capitalism.
He's falsely sold himself as the corrective to Yeltsin, when in truth he is just the normalization
of Yeltsinism. Yetltsin did the dirty work of attacking the people of Russia in the name of capitalist
restoration. Now, Putin is just business as usual.
Bruce, I meant "bad" in a good/evil sense, not a competent/incompetent sense. Clinton partisans
may be fairly unanimous in waxing rhapsodic about her competence, but plenty of them are willing
to cop to her position as a defender of an ultimately evil form of ruling-class power, they simply
think it shouldn't be talked about (see Collin Street @ 184 for an exemplary specimen).
It's the insidious ideology of the Uncle Sam poster, where a slightly-less-evil form of
ruling-class power needs you not just to passively submit to its dictates but to actively
defend its position against its slightly-more-evil ideological enemies, even at the expense of
your own independent moral compass and political thought. The point of this facade isn't
what the lemming-like hordes of Clinton defenders (or Putin defenders, if they're Russian) are
actually accomplishing, which is essentially nothing; the point is what they're not accomplishing,
which is any meaningfully subversive reflection about how ruling-class power works in general
and how the governed classes might effectively counter it.
"... The strongest part of "America's War for the Greater Middle East" is the thirteenth chapter, where Bacevich dissects Bush 43's decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power. While I have previously argued that American war aims in the Iraq war were unidentifiable Bacevich's formulation of said aims (namely, that our overarching aim was to force everyone in the region to bend to our will) is plausible. The weakest part of the book is the very limited discussion (limited basically to chapter 16) of the US special relationship with Israel, a pariah state based on an obsolete ideology, which in my opinion is the real driver of the war. If this relationship could be ended or redefined, we would in one stroke go most of the way towards a rational policy in the Middle East. ..."
"... He cites many examples of Americans deceiving themselves about what constitutes terrorism and who is a terrorist and why they do it. ..."
"... He also makes a convincing case for the war having begun with Carter and never stopping, even in periods between more known wars; much of the action was American use of air power in Iraq, but also tensions with Iran in the Persian Gulf, what was once very strong US support of jihadis fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan (1979-89). ..."
Blocking Consensus: A Critical View of "America's War for the Greater Middle East: A
Military History" , April 15, 2016
"America's War for the Greater Middle East" is the third book I have read by Andrew Bacevich,
who has unique authority to speak on the subject as the war claimed his son's life. Unfortunately,
this book lacks the power of the first two books, "The Limits of Power" and "Breach of Trust."
The overall indictment of American society that it delivers was more convincing in "Breach of
Trust," or perhaps I am simply blinded by the very ideology that Bacevich decries in this book.
I have bought into the status quo in this respect: I believe some, if not most, of the goods recognized
by Americans are indeed universal. I am unwilling to concede that the millions of Afghan girls
and women who got an education in the years after the Taliban's control of that country were first
challenged would be better off if we had never gone in. I also believe that the number of casualties
we are now sustaining in CENTCOM and AFRICOM is low enough that what we are doing is sustainable
indefinitely, unless the Muslim world gets so angry at us that it unites into a new superpower
to challenge us globally. This will disappoint a lot of people and isn't necessarily consistent
with what I have argued at other times but the absence of even one critical review on Amazon was
something I couldn't stomach anymore.
Per Bacevich, the first American lives lost in America's War for the Greater Middle East were
the fatalities of the aircraft collision as special operators were queuing up to leave Desert
One after the mission was called off. I think it does a disservice to President Carter to imply
that sending troops for a rescue mission committed the United States to perpetual war for unachievable
aims, or even to call it the Poland of this war. Bacevich's position that the Carter Doctrine
calling for the free transit of Saudi and other Gulf Arab oil through the Straits of Hormuz made
Desert One and other interventions inevitable is somewhat more supportable.
The strongest part of "America's War for the Greater Middle East" is the thirteenth chapter,
where Bacevich dissects Bush 43's decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power. While I have previously
argued that American war aims in the Iraq war were unidentifiable Bacevich's formulation of said
aims (namely, that our overarching aim was to force everyone in the region to bend to our will)
is plausible. The weakest part of the book is the very limited discussion (limited basically to
chapter 16) of the US special relationship with Israel, a pariah state based on an obsolete ideology,
which in my opinion is the real driver of the war. If this relationship could be ended or redefined,
we would in one stroke go most of the way towards a rational policy in the Middle East.
This book is headed for some Books of the Year lists and maybe some awards. It's well researched,
unusually well-written and deeply disturbing. It is not an easy read; there are hundreds of names,
locations and events over four decades. It deals with how we got into the mess, how we kept at
it and how we're not going to get out. That's the disturbing point, the number of factors that
indicate that we are going to continue with what the book calls the War for the Greater Middle
East. I wish he was wrong, but his case is overwhelming and logically developed. Rather than describe
this book as other reviews have done, I'll consider some details that struck me and add a couple
of quotes to give the flavor. Note: the author has strong opinions, and has ample criticism for
all presidents from Carter to Obama, and strong criticism of many generals, but Republican readers
will not like some of his comments, one cited below. His overall view is rather similar to the
famed quote from World War 1, about lions led by donkeys.
"...combined incoherence with self-deception, both to become abiding hallmarks of America's
evolving War for the Greater Middle East." (44).
"Like the present-day GOP, the Northern Alliance was a loose coalition of unsavory opportunists,
interested chiefly in acquiring power." (227)
"Instead of intimidating, US military efforts have annoyed, incited and generally communicated
a lack of both competence and determination." (367).
He cites many examples of Americans deceiving themselves about what constitutes terrorism
and who is a terrorist and why they do it. The book covers in considerable detail the Carter
actions in Iran, Reagan's Marines in Lebanon, the Bush's wars in Iraq, Clinton's actions in Somalia--in
considerable detail, these actions involved 38,000 US troops at one point, and resulted quite
simply in defeat. He notes that US actions in Bosnia and Kosovo rescued Muslims, who now are enlisting
in considerable numbers as jihadis in the Middle East. In Kosovo he notes that US protection resulted
in a Kosovar state that promptly engaged in an ethnic cleansing of Serbs. He notes that US troops
defeated Iraq's military but the numbers were too small to effectively deal with Baghdad (a city
of 5 million at the time), leading to the collapse of law and order. He thinks the point of defeat
is the incident of Abu Ghraib.
He also makes a convincing case for the war having begun with Carter and never stopping,
even in periods between more known wars; much of the action was American use of air power in Iraq,
but also tensions with Iran in the Persian Gulf, what was once very strong US support of jihadis
fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan (1979-89). Putting situations that tend to be forgotten
about in succession with larger events makes it obvious that the war began under Carter and has
simmered ever since, with periodic intensifications.
And near the book's end he discusses several reasons why the war is going to continue. One,
there is no anti-war or effective anti-interventionist party. Two, electoral expediency means
major party candidates will continue to support military actions. Three, some individuals and
organizations (and companies) benefit from continued war (jobs, military contracts). Four, Americans
largely seem oblivious to the war. There's more, but these are main reasons.
"... Notice that this interview fails to mention that the huge influx of refugees into Europe is the direct result of the US creating failed states in the Middle East. ..."
"... Yes. As many have said, critical thinking in DC went out the door with 9/11. Those in DC who shouldn't be in jail, probably should at most be mopping floors at McDonalds. ..."
"... Let's note that pre-9/11 the foreign policy wasn't exactly just/moral/sane. ..."
"... Who cares? Since when did we live in a democracy? How many people wanted the Syrian and Lybian conflicts? ..."
"... Do we all have to die in poverty because our leaders (in the case of these wars, Zionist) pushed war clandestinely? ..."
"... Funny how that logic is never applied to others who are attacked (victims of our foreign policy). They should act like saints and we should bomb more (or, rather, commit genocide). Maybe might makes right, but then say it and stop masquerading as some burdened savior. ..."
"... At this year's celebration a couple of people were badly injured by Ukrainian rightists who reportedly fled back to the Ukraine, escaping justice. And, as I recall, there was a recent report of a French rightist who had received bomb materials from Ukrainians. ..."
"... I recently read accounts of the rise of neo-nazi and right-wing extremist groups in the former DDR after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Apparently they were substantially infiltrated by US and German intelligence services and, as a result, enjoyed a certain level of impunity and de facto ..."
"... On the other hand, the link between US 'intelligence' and Ukrainian neo-nazis is reasonably well established and is unlikely to have sprung into existence moments before their Maidan mobilization. That they would now use their safe harbor in Ukraine as a base for operations across Europe should not be particularly shocking. ..."
"... Okay, I have some serious problems with this. One, Israel is not just Jewish in its composition. Two, not all Jewish people live in Israel. Three, Jewish people lived along side Muslims and Christians for hundreds of years in that region before Britain, the USA and some useful idiot Zionists decided to make a geopolitical springboard in 1948. You may be right that every nation pursues its own agenda, but I'm not concerned about that, I'm concerned about the nation or nations pursuing their agenda(s) that have the most wealth and the biggest bombs. I'm concerned about the ones running the empire, and Israel is a useful servant to that empire. ..."
"... Israel is a nation state. Identifying as Jewish is another matter altogether. Israel is a colony that was formed at the wrong place and the wrong time. They could have pulled it off in the 18th or 19th century (see USA, Canada, Australia, the entire Western Hemisphere), but doing so immediately after a global war that was largely the end result of nation's colonial ambitions was a big no-no. The window of opportunity for such shenanigans had passed and the British, US, and Zionist progenitors of Israel knew better. ..."
"... If AfD opponents simplistically think that the AfD are a rabble of angry closet Neo-Nazis…..boy their moral/intellectual smugness is going to be shattered at the ballot box in the upcoming years. The core of AfD are the German equivalent of ol' time bottom 90% FDR Democrats. ..."
"... FDR was probably the only American president who was not entirely the servant of the capitalist ruling class. His reforms were for the benefit of American workers and he dragged the Democratic party along with him in creating the American social welfare system. He truly favored cooperative competition with the Soviet Union. Believing his vision of liberalism to be superior to Soviet socialism he had none of the knee jerk fear and hatred of them that has always characterized the American ruling class' relationship with Russia – even now 20 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He was entirely confident the working class would choose his vision. ..."
"... "Notice that this interview fails to mention that the huge influx of refugees into Europe is the direct result of the US creating failed states in the Middle East." ..."
"... I've always assumed the costs of the Syria intervention - geopolitical insecurity, refugees, etc. were seen as a useful collateral dampener on the rise of a Germany-dominated Europe. Perhaps not sought after, but when those costs were put in the calculus and were seen to affect the European states the most, the cost-shifting became a net enabler. ..."
"... The definitive proof of the Empire of Chaos's real agenda in Syria may be found in a 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) document declassified in May last year. ..."
"... "THE WEST, GULF COUNTRIES, AND TURKEY [WHO] SUPPORT THE [SYRIAN] OPPOSITION… THERE IS THE POSSIBILITY OF ESTABLISHING A DECLARED OR UNDECLARED SALAFIST PRINCIPALITY IN EASTERN SYRIA (HASAKA AND DER ZOR), AND THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT THE SUPPORTING POWERS TO THE OPPOSITION WANT, IN ORDER TO ISOLATE THE SYRIAN REGIME, WHICH IS CONSIDERED THE STRATEGIC DEPTH OF THE SHIA EXPANSION (IRAQ AND IRAN)". ..."
"... It establishes that over four years ago US intel was already hedging its bets between established al-Qaeda in Syria, aka Jabhat al-Nusra, and the emergence of ISIS/ISIL/Daesh, aka the Islamic State. ..."
"... It's already in the public domain that by a willful decision, leaked by current Donald Trump adviser Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Washington allowed the emergence of the Islamic State – remember that gleaming white Toyota convoy crossing the open desert? – as a most convenient US strategic asset, and not as the enemy in the remixed, never-ending GWOT (Global War on Terra). ..."
Yves: It's amazing how infrequently this point is made in any political debate or news coverage.
(Jeremy Corbyn being one rare example of someone who brings it up.):
Notice that this interview fails to mention that the huge influx of refugees into Europe
is the direct result of the US creating failed states in the Middle East.
If there were any justice, the refugees would be swamping the UK, US, and France in huge numbers,
as those are the countries that cooked up the Libya failed state and also most active in Syria.
Crazy or stupid (your choice) Hollande vowed to increase the French warfare in Syria after the
recent terror attacks in Paris and elsewhere. As though MORE BOMBS ever managed to decrease terrorism,
right?
Though Merkel made her own bed with her "let them all come to Germany!" invitation, and now
she is sleeping in it. Good riddance when and if she goes.
Yes. As many have said, critical thinking in DC went out the door with 9/11. Those in DC
who shouldn't be in jail, probably should at most be mopping floors at McDonalds.
Hey now. I mop floors. I know people who mop floors. Those perps, sir, are not fit to mop floors.
Unless it's in prison. And even then I'm sure they'd suck. Takes integrity to do a humble job
well.
Who cares? Since when did we live in a democracy? How many people wanted the Syrian and
Lybian conflicts? If I recall, war was averted in parliament and congress.
Do we all have to die in poverty because our leaders (in the case of these wars, Zionist)
pushed war clandestinely?
Funny how that logic is never applied to others who are attacked (victims of our foreign
policy). They should act like saints and we should bomb more (or, rather, commit genocide). Maybe
might makes right, but then say it and stop masquerading as some burdened savior.
as James Baldwin said: "aching, nobly, to wade through the blood of savages."
Thanks for posting this Grossman interview. One facet of the development of the far right that
Grossman hints at, and maybe can only do so because there isn't much data, is its transnational
quality. This summer we visited some lefty friends in Lund, Sweden where each year they hold a
large May Day rally.
At this year's celebration a couple of people were badly injured by Ukrainian rightists
who reportedly fled back to the Ukraine, escaping justice. And, as I recall, there was a recent
report of a French rightist who had received bomb materials from Ukrainians.
As I think about, there's an ugly resonance with Yves' noting the refugees are substantially
a result of US policies. The development of a rightist terrorist potential in the Ukraine has
the same general source.
I recently read accounts of the rise of neo-nazi and right-wing extremist groups in the
former DDR after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Apparently they were substantially infiltrated
by US and German intelligence services and, as a result, enjoyed a certain level of impunity and
de facto financial support from these governments. They were also linked to members
of the 'stay behind' organizations (see
Operation Gladio
), and were 'useful' in violently opposing left-wing groups as well as punk rockers. The modern
AfD is strongest in the states of the former DDR, and are the ideological if not logistical heirs
of these right-wing groups. But to conflate 15% of the electorate with semi-pro neo-nazis and
racists is a bit of a stretch. While they are surely motivated by a strong nativist impulse and
anti-immigrant fervor, their voters also represent the kind of disaffected and disenfranchised
populations that carried the Brexit vote to victory.
On the other hand, the link between US 'intelligence' and Ukrainian neo-nazis is reasonably
well established and is unlikely to have sprung into existence moments before their Maidan mobilization.
That they would now use their safe harbor in Ukraine as a base for operations across Europe should
not be particularly shocking.
No, the AfD is not linked to the CIA It is a pro-social welfare, anti-TPP group that also
wants fair migrant exchanges, that is not just to Europe. It is pestered and censored in Germany.
Just expressing support in ways a security agent deems 'offensive' gets you fined and ostracized.
The fight over private property rights continues. Liberal Democracy has failed around the world
due to the unholy alliance with corporate power. Unchecked corporate power has been unmasked as
the destructive force that it truly is.
The left needs to evolve into a political force that can shape the consciousness of the masses
away from individual greed toward the undeniable benefit of cooperative action. The right will
use fear to drive people into some sort of trembling mass and only by combating this fear can
movement be made.
The compromise the left needs to make is to use any means possible, not to seize the means
of production form existing owners, but to start building alternative ones. It is all too easy
for the right to bring out their tried and true methods to hold power. It is time to starve the
beast, and one way is to not participate and build in another direction.
Corporate power is what needs to be broken. From my limited view, the left has always been
a reactionary force. It needs to evolve into a proactive one, literally building something in
the real world. Another major mistake by the left is to reject and confuse the power of religion.
Neoliberalism is a new religion and gains much power by the use of unquestioning faith. The left
has failed to counteract this religious faith because they have not even tried to counter it with
their own. Just as finance has evolved into a military weapon, it can be argued that religion,
in essence, is a military force.
The political landscape is being reshuffled into defining what we are willing to fight and
die for. Until the left starts offering coherent answers to these questions, the status quo will
continue to pick from the low hanging fruit.
Okay, I have some serious problems with this. One, Israel is not just Jewish in its composition.
Two, not all Jewish people live in Israel. Three, Jewish people lived along side Muslims and Christians
for hundreds of years in that region before Britain, the USA and some useful idiot Zionists decided
to make a geopolitical springboard in 1948. You may be right that every nation pursues its own
agenda, but I'm not concerned about that, I'm concerned about the nation or nations pursuing their
agenda(s) that have the most wealth and the biggest bombs. I'm concerned about the ones running
the empire, and Israel is a useful servant to that empire.
Israel is a nation state. Identifying as Jewish is another matter altogether. Israel is
a colony that was formed at the wrong place and the wrong time. They could have pulled it off
in the 18th or 19th century (see USA, Canada, Australia, the entire Western Hemisphere), but doing
so immediately after a global war that was largely the end result of nation's colonial ambitions
was a big no-no. The window of opportunity for such shenanigans had passed and the British, US,
and Zionist progenitors of Israel knew better.
In addition, it is nonsense that we have normalized the formation of a nation state around
a single ethnic or religious identity. Particularly after the Holocaust (the irony of this never
ceases to amaze me). Would we have the same sympathies for the the countless indigenous ethnic
groups in the Americas who, per capita, had even worse genocides inflicted on them, all documented,
all accepted as inevitable or necessary in most histories of the Americas? Israel is a contorted
hypocrisy that has to either embrace heterogeneity of disappear. Ideally as an inclusive country
that is no longer a colony as it has been for hundreds of years. The fetish that is Israel has
been an unfair burden to all people living in the Middle East and Jewish people the world over
that are forced to (through the sheer force of political dogma) shackle their identities to a
racist, rogue state.
" AfD stands for Alternative for Germany. It's a young party, about 2 years old. It's
built basically on racism."
Got more important things to do than rant about the above statement….
Just will quote basic Sun Tzu via Star Trek-know your opponent, know yourself and victory will
be yours.
If AfD opponents simplistically think that the AfD are a rabble of angry closet Neo-Nazis…..boy
their moral/intellectual smugness is going to be shattered at the ballot box in the upcoming years.
The core of AfD are the German equivalent of ol' time bottom 90% FDR Democrats.
And on the other side Sarah Wagenknecht, a leader in the left, hit a lot of flak from many
in her party when she said there needs to be an "Obergrenze" or limit on the number of refugees.
It would hard to call her racist since she is half Persian. It really is a conflict between those
who cannot think realistically….those who are supported or secure enough not to have to take responsibility
for anyone, and those who will need to make the world function. As a Socialist she apparently
is aware that you cannot have a strong social net and combine that with open immigration from
places that have astronomical birthrates that are outgrowing their resources without destroying
that net. I recall Hillary and the open border people attacked Bernie on that as well. I thought
it was unfair and it is this pandering, among other issues, that will keep me from voting for
her. There is a lot of commonality between AfD and the Linke. Don`t forget that the notion of
German population replacement had some currency during and after WW2 in order to permanently solve
the German problem and we may just be actualizing it now.
In fairness, US immigration policy has slowly been getting tougher over the last 16 years.
Immigration policy in the US goes beyond dialect. I doubt Clinton would be overly "easy".
It's easier. Apart from the new Obama rule to issue visas to H1b holders, effectively tripling
the numbers issued but still under the cap, to a myriad of other programs, it's much easier.
Of the several foreign students I've dated, it gets easier every year. Back in 03, one had
to have an accountant degree with CPA certs, and even then, you often were slave labor in Chi-Town
until you hooked up with an American company. Now the black market foreign industry is so large,
that a mere B.A. is enough. The gov doesn't care. Everyone is approved, save the cap.
spooky quatsch comment from oho – hard to tell what oho means with "90% bottom- line fdr dems".
The very diverse FDR / Dem majority coalesced during and in response to economic crisis. The AfD
has emerged during a German boom. It is successful in East Germany, which in the wake of economic
collapse immediately following reunification has been the beneficiary of massive inner-German
transfers. And it is successful in West Germany much of which is effectively at full-employment.
Its core supporters are the 10% of any populazion that is racist, nationalist, and ignorant. You
might try to argue that there is a uniquely irrational fear in Germany, something associated with
its position on the left edge of Eurasia maybe, a heterogenous cultural unit without convincing
access to the sea, trapped if you will and vulnerable to human flows. Sounds silly but it's hard
to account for German fear.
The AfD is using this irrational fear for political gain. FDR was supported largely by voters
with very real fears.
FDR was probably the only American president who was not entirely the servant of the capitalist
ruling class. His reforms were for the benefit of American workers and he dragged the Democratic
party along with him in creating the American social welfare system. He truly favored cooperative
competition with the Soviet Union. Believing his vision of liberalism to be superior to Soviet
socialism he had none of the knee jerk fear and hatred of them that has always characterized the
American ruling class' relationship with Russia – even now 20 years after the collapse of the
Soviet Union. He was entirely confident the working class would choose his vision.
His reactionary political enemies, concentrated in finance capital, had no reason to be
so confident. Their fear and loathing of the working class was/is legitimately earned.
"Notice that this interview fails to mention that the huge influx of refugees into Europe
is the direct result of the US creating failed states in the Middle East."
That's typical of all MSM (not saying TRNN is mainstream) coverage of refugees. There's lots
of discussion and hand-wringing about accepting refugees, but exactly zero about why they're refugees
in the first place.
Yes the US has had a lot to do with destabilizing Asia and Africa but a lot of it has simply
been a continuation of British policy after WW2. As Britain shrank its foreign involvement the
US expanded. But the real cause is the inability of our politicians and leaders to face up to
the reality that population growth is hitting the limits of resource availability in Asia and
Africa and to institute realistic ways to control population. Absent the population explosion
in these regions in the last decades we would not be seeing the poverty and anger and constant
confllict because there would be enough for all. As much bad press as China has gotten for its
population policy it is one of the few bright spots in world economic development. Interestingly
China does not seem very interested in accepting millions of third world refugees.
I've always assumed the costs of the Syria intervention - geopolitical insecurity, refugees,
etc. were seen as a useful collateral dampener on the rise of a Germany-dominated Europe. Perhaps
not sought after, but when those costs were put in the calculus and were seen to affect the European
states the most, the cost-shifting became a net enabler.
In my naďve point of view it hit me last year that it was a brilliant stroke of Angela Merkel
to grab as many refugees as she could before any other country.
They are a tremendous natural resource. One that many modern countries are beginning to see a
coming shortage of. Many countries, like Germany, France, etc are looking at population shortages
in the working age groups. Merkel's grab of this mass of human resource was maybe an accidentally
brilliant idea.
can't tell if the above comment is satire or astroturfing or naivety?
Merkel's migrants have zero higher-level first-world skills. AfD is strong in ex-East Germany
because there is popular resentment as ex-East Germans get austerity shoved down their throats
while Merkel unfurls the red carpet for migrants.
in der Frage nach festen Arbeitsplätzen für Flüchtlinge ruhen die Hoffnungen zunehmend auf
mittelständischen Unternehmen und Handwerksbetrieben. Denn wie eine Umfrage dieser Zeitung ergab,
hat die große Mehrzahl der im deutschen Aktienindex (Dax) notierten Konzerne noch keine Flüchtlinge
eingestellt. Einzig die Deutsche Post gab an, bis Anfang Juni 50 Flüchtlinge und damit eine nennenswerte
Größe fest angestellt zu haben.
Not true. Syrians are very highly educated. Very good public education and high average attainment.
But Merkel was an idiot if she actually did recognize that Syrians were high potential workers
yet did nothing re how to integrate them, most important, acquisition of German and jobs matching.
The fact capitalism is a ponzi scheme is a key here. When the Aristocracy bowed to the Sephardic
bankers, they created this mess. They were the same idiots that bowed to the Christians 1500+
years before.
Maybe it is time for a new aristocracy. If you want to build internally, you have to abolish
capitalism and its market based scam. That is why "right wingers" won't last without the Sephardic
banks via market expansion. They run the scheme and always have. From their immigration into the
Iberian trails during the 15th century, to their financing and eventual leadership into the protestant
reformation, to the first capitalists scheme at Amsterdam to bribing William the Orange into taking
it into old England.
1. Most of the refugees arriving in Europe are Syrian. The US did not act to topple the Syrian
dictator and did not create a new Syrian government. The United States is responsible for these
refugees.
2. A portion of the refugees are Libyan. At the urging of its European allies (not just the
UK), the US helped topple the Libyan government, but has not created a new government. The US
is responsible for these refugees.
3. A portion of the refugees are from Iraq or Afghanistan. The US toppled the old governments
and installed new ones. The US is responsible for these refugees.
4. A significant portion of the refugees are from African countries including Nigeria and Eritrea.
I assume that these aren't included in the statement above as they are not Middle Eastern.
So, in other words – the US is responsible whether or not we intervene and whether or not we
then attempt to set up a government? I wonder under what circumstances you would not view the
US as responsible?
I would suggest, that given the situation in the Middle East and the fact that the results
are similar regardless of US actions something more basic is at work. Most of the nations of the
Middle East and Africa were artificial creations of primarily Britain and France; they are nations
derived neither from ethnic homogeneity nor the consent or shared history of the governed. Whatever,
the United States did or does, they would ultimately have shattered in one way or another and
refugees would have headed for Europe.
Nope, you don't. The US and its Gulf state "allies" are indeed trying to oust Assad and, if
not set up, at least allow the creation of a Salafist regime.
The US Road Map To Balkanize Syria
By Pepe Escobar
September 22, 2016 "Information Clearing House" – "RT" – Forget about those endless meetings
between Sergei Lavrov and John Kerry; forget about Russia's drive to prevent chaos from reigning
in Syria; forget about the possibility of a real ceasefire being implemented and respected
by US jihad proxies.
Forget about the Pentagon investigating what really happened around its bombing 'mistake'
in Deir Ezzor.
The definitive proof of the Empire of Chaos's real agenda in Syria may be found in a
2012 Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) document declassified in May last year.
As you scroll down the document, you will find page 291, section C, which reads (in caps,
originally):
"THE WEST, GULF COUNTRIES, AND TURKEY [WHO] SUPPORT THE [SYRIAN] OPPOSITION… THERE
IS THE POSSIBILITY OF ESTABLISHING A DECLARED OR UNDECLARED SALAFIST PRINCIPALITY IN EASTERN
SYRIA (HASAKA AND DER ZOR), AND THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT THE SUPPORTING POWERS TO THE OPPOSITION
WANT, IN ORDER TO ISOLATE THE SYRIAN REGIME, WHICH IS CONSIDERED THE STRATEGIC DEPTH OF
THE SHIA EXPANSION (IRAQ AND IRAN)".
The DIA report is a formerly classified SECRET/NOFORN document, which made the rounds
of virtually the whole alphabet soup of US intel, from CENTCOM to CIA, FBI, DHS, NGA and the
State Department.
It establishes that over four years ago US intel was already hedging its bets between
established al-Qaeda in Syria, aka Jabhat al-Nusra, and the emergence of ISIS/ISIL/Daesh, aka
the Islamic State.
It's already in the public domain that by a willful decision, leaked by current Donald
Trump adviser Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Washington allowed the emergence of the Islamic State
– remember that gleaming white Toyota convoy crossing the open desert? – as a most convenient
US strategic asset, and not as the enemy in the remixed, never-ending GWOT (Global War on Terra).
It's as clear as it gets; a "Salafist principality" is to be encouraged as a means
to Divide and Rule over a fragmented Syria in perpetual chaos. Whether it's established
by Jabhat al-Nusra – aka "moderate rebels" in Beltway jargon – or al-Baghdadi's "Califake"
is just a pesky detail.
It gets curioser and curioser as Hasaka and Deir Ezzor are named in the DIA report – and
directly targeted by the 'mistaken' Pentagon bombing. No wonder Pentagon chief Ash 'Empire
of Whining' Carter took no prisoners to directly sabotage what Kerry had agreed on with Lavrov.
No one will ever see these connections established by US corporate media – as in, for instance,
the neocon cabal ruling the Washington Post's editorial pages. But the best of the blogosphere
does not disappoint.
The rest is just blame-shifting that conveniently let's the US off the hook.
Have you not read any press in the last 5 years, or do you just make a habit of making shit
up? The US has been trying to topple Assad for God only knows how long. What, for instance, do
you think the desperate fig leaf of trying to claim that we are supporting non-existant "moderate
Syrian rebels" is about?
"the danger of this right wing group mostly in the form of parties which is by the way it gets
its votes by being anti-immigrant, anti-foreigner, and especially anti-Muslimism. That�'s their
big call."
The intelligentsia (Latin: intellegentia, Polish: inteligencja, Russian: интеллигенция; IPA: [ɪntʲɪlʲɪˈɡʲentsɨjə])
is a social class of people engaged in complex mental labor aimed at guiding or critiquing, or
otherwise playing a leadership role in shaping a society's culture and politics.[1] This therefore
might include everyone from artists to school teachers, as well as academics, writers, journalists,
and other hommes de lettres (men of letters) more usually thought of as being the main constituents
of the intelligentsia.
Intelligentsia is the subject of active polemics concerning its own role in the development of
modern society not always positive historically, often contributing to higher degree of progress,
but also to its backward movement.[2]... In pre-revolutionary Russia the term was first used to
describe people possessing cultural and political initiative.[3] It was commonly used by
those individuals themselves to create an apparent distance from the masses, and generally retained
that narrow self-definition. [citation needed]
If intellectuals replace the current professional politicians as the leaders
of society the situation would become much worse. Because they have neither
the sense of reality, nor common sense. For them, the words and speeches are
more important than the actual social laws and the dominant trends, the dominant
social dynamics of the society. The psychological principle of the intellectuals
is that we could organize everything much better, but we are not allowed to
do it.
But the actual situation is as following: they could organize the life of
society as they wish and plan, in the way they view is the best only if under
conditions that are not present now are not feasible in the future. Therefore
they are not able to act even at the level of current leaders of the society,
which they despise. The actual leaders are influenced by social pressures, by
the current social situation, but at least they doing something. Intellectuals
are unhappy that the real stream of life they are living in. They consider it
wrong. that makes them very dangerous, because they look really smart, while
in reality being sophisticated professional idiots.
"... cultural nationalism is the only ideology capable of being a legitimising ideology under the prevailing global and national political economy. ..."
"... Neoliberalism cannot perform this role since its simplicities make it harsh not just towards the lower orders, but give it the potential for damaging politically important interests amongst capitalist classes themselves. ..."
"... In this form, cultural nationalism provides national ruling classes a sense of their identity and purpose, as well as a form of legitimation among thelower orders. ..."
"... As Gramsci said, these are the main functions of every ruling ideology. Cultural nationalism masks, and to a degree resolves, the intense competition between capitals over access to the state for support domestically and in the international arena – in various bilateral and multilateral fora – where it bargainsfor the most favoured national capitalist interests within the global and imperial hierarchy. ..."
This is where cultural nationalism comes in. Only it can serve to mask, and
bridge, the divides within the 'cartel of anxiety' in a neoliberal context.
Cultural nationalism is a nationalism shorn of its civic-egalitarian and developmentalist
thrust, one reduced to its cultural core. It is structured around the culture
of thee conomically dominant classes in every country, with higher or lower
positions accorded to other groups within the nation relative to it. These positions
correspond, on the whole, to the groups' economic positions, and as such it
organises the dominant classes, and concentric circles of their allies, into
a collective national force. It also gives coherence to, and legitimises, the
activities of the nation-state on behalf of capital, or sections thereof, in
the international sphere.
Indeed, cultural nationalism is the only ideology capable of being a legitimising
ideology under the prevailing global and national political economy.
Neoliberalism
cannot perform this role since its simplicities make it harsh not just towards
the lower orders, but give it the potential for damaging politically important
interests amongst capitalist classes themselves. The activities of the state
on behalf of this or that capitalist interest necessarily exceed the Spartan
limits that neoliberalism sets. Such activities can only be legitimised as being
'in the national interest.'
Second, however, the nationalism that articulates
these interests is necessarily different from, but can easily (and given its
function as a legitimising ideology, it must be said, performatively) be mis-recognised
as, nationalism as widely understood: as being in some real sense in the interests
of all members of the nation. In this form, cultural nationalism provides national
ruling classes a sense of their identity and purpose, as well as a form of legitimation
among thelower orders.
As Gramsci said, these are the main functions of every
ruling ideology. Cultural nationalism masks, and to a degree resolves, the intense
competition between capitals over access to the state for support domestically
and in the international arena – in various bilateral and multilateral fora
– where it bargainsfor the most favoured national capitalist interests within
the global and imperial hierarchy.
Except for a commitment to neoliberal policies, the economic policy content
of this nationalism cannot be consistent: within the country, and inter-nationally,
the capitalist system is volatile and the positions of the various elements
of capital in the national and international hierarchies shift constantly as
does the economic policy of cultural nationalist governments. It is this volatility
that also increases the need for corruption – since that is how competitive
access of individual capitals to the state is today organised.
Whatever its utility to the capitalist classes, however, cultural nationalism
can never have a settled or secure hold on those who are marginalised or sub-ordinated
by it. In neoliberal regimes the scope for offering genuine economic gains to
the people at large, however measured they might be, is small.
This is a problem for right politics since even the broadest coalition of
the propertied can never be an electoral majority, even a viable plurality.
This is only in the nature of capitalist private property. While the left remains
in retreat or disarray, elec-toral apathy is a useful political resource but
even where, as in most countries, political choices are minimal, the electorate
as a whole is volatile. Despite, orperhaps because of, being reduced to a competition
between parties of capital, electoral politics in the age of the New Right entails
very large electoral costs, theextensive and often vain use of the media in
elections and in politics generally, and political compromises which may clash
with the high and shrilly ambitiou sdemands of the primary social base in the propertied
classes. Instability, uncertainty ...
Yet another response [ to globalization] is that I term 21stcentury fascism.The ultra-right is an insurgent force in many countries. In broad strokes,
this project seeks to fuse reactionary political power with transnational capital
and to organise a mass base among historically privileged sectors of the global
working class – such as white workers in the North and middle layers in the
South – that are now experiencing heightened insecurity and the specter of downward
mobility. It involves militarism, extreme masculinisation, homophobia, racism
and racist mobilisations, including the search for scapegoats, such as immigrant
workers and, in the West, Muslims. Twenty-first century fascism evokes mystifying
ideologies, often involving race/culture supremacy and xenophobia, embracing an
idealised and mythical past. Neo-fascist culture normalises and glamorises warfare
and social violence, indeed, generates a fascination with domination that is portrayed
even as heroic.
Notable quotes:
"... over-accumulation ..."
"... Cyclical crises ..."
"... . Structural crises ..."
"... systemic crisis ..."
"... social reproduction. ..."
"... crisis of humanity ..."
"... 1984 has arrived; ..."
"... The crisis has resulted in a rapid political polarisation in global society. ..."
"... In broad strokes, this project seeks to fuse reactionary political power with transnational capital and to organise a mass base among historically privileged sectors of the global working class ..."
"... It involves militarism, extreme masculinisation, homophobia, racism and racist mobilisations, including the search for scapegoats, such as immigrant workers and, in the West, Muslims. ..."
"... Neo-fascist culture normalises and glamorises warfare and social violence, indeed, generates a fascination with domination that is portrayed even as heroic. ..."
World capitalism is experiencing the worst crisis in its 500 year history.
Global capitalism is a qualitatively new stage in the open ended evolution of
capitalism characterised by the rise of transnational capital, a transnational
capitalist class, and a transnational state. Below, William I. Robinson argues
that the global crisis is structural and threatens to become systemic, raising
the specter of collapse and a global police state in the face of ecological
holocaust, concentration of the means of violence, displacement of billions,
limits to extensive expansion and crises of state legitimacy, and suggests that
a massive redistribution of wealth and power downward to the poor majority of
humanity is the only viable solution.
The New Global Capitalism and the 21st Century Crisis
The world capitalist system is arguably experiencing the worst crisis in
its 500 year history. World capitalism has experienced a profound restructuring
through globalisation over the past few decades and has been transformed in
ways that make it fundamentally distinct from its earlier incarnations. Similarly,
the current crisis exhibits features that set it apart from earlier crises of
the system and raise the stakes for humanity. If we are to avert disastrous
outcomes we must understand both the nature of the new global capitalism and
the nature of its crisis. Analysis of capitalist globalisation provides a template
for probing a wide range of social, political, cultural and ideological processes
in this 21st century. Following Marx, we want to focus on the internal dynamics
of capitalism to understand crisis. And following the global capitalism perspective,
we want to see how capitalism has qualitatively evolved in recent decades.
The system-wide crisis we face is not a repeat of earlier such episodes such
as that of the the 1930s or the 1970s precisely because capitalism is fundamentally
different in the 21st century. Globalisation constitutes a qualitatively new
epoch in the ongoing and open-ended evolution of world capitalism, marked by
a number of qualitative shifts in the capitalist system and by novel articulations
of social power. I highlight four aspects unique to this epoch.1
First is the rise of truly transnational capital and a new global production
and financial system into which all nations and much of humanity has been integrated,
either directly or indirectly. We have gone from a world economy, in
which countries and regions were linked to each other via trade and financial
flows in an integrated international market, to a global economy, in
which nations are linked to each more organically through the transnationalisation
of the production process, of finance, and of the circuits of capital accumulation.
No single nation-state can remain insulated from the global economy or prevent
the penetration of the social, political, and cultural superstructure of global
capitalism. Second is the rise of a Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC), a
class group that has drawn in contingents from most countries around the world,
North and South, and has attempted to position itself as a global ruling class.
This TCC is the hegemonic fraction of capital on a world scale. Third
is the rise of Transnational State (TNS) apparatuses. The TNS is constituted
as a loose network made up of trans-, and supranational organisations together
with national states. It functions to organise the conditions for transnational
accumulation. The TCC attempts to organise and institutionally exercise its
class power through TNS apparatuses. Fourth are novel relations of inequality,
domination and exploitation in global society, including an increasing importance
of transnational social and class inequalities relative to North-South inequalities.
Cyclical, Structural, and Systemic Crises
Most commentators on the contemporary crisis refer to the "Great Recession"
of 2008 and its aftermath. Yet the causal origins of global crisis are to be
found in over-accumulation and also in contradictions of state
power, or in what Marxists call the internal contradictions of the capitalist
system. Moreover, because the system is now global, crisis in any one place
tends to represent crisis for the system as a whole. The system cannot expand
because the marginalisation of a significant portion of humanity from direct
productive participation, the downward pressure on wages and popular consumption
worldwide, and the polarisation of income, has reduced the ability of the world
market to absorb world output. At the same time, given the particular configuration
of social and class forces and the correlation of these forces worldwide, national
states are hard-pressed to regulate transnational circuits of accumulation and
offset the explosive contradictions built into the system.
Is this crisis cyclical, structural, or systemic? Cyclical crises
are recurrent to capitalism about once every 10 years and involve recessions
that act as self-correcting mechanisms without any major restructuring of the
system. The recessions of the early 1980s, the early 1990s, and of 2001 were
cyclical crises. In contrast, the 2008 crisis signaled the slide into astructural
crisis. Structural crises reflect deeper contradictions that can only
be resolved by a major restructuring of the system. The structural crisis of
the 1970s was resolved through capitalist globalisation. Prior to that, the
structural crisis of the 1930s was resolved through the creation of a new model
of redistributive capitalism, and prior to that the structural crisis of the
1870s resulted in the development of corporate capitalism. A systemic crisis
involves the replacement of a system by an entirely new system or
by an outright collapse. A structural crisis opens up the possibility
for a systemic crisis. But if it actually snowballs into a systemic crisis –
in this case, if it gives way either to capitalism being superseded or to a
breakdown of global civilisation – is not predetermined and depends entirely
on the response of social and political forces to the crisis and on historical
contingencies that are not easy to forecast. This is an historic moment of extreme
uncertainty, in which collective responses from distinct social and class forces
to the crisis are in great flux.
Hence my concept of global crisis is broader than financial. There are multiple
and mutually constitutive dimensions – economic, social, political, cultural,
ideological and ecological, not to mention the existential crisis of our consciousness,
values and very being. There is a crisis of social polarisation, that is, of
social reproduction. The system cannot meet the needs or assure the
survival of millions of people, perhaps a majority of humanity. There are crises
of state legitimacy and political authority, or of hegemony and
domination. National states face spiraling crises of legitimacy as they
fail to meet the social grievances of local working and popular classes experiencing
downward mobility, unemployment, heightened insecurity and greater hardships.
The legitimacy of the system has increasingly been called into question by millions,
perhaps even billions, of people around the world, and is facing expanded counter-hegemonic
challenges. Global elites have been unable counter this erosion of the system's
authority in the face of worldwide pressures for a global moral economy. And
a canopy that envelops all these dimensions is a crisis of sustainability rooted
in an ecological holocaust that has already begun, expressed in climate change
and the impending collapse of centralised agricultural systems in several regions
of the world, among other indicators.
By a crisis of humanity I mean a crisis that is approaching systemic
proportions, threatening the ability of billions of people to survive, and raising
the specter of a collapse of world civilisation and degeneration into a new
"Dark Ages."2
Global capitalism now couples human and natural history in such a way
as to threaten to bring about what would be the sixth mass extinction in the
known history of life on earth.
This crisis of humanity shares a
number of aspects with earlier structural crises but there are also several
features unique to the present:
The system is fast reaching the ecological limits of its reproduction.
Global capitalism now couples human and natural history in such a way as
to threaten to bring about what would be the sixth mass extinction in the
known history of life on earth.3 This mass extinction would
be caused not by a natural catastrophe such as a meteor impact or by evolutionary
changes such as the end of an ice age but by purposive human activity. According
to leading environmental scientists there are nine "planetary boundaries"
crucial to maintaining an earth system environment in which humans can exist,
four of which are experiencing at this time the onset of irreversible environmental
degradation and three of which (climate change, the nitrogen cycle, and
biodiversity loss) are at "tipping points," meaning that these processes
have already crossed their planetary boundaries.
The magnitude of the means of violence and social control is unprecedented,
as is the concentration of the means of global communication and symbolic
production and circulation in the hands of a very few powerful groups.
Computerised wars, drones, bunker-buster bombs, star wars, and so forth,
have changed the face of warfare. Warfare has become normalised and sanitised
for those not directly at the receiving end of armed aggression. At the
same time we have arrived at the panoptical surveillance society and the
age of thought control by those who control global flows of communication,
images and symbolic production. The world of Edward Snowden is the world
of George Orwell; 1984 has arrived;
Capitalism is reaching apparent limits to its extensive
expansion. There are no longer any new territories of significance that
can be integrated into world capitalism, de-ruralisation is now well advanced,
and the commodification of the countryside and of pre- and non-capitalist
spaces has intensified, that is, converted in hot-house fashion into spaces
of capital, so that intensive expansion is reaching depths never
before seen. Capitalism must continually expand or collapse. How or where
will it now expand?
There is the rise of a vast surplus population inhabiting a "planet
of slums,"4 alienated from the productive economy, thrown
into the margins, and subject to sophisticated systems of social control
and to destruction – to a mortal cycle of dispossession-exploitation-exclusion.
This includes prison-industrial and immigrant-detention complexes, omnipresent
policing, militarised gentrification, and so on;
There is a disjuncture between a globalising economy and a nation-state
based system of political authority. Transnational state apparatuses
are incipient and have not been able to play the role of what social scientists
refer to as a "hegemon," or a leading nation-state that has enough power
and authority to organise and stabilise the system. The spread of weapons
of mass destruction and the unprecedented militarisation of social life
and conflict across the globe makes it hard to imagine that the system can
come under any stable political authority that assures its reproduction.
Global Police State
How have social and political forces worldwide responded to crisis? The
crisis has resulted in a rapid political polarisation in global society.
Both right and left-wing forces are ascendant. Three responses seem to be in
dispute.
One is what we could call "reformism from above." This elite reformism is
aimed at stabilising the system, at saving the system from itself and from more
radical responses from below. Nonetheless, in the years following the 2008 collapse
of the global financial system it seems these reformers are unable (or unwilling)
to prevail over the power of transnational financial capital. A second response
is popular, grassroots and leftist resistance from below. As social and political
conflict escalates around the world there appears to be a mounting global revolt.
While such resistance appears insurgent in the wake of 2008 it is spread very
unevenly across countries and regions and facing many problems and challenges.
Yet another response is that I term 21stcentury fascism.5
The ultra-right is an insurgent force in many countries. In broad
strokes, this project seeks to fuse reactionary political power with transnational
capital and to organise a mass base among historically privileged sectors of
the global working class – such as white workers in the North and middle
layers in the South – that are now experiencing heightened insecurity and the
specter of downward mobility. It involves militarism, extreme masculinisation,
homophobia, racism and racist mobilisations, including the search for scapegoats,
such as immigrant workers and, in the West, Muslims. Twenty-first century
fascism evokes mystifying ideologies, often involving race/culture supremacy
and xenophobia, embracing an idealised and mythical past. Neo-fascist culture
normalises and glamorises warfare and social violence, indeed, generates a fascination
with domination that is portrayed even as heroic.
The need for dominant groups around the world to secure widespread, organised
mass social control of the world's surplus population and rebellious forces
from below gives a powerful impulse to projects of 21st century fascism. Simply
put, the immense structural inequalities of the global political economy cannot
easily be contained through consensual mechanisms of social control. We have
been witnessing transitions from social welfare to social control states around
the world. We have entered a period of great upheavals, momentous changes and
uncertainties. The only viable solution to the crisis of global capitalism is
a massive redistribution of wealth and power downward towards the poor majority
of humanity along the lines of a 21st century democratic socialism, in which
humanity is no longer at war with itself and with nature.
About the Author
William I. Robinson is professor of sociology, global and
international studies, and Latin American studies, at the University of California-Santa
Barbara. Among his many books are Promoting Polyarchy (1996),
Transnational Conflicts (2003), A Theory of Global Capitalism
(2004), Latin America and Global Capitalism (2008),
and
Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity (2014).
A pretty devious scheme -- creating difficulty for the government neoliberal
wanted to depose by pushing neoliberal reforms via IMF and such. They channeling
the discontent into uprising against the legitimate government. Similar process
happened with Yanukovich in Ukraine.
Notable quotes:
"... the Syrian government put staying in power via adopting neoliberal strictures ahead of the welfare of Syrians ..."
"... it doesn't make President Assad virtuous of himself and neither does it reflect the reality that when push came to shove Assad put his position ahead of the people of Syria and kissed neoliberal butt. ..."
"... President Assad revealed his stupidity when he didn't pay attention to what happens to a leader who has previously been featured as a 'tyrant' in western media if he lets the neoliberals in: They fawn & scrape all the while developing connections to undermine him/her. If the undermining is ineffective there is no backing off. The next option is war. The instances are legion from President Noriega of Panama to President Hussein of Iraq to Colonel Ghaddaffi of Libya - that one really hurts as the Colonel was a genuinely committed and astute man. Assad is just another hack in comparison. ..."
"... Syrian leaders are politicians, they suffer the same flaws of politicians across the world. They are power seekers who inevitably come to regard the welfare of their population as a means to an end rather than an end in itself. ..."
"... No one denies that the opposition have been used and abused by FUKUSi, but that of itself does not invalidate the very real issues that persuaded them to resist an austerity imposed from above by assholes who weren't practicing what they preached. ..."
"... According to the European model of diplomacy imposed upon the globe, countries have interests not friends. ..."
"... A solution which reduces numbers of humans killed is worth attempting. ..."
"... Just because someone chooses an option that you disagree with does not make them evil or headchoppers or Islamofacist. ..."
"... On balance I would rather see Assad continue as leader of Syria but I'm not so naive as to believe he is capable of finding a long term resolution, or that there are not a good number of self interested murderous sadists in his crew. ..."
"... This war is about destroying real history, civilization, culture and replacing with fake. The war in Yemen is the same. Who in that region wants to replace real history with fake. Think about it. Most Islamic,Christian, Assyrian history is systematically being destroyed. ..."
"... you make some good points concerning Assad flirting with neoliberalism however, i don't know how you call an opposition 'moderate' when its toting firearms. ..."
"... The protests against Assad were moderate, and to his credit Assad was willing to meet them halfway. However, this situation was exploited by (((foreign powers))) ..."
"... This is not about "good or evil", this is about TOW missiles made in USA against T-55, Saudi money for mercenaries, Israeli regional ambitions and so on. Syria is another country that the US wants to destroy. Six years ago Syria was a peaceful country. ..."
"... Allegedly president Assad is a bad guy but Erdogan, Netanyhu and bin Saud are noble and good men. Who believes in such nonsense? The US has become similar to Israel and this is the reason why "Assad must go". Sick countries do sick things. ..."
"... no, because one side is so simplistically evi l(armed to the fucking teeth and resolved to violent insurrection!!!), if Assad didn't have the backing of the vast majority of his people and of his overreached army it would have ended a long time ago and Syria would be a failed state flailing away in the grip of anarchy. perhaps your Syrian 'friends' should meditate on this naked truth. ..."
"... when that shitty little country called Israel was squeezed onto the map in 1948, Syria welcomed Palestinian refugees with open arms by the hundreds of thousands. no, they didn't grant them citizenship, but prettty much all other rights. ..."
"... This whole nightmare was dreamed up from within the US Embassy in Damascus in 2006. Bashir al Assad was too popular in the country and the region for America's liking, so they plotted to get rid of him. Near all the organ eating, child killing, head chopping "moderate" opposition are from other countries, those that are Syrian, as was the case in Iraq, mostly live outside the country and are not in touch with main stream opinion, but very in touch with US, Saudi etc $$$s. ..."
"... I consider Bashar al-Assad the legitimate Syrian President and attempts to remove him by external interests as grounds for charges of crimes against humanity, crimes of war. ..."
"... As one of the bloggers rightly stated Wesley Clarke spilled the whole beans and revealed their true ilk. 7 countries in 5 years. How coincidental post 9/11. ..."
"... If you say "Assad was flirting with Neo Liberalism" then this is actually a compliment to Assad. Why? Because he wanted to win time. He wanted to prevent the same happening to Syria that has happened to Iraq. At that time there was no other protective power around. Russia was still busy recovering. ..."
"... As demeter said Posted by: Demeter @14, the flirrting with neoliberalism bought them time as neocons were slavering for a new target. It also made the inner circle a ridiculous amount of money. Drought made life terrible for many rural syrians. When the conflict started, if you read this website you'd notice people wondering what was going on and as facts unfolded. realizing that Assad was the lesser of two evils, and as the war has gone on, look like an angel in comparison to the opposition. ..."
"... Salafism is Racism. It de-egitimizes the entire anti Assad revolution. ..."
"... Wesley Clark's "seven countries in five years" transcript for anyone who has forgotten: http://genius.com/General-wesley-clark-seven-countries-in-five-years-annotated ..."
"... the armed conflict originated with scheming by foreign governments to use extremists as a weapon. ..."
"... Furthermore, Debsisdead sets up the same "binary division" that he says he opposes by tarnishing those who oppose using extremists as a weapon of state as Assad loving racists. The plot was described by Sy Hersh in 2007 in "The Redirection" . ..."
"... The fight IS "binary". You support Assad and his fighters, the true rebels, or you don't. Calling Assad a "hack" is a slander of a veritable hero. Watch his interviews. Assad presides over a multi-cultural, multi-confessional, diverse, secular state, PRECISELY what the Reptilians claim they cherish. ..."
"... "the Syrian government put staying in power via adopting neoliberal strictures ahead of the welfare of Syrians." - on that we can agree. ..."
"... It continues to annoy me that the primary trigger for the civil war in Syria has been totally censored from the press. The government deliberately ignited a population explosion, making the sale or possession of condoms or birth control pills illegal and propagandizing that it was every woman's patriotic duty to have six kids. The population doubled every 18 years, from 5 million to 10 million to 20 million and then at 22 the water ran out and things fells apart. Syria is a small country mostly arid plateau, in principle it could be developed to support even more people just not in that amount of time and with the resources that the Syrians actually had. ..."
"... It doesn't mean he's a saint that Assad is leading the very popular 'secular/multi-confessional Syria' resistance against an extremely well-funded army primarily of non-Syrians who are mainly 'headchoppers' who will stop at nothing to impose Saudi-style religious dictatorship on Syria. ..."
"... The 'moderate' opposition to Assad has largely disappeared (back into the loyal opposition that does NOT want a Saudi-style state imposed on Syria), but those who remain in armed rebellion surely must know that they are a powerless, very small portion of what is in fact mercenary army completely subservient to the needs and directives of its primary funders/enablers, the US and Saudi Arabia. So whatever their original noble intentions, they've become part of the Saudi/US imperial problem. ..."
"... All that land, all that resource...and a unifying language. Amazing. If only the Arab world could unite for the collective good of the region we might witness a rogue state in an abrupt and full decline. A sad tactic of colonial powers over the years, setting the native tribes upon each other. We've not evolved here. ..."
"... t in recent history the foreign policy of powerful nations is aimed at sponsoring social disintegration within the borders of targeted countries. ..."
"... Ethnic cleansing means destruction of culture, of historical memory, the forced disappearance of communities that were rooted in a place. ..."
"... Compare President Assad's leadership to that of the western, or Saudi, sponsors of terror; or measure his decisions against those of the hodgepodge of rebels and mercenaries, with their endless internal squabbles and infighting. Assad is so much more of a spokesman for the rights of sovereignty, and his words carry more weight and outshine the banalities that spring from the mouths of those who are paying the bills, and supplying weapons, and giving all kinds of diplomatic comfort to the enemies of the Syrian government. ..."
"... There is no need for sorting things into absolutes of good and evil. But there is a condition under which fewer, a lot fewer, humans would have died in Syria, Without foreign interference--money, weapons, and training--Assad's government would have won this war quite a while ago. ..."
"... And as for "Islamic Fundamentalism", it is this abnormal form of Islam that is purely based on racism and not the other way around. Islamic fundamentalists call everybody, and I mean everybody, who is not living according to their rule a non-believer, a Takfiri, who does not deserver to live. ..."
"... Fundamentalism is never satisfied until it can become a tyranny over the mind. Racism and fundamentalism are as American as apple pie. You have to take a close look at who is pouring oil on this fire! ..."
"... I disagree with you in that neoliberalism is seriously not difficult to define. It boils down to belief that public programs are bad/'inefficient' and that society would be better served by privatizing many things(or even everything) and opening services up to 'competition'. It's mainly just cover for parasites to come in and get rich off of the masses misery. The 'neoliberalism is just a snarl word' meme is incredibly stupid, since plenty of books and articles have been written explicitly defining it. ..."
"... American economic hegemony is inherently neoliberal, and has been for decades. The IMF is essentially an international loan shark that gives countries money on the condition that they dismantle their public spending apparatus and let the market run things. ..."
"... The situation is different now. One Syrian lady, who came to see me in April, who lives in California, told me that her father, who was a big pre-war oppositionist, now just wants to return to Syria to die. There's no question. if you want peace in Syria, Asad is the only choice. The jihadis, who dominate the opposition, don't offer an alternative. ..."
"... The lesson of Viet Nam was to keep the dead and wounded off the six o'clock news. ..."
"... The jackals are going in. Another coup. Syria was on the list. Remap the Middle East. Make it like Disney World. Israel as Mad King Ludwig's Neuschwanstein. ..."
"... I don't think anyone who comments here regularly ever assumed that Bashar al Assad was a knight in white shining armour. Most of us are aware of how he came to be President and that his father did rule the country from 1971 to 2000 with an iron fist. Some if not most also know that initially when Bashar al Assad succeeded to the Presidency, he did have a reformist agenda in mind. How well or not he succeeded in putting that across, what compromises he had to make, who or what opposed him, how he negotiated his way between and among various and opposed power structures in Syrian politics we do not know. ..."
"... Yes, I have trouble reconciling the fact that Bashar al Assad's government did allow CIA renditioning with his reformist agenda in my own head. That is something he will have to come to terms with in the future. I don't know if Assad was naive, under pressure or willing, even eager in agreeing to cooperate with the CIA, or trying to buy time to prepare for invasion once Iraq was down. Whether Assad also realises that he was duped by the IMF and World Bank in following their advice on economic "reforms" (such as privatising Syria's water) is another thing as well. ..."
"... I don't see why you call the problem "Islamic fundamentalism" when in fact it is Sunni fundamentalism. ..."
"... Manifest Destiny is fundamentalism. ..."
"... "Full Spectrum Dominance" and other US Military doctrines are fundamentalist in nature. ..."
"... I have no doubt that Assad was little more than a crude Arab strongman/dictator prince back in the 2011 when the uprising started. Since then, he has evolved into a committed, engaged defender of his country against multilateral foreign aggression, willingly leaving his balls in the vice and all. ..."
"... He could have fled the sinking ship many times so far. Instead, he decided to stay and fight the Takfiri river flowing in through the crack, and risk going down with the ship he inherited. The majority of the Syrians know this very well. ..."
"... Bashar of 2016 (not so much the one of 5 1/2 years ago) would not only win the next free elections, but destroy any opposition. The aggressors know that as a fact. ..."
"... if Syria had control over its borders with Turkey, Israel, Jordan and Iraq would the war have ended a long time ago ? Answer honestly. ..."
"... If yes, then the so-called "opposition" of the union of headchoppers does not represent a significant portion of the Syrian people. Were it otherwise Assad wouldnt be able to survive a single year, let alone 5. With or without foreign help. ..."
"... OK here is an interesting article from 2011 on Abdallah Dardari, the fellow who persuaded Bashar al Assad to adopt the disastrous neoliberal economic reforms that not only ruined Syria's economy and the country's agriculture in particular but also created an underclass who resented the reforms and who initially joined the "rebels". http://english.al-akhbar.com/node/2097 ..."
"... And where is Dardari now? He jumped ship in 2011 and went to Beirut to work for the UN's Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA). He seems like someone to keep a watchful eye on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdullah_Dardari ..."
"... of COURSE assad flirted with the west. between housing cia rendition houses and the less-than-flattering aspects of the wikileaks "syria files", assad and/or his handlers (family and/or military) have tried a little too hard to "assimilate" to western ideals (or the lack thereof). ..."
"... i seriously doubt they will make that mistake again. they saw what happened to al-qaddafi after he tried to play nice and mistook western politicians for human beings. they've learned their lesson and become more ruthless but they were always machiavellians because they have to be. not an endorsement, just an acceptance of how the region is. ..."
"... also: israel, the saudis (along with qatar and the other GCC psychopaths in supporting capacity) and the US are the main actors and throwing european "powers" into the circle of actual power does them an undue favor by ignoring their status as pathetic vassal states. "FrUkDeUSZiowhatever" isn't necessary. ..."
"... Look I know the MSM is utterly controlled - but the extent of that control still shocks at times. It is simply not possible to be "informed" by any normal definition of the word anymore without the alternative media - and for that reason this site serves a valuable purpose and I once again thank the host and contributors. ..."
"... The irony is, Assad is 10x smarter and bigger person than Debs. Yes, he made some mistakes, but if not "flirting with neoliberalism", war against Syria would have started many years earlier, when Resistance wasnt ready one bit (neither Russia, nor Iran, while on the other hand US was more powerful). ..."
"... Support for rebel groups was misguided at best at the beginning of the war. One could conceivably not appreciate the capacity of the KSA/USA/Quatar/Israel to influence and control and create these groups. Jesus it's hard for me to think of a single local opposition group that isnt drenched in fanaticism besides the Kurds. ..."
"... There's no way to a solution for the Syrian people, the population not imported that is, if these groups win. I hate to be so binary but its so naive in my eyes to think anything good will come from the long arm of the gulf countries and the USA taking control. ..."
"... As I've said repeatedly, the GOAL of the Syria crisis for the Western elites, Israel and the ME dictatorships is to take Syria OUT by any means necessary in order to get to IRAN. Nothing else matters to these people. In the same vein, nothing else matters to ninety percent of the CURRENT insurgents than to establish some Salafist state, exterminate the Shia, etc., etc. ..."
"... So, yes, right NOW the whole story is about US elites, Zionist "evil", corrupt monarchs, and scumbag fanatics, etc., etc. Until THAT is resolved, nothing about how Syria is being run is going to matter. ..."
"... Copeland @60: No, I don't think the problem is fundamentalism. It's the warring crusade method of spreading a belief's 'empire' that is the problem. This is a problem uniquely of the Saudi 'do whatever it takes' crusade to convert the entire 'Arab and Muslim world' to their worst, most misogynist form of Islam. ..."
"... Just want to mention that from the beginning there were people who took up arms against the government. This is why the situation went out of control. People ambushed groups of young soldiers. Snipers of unknown origin fired on police and civilians. ..."
"... I rather like Assad. I won't lie. But, he is not the reason for the insurrection in Syria ~ well, except for his alliances with Russia and Iran and his pipeline decisions and his support for Palestinian and Iraqi refugees. What happened in Syria is happening all over the globe because the nation with the most resources in the world, the self-declared exceptionalist state thinks this is the way to rule the world. . . . because they want to rule and they don't care how much destruction it takes to do so. And lucky for us there is no one big enough and bad enough to do it to us - except for our own government. ..."
"... There were a lot of people posting how Bashar al Assad was doing full neoliberalism. And at was true. ..."
"... So Assad was hit by a Tri-horror: global warming, dwindling cash FF resources, and IMF-type pressure, leaving out the trad. enemies, KSA, pipelines , etc. MSM prefer to cover up serious issues with 'ethnic strife' (sunni, shia, black lives matter, etc.) ..."
It is sad to see so many are so locked into their particular views that they
see any offering of an alternative as 'neoliberal' or laughable or - if it weren't
so serious - Zionist.
1/ I do not see the Syrian civil war as racist or race based, I do believe
however that the rejection of all Islamic fundamentalism as being entirely comprised
of 'headchoppers' is racist down to its core. It is that same old same old whitefella
bullshit which refuses to consider other points of view on their own terms but
considers everything through the lens of 'western' culture which it then declares
wanting and discards.
2/ Noirette comes close to identifying one of the issues that kicked
off the conflict, that the Syrian government put staying in power via adopting
neoliberal strictures ahead of the welfare of Syrians. I realize many have
quite foolishly IMO, adopted President Assad as some sort of model of virtue
- mostly because he is seen to be standing up to American imperialism. That
is a virtuous position but it doesn't make President Assad virtuous of himself
and neither does it reflect the reality that when push came to shove Assad put
his position ahead of the people of Syria and kissed neoliberal butt.
3/ President Assad revealed his stupidity when he didn't pay attention
to what happens to a leader who has previously been featured as a 'tyrant' in
western media if he lets the neoliberals in: They fawn & scrape all the while
developing connections to undermine him/her. If the undermining is ineffective
there is no backing off. The next option is war. The instances are legion from
President Noriega of Panama to President Hussein of Iraq to Colonel Ghaddaffi
of Libya - that one really hurts as the Colonel was a genuinely committed and
astute man. Assad is just another hack in comparison.
4/ These Syrian leaders are politicians, they suffer the same flaws of
politicians across the world. They are power seekers who inevitably come to
regard the welfare of their population as a means to an end rather than an end
in itself.
5/ My Syrians friends are an interesting bunch drawn from a range of people
currently living inside and outside of Syria. Some longer term readers might
recall that I'm not American, don't live in America and nowadays don't visit
much at all. The first of the 'refugee' Syrians I got to know, although refugee
is a misnomer since my friend came here on a migrant's visa because his skills
are in demand, is the grandchild of Palestinian refugees - so maybe he is a
refugee but not in the usual sense. Without going into too many specifics as
this is his story not mine, he was born and lived in a refugee camp which was
essentially just another Damascus suburb. As he puts it, although a Palestinian
at heart, he was born in Syria and when he thinks of home it is/was Damascus.
All sides in the conflict claimed to support Palestinian liberation, yet he
and his family were starved out of their homes by both Syrian government militias
and the FSA.
When he left he was initially a stateless person because even though he was
born in Syria he wasn't entitled to Syrian citizenship. He bears no particular
grudge against the government there but he told me once he does wish they were
a lot smarter.
On the other hand he also understands why the people fighting the government
are doing so. I'm not talking about the leadership of course (see above - pols
are pols) but the Syrians who just couldn't take the fading future and the petty
oppression by assholes any longer.
6/ No one denies that the opposition have been used and abused by FUKUSi,
but that of itself does not invalidate the very real issues that persuaded them
to resist an austerity imposed from above by assholes who weren't practicing
what they preached.
I really despair at the mindset which reduces everything to a binary division
- if group A are the people I support they must all be wonderful humans and
group B those who are fighting Group A are all evil assholes.
If group A claim to support Palestinian self determination (even though they
have done sweet fuck all to actually advance that cause) then everyone in Group
B must be pro-Zionist even though I don't know what they say about it (the leadership
of the various resistance groups are ME politicians and therefore most claim
to also support Palestinian independence). Yes assholes in the opposition have
done sleazy deals with Israel over Golan but the Ba'ath administration has done
similar opportunist sell outs over the 40 years when the situation demanded
it.
I fucking hate that as much as anyone else who despises the ersatz state
of Israel, but the reality is that just about every ME leader has put expedience
ahead of principle with regard to Palestine. Colonel Ghadaffi would be the only
leader I'm aware of who didn't. Why do they? That is what all pols and diplomats
do not just Arab ones. According to the European model of diplomacy imposed
upon the globe, countries have interests not friends.
As yet no alternative to that model has succeeded since any attempt to do
so has been rejected with great violence. The use of hostages offered by each
party to guarantee a treaty was once an honorable solution, the hostages were
well treated and the security they afforded reduced conflict - if Oblamblam
had to put up one of his daughters to guarantee a deal does anyone think he
would break it as easily as he currently does? Yet the very notion of hostages
is considered 'terrorism' in the west. But I digress.
The only points I wanted to make was the same as those I have already made:
A solution which reduces numbers of humans killed is worth attempting.
Just because someone chooses an option that you disagree with does
not make them evil or headchoppers or Islamofacist.
On balance I would rather see Assad continue as leader of Syria
but I'm not so naive as to believe he is capable of finding a long term
resolution, or that there are not a good number of self interested murderous
sadists in his crew. By the same token I don't believe all of those
resisting the Ba'athist administration are headchopping jihadists or foreign
mercenaries. This war is about 5 years old. If either side were so simplistically
good or evil it would have ended a long time ago.
Plus one more - it is humorous and saddening to see people throw senseless
name-calling into the mix. It is the method preferred by those who are too
stupid and ill informed to develop a logical point of view.
If you want to call me a Zionist lackey of the imperialists or whatever it
was go right ahead - it is only yourself who you tarnish, I'm secure in the
knowledge of my own work against imperialism, corporate domination and Zionism
but perhaps you, who have a need to throw aspersions are not?
Posted by b on September 12, 2016 at 03:33 AM |
Permalink
Plus one more - it is humorous and saddening to see people throw senseless
name-calling into the mix. It is the method preferred by those who are
too stupid and ill informed to develop a logical point of view.
why you think your article is different from others senseless name-calling,
i see exactly the same.
This war is about destroying real history, civilization, culture
and replacing with fake. The war in Yemen is the same. Who in that region
wants to replace real history with fake. Think about it. Most Islamic,Christian,
Assyrian history is systematically being destroyed.
you make some good points concerning Assad flirting with neoliberalism
however, i don't know how you call an opposition 'moderate' when its toting
firearms.
The protests against Assad were moderate, and to his credit Assad
was willing to meet them halfway. However, this situation was exploited
by (((foreign powers)))
If either side were so simplistically good or evil it would have ended
a long time ago.
This is not about "good or evil", this is about TOW missiles made in
USA against T-55, Saudi money for mercenaries, Israeli regional ambitions
and so on. Syria is another country that the US wants to destroy. Six years
ago Syria was a peaceful country.
Allegedly president Assad is a bad guy but Erdogan, Netanyhu and
bin Saud are noble and good men. Who believes in such nonsense? The US has
become similar to Israel and this is the reason why "Assad must go". Sick
countries do sick things.
If either side were so simplistically good or evil it would have
ended a long time ago
no, because one side is so simplistically evi l(armed to the fucking
teeth and resolved to violent insurrection!!!), if Assad didn't have the
backing of the vast majority of his people and of his overreached army it
would have ended a long time ago and Syria would be a failed state flailing
away in the grip of anarchy. perhaps your Syrian 'friends' should meditate
on this naked truth.
If group A claim to support Palestinian self determination (even
though they have done sweet fuck all to actually advance that cause)...
when that shitty little country called Israel was squeezed onto the
map in 1948, Syria welcomed Palestinian refugees with open arms by the hundreds
of thousands. no, they didn't grant them citizenship, but prettty much all
other rights.
so thanks, b, for headlining this obfuscatory drivel. thus, for posterity.
This whole nightmare was dreamed up from within the US Embassy in Damascus
in 2006. Bashir al Assad was too popular in the country and the region for
America's liking, so they plotted to get rid of him. Near all the organ
eating, child killing, head chopping "moderate" opposition are from other
countries, those that are Syrian, as was the case in Iraq, mostly live outside
the country and are not in touch with main stream opinion, but very in touch
with US, Saudi etc $$$s.
Here again is the reality of where this all started, article from 2012
(below.). And never forget Wesley Clark's Pentagon informant after 9/11
of attacking "seven countries in five years." Those in chaos through US
attacks or attempted "liberation" were on the list, a few more to go and
they are a bit behind schedule. All responsible for this Armageddon should
be answering for their actions in shackles and yellow jump suits in The
Hague.
|~b~ Thank you for putting Debsisdead's comment @ 135 prior post into readable
form. Failing eyesight made the original in its extended format difficult
to read.
Reference Debsisdead comment:
Your definition of neoliberal would be nice to have. Usually it is used
as ephemerally as a mirage, to appear in uncountable numbers of meaning.
Having determined your definition of neoliberal, are you sure it WAS
neoliberal rather than a hegemonic entity? Neoliberal seems best used as
the reactionary faux historic liberalism as applied to economic agendas
(neocon is the political twin for neoliberal, libertarian had been previously
been co-opted).
Instead of F•UK•US•i, maybe a F•UK•UZoP would suffice (France•United
Kingdom•United Zionist occupied Palestine) given the spheres of influence
involved.
Agree with your observations about the limited mentality of dualism;
manichaeism is a crutch for disabled minds unaware and blind to subtle distinctions
that comprise spectrums.
Though not paying close attention to Syrian history, it was Hafez al-Assad
who became master of the Syrian Ba'athist coup d'état and politically stabilised
Syria under Ba'athist hegemony. In the midst of the 'Arab-spring' zeitgeist,
an incident involving a child with security forces led to a genuine public
outcry being suppressed by state security forces. This incident, quickly
settled became cause célčbre for a subsequent revolt, initially by SAA dissidents
but soon thereafter by external interests having the motive of regime overthrow
of Syrian Ba'athists and their leadership. Other narratives generally make
little sense though may contain some factors involved; the waters have been
sufficiently muddied as to obscure many original factors - possibly Bashar
al-Assad's awareness of his security forces involvement in US rendition
and torture as to compromise his immediately assuming command of his security
forces in the original public protest over the child. Those things are now
well concealed under the fogs of conflict and are future historians to sort.
I consider Bashar al-Assad the legitimate Syrian President and attempts
to remove him by external interests as grounds for charges of crimes against
humanity, crimes of war.
Classic western sheeple disconnect. As one of the bloggers rightly stated
Wesley Clarke spilled the whole beans and revealed their true ilk. 7 countries
in 5 years. How coincidental post 9/11. This total disconnect with global
realities is a massive problem in the west cause the 86000 elite /oligarchs
r pushing for a war with both the bears/ Russian and Chinese along with
Iran. These countries have blatantly stated they will not be extorted by
fascism. All western countries r all living a Corporate state. Just look
all around every facet of our society is financialised. Health ,education
, public services.
Wake up cause if we dont we will be extinct Nuclear winter
I am of syrian origin, born in Beirut Lebanon.
My family lived a happy life there, but shortly after I was born, Israel
invaded Lebanon, and my family fled and emigrated to Europe, I was 1 year
old.
I call major bullshit on your piece.
If you say "Assad was flirting with Neo Liberalism" then this is actually
a compliment to Assad.
Why? Because he wanted to win time. He wanted to prevent the same happening
to Syria that has happened to Iraq. At that time there was no other protective
power around. Russia was still busy recovering.
What do you think would
have happened had Assad not pretended he would go along? Syria would have
been bombed to pieces right then. Why did Assad change his mind later and
refused to cooperate with Qatar, Saudi and US? Because the balance of power
was about to change. Iran and Russia were rising powers (mainly in the military
field).
I could say so much more. I stopped reading your post when you mentioned
that your Palestinian friend ( I know the neighbourhood in Damascus, it
is called Yarmouk and it is indeed a very nice suburb) does not have Syrian
citizenship. Do you know why Palaestinians don't get Syrian citizenship?
Because they are supposed to return to their homeland Palestine.
And they can only do that as Palestinians and not as Syrians. That is
why.
And that so many (not all!) Palestinians chose to backstab the country
that has hosted them and fed them and gave them a life for so many years,
and fought side by side with islamist terrorists and so called Free Syrian
Army traitors is a human error, is based on false promises, is lack of character
and honour and understanding of the broader context and interests. How will
some of these fools and misguided young men feel when they realise that
they have played right into the hand of their biggest enemy, the Zionists.
I would like to remind some of you who might have forgotten that famous
incident described by Robert Fisk years ago, when a Syrian Officer told
him upon the capture of some of these "freedom fighters' on Syrian soil,
one of them said: "I did not know that Palestine was so beautiful", not
realising that he was not fighting in Palestine but in Syria.
And as for "Islamic Fundamentalism", it is this abnormal form of Islam
that is purely based on racism and not the other way around. Islamic fundamentalists
call everybody, and I mean everybody, who is not living according to their
rule a non-believer, a Takfiri, who does not deserver to live.
Though reluctant to get involved in what seems to be for some a personal
spat, I would like to point out one fundemental point that renders the above
published and counter arguments difficult to comprehend which is that they
lack a time frame.
The 'Syrian opposition' or what ever you wish to call it is not now what
it was 6 years ago. Thus, for me, at least, it is not possible to discuss
the make up of the opposition unless there are some time frames applied.
An example is a Syrian who was an officer in the FSA but fled to Canada
last year. He fled the Syrian conflict over 3 years ago to Turkey -which
is how I know him - where he did not continue ties with any group. He simply
put his head down and worked slavishly living at his place of work most
of the time to escape to Canada - he feared remaining in Istanbul. He claimed
that he and others had all been taken in by promises and that the conflict
had been usurped by extremists. He was not a headchopper, he was not the
beheader of 12 year old children. He was and is a devout Muslim. He was
a citizen of Aleppo city. I know him and of him through other local Syrians
in Istanbul and believe his testimony. I mention him only to highlight that
the conflict is not what it was, not what some intended it to be ... Nor
is it what some paint it to be. There are many who fight whomever attacks
their community be they pro / anti Government. - Arabs especially have extended
village communities/ tribes and pragmatically they 'agree' to be occupied
as long as they are allowed to continue their lives in peace. If conflict
breaks out they fight whomever is necessary.
DebIsDead makes some very excellent points in his/her comments. They
deserve appraisal and respectful response. It is also clear thar he/she
is writing defensively in some parts and those detract from what is actually
being said.
The piece suffers from several errors. As demeter said Posted by: Demeter
@14, the flirrting with neoliberalism bought them time as neocons were slavering
for a new target. It also made the inner circle a ridiculous amount of money.
Drought made life terrible for many rural syrians. When the conflict started,
if you read this website you'd notice people wondering what was going on
and as facts unfolded. realizing that Assad was the lesser of two evils,
and as the war has gone on, look like an angel in comparison to the opposition.
You can't change the fact that it took less than 2 years for the opposition
to be dominated by both foreign and domestic takfiris who wanted to impose
saudi style culture on an open relatively prosperous cosmopolitan country.
They've succeeded in smashing it to pieces. Snuff your balanced account
and your bold anti racism
Debsisdead sets up a strawman - racism against Islamic fundamentalists
and validity of opposition against Assad - and uses this to sidestep
that the armed conflict originated with scheming by foreign governments
to use extremists as a weapon.
"If you want to call me a Zionist lackey of the imperialists or whatever
it was go right ahead - it is only yourself who you tarnish, I'm secure
in the knowledge of my own work against imperialism, corporate domination
and Zionism but perhaps you, who have a need to throw aspersions are not?"
Passive-aggressive much?
The fight IS "binary". You support Assad and his fighters, the true rebels,
or you don't. Calling Assad a "hack" is a slander of a veritable hero. Watch
his interviews. Assad presides over a multi-cultural, multi-confessional,
diverse, secular state, PRECISELY what the Reptilians claim they cherish.
"the Syrian government put staying in power via adopting neoliberal strictures
ahead of the welfare of Syrians." - on that we can agree.
It continues to annoy me that the primary trigger for the civil war in
Syria has been totally censored from the press. The government deliberately
ignited a population explosion, making the sale or possession of condoms
or birth control pills illegal and propagandizing that it was every woman's
patriotic duty to have six kids. The population doubled every 18 years,
from 5 million to 10 million to 20 million and then at 22 the water ran
out and things fells apart. Syria is a small country mostly arid plateau,
in principle it could be developed to support even more people just not
in that amount of time and with the resources that the Syrians actually
had.
No the issue was not 'climate change'. The aquifers in Syria had been
falling for years, even when rainfall was above normal. Don't blame the
weather.
"The more the merrier" - tell me exactly how people having more children
than they can support creates wealth? It doesn't and it never has.
Whenever governments treat their people as if they were cattle, demanding
that they breed the 'correct' number of children rather than making the
decision based on their own desires and judgement of how many they can support,
the result is always bad.
Assad treated the people of Syria as if they were cattle. Surely this
deserves mention?
Cultural "left" bullshit at its best. Cultural "leftists" don't need to
know any hostory or have any understanding of a political issue: it's sufficient
to pull out a few details from the NATO press and apply their grad school
"oppression" analysis.
Thanks to b for posting the comment of Debs is Dead. The point I would take
issue with is where he states "I realize many have quite foolishly IMO,
adopted President Assad as some sort of model of virtue. . ."
I don't believe this is a correct realization. I think the many to whom
he refers know very well that any person in leadership of a country can
be found to have flaws, major and minor, and even to have more of such than
the average mortal. The crucial counterpoint, however, which used to be
raised fairly often, is that it is the acceptance of the majority of the
people governed by such leaders that ought to be the international norm
for diplomatic relations.
I respect the knowledge DiD has gained from his Syrian friends and contacts.
But I also remember a man called Chilabi and am very leery of destabilization
attempts this country has been engaged in lo these many generations, using
such displaced persons as surrogates. And rather than properly mourn the
9/11 victims and brave firemen and rescuers of that terrible day, I find
myself mourning the larger tragedy of unnecessary wars launched as a consequence
of our collective horror at that critical moment in our history.
After making sound point about black-and-white worldview being unrealistic,
the guy goes full retard. Position towards Palestinians as the one and only
criteria to judge ME developments... C'mon, it's not even funny.
And while started from a "My Syrian friends" then he goes on reasoning on
behalf of one single ex-Palestinian ex-Syrian guy...
Looks like self-revelation of a kind. Some guy, sitting in Israel, or whatever,
waging informational warfare for the Mossad/CIA/NGO who pays his rent.
"The government deliberately ignited a population explosion, making the
sale or possession of condoms or birth control pills illegal and propagandizing
that it was every woman's patriotic duty to have six kids."
DiD: "I realize many have quite foolishly IMO, adopted President Assad as
some sort of model of virtue. . ." The big reveal is that DiD can't name
a single contributor here who has written that Assad is "some sort of model
of virtue."
It doesn't mean he's a saint that Assad is leading the very popular 'secular/multi-confessional
Syria' resistance against an extremely well-funded army primarily of non-Syrians
who are mainly 'headchoppers' who will stop at nothing to impose Saudi-style
religious dictatorship on Syria.
The 'moderate' opposition to Assad has
largely disappeared (back into the loyal opposition that does NOT want a
Saudi-style state imposed on Syria), but those who remain in armed rebellion
surely must know that they are a powerless, very small portion of what is
in fact mercenary army completely subservient to the needs and directives
of its primary funders/enablers, the US and Saudi Arabia. So whatever their
original noble intentions, they've become part of the Saudi/US imperial
problem.
Thanks for addressing the problem of angry comments by some posters who
just want to throw verbal grenades is unacceptable. I hope this site continues
to be a great source for sharing information and ideas.
Why in God's name was this pointless comment by Debs is Dead promoted this
way?!!! The only point being made, that I can see, is that the war in Syria
does have some legitimate issues at its root. WELL OF COURSE IT DOES. The
Hegemon rarely to never makes up civil unrest in countries it wants to overthrow
out of whole cloth. They take some dispute that is already there and ramp
it up; this process escalates until it turns into some form of a proxy war
or coup. In other words, the domestic political process is DISTORTED until
it is no longer remotely recognizable as a domestic process.
So sure, if the US and its allies had not stoked political factionism
in Syria into a global proxy war, we could discuss the fine details of the
Syrian domestic process very usefully. At this point, though, IT IS IRRELEVANT.
I do agree on one point: Assad joins the horrendous list of overlords
who thought they could make a deal with the Hegemon on their own terms.
Assad will pay for that mistake with his life very soon I would guess and
I think that Putin will too, though that might take a little longer. If
they had chosen to stand on principle as Chavez did, maybe they would be
dead as Chavez is (possibly done in, who knows), but they'd be remembered
with honor as Chavez is.
It is a shame no one stood up for Libya, for a surviving Gaddafi would have
emerged considerably stronger - as Assad eventually will.
Whatever genuine opposition there was has long been hijacked by opportunistic
takfiris, wahabbists and there various paymasters. And so as ruralito says
@25: "The fight IS "binary...". The fight is indeed binary, the enemy is
plural. Assad versus the many appearances of both the first and fourth kind.
Appearances to the mind are of four kinds.
Things either are what they appear to be;
or they neither are, nor appear to be;
or they are, and do not appear to be;
or they are not, and yet appear to be.
Rightly to aim in all these cases is the wise man's task. ~Epictetus
Where there is obfuscation lay the enemy, hence Russia's long game of
identification.
Does anyone remember the essay posted on this site a while back titled "The
Feckless Left?" I don't believe B posted it, but if memory serves it's posted
front and centre on the navigation bar beside this piece?
It really hammers those people like Tariq Ali, who while surely having
legitimate grievances against the Assad govt, opened the door for legitimation
of foreign sponsored war. They thought that funneling millions of dollars
worth of training, weapons and mercs would open the door for another secular
govt, but this time much 'better.' Surely.
No one thinks Assad is great. I really have trouble understanding where
that notion comes from. It's just that the alternative is surely much worse.
Lots of people didn't like Ghaddafi but jesus, I'm sure most Libyans would
wish they could turn back the clock (at the risk of putting words in their
mouths). It's not binary, no one sees this as good vs evil, its just that
its become so painfully obvious at this point that if the opposition wins
Syria will be so fucked in every which way. Those with real, tangible grievances
are never going to have their voices heard. It will become the next Libya,
except the US and it's clients will actually have a say in what's left of
the political body in the country if you could even label it that at that
point (which is quite frightenening in my eyes. Libya is already a shit
show and they don't have much of a foothold there besides airstrikes and
that little coastal base for the GNA to have their photo ops).
I find it ironic that when criticisms are levelled at Assad from the
left they usually point out things that had he done more of, and worse of,
he probably would be free of this situation and still firmly in power. If
he had bowed down to Qatar and the KSA/USA I wonder if the 'armed opposition'
would still have their problems with him? That's the ultimate irony to me.
If he had accepted the pipelines, the privatization regimes, etc. would
they still be hollering his name? It's very sad that even with the balancing
act he did his country has been destroyed. Even if the SAA is able to come
out on top at this point, the country is wholly destroyed. What's even the
point of a having a 'legitimate' or 'illegitimate' opposition when they're
essentially fighting over scraps now. I'd be surprised if they could rebuild
the country in 120 years. Libya in my eyes will never be what it once was.
It'll never have the same standards of living after being hit with a sledgehammer.
I don't mean to be ironic or pessimistic, its just a sad state of affairs
all around and everyday it seems more and more unlikely that any halfway
decent solution for the POPULATION OF SYRIA, not Assad, will come out of
this.. It's like, I'm no nationalist, but in many countries I kind of would
rather that than the alternative. Ghaddafi wasn't great but his people could've
been a lot worse of - and ARE a lot worse of now. I'm no Assad fan, but
my god look what the alternative is here. If it wasnt 95% foreign sponsored
maybe id see your point.
Read the essay posted on the left there. "Syria, the Feckless Left" IIRC.
I thought that summed up my thoughts well enough.
And guys, even if you agree with me please refrain from the name calling.
It makes those of you with a legitimate rebuttal seem silly and wrong. I've
always thought MoA was so refreshing because it was (somewhat) free of that.
At least B is generating discussion. I kind of appreciate that. It's nice
to hear ither views, even if they are a little unrealistic and pro violent
and anti democratic.
An example of an armed opposition with legitimate grievances that is
far from perfect but still very sympathetic (in my eyes) is hizbollah. They
have real problems to deal with. While they recieve foreign sponsorship
they aren't a foreign group the way the Syrian opposition is. And they will
be all but destroyed when their supply lines from Syria are cut off. I wonder
how that fits in with OPs post.
What makes Debs is Dead's turgid comment so irrational is that it endorses
Regime Change in Syria as an ongoing, but necessary and inevitable, "good".
But in doing so it tip-toes around the fact that it doesn't matter how Evil
an elected President is, or is not, it's up to the the people who elected
him to decide when they've had enough. It most certainly is NOT Neoconned
AmeriKKKa's concern.
Debs also 'forgot' to justify totally wrecking yet another of many ME
countries because of perceived and imaginary character flaws in a single
individual.
It does not compute; but then neither does "Israel's" 70 year (and counting)
hate crime, The Perpetual Palestinian Holohoax.
Whatever happened to the age old expression that one has to walk in someone
else's shoes to understand their walk in life?
In an all too obvious fashion, another arm chair expert is blessing the
world with his/her drivel.
To make it as concise as possible:
What would you have done in Assad's position? The U.S. is trying to annex
Syria since 1948 and never gave up on the plan to convert it to what the
neo-fascists turned Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia and the Republic of
Yugoslavia - whereas Yemen is still in the making, together with Ukraine,
Turkey and Africa as a whole.
In the light of U.S. 'foreign policy', the piece reeks of the stench
of obfuscation.
Debs also 'forgot' to justify totally wrecking yet another of many ME
countries because of perceived and imaginary character flaws in a single
individual.
We shouldn't be surprised. Even a basic pragmatic approach to this conflict
has been lost by many in the one sided, over the top shower of faeces that
is the western MSM.
It does not compute; but then neither does "Israel's" 70 year (and
counting) hate crime, The Perpetual Palestinian Holohoax.
All that land, all that resource...and a unifying language. Amazing.
If only the Arab world could unite for the collective good of the region
we might witness a rogue state in an abrupt and full decline. A sad tactic of colonial powers over the years, setting the native tribes
upon each other. We've not evolved here.
It is impossible for any one of us to possess the whole picture, which is
why we pool our experience, and benefit from these discussions. The thing
I see at the root of the Syrian war is the process of ethnic cleansing.
In many cases that involve murderous prejudice, it erupts as civil war;
but in recent history the foreign policy of powerful nations is aimed at
sponsoring social disintegration within the borders of targeted countries.
Ethnic cleansing means destruction of culture, of historical memory,
the forced disappearance of communities that were rooted in a place.
The objectives of the perpetrators have nothing to do with the convictions
of the fundamentalists who do the dirty work; and the sectarian and mercenary
troops are merely the tools of those who are creating hell on earth.
I agree with what papa wrote at the top of this thread:
why you think your article is different from others senseless name-calling,[?]
i see exactly the same. This war is about destroying real history, civilization,
culture and replacing with fake. The war in Yemen is the same. Who in
that region wants to replace real history with fake. Think about it.
Most Islamic,Christian, Assyrian history is systematically being destroyed.
Compare President Assad's leadership to that of the western, or Saudi, sponsors
of terror; or measure his decisions against those of the hodgepodge of rebels
and mercenaries, with their endless internal squabbles and infighting. Assad
is so much more of a spokesman for the rights of sovereignty, and his words
carry more weight and outshine the banalities that spring from the mouths
of those who are paying the bills, and supplying weapons, and giving all
kinds of diplomatic comfort to the enemies of the Syrian government.
Debsisdead has always brought much food for thought to this watering
hole. I have always respected him, and I think he has a fine mind. Nonetheless,
despite the valuable contribution of this piece as a beginning place, in
which we might reevaluate some of our presumptions, I maintain there are
a few errors which stand out, and ought to be discussed.
I call into question these two points:
(1) Just because someone chooses an option that you disagree with does
not make them evil or headchoppers or Islamofacist.
Up thread @14, we were reminded of Robert Fisk's report about misdirected,
misinformed "freedom fighters" naively wandering around in Syria, while
thinking that they were fighting in Palestine. In this ruin of Syria, where
the well-intentioned are captured, or co-opted into evil acts against the
civilian population, --is it really incumbent upon us, --from where we sit,
to agonize over the motives of those who are committing the actual atrocities
against the defenseless? What is the point?
(2) On balance I would rather see Assad continue as leader of Syria
but I'm not so naive as to believe he is capable of finding a long term
resolution, or that there are not a good number of self interested murderous
sadists in his crew. By the same token I don't believe all of those
resisting the Ba'athist administration are headchopping jihadists or
foreign mercenaries. This war is about 5 years old. If either side were
so simplistically good or evil it would have ended a long time ago.
There is no need for sorting things into absolutes of good and evil.
But there is a condition under which fewer, a lot fewer, humans would have
died in Syria, Without foreign interference--money, weapons, and training--Assad's
government would have won this war quite a while ago.
And as for "Islamic Fundamentalism", it is this abnormal form of Islam
that is purely based on racism and not the other way around. Islamic
fundamentalists call everybody, and I mean everybody, who is not living
according to their rule a non-believer, a Takfiri, who does not deserver
to live.
Fundamentalism is never satisfied until it can become a tyranny over the
mind. Racism and fundamentalism are as American as apple pie. You have to
take a close look at who is pouring oil on this fire!
@9 I disagree with you in that neoliberalism is seriously not difficult to
define. It boils down to belief that public programs are bad/'inefficient'
and that society would be better served by privatizing many things(or even
everything) and opening services up to 'competition'. It's mainly just cover
for parasites to come in and get rich off of the masses misery. The 'neoliberalism
is just a snarl word' meme is incredibly stupid, since plenty of books and
articles have been written explicitly defining it.
"Having determined your definition of neoliberal, are you sure it WAS
neoliberal rather than a hegemonic entity?"
American economic hegemony is inherently neoliberal, and has been for
decades. The IMF is essentially an international loan shark that gives countries
money on the condition that they dismantle their public spending apparatus
and let the market run things.
I usually enjoy DiD's rants (rant in the nice sense), but in this case he
is wrong. His remarks are out of date.
No doubt he has Syrian friends in NZ, including the Syro-Palestinian
he mentions. They will have been living their past vision of Syria for some
time. Yes, back in 2011, there was a big vision of a future democratic Syria
among the intellectuals. However those who fight for the rebellion are not
middle class (who left) but rural Islamist Sunnis, who have a primitive
al-Qa'ida style view.
The Syrian civil war is quite like the Spanish civil war. It started
with noble republicans, including foreigners like Orwell, fighting against
nasty Franco, but finished with Stalin's communists fighting against Nazi-supported
fascists.
The situation is different now. One Syrian lady, who came to see me in
April, who lives in California, told me that her father, who was a big pre-war
oppositionist, now just wants to return to Syria to die. There's no question. if you want peace in Syria, Asad is the only choice.
The jihadis, who dominate the opposition, don't offer an alternative.
Noirette comes close to identifying one of the issues that kicked off
the conflict, that the Syrian government put staying in power via adopting
neoliberal strictures ahead of the welfare of Syrians.
The Ba'thist regime is a mafia of the family, not a dictatorship of Bashshar.
Evidently their own interest plays a premier role, but otherwise why not
in favour of the Syrian people? There's lot of evidence in favour of Syrian
peace.
The lesson of Viet Nam was to keep the dead and wounded off the six o'clock
news.
The jackals are going in. Another coup. Syria was on the list. Remap
the Middle East. Make it like Disney World. Israel as Mad King Ludwig's
Neuschwanstein.
Islam and its backward dictates, and Christianity with its backward dictates
and Manifest Destiny are problematic.
I may be white and I may be a fella but don't believe I'm in the fold as
described. Fundamentalists of any sort are free to believe as they will
but when they force it on others via gun, govt, societal pressures, violence
there's trouble. I've seen comparisons to the extremes from Christianity's
past with the excuse of Islam as being in its early years. No excuses. Fundies
out. But we don't see that in places like Saudi Arabia or Iran. Facts on
the ground rule. Iran had a bit more moderation but only under the tyrant
Shah. A majority may have voted for the Islamic Republic and all that entails
but what of the minority?
BTW, where are the stories (links) that show Bashar has embraced neoliberalism?
In the end, DiD reduced to pointing to two evils (with multi-facets) and
it looks like Assad is the lesser. But who can come up with a solution for
a country so divided and so infiltrated by outsiders? And here in the US,
look at the choice of future leaders that so many do not want. Where is
the one who will lead the US out of its BS? And who will vote for him/her?
Thanks to B for republishing the comment from Debsisdead. The comment raises
some issues about how people generally see the war in Syria, if they know
of it, as some sort of real-life video game substitute for bashing one side
or another.
I am not sure though that Debsisdead realises the full import of what
s/he has said and that much criticism s/he makes about comments in MoA comments
forums could apply equally to what s/he says and has said in the past.
I don't think anyone who comments here regularly ever assumed that Bashar
al Assad was a knight in white shining armour. Most of us are aware of how
he came to be President and that his father did rule the country from 1971
to 2000 with an iron fist. Some if not most also know that initially when
Bashar al Assad succeeded to the Presidency, he did have a reformist agenda
in mind. How well or not he succeeded in putting that across, what compromises
he had to make, who or what opposed him, how he negotiated his way between
and among various and opposed power structures in Syrian politics we do
not know.
Yes, I have trouble reconciling the fact that Bashar al Assad's government
did allow CIA renditioning with his reformist agenda in my own head. That
is something he will have to come to terms with in the future. I don't know
if Assad was naive, under pressure or willing, even eager in agreeing to
cooperate with the CIA, or trying to buy time to prepare for invasion once
Iraq was down. Whether Assad also realises that he was duped by the IMF
and World Bank in following their advice on economic "reforms" (such as
privatising Syria's water) is another thing as well.
But one thing that Debsisdead has overlooked is the fact that Bashar
al Assad is popular among the Syrian public, who returned him as President
in multi-candidate direct elections held in June 2014 with at least 88%
of the vote (with a turnout of 73%, better than some Western countries)
and who confirmed his popularity in parliamentary elections held in April
2016 with his Ba'ath Party-led coalition winning roughly two-thirds of seats.
The fact that Syrians themselves hold Assad in such high regard must
say something about his leadership that has endeared him to them. If as
Debsisdead suggests, Assad practises self-interested "realpolitik" like
so many other Middle Eastern politicians, even to the extent of offering
reconciliation to jihadis who lay down their weapons and surrender, how
has he managed to survive and how did Syria manage to hold off the jihadis
and US-Turkish intervention and supply before requesting Russian help?
Copeland @58: I don't see why you call the problem "Islamic fundamentalism"
when in fact it is Sunni fundamentalism. Admittedly it's tough to 'name'
the problem. I'm sure I speak for most here that the problem isn't fundamentalism
but 'warring imperialist fundamentalist and misogynist Sunni Islam' that
is the problem.
It'd be nice to have a brief and accurate way of saying
what this is: 'Saudi Arabia violently exporting its worst form of Islam'.
When people refer to Christian fundamentalism they use the broad term
as well. Nothing is otherwise wrong with denominational belief, if past
a certain point it is not fundamentalist. You say the problem is not fundamentalism,
but something else. Indeed, the problem is fundamentalism.
Manifest
Destiny is fundamentalism. There are even atheist fundamentalists. "Full
Spectrum Dominance" and other US Military doctrines are fundamentalist in
nature. We are awash in fundamentalism, consumerist fundamentalism, capitalist
fundamentalism. If we are unlucky and don't succeed in changing the path
we are on; then we will understand too late the inscription that appeared
in the Temple of Apollo: "Nothing too much".
They say that the first casualty of war is truth and from what I read in
comments such a mental state prevails among readers, they see Assad, quite
reasonably, as the only one who can end this horrible war and the only one
who is really interested in doing so while US and even seemingly Russia
seems to treat this conflict as a instrument of global geopolitical struggle
instigated by US imperial delusions.
But of course one cannot escape conclusion that although provoked by
the CIA operation Bashir Assad failed years befor 2011 exactly because,
living in London, did not see neoliberalism as an existential threat ad
his father did but a system that has its benefits and can be dealt with,
so for a short while Saddam, Gaddafi and Mubarak thought while they were
pampered by western elites.
Now Assad is the only choice I'd Syrians want to keep what would resemble
unified Syrian state since nobody else seems to care.
I have no doubt that Assad was little more than a crude Arab strongman/dictator
prince back in the 2011 when the uprising started.
Since then, he has evolved into a committed, engaged defender of his
country against multilateral foreign aggression, willingly leaving his balls
in the vice and all.
He could have fled the sinking ship many times so far. Instead, he decided
to stay and fight the Takfiri river flowing in through the crack, and risk
going down with the ship he inherited. The majority of the Syrians know
this very well.
Bashar of 2016 (not so much the one of 5 1/2 years ago) would not only
win the next free elections, but destroy any opposition. The aggressors
know that as a fact.
Which is precisely why he "must go" prior to any such elections. He would
be invincible.
"This war is about 5 years old. If either side were so simplistically
good or evil it would have ended a long time ago."
Question to you:
if Syria had control over its borders with Turkey, Israel, Jordan and
Iraq would the war have ended a long time ago ? Answer honestly.
If yes, then the so-called "opposition" of the union of headchoppers
does not represent a significant portion of the Syrian people. Were it otherwise
Assad wouldnt be able to survive a single year, let alone 5. With or without
foreign help.
And that, my friend, may be the biggest oft ignored cui bono of the entire
Syrian war.
If Assad goes:
Syria falls apart. Western Golan has no more debtor nation to be returned
to as far as the UN go. It immediately becomes fee simple property of the
occupying entity, for as long as the occupier shall exist (and, with Western
Golan included, that might be a bit longer perchance...).
Hizbullah loses both its best supply line and all the strategic depth
it might have as well as the only ally anywhere close enough to help. It
becomes a military non-entity. Who benefits?
I think this cui bono (and a double one at that!) is a $100 difficulty
level question, although it feels like a $64k one.
Best opinion post I've yet read on this site. "Binary division," also very
much affects the U.S. election. If you hate Hillary, you must just LOVE
Trump, even though many of the best reasons to hate her--her arrogance,
her incompetence, her phoniness, her lies, her and Bill's relentless acquisition
of great wealth, etc.--are also reasons to hate Trump. Assad is a bastard,
Putin is a bastard, Saddam was a bastard--but so are Obama, Netanyahu, Hollande,
etc. Is it REALLY that hard to figure out?
@ 62 john... we'll have to wait for debs to explain how all that (in your
link) adds up, so long as no one calls him any name/s.... i'd like to say
'the anticipation of debs commenting again is killing me', but regardless,
killing innocent people in faraway lands thanks usa foreign policy is ongoing..
OK here is an interesting article from 2011 on Abdallah Dardari, the fellow
who persuaded Bashar al Assad to adopt the disastrous neoliberal economic
reforms that not only ruined Syria's economy and the country's agriculture
in particular but also created an underclass who resented the reforms and
who initially joined the "rebels". http://english.al-akhbar.com/node/2097
And where is Dardari now? He jumped ship in 2011 and went to Beirut to
work for the UN's Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA).
He seems like someone to keep a watchful eye on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdullah_Dardari
not even sure where to begin...this article is barely worthy of a random
facebook post and contains a roughly even mix of straw men and stuff most
people already know and don't need dictated to them by random internet folks.
of COURSE assad flirted with the west. between housing cia rendition
houses and the less-than-flattering aspects of the wikileaks "syria files",
assad and/or his handlers (family and/or military) have tried a little too
hard to "assimilate" to western ideals (or the lack thereof).
i seriously
doubt they will make that mistake again. they saw what happened to al-qaddafi
after he tried to play nice and mistook western politicians for human beings.
they've learned their lesson and become more ruthless but they were always
machiavellians because they have to be. not an endorsement, just an acceptance
of how the region is.
and then there's "just about every ME leader has put expedience ahead
of principle with regard to Palestine. Colonel Ghadaffi would be the only
leader I'm aware of who didn't". that might be a surprise to nasrallah and
a fair share of iran's power base. i'd also say "expedience" is an odd way
to describe the simple choice of avoiding israeli/saudi/US aggression in
the short term since the alternative would be what we're seeing in syria
and libya as we speak. again, not an endorsment of their relative cowardice.
just saying i understand the urge to avoid salfist proxy wars.
[also: israel, the saudis (along with qatar and the other GCC psychopaths
in supporting capacity) and the US are the main actors and throwing european
"powers" into the circle of actual power does them an undue favor by ignoring
their status as pathetic vassal states. "FrUkDeUSZiowhatever" isn't necessary.]
as for "calling all islamic fundamentalism" "headchopping" being "racist",
be sure not to smoke around all those straw men. never mind the inanity
of pretending that all islamic "fundamentalism" is the same. never mind
conflating religion with ethnicity. outside of typical western sites that
lean to the right and are open about it few people would say anything like
that. maybe you meant to post this on glenn beck's site?
whatever. hopefully there won't be more guest posts in the future.
I read this site regularly and give thanks to the numerous intelligent posters
who share their knowledge of the middle east and Syria in particular. Still,
I do try to read alternative views to understand opposition perspectives
no matter how biased or damaging these might they appear to the readers
of this blog. So in the wake of recent agreements, I try find out what the
mainstream media is saying about the Ahrar al-Sham refusal to recognize
the US/Russia sponsored peace plan....and type that into google.......and
crickets. All that comes up is a single Al-Masdar report.
Look I know the
MSM is utterly controlled - but the extent of that control still shocks
at times. It is simply not possible to be "informed" by any normal definition
of the word anymore without the alternative media - and for that reason
this site serves a valuable purpose and I once again thank the host and
contributors.
The irony is, Assad is 10x smarter and bigger person than Debs. Yes, he
made some mistakes, but if not "flirting with neoliberalism", war against
Syria would have started many years earlier, when Resistance wasnt ready
one bit (neither Russia, nor Iran, while on the other hand US was more powerful).
The other ironic point, Debs is guilty of many things he blames other
for, hence comments about his hypocrisy and lack of self-awareness.
The essay I refered to earlier at 45/46 from this site I'll post below.
I think it has a lot of bearing on what DiD is implying here. It's DEFINITELY
worth a read and is probably the reason why I started appreciating this
site in the first place.
Support for rebel groups was misguided at best at the beginning of the
war. One could conceivably not appreciate the capacity of the KSA/USA/Quatar/Israel
to influence and control and create these groups. Jesus it's hard for me
to think of a single local opposition group that isnt drenched in fanaticism
besides the Kurds. But now that we understand the makeup and texture of
these groups much more and to continue support, even just in the most minor
of ways, is really disheartening.
There's no way to a solution for the Syrian
people, the population not imported that is, if these groups win. I hate
to be so binary but its so naive in my eyes to think anything good will
come from the long arm of the gulf countries and the USA taking control.
WORTH A READ. ONE OF THE BEST THINGS EVER POSTED ON MoA.
Richard Steven Hack | Sep 13, 2016 3:38:32 AM |
79
The problem with this post is simple: all this might have been true back
when the insurgency STARTED. TODAY it is UTTERLY IRRELEVANT.
As I've said repeatedly, the GOAL of the Syria crisis for the Western
elites, Israel and the ME dictatorships is to take Syria OUT by any means
necessary in order to get to IRAN. Nothing else matters to these people.
In the same vein, nothing else matters to ninety percent of the CURRENT
insurgents than to establish some Salafist state, exterminate the Shia,
etc., etc.
So, yes, right NOW the whole story is about US elites, Zionist "evil",
corrupt monarchs, and scumbag fanatics, etc., etc. Until THAT is resolved,
nothing about how Syria is being run is going to matter.
I don't know and have never read ANYONE who is a serious commenter on
this issue - and by that I mean NOT the trolls that infest every comment
thread on every blog - who seriously thinks Assad is a "decent ruler". At
this point it does not matter. He personally does not matter. What matters
is that Syria is not destroyed, so that Hizballah is not destroyed, so that
Iran is not destroyed, so that Israel rules a fragmented Middle East and
eventually destroys the Palestinians and that the US gets all the oil for
free. This is what Russia is trying to defend, not Assad.
And if this leaves a certain percentage of Syrian citizens screwed over
by Assad, well, they should have figured that out as much as Assad should
have figured out that he never should have tried to get along with the US.
Frankly, this is a pointless post which is WAY out of date.
Posted by: Richard Steven Hack | Sep 13, 2016 3:38:32 AM | 79
In the same vein, nothing else matters to ninety percent of the CURRENT
insurgents than to establish some Salafist state, exterminate the Shia,
etc., etc.
"We had to be fighters," he said, "because we didn't find any other
job. If you want to stay inside you need to be a part of the FSA [Free
Syrian Army, the group that has closest relations with the West]. Everything
is very expensive. They pay us $100 a month but it is not enough.
"All this war is a lie. We had good lives before the revolution.
Anyway this is not a revolution. They lied to us in the name of religion.
"I don't want to go on fighting but I need to find a job, a house.
Everything I have is here in Muadhamiya."
...
.. who seriously thinks Assad is a "decent ruler". At this point it does
not matter. He personally does not matter.
...
Frankly, this is a pointless post which is WAY out of date.
Posted by: Richard Steven Hack | Sep 13, 2016 3:38:32 AM | 79
Well, according to RSH, who specialises in being wrong...
Assad does matter because he is the ELECTED leader chosen by the People
of Syria in MORE THAN ONE election.
Did you forget?
Did you not know?
Or doesn't any of that "democracy" stuff matter either?
Israel said its aircraft attacked a Syrian army position on Tuesday after
a stray mortar bomb struck the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights, and it
denied a Syrian statement that a warplane and drone were shot down.
The air strike was a now-routine Israeli response to the occasional spillover
from fighting in a five-year-old civil war, and across Syria a ceasefire
was holding at the start of its second day.
Syria's army command said in a statement that Israeli warplanes had attacked
an army position at 1 a.m. on Tuesday (2200 GMT, Monday) in the countryside
of Quneitra province.
The Israeli military said its aircraft attacked targets in Syria hours
after the mortar bomb from fighting among factions in Syria struck the Golan
Heights. Israel captured the plateau from Syria in a 1967 war.
The Syrian army said it had shot down an Israeli warplane and a drone
after the Israeli attack.
Denying any of its aircraft had been lost, the Israeli military said
in a statement: "Overnight two surface-to-air missiles were launched from
Syria after the mission to target Syrian artillery positions. At no point
was the safety of (Israeli) aircraft compromised."
The seven-day truce in Syria, brokered by Russia and the United States,
is their second attempt this year by to halt the bloodshed.
Copeland @60: No, I don't think the problem is fundamentalism. It's the
warring crusade method of spreading a belief's 'empire' that is the problem.
This is a problem uniquely of the Saudi 'do whatever it takes' crusade to
convert the entire 'Arab and Muslim world' to their worst, most misogynist
form of Islam. T
here are of course many fundamentalists (the Amish and some
Mennonites are examples from Christianity) that are not evangelical, or
put severe (no violence, no manipulation, no kidnapping, stop pushing if
the person says 'no') limits on their evangelism.
Only the Saudis, or pushers
of their version of Islam, seem to put no limits at all on their sect's
crusade.
Just want to mention that from the beginning there were people who took
up arms against the government. This is why the situation went out of control.
People ambushed groups of young soldiers. Snipers of unknown origin fired
on police and civilians.
There are plenty of people in the United States right now who are just
as oppressed - I would wager more so - than anyone in Syria. Immigrants
from the south are treated horribly here. There are still black enclaves
in large cities where young men are shot by the police on a daily basis
for suspicious behavior and minor driving infractions. And then there are
the disenfranchised white folks in the Teaparty who belong to the NRA and
insist on 'open carry' of their weapons on the street and train in the back
woods for a coming war. Tell me what would happen if there were a guarantor
these people found believable who promised them that if they took up arms
against the government (and anyone else in the country they felt threatened
by) they would be guaranteed to win and become the government of a 'New
America'. What if that foreign guarantor were to pay them and improve their
armaments while providing political cover.
I rather like Assad. I won't lie. But, he is not the reason for the insurrection
in Syria ~ well, except for his alliances with Russia and Iran and his pipeline
decisions and his support for Palestinian and Iraqi refugees. What happened
in Syria is happening all over the globe because the nation with the most
resources in the world, the self-declared exceptionalist state thinks this
is the way to rule the world. . . . because they want to rule and they don't
care how much destruction it takes to do so. And lucky for us there is no
one big enough and bad enough to do it to us - except for our own government.
"All of the petrodollars Saudi Arabia spends to advance this claim of
leadership and the monopolistic use of Islam's greatest holy sites to manufacture
a claim of entitlement to Muslim leadership were shattered by this collective
revolt from leading Sunni Muslim scholars and institutions who refused to
allow extremism, takfir, and terror ideology to be legitimized in their
name by a fringe they decided that it is even not part of their community.
This is the beginning of a new era of Muslim awakening the Wahhabis spared
no efforts and no precious resources to ensure it will never arrive."
Assad (=> group in power), whose stated aim was to pass from a 'socialist'
to a 'market' economy. Notes.
*decreased public sector employment.* -- was about 30%, went far
lower (1) - was a staple: one 'smart' graduate in the family guaranteed
a good Gvmt job, could support many.
*cut subsidies* (energy, water, housing, food, etc.) drought (2005>)
plus these moves threw millions into cities with no jobs.. pre-drought
about 20% agri empl. cuts to agri subsidies created the most disruption.
…imho was spurred by the sharply declining oil revenues (peak oil..)
which accounted for ?, 15% GDP in 2002 for ex to a few slim points edging
to nil in 2012, consequences:
> a. unemployment rose 'n rose (to 35-40% youth? xyz overall?), and social
stability was affected by family/extended f/ district etc. organisation
being smashed. education health care in poor regions suffered (2)
> b. small biz of various types went under becos loss of subs, competition
from outsiders (free market policy), lack of bank loans it is said by some
but idk, and loss of clients as these became impoverished. Syria does not
have a national (afaik) unemployment scheme. Assad to his credit
set up a cash-transfer thingie to poor families, but that is not a subsitute
for 'growing employment..'
*opened up the country's banking system* (can't treat the details..)
So Assad was hit by a Tri-horror: global warming, dwindling cash
FF resources, and IMF-type pressure, leaving out the trad. enemies, KSA,
pipelines , etc. MSM prefer to cover up serious issues with 'ethnic strife'
(sunni, shia, black lives matter, etc.)
1. all nos off the top of my head.
2. Acceptance of a massive refugee pop. (Pals in the past, Kurds, but
numerically important now, Iraqis) plus the high birth rate
2011> 10 year plan syria in arabic (which i can't read) but look at images
and 'supporters' etc.
"... This phenomenon has been termed the "resource curse." It consists of multiple elements, all bad. ..."
"... The curse is mostly the result of having powerful and rapacious neighbors with no compunction but to use whatever means necessary to install a 'friendly' government willing to repress its own people in order to allow the theft of their 'resources'. ..."
"... As for Chile's governing elite, they wore the comfortable version of the "copper collar', the one made of money as opposed to chains, and so paid-off, lived in wealth and comfort so long as they kept their countrymen from doing anything that Anaconda copper didn't like. ..."
"... Superb stuff, especially "monopolistic control of commodity markets", supply and demand pressures on wheat and oil and copper have mostly faded to insignificance with hyper-leveraged commodities markets and supine (complicit) regulators. ..."
"... See: oil going to $140 not so many years ago despite building supply and weak demand. Goldman famously decided commodities were an "asset class" in 2003 and completely f*cked up these critical price signals for the world economy. ..."
"... Oh, right, our precious middlemen call it "sequestration" and "arbitrage". There's a million pounds of aluminum in the Mexican desert that calls bullshit on your claim. Any more self-absorbed theology you would like to discuss this fine Monday? ..."
"... The terrible legacy of the Pinochet years were also done by the "Chicago boys" who were hired to run the government. In their hate of the people and the embrace of neoliberal capitalism, they did something much worse: they changed the Constitution of the country so that undoing all their hateful legislation would be near impossible to override. When you hear of Student Protests in Chile – they are still fighting to undo the terrible legacy. ..."
"... What was Allende's Socialist party's policies, were they Nordic-style Social Democracy? I still am not sure if there is a meaningful ideological difference between Nordic Social Democracy, & Latin American "Socialism of the 21st Century" in Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia. ..."
"... Perhaps the Nordics have a special secret deal with Murica & the US Imperial MIC: go along with the US Imperial foreign policy, & don't loudly promote your Social Democratic system, to anyone but especially not to nonwhite nations; & in turn we won't falsely slander you as Commie Dictators as we do any other nation attempting Social Democracy. ..."
The story of Chile's popular, and democratic rejection of government by oligarchs is today's must-read, and provides unsettling
similarities to current events, most strikingly in my estimation, recently in Venezuela.
The Popular Unity government enjoyed promising successes during its first year in power. Domestic production spiked in 1971,
leading to a GDP growth rate of almost 9 percent. Unemployment fell from 7 percent to below 3 percent, and wages increased dramatically,
particularly for the lowest earners. Allende's land reform program - along with intensified popular attacks on large, unproductive
landholdings - led to near record harvests and a new abundance of food for the poor.
Of course no good deed goes unpunished by oligarchs.
On the other hand, Chilean elites also pursued a more top-down strategy in their effort to bring the economy to its knees.
Objecting to government-mandated price controls and export restrictions, powerful business interests took to hoarding consumer
essentials, secretly warehousing enormous quantities of basic goods only to let them spoil as avoidable food shortages rocked
the nation.
And of course there's the USA's never-ending efforts to spread peace and democracy.
Meanwhile, in Washington, President Nixon was making good on his promise to "make Chile's economy scream." He called for an
end to all US assistance to the Allende government, and instructed US officials to use their "predominant position in international
financial institutions to dry up the flow" of international credit to Chile.
And finally a sobering reminder, that in the end, if they can't beat you at the polls, they are not above putting and end to you
altogether.
Deeply committed to maintaining the legality of the revolutionary process, the UP government sought to slow the pace of radical
democratic reforms at the grassroots in a misguided effort to avoid a putsch, or the outbreak of open civil war. In the end, this
error proved fatal - an armed popular base, exercising direct control over its communities and workplaces, could have been an
invaluable line of defense for the Allende administration, as well as for its broader goal of total societal transformation.
When Henry Kissinger began secretly taping all of his phone conversations in 1969, little did he know that he was giving history
the gift that keeps on giving. Now, on the 35th anniversary of the September 11, 1973, CIA-backed military coup in Chile, phone
transcripts that Kissinger made of his talks with President Nixon and the CIA chief among other top government officials reveal
in the most candid of language the imperial mindset of the Nixon administration as it began plotting to overthrow President Salvador
Allende, the world's first democratically elected Socialist. "We will not let Chile go down the drain," Kissinger told CIA director
Richard Helms in a phone call following Allende's narrow election on September 4, 1970, according to a recently declassified transcript.
"I am with you," Helms responded.
The comparison with Venezuela is hugely important, especially with regard to the suppliers boycot, where the Venezuelan opposition
seem to be directly copying the Chilean playbook. Even so, there is another aspect that should be of greater concern. Chile stands
out for its reliance on mining, especially copper. By failing in his bid to diversify the Chilean economy, Allende left his country
vulnerable to the fluctuations of the global economy and the whims of first world importers.
If memory serves, in 1973 mining represented around ~25% of the Chilean economy. Venezuela, by contrast, now has 45% of its
GDP tied up in oil exports. The only fact that should be surprising, then, is that the Bolivarian governments have lasted as long
as they have; perhaps a testament to the sweeping social improvements that have won them a mass-supported bulwark against constant
right wing assaults. Even so, with the economy undiversified, that bulwark will only hold out for so long.
This phenomenon has been termed the "resource curse." It consists of multiple elements, all bad.
For one, the ability to produce a commodity at the world's lowest price reduces the incentive to diversify one's economy. In
an extreme case like Saudi Arabia, even the workers hired to produce the oil are mostly foreign, leaving domestic workers unskilled
and idle.
Second, contrary to the belief early in the industrial revolution that commodity prices would be driven up by scarcity, in
fact technological improvement has more than counterbalanced scarcity to keep commodity prices flat to down in real terms.
Finally, as every commodity trader knows, the stylized secular chart pattern of any commodity is a sharp spike owing to a shortage,
followed by a long (as in decades) bowl produced by excessive capacity brought online in the wake of the shortage.
Governments, not adept at realizing that commodity price spikes are not sustainable, accumulate fixed costs during the boom
years and then get crunched in the subsequent price crash.
Is this suppose to explain what happened in Chile in 1973? Catallactics, ushered in AND imposed via a brutal military dictatorship,
yet fail to recognize the contradiction in the so-called "effects of violent intervention with the market"
This phenomenon has been termed the "resource curse." It consists of multiple elements, all bad.
The curse is mostly the result of having powerful and rapacious neighbors with no compunction but to use whatever means
necessary to install a 'friendly' government willing to repress its own people in order to allow the theft of their 'resources'.
For one, the ability to produce a commodity at the world's lowest price reduces the incentive to diversify one's economy.
It was not the people of Chile, who profited by the "ability to produce a commodity at the world's lowest price" and so cannot
be blamed for the inability to diversify their economy.
As for Chile's governing elite, they wore the comfortable version of the "copper collar', the one made of money as opposed
to chains, and so paid-off, lived in wealth and comfort so long as they kept their countrymen from doing anything that Anaconda
copper didn't like.
In an extreme case like Saudi Arabia, even the workers hired to produce the oil are mostly foreign, leaving domestic
workers unskilled and idle.
The extreme case of Saudi Arabia is a direct result of the hegemonic tactics just described, install a government 'friendly'
to American 'interests' in this case the House of Saud, and make them so fabulously wealthy that there is no questioning their
loyalty, until it becomes questionable
Second, contrary to the belief early in the industrial revolution that commodity prices would be driven up by scarcity,
in fact technological improvement has more than counterbalanced scarcity to keep commodity prices flat to down in real terms.
Finally, as every commodity trader knows, the stylized secular chart pattern of any commodity is a sharp spike owing
to a shortage, followed by a long (as in decades) bowl produced by excessive capacity brought online in the wake of the shortage.
Until finally, after the inevitable effect of monopolistic control of commodity 'markets' and the corrupting influence of corporate
power destroy the working man's earning potential, and by extension his purchasing power, and so extinguishes 'demand'.
Governments, not adept at realizing that commodity price spikes are not sustainable, accumulate fixed costs during the
boom years and then get crunched in the subsequent price crash.
It was not the Chilean government who concerned themselves with sustainability, as they were paid not to, and the corporations
who made all the money didn't give a damn either.
It should be easy to understand the logic, and necessity of voting out the ruling elite who were very good at lining their
own pockets, but not so good at planning for their people's well-being.
The Chilean people grew tired of rule by greedy people bought-off by American corporations, and elected a socialist government
in an effort to remedy the situation.
For their troubles, they were treated to a violent coup with thousands killed, tortured and disappeared.
And finally, it appears that you think this is all the 'natural' operation of 'markets'?
Superb stuff, especially "monopolistic control of commodity markets", supply and demand pressures on wheat and oil and
copper have mostly faded to insignificance with hyper-leveraged commodities markets and supine (complicit) regulators.
See: oil going to $140 not so many years ago despite building supply and weak demand. Goldman famously decided commodities
were an "asset class" in 2003 and completely f*cked up these critical price signals for the world economy.
" . an armed popular base, exercising direct control over its communities and workplaces, could have been an invaluable
line of defense for the Allende administration, as well as for its broader goal of total societal transformation."
"Those who do not learn history" are condemned to being exploited and controlled by those who do.
'Objecting to government-mandated price controls and export restrictions, powerful business interests took to hoarding
consumer essentials.'
Businesses don't exist for the purpose of "hoarding." But if mandated prices are set below cost, of course goods will
not be sold at a loss. Blaming the victims instead of the price controllers is like blaming a murder victim for "getting in the
way of my bullet."
Goods perhaps, but not labor. If mandated prices (for labor) are set below cost, serfs will still sell their labor. For example,
any soldier who never came back from Iraq obviously under-priced his labor.
Businesses don't exist for the purpose of "hoarding."
Oh, right, our precious middlemen call it "sequestration" and "arbitrage". There's a million pounds of aluminum in the
Mexican desert that calls bullshit on your claim. Any more self-absorbed theology you would like to discuss this fine Monday?
The terrible legacy of the Pinochet years were also done by the "Chicago boys" who were hired to run the government. In
their hate of the people and the embrace of neoliberal capitalism, they did something much worse: they changed the Constitution
of the country so that undoing all their hateful legislation would be near impossible to override. When you hear of Student Protests
in Chile – they are still fighting to undo the terrible legacy.
Sidenote: US has one of the Chicago Boys, entrenched at the Cato Institute.
yeah the chicago austerity mongers, and kissinger. guess who takes advice from kissinger, and pushes neoliberal economic policies.
the democrats used to be opposed to that sort of thing, at least in public.
What was Allende's Socialist party's policies, were they Nordic-style Social Democracy? I still am not sure if there is
a meaningful ideological difference between Nordic Social Democracy, & Latin American "Socialism of the 21st Century" in Venezuela,
Ecuador, Bolivia.
Norway & Venezuela both have a state-owned oil company, the profits of which are actually used to help their citizens, specifically
in education & health funding. Yet the likes of 0bama/Bush43 praise Norway & slam Venezuela.
Allende was even a full White Guy TM like the Nordics, albeit not blond-hair blue eyes like some Nordics. I suspected this
was perhaps an important reason the likes of 0bama/Bush43 praises the Nordic nations while labeling the part-Native American &/or
Black Venezuelan/Ecuador/Bolivian Presidents as being "Commie" "Dictators".
Perhaps the Nordics have a special secret deal with Murica & the US Imperial MIC: go along with the US Imperial foreign
policy, & don't loudly promote your Social Democratic system, to anyone but especially not to nonwhite nations; & in turn we won't
falsely slander you as Commie Dictators as we do any other nation attempting Social Democracy.
Far right nationalism is essentially an externality caused of neoliberal
globalization. that means that neoliberalism inevitably produces a splash of
virulent far right nationalism in countries were the standard of living dropped
considerably and unemployment hit high marks.
The author failed to mention neoliberalism and the crisis of neoliberal globalization
even once. What a sucker. Very few of Guardian commenter realized that this we
are now facing with a strong, driven by nationalism, backlash to neoliberal globalization.
In this case with neoliberals represented by EU bureaucrats.
Notable quotes:
"... There goes Mason again -- spouting his pro-global fascist bile as though he were some Socialist hero. ..."
"... Sovereign nations are the ONLY bulwark against the banking cartel's now-obvious global tyranny of debt servitude. ..."
"... I always seems hypocritical to slate nationalism in one breath and celebrate cultural diversity in the next. Given that most cultures in existence are very much defined by national identity...you have only to look at how people define themselves...'progressives' find themselves constantly having to square the circle of protecting cultures whilst trying to eliminate nations. ..."
"... conservative and middle of the road parties (and for a long time this included Labour) pushed an agenda that favoured the rich, and left the middle class by the wayside. If you want to find the cheerleaders of globalism you don't have to look much further than most of the world's conservative parties. Far right (or far left) parties aren't very successful in democracies in which people come before profit. ..."
"... Money interests controlling the world demeaning the nation state, undermining ethnic unity, using well meaning liberal fools to make true government impossible and preventing people from achieving their natural greatness. ..."
"... Funny stuff to read. There is no Croatia as a independent state. It is owned by multinational companies. Everything is foreign except forests and drinking water. The is no Croatian independent army - Croatian army is a part of NATO. ..."
"... There is no independent government left or right since everything they do is to listen to their masters from Brussels who are slaping then while they are amassing wealth by means of corruption. ..."
"... Now that the global economy is shaken, the olden demons have crawled out of the woodwork ..."
"... They also seem a bit lost on Mussolini, a man they compare to Trump on an incessant basis (I cringe a little each time I read it). This a man who, in his Fascist Manifesto, advocated in favour of the minimum wage, pandering to the unions, progressive taxation, lowering the voting age and abolishing the upper-chamber. Does that sound 'far-right' to you? ..."
"... Adolf Hitler, 1927: "We are socialists, we are enemies of today's capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions." ..."
"... perhaps it's a case of the EU reaping what it's sowed? let's face the leading members of the eu at the time - in particular Germany - did all they could to hasten the break up of Yugoslavia. The 'state' of Croatia was a construct of the nazis in the first place ..."
"... in 1992, before the war in Bosnia started, Europe sent Jose Cutilleiro to broker a peace deal. He did it and all three sides (Bosnian Serbs, Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Muslims) signed it and the collective sigh of relief could be heard on the Moon. But then Warren Zimmerman, US diplomat, called the leader of Bosnian Muslims for a talk that lasted five days and after that, Alija Izetbegovic retracted his signature, a Muslim killed a Serb in Sarajevo, the first shots were fired after that and the war started...you were saying something about Americans imposing peace? ..."
"... The huge elephant in the room is NATO. A highly corrupt, highly undemocratic institution that has long acted like the world police, meddling everywhere and funding tyrants which won't stop until it completes its aim of full globalisation. It actively aims to flood Europe with migrants without giving democratic elected governments a say. You think Juncker is bad, well he is, but read up on Peter Sutherland and other shady characters in NATO. Until NATO is somehow brought under control nationalism will continue to rise. ..."
There goes Mason again -- spouting his pro-global fascist bile as though
he were some Socialist hero.
Sovereign nations are the ONLY bulwark against the banking cartel's
now-obvious global tyranny of debt servitude.
The more sovereign nations and centres of sovereign power we have, the
more insulated we are from the kind of global fascism that Mason, being
the snake oil salesman he is, peddles.
I always seems hypocritical to slate nationalism in one breath and celebrate
cultural diversity in the next. Given that most cultures in existence are
very much defined by national identity...you have only to look at
how people define themselves...'progressives' find themselves constantly
having to square the circle of protecting cultures whilst trying to eliminate
nations.
Perhaps the resultant cultural homelessness is just as much a cause of
issues as is nationalism in itself.
For me the reason nationalist parties are doing well is that conservative
and middle of the road parties (and for a long time this included Labour)
pushed an agenda that favoured the rich, and left the middle class by the
wayside. If you want to find the cheerleaders of globalism you don't have
to look much further than most of the world's conservative parties. Far
right (or far left) parties aren't very successful in democracies in which
people come before profit.
As for Weimar, since you brought it up. Fascism wasn't voted into power.
A group of bankers and industrialists (conservatives) persuaded the German
president to make Hitler the chancellor. The rest is history. As a darkly
humorous coda, one of the high ups in the Reichsbank was interviewed after
the war and asked why he helped do this - considering the awful things Hitler
had been saying. His answer was along the lines of; 'we didn't think he
was serious about that...'
Mason is right of course. I do fear a repeat of history. One thing that
strikes me looking at the nationalist conspiracy theorists is how familiar
it is. I've been looking a lot recently at the far right since the end of
the 19th century up to World War 2. It's basically the same guff that Ukippers
spout.
Money interests controlling the world demeaning the nation state,
undermining ethnic unity, using well meaning liberal fools to make true
government impossible and preventing people from achieving their natural
greatness.
The only real difference is that at the time the bastards used the Jews
to personify a global conspiracy of the wealthy and now they use the more
malleable "elite". It's a much more flexible term. Disagree with me and
using facts? You are part of a metropolitan bubble or academic ivory tower
etc...Also big difference is that at the time they did have to stand on
a street corner to spout their bile and risk a scrap. Now it's swamping
the comments section of a left wing newspaper. Much safer if a bit more
cowardly.
Funny stuff to read. There is no Croatia as a independent state. It
is owned by multinational companies. Everything is foreign except forests
and drinking water. The is no Croatian independent army - Croatian army
is a part of NATO.
There is no independent government left or right since everything
they do is to listen to their masters from Brussels who are slaping then
while they are amassing wealth by means of corruption.
Result is 53% of turnout in elections. People don't care or try to chance
something that is impossible to change.
We are a nation of 4 million - a great threat to core values of EU where
everything is great. Kick us out and enjoy your multiculturalism - I will
rather take my dog for a walk not having to the lock the door in my house...
Now that the global economy is shaken, the olden demons have crawled
out of the woodwork and the inherently Fascist nations (the ones who
chose militarist authoritarianism or totalitarianism on their own before
WWII) are reverting to type. Croatia, Poland, Hungary, Finland, the Baltic
states.
We can only hope Spain, Portugal, Italy, Austria, Germany, Romania, and
Bulgaria can find the inner strength to resist this temptation to regress.
Just once, I'd love for a Guardian 'journalist' to define what 'far-right'
means; it's, by some distance, their most commonly used slur. I know they
think it's a pejorative term, but what alludes them is it's the precise
definition of anarchism or extreme individualism. They seem to think it's
a synonym for 'racist.'
It probably has something to do with the fact they've been taught history's
worst tyrant was 'far-right' because, well, 'he was waycist.' Except, what
they've failed to notice is
the name of his party
the fact he was
a ruthless statist and advocated supreme state-control
he despised laissez-faire
capitalism
he hated liberal individualism.
racism isn't a political
policy and the left doesn't oppose racism, it merely opposes racism against
non-white people 6. he was a self-avowed socialist!
They also seem a bit lost on Mussolini, a man they compare to Trump
on an incessant basis (I cringe a little each time I read it). This a man
who, in his Fascist Manifesto, advocated in favour of the minimum wage,
pandering to the unions, progressive taxation, lowering the voting age and
abolishing the upper-chamber. Does that sound 'far-right' to you?
His manifesto reads like the manifesto of a modern progressive party
(which is why the progressives of the 20's championed him). It just demonstrates
how utterly narrative driven progressive politics is; then again, those
who live by narrative die by narrative.
Adolf Hitler, 1927: "We are socialists, we are enemies of today's capitalistic
economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its
unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according
to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we
are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions."
He basically sounds like your modern-day progressive.
Leigh Richards , 2016-09-13 06:36:12
perhaps it's a case of the EU reaping what it's sowed? let's face the leading
members of the eu at the time - in particular Germany - did all they could
to hasten the break up of Yugoslavia. The 'state' of Croatia was a construct
of the nazis in the first place FFS!
It was, ultimately, US diplomacy that imposed the peace of 1995.
in 1992, before the war in Bosnia started, Europe sent Jose Cutilleiro
to broker a peace deal. He did it and all three sides (Bosnian Serbs, Bosnian
Croats and Bosnian Muslims) signed it and the collective sigh of relief
could be heard on the Moon. But then Warren Zimmerman, US diplomat, called
the leader of Bosnian Muslims for a talk that lasted five days and after
that, Alija Izetbegovic retracted his signature, a Muslim killed a Serb
in Sarajevo, the first shots were fired after that and the war started...you
were saying something about Americans imposing peace?
They used to say of the Balkans that it is like tectonic plates building
up pressure one against the other. Eventually they will explode again. This
seems likely.
"Money interests controlling the world demeaning the nation state, undermining
ethnic unity"
That's not a conspiracy theory, that's the truth. The far-right are opportunistic
vultures of course but people's concerns are very real, even if most of
them don't know the full facts. Who does?
The huge elephant in the room is NATO.
A highly corrupt, highly undemocratic institution that has long acted
like the world police, meddling everywhere and funding tyrants which won't
stop until it completes its aim of full globalisation. It actively aims
to flood Europe with migrants without giving democratic elected governments
a say. You think Juncker is bad, well he is, but read up on Peter Sutherland
and other shady characters in NATO. Until NATO is somehow brought under
control nationalism will continue to rise. Chilling.
It is not true that announced referendum in Republika Srpska is about independence.
It is actually to check people's opinion about constitutional court that
forbidding Serbs to celebrate 09 January as National Day - just one more
decision in a row made exclusively to further lower Serb autonomy in region
guaranteed by peace agreement.
Just across the mountains lies Republika Srpska – the Serb enclave
created in the country of Bosnia and Herzegovina by the Dayton Agreement
in 1995, after a bitter civil war. Republika Srpska's leaders are threatening
to hold a referendum on independence, which would blow up the deal that
has brought peace to the region for 20 years.
In response, Croatia's politicians have upped the rhetoric..
Three paragraphs, that is how long I had to wait for the first "It's
actually Serbs' Fault" bit. Croatia has no interest in Republika Srpska
at the moment, and if it does, it is observing its moves to eventually copy
them and get out of the very uncomfortable partnership with Bosnian Muslims
whom they see as a much greater threat, so mr. Mason completely missed the
mark - I would have a word with the researchers if I was him, this is quite
embarrassing.
Croatia is silently desensitizing EU for a very long time: a mass for
fascist leader Pavelic here, a monument to an ustasha terrorist there, a
nazi minister yesterday, releasing a war criminal today - little by little,
Croatia is being nazified under the nose of EU officials.
It all started in 1990 and never stopped. Imagine the German Jews waking
up one morning discovering the German constitution has been altered to exclude
them from sharing the equal rights with the rest and that Nazi money, flags
and other symbols are reinstated and that even some old Nazi politicians
are brought from abroad to take positions in the government - all that happened
to Croatian Serbs in 1990, the regime that killed 200 000 of them in 1941
seemed to be resurrected. Worse even, nobody in Europe minded that Croatian
defense minister Susak openly uses Nazi salute and the rest of them lionizes
the Nazi Independent State of Croatia.
It is happening again, in Croatia, Hungary and Poland and again EU doesn't
react so I start to think that EU actually doesn't mind Nazis at all.
I think some countries are just more susceptible to nationalism than others.
It's no accident that among the activist demographic, Paul is citing 40%
unemployment.
Nationalism and fascism are growing forces across the world.
It is a highly complex issue, but the source of hatred towards others
and the exultation of the "you and yours" is fear and insecurity. It is
an animalistic response, a tribalism within our DNA.
To my mind, there are some simple pillars of resistance. Education, of
course. A significant reduction in inequality, and the reintroduction of
hope particularly to young men. A fair crack of the whip for all.
But the big point for me that people miss is the complete lack of a narrative
from the developed world, except dog-eat-dog, individualism, selfishness
and false utopia of wealth generation. Nationalism and fascism have a story,
have a decisive message. It is seductive to those who are lost.
Until the developed world can find what it really stands for (and don't
tell me it's "democracy and freedom" because neither is fully true), our
society will continue to fracture and the next world war will edge ever
closer.
This article gets it wrong. There is not a single Member of the Croatian
Parliament, who could be labeled as "far right", or anybody resembling Farrage,
the BNP, Marine Le Pen, or the Italian Right, where memorial services for
Mussolini are casually being held. Croatian politics has no right wing,
period.
Bullshit dude, you're flat out lying. There are Pavelić and Ustaša memorials
all over the country, masses held, za dom spremni ustaša in football stands
without any action by the police or politics. There are proponents of this
policy in the Sabor, luckily less now than before, so if you're trying to
preach to the British, you lose. Delete your account.
Shows exactly how 'European values' repetitively thrown at us as the founding
blocks of the EU, are pretty meaningless in reality. The standards to which
Turkey must adhere according to EU whims are far different to those of Balkan
entities (nicely 'Christian' and unlike Cyprus, unequivocally 'European'
in geography).
OK to low standards from member states, but not OK to higher standards than
some members from Turkey. And yet this is all about 'values', such as fundamental
rights, justice, education, which have to be anchored in perceived religion
and the paranoia of those who don't know who they are unless a national
identity is legislated for them.
This article completely ignores the fact that the right-wing HDZ leader,
Karamarko, is now long and gone. The new leader Plenkovic has 180-degree
opposite rhetoric, which is typical of HDZ in general, a party without a
consistent left-right positioning. It arose as a populist movement to form
independent Croatia.
The new leader of the HDZ was elected with the same majority of the same
people as the previous Karamarko. Plenković is a facade behind the same
pro-fascist, criminal organization as before. HDZ has from the outset been
positioned right, and surprisingly the least right during Tuđman, former
Tito general and communist.
Utter tosh - Britain voted for Brexit as it is sick & tired of being dictated
to be unelected undemocratic Brussels bureaucrats & the ECJ. The United
States of Europe project is an corpse that has not the intelligence to realise
it is dying & the sooner the better. If the EU reverted in being purely
a trading arrangement rather than a supra-national political ideal it may
still have a miniscule chance of survival but with cretins like Juncker,
Tusk et al in charge - no chance. The sooner we exercise Article 50 & begin
the divorce proceedings the better.
So out of touch, Mr. Mason or is it a slow day at the office? Where to start?!?
Perhaps go back to the nineties when Franjo Tudjman spoke to the crowds
and declared "thank God my wife is neither a Serb or a Jew". Europe praised
him and supported his ethnic cleansing of more than 250.000 Serbs from the
Krajina. Successive Croat governments have rehabilitated war criminals from
WWII and renamed squares and streets after racist butchers. In the meantime
Europe has aided and abetted whether by actively participating or by ignoring
what is going on. You need to read a lot more about the situation and stop
weaving the Russians into this mess. It is the EU and US mess. The solution
should e looked for st their door!
Xenophobic croatians? They are trying to uphold those millions of demanding
invaders so you can peacefully write bull like this in your north london
garden. They were happy to recover from the war and now they are cracking
again under the financial burden of the illegal immigrant crisis. Rampant
corruption in Croatia? Your whole elite is in bed with Saudies and Russian
oligarchs. London is the moneylaundering capital of the world a safehaven
for crooks.
Didn't graun know this ? Croatia has long been a 'frontier post' of European
'civilisation'. Fascist tendency is well known trait in Croatian society(just
as Nationalism has in Serbia). Anyone with the basic knowledge on Balkans
is aware of this.
Anyway to be honest I am not at all surprised with such 'articles' where
the author gets sos surprised after similar things happen. It occurred in
-
1. In post Qaddafi Libya graun was 'surprised' to know that rebels have
islamist leaning (leaning my a**, they ARE hardcore islamists)
2. In post Yanukovich Ukraine when after so many failed attempts to cover
things up they had to publish some articles saying battalions like Aidar,
Azov 'like' to use fascist symbols(it's expected from fascists, isn't it
? )
3. They still haven't admitted that 'moderates' in Syria are not exactly
moderates. I guess they will admit it only if Assad is overthrown.
"Russian money has poured not just into Serbia but into Republika Srpska,
too, together with increased diplomatic influence." Yes, but more investments
are coming from the West (Fiat, Michelin, Mondelez, Microsoft, etc.) with
substantial governments sponsored infrastructure projects coming from UAE
and EU. Why is successful nationhood of Balkan states almost explicitly
linked with complete alignment with either East or West? Why is not normal
to trade freely and be "politically and diplomatically influenced" by both
sides? Or, it could be exclusively reserved right for, for example, Britain
that now looks to China as a post-Brexit alternative. No matter how media
is trying to portrait the Russian influence in the region, the fact is that
Balkan countries are well seated in the heart of Europe, with no intention
to pack and leave.
What is cosmetically used as a divisive material by the local political
parties in the Balkans for their daily use, is usually propelled by the
media as an undeniable proof that "old Balkan ghosts" are back. The ordinary
people are tired of political rhetoric, amplified by sensations hungry media.
By looking for the change, they might be ending with the same result, election
after election, but nations of the region are not interested in yet another
geostrategic trap, full of sacrifices for the sake of big players. They
want peace and a chance to make a dignified living.
This is actually we fear from the neolib hype of their attention to the
young generation =
Meanwhile, young people across the region try to live in a cannabis-softened,
networked dreamworld – where electronic dance music or Pokémon Go replace
the national and political identities formed 20 years ago.
I remember during the various Balkan wars the region was frequently described
as an 'historical fault-line'. There was then something of a revisionist
backlash that disputed that such a thing existed and asserted that the antagonism
between various groups went back no further than the rise of romantic nationalism
in the 1800s.
Actually, there is a fault-line, but not the one that many people imagine
(i.e Christian/Muslim or Occidental/Oriental). The division is between different
Slav groups; one the one hand, those like the Slovenes and Croats who are
traditionally Catholic and consider themselves part of the West, and on
the other the Serbs, Macedonians and Montenegrins who generally see themselves
as part of an Orthodox, 'authentically' Slavic community with Russia at
its head. Much the same division is found further North and is fed by both
Russian historiography that sees the country as the guardian of Slavdom
- the big brother to various smaller nations - and by the instinctive Western
view that the 'other' is fundamentally uncivilised (or at least un-modern).
My own country (the Czech Republic) is a good example of this. Far from
seeing ourselves as part of some great Slav family except in the most abstract
sense, most Czechs take their cues from Berlin, Paris, London and Washington
and see Russians as somewhat backward and uncouth (an impression reinforced
by the presence of the Red Army here for nearly 50 years. Believe me, if
you'd seen the poor bastards up close, you wouldn't fear them so much as
pity them). But go to Minsk or even parts of Eastern Slovakia and you'll
find opinions that are the polar opposite of the above. For various historical
reasons, the same attitudes are amplified in the Balkans so that you have
a situation where peoples who are ethnically almost identical end up hating
each other to the point of violence.
On a different note, it is strange that the legacy of colonialism is
used to excuse almost anything in the developing world but Turkish domination
of the Balkans and the impact that that had on the cultural development
and outlook of the various peoples there - the Serbs in particular - is
virtually never factored in as a reason for people killing each other in
large numbers. It is almost as if some people think that Europeans should
know better...
Globalization is happening with or without NATO. Technology and science
progressed, the world is connected, the differences are melting. Isolation
never ends well. On topic: Croatia is in NATO and there are no refugees
here.
The EU is Balkanising Europe with a helping hand from Merkel. Ethnic and
geopolitical conflict is our future, simply look at the polls in western
European states. "Nationalism" is the modern lefts boogie man. Maybe if
the left (and let's be honest, center right) stopped with their ludicrous
immigration policies there would be less hardline national sentiment. Multiculturalism
is not some sort of human right, it's a political ideology, and it will
come apart.
The EU is doing great things for all the med countries, building strong
economies with good prospects for young people and promoting peace and democracy
on its borders, why the concern?
Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, the Balkans, Ukraine, Turkey, Syria, they are being
imbued with the spirit of European free thought and values, the sort of
liberal tolerance you will only find in great countries like France, why
are you laughing?
It is disturbing that here as in the UK with Farage and Brexit and lePen
in France etc(long list of nasty pieces of work) nationalism is resurgent.It
differs little from the Fascism of the 30s in its glorification of the nation
state and hatred of foreigners. Europe has to face this down in any way
it can or we will repeat the mistakes of last century and get embroiled
in a conflict that only the pedlars of hate would welcome.
On this issue the guardian ,Mason and below the line comment are out of
their depth by a mile, far to complicated/sensitive an issue, which demands
a great deal of historical knowledge and cultural /political /religious/ethnic
awareness .
A lot of points here raised, none of them expanded on.
Croatia is in the title, yet, you mention Bosnia, Republika Srpska, Macedonia...
the Balkans, as you like to call this region, is a complex, many layered
thing... Puting Republika Srpska together with Macedonia or Croatia is something
like comparing Tunisia, Syria and Pakistan (not that these two regions are
of the same relevance, just making the point that garbling these countries
together and explaining each in a few sentences isn't doing any of them
justice).
Some things pointed out are plain wrong. For instance: "...the likely
outcome is a coalition of the same old "centrist" parties – nationalists
and social democrats." Not gonna happen. The so-called nationalists have
never ever formed a coalition with the so called social democrats, nor will
they in the near future.
And last, but not the least: "If Europe wants to make the Balkans work,
it needs to understand the limits of its current approach." What does that
even mean? What Europe? You seem to label Croatia as nationalist, and leaning
in a fascist direction, and yet you name Europe as the one to control us?
Who? Hungary? Poland? Germany with its rise of AFD? I don't think Europe
has the moral high ground to meddle here, and I don't see what would even
be accomplished by it. Unless there are gross human rights violations all
of sudden, of course.
For the time being, I think everyone should concentrate on sorting out
their own countries.
People in Croatia are fed up with the status quo. Same old politicians
for years, with same old policies, and if someone seemingly new pops up
it turns out it was the same old garbage all over again. That is the reason
behind low turnout. And whenever there is a low turnout in Croatia, the
right parties gain ground, because they have a very disciplined electorate.
They tell then to vote for God and country and so they do.
Sadly or more like, quite fortunately, this piece is not about Russia.
It is a piece aimed at asserting the rational over certain ingrained
ethnic rivalries. Good.
We have seen enough of nationalism and inter racial ethnic division.
It bought all those peoples nothing but bad.
Yes. Membership of the EU should not be taken for granted. There should
be certain criteria which the political leaders of applicant states ahould
adhere and adhere they must. There should be no compromise. No compromise!
("No Surrender").
If they want the advantages which membership of the single market can
bestow, then they must accept the civil rights which are bestowed on it's
newly adopted citizens.
If the Croats under rheir nationaliatic and chauvanistic government ignore
this general perspective, rhen they are indeed, unfit. If they can't respect
former adversaries. If they refuse to acknowledge their past, well, don't
let them join (Never, never, never!).
Macedonia's political elite is indeed corrupt to the bone but the country
is certainly not "mired in ethnic conflict" whatever that means Paul. Do
some bloody research.
And your implicit assumption that national chauvinism is somehow a typically
Balkan event says a lot about your thought process. Know that the EU will
not do anything about Croatia's hard right because it's nice to have someone
to do your dirty work on the border zones while you play the honest liberal.
It takes a genuine left! wing government to really upset someone in Brussels.
Well, some of the nasty rethoric like calling Serbs "misery" actually came
from the popular leader on the left this time, who lost. It's too confusing
to put it all in one article.
But, in Macedonia, there were problems, right? Between Macedonians and Albanians,
only last year.
Those who lend the money can smell the global rise in socialism a mile off
- no wonder they are driving the wars the wars in Middle East - which drives
the desperate and displaced into Europe - which starts the rise in hard
right politics... It's so obvious and yet it happens every time.
Well if the US (Clinton) hadn't directed the EU to get involved in Ukraine
and incite a revolution then Putin wouldn't have had to get involved to
protect his naval base and the ethnic Russians in Ukraine. Then the US wouldn't
have had a cause to start trade sanctions and piss of Mr Putin. In which
case Mr Putin wouldn't probably have had the motivation to start cold war
games again.
Anyway I am sure Mrs Clinton has had a very large cheque from the US
defense industry who are the ultimate sponsors of US war games.
What about Ukraine Paul, we've seen open nazism there since the day the
Americans coopted the Maiden coup, oh I forgot that nasty Mr Putin made
them do it ...
Guardian cried nationalism at Scots who just wanted rid of the tories and
Westminster government
its difficult for me to trust any article from guar which includes the
word nationalism
it could well be nationalism which is driving this.... but guar has a
history of demonstrating that it does not even come close to grasping the
basic meaning of the word
The Guardian is 'multiculturalist'. Multiculturalism means absolutely nothing
at all and is a thoroughly discredited idea/l. IMO it is a vehicle for the
alienation of individuals from each other and the destruction of the bond,
i.e. culture, that holds them together and, in most cases, has been constructed
over thousands of years. Destruction of culture and language has always
been the weapon of choice in the imperialists' subjection project. People
will fight back.
Nationalism, as the, increasingly centralised, distant, authoritarian, democratically
deficient EU becomes more and more politically focused and powerful, will
simply grow and grow.
Political and financial elites across the EU live in mortal fear of referenda
for a very good reason.
Supporting the break up of Yugoslavia was the worse mistake the European
powers ever made since 1945. And approving the independence of Kosovo probably
the second. On what grounds do they think now they can oppose the independence
of Republika Srpska? The continued harassment and gratuitous confrontation
of certain EU states against Russia won't help either.
Europe is tending towards break up as countries start to align back to their
historical roots. Look at a map of Europe now compared with 30 years ago.
Don't forget all the regional tensions, the Basques, Catalans, and I hear
20 other similar situations across Europe. Meanwhile Project EU thinks it
can create a single Europe. It's laughable.
We have no influence or control over the EU. It is run by Germany and their
puppets in Brussels. The actual purpose of the euro politicians is to create
a single country called Europe. One currency, one legal system, one army,
open borders, etc. Sovereign control will be gradually stripped from individual
countries and passed to Brussels. But of course it is completely corrupt
and mismanaged and it is only a matter of time before it collapses. At least
we had the balls to brexit.
These things are really serious and they are happening all over the democratic
world. We can end up with Trump on one end and myriad far right or crypto
far right governments in Europe. It is a complete failure of our political
economic and educational system.
I honestly believe that representational democracy as we know it is on its
last breath.
Why do you create a distinction between the left and fascism? Fascism, as
advocated by The National Socialist German Workers Party and Mussolini,
adored statism (state-control).
The left is about ever-increasing state power, the right is about individualism
('far-right', a term used as a pejorative, actually means anarchy, Hitler
was a megalomaniacal control freak). The fascists are on record time and
time again expressing their hatred of laissez-faire capitalism and liberal
individualism.
Mussolini's manifesto - which advocates the minimum wage, pandering to
the unions, progressive taxation, lowering the voting age and abolishing
the upper-chamber - reads like a manifesto for a modern-day progressive
party. Why? Because it was self-proclaimed 'progressives', in the 20s, who
supported it.
The EU has made small regions feel powerless and provoked more nationalism,
just look at the tensions within the UK, Spain, Italy before you even start
with the Balkans. The Balkans have been forced to be the frontline in a
blockade for a mismanaged German refugee crisis. All these eastern european
economies are mostly basket cases that joining the EU won't save. Indeed
with EU free movement of labour they'll find all their young talent gone
looking for opportunities abroad but maybe that's what they want?
Why does the Guardian conflate every expression of nationalism with fascism?
It's a bit like conflating an instance of one white police officer shooting
one black person with systemic racism - it doesn't fit. It's childlike.
We are nationalist. It's not whether we should be, we are. We have a
border, we unite behind symbols, we have a national anthem, a national Parliament,
a national health service and a national language. I don't believe 'Britishness'
is quantifiable, however I also, unlike The Guardian, realise it exists;
much in the same way 'love' can't quantified, but many accept it (it is
our national religion).
'Britishness' is merely the collective will of the British people. While
we can't quantify it per se, it exists. It's the collective moral obligation
held by the citizens of this country towards free healthcare at the point
of delivery; it's a moral obligation which doesn't exist in the majority
of countries the world over. It's a very British moral obligation, and one
which is in danger of being eroded by the left's worst policy: open borders.
I know in Guardian-land criticism of its national religions, ie, diversity,
open borders, globalism, feminism, etc., is tantamount to blasphemy, but
can we please get a handle on reality? There are nearly 200 nation-states
in the world and only a tiny handful of them are in a political union; the
nation-state is now, and will continue to be, the primary actor in international
relations.
That in your arrogance you forget this is what has led to your spectacular
fall from grace all over the western world. The people don't want globalism;
the people are tribal, and they always will be. The people extend trust
to outsiders with a great deal of caution; they don't do so because they
are bad, they do so because of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.
What's more, it's not just 'British people' who adopt these attitudes;
it's everyone; it's every group. It's why Bangladeshis congregate together
in Tower Hamlets, it's why Pakistanis congregate together in Govanhill;
it's why black people congregate together in Chicago.
You can't just unwind 200,000 years of evolution with 30 years of progressive
politics; you certainly can't achieve that when you determine that the in-group
is the problem.
If you want real progress, be liberal. At this stage, I don't believe
progressives are even opposed to racism; they merely oppose racism against
non-white people. I don't believe progressives favour equality; they merely
favour equality for women (or x group). These aren't liberal attitudes,
these are bigoted attitudes.
They are just reinforcing group-based dynamics (ethnocentrism, tribalism,
gynocentrism, etc.), the very dynamics you criticise in the context of other
groups (ie, white heterosexual males).
Excellent comment. Isn't it strange that repressive ideologies are called
'progressive' by the Marxists and Globalists that spread the word, the fear
and the idiocy.
It's simple: nationalism is neurotic and built on defining oneself by the
virtue of one's difference, to the exclusion of similarities and debasement
of the other. It's the reverse of the Good Samaritan.
All that is very nice indeed, problem is when 'in the name of my nation'
someone ends up laying dead and beaten to pulp on the streets .... and that,
sorry, ain't so nice.
This short article contains several very deep observations. Highly
recommended...
Notable quotes:
"... There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs or ExxonMobil or Raytheon. We've lost our privacy. We've seen, under Obama, an assault against civil liberties that has outstripped what George W. Bush carried out. ..."
"... This has been a bipartisan effort, because they've both been captured by corporate power. We have undergone what John Ralston Saul correctly calls a corporate coup d'état in slow motion, and it's over. ..."
"... First, it dislocated the working class, deindustrialized the country. Then, in the name of austerity, it destroyed public institutions, education, public broadcasting. And then it poisoned the political system. And we are now watching, in Poland, they created a 30,000 to 40,000 armed militia. You know, they have an army. The Parliament, nothing works. And I think that this political system in the United States has seized up in exactly the same form. ..."
"... So, is Trump a repugnant personality? Yes. Although I would argue that in terms of megalomania and narcissism, Hillary Clinton is not far behind. But the point is, we've got to break away from-which is exactly the narrative they want us to focus on. ..."
"... I mean, this whole debate over the WikiLeaks is insane. Did Russia? I've printed classified material that was given to me by the Mossad. But I never exposed that Mossad gave it to me. Is what was published true or untrue? And the fact is, you know, in those long emails -- you should read them. They're appalling, including calling Dr. Cornel West "trash." It is-the whole-it exposes the way the system was rigged, within-I'm talking about the Democratic Party -- the denial of independents, the superdelegates, the stealing of the caucus in Nevada, the huge amounts of corporate money and super PACs that flowed into the Clinton campaign. ..."
"... Clinton has a track record, and it's one that has abandoned children. I mean, she and her husband destroyed welfare as we know it, and 70 percent of the original recipients were children. ..."
"... Trump is not the phenomenon. Trump is responding to a phenomenon created by neoliberalism. And we may get rid of Trump, but we will get something even more vile ..."
CHRIS HEDGES : Well, reducing the election to personalities
is kind of infantile at this point. The fact is, we live in a system that Sheldon
Wolin calls inverted totalitarianism. It's a system where corporate power has
seized all of the levers of control. There is no way to vote against the interests
of Goldman Sachs or ExxonMobil or Raytheon. We've lost our privacy. We've seen,
under Obama, an assault against civil liberties that has outstripped what George
W. Bush carried out. We've seen the executive branch misinterpret the 2001 Authorization
to Use Military Force Act as giving itself the right to assassinate American
citizens, including children. I speak of Anwar al-Awlaki's 16-year-old son.
We have bailed out the banks, pushed through programs of austerity. This
has been a bipartisan effort, because they've both been captured by corporate
power. We have undergone what John Ralston Saul correctly calls a corporate
coup d'état in slow motion, and it's over.
I just came back from Poland, which is a kind of case study of how
neoliberal poison destroys a society and creates figures like Trump. Poland
has gone, I think we can argue, into a neofascism.
First, it dislocated the working class, deindustrialized the country.
Then, in the name of austerity, it destroyed public institutions, education,
public broadcasting. And then it poisoned the political system. And we are now
watching, in Poland, they created a 30,000 to 40,000 armed militia. You know,
they have an army. The Parliament, nothing works. And I think that this political
system in the United States has seized up in exactly the same form.
So, is Trump a repugnant personality? Yes. Although I would argue that
in terms of megalomania and narcissism, Hillary Clinton is not far behind. But
the point is, we've got to break away from-which is exactly the narrative they
want us to focus on. We've got to break away from political personalities
and understand and examine and critique the structures of power. And, in fact,
the Democratic Party, especially beginning under Bill Clinton, has carried water
for corporate entities as assiduously as the Republican Party. This is something
that Ralph Nader understood long before the rest of us, and stepped out very
courageously in 2000. And I think we will look back on that period and find
Ralph to be an amazingly prophetic figure. Nobody understands corporate power
better than Ralph. And I think now people have caught up with Ralph.
And this is, of course, why I support Dr. Stein and the Green Party. We have
to remember that 10 years ago, Syriza, which controls the Greek government,
was polling at exactly the same spot that the Green Party is polling now-about
4 percent. We've got to break out of this idea that we can create systematic
change within a particular election cycle. We've got to be willing to step out
into the political wilderness, perhaps, for a decade. But on the issues of climate
change, on the issue of the destruction of civil liberties, including our right
to privacy-and I speak as a former investigative journalist, which doesn't exist
anymore because of wholesale government surveillance-we have no ability, except
for hackers.
I mean, this whole debate over the WikiLeaks is insane. Did Russia? I've
printed classified material that was given to me by the Mossad. But I never
exposed that Mossad gave it to me. Is what was published true or untrue? And
the fact is, you know, in those long emails -- you should read them. They're
appalling, including calling Dr. Cornel West "trash." It is-the whole-it exposes
the way the system was rigged, within-I'm talking about the Democratic Party
-- the denial of independents, the superdelegates, the stealing of the caucus
in Nevada, the huge amounts of corporate money and super PACs that flowed into
the Clinton campaign.
The fact is, Clinton has a track record, and it's one that has abandoned
children. I mean, she and her husband destroyed welfare as we know it, and 70
percent of the original recipients were children.
This debate over -- I don't like Trump, but Trump is not the phenomenon.
Trump is responding to a phenomenon created by neoliberalism. And we may get
rid of Trump, but we will get something even more vile, maybe Ted Cruz.
"... On the morning following the Austrian presidential election, when it became certain that the neo-nationalist candidate had not won the Austrian presidency (thanks to a few thousand overseas votes, mostly belonging to the middle class), there was a great sigh of relief from the Transnational Elite, (TE), i.e. the network of economic and political elites running the New World Order of Neoliberal Globalization (NWO), mainly based in the G7 countries. ..."
"... The elites are not used to "no" votes, and whenever the European peoples did not vote the 'correct' way in their plebiscites they were forced to vote again until they did so, or they were simply smashed – as was the case with the Greek plebiscite a year ago. ..."
"... In other words, the peoples' need for self-determination, in the NWO, had no other outlet but the nation-state, as, up to a few years ago, the world was dominated by nation–states, within which communities with a common culture, language, customs etc. could express themselves. ..."
"... The nation-state became again a means of self-determination, as it used to be in the 20th century for peoples under colonial rule struggling for their national liberation. The national culture is of course in clear contradiction with a globalist culture like the one imposed now 'from above' by the Transnational and national elites. ..."
"... In fact, the Transnational Elite launched several criminal wars in the last thirty years or so to "protect" human rights (Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and indirectly Syria) leading to millions of deaths and dislocations of populations. ..."
"... Nationalism's emphasis was on the nation-state (or the aspiration for one), whereas neo-nationalism's emphasis is not so much on the nation but rather on sovereignty at the economic but also at the political and cultural levels, which has been phased out in the globalization process; ..."
"... Unlike old nationalism, neo-nationalism raises also demands that in the past were an essential part of the Left agenda, such as the demand for greater equality (within the nation-state and between nation-states), the demand to minimize the power of the elites, even anti-war demands. ..."
"... The neo-nationalist movement had already created strong roots all over the EU, from its Western part (France, UK) up to its Eastern part (Hungary, Poland) and now Austria. Even in the USA itself Donald Trump, who has called on Americans to resist "the false song of globalism", expresses to a significant extent neo-nationalist trends and may be tomorrow the next President of the "Free World". ..."
"... by the strong informal patriotic movement in Russia, which encompasses all those opposing the integration of the country into the NWO ––from neo-nationalists to communists and from orthodox Christians to secularists, while the leadership under Putin is trying to accommodate the very powerful globalist part of the elite (oligarchs, mass media, social media etc.) with this patriotic movement. ..."
"... it is mainly Le Pen's National Front party, more than any other neo-nationalist party in the West, that realized that globalization and membership in the NWΟ's institutions are incompatible with national sovereignty. ..."
"... "Globalization is a barbarity, it is the country which should limit its abuses and regulate it [globalization]." Today the world is in the hands of multinational corporations and large international finance" Immigration "weighs down on wages," while the minimum wage is now becoming the maximum wage" ..."
"... It is therefore obvious that the globalization process has already had devastating economic and social consequences on the majority of the world population. At the same time, the same process has also resulted in tremendous changes at the political and the cultural levels, in the past three decades or so. Last, but not least, it has led to a series of major wars by the Transnational Elite in its attempt to integrate any country resisting integration into the New World Order (NWO) defined by neoliberal globalization (Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria) ..."
"... The neo-nationalist movement is embraced by most of the victims of globalization all over Europe, particularly the working class that used to support the Left ..."
"... the only kind of 'fascism' still possible today is the one directly or indirectly supported by the TE (what we may call 'Euro-fascism'), which is therefore a kind of pseudo-fascism––although in terms of the bestial practices it uses, it may be even more genuine than the 'real thing' of the inter-war period. This is, for instance, the case of the Ukrainian Euro-fascists who are the closest thing to historical Nazism available today, not only in terms of their practices but also in terms of their history. ..."
"... The neo-nationalist parties are embraced by most of the victims of globalization all over Europe, particularly the working class which used to support the Left,[xxvii] whilst the latter has effectively embraced all aspects of globalization (economic, political, ideological and cultural) and has been fully integrated into the NWO––a defining moment in its present intellectual and political bankruptcy. ..."
On the morning following the Austrian presidential election, when it became certain that the
neo-nationalist candidate had not won the Austrian presidency (thanks to a few thousand overseas
votes, mostly belonging to the middle class), there was a great sigh of relief from the Transnational
Elite, (TE), i.e. the network of economic and political elites running the New World Order of Neoliberal
Globalization (NWO), mainly based in the G7 countries.
The huge expansion of the anti-globalization movement over the past few years was under control,
for the time being, and the EU elites would not have to resort to sanctions against a country at
the core of the Union – such as those which may soon be imposed against Poland.
In fact, the only reason they have not as yet been imposed is, presumably, the fear of Brexit,
but as soon as the British people finally submit to the huge campaign of intimidation ("Project Fear")
launched against them by the entire transnational elite, Poland's – and later Hungary's – turn will
come in earnest.
The elites are not used to "no" votes, and whenever the European peoples did not vote the
'correct' way in their plebiscites they were forced to vote again until they did so, or they were
simply smashed – as was the case with the Greek plebiscite a year ago. The interesting thing,
however, is that in the Greek case it was the so-called "NewLeft" represented by SYRIZA, which not
only accepted the worst package of measures imposed on Greece (and perhaps any other country) ever,[ii]
but which is also currently busy conducting a huge propaganda campaign (using the state media, which
it absolutely controls, as its main propaganda tool) to deceive the exhausted Greek people that the
government has even achieved some sort of victory in the negotiations! At the same time, the working
class – the traditional supporters of the Left – are deserting the Left en masse and heading towards
the neo-nationalist parties: from Britain and France to Austria. So how can we explain these seemingly
inexplicable phenomena?
Nationalism vs. neo-nationalism
As I tried to show in the past,[iii] the emergence of the modern nation-state in the 17th-18th
centuries played an important role in the development of the system of the market economy and vice
versa. However, whereas the 'nationalization' of the market was necessary for the development of
the 'market system' out of the markets of the past, once capital was internationalized and therefore
the market system itself was internationalized, the nation state became an impediment to further
'progress' of the market system. This is how the NWO emerged, which involved a radical restructuring
not only of the economy, with the rise of Transnational Corporations, but also of polity, with the
present phasing out of nation-states and national sovereignty.
Inevitably, the phasing out of the nation-state and national sovereignty led to the flourishing
of neo-nationalism, as a movement for self-determination. Yet, this development became inevitable
only because the alternative form of social organization, confederalism, which was alive even up
to the time of the Paris Commune had in the meantime disappeared.
In other words, the peoples' need for self-determination, in the NWO, had no other outlet
but the nation-state, as, up to a few years ago, the world was dominated by nation–states, within
which communities with a common culture, language, customs etc. could express themselves.
The nation-state became again a means of self-determination, as it used to be in the 20th
century for peoples under colonial rule struggling for their national liberation. The national culture
is of course in clear contradiction with a globalist culture like the one imposed now 'from above'
by the Transnational and national elites.
This globalist culture is based on the globalization ideology of multiculturalism, protection
of human rights etc., which in fact is an extension of the classical liberal ideology to the NWO.
In fact, the Transnational Elite launched several criminal wars in the last thirty years or so
to "protect" human rights (Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and indirectly Syria) leading to
millions of deaths and dislocations of populations. It is not therefore accidental that globalist
ideologists characterize the present flourishing of what I called neo-nationalism, as the rise of
'illiberalism'.'[iv] It is therefore clear that we have to distinguish between old (or classical)
nationalism and the new phenomenon of neo-nationalism. To my mind, the main differences between them
are as follows:
a) Nationalism developed in the era of nation-states as a movement for uniting
communities with a common history, culture and usually language under the common roof of nation-states
that were emerging at the time but also even in the 20th century when national liberation movements
against colonialist empires were fighting for their own nation states. On the other hand, neo-nationalism
developed in the era of globalization with the aim of protecting the national sovereignty of nations
which was under extinction because of the integration of their states into the NWO;
b) Nationalism's emphasis was on the nation-state (or the aspiration for
one), whereas neo-nationalism's emphasis is not so much on the nation but rather on sovereignty at
the economic but also at the political and cultural levels, which has been phased out in the globalization
process;
c) Unlike old nationalism, neo-nationalism raises also demands that in the
past were an essential part of the Left agenda, such as the demand for greater equality (within the
nation-state and between nation-states), the demand to minimize the power of the elites, even anti-war
demands.
Naturally, given the origin of many neo-nationalist parties and their supporters, elements of
the old nationalist ideology may penetrate them, such as the Islamophobic and anti-immigration trends,
which provide the excuse to the elites to dismiss all these movements as 'far right'. However, such
demands are by no means the main reasons why such movements expand. Particularly so, as it can easily
be shown that the refugee problem is also part and parcel of globalization and the '4 freedoms' (capital,
labor, goods and services) its ideology preaches.
The rise of the neo-nationalist movement
Therefore, neo-nationalism is basically a movement that arose out of the effects of globalization,
particularly as far as the continuous squeezing of employees' real incomes is concerned––as a result
of liberalizing labor markets, so that labor could become more competitive. The present 'job miracle',
for instance, in Britain, (which is characterized as "the job creation capital of the western economies"),
hides the fact that, as an analyst pointed out, "unemployment is low, largely because British workers
have been willing to stomach the biggest real-terms pay cut since the Victorian era".[v]
The neo-nationalist movement had already created strong roots all over the EU, from its Western
part (France, UK) up to its Eastern part (Hungary, Poland) and now Austria. Even in the USA itself
Donald Trump, who has called on Americans to resist "the false song of globalism", expresses to a
significant extent neo-nationalist trends and may be tomorrow the next President of the "Free World".Of course, given the political and economic power that the elites have concentrated against these
neo-nationalist movements, it is possible that neither Brexit nor any of these movements may take
over, but this will not stop of course social dissent against the phasing out of national sovereignty.
The same process is repeated almost everywhere in Europe today, inevitably leading many people
(and particularly working class people) to turn to the rising neo-nationalist Right. This is not
of course because they suddenly became "nationalists" let alone "fascists", as the globalist "NewLeft"
(that is the kind of Left which is fully integrated into the NWO and does not question its institutions,
e.g. the EU) accuses them in order to ostracize them. It is simply because the present globalist
"NewLeft" does not wish to lead the struggle against globalization, while, at the same time, the
popular strata have realized that national and economic sovereignty is incompatible with globalization.
This is a fact fully realized, for example, by the strong informal patriotic movement in Russia,
which encompasses all those opposing the integration of the country into the NWO ––from neo-nationalists
to communists and from orthodox Christians to secularists, while the leadership under Putin is trying
to accommodate the very powerful globalist part of the elite (oligarchs, mass media, social media
etc.) with this patriotic movement.
But, it is mainly Le Pen's National Front party, more than any other neo-nationalist party
in the West, that realized that globalization and membership in the NWΟ's institutions are incompatible
with national sovereignty. As Le Pen stressed, (in a way that the "NewLeft" has abandoned long
ago!):
"Globalization is a barbarity, it is the country which should limit its abuses and regulate
it [globalization]." Today the world is in the hands of multinational corporations and large international
finance" Immigration "weighs down on wages," while the minimum wage is now becoming the maximum
wage".[vi]
In fact, the French National Front is the most important neo-nationalist party in Europe and may
well be in power following the next Presidential elections in 2017, unless of course a united front
of all globalist parties (including the "NewLeft" and the Greens), supported by the entire TE and
particularly the Euro-elites and the mass media controlled by them, prevents it from doing so (exactly
as it happens at present in Britain with respect to Brexit). This is how Florian Philippot the FN's
vice-president and chief strategist aptly put its case in a FT interview:
"The people who always voted for the left, who believed in the left and who thought that it
represented an improvement in salaries and pensions, social and economic progress, industrial
policies . these people have realized that they were misled."[vii]
As the same FT report points out, to some observers of French politics, the FN's economic policies,
which include exiting the euro and throwing up trade barriers to protect industry, read like something
copied from a 1930s political manifesto, while Christian Saint-Étienne, an economist for Le Figaro
newspaper, recently described this vision as "Peronist Marxism".[viii] In fact, in a more recent
FT interview, Marine Le Pen, the FN president went a step further in the same direction and she called,
apart from exiting from the Euro––that she expects to lead to the collapse of the Euro, if not of
the EU itself, (which she-rightly–welcomes)––for the nationalization of banks. At the same time she
championed public services and presented herself as the protector of workers and farmers in the face
of "wild and anarchic globalization which has brought more pain than happiness ".[ix]
For comparison, it never even occurred to SYRIZA (and Varoufakis who now wears his "radical" hat)
to use such slogans before the elections (let alone after them!) Needless to add that her foreign
policy is also very different from that of the French establishment, as she wants a radical overhaul
of French foreign policy in which relations with the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad would
be restored and those with the likes of Qatar and Turkey, which she alleges support terrorism, reviewed.
At the same time, Le Pen sees the US as a purveyor of dangerous policies and Russia as a more suitable
friend.
Furthermore, as it was also stressed in the same FT report, "the FN is not the only supposedly
rightwing European populist party seeking to draw support from disaffected voters on the left. Nigel
Farage, the leader of the UK Independence party has adopted a similar approach and has been discussing
plans "to ring-fence the National Health Service budget and lower taxes for low earners, among a
host of measures geared to economically vulnerable voters who would typically support Labor".[x]
Similar trends are noticed in other European countries like Finland, where the anti-NATO and pro-independence
from the EU parties had effectively won the last elections,[xi] as well as in Hungary, where neo-nationalist
forces are continuously rising,[xii] and Orban's government has done more than any other EU leader
in protecting his country's sovereignty, being as a result, in constant conflict with the Euro-elites.
Finally, the rise of a neo-nationalist party in Poland enraged Martin Schulz, the loudmouthed gatekeeper
of the TE in the European Parliament, who accused the new government as attempting a "dangerous 'Putinization'
of European politics."[xiii]
However, what Eurocrats like Martin Schulz "forget" is that since Poland joined the EU
in 2004, at least two million Poles have emigrated, many of them to the UK. The victory of the Law
and Justice Party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc, PiS) in October 2015 was due not just to a backlash by
traditional Polish voters to the bulldozing of their values by the ideology of globalization but
also to the fact, as Cédric Gouverneur pointed out, that "the nationalist, pro-religion, protectionist,
xenophobic PiS has attracted these disappointed people with an ambitious welfare programme: a family
allowance of 500 zloty ($130) a month per child, funded through a tax on banks and big business;
a minimum wage; and a return to a retirement age of 60 for women and 65 for men (PO had planned to
raise it to 67 for both).[xiv] In fact, PiS used to be a conservative pro-EU party when they were
in power between 2005 and 2007, following faithfully the neoliberal program, and since then they
have become increasingly populist and Eurosceptic. As a result, in the last elections they won the
parliamentary elections in both the lower house (Sejm) and the Senate, with 37.6% of the vote, against
24.1% for the neoliberals and 8.8% for the populist Kukiz while the "progressive" camp failed to
clear the threshold (5% for parties, 8% for coalitions) and have no parliamentary representation
at all!
The bankruptcy of the Left
It is therefore obvious that the globalization process has already had devastating economic
and social consequences on the majority of the world population. At the same time, the same process
has also resulted in tremendous changes at the political and the cultural levels, in the past three
decades or so. Last, but not least, it has led to a series of major wars by the Transnational Elite
in its attempt to integrate any country resisting integration into the New World Order (NWO) defined
by neoliberal globalization (Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria).
Furthermore, there is little doubt anymore that it was the intellectual failure of the Left to
grasp the real significance of a new systemic phenomenon, (i.e. the rise of the Transnational Corporation
that has led to the emergence of the globalization era) and its consequent political bankruptcy,
which were the ultimate causes of the rise of a neo-nationalist movement in Europe. This movement
is embraced by most of the victims of globalization all over Europe, particularly the working class
that used to support the Left, whilst the latter has effectively embraced not just economic globalization
but also political, ideological and cultural globalization and has therefore been fully integrated
into the New World Order. In fact, today, following the successful emasculation of the antisystemic
movement against globalization, thanks mainly to the activities of the globalist Left, it was left
to the neo-nationalist movement to fight against globalization in general and against the EU in particular.
Almost inevitably, in view of the campaigns of the TE against Muslim countries (Iraq, Afghanistan,
Libya, Syria), worrying Islamophobic trends have developed within several of these neo-nationalist
movements, some of them turning their old anti-Semitism to Islamophobia, supported on this by Zionists
themselves![xv] Even Marine Le Pen did not avoid the temptation to lie about Islamophobia and anti-Semitism,
stressing that "there is no Islamophobia in France but there is a rise in anti-Semitism".
Yet, she is well aware of the fact that Islamophobia was growing in France well before Charlie
Hebdo,[xvi] with racial attacks against Islamic immigrants, (most of whom live under squalid conditions
in virtual ghettos) being very frequent. At the same time, it is well known that the Jewish community
is mostly well off and shares a very disproportionate part of political and economic power in the
country to its actual size, as it happens of course also––and to an even larger extent–– in UK and
USA. This is one more reason why Popular Fronts for National and Social Liberation have to be built
in every country of the world to fight not only Eurofascism and the NWO-which is of course the main
enemy––but also any racist trends developing within these new anti-globalization movements, which
today take the form of neo-nationalism. This would also prevent the elites from using the historically
well-tested 'divide and rule' practice to divide the victims of globalization.
Similarly, the point implicitly raised by the stand of the British "NewLeft" in general on the
issue of Brexit cannot just be discussed in terms of the free trade vs. protectionism debate, as
the liberal (or globalist) "NewLeft" does (see for instance Jean Bricmont[xvii] and Larry Elliott[xviii]
of the Guardian). Yet, the point is whether it is globalization itself, which has led to the present
mass economic violence against the vast majority of the world population and the accompanying it
military violence. In other words, what all these "NewLeft" trends hide is that globalization is
a class issue. But, this is the essence of the bankruptcy of the "NewLeft" , which is reflected in
the fact that, today, it is the neo-nationalist Right which has replaced the Left in its role of
representing the victims of the system in its globalized form , while the Left mainly
represents those in the middle class or the petty bourgeoisie who benefit from globalization. Needless
to add that today's bankrupt "NewLeft" promptly characterized the rising neo-nationalist parties
as racist, if not fascist and neo-Nazis, fully siding with the EU's black propaganda campaign against
the rising movement for national sovereignty.
This is obviously another nail in the coffin of this kind of "NewLeft" , as the millions of European
voters who turn their back towards this degraded "NewLeft" are far from racists or fascists but simply
want to control their way of life rather than letting it to be determined by the free movement of
capital, labor and commodities, as the various Soroses of this world demand!
The neo-nationalist movement is embraced by most of the victims of globalization all over
Europe, particularly the working class that used to support the Left,[xix] whilst the latter
has effectively embraced not just economic globalization but also political, ideological and cultural
globalization and has therefore been fully integrated into the New World Order––a defining moment
in its present intellectual and political bankruptcy. In the Austrian elections, it became once more
clear that the Left expresses now the middle class, while the neo-nationalists the working class.
As the super-globalist BBC presented the results:
Support for Mr Hofer was exceptionally strong among manual workers – nearly 90%. The vote for
Mr Van der Bellen was much stronger among people with a university degree or other higher education
qualifications. In nine out of Austria's 10 main cities Mr Van der Bellen came top, whereas Mr Hofer
dominated the rural areas, the Austrian broadcaster ORF reported (in German).[xx]
The process of the NewLeft's bankruptcy has been further enhanced by the fact that, faced with
political collapse in the May 2014 Euro-parliamentary elections, it allied itself with the elites
in condemning the neo-nationalist parties as fascist and neo-Nazi. However, today, following the
successful emasculation of the antisystemic movement against globalization (mainly through the World
Social Forum, thanks to the activities of the globalist "NewLeft" ),[xxi] it is up to the neo-nationalist
movement to fight globalization in general and the EU in particular. It is therefore clear that the
neo-nationalist parties which are, in fact, all under attack by the TE, constitute cases of movements
that have simply filled the huge gap created by the globalist "NewLeft" . Thus, this "NewLeft" ,
Instead of placing itself in the front line among all those peoples fighting globalization and the
phasing out of their economic and national sovereignty, it has indirectly promoted globalization,
using arguments based on an anachronistic internationalism, supposedly founded on Marxism.
On the other side, as one might expect, most members of the Globalist "NewLeft" have joined the
new 'movement' by Varoufakis to democratize Europe, "forgetting" in the process that 'Democracy'
was also the West's propaganda excuse for destroying Iraq, Libya and now Syria. Today, it seems that
the Soros circus is aiming to use exactly the same excuse to destroy Europe, in the sense of securing
the perpetuation of the EU elites' domination of the European peoples and therefore the continuation
of the consequent economic violence involved. The most prominent members of the globalist "NewLeft"
who have already joined this new DIEM 'movement' range from Noam Chomsky and Julian Assange to Suzan
George and Toni Negri, and from Hillary Wainwright of Red Pepper to CounterPunch and
other globalist "NewLeft" newspapers and journals all over the world. In this context, it is particularly
interesting to refer to Slavoj Žižek's commentary on the 'Manifesto' that was presented at the inaugural
meeting of Varoufakis's new movement in Berlin on February 2016.[xxii]
Neo-nationalism and immigration
So, the unifying element of neo-nationalists is their struggle for national sovereignty, which
they (rightly), see as disappearing in the era of globalization. Even when their main immediate motive
is the fight against immigration, indirectly their fight is against globalization, as they realize
that it is the opening of all markets, including the labor markets, particularly within economic
unions like the EU, which is the direct cause of their own unemployment or low-wage employment, as
well as of the deterioration of the welfare state, given that the elites are not prepared to expand
social expenditure to accommodate the influx of immigrants. Yet, this is not a racist movement but
a purely economic movement, although the TE and the Zionist elites, with the help of the globalist
"NewLeft" , try hard to convert it into an Islamophobic movement––as the Charlie Hebdo case
clearly showed[xxiii]–––so that they could use it in any way they see fit in the support of the NWO.
But, what is the relationship of both neo-nationalists and Euro-fascists to historical fascism
and Nazism? As I tried to show elsewhere,[xxiv] fascism, as well as National Socialism, presuppose
a nation-state, therefore this kind of phenomenon is impossible to develop in any country fully integrated
into the NWO, which, by definition, cannot have any significant degree of national sovereignty. The
only kind of sovereignty available in the NWO of neoliberal globalization is transnational sovereignty,
which, in fact, is exclusively shared by members of the TE. In other words, fascism and Nazism were
historical phenomena of the era of nation-state before the ascent of the NWO of neoliberal globalization,
when states still had a significant degree of national and economic sovereignty.
However, in the globalization era, it is exactly this sovereignty that is being phased out for
any country fully integrated into the NWO. Therefore, the only kind of 'fascism' still possible
today is the one directly or indirectly supported by the TE (what we may call 'Euro-fascism'), which
is therefore a kind of pseudo-fascism––although in terms of the bestial practices it uses, it may
be even more genuine than the 'real thing' of the inter-war period. This is, for instance, the case
of the Ukrainian Euro-fascists who are the closest thing to historical Nazism available today, not
only in terms of their practices but also in terms of their history. However, as there is overwhelming
evidence of the full support they have enjoyed by the Transnational Elite and (paradoxically?) even
by the Zionist elite,[xxv] they should more accurately be called Euro-fascists.
It is therefore clear that the neo-nationalist parties, which are all under attack by the TE,
constitute cases of movements that simply filled the huge gap left by the globalist Left, which,
instead of placing itself in the front line of all those peoples fighting globalization and the phasing
out of their economic and national sovereignty,[xxvi] indirectly promoted globalization, using arguments
based on an anachronistic internationalism, developed a hundred years ago or so. The neo-nationalist
parties are embraced by most of the victims of globalization all over Europe, particularly the working
class which used to support the Left,[xxvii] whilst the latter has effectively embraced all aspects
of globalization (economic, political, ideological and cultural) and has been fully integrated into
the NWO––a defining moment in its present intellectual and political bankruptcy.
National and Social Liberation Fronts everywhere!
So, at this crucial historical juncture that will determine whether we shall all become subservient
to neoliberal globalization and the transnational elite (as the DIEM25 Manifesto implies through
our subordination to the EU) or not, it is imperative that we create a Popular Front in each country
which will include all the victims of globalization among the popular strata, regardless of their
current political affiliations.
In Europe, in particular, where the popular strata are facing economic disaster, what is urgently
needed is not an "antifascist" Front within the EU, as proposed by the 'parliamentary juntas' in
power and the Euro-elites, also supported by the globalist "NewLeft" (such as Diem25, Plan B in Europe,
Die Linke, the Socialist Workers' Party in the UK, SYRIZA in Greece and so on), which would, in fact,
unite aggressors and victims. An 'antifascist' front would simply disorient the masses and make them
incapable of facing the real fascism being imposed on them[xxviii] by the political and economic
elites, which constitute the transnational and local elites. Instead, what is needed is a Popular
Front for National and Social Liberation, which that could attract the vast majority of the people
who would fight for immediate unilateral withdrawal from the EU – which is managed by the European
part of the transnational elite – as well as for economic self- reliance, thus breaking with globalization.
To my mind, it is only the creation of broad Popular Fronts that could effect each country's exit
from the EU, NAFTA and similar economic unions, with the aim of achieving economic self-reliance.
Re-development based on self-reliance is the only way in which peoples breaking away from globalization
and its institutions (like the EU) could rebuild their productive structures, which have been dismantled
by globalization. This could also, objectively, lay the ground for future systemic change, decided
upon democratically by the peoples themselves. Therefore, the fundamental aim of the social struggle
today should be a complete break with the present NWO and the building of a new global democratic
community, in which economic and national sovereignty have been restored, so that peoples could then
fight for the ideal society, as they see it.
Takis Fotopoulos is a political philosopher, editor of Society & Nature/
Democracy and Nature/The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy. He has also been a columnist
for the Athens Daily Eleftherotypia since 1990. Between 1969 and 1989 he was Senior Lecturer in Economics
at the University of North London (formerly Polytechnic of North London). He is the author of over
25 books and over 1,500 articles, many of which have been translated into various languages.
This article is based on Ch. 4 of the book to be published next month by Progressive Press,
The New World Order in Action, vol. 1: The NWO, the Left and Neo-Nationalism. This is a major three-volume
project aiming to cover all aspects of the New World Order (NWO) of neoliberal globalization
http://www.progressivepress.com/book-listing/new-world-order-action
Notes:
Bruno Waterfield, "Juncker vows to use new powers to block the far-right", [i]The Times,
24/5/2016
[xviii] see for instance Larry Elliott, "How free trade became the hot topic vexing voters
and politicians in Europe and the US" , The Guardian , 28/3/2016
[xix] Francis Elliott et al. 'Working class prefers Ukip to Labour", The Times , 25/11/2014
Looks like now line in 1920th the global pendulum moves toward nationalism.
So in a way neoliberalism breeds nationalism and transnational elite paves the way
for dictators like Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin in the past. Transnational elites
start to recognize the danger, but they can do nothing about it as Trump has shown
so vividly in the USA.
High unemployment logically lead to nationalism and all
those neoliberal politicians understood that they are destroying the county but
continue to plunder it anyway. Biden already cried uncle about the danger of far
right nationalism on CNN. But reality in the USA is not then different from the
reality in Britain.
Notable quotes:
"... No wonder Donald Trump's campaign has ignited a growing nationalism movement. We're creating jobs and giving them away. We've let globalization get away from us. It's abundantly clear that we don't have the right public policies in place to incentivize corporations to keep Americans gainfully employed. ..."
"... Grove's bold piece was embraced by some, panned by others and largely ignored. Whether he or Trump have exactly the right solution to the globalization and immigration problems plaguing free-market economies throughout the western world doesn't matter. What matters is that they've identified a problem that needs to be solved before it's too late. So did the British people when they voted to exit the EU. ..."
"... Economic prosperity and security must trump political correctness and ideology. The Brits got it right. Will we? ..."
It's hard to say if that was the wakeup call that led to a sharp reversal and
Thursday's historic vote to leave the EU, but it was nevertheless a stunning
realization that Prime Minister David Cameron had failed to stem the tide of
immigrant workers flooding the UK's job market, as he had promised to do.
Meanwhile, a laundry list of commentators from the
Washington Post and
Esquire to
Vox and the
New York Times chalked it all up to millions of racist xenophobes who are
terrified of immigrants mucking up their pristine white privileged world. If
that sounds at all similar to the anti-Trump rhetoric, you can sort of see where
this is going.
The thing is, there's nothing even remotely irrational or bigoted about the
alarming
transformation of Britain's job market. Since 1997, the number of foreign-born
workers has doubled to one in six. And since 2014, three EU migrants have found
jobs for every Brit, according to official government figures. And, as we'll
see in a minute, there are concerning parallels on this side of the pond, as
well.
I hear from college grads and experienced professionals looking for jobs
all the time, but a recent inquiry from a 27-year-old Edinburgh, Scotland woman
with a BS in microbiology and excellent grades got my attention. She has applied
for more than 400 jobs without managing to secure an interview. Not a single
one.
More concerning is that the workforce itself has continued to shrink over
the same period. Whether that reflects increasing competition, lack of in-demand
skillsets or both doesn't really matter. The net result is that foreigners are
getting more of our jobs, and that's as true of offshore jobs as it is of onshore
jobs.
Think about it. Apple has created well over a million jobs, but 90% of them
are outsourced to China. Google may not make phones and tablets, but the vast
majority of Android-enabled mobile devices are manufactured in Asia. Of course,
that's true of nearly every industry, old or new.
We may not face the identical migrant worker problem that the UK has, but
the net result is the same: By giving up more and more jobs we create to foreign-born
immigrants and offshore contractors, that leaves fewer and fewer jobs and increasing
competition for American citizens.
No wonder Donald Trump's campaign has ignited a growing nationalism
movement. We're creating jobs and giving them away. We've let globalization
get away from us. It's abundantly clear that we don't have the right public
policies in place to incentivize corporations to keep Americans gainfully
employed.
Back in 2010, former Intel chairman Andy Grove penned How America Can Create
Jobs. The front-page Bloomberg BusinessWeek feature clearly outlined the perils
of losing our manufacturing muscle and declared the need for public policy that
puts jobs first, even if it does means constraining free trade with tariffs,
trade war be damned.
Grove's bold piece was embraced by some, panned by others and largely ignored.
Whether he or Trump have exactly the right solution to the globalization and
immigration problems plaguing free-market economies throughout the western world
doesn't matter. What matters is that they've identified a problem that needs
to be solved before it's too late. So did the British people when they voted
to exit the EU.
Economic prosperity and security must trump political correctness and ideology.
The Brits got it right. Will we?
"... Already feeling marginalized and often targeted, the boys and men described themselves as "searchers" or "seekers," kids looking for a group with which to identify and where they would feel they belonged. "When you enter puberty, it's like you have to choose a branch," said one ex-Nazi. "You have to choose between being a Nazi, anti-Nazi, punk or hip- hopper-in today's society, you just can't choose to be neutral" (cited in Wahlstrom 2001, 13-14). ..."
"... The systematic deprivation of adequate rest and food may have been a deliberate ploy of the camp organizers to reduce the chances of dissent since time, energy, initiative, and planning are needed to develop a collective sense of grievance. ..."
"... Festivals are excellent opportunities for far-right groups to spread the word about their successes to like-minded activists and sympathizers, since visitors come from as far away as Italy to see White Power music bands. In the festival mentioned above, a folk-dance act in the afternoon attracted only some hundred spectators, but evening performances by the U.S. band Youngland drew a large crowd that pushed to the front of the stage, leaving only limited space for burly skinheads indulging in pogo dancing. The music created a ritual closeness and attachment among the audience, shaping the emotions and aggression of the like-minded crowd, initially in a playful way, but one that switched into brutality a few moments later. ..."
"... it is intriguing to see some of the same mechanisms and dynamics in play in creating and sustaining an extremist movement. The importance of performance and music in eliciting loyal participation from young adherents comes up in the articles about Germany, Sweden, and India. Likewise the importance of the emotional needs of boys as they approach manhood, and the hyper-masculine themes of violence and brutality in the neo-Nazi organizations that appeal to them, recurs in several of the essays. ..."
nderstand the dynamics of far-right extremism without understanding far-right extremists? Probably
not; it seems clear we need to have a much more "micro" understanding of the actors than we currently
have if we are to understand these movements so antithetical to the values of liberal democracy.
And yet there isn't much of a literature on this subject.
An important exception is a 2007 special issue of the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography
, curated by Kathleen Blee (
link ). This volume brings
together several ethnographic studies of extremist groups, and it makes for very interesting reading.
Kathleen Blee is a pioneer in this field and is the author of
Inside Organized Racism: Women in the Hate Movement (2002). She writes in Inside Organized
Racism :
Intense, activist racism typically does not arise on its own; it is learned in racist groups
. These groups promote ideas radically different from the racist attitudes held by many whites.
They teach a complex and contradictory mix of hatred for enemies, belief in conspiracies, and
allegiance to an imaginary unified race of "Aryans." (3)
One of Blee's key contributions has been to highlight the increasingly important and independent
role played by women in right-wing extremist movements in the United States and Europe.
The JCE issue includes valuable studies of right-wing extremist groups in India, France, Germany,
the Netherlands, and Scandinavia. And each of the essays is well worth reading, including especially
Blee's good introduction. Here is the table of contents:
Key questions concerning the mechanisms of mobilization arise in almost all the essays. What are
the mechanisms through which new adherents are recruited? What psychological and emotional mechanisms
are in play that keep loyalists involved in the movement? Contributors to this volume find a highly
heterogeneous set of circumstances leading to extremist activism. Blee argues that an internalist
approach is needed to allow us to have a more nuanced understanding of the social and personal
dynamics of extremist movements. What she means by externalist here is the idea that there
are societal forces and "risk factors" that contribute to the emergence of hate and racism within
a population, and that these factors can be studied in a general way. An internalist approach, by
contrast, aims at discovering the motives and causes of extremist engagement through study of the
actors themselves, within specific social circumstances.
But it is problematic to use data garnered in externalist studies to draw conclusions about micromobilization
since it is not possible to infer the motivations of activists from the external conditions in
which the group emerged. Because people are drawn to far-right movements for a variety of reasons
that have little connection to political ideology (Blee 2002)-including a search for community,
affirmation of masculinity, and personal loyalties- what motivates someone to join an anti-immigrant
group, for example, might-or might not-be animus toward immigrants. (120)
Based on interviews, participant-observation, and life-history methods, contributors find a mix of
factors leading to the choice of extremist involvement: adolescent hyper-masculinity, a desire to
belong, a history of bullying and abuse, as well as social exposure to adult hate activists. But
this work is more difficult than many other kinds of ethnographic research because of the secrecy,
suspiciousness, and danger associated with these kinds of activism:
Close-up or "internalist" studies of far-right movements can provide a better understanding of
the workings of far-right groups and the beliefs and motivations of their activists and supporters,
but such studies are rare because data from interviews with members, observations of group activities,
and internal documents are difficult to obtain.... Few scholars want to invest the considerable
time or to establish the rapport necessary for close-up studies of those they regard as inexplicable
and repugnant, in addition to dangerous and difficult. Yet, as the articles in this volume demonstrate,
internalist studies of the far right can reveal otherwise obscured and important features of extreme
rightist political mobilization. (121-122)
A few snippets will give some flavor of the volume. Here is Michael Kimmel's description
of some of the young men and boys attracted to the neo-Nazi movement in Sweden:
Insecure and lonely at twelve years old, Edward started hanging out with skinheads because he
"moved to a new town, knew nobody, and needed friends." Equally lonely and utterly alienated from
his distant father, Pelle met an older skinhead who took him under his wing and became a sort
of mentor. Pelle was a "street hooligan" hanging out in street gangs, brawling and drinking with
other gangs. "My group actually looked down on the neo-Nazis," he says, because "they weren't
real fighters." "All the guys had an insecure role as a man," says Robert. "They were all asking
'who am I?'" ...
Already feeling marginalized and often targeted, the boys and men described themselves
as "searchers" or "seekers," kids looking for a group with which to identify and where they would
feel they belonged. "When you enter puberty, it's like you have to choose a branch," said one
ex-Nazi. "You have to choose between being a Nazi, anti-Nazi, punk or hip- hopper-in today's society,
you just can't choose to be neutral" (cited in Wahlstrom 2001, 13-14). ...
For others, it was a sense of alienation from family and especially the desire to rebel against
their fathers. "Grown-ups often forget an important component of Swedish racism, the emotional
conviction," says Jonas Hallen (2000). "If you have been beaten, threatened, and stolen from,
you won't listen to facts and numbers."(209-210)
Here is Meera Sehgal's description of far-right Hindu nationalist training camps for
young girls in India:
The overall atmosphere of this camp and the Samiti's camps in general was rigid and authoritarian,
with a strong emphasis on discipline. ... A number of girls fell ill with diarrhea, exhaustion,
and heat stroke. Every day at least five to ten girls could be seen crying, wanting to go home.
They pleaded with their city's local Samiti leaders, camp instructors, and organizers to be allowed
to call their parents, but were not allowed to do so. ... Neither students nor instructors were
allowed to get sufficient rest or decent food.
The training was at a frenetic pace in physically trying conditions. Participants were kept
awake and physically and mentally engaged from dawn to late night. Approximately four hours a
day were devoted to physical training; five hours to ideological indoctrination through lectures,
group discussions, and rote memorization; and two hours to indoctrination through cultural programming
like songs, stories, plays, jokes, and skits. Many girls and women were consequently soon physically
exhausted, and yet were forced to continue. The systematic deprivation of adequate rest and
food may have been a deliberate ploy of the camp organizers to reduce the chances of dissent since
time, energy, initiative, and planning are needed to develop a collective sense of grievance.
Indoctrination, which was the Samiti's first priority, ranged from classroom lectures and small
and large group discussions led by different instructors, to nightly cultural programs where skits,
storytelling, songs, and chants were taught by the instructors and seasoned activists, based on
the lives of various "Hindu" women, both mythical and historical. (170)
And here is Fabian Virchow's description of the emotional power of music and spectacle
at a neo-Nazi rally in Germany:
Festivals are excellent opportunities for far-right groups to spread the word about their
successes to like-minded activists and sympathizers, since visitors come from as far away as Italy
to see White Power music bands. In the festival mentioned above, a folk-dance act in the afternoon
attracted only some hundred spectators, but evening performances by the U.S. band Youngland drew
a large crowd that pushed to the front of the stage, leaving only limited space for burly skinheads
indulging in pogo dancing. The music created a ritual closeness and attachment among the audience,
shaping the emotions and aggression of the like-minded crowd, initially in a playful way, but
one that switched into brutality a few moments later.
The aggression of White Power music is evident in the messages of its songs, which are either
confessing, demonstrating self-assertion against what is perceived as totally hostile surroundings,
or requesting action (Meyer 1995). Using Heavy Metal or Oi Punk as its musical basis, White Power
music not only attracts those who see themselves as part of the same political movement as the
musicians, but also serves as one of the most important tools for recruiting new adherents to
the politics of the far right (Dornbusch and Raabe 2002).
Since the festival I visited takes place only once a year, and because performances of White
Power bands are organized clandestinely in most cases and are often disrupted by the police, the
far-right movement needs additional events to shape and sustain its collective identity. As the
far right and the NPD and neo-Nazi groupuscules in particular regard themselves as a "movement
of action," it is no surprise that rallies play an important role in this effort. (151)
Each of these essays is based on first-hand observation and interaction, and they give some insight
into the psychological forces playing on the participants as well as the mobilizational strategies
used by the leaders of these kinds of movements. The articles published here offer a good cross-section
of the ways in which ethnographic methods can be brought to bear on the phenomenon of extremist right-wing
activism. And because the studies are drawn from five quite different national contexts (Sweden,
Germany, Netherlands, India, France), it is intriguing to see some of the same mechanisms and
dynamics in play in creating and sustaining an extremist movement. The importance of performance
and music in eliciting loyal participation from young adherents comes up in the articles about Germany,
Sweden, and India. Likewise the importance of the emotional needs of boys as they approach manhood,
and the hyper-masculine themes of violence and brutality in the neo-Nazi organizations that appeal
to them, recurs in several of the essays.
Along with KA Kreasap, Kathleen Blee is also the author of a 2010 review article on right-wing
extremist movements in Annual Reviews of Sociology (
link ). These are the kinds of hate-based organizations and activists tracked by the Southern
Poverty Law Center (
link ), and that seem to be more visible than ever before during the current presidential campaign.
The essay pays attention to the question of the motivations and "risk factors" that lead people to
join right-wing movements. Blee and Kreasap argue that the motivations and circumstances of mobilization
into right-wing organizations are substantially more heterogeneous than a simple story leading from
racist attitudes to racist mobilization would suggest. They argue that antecedent racist ideology
is indeed a factor, but that music, culture, social media, and continent social networks also play
significant causal roles.
"... Several recent posts have commented on the rise of a nationalistic, nativist politics in numerous contemporary democracies around the world. ..."
"... Wasserman emphasizes the importance of ideas and culture within the rise of Austrofascism, and he makes use of Gramsci's concept of hegemony as a way of understanding the link between philosophy and politics. The pro-fascist right held a dominant role within major Viennese cultural and educational institutions. ..."
"... The ideas represented within its institutions ran a broad spectrum, yet its discourse centered on radical anti-Semitism, German nationalism, völkisch authoritarianism, anti-Enlightenment (and antimodernist) thinking, and corporatism. The potential for collaboration between Catholic conservatives and German nationalists has only in recent years begun to attract scholarly attention. ..."
Several recent posts have commented on the rise of a nationalistic, nativist politics in numerous
contemporary democracies around the world. The implications of this political process are deeply
challenging to the values of liberal democracy. We need to try to understand these developments.
(Peter Merkl's research on European right-wing extremism is very helpful here;
Right-wing Extremism in the Twenty-first Century .)
One plausible approach to trying to understand the dynamics of this turn to the far right is to
consider relevantly similar historical examples. A very interesting study on the history of Austria's
right-wing extremism between the wars was published recently by Janek Wasserman,
Black Vienna: The Radical Right in the Red City, 1918-1938 .
Wasserman emphasizes the importance of ideas and culture within the rise of Austrofascism,
and he makes use of Gramsci's concept of hegemony as a way of understanding the link between philosophy
and politics. The pro-fascist right held a dominant role within major Viennese cultural and educational
institutions. Here is how Wasserman describes the content of ultra-conservative philosophy and
ideology in inter-war Vienna:
The ideas represented within its institutions ran a broad spectrum, yet its discourse centered
on radical anti-Semitism, German nationalism, völkisch authoritarianism, anti-Enlightenment
(and antimodernist) thinking, and corporatism. The potential for collaboration between Catholic
conservatives and German nationalists has only in recent years begun to attract scholarly attention.
(6)
This climate was highly inhospitable towards ideas and values from progressive thinkers. Wasserman
describes the intellectual and cultural climate of Vienna in these terms:
At the turn of the century, Austria was one of the most culturally conservative nations in Europe.
The advocacy of avant-garde scientific theories therefore put the First Vienna Circle- and its
intellectual forbears- under pressure. Ultimately, it left them in marginal positions until several
years after the Great War. In the wake of the Wahrmund affair, discussed in chapter 1, intellectuals
advocating secularist, rationalist, or liberal views faced a hostile academic landscape.
Ernst Mach, for example, was an intellectual outsider at the University of Vienna from 1895
until his death in 1916. Always supportive of socialist causes, he left a portion of his estate
to the Social Democrats in his last will and testament. His theories of sensationalism and radical
empiricism were challenged on all sides, most notably by his successor Ludwig Boltzmann. His students,
among them David Josef Bach and Friedrich Adler, either had to leave the country to find appointments
or give up academics altogether. Unable to find positions in Vienna, Frank moved to Prague and
Neurath to Heidelberg. Hahn did not receive a position until after the war. The First Vienna Circle
disbanded because of a lack of opportunity at home. (110-111)
"... Let us hope. But let us expose the dirty hand of Uncle Sam working over time for the corporate trans border pirates down there. Barry once again has been a conspicuous useful idiot with his visit to Argentina. ..."
"... In the making since long before Smedley Butler realized the marines were serving US banks. ..."
Venezuela fundamental transformation proceeds apace ...
the crowd images are impressive
Venezuelans stage mass protest demanding recall to oust
president
"Venezuela's political opposition says Thursday's mass
demonstration - dubbed the "taking of Caracas" - against
President Nicolas Maduro brought one million people into
the streets demanding political change.
Opposition leaders Jesus Torrealba, of the Democratic
Unity Roundtable said it was the "biggest rally in recent
decades" with "between 950,000 and 1.1 million people"
taking part.
Dozens of city blocks were choked with people angry
about growing food shortages and an inflation rate that is
expected to top 700 percent this year.
Maduro led a comparatively small counter rally of
hard-core supporters, many of them state workers. The
number of participants was estimated at fewer than
30,000."
You have dismissed Doug Henwood for some bizarre reason.
He had a good interview on his radio show about the
left in Latin America which was specifically about the
coup in Brazil but talked about a lot more with a
historian of the left in Latin America.
This historian was hopeful despite what has been
happening. There are ebbs and flows but think of the
spontaneous support for Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn or
Podemos or Syriza.
There is real and popular or "organic" organizing of
the left in Latin America against corporate hegemony,
despite the supposed or real corruptions of official
leftist parties like in Brazil.
The left is much more durable than it appears.
There's more than meets the eye.
Paine -> Peter K....
, -1
Let us hope. But let us expose the dirty hand of Uncle
Sam working over time for the corporate trans border
pirates down there. Barry once again has been a
conspicuous useful idiot with his visit to Argentina.
"... A direct approach to the objective exhausts the attacker and hardens the resistance by compression, where as an indirect approach loosens the defenders hold by upsetting his balance." ..."
"... advocated fighting the decisive battle after the opponent has been unbalanced. ..."
...Liddell Hart wrote Strategy: An Indirect Approach , in which he stated: "In strategy
the longest way around is often the shortest way there. A direct approach to the objective exhausts
the attacker and hardens the resistance by compression, where as an indirect approach loosens the
defenders hold by upsetting his balance."
Liddell exhaustively analyzed numerous battles throughout history and advocated fighting the
decisive battle after the opponent has been unbalanced.
... ... ...
Shimon Naveh, the founder and former head of the
Israel Defense Forces
' Operational Theory Research Institute, stated that after World War II Liddell Hart "created"
the idea of Blitzkrieg as a military doctrine: "It was the opposite of a doctrine. Blitzkrieg consisted
of an avalanche of actions that were sorted out less by design and more by success." [28] Naveh stated that,
"by manipulation and contrivance, Liddell Hart distorted the actual circumstances of the Blitzkrieg
formation and obscured its origins. Through his indoctrinated idealization of an ostentatious
concept he reinforced the myth of Blitzkrieg. By imposing, retrospectively, his own perceptions
of mobile warfare upon the shallow concept of Blitzkrieg, he created a theoretical imbroglio that
has taken 40 years to unravel". [29]
The Hungarian billionaire appeared to have a fascination with not just fostering but creating
anti-Putin opposition forces inside of Russia in a bid to destabilize the country.
The recent
DC Leaks document dump of over 2,500 documents from George Soros' Open Society Foundations illustrates
a disturbing trend by the billionaire of using his wealth and influence to sow chaos across the world
in a bid to profit off of global suffering and impose neoliberal ideas on an international scale.
The leaks have already exposed Soros' efforts to destabilize the European Union by promoting
a policy of open borders and mass migration and fracturing Ukraine's government by fomenting an illegal
coup of a democratically elected government using neo-Nazi hardliners. Once dubbed the "puppet
master" by the fanatical Glenn Beck, Soros has also been linked to both corruption in the United
States and, according to some, positive social reform in his funding of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Yet the man who has brought regimes around the world to their knees has long wanted to bring
Putin's government crashing down, but has proven unsuccessful time and again. New memos from the
DC Leaks file dump show that this failure to oust Putin wasn't for lack of trying on the part of
Soros. In a November 2012 document titled "OSF [Open Society Foundation] Russia Strategic Planning
Meeting Notes" a team of anti-Putin international experts sat down to discuss how to "identify joint
priorities for OSF's Russia activities in the coming year. How can we most effectively collaborate,
considering the deteriorating political environment for our partners?"
Whereas that seems benign, the document minutes show that the meeting's participants hoped that
Medvedev's years as president would provide "an opening" for the Open Society Foundations to influence
and rattle the Russian government. A hope that disappeared when Putin returned to office.
"The Medvedev period allowed for a number of improvements and significant openings for NGOs…
However, pressure has come back very quickly in the short time that Putin has been back in power."
The NGO operation became quickly distrusted in Russia following the botched "Maidan like"
protests which were immediately dismantled before it could threaten the Russian government.
"The Russian protests deeply affected the life of NGO's," read the minutes. The meeting explains
that the government had attempted to encourage civil opposition by providing funds, "but by encouraging
self-organization, they had opened up Pandora's Box… the door was opened for self-mobilization."
The document proceeded to provide an extensive bullet point list of "what must be done" in
order to destabilize Russia including working to flood the country with migrants and influencing
the country's media operations.
The memo was followed up with what was called "the Russia Project" which called for identifying
and organizing opponents to Putin, advancing principles of globalism, and undermine Russia's image
in the lead up to the Sochi Winter Olympics.
"... The human rights context has greatly changed from 2006 to 2012: the Medvedev period allowed for a number of improvements and significant openings for NGOs. ..."
"... The Russian protests deeply affected the life of NGOs. The state had been providing money for self-organization, thinking this would defuse the possibility of large-scale opposition. But by encouraging self-organization, they had opened up a Pandora's Box. People became active and began to feel that it was possible to change something; the door was opened for self-mobilization. ..."
"... The document details in an extensive bullet point list, "what must be done" to destabilize Russia, focusing on many recurrent neo-liberal themes that Soros uses to infect host nations and overturn governments… ..."
"... We will mitigate the negative impact of new laws via domestic and international advocacy. Key allies in this regard are the growing numbers of diverse Russian citizens opposing the country's regression, along with the sizeable community of Russian legal experts with an in-depth knowledge of NGO law and a strong motivation to help the sector continue its activities. ..."
"... Engaging with Russian diaspora who oppose the current government, and mobilising the LGBT community through mass media propaganda, are recurrent themes in the Soros document. ..."
"... Our comparative advantage lies in the deep and wide networks that we have fostered these past years. A strategic use of these networks will maximize the long-term impact of the work that LGBT rights organizations are doing. LGBT rights groups in Russia are professional and effective, yet they lack the capacity to reach far beyond their immediate communities and galvanize other civil society players necessary for their long-term success. ..."
"... Destabilisation of a country the size of Russia does not come without a significant price tag, for which George Soros seems more than ready to pony up… ..."
"... Their can be no doubt that the 2014-2017 plan outlined by Soros NGOs, which even envisioned staff growth and Eurasian region restructuring, has hit a major speed bump with the 2015 law that saw these divisive forces operating within Russian finally get booted out of the country. ..."
"... Vlad, smoke this Globalist scum. American people will cheer you! ..."
"... MR. Soros needs to get wacked by someone as he is directly responsible for thousands of deaths in Ukraine alone and I won't even mention the Nazi informer days. ..."
The recent
DC Leaks , of over 2,500 documents from George Soros NGOs, has shed a bright light on how the
billionaire uses his vast wealth to create global chaos in an never ending push to deliver his neo-liberal
euphoria to the peasant classes.
While Soros has managed to thoroughly destabilise the European Union by promoting mass immigration
and open borders, divided the United States by actively funding Black Lives Matters and corrupting
the very corruptible US political class, and destroyed Ukraine by pushing for an illegal coup of
a democratically elected government using neo-nazi strong men… one country that Soros has not bee
able to crack has been The Russian Federation.
Russia's political pragmatism and humanist value system rooted in a traditional, "nation-state"
culture most likely infuriates Soros.
Russia is Soros' white whale... a creature he has been trying to capture and kill-off for nearly
a decade.
Unfortunately for Soros (and fortunately for the entire planet) the Russian government realised
the cancerous nature of Soros backed NGOs, and took the proper preventative measures…which in hindsight,
and after reviewing the DC Leaks memos, proved to be a very wise move.
Russian Prosecutor
General's Office issued a statement in which it recognized George Soros's Open Society Institute
and another affiliated organization as "undesirable groups", banning Russian citizens and organizations
from participation in any of their projects.
–prosecutors said the activities of the Open Society Institute and the Open Society Institute
Assistance Foundation were a threat to the foundations of Russia's Constitutional order and national
security . They added that the Justice Ministry would be duly informed about these conclusions
and would add the two groups to Russia's list of undesirable foreign organizations.
According to RT , prosecutors launched a probe into the activities of the two organizations
– both sponsored by the well-known US financier George Soros – in July this year, after Russian
senators approved the so-called "patriotic stop-list" of 12 groups that required immediate attention
over their supposed anti-Russian activities.
The Law on Undesirable Foreign Organizations came into force in early June this year. It requires
the Prosecutor General's Office and the Foreign Ministry to draw up an official list of undesirable
foreign organizations and outlaw their activities. Once a group is recognized as undesirable,
its assets in Russia must be frozen, its offices closed and the distribution of any of its materials
must be banned. That said, it is doubtful that Soros still has any active assets in Russia – his
foundation, which emerged in Russia in its early post-USSR years in the mid-1990s, wrapped up
active operations in 2003 when Putin cemented his control on power.
The huge document tranche released by DC Leaks
shows how dangerous the Open Society and George Soros were to the well being and preservation
of the Russian Federation and the Russian culture.
In a document from November 2012 entitled, "OSF [Open Society Foundation] Russia Strategic Planning
Meeting Notes" , Participants:
Leonard Benardo, Iva Dobichina, Elizabeth Eagen, Jeff Goldstein, Minna Jarvenpaa, Ralf Jürgens,
Elena Kovalevskaya, Vicki Litvinov, Tanya Margolin, Amy McDonough, Sara Rhodin, Yervand Shirinyan,
Becky Tolson
Discuss how to …
Identify joint priorities for OSF's Russia activities in the coming year. How can we most effectively
collaborate, considering the deteriorating political environment for our partners?
The main revelation of the document minutes comes from the hope that Medvedev's years as president
would provide the NGOs the "opening" they would need to finally break the Russian bear.
That all evaporated in 2012, when Vladimir Putin returned to the President's office.
The OSF, clearly distraught and disappointed, begins to lay down the groundwork for how to challenge
the Putin administration, in light of his very different approach to dealing with NGOs like the Open
Society Foundation.
The human rights context has greatly changed from 2006 to 2012: the Medvedev period allowed
for a number of improvements and significant openings for NGOs. Amendments to the NGO law in 2006
led to campaigning on behalf of NGOs; many of our grantees benefited during this period. Surkov
established ties with many groups that were willing to cooperate with the state and our partners
served as experts in key processes like police reform . A space was created for modernization
and for the inclusion of civil society during Medvedev's term. However, pressure has come back
very quickly in the short time that Putin has been back in power.
A major turning point for NGO operation in Russia came with the botched Russian "Maidan like"
protests, which were promptly dismantled before any damage could be inflicted.
The Russian protests deeply affected the life of NGOs. The state had been providing money for
self-organization, thinking this would defuse the possibility of large-scale opposition. But by
encouraging self-organization, they had opened up a Pandora's Box. People became active and began
to feel that it was possible to change something; the door was opened for self-mobilization.
The state has responded with repression and political prisoners, in order to instill fear in
the population. The state is also working to undermine social support for the protests. Its support
of socially-oriented ("good") NGOs is a way to divide the community, while the foreign agents
law frames the protests as foreign money undermining Russia.
Why the fascination with Russia? Why is it important for OSF to focus on Russia? With Russia comes
immense wealth and tremendous geo-political power.
Key open society themes and issues are highly relevant in Russia
– Transparency and accountability (anticorruption)
– Rights and justice (i.e., criminal justice, policing, rule of law, LGBT, women's rights)
– Migration
– Inclusive education (disability, Roma)
– Media freedom, access to information
– Health (access to medicines, HIV, harm reduction)
Copy-cat problem: Russian tactics are picked up by Central Asia (ie, anti-extremism law in
Kazakhstan)
Russia's influence in UN Human Rights Council – pushing resolution that says human rights should
take into consideration traditional values of country in question – very few HR orgs that are
following the council saw this coming – has large implications beyond Russia
Participation in global international regimes (G20, ICC, WTO) – a more open Russia creates
changes in international governing bodies
European Court litigation
The document details in an extensive bullet point list, "what must be done" to destabilize Russia,
focusing on many recurrent neo-liberal themes that Soros uses to infect host nations and overturn
governments…
– Political prisoners (Bolotnaya, etc.)
– Media censorship and control (pressure in independent media – work w/ NMP)
– Surveillance
– LGBT (push against propaganda laws, which are driven by local officials, not by the federal
gov't)
– Women's rights
– Disability rights and inclusive education
Prisons
– Lots of funding is going to monitoring; where is our money best placed?
– ONKs don't have sufficient $ for travel and legal representation
Policing and police violence (Public Verdict, Man and Law, etc.)
Migrants
Transparency and accountability
– State spending – monitoring, analysis
– Tracking cross-border transactions and business purchases
– Connections between accountability, human rights, and ordinary citizens' interests
Following the 2012 document, and the apparent disappointment expressed by OSF members at Russia's
resistance to the neo-liberal way of life,
DC Leaks provides a follow up memo entitled, "Russia Project Strategy, 2014-2017".
The document summary…
Russia today faces a regrettable backsliding into authoritarian practice. Confronted with serious
domestic challenges, the regime has become more insular and isolationist, seeking to solidify
its base. The progressively draconian laws promulgated since Putin's return to the presidency
have placed all foreign- funded organizations under threat of isolation and disrepute. Despite
these decidedly challenging conditions, it is essential that we continue to engage Russia, both
to preserve its extant democratic spaces, and to ensure that Russian voices do not go dark on
the broader global stage.
The destabilization of Russia, now aptly named, "the Russia Project" goes on to identify three
cornerstone concepts…
Amid the grim landscape, there nonetheless remain apertures for the Russia Project's intervention.
Exploiting all available opportunities, we will undertake the following three concepts, which
we deem vital in the current climate:
1) We will mitigate the negative impact of new laws via domestic and international advocacy.
Key allies in this regard are the growing numbers of diverse Russian citizens opposing the country's
regression, along with the sizeable community of Russian legal experts with an in-depth knowledge
of NGO law and a strong motivation to help the sector continue its activities.
2) We will integrate Russian voices into the global exchange of ideas. Given that Russian intellectuals,
practitioners and activists are increasingly sidelined domestically, and academics are often isolated
from the international community, we will support venues for inserting diverse, critical Russian
thinking into the global discourse. Such opportunities allow Russian actors to enter into mutually
beneficial collaborations on topics ranging from migration to digital activism, thus maintaining
their relevance and reducing their provincialization.
3) We aim to mainstream the rights and dignity of one of Russia's most marginalized populations:
LGBT individuals. The RP's diverse network of partners provides an opportunity to build a broader
base of civil society allies at a time when the LGBT community is under profound threat. We hope
to see a more balanced discourse on LGBT rights among the Russian public, as well as a strong
cohort of mainstream independent organizations actively incorporating LGBT interests into their
work.
Social mobilisation and the funding of alternative media networks, to promote social discourse
and dissatisfaction, are common tactics that Soros NGOs uses to build up towards a revolution.
Along with these initiatives, we remain committed to supporting three primary fields: (a) access
to justice and legal empowerment of marginalized groups, (b) access to independent information
and alternative media, and (c) platforms for critical debate, discussion, and social mobilization.
The RP plans to provide core support to our trusted partners in each of these fields, investing
in their growth and development, and remaining flexible about the funding arrangements necessary
to allow them to continue their essential work. We also seek to strengthen their legitimacy and
financial sustainability, in order to build a more transparent, effective, and organizationally
efficient third sector.
Russia is currently in a gradual, arbitrary, and haphazard process of becoming more closed.
Amid this background, the RP's cardinal role is to create a dense and wide-ranging field of independent
civil society actors, who can in the best case help set the agenda for a more open and democratic
future in Russia, and in the worst case survive the effects of new draconian legislation.
Engaging with Russian diaspora who oppose the current government, and mobilising the LGBT community
through mass media propaganda, are recurrent themes in the Soros document.
The media focus on LGBT rights in the run up to the Sochi winter Olympics was an opportunity not
to be missed by Soros.
In the short to mid-term, the RP aims to engender broader civil society support for this highly
marginalized group. Even though the "propaganda of homosexuality" law has gained unprecedented
international attention in the lead-up to the Winter Olympics in Sochi, the voices of Russian
activists are barely being heard over larger international LGBT organizations. We want to make
sure that our Russian partners have a leading role in shaping the strategy of the international
movement, that planned campaigns have a domestic rather than just an international focus, and
that the momentum gathering around Sochi does not dissipate immediately after the Olympics end.
Our comparative advantage lies in the deep and wide networks that we have fostered these past
years. A strategic use of these networks will maximize the long-term impact of the work that LGBT
rights organizations are doing. LGBT rights groups in Russia are professional and effective, yet
they lack the capacity to reach far beyond their immediate communities and galvanize other civil
society players necessary for their long-term success.
Destabilisation of a country the size of Russia does not come without a significant price tag,
for which George Soros seems more than ready to pony up…
Given the large number of grants in the RP portfolio, we see a need for additional staffing
in order to implement our strategic priorities and effectively monitor our activities. However,
as a number of programs in the Eurasia region are being restructured, we are awaiting the results
of this transition before making any substantive recommendations.
Their can be no doubt that the 2014-2017 plan outlined by Soros NGOs, which even envisioned staff
growth and Eurasian region restructuring, has hit a major speed bump with the 2015 law that saw these
divisive forces operating within Russian finally get booted out of the country.
They have a warrant out for his arrest if he ever steps foot in Russia (highly unlikely). If I
remember correctly another country does also.
MR. Soros needs to get wacked by someone as he is directly responsible for thousands of deaths
in Ukraine alone and I won't even mention the Nazi informer days.
"... Andrew Gavin Marshall is a Research Associate with the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is currently studying Political Economy and History at Simon Fraser University. ..."
Following US geo-strategy in what Brzezinski termed the "global Balkans," the US government has
worked closely with major NGOs to "promote democracy" and "freedom" in former Soviet republics, playing
a role behind the scenes in fomenting what are termed "colour revolutions," which install US and
Western-friendly puppet leaders to advance the interests of the West, both economically and strategically.
Part 2 of this essay on "The Origins of World War III" analyzes the colour revolutions as being
a key stratagem in imposing the US-led New World Order. The "colour revolution" or "soft" revolution
strategy is a covert political tactic of expanding NATO and US influence to the borders of Russia
and even China; following in line with one of the primary aims of US strategy in the New World Order:
to contain China and Russia and prevent the rise of any challenge to US power in the region.
These revolutions are portrayed in the western media as popular democratic revolutions, in which
the people of these respective nations demand democratic accountability and governance from their
despotic leaders and archaic political systems. However, the reality is far from what this utopian
imagery suggests. Western NGOs and media heavily finance and organize opposition groups and protest
movements, and in the midst of an election, create a public perception of vote fraud in order to
mobilize the mass protest movements to demand "their" candidate be put into power. It just so happens
that "their" candidate is always the Western US-favoured candidate, whose campaign is often heavily
financed by Washington; and who proposes US-friendly policies and neoliberal economic conditions.
In the end, it is the people who lose out, as their genuine hope for change and accountability is
denied by the influence the US wields over their political leaders.
The soft revolutions also have the effect of antagonizing China and Russia, specifically, as it
places US protectorates on their borders, and drives many of the former Warsaw Pact nations to seek
closer political, economic and military cooperation. This then exacerbates tensions between the west
and China and Russia; which ultimately leads the world closer to a potential conflict between the
two blocs.
Serbia
Serbia experienced its "colour revolution" in October of 2000, which led to the overthrow of Serbian
leader Slobodan Milosevic. As the Washington Post reported in December of 2000, from 1999 on, the
US undertook a major "electoral strategy" to oust Milosevic, as "U.S.-funded consultants played a
crucial role behind the scenes in virtually every facet of the anti-Milosevic drive, running tracking
polls, training thousands of opposition activists and helping to organize a vitally important parallel
vote count. U.S. taxpayers paid for 5,000 cans of spray paint used by student activists to scrawl
anti-Milosevic graffiti on walls across Serbia, and 2.5 million stickers with the slogan "He's Finished,"
which became the revolution's catchphrase." Further, according to Michael Dobbs,writing in the Washington
Post, some "20 opposition leaders accepted an invitation from the Washington-based National Democratic
Institute (NDI) in October 1999 to a seminar at the Marriott Hotel in Budapest."
Interestingly, "Some Americans involved in the anti-Milosevic effort said they were aware of CIA
activity at the fringes of the campaign, but had trouble finding out what the agency was up to. Whatever
it was, they concluded it was not particularly effective. The lead role was taken by the State Department
and the U.S. Agency for International Development, the government's foreign assistance agency, which
channeled the funds through commercial contractors and nonprofit groups such as NDI and its Republican
counterpart, the International Republican Institute (IRI)."
The NDI (National Democratic Institute), "worked closely with Serbian opposition parties, IRI
focused its attention on Otpor, which served as the revolution's ideological and organizational backbone.
In March, IRI paid for two dozen Otpor leaders to attend a seminar on nonviolent resistance at the
Hilton Hotel in Budapest." At the seminar, "the Serbian students received training in such matters
as how to organize a strike, how to communicate with symbols, how to overcome fear and how to undermine
the authority of a dictatorial regime."[1]
As the New York Times revealed, Otpor, the major student opposition group, had a steady flow of
money coming from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a Congress-funded "democracy promoting"
organization. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) gave money to Otpor,
as did the International Republican Institute, "another nongovernmental Washington group financed
partly by A.I.D."[2]
Georgia
In 2003, Georgia went through its "Rose Revolution," which led to the overthrow of president Eduard
Shevardnadze, replacing him with Mikhail Saakashvili after the 2004 elections. In a November 2003
article in The Globe and Mail, it was reported that a US based foundation "began laying the brickwork
for the toppling of Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze," as funds from his non-profit organization
"sent a 31-year-old Tbilisi activist named Giga Bokeria to Serbia to meet with members of the Otpor
(Resistance) movement and learn how they used street demonstrations to topple dictator Slobodan Milosevic.
Then, in the summer," the "foundation paid for a return trip to Georgia by Otpor activists, who ran
three-day courses teaching more than 1,000 students how to stage a peaceful revolution."
This US-based foundation "also funded a popular opposition television station that was crucial
in mobilizing support for [the] 'velvet revolution,' and [it] reportedly gave financial support to
a youth group that led the street protests." The owner of the foundation "has a warm relationship
with Mr. Shevardnadze's chief opponent, Mikhail Saakashvili, a New York-educated lawyer who is expected
to win the presidency in an election scheduled for Jan. 4."
During a press conference a week before his resignation, Mr. Shevardnadze said that the US foundation
"is set against the President of Georgia." Moreover, "Mr. Bokeria, whose Liberty Institute received
money from both [the financier's foundation] and the U.S. government-backed Eurasia Institute, says
three other organizations played key roles in Mr. Shevardnadze's downfall: Mr. Saakashvili's National
Movement party, the Rustavi-2 television station and Kmara! (Georgian for Enough!), a youth group
that declared war on Mr. Shevardnadze [in] April and began a poster and graffiti campaign attacking
government corruption." [3]
The day following the publication of the previously quoted article, the author published another
article in the Globe and Mail explaining that the "bloodless revolution" in Georgia "smells more
like another victory for the United States over Russia in the post-Cold War international chess game."
The author, Mark MacKinnon, explained that Eduard Shevardnadze's downfall lied "in the oil under
the Caspian Sea, one of the world's few great remaining, relatively unexploited, sources of oil,"
as "Georgia and neighbouring Azerbaijan, which borders the Caspian, quickly came to be seen not just
as newly independent countries, but as part of an 'energy corridor'." Plans were drawn up for a massive
"pipeline that would run through Georgia to Turkey and the Mediterranean." It is worth quoting MacKinnon
at length:
When these plans were made, Mr. Shevardnadze was seen as an asset by both Western investors and
the U.S. government. His reputation as the man who helped end the Cold War gave investors a sense
of confidence in the country, and his stated intention to move Georgia out of Russia's orbit and
into Western institutions such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union played
well at the U.S. State Department.
The United States quickly moved to embrace Georgia, opening a military base in the country [in
2001] to give Georgian soldiers "anti-terrorist" training. They were the first U.S. troops to set
up in a former Soviet republic.
But somewhere along the line, Mr. Shevardnadze reversed course and decided to once more embrace
Russia. This summer, Georgia signed a secret 25-year deal to make the Russian energy giant Gazprom
its sole supplier of gas. Then it effectively sold the electricity grid to another Russian firm,
cutting out AES, the company that the U.S. administration had backed to win the deal. Mr. Shevardnadze
attacked AES as "liars and cheats." Both deals dramatically increased Russian influence in Tbilisi.
Following the elections in Georgia, the US-backed and educated Mikhail Saakashvili ascended to
the Presidency and "won the day."[4] This is again an example of the intimate relationship between
oil geopolitics and US foreign policy. The colour revolution was vital in pressing US and NATO interests
forward in the region; gaining control over Central Asia's gas reserves and keeping Russia from expanding
its influence. This follows directly in line with the US-NATO imperial strategy for the new world
order, following the collapse of the USSR. [This strategy is outlined in detail in Part 1 of this
essay: An Imperial Strategy for
a New World Order: The Origins of World War III].
Ukraine
In 2004, Ukraine went through its "Orange Revolution," in which opposition and pro-Western leader
Viktor Yushchenko became President, defeating Viktor Yanukovych. As the Guardian revealed in 2004,
that following the disputed elections (as happens in every "colour revolution"), "the democracy guerrillas
of the Ukrainian Pora youth movement have already notched up a famous victory – whatever the outcome
of the dangerous stand-off in Kiev," however, "the campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated
and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries
in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes."
The author, Ian Traynor, explained that, "Funded and organised by the US government, deploying
US consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and US non-government organisations,
the campaign was first used in Europe in Belgrade in 2000 to beat Slobodan Milosevic at the ballot
box." Further, "The Democratic party's National Democratic Institute, the Republican party's International
Republican Institute, the US state department and USAid are the main agencies involved in these grassroots
campaigns as well as the Freedom House NGO" and the same billionaire financier involved in Georgia's
Rose Revolution. In implementing the regime-change strategy, "The usually fractious oppositions have
to be united behind a single candidate if there is to be any chance of unseating the regime. That
leader is selected on pragmatic and objective grounds, even if he or she is anti-American."
Traynor continues:
Freedom House and the Democratic party's NDI helped fund and organise the "largest civil regional
election monitoring effort" in Ukraine, involving more than 1,000 trained observers. They also organised
exit polls. On Sunday night those polls gave Mr Yushchenko an 11-point lead and set the agenda for
much of what has followed.
The exit polls are seen as critical because they seize the initiative in the propaganda battle
with the regime, invariably appearing first, receiving wide media coverage and putting the onus on
the authorities to respond.
The final stage in the US template concerns how to react when the incumbent tries to steal a lost
election.
[. . . ] In Belgrade, Tbilisi, and now Kiev, where the authorities initially tried to cling to
power, the advice was to stay cool but determined and to organise mass displays of civil disobedience,
which must remain peaceful but risk provoking the regime into violent suppression.[5]
As an article in the Guardian by Jonathan Steele explained, the opposition leader, Viktor Yushchenko,
who disputed the election results, "served as prime minister under the outgoing president, Leonid
Kuchma, and some of his backers are also linked to the brutal industrial clans who manipulated Ukraine's
post-Soviet privatization." He further explained that election rigging is mainly irrelevant, as "The
decision to protest appears to depend mainly on realpolitik and whether the challengers or the incumbent
are considered more 'pro-western' or 'pro-market'." In other words, those who support a neoliberal
economic agenda will have the support of the US-NATO, as neoliberalism is their established international
economic order and advances their interests in the region.
Moreover, "In Ukraine, Yushchenko got the western nod, and floods of money poured in to groups
which support him, ranging from the youth organisation, Pora, to various opposition websites. More
provocatively, the US and other western embassies paid for exit polls." This is emblematic of the
strategic importance of the Ukraine to the United States, "which refuses to abandon its cold war
policy of encircling Russia and seeking to pull every former Soviet republic to its side."[6]
One Guardian commentator pointed out the hypocrisy of western media coverage: "Two million
anti-war demonstrators can stream though the streets of London and be politically ignored, but a
few tens of thousands in central Kiev are proclaimed to be 'the people', while the Ukrainian police,
courts and governmental institutions are discounted as instruments of oppression." It was also explained
that, "Enormous rallies have been held in Kiev in support of the prime minister, Viktor Yanukovich,
but they are not shown on our TV screens: if their existence is admitted, Yanukovich supporters are
denigrated as having been 'bussed in'. The demonstrations in favour of Viktor Yushchenko have laser
lights, plasma screens, sophisticated sound systems, rock concerts, tents to camp in and huge quantities
of orange clothing; yet we happily dupe ourselves that they are spontaneous."[7]
In 2004, the Associated Press reported that, "The Bush administration has spent more than $65
million in the past two years to aid political organizations in Ukraine, paying to bring opposition
leader Viktor Yushchenko to meet U.S. leaders and helping to underwrite an exit poll indicating he
won last month's disputed runoff election." The money, they state, "was funneled through organizations
such as the Eurasia Foundation or through groups aligned with Republicans and Democrats that organized
election training, with human rights forums or with independent news outlets." However, even government
officials "acknowledge that some of the money helped train groups and individuals opposed to the
Russian-backed government candidate."
The report stated that some major international foundations funded the exit polls, which according
to the incumbent leader were "skewed." These foundations included "The National Endowment for Democracy,
which receives its money directly from Congress; the Eurasia Foundation, which receives money from
the State Department, and the Renaissance Foundation," which receives money from the same billionaire
financier as well as the US State Department. Since the State Department is involved, that implies
that this funding is quite directly enmeshed in US foreign policy strategy. "Other countries involved
included Great Britain, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Canada, Norway, Sweden and Denmark." Also involved
in funding certain groups and activities in the Ukraine was the International Republican Institute
and the National Democratic Institute, which was chaired by former Secretary of States Madeline Albright
at the time.[8]
Mark Almond wrote for the Guardian in 2004 of the advent of "People Power," describing it in relation
to the situation that was then breaking in the Ukraine, and stated that, "The upheaval in Ukraine
is presented as a battle between the people and Soviet-era power structures. The role of western
cold war-era agencies is taboo. Poke your nose into the funding of the lavish carnival in Kiev, and
the shrieks of rage show that you have touched a neuralgic point of the New World Order."
Almond elaborated:
"Throughout the 1980s, in the build-up to 1989′s velvet revolutions, a small army of volunteers
– and, let's be frank, spies – co-operated to promote what became People Power. A network of interlocking
foundations and charities mushroomed to organise the logistics of transferring millions of dollars
to dissidents. The money came overwhelmingly from Nato states and covert allies such as "neutral"
Sweden.
[ ...] The hangover from People Power is shock therapy. Each successive crowd is sold a multimedia
vision of Euro-Atlantic prosperity by western-funded "independent" media to get them on the streets.
No one dwells on the mass unemployment, rampant insider dealing, growth of organised crime, prostitution
and soaring death rates in successful People Power states.
As Almond delicately put it, "People Power is, it turns out, more about closing things than creating
an open society. It shuts factories but, worse still, minds. Its advocates demand a free market in
everything – except opinion. The current ideology of New World Order ideologues, many of whom are
renegade communists, is Market-Leninism – that combination of a dogmatic economic model with Machiavellian
methods to grasp the levers of power."[9]
As Mark MacKinnon reported for the Globe and Mail, Canada, too, supported the efforts of the youth
activist group, Pora, in the Ukraine, providing funding for the "people power democracy" movement.
As MacKinnon noted, "The Bush administration was particularly keen to see a pro-Western figure as
president to ensure control over a key pipeline running from Odessa on the Black Sea to Brody on
the Polish border." However, "The outgoing president, Leonid Kuchma, had recently reversed the flow
so the pipeline carried Russian crude south instead of helping U.S. producers in the Caspian Sea
region ship their product to Europe." As MacKinnon analyzes, the initial funding from western nations
came from Canada, although this was eventually far surpassed in amount by the United States.
Andrew Robinson, Canada's ambassador to Ukraine at the time, in 2004, "began to organize secret
monthly meetings of Western ambassadors, presiding over what he called "donor co-ordination" sessions
among 28 countries interested in seeing Mr. Yushchenko succeed. Eventually, he acted as the group's
spokesman and became a prominent critic of the Kuchma government's heavy-handed media control." Canada
further "invested in a controversial exit poll, carried out on election day by Ukraine's Razumkov
Centre and other groups, that contradicted the official results showing Mr. Yanukovich had won."
Once the new, pro-Western government was in, it "announced its intention to reverse the flow of the
Odessa-Brody pipeline."[10]
Again, this follows the example of Georgia, where several US and NATO interests are met through
the success of the "colour revolution"; simultaneously preventing Russian expansion and influence
from spreading in the region as well as advancing US and NATO control and influence over the major
resources and transport corridors of the region.
Daniel Wolf wrote for the Guardian that, "For most of the people gathered in Kiev's Independence
Square, the demonstration felt spontaneous. They had every reason to want to stop the government
candidate, Viktor Yanukovich, from coming to power, and they took the chance that was offered to
them. But walking through the encampment last December, it was hard to ignore the evidence of meticulous
preparation – the soup kitchens and tents for the demonstrators, the slickness of the concert, the
professionalism of the TV coverage, the proliferation of the sickly orange logo wherever you looked."
He elaborated, writing, "the events in the square were the result of careful, secret planning by
Yushchenko's inner circle over a period of years. The true story of the orange revolution is far
more interesting than the fable that has been widely accepted."
Roman Bessmertny, Yushchenko's campaign manager, two years prior to the 2004 elections, "put as
many as 150,000 people through training courses, seminars, practical tuition conducted by legal and
media specialists. Some attending these courses were members of election committees at local, regional
and national level; others were election monitors, who were not only taught what to watch out for
but given camcorders to record it on video. More than 10,000 cameras were distributed, with the aim
of recording events at every third polling station." Ultimately, it was an intricately well-planned
public relations media-savvy campaign, orchestrated through heavy financing. Hardly the sporadic
"people power" notion applied to the "peaceful coup" in the western media.[11]
The "Tulip Revolution" in Kyrgyzstan
In 2005, Kyrgyzstan underwent its "Tulip Revolution" in which the incumbent was replaced by the
pro-Western candidate through another "popular revolution." As the New York Times reported in March
of 2005, shortly before the March elections, "an opposition newspaper ran photographs of a palatial
home under construction for the country's deeply unpopular president, Askar Akayev, helping set off
widespread outrage and a popular revolt." However, this "newspaper was the recipient of United States
government grants and was printed on an American government-financed printing press operated by Freedom
House, an American organization that describes itself as 'a clear voice for democracy and freedom
around the world'."
Moreover, other countries that have "helped underwrite programs to develop democracy and civil
society" in Kyrgyzstan were Britain, the Netherlands and Norway. These countries collectively "played
a crucial role in preparing the ground for the popular uprising that swept opposition politicians
to power." Money mostly flowed from the United States, in particular, through the National Endowment
for Democracy (NED), as well as through "the Freedom House printing press or Kyrgyz-language service
of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a pro-democracy broadcaster." The National Democratic Institute
also played a major financing role, for which one of the chief beneficiaries of their financial aid
said, "It would have been absolutely impossible for this to have happened without that help."
The Times further reported that:
"American money helps finance civil society centers around the country where activists and citizens
can meet, receive training, read independent newspapers and even watch CNN or surf the Internet in
some. The N.D.I. [National Democratic Institute] alone operates 20 centers that provide news summaries
in Russian, Kyrgyz and Uzbek.
The United States sponsors the American University in Kyrgyzstan, whose stated mission is, in
part, to promote the development of civil society, and pays for exchange programs that send students
and non-governmental organization leaders to the United States. Kyrgyzstan's new prime minister,
Kurmanbek Bakiyev, was one.
All of that money and manpower gave the coalescing Kyrgyz opposition financing and moral support
in recent years, as well as the infrastructure that allowed it to communicate its ideas to the Kyrgyz
people."
As for those "who did not read Russian or have access to the newspaper listened to summaries of
its articles on Kyrgyz-language Radio Azattyk, the local United States-government financed franchise
of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty." Other "independent" media was paid for courtesy of the US State
Department.[12]
As the Wall Street Journal revealed prior to the elections, opposition groups, NGOs and "independent"
media in Kyrgyzstan were getting financial assistance from Freedom House in the US, as well as the
US Agency for International Development (USAID). The Journal reported that, "To avoid provoking Russia
and violating diplomatic norms, the U.S. can't directly back opposition political parties. But it
underwrites a web of influential NGOs whose support of press freedom, the rule of law and clean elections
almost inevitably pits them against the entrenched interests of the old autocratic regimes."
As the Journal further reported, Kyrgyzstan "occupies a strategic location. The U.S. and Russia
both have military bases here. The country's five million citizens, mostly Muslim, are sandwiched
in a tumultuous neighborhood among oil-rich Kazakhstan, whose regime tolerates little political dissent;
dictatorial Uzbekistan, which has clamped down on foreign aid groups and destitute Tajikistan."
In the country, a main opposition NGO, the Coalition for Democracy and Civil Rights, gets its
funding "from the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, a Washington-based nonprofit
funded by the U.S. government, and from USAID." Other agencies reported to be involved, either through
funding or ideological-technical promotion (see: propaganda), are the National Endowment for Democracy
(NED), the Albert Einstein Institute, Freedom House, and the US State Department.[13]
President Askar Akayev of Kyrgyzstan had referred to a "third force" gaining power in his country.
The term was borrowed from one of the most prominent US think tanks, as "third force" is:
"… which details how western-backed non-governmental organisations (NGOs) can promote regime and
policy change all over the world. The formulaic repetition of a third "people power" revolution in
the former Soviet Union in just over one year – after the similar events in Georgia in November 2003
and in Ukraine last Christmas – means that the post-Soviet space now resembles Central America in
the 1970s and 1980s, when a series of US-backed coups consolidated that country's control over the
western hemisphere."
As the Guardian reported:
"Many of the same US government operatives in Latin America have plied their trade in eastern
Europe under George Bush, most notably Michael Kozak, former US ambassador to Belarus, who boasted
in these pages in 2001 that he was doing in Belarus exactly what he had been doing in Nicaragua:
"supporting democracy".
Further:
"The case of Freedom House is particularly arresting. Chaired by the former CIA director James
Woolsey, Freedom House was a major sponsor of the orange revolution in Ukraine. It set up a printing
press in Bishkek in November 2003, which prints 60 opposition journals. Although it is described
as an "independent" press, the body that officially owns it is chaired by the bellicose Republican
senator John McCain, while the former national security adviser Anthony Lake sits on the board. The
US also supports opposition radio and TV."[14]
So again, the same formula was followed in the Central Asian Republics of the former Soviet Union.
This US foreign-policy strategy of promoting "soft revolution" is managed through a network of American
and international NGOs and think tanks. It advances NATO and, in particular, US interests in the
region.
Conclusion
The soft revolutions or "colour revolutions" are a key stratagem in the New World Order; advancing,
through deceptions and manipulation, the key strategy of containing Russia and controlling key resources.
This strategy is critical to understanding the imperialistic nature of the New World Order, especially
when it comes to identifying when this strategy is repeated; specifically in relation to the Iranian
elections of 2009.
Part 1 of this essay outlined the US-NATO imperial strategy for entering the New World Order,
following the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991. The primary aim was focused on encircling Russia
and China and preventing the rise of a new superpower. The US was to act as the imperial hegemon,
serving international financial interests in imposing the New World Order. Part 2 outlined the US
imperial strategy of using "colour revolutions" to advance its interests in Central Asia and Eastern
Europe, following along the overall policy outlined in Part 1, of containing Russia and China from
expanding influence and gaining access to key natural resources.
The third and final part to this essay analyzes the nature of the imperial strategy to construct
a New World Order, focusing on the increasing conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Latin America,
Eastern Europe and Africa; and the potential these conflicts have for starting a new world war with
China and Russia. In particular, its focus is within the past few years, and emphasizes the increasing
nature of conflict and war in the New World Order. Part 3 looks at the potential for "A New World
War for a New World Order."
Andrew Gavin Marshall is a Research Associate with the Centre for Research on Globalization
(CRG). He is currently studying Political Economy and History at Simon Fraser University.
The original source of this article is Global Research
Another debt shark is circling this poor country after feeling blood in the water...
Notable quotes:
"... Pyatt seemed open to the idea of guiding Ukraine towards a decentralization of power just short of Lavrov's recommendation for a federalized Ukraine, but George Soros pushed back stating that a federalization model would result in Russia gaining influence over eastern regions of the country which the Hungarian billionaire disapproved of. ..."
"... Ambassador Pyatt's position towards decentralization also appeared to shake as the correspondence continued saying that the "Russian propaganda machine is telling Kharkhiv and Donbass residents that the government in Western Ukraine is looking to take away their resources and rights ..."
"... In a separate meeting, titled "Civil Society Roundtable Meeting," George Soros directly calls for the formation of a Ukrainian "fifth column" – a group whose sole purpose is to undermine a larger group – in order to push Ukraine away from Russia. ..."
"... "We would rather have people there as fifth column – pivotal thing for future of Ukrainian society – continue to work with Crimean people" said the document regarding the disputed territory only highlighting that there was potentially improper interference by Soros in Ukraine's civil society. ..."
New documents released by hackers who compromised George Soros' Open
Society Foundations raise serious questions about the Hungarian billionaire's role in Ukraine.
A leaked document, from the massive 2,500 file dump by DC Leaks of George Soros' most sensitive Open
Society Foundations communications, show the inordinate amount of power and authority the Hungarian
billionaire wielded over Ukraine in the immediate aftermath of the Maidan government overthrow.
Soros, along with key executives from the Open Society Foundations, held extensive meetings with
nearly every actor involved in the Maidan coup including Ukraine's Ministers of Foreign Affairs,
Justice, Health and Education as well as US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt and the regional director of
USAID. However, the documents do exclude one key official, Victoria Nuland, who was allegedly involved
in steering the opposition to the Yanukovych government.
The records focus on plans to minimize and counter Russian influence and cultural ties to Ukraine
with a focus towards steering Kiev towards social and economic reforms that Soros favored. The Hungarian
billionaire has not been bashful about his acts or intent to influence politics in Ukraine establishing
the NGO, International Renaissance Foundation (IRF) to spearhead the formation of the "New Ukraine."
Most troubling in the document leak appears to be a file titled
"Breakfast with US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt" to discuss Ukraine's future. In the meeting, which
took place on March 31, 2014, just months after the Maidan coup and weeks prior to civil strife following
Ukrainian forces assault on Donbass, US Ambassador Pyatt outlines a PR war against Putin, a position
George Soros viewed favorably in the meeting.
"The short term issue that needs to be addressed will be the problem in getting the message out
from the government through professional PR tools, especially given Putin's own professional smear
campaigns," said the US Ambassador.
George Soros responded, "Agreement on the strategic communications issue – providing professional
PR assistance to the Ukrainian government would be very useful."
Pyatt seemed open to the idea of guiding Ukraine towards a decentralization of power just short
of Lavrov's recommendation for a federalized Ukraine, but George Soros pushed back stating that a
federalization model would result in Russia gaining influence over eastern regions of the country
which the Hungarian billionaire disapproved of.
The Ambassador noted that Secretary of State John Kerry "would be interested to hear George Soros'
views on the situation directly, upon return from his trip" raising the question why one wealthy
foreign individual, neither from Ukraine nor Russia, had such access to influence American policy.
Ambassador Pyatt's position towards decentralization also appeared to shake as the correspondence
continued saying that the "Russian propaganda machine is telling Kharkhiv and Donbass residents that
the government in Western Ukraine is looking to take away their resources and rights through the
decentralization process, feeding into Lavrov's line that the Ukrainian government is dysfunctional
and not successful as a unitary state, making it a necessity to have federalization.
Then, in a full capitulation, the American diplomat point blank asks George Soros, "what should
the US government be doing and what is the US government currently doing."
To which, George Soros responded, "Obama has been too soft on Putin, and there is a need to impose
potent smart sanctions." He then called on the US government to "impose sanctions on Russia for 90
days or until the Russian government recognizes the results of the presidential elections."
In a separate meeting, titled "Civil Society Roundtable Meeting," George Soros directly calls
for the formation of a Ukrainian "fifth column" – a group whose sole purpose is to undermine a larger
group – in order to push Ukraine away from Russia.
"We would rather have people there as fifth column – pivotal thing for future of Ukrainian society
– continue to work with Crimean people" said the document regarding the disputed territory only highlighting
that there was potentially improper interference by Soros in Ukraine's civil society.
High level military commanders are more politicians then commanders. And if they belong to
neocons this is a dangerous and potentially explosive combination. Especially if State
Department is fully aligned with Pentagon, like happened under Secretary Clinton tenure.
Notable quotes:
"... He had exaggerated Russian activities in eastern Ukraine with the overt goal of delivering weapons to Kiev. ..."
"... "I think POTUS sees us as a threat that must be minimized,... ie do not get me into a war????" Breedlove wrote in one email, using the acronym for the president of the United States. How could Obama be persuaded to be more "engaged" in the conflict in Ukraine -- read: deliver weapons -- Breedlove had asked former Secretary of State Colin Powell. ..."
"... Breedlove sought counsel from some very prominent people, his emails show. Among them were Wesley Clark, Breedlove's predecessor at NATO, Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs at the State Department, and Geoffrey Pyatt, the US ambassador to Kiev. ..."
"... One name that kept popping up was Phillip Karber, an adjunct assistant professor at Georgetown University in Washington DC and president of the Potomac Foundation, a conservative think tank founded by the former defense contractor BDM. By its own account, the foundation has helped eastern European countries prepare their accession into NATO. Now the Ukrainian parliament and the government in Kiev were asking Karber for help. ..."
"... According to the email, Pakistan had offered, "under the table," to sell Ukraine 500 portable TOW-II launchers and 8,000 TOW-II missiles. The deliveries could begin within two weeks. Even the Poles were willing to start sending "well maintained T-72 tanks, plus several hundred SP 122mm guns, and SP-122 howitzers (along with copious amounts of artillery ammunition for both)" that they had leftover from the Soviet era. The sales would likely go unnoticed, Karber said, because Poland's old weapons were "virtually undistinguishable from those of Ukraine." ..."
"... Karber noted, however, that Pakistan and Poland would not make any deliveries without informal US approval. Furthermore, Warsaw would only be willing to help if its deliveries to Kiev were replaced with new, state-of-the-art weapons from NATO. Karber concluded his letter with a warning: "Time has run out." Without immediate assistance, the Ukrainian army "could face prospect of collapse within 30 days." ..."
"... In March, Karber traveled again to Warsaw in order to, as he told Breedlove, consult with leading members of the ruling party, on the need to "quietly supply arty ( eds: artillery ) and antitank munitions to Ukraine." ..."
"... In an email to Breedlove, Clark described defense expert Karber as "brilliant." After a first visit, Breedlove indicated he had also been impressed. "GREAT visit," he wrote. Karber, an extremely enterprising man, appeared at first glance to be a valuable informant because he often -- at least a dozen times by his own account -- traveled to the front and spoke with Ukrainian commanders. The US embassy in Kiev also relied on Karber for information because it lacked its own sources. "We're largely blind," the embassy's defense attaché wrote in an email. ..."
"... At times, Karber's missives read like prose. In one, he wrote about the 2014 Christmas celebrations he had spent together with Dnipro-1, the ultranationalist volunteer battalion. "The toasts and vodka flow, the women sing the Ukrainian national anthem -- no one has a dry eye." ..."
"... Karber had only good things to report about the unit, which had already been discredited as a private oligarch army. He wrote that the staff and volunteers were dominated by middle class people and that there was a large professional staff that was even "working on the holiday." Breedlove responded that these insights were "quietly finding their way into the right places." ..."
"... In fact, Karber is a highly controversial figure. During the 1980s, the longtime BDM employee, was counted among the fiercest Cold War hawks. Back in 1985, he warned of an impending Soviet attack on the basis of documents he had translated incorrectly. ..."
"... He also blundered during the Ukraine crisis after sending photos to US Senator James Inhofe, claiming to show Russian units in Ukraine. Inhofe released the photos publicly, but it quickly emerged that one had originated from the 2008 war in Georgia. ..."
"... The reasons that Breedlove continued to rely on Karber despite such false reports remain unclear. Was he willing to pay any price for weapons deliveries? Or did he have other motives? The emails illustrate the degree to which Breedlove and his fellow campaigners feared that Congress might reduce the number of US troops in Europe. ..."
"... General Breedlove's departure from his NATO post in May has done little to placate anyone in the German government. After all, the man Breedlove regarded as an obstacle, President Obama, is nearing the end of his second term. His possible successor, the Democrat Hillary Clinton, is considered a hardliner vis-a-vis Russia. ..."
"... What's more: Nuland, a diplomat who shares many of the same views as Breedlove, could move into an even more important role after the November election -- she's considered a potential candidate for secretary of state. ..."
"... The now famous and appropriate quote from President Eisenhower: ..."
"... In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. ..."
"... The idea of NATO as a defence organisation, following the 2nd World War was quite rational. The history of this organisation however, has shown, how a well meant intention can be misused to force through policies, which have nothing to do with the original purpose. Currently it would appear to have no other role, than to provide high ranking army officers with well paid employment, which can only be justified by way of international conflicts. In the absence of conflict, NATO would have no other cause for existence. ..."
"... The Cold War continues, only the enemy is not the Soviet Union but Russia. Ever since the war against Napoleon Russia has emerged as a threat to certain European interests, at first liberal and nationalist interests. After the Bolshevik Revolution the enemy was still Russia, now revitalized with extreme Bolshevik ideology. Hitler used this effectively to target liberals, leftists and especially Jews. ..."
"... After the fall of Communism nothing has really changed. The West is still urged to resist the Russian threat, a threat invented by Polish, Baltic, and Ukrainian nationalists and perhaps Fascists. Donald Trump alone seems impervious to this propaganda. Let's at least give him credit in this case, if not in many others. NATO has become a permanent anti-Russian phony alliance, financed by America. ..."
"... These people are hell-bent to bring the world to the brink of war, with lies and excuses about fear of Russian attacks. So Poland was willing to step into the conflict with Ukraine and deliver lethal armament? All the while afraid of Russia invading it? ..."
"... Philip Breedlove is a war monger and should be fired from his position. The efforts of the group around him seeking to secure weapons for the Ukraine to intensify the conflict must have happened with Breedlove's knowledge and support. If not, then he is not capable to meet the demands of his job and should be dismissed for incompetence. Either way, this guy is unacceptable. ..."
"... Ms. Nuland is the same us official recorded by Russian intelligence trying to manipulate events in Ukraine before the overthrow of the president and all the tragic events that followed. That she is still working for US state dept. is puzzling to say the least. ..."
"... Very simple, he is attempting to INVENT a NEW ROLE for NATO, as it is well known in the domain of sociology: any organization strives for survival, especially when it becomes OBSOLETE. ..."
"... nato Breedhate? ..."
"... SPON was always parotting him. And SPON member Benjamin Bidder and many other SPON guys were foaming at the mouth with war rhetoric all the time in 2014-15. Shame on those fools. Finally, with this contribution you are approaching your real job. And this is to distribute information instead of propaganda. ..."
The newly leaked emails reveal a clandestine network of Western agitators around the NATO military
chief, whose presence fueled the conflict in Ukraine. Many allies found in Breedlove's alarmist public
statements about alleged large Russian troop movements cause for concern early on. Earlier this year,
the general was assuring the world that US European Command was "deterring Russia now and preparing
to fight and win if necessary."
The emails document for the first time the questionable sources from whom Breedlove was getting
his information. He had exaggerated Russian activities in eastern Ukraine with the overt goal of
delivering weapons to Kiev.
The general and his likeminded colleagues perceived US President Barack Obama, the commander-in-chief
of all American forces, as well as German Chancellor Angela Merkel as obstacles. Obama and Merkel
were being "politically naive & counter-productive" in their calls for de-escalation, according to
Phillip Karber, a central figure in Breedlove's network who was feeding information from Ukraine
to the general.
"I think POTUS sees us as a threat that must be minimized,... ie do not get me into a war????"
Breedlove wrote in one email, using the acronym for the president of the United States. How could
Obama be persuaded to be more "engaged" in the conflict in Ukraine -- read: deliver weapons -- Breedlove
had asked former Secretary of State Colin Powell.
Breedlove sought counsel from some very prominent people, his emails show. Among them were Wesley
Clark, Breedlove's predecessor at NATO, Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary of state for European
and Eurasian affairs at the State Department, and Geoffrey Pyatt, the US ambassador to Kiev.
One name that kept popping up was Phillip Karber, an adjunct assistant professor at Georgetown
University in Washington DC and president of the Potomac Foundation, a conservative think tank founded
by the former defense contractor BDM. By its own account, the foundation has helped eastern European
countries prepare their accession into NATO. Now the Ukrainian parliament and the government in Kiev
were asking Karber for help.
Surreptitious Channels
On February 16, 2015, when the Ukraine crisis had reached its climax, Karber wrote an email to
Breedlove, Clark, Pyatt and Rose Gottemoeller, the under secretary for arms control and international
security at the State Department, who will be moving to Brussels this fall to take up the post of
deputy secretary general of NATO. Karber was in Warsaw, and he said he had found surreptitious channels
to get weapons to Ukraine -- without the US being directly involved.
According to the email, Pakistan had offered, "under the table," to sell Ukraine 500 portable
TOW-II launchers and 8,000 TOW-II missiles. The deliveries could begin within two weeks. Even the
Poles were willing to start sending "well maintained T-72 tanks, plus several hundred SP 122mm guns,
and SP-122 howitzers (along with copious amounts of artillery ammunition for both)" that they had
leftover from the Soviet era. The sales would likely go unnoticed, Karber said, because Poland's
old weapons were "virtually undistinguishable from those of Ukraine."
AFP
A destroyed airport building in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk : Thousands were killed
in fighting during the Ukraine conflict.
Karber noted, however, that Pakistan and Poland would not make any deliveries without informal
US approval. Furthermore, Warsaw would only be willing to help if its deliveries to Kiev were replaced
with new, state-of-the-art weapons from NATO. Karber concluded his letter with a warning: "Time has run out." Without immediate assistance,
the Ukrainian army "could face prospect of collapse within 30 days."
"Stark," Breedlove replied. "I may share some of this but will thoroughly wipe the fingerprints
off."
In March, Karber traveled again to Warsaw in order to, as he told Breedlove, consult with leading
members of the ruling party, on the need to "quietly supply arty ( eds: artillery ) and antitank
munitions to Ukraine."
Much to the irritation of Breedlove, Clark and Karber, nothing happened. Those responsible were
quickly identified. The National Security Council, Obama's circle of advisors, were "slowing things
down," Karber complained. Clark pointed his finger directly at the White House, writing, "Our problem
is higher than State," a reference to the State Department.
... ... ...
'The Front Is Now Everywhere'
Karber's emails constantly made it sound as though the apocalypse was only a few weeks away. "The
front is now everywhere," he told Breedlove in an email at the beginning of 2015, adding that Russian
agents and their proxies "have begun launching a series of terrorist attacks, assassinations, kidnappings
and infrastructure bombings," in an effort to destabilize Kiev and other Ukrainian cities.
In an email to Breedlove, Clark described defense expert Karber as "brilliant." After a first
visit, Breedlove indicated he had also been impressed. "GREAT visit," he wrote. Karber, an extremely
enterprising man, appeared at first glance to be a valuable informant because he often -- at least
a dozen times by his own account -- traveled to the front and spoke with Ukrainian commanders. The
US embassy in Kiev also relied on Karber for information because it lacked its own sources. "We're
largely blind," the embassy's defense attaché wrote in an email.
At times, Karber's missives read like prose. In one, he wrote about the 2014 Christmas celebrations
he had spent together with Dnipro-1, the ultranationalist volunteer battalion. "The toasts and vodka
flow, the women sing the Ukrainian national anthem -- no one has a dry eye."
Karber had only good things to report about the unit, which had already been discredited as a
private oligarch army. He wrote that the staff and volunteers were dominated by middle class people
and that there was a large professional staff that was even "working on the holiday." Breedlove responded
that these insights were "quietly finding their way into the right places."
Highly Controversial Figure
In fact, Karber is a highly controversial figure. During the 1980s, the longtime BDM employee,
was counted among the fiercest Cold War hawks. Back in 1985, he warned of an impending Soviet attack
on the basis of documents he had translated incorrectly.
He also blundered during the Ukraine crisis after sending photos to US Senator James Inhofe, claiming
to show Russian units in Ukraine. Inhofe released the photos publicly, but it quickly emerged that
one had originated from the 2008 war in Georgia.
By November 10, 2014, at the latest, Breedlove must have recognized that his informant was on
thin ice. That's when Karber reported that the separatists were boasting they had a tactical nuclear
warhead for the 2S4 mortar. Karber himself described the news as "weird," but also added that "there
is a lot of 'crazy' things going on" in Ukraine.
The reasons that Breedlove continued to rely on Karber despite such false reports remain unclear.
Was he willing to pay any price for weapons deliveries? Or did he have other motives? The emails
illustrate the degree to which Breedlove and his fellow campaigners feared that Congress might reduce
the number of US troops in Europe.
Karber confirmed the authenticity of the leaked email correspondence. Regarding the questions
about the accuracy of his reports, he told SPIEGEL that, "like any information derived from direct
observation at the front during the 'fog of war,' it is partial, time sensitive, and perceived through
a personal perspective." Looking back with the advantage of hindsight and a more comprehensive perspective,
"I believe that I was right more than wrong," Karber writes, "but certainly not perfect." He adds
that, "in 170 days at the front, I never once met a German military or official directly observing
the conflict."
Great Interest in Berlin
Breedlove's leaked email correspondences were read in Berlin with great interest. A year ago,
word of the NATO commander's "dangerous propaganda" was circulating around Merkel's Chancellery.
In light of the new information, officials felt vindicated in their assessment. Germany's Federal
Foreign Office has expressed similar sentiment, saying that fortunately "influential voices had continuously
advocated against the delivery of 'lethal weapons.'"
Karber says he finds it "obscene that the most effective sanction of this war is not the economic
limits placed on Russia, but the virtual complete embargo of all lethal aid to the victim. I find
this to be the height of sophistry -- if a woman is being attacked by a group of hooligans and yells
out to the crowd or passersby, 'Give me a can of mace,' is it better to not supply it because the
attackers could have a knife and passively watch her get raped?"
General Breedlove's departure from his NATO post in May has done little to placate anyone in the
German government. After all, the man Breedlove regarded as an obstacle, President Obama, is nearing
the end of his second term. His possible successor, the Democrat Hillary Clinton, is considered a
hardliner vis-a-vis Russia.
What's more: Nuland, a diplomat who shares many of the same views as Breedlove, could move into
an even more important role after the November election -- she's considered a potential candidate
for secretary of state.
bubasan 07/28/2016
Upon reading this article, I am reminded of Dwight D Eisenhowers Farewell speech to the American
Public on January 17, 1961. So long as we continue the PC mentality of NOT Teaching History, as
it really was, we are going to repeat past mistake's. The now famous and appropriate quote
from President Eisenhower:
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted
influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.
Inglenda2 07/28/2016
The idea of NATO as a defence organisation, following the 2nd World War was quite rational.
The history of this organisation however, has shown, how a well meant intention can be misused
to force through policies, which have nothing to do with the original purpose. Currently it would
appear to have no other role, than to provide high ranking army officers with well paid employment,
which can only be justified by way of international conflicts. In the absence of conflict, NATO
would have no other cause for existence.
PeterCT 07/28/2016
Why is Breedlove so fat? He is setting a bad example to his troops. Show all comments
turnipseed 07/29/2016
The Cold War continues, only the enemy is not the Soviet Union but Russia. Ever since the
war against Napoleon Russia has emerged as a threat to certain European interests, at first liberal
and nationalist interests. After the Bolshevik Revolution the enemy was still Russia, now revitalized
with extreme Bolshevik ideology. Hitler used this effectively to target liberals, leftists and
especially Jews.
After the fall of Communism nothing has really changed. The West is still urged to resist
the Russian threat, a threat invented by Polish, Baltic, and Ukrainian nationalists and perhaps
Fascists. Donald Trump alone seems impervious to this propaganda. Let's at least give him credit
in this case, if not in many others. NATO has become a permanent anti-Russian phony alliance,
financed by America.
90-grad 07/31/2016
Quite detailed article. Not being published in the german website. How to describe these people,
basically just trying to ignite bigger conflicts, or even war. Hardliner, hawks, to me not strong
enough. These are criminals of war, and they should be named accordingly. These are exactly the
kind of persons, who helped Bush to invade Irak, basing on false informations to the public. And
their peace endangering activities help politicians like H.Clinton to keep the peoble in fear,
solely to their own benefit. Disgusting!
huguenot1566 07/31/2016
Extremely disturbing
I don't even know here to begin. Breedlove, Karber, Clark all Americans, seemingly on their
own without Obama's permission, trying to exaggerate or fabricate evidence in order to start a
war with Russia and the danger to the world is profoundly terrifying (Iraq 2003). The US Embassy
in Ukraine saying they were in the dark and therefore relying on information from a college professor,
Karber, who still thinks we're in the Cold War along with Clark who was retired & meddling in
an unofficial capacity as far as the story implies tells me they should be brought up on charges.
And Breedlove is supposed to follow orders not make up his own policy & then try & manufacture
evidence supporting that policy to start war. If the US Embassy in Ukraine says they were in the
dark then clearly they were fishing for info to proactively involve themselves in another nation
& region's personal business. Congress & the U.S. military should investigate as these actions
violate the U.S. Constitution. Thankfully, Germany and NATO is able to say no. It tells Americans
that something isn't right on their end of this.
verbatim128 07/31/2016
Look who was crying wolf!
These people are hell-bent to bring the world to the brink of war, with lies and excuses about
fear of Russian attacks. So Poland was willing to step into the conflict with Ukraine and deliver
lethal armament? All the while afraid of Russia invading it? We, public opinion and most Western
peace-loving folk, are played like a fiddle to step into the fray to "protect" and further some
age-old ethnic and nationalistic rivalries. Time to put an end to this.
gerhard38 08/01/2016
Fucking war monger
Philip Breedlove is a war monger and should be fired from his position. The efforts of the
group around him seeking to secure weapons for the Ukraine to intensify the conflict must have
happened with Breedlove's knowledge and support. If not, then he is not capable to meet the demands
of his job and should be dismissed for incompetence. Either way, this guy is unacceptable.
aegiov 08/01/2016
Ms. Nuland is the same us official recorded by Russian intelligence trying to manipulate events
in Ukraine before the overthrow of the president and all the tragic events that followed. That
she is still working for US state dept. is puzzling to say the least. good reporting. thank you.
titus_norberto 08/02/2016
The Front Is Now Everywhere, indeed...
Quote: 'The Front Is Now Everywhere', yes indeed, we can go back to the Wilson administration,
he invented the League of Nations and his nation did not even joined.
There is a folly in American presidents, they believe they can solve worlds problems, especially
in the Middle East, with two invariable results:
1- utter failure plus CHAOS; and
2- utter disregard for DOMESTIC GOVERNANCE.
Now, the fact that the front is NOW 2016 everywhere is the result of failure one. Donald Trump
is the result of failure two. There is another aspect to consider, what is General Breedlove doing
? Very simple, he is attempting to INVENT a NEW ROLE for NATO, as it is well known in the domain
of sociology: any organization strives for survival, especially when it becomes OBSOLETE.
vsepr1975 08/03/2016
nato
Breedhate?
w.schuler 08/09/2016
Fat Bredlove is a war monger
This is true and it was obvious from the very beginning. But SPON was always parotting him.
And SPON member Benjamin Bidder and many other SPON guys were foaming at the mouth with war rhetoric
all the time in 2014-15. Shame on those fools. Finally, with this contribution you are approaching
your real job. And this is to distribute information instead of propaganda.
"... This research documents that the negative effects of globalization on employment and wages are larger than many people realized. In addition, it recognizes that most of the benefits have accrued to those at the top of the income distribution while the costs -- lost jobs, lower wages and fewer attractive employment opportunities -- have fallen mainly on the working class. ..."
The toughest question about global trade: This year's battle for the
White House has put international trade in the spotlight. Donald Trump has
led the charge against trade agreements, but Hillary Clinton's reversal
of her support for President Obama's Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) also
reflects the evolving view of the benefits of globalization.
The American public has long been suspicious of international trade, but
economists have been much more supportive. However, new evidence in the
economics literature has caused a rethinking of how to evaluate trade agreements.
This research documents that the negative effects of globalization
on employment and wages are larger than many people realized. In addition,
it recognizes that most of the benefits have accrued to those at the top
of the income distribution while the costs -- lost jobs, lower wages and
fewer attractive employment opportunities -- have fallen mainly on the working
class.
One response from many advocates is to point out that international trade
has lifted millions of people around the world out of poverty and that reducing
the pace of globalization would slow the rate of global poverty reduction.
All of which brings up an important and rather difficult question: Just
how should we value international trade? ...
Tom aka Rusty said...
Who decided that US workers would be required to sacrifice to create a middle
class in China (and the Chinese military, oops)? Why didn't the elites join
in the sacrifice? Why no transparency? Or was this pushed with great theories
that didn't work? Just wondering.
Brexit was a vote against London, globalization and multiculturalism as much as a vote against
Europe.
London is the world's single most important center of global finance - though that may be at
risk now. With the surrounding southeast region, it dominates the United Kingdom's economic
growth. It has some of the world's most expensive real estate and richest residents - and
absentee property owners. It is one of the world's most cosmopolitan cities. It is home to about
1 million continental Europeans. And it voted overwhelmingly to remain in the European Union. The
rest of England did not.
"... John Lukacs, the Hungarian-American historian, has spent a lifetime arguing that nationalism-not socialism, or even liberalism-is the core ideology of modernity, and that the lesson of history is that nationalism will assert itself, like an unquenchable microbe, anytime it has the least opportunity. ..."
What was really at stake was a closed vision of the future against a cosmopolitan one. The
divide was much less the prosperous versus the poor than it was city versus small towns, the
well-educated versus those without advanced degrees, and, most of all, the young versus the old.
Economic insecurity was, obviously, one of the things that drove the vote, but nostalgic
nationalism drove it more, and what was really striking was that the struggling young took it for
granted that the way toward a better future lay in ever-more European and planetary
consciousness, not in closing it down. The vote was intolerably cruel in particular to the
twentysomethings of Britain, many of whom did not hesitate to protest. They had gone to sleep on
Thursday evening with all the world, or at least with all of Europe, before them, as citizens
with possible futures in twenty-eight nations; they woke on Friday morning to be told that their
future would contract to one nation, and that one possibly shrinking before their eyes, right to
the Scottish border.
... ... ...
At this moment, two irascible émigrés from the past century of European tragedies might come
to mind. John Lukacs, the Hungarian-American historian, has spent a lifetime arguing that
nationalism-not socialism, or even liberalism-is the core ideology of modernity, and that the
lesson of history is that nationalism will assert itself, like an unquenchable microbe, anytime
it has the least opportunity. (He also draws the distinction between patriotism-the love of
place and tradition and a desire to see its particularities thrive-and true nationalism, which is
a vengeful, irrational certainty that the alien outside or even within a country's borders is
responsible for some humiliation to the true nation.) This pessimistic strain was matched by that
of Karl Popper, the Austrian-Anglo philosopher, who saw that what he named the "open society,"
though essential to the transmission of humane values and the growth of knowledge, can impose
great strains on its citizens-strains of lost identity, certainty, tribal wholeness. The reaction
to this strain is inevitable, and sure. What keeps an open society from being overturned is only
the balm of ever-increased prosperity; when prosperity ends or is endangered, all the bad demons
come out of the forest. In this much broader sense, it may be prosperity that makes pluralism
possible. Economics alone don't drive the ideology of nationalism, but without prosperity it has
more room to bloom. Meanwhile, nationalism won't just go away, and open, liberal societies are
far more fragile than their success can make them seem-and these two sad truths seem to need
perpetual restating, or the lights really will go out across Europe.
Whether it's having any effect will not be known until the vote on Thursday. What is known,
what the debate over the referendum has demonstrated with great clarity, is that there is in
Britain a populist strain of the sort that has brought nationalist governments to Hungary and
Poland, helped right-wing parties make strong showings in France and some other European
countries - and, in America, done much to promote the cause of Donald Trump. In the United States
and Britain, a relatively normal electoral process became seized with populist nationalism and
increasingly immune to normal political discourse.
In Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron announced back in 2013 that he would hold a referendum
on E.U. membership largely to mollify euroskeptics in his Conservative Party, presuming that
Britons would vote to stay in. Before long, a similar demographic gathered on the "Leave" side in
Britain and the Trump side in America - workers who felt alienated by a globalizing and changing
world, who felt politicians had ceased listening to them, who were convinced that tides of
foreigners were threatening their livelihood and identity.
And so the British referendum has become something of a battleground for all Western democracies
where anti-immigrant hostilities are building.
And even if the "Remain" side prevails on Thursday and Mr. Trump is decisively rejected in
November, Western democracies will need to take a long, hard look at the social divide, the
insecurities, the alienation, the nationalism and racism that have invaded so many political
battlegrounds.
"... Britain's vote to exit the European Union reflected a resurgence of far-right nationalism that was adding pressure on countries to shore up their borders, ..."
"... countries facing an increased desire for national identity, and the growing anti-globalization sentiment that was driving them to be more assertive about protecting their markets. ..."
Britain's vote to exit the European Union reflected a resurgence of far-right nationalism
that was adding pressure on countries to shore up their borders, said Singapore's Defence
Minister Ng Eng Hen.
The challenge for Singapore in the face of the Brexit vote, Ng said, will be to stay neutral and
not judge those countries facing an increased desire for national identity, and the growing
anti-globalization sentiment that was driving them to be more assertive about protecting their
markets.
"There is a resurgence of what pundits and political analysts call far-right, a rising
nationalism, which is a reaction hearkened to so-called 'good old days', not remembering that the
good old days also have many, many bad points," Ng told reporters at a media conference ahead of
Singapore Armed Forces day. "We want to be neutral, in terms of not being judgmental because this
is as history goes. But nonetheless, it is a challenge," he said.
As terrorism continues to represent a clear and present threat, Ng, 57, said no country was
immune to the defects of home-grown terrorism, and emphasized the need for international
cooperation to combat the heightened threat of global terrorism.
"You can monitor closely your borders, you can even close off your borders but homegrown
terrorism is something else. It is very hard to protect against lone wolves or wolf-pack attacks
-- somebody who is radicalized, who has really not been contacted physically by somebody outside
their own country," he said.
When the Brexit referendum is done, tens of millions of
Britons will likely have registered a vote against the liberal vision of European unity and
assimilation. In this country, even after the disastrous past few weeks Donald Trump has
had, a
new opinion poll, from Quinnipiac University, indicates that in crucial states like
Ohio and Pennsylvania he remains statistically tied with Hillary Clinton.
Why is this happening? Trump and his counterpart in
Britain, the U.K. Independence Party (UKIP) leader Nigel Farage, didn't
emerge from nowhere. Both are wealthy men who affect an affinity with the common people,
and who have skillfully exploited a deep well of resentment among working-class and
middle-class voters, some of whom have traditionally supported left-of-center parties.
Certainly, a parallel factor in both men's rise is racism, or, more specifically, nativism.
Trump has presented a nightmarish vision of America overrun by Mexican felons and Muslim
terrorists. UKIP printed up campaign posters that showed thousands of
dark-colored refugees lining up to enter Slovenia, which is part of the E.U., next to the
words "BREAKING POINT: The EU has failed us all." But racism and nationalism
have both been around for a long time, as have demagogues who try to exploit them. In
healthy democracies, these troublemakers are confined to the fringes.
Historically, transforming radical parties of the right (or
left) into mass movements has required some sort of disaster, such as a major war or an
economic depression. Europe in the early twentieth century witnessed both, with cataclysmic
results. After the First World War, the introduction of social democracy, the socioeconomic
system that most Western countries settled on, delivered steadily rising living standards,
which helped to keep the extremists at bay. If prosperity wasn't shared equally-and it
wasn't-egalitarian social norms and redistributive tax systems blunted some of the
inequities that go along with free-market capitalism.
But in the past few decades Western countries have been
subjected to a triad of forces that, while not as visible or dramatic as wars and
depressions, have proved equally destabilizing: globalization, technical progress, and a
political philosophy that embraces both. In the United States, it is no coincidence that
Trump is doing well in the Rust Belt and other deindustrialized areas. A one-two punch of
automation and offshoring has battered these regions, leaving many of their residents
ill-equipped to prosper in today's economy. Trump is exploiting the same economic anxieties
and resentments that helped Bernie Sanders, another critic of globalization and free trade,
carry the Michigan Democratic primary.
"There is no excuse for supporting a racist, sexist,
xenophobic buffoon like Donald Trump," Dean Baker, an economist and blogger at the liberal
Center for Economic and Policy Research, in Washington,
noted recently. "But we should be clear; the workers who turn to him do have real
grievances. The system has been rigged against them."
Similarly, it is not an accident that UKIP
is popular in the former mill towns of northern England, in the engineering belt of the
West Midlands, and in working-class exurbs of London. "Children emerging from the primary
school next door, almost all from ethnic minorities, are just a visible reminder for anyone
seeking easy answers to genuine grievance," the Guardian's Polly Toynbee wrote,
last week, after a visit to Barking, in Essex, which is close to a big car factory
owned by Ford. "As high-status Ford jobs are swapped for low-paid warehouse work,
indignation is diverted daily against migrants by the Mail, Sun, Sunday Times and the rest.
. . . This is the sound of Britain breaking."
For the past half century, the major political parties,
on both sides of the Atlantic, have promulgated the idea that free trade and globalization
are the keys to prosperity. If you pressed the mainstream economists who advise these
parties, they might concede that trade creates losers as well as winners, and that the
argument for ever more global integration implicitly assumes that the winners will
compensate the losers. But the fact that such a sharing of the gains has been sorely
lacking was regarded as a relatively minor detail, and certainly not as a justification for
calling a halt to the entire process.
If you are reading this post, the likelihood is that you,
like me, are one of the winners. Highly educated, professional people tend to work in
sectors of the economy that have benefitted from the changes in the international division
of labor (e.g., finance, consulting, media, tech) or have been largely spared the rigors of
global competition (e.g., law, medicine, academia). From a secure perch on the economic
ladder, it is easy to celebrate the gains that technology and globalization have brought,
such as a cornucopia of cheap goods in rich countries and rising prosperity in poor ones.
It's also tempting to dismiss the arguments of people who ignore the benefits of this
process, or who can't see that it is irreversible.
But, as Baker points out, "it is a bit hypocritical of
those who have benefited" from this economic transformation to be "mocking the poor
judgment of its victims"-especially now that the forces of global competition and
technological progress are reaching into areas that were previously protected. In a world
of self-driving cars and trucks, what is the future for truck drivers, cab and limo
drivers, and delivery men? Not a very prosperous one, surely. And the creative destruction
that the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter celebrated won't stop there. With software
that can transfer money at zero cost, medical robots that can carry out the most delicate
of operations, and smart algorithms that can diagnose diseases or dispense legal advice,
what is the future for bankers, surgeons, doctors, lawyers, and other professionals?
There is no straightforward answer to this question, just
as there is no easy answer to the question of what can be done to help those who have
already lost out. One option is to strengthen the social safety net and, perhaps, to move
toward some sort of universal basic income, which would guarantee a minimum standard of
living to everybody, regardless of employment prospects. The political enactment of such
solutions, however, is contingent on the existence of social solidarity, which the very
process of economic and technological change, by heightening inequalities and
eroding communal institutions, undermines.
Lacking grounds for optimism, and feeling remote from the
levers of power, the disappointed nurse their grievances-until along come politicians who
tell them that they are right to be angry, that their resentments are justified, and that
they should be mad not just at the winners but at immigrants, too. Trump and Farage are the
latest and most successful of these political opportunists. Sadly, they are unlikely to be
the last.
"... In Bernie Sanders's fulminations against corporate and financial elites one hears echoes of the radical-leftist rhetoric in Greece and Italy against EU banking elites. ..."
"... And as "Brexit" swept the native-born English outside of multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural, multilingual London, populist-nationalist Donald Trump and antiestablishment Ted Cruz swept the native-born white working and middle classes in the primaries. ..."
"... In Britain, all the mainstream parties-Labor, Tory, Liberal Democrat, Scottish National-supported "Remain." All lost. ..."
"... In the past six months, millions of Democrats voted for a 74-year-old socialist against the establishment choice, Hillary Clinton, as Bush-Romney-Ryan Republicanism was massively repudiated in the Republican primaries. ..."
"... As Trump said last week, "We got here because we switched from a policy of Americanism-focusing on what's good for America's middle class-to a policy of globalism, focusing on how to make money for large corporations who can move their wealth and workers to foreign countries all to the detriment of the American worker and the American economy." ..."
Some of us have long predicted the breakup of the European Union. The Cousins appear to have just
delivered the
coup de grace
.
While Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to remain in the
EU, England voted for independence. These people, with their unique history, language, and culture,
want to write their own laws and rule themselves.
The English wish to remain who they are, and they do not want their country to become, in Theodore
Roosevelt's phrase, "a polyglot boarding house" for the world.
From patriots of all nations, congratulations are in order.
It will all begin to unravel now, over there, and soon over here.
Across Europe, tribalism, of all strains, is resurgent. Not only does the EU appear to be breaking
up, countries appear about to break up.
Scotland will seek a second referendum to leave the UK. The French National Front of Marine Le
Pen and the Dutch Party for Freedom both want out of the EU. As Scots seek to secede from the UK,
Catalonia seeks to secede from Spain, Veneto from Italy, and Flemish nationalists from Belgium.
Ethnonationalism seems everywhere ascendant. Yet, looking back in history, is this not the way
the world has been going for some centuries now?
The disintegration of the EU into its component nations would follow, as Vladimir Putin helpfully
points out, the dissolution of the USSR into 15 nations, and the breakup of Yugoslavia into seven.
Czechoslovakia lately split in two. The Donbass seeks to secede from Ukraine. Is that so different
from Transnistria splitting off from Romania, Abkhazia and South Ossetia seceding from Georgia, and
Chechnya seeking separation from Russia?
After World War II came the disintegration of the French and British empires and birth of dozens
of new nations in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. America returned the Philippine islands to their
people.
The previous century saw the collapse of the Spanish Empire and birth of a score of new nations
in our own hemisphere.
In Xi Jinping's China and Putin's Russia, nationalism is rising, even as China seeks to repress
Uighur and Tibetan separatists.
People want to rule themselves, and be themselves, separate from all others. Palestinians want
their own nation. Israelis want "a Jewish state."
On Cyprus, Turks and Greeks seem happier apart.
Kurds are fighting to secede from Turkey and Iraq, and perhaps soon from Syria and Iran. Afghanistan
appears to be splintering into regions dominated by Pashtuns, Hazaras, Uzbeks, and Tajiks.
Eritrea has left Ethiopia. South Sudan has seceded from Khartoum.
Nor is America immune to the populist sentiments surging in Europe.
In Bernie Sanders's fulminations against corporate and financial elites one hears echoes of
the radical-leftist rhetoric in Greece and Italy against EU banking elites.
And as "Brexit" swept the native-born English outside of multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural,
multilingual London, populist-nationalist Donald Trump and antiestablishment Ted Cruz swept the native-born
white working and middle classes in the primaries.
In Britain, all the mainstream parties-Labor, Tory, Liberal Democrat, Scottish National-supported
"Remain." All lost.
Nigel Farage's UK Independence Party alone won.
In the past six months, millions of Democrats voted for a 74-year-old socialist against the
establishment choice, Hillary Clinton, as Bush-Romney-Ryan Republicanism was massively repudiated
in the Republican primaries.
As Trump said last week, "We got here because we switched from a policy of Americanism-focusing
on what's good for America's middle class-to a policy of globalism, focusing on how to make money
for large corporations who can move their wealth and workers to foreign countries all to the detriment
of the American worker and the American economy."
Yesterday, news arrived that in May alone, the U.S. had run a trade deficit in goods of $60 billion.
This translates into an annual deficit of $720 billion in goods, or near 4 percent of our GDP wiped
out by purchases of foreign-made rather than U.S.-made goods.
In 40 years, we have not run a trade surplus. The most self-sufficient republic in all of history
now relies for its necessities upon other nations.
What might a Trumpian policy of Americanism over globalism entail?
A 10 to 20 percent tariff on manufactured goods to wipe out the trade deficit in goods, with the
hundreds of billions in revenue used to slash or eliminate corporate taxes in the USA.
Every U.S. business would benefit. Every global company would have an incentive not only to move
production here, but its headquarters here.
An "America first" immigration policy would secure the border, cut legal immigration to tighten
U.S. labor markets, strictly enforce U.S. laws against those breaking into our country, and get tough
with businesses that make a practice of hiring people here illegally.
In Europe and America, corporate, financial, and political elites are increasingly disrespected
and transnationalism is receding. An anti-establishment, nationalist, populist wave is surging across
Europe and the USA.
It is an anti-insider, anti-Clinton wave, and Trump could ride it to victory.
Jeremy Corbyn today launched a review into
the Labour party's supposed "anti-semitism crisis" – in fact, a crisis entirely
confected by a toxic mix of the right, Israel supporters and the media. I have
repeatedly pointed out that misleading claims of anti-semitism (along with much else)
are being thrown at Corbyn to discredit him. You can read my criticisms of this
campaign and Labour's response
here
,
here
and
here
.
In his speech, Corbyn made an entirely fair point that Jews should not be blamed
for the behaviour of Israel any more than Muslims should be for the behaviour of
states that are Islamic. He said:
Our Jewish friends are no more responsible for the actions of Israel or the
Netanyahu government than our Muslim friends are for those of various self-styled
Islamic states or organisations.
But no matter what he said, the usual suspects are now accusing him of comparing
Israel with Islamic State, even though that is clearly not what he said – not even
close.
First, even if he had said "Islamic State", which he didn't, that would not have
meant he made a comparison with Israel. He was comparing the assumptions some people
make that Jews and Muslims have tribal allegiances based on their religious or ethnic
background. He was saying it was unfair to make such assumptions of either Jews or
Muslims.
In fact, such an assumption (which Corbyn does not share) would be more unfair to
Muslims than to Jews. It would suggest that some Muslims easily feel an affinity
with a terror organisation, while some Jews feel an affinity with a recognised state
(which may or may not include their support for the occupation). That assumption is
far uglier towards Muslims than it is towards Jews.
But, of course, all of this is irrelevant because Corbyn did not make any
such comparison. He clearly referred to "various self-styled Islamic states or
organisations". A spokesman later clarified that he meant "Saudi Arabia, Pakistan,
Iran or Hamas in Gaza". In other words, "various self-styled Islamic states and
organisations" – just as he said in the speech.
Surprise, surprise, the supposedly liberal
Guardian
's coverage of this
incident is as appalling as
that
found in the right wing
Telegraph
. The
Guardian
has an
article
, quoting rabbis and others, pointing out the irony that Corbyn made an
anti-semitic comment at the launch of an anti-semitism review – except, of course,
that he didn't.
In fact, contrary to all normal journalism, you have to read the
Guardian
story from bottom-up. The last paragraph states:
This story was amended on 30 June to correct the quotation in the second
paragraph. An earlier version quoted Corbyn as saying: "Our Jewish friends are no
more responsible for the actions for the actions of Israel or the Netanyahu
government than our Islamic friends are responsible for Islamic State."
Or in other words, the
Guardian
reporter did not even bother to listen to
the video of the speech posted alongside her report on the
Guardian
's own
website. Instead she and her editors jumped on the same bandwagon as everyone else,
spreading the same malicious rumours and misinformation.
When it later emerged that the story was a complete fabrication – one they could
have proved for themselves had they listened to what Corbyn really said – they simply
appended at the bottom a one-par mea culpa that almost no one will read. The
Guardian
has continued to publish the same defamatory article, one based on a
deception from start to finish.
This is the very definition of gutter journalism. And it comes as the
Guardian
editor, Kath Viner, asks (begs?) readers to dig deep in their pockets to support the
Guardian
. She
writes
:
The Guardian's role in producing fast, well-sourced, calm, accessible and
intelligent journalism is more important than ever.
Well, it would be if that is what they were doing. Instead, this story
confirms that the paper is producing the same shop-soiled disinformation as everyone
else.
Save your money and invest it in supporting real independent journalism.
At this moment, two irascible émigrés from the past century of European tragedies might come
to mind. John Lukacs, the Hungarian-American historian, has spent a lifetime arguing that
nationalism-not socialism, or even liberalism-is the core ideology of modernity, and that the
lesson of history is that nationalism will assert itself, like an unquenchable microbe, anytime
it has the least opportunity. (He also draws the distinction between patriotism-the love of place
and tradition and a desire to see its particularities thrive-and true nationalism, which is a
vengeful, irrational certainty that the alien outside or even within a country's borders is
responsible for some humiliation to the true nation.) This pessimistic strain was matched by that
of Karl Popper, the Austrian-Anglo philosopher, who saw that what he named the "open society,"
though essential to the transmission of humane values and the growth of knowledge, can impose
great strains on its citizens-strains of lost identity, certainty, tribal wholeness. The reaction
to this strain is inevitable, and sure. What keeps an open society from being overturned is only
the balm of ever-increased prosperity; when prosperity ends or is endangered, all the bad demons
come out of the forest. In this much broader sense, it may be prosperity that makes pluralism
possible. Economics alone don't drive the ideology of nationalism, but without prosperity it has
more room to bloom. Meanwhile, nationalism won't just go away, and open, liberal societies are
far more fragile than their success can make them seem-and these two sad truths seem to need
perpetual restating, or the lights really will go out across Europe.
За последний месяц на Украине появилось новое
правительство во главе с Владимиром Гройсманом, была переформатирована
коалиция в Верховной Раде и назначен новый генпрокурор. Бывший депутат Рады,
а потом спикер парламента Новороссии Олег Царев рассказал "Ленте.ру" о том,
чего ждать от обновленной украинской власти.
"Порошенко дожал американцев и олигархов"
"Лента.ру": Что изменится на Украине с назначением
нового правительства Владимира Гройсмана? Можно ли ожидать улучшения
социально-экономической ситуации?
Царев:
Главным итогом последнего политического кризиса я считаю
то, что Петру Порошенко удалось сосредоточить в своих руках всю полноту
власти. На пути к этому он смог дожать американцев, олигархов, продавить
оппонентов внутри страны. Финальным аккордом стало избрание 12 мая
генпрокурором Украины кума президента Юрия Луценко. Порошенко получил полный
карт-бланш, установил контроль и над кабинетом министров, и над Верховной
Радой, и над силовыми структурами. Оппоненты Порошенко - [Игорь] Коломойский
и [Арсений] Яценюк - пытались ему противостоять. В частности, с их
противодействием я связываю активную раскрутку на Украине скандала с
панамскими офшорами президента. Вся эта кампания неслучайно началась в тот
момент, когда глава государства поехал на переговоры в США. Целью было его
ослабление, чтобы он не смог договориться с американцами. Тем не менее он
американцев дожал и своего добился. Основным аргументом для расширения его
полномочий было устранение угрозы сползания страны к анархии. Да, это
движение в сторону диктатуры, но американцы никогда не возражали против
диктатуры, если она действует в их интересах.
А что этот личный успех Порошенко значит для украинского
народа?
К интересам украинского народа вся эта политическая борьба не имеет
никакого отношения. Речь идет о контроле финансовых потоков, в частности
крупные игроки готовятся к намечающейся последней приватизации. Одно из
последствий украинского переворота и, как следствие, гражданской войны в
Донбассе и разрыва экономических связей с Россией - обесценивание активов у
олигархов. На сегодняшний день их активы, заложенные под взятые в зарубежных
банках кредиты, меньше самих кредитов. Фактически они банкроты. Спасти
олигархов может только срочная покупка по заниженным ценам новых активов,
чтобы получить за рубежом под них новые кредиты и за их счет перекрыть
старые. В продажу должны пойти порты, железная дорога, АЭС,
сельскохозяйственные угодья. Как вы понимаете, мировая банковская система
устроена так, что в конечном итоге вся украинская собственность должна
поменять владельцев с украинских на зарубежных.
Этот процесс уже начался?
Первоначально договоренности у олигархов имелись с уже бывшим премьером
Яценюком. Активы были распределены. Например, Коломойский должен был забрать
Одесский припортовый завод, еще ряд предприятий. Яценюк их устраивал, его
аппетиты были поменьше, чем у президента, поэтому олигархи поддерживали
главу правительства в борьбе против Порошенко. Все СМИ Коломойского активно
раздували панамский скандал, работа велась по всему миру, оплачивалась
международная пиар-кампания. Но Порошенко выдержал, договорился с
американцами, а у тех есть рычаги давления на украинских олигархов, хранящих
свои средства в странах Запада. Теперь все олигархи пришли договариваться к
Порошенко. Коломойский и другие контролируют своих депутатов, дают им
указания. Благодаря этому президенту удалось сделать премьер-министром лично
преданного ему Гройсмана и назначить генпрокурором Луценко.
"У каждого украинского политика есть куратор в США"
Какие перспективы у такой конфигурации власти?
На сегодняшний момент американцы против резких изменений. Такова логика
президентских выборов в США - уходящий президент не должен оставлять
проблемы следующему главе государства. Поэтому сейчас Россию будут
похлопывать по плечу, говорить о возможной отмене санкций, может быть, даже
откатится цена на нефть. Но это временная ситуация! У администрации нового
американского президента будет свой план по Украине. Москва получила
временную передышку, важно использовать это короткое время для решения
внутренних проблем, наведения порядка в экономике.
На Украине по-прежнему периодически заявляют о себе
радикальные националисты, экстремисты. Почему Запад не выступает против
этого?
Тут ситуация двойственная. С одной стороны, Порошенко для того и дали
возможность сосредоточить власть в своих руках, чтобы он укрепил
государство. Он от нацистов потихоньку уже избавляется, но полностью убирать
их со сцены не будет. Отморозков под рукой иметь удобно. Надо разобраться с
"Оппозиционным блоком" или Васей Волгой (лидер партии "Союз левых сил" -
"прим. "Ленты.ру"
), другими какими-то оппонентами? И типа возмущенная
общественность делает это. Президент разводит руками: "Что я могу? Это не я,
это другие люди". Радикалы полностью не исчезнут, но будут работать по
команде, в строго очерченных границах выполняя ту роль, которую выполняли
батальоны смерти в Латинской Америке.
Отношение к России будет меняться?
Никаких надежд на это питать не стоит - Украина останется русофобской по
духу. Просто русофобия будет не самодеятельной, а санкционированной,
управляемой государством. России и украинцам с отличной от официальной
точкой зрения лучше не станет.
Активно проявляет себя в украинском политическом
пространстве Михаил Саакашвили. Понятно, что у него огромные амбиции,
ограничиваться Одесской областью он не желает. Каковы его перспективы?
У него хорошие шансы войти в высшие эшелоны украинской власти. У
Саакашвили второй личный рейтинг после Юлии Тимошенко. Надо понимать, что у
каждого более-менее серьезного украинского политика сейчас есть свой
американский куратор. Кто-то работает с демократами, кто-то - с
консерваторами, кто-то связан с Госдепартаментом, другие взаимодействуют с
конкретным чиновником, у кого-то "крыша" ЦРУ, как, например, у Наливайченко
(бывший глава СБУ -
прим. "Ленты.ру"
). При этом между самими
кураторами идет серьезная борьба. Из-за этого возникают различные казусы.
Так, куратор бывшего министра финансов Украины Натальи Яресько сообщила ей,
что ее кандидатура утверждена на должность главы правительства. Та стала уже
делать какие-то высокомерные заявления, но в итоге в правительстве Гройсмана
не сохранила даже должность главы Минфина. Проблема Саакашвили связана с
тем, что его кураторы в США сегодня не на вершине власти. Вторая трудность -
отсутствие у него своей политической силы. Ему надо свой рейтинг как-то
конвертировать в движение, чтобы закрепиться внутри Украины.
Юлия Тимошенко сможет вернуться во власть?
У нее не только высокий рейтинг, но есть и собственная политическая сила
- партия "Батькивщина". Да, в Раде это всего 25 депутатов, поэтому она и не
претендует на какие-то серьезные посты. Я знаю, что ей при формировании
правительства Гройсмана предлагали войти в кабмин. Но она посчитала, что ей
лучше еще нарастить рейтинг, находясь в оппозиции.
"Боевые действия в Донбассе продолжатся"
Что в ближайшее время ждет Донбасс? И какова судьба
минских соглашений?
По сути, жители Донбасса - заложники неопределенности, вызванной минскими
соглашениями. Меня совсем не удивило отсутствие результатов на последней
встрече министров иностранных дел нормандской четверки. Для украинской
власти вопросом жизни и смерти в полном смысле этого слова является
непризнание вооруженного конфликта на востоке страны гражданской войной.
Если война в Донбассе - не война с Россией, а внутренний гражданский
конфликт, то начало АТО, привлечение армии, насильная мобилизация, обстрелы
городов Донбасса - это не только грубое нарушение Конституции Украины, но и
преступление, по которому нет сроков давности. Руководители страны - военные
преступники. Все погибшие в результате конфликта, как военные так и мирные
жители, на их совести. Представители киевской власти как попугаи будут
говорить об агрессии России на востоке Украины. То, что они сами себе
противоречат, их не сильно волнует. Если Россия агрессор, то надо разрывать
дипломатические отношения и объявлять войну России. Причем логичнее всего
начинать "освобождение от России" с Крыма. Ведь то, что в Крыму, в отличие
от Донбасса, находится российская армия, ни для кого не секрет. Но дураков
нет. Одно дело воевать в Донбассе с выдуманными российскими войсками, а
совсем другое - столкнуться с настоящей кадровой российской армией в Крыму.
С соглашениями тупиковая ситуация?
То, что подписи под минскими соглашениями поставили представители
самопровозглашенных народных республик, и так поставило Киев в сложное
положение. Если договоренности будут выполнены, то дело Киеву придется иметь
уже с легитимными представителями Донбасса. (Лично я считаю, что у глав ДНР
Александра Захарченко и ЛНР Игоря Плотницкого легитимности больше, чем у
Порошенко). Это значит, что в случае конфликта он попадает под определение
"гражданская война", а действия киевского руководства можно трактовать как
военное преступление. Таким образом, при выполнении минских соглашений Киев
окажется в шпагате.
Фашистские режимы держатся на страхе, они устойчивы, если существует
только одна точка зрения. А не разделяющих ее государство или батальоны
смерти устраняют. Неподконтрольный центральной власти анклав на востоке
нельзя физически раздавить, и это делает режим очень неустойчивым. С другой
стороны, минский комплекс мер продавливают европейцы и публично отказываться
от него нельзя. Но и выполнить невозможно. Все это прекрасно понимают как в
Киеве, так и в Вашингтоне. Если бы американцы действительно хотели
выполнения соглашений, то Виктория Нуланд сегодня бы сидела в Киеве и
разговаривала с депутатами, руководителями фракций и олигархами в жесткой
форме. Аргументов много: угроза запрета въезда в ЕС, закрытие кредитования в
зарубежных банках, конфискация собственности и арест счетов за границей
Государственные СМИ и СМИ, подчиняющиеся олигархам, с утра и до вечера, в
случае если бы действительно ставилась такая задача, говорили о том что,
минские договоренности надо выполнять. Но мы этого не наблюдаем.
Мое резюме такое: Украина и США как минимум до президентских выборов в
Америке сохранят риторику о том, что минские соглашения следует выполнять.
Но в то же время выполнять их, голосуя в Верховной Раде за амнистию,
специальный статус отдельных районов, изменения в Конституцию, закон о
выборах в Донбассе, не будут. Организовывать крупномасштабное наступление
тоже не будут, дабы не нарваться на контрнаступление. Но боевые действия в
ограниченном режиме на границе с Донбассом, очевидно, продолжатся по той
причине, что первый пункт соглашений - прекращение огня. Невыполнение
первого пункта дает возможность затягивать и с другими.
Какие-то поводы для оптимизма вы все-таки видите?
Медленно, шаг за шагом, но в Донбассе все-таки становится спокойнее, а
уровень жизни немного растет. Я как один из тех, кто стоял в начале этого
процесса, хотел бы большего. Поэтому я, возможно, слишком резко оцениваю
ситуацию, хотя сделано, конечно, очень много.
"Я не общаюсь с Януковичем"
Есть регионы Украины, которые готовы пойти по пути ДНР и
ЛНР?
За время правления Порошенко украинские силовики провели точечную, но
системную работу по выявлению недовольных киевской властью. Одни попали в
тюрьму, другие покинули Украину. Движение сопротивления во многом подавлено.
Общее недовольство теми, кто пришел к власти после госпереворота в 2014 году,
есть, уровень жизни падает, тарифы растут, социально-экономическая ситуация
ухудшается. Но отсутствуют лидеры, способные повести за собой людей.
Вы общаетесь с кем-то из прежнего руководства Украины?
Может быть, обсуждаете что-то с беглым президентом Виктором Януковичем?
Я с глубоким уважением отношусь к бывшему главе правительства Николаю
Азарову. С ним мы обсуждаем много вопросов. С Януковичем не общаюсь. Знаете,
после госпереворота в Киеве погибло громадное количество людей, Донбасс стал
зоной боевых действий. Через возглавляемый мной парламент Новороссии шла
первая российская гуманитарная помощь, другой структуры для такой работы
просто не было. Я по пять-шесть раз в день посещал пострадавшие семьи в
Луганске, Донецке. Мне важно было показать людям, что их не бросили. Я
приезжал в семьи, где погибли дети, старики, где разрушены дома. Я видел это
горе, которое принесла, в том числе, политика Януковича. Это очень тяжело.
Вы считаете, что лично Янукович виноват в происходящем
на Украине сейчас?
У него были все рычаги власти. Он мог бороться как Каддафи, как сирийский
лидер Башар Асад, он мог погибнуть, как Альенде (Сальвадор Альенде,
президент Чили, погиб в 1973 году в ходе военного переворота -
прим. "Ленты.ру"
),
и остаться символом сопротивления в веках, но он этого не сделал. Политик не
имеет права думать о себе.
И что же, не было тогда людей, близких к "телу", которые
могли оказать на него какое-то влияние, чтобы он принял другое решение? Или
он никого не слушал?
Украина - олигархическая страна, причем классическая олигархическая
страна. Можно много говорить про демократические выборы, но в итоге
украинский народ выбирает того кандидата, которого выбрали олигархи. Ну, как
минимум из перечня тех, на кого они сделали ставку. Поэтому его
обязательства перед ними были важнее, чем перед простыми людьми.
А олигархам, выходит, невыгодно было сохранить страну?
В какой-то момент олигархов взяли за самое дорогое, что у них есть, - за
деньги и за собственность. Вариантов не было.
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I was sceptical from an early stage about the Arab Spring uprisings leading to
the replacement of authoritarian regimes by secular democracies. Optimistic forecasts
I was hearing in the first heady months of 2011 sounded suspiciously similar to
what I had heard in Kabul after the fall of the Taliban in 2001 and in Baghdad
after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003. In each of the three cases, there
was the same dangerous conviction on the part of the domestic opposition, outside
powers and the international media that all ills could be attributed to the demonic
old regime and a brave new world was being born.
This seemed very simple-minded:
I was very conscious that these police states – be they in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia,
Syria, Yemen or Bahrain – were the product as well as the exploiters of threats
to their country's independence from abroad as well as social, sectarian and ethnic
divisions at home. Journalists, who earn their bread by expressing themselves freely,
were particularly prone to believe that free expression and honest elections were
all that was needed to put things right.
Explanations of what one thought was happening in these countries were often
misinterpreted as justification for odious and discredited regimes. In Libya, where
the uprising started on 15 February 2011, I wrote about how the opposition was
wholly dependent on Nato military support and would have been rapidly defeated
by pro-Gaddafi forces without it. It followed from this that the opposition would
not have the strength to fill the inevitable political vacuum if Gaddafi was to
fall. I noted gloomily that Arab states, such as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies,
who were pressing for foreign intervention against Gaddafi, themselves held power
by methods no less repressive than the Libyan leader. It was his radicalism – muted
though this was in his later years – not his authoritarianism that made the kings
and emirs hate him.
This was an unpopular stance to take on Libya during the high tide of the Arab
Spring, when foreign governments and media alike were uncritically lauding the
opposition. The two sides in what was a genuine civil war were portrayed as white
hats and black hats; rebel claims about government atrocities were credulously
broadcast, though they frequently turned out to be concocted, while government
denials were contemptuously dismissed. Human rights organisations such as Amnesty
International and Human Rights Watch were much more thorough than the media in
checking these stories, although their detailed reports appeared long after the
news agenda had moved on.
Whatever their other failings, the rebels ran a slick and highly professional
press campaign from their headquarters in Benghazi. Spokesmen efficiently fended
off embarrassing questions and crowds waved placards bearing well-thought-out slogans
in grammatical English in front of the television cameras.
My doubts about many aspects of the Libyan uprising, as it was presented to
the world, are open to misinterpretation. There was nothing phony about people's
anger against a man and a regime that had monopolised power over them for 43 years.
As in other Arab military regimes turned police states, Gaddafi had once justified
his rule as necessary to defend Libyan national interests against foreign states
and oil companies. But as the decades passed, these justifications became excuses
for a Gaddafi family dictatorship that stifled all dissent.
Just how claustrophobic it was to be a Libyan at this time was brought home
to me by Ahmed Abdullah al-Ghadamsi, an intelligent, able and well-educated man
whom I met by accident after the fall of Tripoli and who worked for me as a guide
and assistant. He came from a family and a district in Tripoli that was always
anti-Gaddafi, and he had been on the edge of the resistance movement before we
met. He was good at talking his way through checkpoints and winning the confidence
of the suspicious militiamen who were manning them.
We shared a feeling of exhilaration now that the old regime was gone. I remember
Ahmed saying to me with amused exasperation that "books used to be more difficult
to bring into the country than weapons". Seven weeks later, he was dead. He had
felt he must play some active role in the revolution rather than just making money,
had volunteered as a fighter and was shot through the head in the last days of
the civil war.
In the early months of the uprising, a good place to judge the rebel movement
was close to the front line in the largely deserted town of Ajdabiya, two hours'
drive south of Benghazi. Here the military stalemate of sudden advances and retreats
was very visible: in the restaurant of the local hotel waiters started to ask journalists
to pay their bills before they ate. The urgency on the part of the hotel management
reflected their bitter experience of seeing journalists – their only customers
– abandon meals half-eaten and leave, bills unpaid, because of a sudden and unexpected
advance by the pro-Gaddafi forces.
On the outskirts of Ajdabiya, rebel pick-ups and trucks, with heavy machine
guns welded to the back, rushed backwards and forwards, the speed of their retreats
so swift as to endanger any camera crews or reporters standing nearby. I had an
ominous feeling, as I drove about Ajdabiya, Benghazi and the hinterland of Cyrenaica,
that all would not turn out well. "It would take a long time to reduce Libya to
the level of Somalia," I wrote on 13 April 2011, "but civil conflicts and the hatreds
they induce build up their own momentum once the shooting has begun. One of the
good things about Libya is that so many young men – unlike Afghans and Iraqis of
a similar age – do not know how to use a gun. This will not last."
Nor did it. But it was not the militarisation of Libyans that broke the stalemate
but the intervention of Nato air forces. The shape of things to come was already
becoming clear: on 22 May I described how flames were billowing up "from the hulks
of eight Libyan Navy vessels destroyed by Nato air attacks as they lay in ports
along the Libyan coast. Their destruction shows how Muammar Gaddafi is being squeezed
militarily, but also the degree to which the US, France and Britain, and not the
Libyan rebels, are now the main players in the struggle for power in Libya. Probably
Gaddafi will go down because he is too weak to withstand the forces arrayed against
him. Failure to end his regime would be too humiliating and politically damaging
for Nato after 2,700 air strikes. Once he goes, there will be a political vacuum
that the opposition will scarcely be able to fill. The fall of the regime may usher
in a new round of a long-running Libyan crisis that continues for years to come."
By August, Gaddafi had fled and I was in Tripoli touring the abandoned palaces,
villas and prisons of the ruling family that had so recently abandoned them. I
tried not to be a professional pessimist, pointing out hopefully that, unlike Iraqis
and Afghans, Libyans had a high standard of living, were well educated and were
not split by age-old ethnic and sectarian divisions. But even this upbeat summary
concluded plaintively as I added: "All the same, I wish the shooting outside my
window would stop."
It never really did stop. Tripoli was full of checkpoints that reminded me of
Lebanon during the civil war of 1975 to 1990. The arrival of the new transitional
government from Benghazi did not fill me with confidence since one of its first
measures was to announce the end of the ban on polygamy introduced by Gaddafi.
I had periodically visited Tripoli in the 1980s and 1990s and had noticed that,
as in the oil states of the Gulf, most of the work was done by migrants from poor
countries that were Libya's African neighbours. To find out what was happening
in Libya at that time, I would go for a walk in the marketplace and fall into conversation
with bored Ghanaians or Chadians, all migrants on their day off, who would tell
me more about the real state of the country than any Libyan official or Western
diplomat.
But with the fall of Gaddafi, all black faces were regarded with suspicion by
the new rulers as likely supporters of the fallen leader. They were often accused
of being "pro-Gaddafi mercenaries", interrogated, jailed and occasionally murdered.
Life for the migrant and indigenous black population was to get steadily worse
in the coming years as Libya disintegrated, and by 2015 Ethiopian and Egyptian
Christians were being executed by Islamic State's Libyan clone. Meanwhile, the
West Europeans were reaping what they had sown by destroying the Libyan state:
migrant labourers, who had once found jobs in Libyan markets and building sites,
were now risking their lives as they sailed in over-crowded and unseaworthy boats
across the Mediterranean in a desperate attempt to reach Europe.
My fears about the "Somalianisation" of Libya, first expressed in March 2011,
had turned out to be all too true. Four years later, Libya was ruled, in so far
as it was ruled at all, by two governments, one based in Tripoli and the other
in Tobruk, while real authority lay in the hands of militias that fought each other
for power and money. Demonstrators in the streets of Tripoli were shot down by
anti-aircraft machine guns whose large calibre bullets tore apart the bodies of
protesters; Tripoli International Airport was destroyed in fighting between rival
militias; torture was ubiquitous; and the country split between east and west.
For all his quirky personality cult and monopoly of power, life in Libya under
Gaddafi had not been as bad as this. The demonisation of Gaddafi had an unfortunate
effect in ensuring the opposition had no real programme other than his replacement
by themselves.
Libyans were relieved at the end of 2011 to find that they no longer had to
study the puerile nostrums of Gaddafi's Green Book – in the knowledge that if you
failed the exam devoted to this work, you had to retake the entire course. But
Libyans also found to their horror that they had lost a haphazard but functioning
state, and with it personal security in the sense of being able to walk the streets
in safety. They were now at the mercy of predatory militiamen who were paid out
of Libya's diminished oil revenues. I remember a fellow journalist upbraiding me
politely in 2011 for stressing the failings of the Libyan rebels, saying: "Let's
remember who are the good guys." A few months later, as the revolution turned sour,
good and bad in Libya were ever more difficult to tell apart.
This was a common experience in the six countries most affected by the Arab Spring.
By 2015, three of these – Libya, Syria and Yemen – were being ravaged by warfare
and two others – Egypt and Bahrain – were ruled by authoritarian governments more
brutal and dictatorial than anything that had gone before. Only in Tunisia, where
it had all started, did an elected civilian government cling on, though increasingly
destabilised by massacres of foreign tourists by Isis training camps in Libya.
The Arab Spring had turned into the age of jihad.
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No one asks these questions because they seem absurd. Yet, no one can escape
them either. Until the onslaught of the global economic crisis, the motto of
so-called "neoliberalism" was TINA: "There Is No Alternative!"
No alternative to "neoliberal globalization"?
No alternative to the unfettered "free market" economy?
What Is "Neoliberal Globalization"?
Let us first clarify what globalization and neoliberalism are, where they
come from, who they are directed by, what they claim, what they do, why their
effects are so fatal, why they will fail and why people nonetheless cling to
them. Then, let us look at the responses of those who are not – or will not
– be able to live with the consequences they cause.
This is where the difficulties begin. For a good twenty years now we have
been told that there is no alternative to neoliberal globalization, and that,
in fact, no such alternative is needed either. Over and over again, we have
been confronted with the TINA-concept: "There Is No Alternative!" The "iron
lady", Margaret Thatcher, was one of those who reiterated this belief without
end.
The TINA-concept prohibits all thought. It follows the rationale that there
is no point in analyzing and discussing neoliberalism and so-called globalization
because they are inevitable. Whether we condone what is happening or not does
not matter, it is happening anyway. There is no point in trying to understand.
Hence: Go with it! Kill or be killed!
Some go as far as suggesting that globalization – meaning, an economic system
which developed under specific social and historical conditions – is nothing
less but a law of nature. In turn, "human nature" is supposedly reflected by
the character of the system's economic subjects: egotistical, ruthless, greedy
and cold. This, we are told, works towards everyone's benefit.
The question remains: why has Adam Smith's "invisible hand" become a "visible
fist"? While a tiny minority reaps enormous benefits from today's neoliberalism
(none of which will remain, of course), the vast majority of the earth's population
suffers hardship to the extent that their very survival is at stake. The damage
done seems irreversible.
All over the world media outlets – especially television stations – avoid
addressing the problem. A common excuse is that it cannot be explained.[1] The
true reason is, of course, the media's corporate control.
What Is Neoliberalism?
Neoliberalism as an economic policy agenda which began in Chile in 1973.
Its inauguration consisted of a U.S.-organized coup against a democratically
elected socialist president and the installment of a bloody military dictatorship
notorious for systematic torture. This was the only way to turn the neoliberal
model of the so-called "Chicago Boys" under the leadership of Milton Friedman
– a student of Friedrich von Hayek – into reality.
The predecessor of the neoliberal model is the economic liberalism of the
18th and 19th centuries and its notion of "free trade". Goethe's assessment
at the time was: "Free trade, piracy, war – an inseparable three!"[2]
At the center of both old and new economic liberalism lies:
Self-interest and individualism; segregation of ethical principles and economic
affairs, in other words: a process of 'de-bedding' economy from society; economic
rationality as a mere cost-benefit calculation and profit maximization; competition
as the essential driving force for growth and progress; specialization and the
replacement of a subsistence economy with profit-oriented foreign trade ('comparative
cost advantage'); and the proscription of public (state) interference with market
forces.[3]
Where the new economic liberalism outdoes the old is in its global claim.
Today's economic liberalism functions as a model for each and everyone: all
parts of the economy, all sectors of society, of life/nature itself. As a consequence,
the once "de-bedded" economy now claims to "im-bed" everything, including political
power. Furthermore, a new twisted "economic ethics" (and with it a certain idea
of "human nature") emerges that mocks everything from so-called do-gooders to
altruism to selfless help to care for others to a notion of responsibility.[4]
This goes as far as claiming that the common good depends entirely on the
uncontrolled egoism of the individual and, especially, on the prosperity of
transnational corporations. The allegedly necessary "freedom" of the economy
– which, paradoxically, only means the freedom of corporations – hence consists
of a freedom from responsibility and commitment to society.
The maximization of profit itself must occur within the shortest possible
time; this means, preferably, through speculation and "shareholder value". It
must meet as few obstacles as possible. Today, global economic interests outweigh
not only extra-economic concerns but also national economic considerations since
corporations today see themselves beyond both community and nation.[5] A "level
playing field" is created that offers the global players the best possible conditions.
This playing field knows of no legal, social, ecological, cultural or national
"barriers".[6] As a result, economic competition plays out on a market that
is free of all non-market, extra-economic or protectionist influences – unless
they serve the interests of the big players (the corporations), of course. The
corporations' interests – their maximal growth and progress – take on complete
priority. This is rationalized by alleging that their well-being means the well-being
of small enterprises and workshops as well.
The difference between the new and the old economic liberalism can first
be articulated in quantitative terms: after capitalism went through a series
of ruptures and challenges – caused by the "competing economic system", the
crisis of capitalism, post-war "Keynesianism" with its social and welfare state
tendencies, internal mass consumer demand (so-called Fordism), and the objective
of full employment in the North. The liberal economic goals of the past are
now not only euphorically resurrected but they are also "globalized". The main
reason is indeed that the competition between alternative economic systems is
gone. However, to conclude that this confirms the victory of capitalism and
the "golden West" over "dark socialism" is only one possible interpretation.
Another – opposing – interpretation is to see the "modern world system" (which
contains both capitalism and socialism) as having hit a general crisis which
causes total and merciless competition over global resources while leveling
the way for investment opportunities, i.e. the valorization of capital.[7]
The ongoing globalization of neoliberalism demonstrates which interpretation
is right. Not least, because the differences between the old and the new economic
liberalism can not only be articulated in quantitative terms but in qualitative
ones too. What we are witnessing are completely new phenomena: instead of a
democratic "complete competition" between many small enterprises enjoying the
freedom of the market, only the big corporations win. In turn, they create new
market oligopolies and monopolies of previously unknown dimensions. The market
hence only remains free for them, while it is rendered unfree for all others
who are condemned to an existence of dependency (as enforced producers, workers
and consumers) or excluded from the market altogether (if they have neither
anything to sell or buy). About fifty percent of the world's population fall
into this group today, and the percentage is rising.[8]
Anti-trust laws have lost all power since the transnational corporations
set the norms. It is the corporations – not "the market" as an anonymous mechanism
or "invisible hand" – that determine today's rules of trade, for example prices
and legal regulations. This happens outside any political control. Speculation
with an average twenty percent profit margin edges out honest producers who
become "unprofitable".[9] Money becomes too precious for comparatively non-profitable,
long-term projects,
or projects that only – how audacious! – serve a good life. Money instead
"travels upwards" and disappears. Financial capital determines more and more
what the markets are and do.[10] By delinking the dollar from the price of gold,
money creation no longer bears a direct relationship to production".[11] Moreover,
these days most of us are – exactly like all governments – in debt. It is financial
capital that has all the money – we have none.[12]
Small, medium, even some bigger enterprises are pushed out of the market,
forced to fold or swallowed by transnational corporations because their performances
are below average in comparison to speculation – rather: spookulation – wins.
The public sector, which has historically been defined as a sector of not-for-profit
economy and administration, is "slimmed" and its "profitable" parts ("gems")
handed to corporations (privatized). As a consequence, social services that
are necessary for our existence disappear. Small and medium private businesses
– which, until recently, employed eighty percent of the workforce and provided
normal working conditions – are affected by these developments as well. The
alleged correlation between economic growth and secure employment is false.
When economic growth is accompanied by the mergers of businesses, jobs are lost.[13]
If there are any new jobs, most are precarious, meaning that they are only
available temporarily and badly paid. One job is usually not enough to make
a living.[14] This means that the working conditions in the North become akin
to those in the South, and the working conditions of men akin to those of women
– a trend diametrically opposed to what we have always been told. Corporations
now leave for the South (or East) to use cheap – and particularly female – labor
without union affiliation. This has already been happening since the 1970s in
the "Export Processing Zones" (EPZs, "world market factories" or "maquiladoras"),
where most of the world's computer chips, sneakers, clothes and electronic goods
are produced.[15] The EPZs lie in areas where century-old colonial-capitalist
and authoritarian-patriarchal conditions guarantee the availability of cheap
labor.[16] The recent shift of business opportunities from consumer goods to
armaments is a particularly troubling development.[17]
It is not only commodity production that is "outsourced" and located in the
EPZs, but service industries as well. This is a result of the so-called Third
Industrial Revolution, meaning the development of new information and communication
technologies. Many jobs have disappeared entirely due to computerization, also
in administrative fields.[18] The combination of the principles of "high tech"
and "low wage"/"no wage" (always denied by "progress" enthusiasts) guarantees
a "comparative cost advantage" in foreign trade. This will eventually lead to
"Chinese wages" in the West. A potential loss of Western consumers is not seen
as a threat. A corporate economy does not care whether consumers are European,
Chinese or Indian.
The means of production become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, especially
since finance capital – rendered precarious itself – controls asset values ever
more aggressively. New forms of private property are created, not least through
the "clearance" of public property and the transformation of formerly public
and small-scale private services and industries to a corporate business sector.
This concerns primarily fields that have long been (at least partly) excluded
from the logic of profit – e.g. education, health, energy or water supply/disposal.
New forms of so-called enclosures emerge from today's total commercialization
of formerly small-scale private or public industries and services, of the "commons",
and of natural resources like oceans, rain forests, regions of genetic diversity
or geopolitical interest (e.g. potential pipeline routes), etc.[19] As far as
the new virtual spaces and communication networks go, we are witnessing frantic
efforts to bring these under private control as well.[20]
All these new forms of private property are essentially created by (more
or less) predatory forms of appropriation. In this sense, they are a continuation
of the history of so-called original accumulation which has expanded globally,
in accordance with to the motto: "Growth through expropriation!"[21]
Most people have less and less access to the means of production, and so
the dependence on scarce and underpaid work increases. The destruction of the
welfare state also destroys the notion that individuals can rely on the community
to provide for them in times of need. Our existence relies exclusively on private,
i.e. expensive, services that are often of much worse quality and much less
reliable than public services. (It is a myth that the private always outdoes
the public.) What we are experiencing is undersupply formerly only known by
the colonial South. The old claim that the South will eventually develop into
the North is proven wrong. It is the North that increasingly develops into the
South. We are witnessing the latest form of "development", namely, a world system
of underdevelopment.[22] Development and underdevelopment go hand in hand.[23]
This might even dawn on "development aid" workers soon.
It is usually women who are called upon to counterbalance underdevelopment
through increased work ("service provisions") in the household. As a result,
the workload and underpay of women takes on horrendous dimensions: they do unpaid
work inside their homes and poorly paid "housewifized" work outside.[24] Yet,
commercialization does not stop in front of the home's doors either. Even housework
becomes commercially co-opted ("new maid question"), with hardly any financial
benefits for the women who do the work.[25]
Not least because of this, women are increasingly coerced into prostitution,
one of today's biggest global industries.[26] This illustrates two things: a)
how little the "emancipation" of women actually leads to "equal terms" with
men; and b) that "capitalist development" does not imply increased "freedom"
in wage labor relations, as the Left has claimed for a long time.[27] If the
latter were the case, then neoliberalism would mean the voluntary end of capitalism
once it reaches its furthest extension. This, however, does not appear likely.
Today, hundreds of millions of quasi-slaves, more than ever before, exist
in the "world system."[28] The authoritarian model of the "Export Processing
Zones" is conquering the East and threatening the North. The redistribution
of wealth runs ever more – and with ever accelerated speed – from the bottom
to the top. The gap between the rich and the poor has never been wider. The
middle classes disappear. This is the situation we are facing.
It becomes obvious that neoliberalism marks not the end of colonialism but,
to the contrary, the colonization of the North. This new "colonization of the
world"[29] points back to the beginnings of the "modern world system" in the
"long 16th century", when the conquering of the Americas, their exploitation
and colonial transformation allowed for the rise and "development" of Europe.[30]
The so-called "children's diseases" of modernity keep on haunting it, even in
old age. They are, in fact, the main feature of modernity's latest stage. They
are expanding instead of disappearing.
Where there is no South, there is no North; where there is no periphery,
there is no center; where there is no colony, there is no – in any case no "Western"
– civilization.[31]
Austria is part of the world system too. It is increasingly becoming a corporate
colony (particularly of German corporations). This, however, does not keep it
from being an active colonizer itself, especially in the East.[32]
Social, cultural, traditional and ecological considerations are abandoned
and give way to a mentality of plundering. All global resources that we still
have – natural resources, forests, water, genetic pools – have turned into objects
of utilization. Rapid ecological destruction through depletion is the consequence.
If one makes more profit by cutting down trees than by planting them, then there
is no reason not to cut them.[33] Neither the public nor the state interferes,
despite global warming and the obvious fact that the clearing of the few remaining
rain forests will irreversibly destroy the earth's climate – not to mention
the many other negative effects of such actions.[34] Climate, animal, plants,
human and general ecological rights are worth nothing compared to the interests
of the corporations – no matter that the rain forest is not a renewable resource
and that the entire earth's ecosystem depends on it. If greed, and the rationalism
with which it is economically enforced, really was an inherent anthropological
trait, we would have never even reached this day.
The commander of the Space Shuttle that circled the earth in 2005 remarked
that "the center of Africa was burning". She meant the Congo, in which the last
great rain forest of the continent is located. Without it there will be no more
rain clouds above the sources of the Nile. However, it needs to disappear in
order for corporations to gain free access to the Congo's natural resources
that are the reason for the wars that plague the region today. After all, one
needs diamonds and coltan for mobile phones.
Today, everything on earth is turned into commodities, i.e. everything becomes
an object of "trade" and commercialization (which truly means liquidation, the
transformation of all into liquid money). In its neoliberal stage it is not
enough for capitalism to globally pursue less cost-intensive and preferably
"wageless" commodity production. The objective is to transform everyone and
everything into commodities, including life itself.[35] We are racing blindly
towards the violent and absolute conclusion of this "mode of production", namely
total capitalization/liquidation by "monetarization".[36]
We are not only witnessing perpetual praise of the market – we are witnessing
what can be described as "market fundamentalism". People believe in the market
as if it was a god. There seems to be a sense that nothing could ever happen
without it. Total global maximized accumulation of money/capital as abstract
wealth becomes the sole purpose of economic activity. A "free" world market
for everything has to be established – a world market that functions according
to the interests of the corporations and capitalist money. The installment of
such a market proceeds with dazzling speed. It creates new profit possibilities
where they have not existed before, e.g. in Iraq, Eastern Europe or China.
One thing remains generally overlooked: the abstract wealth created for accumulation
implies the destruction of nature as concrete wealth. The result is a "hole
in the ground" and next to it a garbage dump with used commodities, outdated
machinery and money without value.[37] However, once all concrete wealth (which
today consists mainly of the last natural resources) will be gone, abstract
wealth will disappear as well. It will, in Marx's words, "evaporate". The fact
that abstract wealth is not real wealth will become obvious, and so will the
answer to the question of which wealth modern economic activity has really created.
In the end it is nothing but monetary wealth (and even this mainly exists virtually
or on accounts) that constitutes a monoculture controlled by a tiny minority.
Diversity is suffocated and millions of people are left wondering how to survive.
And really: how do you survive with neither resources nor means of production
nor money?
The nihilism of our economic system is evident. The whole world will be transformed
into money – and then it will disappear. After all, money cannot be eaten. What
no one seems to consider is the fact that it is impossible to re-transform commodities,
money, capital and machinery into nature or concrete wealth. It seems that underlying
all "economic development" is the assumption that "resources", the "sources
of wealth",[38] are renewable and everlasting – just like the "growth" they
create.[39]
The notion that capitalism and democracy are one is proven a myth by neoliberalism
and its "monetary totalitarianism".[40]
The primacy of politics over economy has been lost. Politicians of all parties
have abandoned it. It is the corporations that dictate politics. Where corporate
interests are concerned, there is no place for democratic convention or community
control. Public space disappears. The res publica turns into a res privata,
or – as we could say today – a res privata transnationale (in its original Latin
meaning, privare means "to deprive"). Only those in power still have rights.
They give themselves the licenses they need, from the "license to plunder" to
the "license to kill".[41] Those who get in their way or challenge their "rights"
are vilified, criminalized and to an increasing degree defined as "terrorists"
or, in the case of defiant governments, as "rogue states" – a label that usually
implies threatened or actual military attack, as we can see in the cases of
Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq, and maybe Syria and Iran in the near future.
U.S. President Bush had even spoken of the possibility of "preemptive" nuclear
strikes should the U.S. feel endangered by weapons of mass destruction.[42]
The European Union did not object.[43]
Neoliberalism and war are two sides of the same coin.[44] Free trade, piracy
and war are still "an inseparable three" – today maybe more so than ever. War
is not only "good for the economy" but is indeed its driving force and can be
understood as the "continuation of economy with other means".[45] War and economy
have become almost indistinguishable.[46] Wars about resources – especially
oil and water – have already begun.[47] The Gulf Wars are the most obvious examples.
Militarism once again appears as the "executor of capital accumulation" – potentially
everywhere and enduringly.[48]
Human rights and rights of sovereignty have been transferred from people,
communities and governments to corporations.[49] The notion of the people as
a sovereign body has practically been abolished. We have witnessed a coup of
sorts. The political systems of the West and the nation state as guarantees
for and expression of the international division of labor in the modern world
system are increasingly dissolving.[50] Nation states are developing into "periphery
states" according to the inferior role they play in the proto-despotic "New
World Order".[51] Democracy appears outdated. After all, it "hinders business".[52]
The "New World Order" implies a new division of labor that does no longer
distinguish between North and South, East and West – today, everywhere is South.
An according International Law is established which effectively functions from
top to bottom ("top-down") and eliminates all local and regional communal rights.
And not only that: many such rights are rendered invalid both retroactively
and for the future.[53]
The logic of neoliberalism as a sort of totalitarian neo-mercantilism is
that all resources, all markets, all money, all profits, all means of production,
all "investment opportunities", all rights and all power belong to the corporations
only. To paraphrase Richard Sennett: "Everything to the Corporations!"[54] One
might add: "Now!"
The corporations are free to do whatever they please with what they get.
Nobody is allowed to interfere. Ironically, we are expected to rely on them
to find a way out of the crisis we are in. This puts the entire globe at risk
since responsibility is something the corporations do not have or know. The
times of social contracts are gone.[55] In fact, pointing out the crisis alone
has become a crime and all critique will soon be defined as "terror" and persecuted
as such.[56]
IMF Economic Medicine
Since the 1980s, it is mainly the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) of
the World Bank and the IMF that act as the enforcers of neoliberalism. These
programs are levied against the countries of the South which can be extorted
due to their debts. Meanwhile, numerous military interventions and wars help
to take possession of the assets that still remain, secure resources, install
neoliberalism as the global economic politics, crush resistance movements (which
are cynically labeled as "IMF uprisings"), and facilitate the lucrative business
of reconstruction.[57]
In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher introduced neoliberalism
in Anglo-America. In 1989, the so-called "Washington Consensus" was formulated.
It claimed to lead to global freedom, prosperity and economic growth through
"deregulation, liberalization and privatization". This has become the credo
and promise of all neoliberals. Today we know that the promise has come true
for the corporations only – not for anybody else.
In the Middle East, the Western support for Saddam Hussein in the war between
Iraq and Iran in the 1980s, and the Gulf War of the early 1990s, announced the
permanent U.S. presence in the world's most contested oil region.
In continental Europe, neoliberalism began with the crisis in Yugoslavia
caused by the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) of the World Bank and the
IMF. The country was heavily exploited, fell apart and finally beset by a civil
war over its last remaining resources.[58] Since the NATO war in 1999, the Balkans
are fragmented, occupied and geopolitically under neoliberal control.[59] The
region is of main strategic interest for future oil and gas transport from the
Caucasus to the West (for example the "Nabucco" gas pipeline that is supposed
to start operating from the Caspian Sea through Turkey and the Balkans by 2011.[60]
The reconstruction of the Balkans is exclusively in the hands of Western corporations.
All governments, whether left, right, liberal or green, accept this. There
is no analysis of the connection between the politics of neoliberalism, its
history, its background and its effects on Europe and other parts of the world.
Likewise, there is no analysis of its connection to the new militarism.
NOTES
[1] Maria Mies and Claudia von Werlhof (Hg), Lizenz zum Plündern. Das Multilaterale
Abkommen über Investitionen MAI. Globalisierung der Konzernherrschaft – und
was wir dagegen tun können, Hamburg, EVA, 2003 (1998), p. 23, 36.
[2] Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: Part Two, New York, Oxford University
Press, 1999.
[3] Maria Mies, Krieg ohne Grenzen. Die neue Kolonisierung der Welt, Köln,
PapyRossa, 2005, p. 34.
[4] Arno Gruen, Der Verlust des Mitgefühls. Über die Politik der Gleichgültigkeit,
München, 1997, dtv.
[5] Sassen Saskia, "Wohin führt die Globalisierung?," Machtbeben, 2000, Stuttgart-München,
DVA.
[6] Maria Mies and Claudia von Werlhof (Hg), Lizenz zum Plündern. Das Multilaterale
Abkommen über Investitionen MAI. Globalisierung der Konzernherrschaft – und
was wir dagegen tun können, Hamburg, EVA, 2003 (1998), p. 24.
[7] Immanuel Wallerstein, Aufstieg und künftiger Niedergang des kapitalistischen
Weltsystems, in Senghaas, Dieter: Kapitalistische Weltökonomie. Kontroversen
über ihren Ursprung und ihre Entwicklungsdynamik, Frankfurt, 1979, Suhrkamp;
Immanuel Wallerstein (Hg), The Modern World-System in the Longue Durée, Boulder/
London; Paradigm Publishers, 2004.
[8] Susan George, im Vortrag, Treffen von Gegnern und Befürwortern der Globalisierung
im Rahmen der Tagung des WEF (World Economic Forum), Salzburg, 2001.
[9] Elmar Altvater, Das Ende des Kapitalismus, wie wir ihn kennen, Münster,
Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2005.
[10] Elmar Altvater and Birgit Mahnkopf, Grenzen der Globalisierung. Ökonomie,
Ökologie und Politik in der Weltgesellschaft, Münster, Westfälisches Dampfboot,
1996.
[11] Bernard Lietaer, Jenseits von Gier und Knappheit, Interview mit Sarah
van Gelder, 2006,
www.transaction.net/press/interviews/Lietaer 0497.html; Margrit Kennedy,
Geld ohne Zinsen und Inflation, Steyerberg, Permakultur, 1990.
[12] Helmut Creutz, Das Geldsyndrom. Wege zur krisenfreien Marktwirtschaft,
Frankfurt, Ullstein, 1995.
[13] Maria Mies and Claudia von Werlhof (Hg), Lizenz zum Plündern. Das Multilaterale
Abkommen über Investitionen MAI. Globalisierung der Konzernherrschaft – und
was wir dagegen tun können, Hamburg, EVA, 2003 (1998), p. 7.
[14] Barbara Ehrenreich, Arbeit poor. Unterwegs in der Dienstleistungsgesellschaft,
München, Kunstmann, 2001.
[15] Folker Fröbel, Jürgen Heinrichs, and Otto Kreye, Die neue internationale
Arbeitsteilung. Strukturelle Arbeitslosigkeit in den Industrieländern und die
Industrialisierung der Entwicklungsländer, Reinbek, Rowohlt, 1977.
[16] Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, Maria Mies, and Claudia von Werlhof, Women,
The Last Colony, London/ New Delhi, Zed Books, 1988.
[17] Michel Chossudovsky, War and Globalization. The Truth Behind September
11th, Oro, Ontario, Global Outlook, 2003.
[18] Folker Fröbel, Jürgen Heinrichs, and Otto Kreye, Die neue internationale
Arbeitsteilung. Strukturelle Arbeitslosigkeit in den Industrieländern und die
Industrialisierung der Entwicklungsländer, Reinbek, Rowohlt, 1977.
[19] Ana Isla, The Tragedy of the Enclosures: An Eco-Feminist Perspective
on Selling Oxygen and Prostitution in Costa Rica, Man., Brock Univ., Sociology
Dpt., St. Catherines, Ontario, Canada, 2005.
[20] John Hepburn, Die Rückeroberung von Allmenden – von alten und von neuen,
übers. Vortrag bei, Other Worlds Conference; Univ. of Pennsylvania; 28./29.4,
2005.
[21] Claudia von Werlhof, Was haben die Hühner mit dem Dollar zu tun? Frauen
und Ökonomie, München, Frauenoffensive, 1991; Claudia von Werlhof, MAInopoly:
Aus Spiel wird Ernst, in Mies/Werlhof, 2003, p. 148-192.
[22] Andre Gunder Frank, Die Entwicklung der Unterentwicklung, in ders. u.a.,
Kritik des bürgerlichen Antiimperialismus, Berlin, Wagenbach, 1969.
[23] Maria Mies, Krieg ohne Grenzen, Die neue Kolonisierung der Welt, Köln,
PapyRossa, 2005.
[24] Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, Maria Mies, and Claudia von Werlhof, Women,
the Last Colony, London/New Delhi, Zed Books, 1988.
[25] Claudia von Werlhof, Frauen und Ökonomie. Reden, Vorträge 2002-2004,
Themen GATS, Globalisierung, Mechernich, Gerda-Weiler-Stiftung, 2004.
[26] Ana Isla, "Women and Biodiversity as Capital Accumulation: An Eco-Feminist
View," Socialist Bulletin, Vol. 69, Winter, 2003, p. 21-34; Ana Isla, The Tragedy
of the Enclosures: An Eco-Feminist Perspective on Selling Oxygen and Prostitution
in Costa Rica, Man., Brock Univ., Sociology Department, St. Catherines, Ontario,
Canada, 2005.
[27] Immanuel Wallerstein, Aufstieg und künftiger Niedergang des kapitalistischen
Weltsystems, in Senghaas, Dieter: Kapitalistische Weltökonomie. Kontroversen
über ihren Ursprung und ihre Entwicklungsdynamik, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1979.
[28] Kevin Bales, Die neue Sklaverei, München, Kunstmann, 2001.
[29] Maria Mies, Krieg ohne Grenzen, Die neue Kolonisierung der Welt, Köln,
PapyRossa, 2005.
[30] Immanuel Wallerstein, Aufstieg und künftiger Niedergang des kapitalistischen
Weltsystems, in Senghaas, Dieter: Kapitalistische Weltökonomie. Kontroversen
über ihren Ursprung und ihre Entwicklungsdynamik, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1979;
Andre Gunder Frank, Orientierung im Weltsystem, Von der Neuen Welt zum Reich
der Mitte, Wien, Promedia, 2005; Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on
a World Scale, Women in the International Division of Labour, London, Zed Books,
1986.
[31] Claudia von Werlhof, "Questions to Ramona," in Corinne Kumar (Ed.),
Asking, We Walk. The South as New Political Imaginary, Vol. 2, Bangalore, Streelekha,
2007, p. 214-268
[32] Hannes Hofbauer, Osterweiterung. Vom Drang nach Osten zur peripheren
EU-Integration, Wien, Promedia, 2003; Andrea Salzburger, Zurück in die Zukunft
des Kapitalismus, Kommerz und Verelendung in Polen, Frankfurt – New York, Peter
Lang Verlag, 2006.
[34] August Raggam, Klimawandel, Biomasse als Chance gegen Klimakollaps und
globale Erwärmung, Graz, Gerhard Erker, 2004.
[35] Immanuel Wallerstein, Aufstieg und künftiger Niedergang des kapitalistischen
Weltsystems, in Senghaas, Dieter: Kapitalistische Weltökonomie. Kontroversen
über ihren Ursprung und ihre Entwicklungsdynamik, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1979.
[36] Renate Genth, Die Bedrohung der Demokratie durch die Ökonomisierung
der Politik, feature für den Saarländischen Rundfunk am 4.3., 2006.
[37] Johan Galtung, Eurotopia, Die Zukunft eines Kontinents, Wien, Promedia,
1993.
[38] Karl Marx, Capital, New York, Vintage, 1976.
[39] Claudia von Werlhof, Loosing Faith in Progress: Capitalist Patriarchy
as an "Alchemical System," in Bennholdt-Thomsen et.al.(Eds.), There is an Alternative,
2001, p. 15-40.
[40] Renate Genth, Die Bedrohung der Demokratie durch die Ökonomisierung
der Politik, feature für den Saarländischen Rundfunk am 4.3., 2006.
[41] Maria Mies and Claudia von Werlhof (Hg), Lizenz zum Plündern. Das Multilaterale
Abkommen über Investitionen MAI. Globalisierung der Konzernherrschaft – und
was wir dagegen tun können, Hamburg, EVA, 2003 (1998), p. 7; Maria Mies, Krieg
ohne Grenzen, Die neue Kolonisierung der Welt, Köln, PapyRossa, 2005.
[42] Michel Chossudovsky, America's "War on Terrorism," Montreal, Global
Research, 2005.
[43] Michel Chossudovsky, "Nuclear War Against Iran," Global Research, Center
for Research on Globalization, Ottawa 13.1, 2006.
[44] Altvater, Chossudovsky, Roy, Serfati, Globalisierung und Krieg, Sand
im Getriebe 17, Internationaler deutschsprachiger Rundbrief der ATTAC – Bewegung,
Sonderausgabe zu den Anti-Kriegs-Demonstrationen am 15.2., 2003; Maria Mies,
Krieg ohne Grenzen, Die neue Kolonisierung der Welt, Köln, PapyRossa, 2005.
[45] Hazel Hendersen, Building a Win-Win World. Life Beyond Global Economic
Warfare, San Francisco, 1996.
[46] Claudia von Werlhof, Vom Wirtschaftskrieg zur Kriegswirtschaft. Die
Waffen der, Neuen-Welt-Ordnung, in Mies 2005, p. 40-48.
[47] Michael T. Klare, Resource Wars. The New Landscape of Global Conflict,
New York, Henry Holt and Company, 2001.
[48] Rosa Luxemburg, Die Akkumulation des Kapitals, Frankfurt, 1970.
[49] Tony Clarke, Der Angriff auf demokratische Rechte und Freiheiten, in
Mies/Werlhof, 2003, p. 80-94.
[50] Sassen Saskia, Machtbeben. Wohin führt die Globalisierung?, Stuttgart-München,
DVA, 2000.
[51] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge, Harvard Univ. Press,
2001; Noam Chomsky, Hybris. Die endgültige Sicherstellung der globalen –Vormachtstellung
der USA, Hamburg-Wien, Europaverlag, 2003.
[52] Claudia von Werlhof, Speed Kills!, in Dimmel/Schmee, 2005, p. 284-292
[53] See the "roll back" and "stand still" clauses in the WTO agreements
in Maria Mies and Claudia von Werlhof (Hg), Lizenz zum Plündern. Das Multilaterale
Abkommen über Investitionen MAI. Globalisierung der Konzernherrschaft – und
was wir dagegen tun können, Hamburg, EVA, 2003.
[54] Richard Sennett, zit. "In Einladung zu den Wiener Vorlesungen," 21.11.2005:
Alternativen zur neoliberalen Globalisierung, 2005.
[55] Claudia von Werlhof, MAInopoly: Aus Spiel wird Ernst, in Mies/Werlhof,
2003, p. 148-192.
[56] Michel Chossudovsky, America's "War on Terrorism," Montreal, Global
Research, 2005.
[57] Michel Chossudovsky, Global Brutal. Der entfesselte Welthandel, die
Armut, der Krieg, Frankfurt, Zweitausendeins, 2002; Maria Mies, Krieg ohne Grenzen.
Die neue Kolonisierung der Welt, Köln, PapyRossa, 2005; Bennholdt-Thomsen/Faraclas/Werlhof
2001.
[58] Michel Chossudovsky, Global Brutal. Der entfesselte Welthandel, die
Armut, der Krieg, Frankfurt, Zweitausendeins, 2002.
[59] Wolfgang Richter, Elmar Schmähling, and Eckart Spoo (Hg), Die Wahrheit
über den NATO-Krieg gegen Jugoslawien, Schkeuditz, Schkeuditzer Buchverlag,
2000; Wolfgang Richter, Elmar Schmähling, and Eckart Spoo (Hg), Die deutsche
Verantwortung für den NATO-Krieg gegen Jugoslawien, Schkeuditz, Schkeuditzer
Buchverlag, 2000.
The article reviews briefly the theory of nationalism, and introduces (yet another)
definition of nations and nationalism. Starting from this definition of nationalism as a world
order with specific characteristics, oppositions such as core and periphery,
globalism/nationalism, and realism/idealism are formally rejected. Nationalism is considered
as a purely global structure. Within this, it is suggested, the number of states tends to fall
to an equilibrium number which is itself falling, this number of states being the current best
approximation to a single world state. Within nationalism variants are associated with
different equilibrium numbers: these variants compete. Together, as the nationalist structure,
they formally exclude other world orders. Such a structure appears to have the function of
blocking change, and it is tentatively suggested that it derives directly from an innate human
conservatism. The article attempts to show how characteristics of classic nationalism, and
more recent identity politics, are part of nationalist structures. They involve either the
exclusion of other forms of state, or of other orders of states, or the intensification of
identity as it exists.
If a world order of states is so arranged that similarity within each state is maximized,
and the number of states is minimized, then that world order is a nationalist world order, and
its components are nation states. This definition does not start from the characteristics of a
nation, as many definitions of nationalism do. It starts instead from the world order,
considering the nation only in a very abstract sense. Implicitly this definition is also a
functionalist theory of nationalism, and this is expanded later in this article. The article
closes with a more speculative section on how identity politics could replace nationalism, but
continue its function.
When our founders boldly declared America's independence to the world and our purposes to
the Almighty, they knew that America, to endure, would have to change. Not change for
change's sake, but change to preserve America's ideals - life, liberty, the pursuit of
happiness. Though we march to the music of our time, our mission is timeless.
A world of nation states is a world of states built to maintain past ideals, where change
is limited to that necessary for their survival, a world structured against 'change for the
sake of change'. Structuralism, functionalism, and voluntarism are currently taboo in the
social sciences. Yet, I think it strange to reject the clear explanations of the purpose of
nationalism, so often given by nationalists and national leaders. In practice it is often an
abdication of moral judgment on the actions of nationalists.
Before considering the relation of structure and function of nations, a brief indication
of the range of theories of nationalism. Any comprehensive review of theories of nationalism
could only be of book length (for instance
Smith, 1983). The Oxford
Reader on Nationalism (Hutchinson
and Smith, 1994) collects examples of the main theories.
It is not surprising that authors in one discipline are unfamiliar with theory in another,
or that there is overlap and duplication.
Peter Alter (1985: p. 169)
remarks that the literature can scarcely be overseen. In this fragmentation among disciplines,
a plurality of theories is at least possible. In turn, plurality of theories should give more
space for innovative theories - more than in a single recent paradigmatic discipline. (This
reverses the standard assumption, that periods of revolution in science are the periods of
innovation in science. Given fragmentation of disciplines, there might be more innovation in
'normal science' than through paradigm change.) However, in this respect nationalism theory is
a disappointment. Plurality of disciplines has not produced an equivalent plurality of theory.
Some common approaches recur across disciplines. Examples of such common features are the
tendency, to approach nationalism on a country-by-country basis, and to date it as a
phenomenon of modernity.
In any case, it is possible to give some simple (non-inclusive) categorization of theories
of nationalism:
normative theory of nationalism in political philosophy, for instance in
Walzer (1983).
theories of nationalism as political extremism. These use a definition of nationalism
common in the media: as equivalent to jingoism, ethnic hatred, expansionism, militarism, or
aggressive separatism, contrasted with constitutionalism, liberalism or patriotism (see
Connor, 1994: pp. 196 - 209).
This approach is related to 'shopping list' definitions of the extreme right (Mudde,
1996: pp. 228 - 9).
modernization theories of nationalism: these form the bulk of social science theory of
nationalism
primordialist theories, disputing the modern origin of nations
civilization theories of nationalism, often implying an ultimate global community.
Freud's (1932) comparison of
peoples with primitive organisms is a core version of such a theory of nations.
historicist theories, which take the existence of nations as given, and consider their
development (or obstacles to that development).
social-integrative theories, especially 'substitute religion' theories
state formation theories, residually explaining nationalism, usually as a product of
centralizing policy to uniformity
global system or global order theories, which do not usually consider internal
characteristics of nation states. Theory of state formation through war combines this with
the last category (for instance,
Rasler and Thompson, 1989).
This is only one categorization, and indicative only.
James Goodman (1996), for
instance, categorizes theories of nationalism into five approaches: ethno-national,
modernization, state-centred, class-centred, and 'uneven development' theories.
The first three are in the category modernization theories, A. D. Smith is the main 'primordialist'.
Gellner's academic field was the philosophy of sociology, Anderson taught international
relations, Hobsbawm is a social historian, and Smith a sociologist (notes in
Hutchinson and Smith, 1994).
Gellner's work is the most consistently theoretical: it proposes a model of the
transformation to nation states derived from economic factors:
So the economy needs both the new type of central culture and the central state; the
culture needs the state; and the state probably needs the homogeneous branding of its flock
... (Gellner, 1983: p. 140)
Anderson does not propose a derivation of this kind, but his central thesis is that
communication and media did facilitate the emergence of nations as imagined communities. For
Anderson, only face- to-face contact can sustain community: nations are in some sense an
illusion. Both of these views date nationalism as definitively modern. A. D. Smith's central
thesis is that pre-modern equivalents of nations existed - indirectly invalidating the
modernization theories. Hobsbawm's article on invented tradition appeared earlier, but can be
read as a refutation of the pre-modern origin of national tradition. Hobsbawm gives examples
of how such tradition, even the sustaining myth of nations, can be borrowed, added to, or
simply invented. (A similar work by
Bernard Lewis (1977), did not apparently have the same impact.)
The so-called resurgence of nationalism in Eastern Europe after 1989 brought these works
to media attention, as well as academic status. (At one time I could chose between six
different courses on them, at one university.) All of them are also very readable, with much
interesting illustration from the history of nations. No more recent work has made the same
impact, and the fixation on the themes of these authors may have limited theoretical
perspectives.
Any attempt to compress these works into one paragraph is inadequate. However, one thing
is clear: the authors have not engaged in any wide speculation about hypothetical worlds of
entirely non-national states. Nations are explained in these theories, not the absence of
non-nations. Insofar as possible alternatives are considered, these are possible continuations
of the mediaeval European order.
Most nationalism theory pays little attention to nationalism as a world order. This is
surprising, since nationalists themselves so often treat it as such. Some definitions of
nationalism are entirely particularistic:
Elwert (1989: p. 37) says that
nationalists only want a nation for themselves, not others. This is untrue: nationalists have
often wanted other nations. The classic example is Mazzini, who founded or inspired not only
Young Italy, but Young Germany, Switzerland, Poland, Bohemia and Argentina among others (Mack
Smith, 1994: pp. 11-12). Mazzini's vision was global: he saw the peoples as nothing less
then the units of humanity's army:
L'Umanitŕ č un grande esercito che move alla conquista di terre incognite, contro nemici
potenti e avveduti. I Popoli sono i diversi corpi, le divisioni di quello esercito. (Mazzini
(1860) [1953]: p. 89)
This is a metaphor, but it should emphasize the extreme universalism of nationalism.
Armies are not known for maximizing autonomy or individual will. Any listing of the ethical
claims of nationalism (the subject of a separate article) will show that nationalism can not
de derived, from Enlightenment ideas of self-determination. That was the basic thesis of
Elie Kedourie's influential
Nationalism (1960, revised 1992).
Peter Taylor (1989: p. 175)
summarizes the world as seen by nationalists, at three levels (approximately the global,
national and individual).
The world is, for them, a mosaic of nations which find harmony when all are free nation
states.
Nations themselves are natural units with a cultural homogeneity based on common
ancestry or history, each requiring its own sovereign state on its own inalienable
territory.
Individuals all belong to a nation, which requires their first loyalty, and in which
they find freedom.
This standard nationalist thought says more about nationalism than the immediate goals of
any one nationalist group. For both of these things - world view and activism - the word
'nationalism' is used. This may be confusing, but it is also misleading to split nationalism
into 'international relations' and 'internal politics', and then include secessionism in the
second category. Basque separatists in Northern Spain and South-western France want a nation
state, and are labelled nationalists: the governments of France and Spain, who have already
got a nation state, are not. There is undeniably a secessionist nationalism, with claims
against a larger state, such as those of the ETA. However, the definition at the start of this
article is intended to emphasize the global effect of such movements, and their historical
equivalence to the founders of the states they oppose. The term nationalism is used here,
deliberately, to describe both aspects of the phenomenon.
Nationalism is not a particularism. It is a universalism, a consistent vision or ideology.
Autonomy, secession, war and conquest can be compatible with a universal shared goal.
Apparently amending his earlier view of nationalism,
Peter Taylor (1995: p. 10)
described one world as 'the nemesis of interterritoriality'. However, a world of nations can
still be one world, if it is one nationalist world. The definition of nationalism used here is
intended to emphasize this universal, 'world order', aspect of nationalism. Since nations,
united nations.
The definition implies that nationalism is a substitute for a world state. If cultural
homogeneity cannot be achieved, because co-ordination over distance is not perfect, then a
strategy of co-operating local similarities is the best option. The number of cultures on
earth will be the outcome of this strategy. Later, as states form on the basis of pre-existing
ethnic or cultural groups, the number of states will also derive from this strategy. If there
are too few states, and each too large, they may become internally diverse. If there are too
many, they will differ too much among themselves. It is therefore not possible to project the
long term fall in the number of states to the point at which only one is left, as
Robert Carneiro did (1976;
see Chase- Dunn, 1990). The
trend to fewer political units seemed clear enough to Carneiro, to project a date for world
government: 2300 AD. If however, the nationalist world order is considered as a global
structure, and not seen as competing states, then there is no certainty of reaching a single
world state. If there is already such a global order, globalization does not imply the
reduction of its components to one. Instead, there is an optimum number of nation states at
any one time, within such a nationalist world order. That optimum is determined by limits of
communications, transport, and the degree of political and social organization. This number is
falling, but constraints of distance may never be eroded enough to reduce it to one. The
optimum number may in fact exceed the number of states that now exist. The many separatist
movements, the success of small states, and the fact that there are many more languages than
states, all indicate a world with many more than 185 states: perhaps closer to 1000.
That implies a change in the nature of the component states. The classic 19th century
European nation state, the basis of most definitions of nationalism, would best fit a world of
between 200 and 500 states. It is a universalism: but there are competing universalisms,
variants within nationalism. This is very clear in Europe, where these variants are used as
programmes for the whole continent. Most are serious, some are what might be called
geopolitical kitsch (Heineken,
1992; Pedersen, 1992).
Classic nationalists speak of Europe des patries, ethno-nationalists of Europe des ethnies (Heraud,
1993), regionalists of Europe of the regions (Borrп╠s-Alomar,
1994). Only in Europe are the alternatives formulated so explicitly, but these
universalist structures are implicitly global. They are ways of dividing the world:
alternatives to classic nationalism. In other words, use of similar terms at a global scale
can be expected: a world of the regions, a world of the peoples, and so on.
There is what might be called world- nationalism, associated with a single global state.
Its explicit form is world federalism, and plans to the UN into a sort of world government.
This centuries-old tradition (see
ter Meulen, 1917; van der
Linden, 1987) is represented by the work of
Richard Falk (1987; 1992) and
many others (Marien, 1995: pp. 297
- 301). It is paralleled by the philosophical tradition of cosmopolitanism (see
Toulmin, 1990), and by a
belief in globalization. (Marien's 1995 article covers a very wide range of global visions,
from New Age to neo-liberal.) Then there is inter-culturalism - the division of the world into
5 to 50 cultures or civilizations, once used in organicist versions by historians (Demandt,
1978: pp. 96 - 101), and recently revived by
Samuel Huntington (1993).
At the same scale are the pan- nationalist movements, all of them failures until now (Snyder,
1984: p. 254). Then there is classic (inter-) nationalism, the basis of the existing world
order. Next to that is ethno-nationalism (Connor,
1994; Heraud, 1993;
Tiryakian, 1985;
Watson, 1990). Although there
is no clear distinction between some 'nations' and 'peoples', the scale of the inter-ethnic
world is very different, with up to 10,000 'peoples'. It is this variant which has the
clearest demands at present, classically stated in the International Covenant on the Rights of
Indigenous Nations (CWIS, 1994).
At a similar scale is a historic-cultural-linguistic regionalism, well organized in Europe
(see Kohr, 1986;
Labasse, 1991). These regions
are often seen as units of a future federal Europe, combining regionalism with a weak
pan-nationalism. Finally although it rarely generates separatism, there is an inter-localism:
it sees the small community, the village or neighbourhood, as the only authentic unit of
social organization.
In all these variants, the possible states share four functional characteristics
(described later), and there is a global order of such states. I would emphasize that this
article is not intended to explain all aspects of nationalism, but to consider why states do
not deviate from this model.
In universal structures (functional or not) there is logically no core or periphery - at
least, not in the sense of most world system models. However, competition between
universalisms can create this appearance. Some separatist movements, for instance, defy the
expected logic of core and periphery: the Lega Nord, or Catalonian separatism.
Mansvelt Beck (1991) explains
this as an 'inverted core- periphery relationship'. This kind of explanation can be avoided on
the assumption that there is no real separatism at all. Catalonian regionalism is regionalism,
a model for the whole world, not just Spain: Basque nationalism is a manifestation of global
ethno- nationalism, and so on. The variants of nationalism are superimposed universalisms. An
ETA attack on a Spanish army barracks is, seen in this way, a clash of universalisms.
To this extent, nationalist movements cannot logically be analyzed in terms of social
movement theories. (This is an example of the formal consequences of adopting the universalist
definition used in this article). Nor can electoral support for 'nationalist parties' be
analyzed. In Britain, the Scottish National Party supports a nation state, but then so do the
Labour Party and the Conservative Party. Support for nationalism in UK elections is
consistently around 99 percent. Again, separatist sentiment is labelled nationalist, but
unionist sentiment is not. In this way, SNP support enters a different category for electoral
analysis: but this is a purely taxonomic effect.
In a similar way, a rise in the number of states may generate the illusion of power,
struggle and resistance. This may be the case, even if there is no difference of scale. All
units (potential states) might be comparable, as with Czechoslovakia, Czechia, and Slovakia.
These are all classic European nation states. However, seen from Slovakia, Czechoslovakia
stands for hegemonic culture, an imposed universalism, oppression and 'power'. Earlier, the
Slavic nationalists who inspired the Czechoslovak state, had opposed the dominance of
German-language culture in Central Europe. Earlier still, German romantic nationalists had
opposed the dominance of French Enlightenment rationalist culture. All secessionist movements
are anti-hegemonic and anti-universalist, until independence day. After that they become
another's hegemonic universalism, another's 'state'. And, indeed, Slovakia has been
criticized, for its treatment of the Hungarian minority.
Logically, in a perfect order of nations, there is no dominance or 'power': everyone
co-operates a nationalist in sustaining the structure. This may however involve changing the
number of states, creating the illusion of conflict. People volunteer for military service:
that is said to prove they are willing to die for their country. It is equally logical to say
they die for the functioning of the world order. That, emphasized, in a perfect order of
nations.
This is an abstraction, true. Nevertheless, it is not such an abstraction that is has no
real effect. Conflicts do involve common reinforcement, including reinforcement of national
structure. Secession, especially, forces both sides further into their own identity. Identity
makes counter- identity (see Barth,
1969), as with Slovak and Czech. It is probably true that Czecho-Slovakia is more
nationalist since it split: it is certainly true of Yugoslavia. In this way the action of
individuals in one nation can intensify global identity, affecting the number of nations in
the process. So it is logically possible that there is no national oppression, nor national
liberation. The 'struggle' is to intensify nationalism, the world order. Inside it, to oppress
or be oppressed as a nation serves the same function. In practice, an oppressed group will say
it is a nation fighting a state: the state will say it is a nation fighting terrorists.
Another opposition recurrent in theory on nations is that between the national and the
global (see Arnason, 1990).
The nation state and national culture are being eroded by global communication - it is often
said. It is said that Internet will dissolve nations. Much the same thing was said about
satellite television, air travel, radio, the telegraph, and railways. Nation states are still
here. Yet few people are sceptical about 'globalization' (Cox,
1992; Smith, 1990), and in
a sense there is no reason to be. There is no erosion of the national by the global, but only
because there is nothing to erode. Nationalism is 100% global: a world order cannot logically
be further globalized.
The components of an order do not stand in opposition to it: certainly not in the sense
implied by the term 'globalization'. The implicit assumption is that nations are particular
entities, necessarily at a sub-global level. In other worlds, the whole idea starts from the
assumption that there is no universal nationalism. If I claim the people on the pitch at a
football match walked there by chance, and I see them playing football, then I could say they
are being 'football- ized'. In fact they went there as a group, for that purpose.
The question is why there is such enthusiasm for the concept of globalization. First, it
is in the nature of nationalism itself. The world of nations is an imperfect substitute for a
homogenous world state: it is logical for nationalists to hope it is approaching. Secondly,
the enthusiasm is in any case matched by the anti-universalist ideas mentioned above. There
are books and conferences on the coming global state, but equally on the rise of regions. It
seems possible to combine two scales of thought, for instance in cultural pan-syncretism (see
Nederveen Pieterse, 1993) or
sub-state federation (Bengoetxea,
1993). Thirdly, this is only one example of a pattern: for each of the level of scale of
nationalism, there are possible upward and downward transitions. Shifts from the
ethno-regional to the global, for instance, or from pan-nationalism to linguistic regionalism.
Only three of these possibilities are active at present:
globalism, more normative than descriptive
anti-hegemonic criticism of existing national states and their cultures, without any
territorial effect as yet. In reaction there is some new defence of the nation state,
especially in response to multiculturalism and identity politics. This applies most in
high-immigration western industrialized countries, where it is a major issue. (The U.S.A.
especially: see
Schlesinger, 1992.) In any case, more recent interest in fusion, hybridity, and
'crossing boundaries' favours pan- nationalism. Separatist identity politics seems on the
way out.
ethno-nationalism, and in Europe regionalism at the same subnational scale - which
enjoys some support within the EU (van
der Knaap, 1994).
This last is by far the most active shift. The next ten years are unlikely to see a world
government, and the US is unlikely to break up (and does not need Arthur Schlesinger to save
it): but it might see an independent Vlaanderen or Catalunya, or the definitive break-up of
Afghanistan.
The world order of nations is therefore characterized by both secession and fusion, but it
is not being 'torn apart'. It is a structure being rebuilt to function better. All these
shifts in scale merely substitute one universalism for another, all variants of one world
order. There is no dramatic fragmentation, and no paradigmatic shift to one world community.
No shift is needed.
It also follows, from the definitions used here, that a world of nation states cannot be
chaotic or anarchic. The academic discipline of international relations is influenced by the
idea of a slow progress toward the imposition of some kind of order on warring, aggressive
states, the tradition of, for instance,
Hedley Bull (1977, 1984). This
tradition concedes some 'order in the system'. However, logically there cannot be anything
else but order. A world order is by definition not disorder: international relations are by
definition 'idealist' in International Relations terms, and a national state cannot be a
Machtsstaat. So called realism models a world of aggressively competitive states - sometimes
identified with mediaeval Europe. From this a recognition of commonalities may emerge, and
states may co-operate, bringing order and peace. Those who consider this inherent or
inevitable are usually classified as idealist.
But war is not disorder: Carneiro's model, the simplest possible, demonstrates that states
disappear through 'competitive exclusion' until there is one left: there are many wars, but it
is an ordered, linear process (see
Cioffi-Revilla, 1991). The realist/idealist dispute ignores the type of state involved.
The question is not why there are so many wars between nations, but why there are so few wars
between non-nations. Not why there is ethnic cleansing, but why there is so little non-ethnic
cleansing. Not what is international relations, but why there are only inter-national
relations. Any attempt to imagine a fundamentally non-national world, should make clear how
stable the world of nations is. Nation states can apparently fight each other, without risk of
emergence of new state forms in the alleged 'chaos'.
It may seem that all this imposes a simplistic order on a complex world. However it is
nationalists who want to impose a simple structure, and they have been remarkably successful.
Of course the world order is not perfect, and states do have autonomous interests. These may
be of the kind graphically attributed to them in pre-war Geopolitik (Schmidt,
1929), or less obsessively in recent geopolitical atlases. Nations do sometimes act as
entities 'seeking access to the sea', or 'control of river basins', or resources, or
historical territories. The Schmidt-Haack Atlas maps tens of different types of claim, and
some were later used by Germany. However, if all nation states consistently acted like this,
there would be constant all-state war.
There is also the possibility that a state will turn against the world order, a real
renegade state. Usually this term merely indicates a state disliked by western policy makers:
see Dror (1971) on 'crazy
states'. A real renegade state would have to stop being a nation state: no-one speaks of
'crazy nations'. More probable is that nationalism as a universal order conflicts with other
universalisms; other world orders of one or more states, or perhaps a stateless world. The
definition of nationalism used here, defines it as a monolith with great historical
continuity. It should then react to competing monoliths, as a unit. The Greek polis is often
cited as the prototype of nations, indeed of all political community. It was also a unit
within an order of similar states. That Hellenic order may have had a proto-national identity
itself. However, as an order of city states, it was in intermittent conflict with Asian
empires. The present order of nation states covers the globe, however, so that any competing
world will be found within it.
There is at present one clear example of a competing world order: theocratic religious
universalism, of the kind promoted (in Britain) by the Muslim Unity Organization. It advocates
a world caliphate, khilafa. It is not accidental that this group operates from Britain: the
existing Islamic nation states would be the first to disappear on the road to the caliphate.
However small such groups are, they have a coherent and radical alternative not just to 'the
West', but to the whole existing world:
...there is a long and still vibrant tradition of Muslim agitation against nationalism and
the nation state. The most recent manifestation of this agitation has had Shi'i
inspiration, but there are no significant differences between Sunni and Shi'a on this
question, or between Arab and non-Arab Muslims. Feeling that Islam's decline is due chiefly
to the adoption of Western ideas and culture, all express pessimism and suggest a radical
restructuring of the world order. (Piscatori,
1986: p. 145)
A complete alternative world order is unlikely to control any territory within the world
order it rejects. It is however not adequate to consider such universalist Islamic movements
as 'social movements' within existing nation states. They cannot be accommodated within the
'public domain' of these states, as suggested by
John Rex (1996) in a
previous article in Sociological
Research Online. This has nothing to do with their immigrant or ethnic status: a Catholic
theocracy would not fit into a liberal democratic nation state either.
As long as there are nations, there will be no caliphate; it is neither a people, nor a
region, nor a nation, nor a culture. Structurally, nationalism excludes other entities from
state status. Nationalism is a blocking world order: it excludes other worlds. It is difficult
to imagine all these possible worlds from inside the world of nations, and that is part of its
success. Any attempt to imagine them will lead to apparent absurdity.
What nationalism blocks, above all, is change. The definition of nationalism as tending to
total homogeneity implies stability also. The order blocks, but not without direction. It may
well be, in itself, empty: it does not define, for instance, what language will be spoken in
the third nation east of the Rhine. That does not stop it having a purpose. If the world order
of nations (as defined here) is superimposed on a world, it will block change in time, and
exclude the alternative worlds that are possible at any point in time. That is an ethical
choice, and the ethics of nations are outside the scope of this article, as noted.
If nationalism is chosen, someone chose it. No one person invented nationalism: the most
logical 'someone' is, exactly as Mazzini suggested, humanity. There is some theory which links
the nation to the psyche: the most obvious areas of interest are self-determination (Ronen,
1979) and personal identity, sense of self (Bloom,
1990). I suggest the structure of nationalism derives from an innate human conservatism.
This is no more absurd than saying that structures of reservoirs and water supply derive from
an innate human need for water. It does not imply that all persons at all times are absolutely
conservative. (Nor does it contradict biology: change causes stress.)
How can the world order of nations answer such an innate aversion to change? First, in
that it gives a monopoly of state formation - and so of sovereignty - to nations. Not that all
states correspond exactly to one nation: again, the point is how few states correspond to
non-national entities. They do exist as historical curiosities: the Vatican, and the
autonomous Agio Oros (Athos) in Greece. Some nationalists have a horror of a state without a
nation: see Heraud's comment on the Vatican as a product of History, 'qui est violence' (1993:
p. 11). If national divisions were not dominant, there should be more of these
counter-examples. Secondly, the nation itself is past-based. Trans-generationality is a key
characteristic of nations, and found in many definitions of nation. Writing on the subjective
experience of cultural identity,
A. D. Smith (1990: p. 179) names three components of shared experience: a sense of
transgenerational continuity, shared memories, and a sense of common destiny. Collapsing the
three into one gives the purpose of a nation: it exists to project the past (as collectively
remembered) into the future, as little changed as possible. Nationalists almost do not ignore
the future:
Nations are thus projects for the future and have the right to self-determination in order
to organise their future. (Bengoetxea,
1993: p.95)
However in a national world order, nations are the only entities with self-determination
and territory, and they are past- constituted. Just as with the world order, the nation is
empty but not directionless: superimpose a nation on a heritage, and it will preserve it. In
fact it will make the past into a 'heritage', one of the metaphors of possession common in
nationalism. It is logical in nations, that the past should increase its share of economy,
society and culture (see Horne, 1984;
Lowenthal, 1985), that
territory undergoes 'heritage-ization' (Walsh,
1992: pp. 138 - 147), that memory is cultural (see
Assman, 1988) and that its
preservation is a task of the state. Despite Lowenthal's title, the past is not treated as an
apart entity, but rather divided up to correspond to existing nations. The world is thus
occupied by states projecting parallel pasts into the future: there is no non-memory space, no
space which is not of the past.
Thirdly, the nations are in principle eternal, and so the nation state, and so the world
order. (Dependent territories and mandates can have a formal time limit, but this relates to a
transfer of power. Mandate territories become independent nation states, or join an existing
neighbour.) The idea of setting up a state for a limited time for a specific purpose is alien
to nationalism. The exceptions which show it is possible - for example extraterritorial mining
concessions - are curiosities in a world of nations. The projection of the past will continue.
Fourth, and most specifically, no state has ever been established for the primary purpose
of change. This logical possibility is not limited by available technology or culture - it
could have been done 1000 years ago.
Returning to the definition: there logically exists a general class of orders of states
where the boundaries are not drawn so as to maximise change. In other words, a class of
change-limiting orders, in effect change-minimizing orders. The order of nations is probably
the most effective of these. Formally, it is an order of coterminous states covering the
entire land surface, formed by transgenerational identity communities, claiming a monopoly of
state formation, and eternal legitimacy. All the scale variants of nationalism conform to this
definition.
These four functional characteristics of the nationalist world order emphasize how
different it is from other possible orders, and how it has excluded them for a long time. In
effect it has become superimposed on the world, by choice. It would be inaccurate to say it
arrived at one instant. No-one can give a definitive date for when nationalism began:
Marcu (1976: pp. 3 - 15) quotes
41 different views on the issue. Instead, a structure has been elaborated and intensified, and
the beginnings of other structures have been abandoned. Compare the five possible futures of
thirteenth century Europe suggested by
Tilly (1975: p. 26), or the
different routes to the national identity suggested by
Armstrong (1982: pp. 283 - 300).
The intensification has increased in the last 200 years, as nations become more national.
It is a property of nationalism that intensifying the national identity intensifies the
world order. Most theory of nationalism attributes this process to the state, at most to the
interaction of state and civil society:
Aprčs avoir ajusté ŕ leur échelle propre l'armée, la justice, la religion et
l'administration, ils en viennent ŕ nationaliser le marché (impôts, douanes, lois et
rčglements, poids et mesures, etc.) ŕ nationaliser l'école (langue officielle, programmes,
examens, etc.) et, de proche en proche, ŕ nationaliser encore la conscription, les services
publics, certaines entreprieses au moins (chemins de fer, postes, ports etc.) ... l'Etat
tend ŕ façonner toute la societé civile, laquelle tend, en retour, a soumettre l'Etat ŕ ses
finalités propres... (Fossaert,
1994: p. 195)
After having adjusted the army, the courts, religion and
administration to national scale, they start to national-ise the market (taxes, customs,
laws and regulations, weights and measures), to national-ise the schools (official
language, educational programmes, exams), and then to nationalise in turn, conscription,
public service, some business enterprises (railways, post, ports) ... The State forms civil
society, which in turn begins to use the State for its own goals... (Fossaert,
1994: p. 195)
The logic of nationalism however, is that this is a process of convergence driven from
below, that the national identity is exactly what
A. D. Smith (1990: p. 179)
says it is not: an average. The state is merely an instrument. Too large a state and the
convergence will be ineffective, too small and the averages will differ too much - and so back
to the starting definition. Neither secession nor conquest disturb this process in the long
run: the new nations will have their own 'nationalization', their own convergence. In other
words, even at the level of the individual state, attitudes to change can determine the degree
of national uniformity. Secession, in effect, punishes the state for allowing too much
difference in the population. This is not an abstraction: many nationalists explicitly value
homogeneous communities.
In any case, daily reality in most nations is not secession, but less spectacular
processes of emancipation. Nations are not perfect: they include minorities (or majorities)
which do not conform to the national ideal, but have no other national identity. Repeatedly,
such groups chose to integrate into the nation, rather than allow non-national secession. They
pressure the state for inclusion, and often try to adjust the national identity, through
cultural politics. Once again, there is no political-geographic inevitability in this: if
people can secede as a nation they can secede as something else. They chose not to, with some
historical exceptions. Again, the remarkable feature of the world order of nations is not the
number of secessionist movements, but the fact that all of them represent a people, or a
nation.
A good example of the intensity of this choice is the campaign of gay and lesbian groups -
especially in the U.S.A. - against the military ban on service, for 'the right to die for my
country'. It seems absurd to demand to be killed in an army which discriminates against you.
The emotions here can only be nationalist, U.S.A. nationalist: a sort of desperate desire to
be part of an identity, to conform, to belong, not to be different. This is an example of
genuine anger directed against the state, for failing to homogenize the nation. The logically
possible alternatives do not occur. Despite the influence of religion in the U.S.A., there is
no comparable demand for the 'right to die for my church', let alone any other organization.
There is also no serious secessionist movement of gays and/or lesbians despite decades of
social organization. When Cardinal Archbishop Quarracino of Buenos Aires proposed (in August
1994) a 'separate country for homosexuals', he had to publicly apologise, saying it was a
joke. He did not know, probably, of Queer Nation (Bérubé,
1991; Chee, 1991), nor that
it makes no territorial demands, despite its name.
Many processes, then, which may seem separate or contradictory, can be described in a
structure of nationalism, starting from its formal definition as a specific world order.
Integration through formalism is a characteristic of conspiracy theories: does all this imply
a vast conspiracy involving almost all humans over centuries? Not necessarily: it is possible
to generate complex structures from simple rules. The most general rule for a nationalist
world as a blocking world order would be approximately: 'if there is change, intensify
identity'. A second rule might be to intensify identity preferably by fusion or accretion, and
only if that failed, by secession. However, it is not necessary to imply a hidden formal
grammar of nationalism. People do not need one: they can reflect on what is happening, and
produce open doctrines of complex action - as did Mazzini, and other nationalist ideologists.
National identity links the individual to the world order. It has also been a central
theme in universities over the last 15 - 20 years. Especially so, in English-speaking
countries where a liberal political tradition is confronted by ethnic diversity (Rex,
1996). Some of that academic activity has an obvious link to nationalism, ethnic studies
for example. More generally, there is an interest in what might be called structures of
cultural identity, which may have a spatial or territorial counterpart.
In the US the work of bell hooks, for instance, shows a transition from marginality as a
'site of deprivation' to a 'site of resistance' to a 'site one stays in' (hooks,
1990: p. 341), which is almost a summary of secessionist nationalism. In this way
nationalist models, even of classic Mazzinian nationalism, may be adopted for identity
politics. (That is, without necessarily breaking up existing nation states.) This continuity
from 19th century nationalism to recent identity politics has yet to be researched. Even
before the First World War, the Austro-Marxist
Bauer (1907) anticipated the
model of a multicultural state, now common in political speech in western Europe. Already in
1944, Louis Adamic described
the United States as 'A Nation of Nations', and President Kennedy echoed the idea in the
sixties (Kennedy, 1964). In
contrast to Benedict Anderson's
view (1992) that multiculturalism is transitional, there is no reason why a nation state
can not be a Vielvölkerstaat, with diversity as a national value. The ultimate logic would be
to make each nation itself a microcosm of the world order: united nations of united nations.
It seems possible that use of identity can be further intensified, possibly to the point
that a non-territorial structure of transgenerational identity replaces classic nationalism.
For an example of the new politics, see the post-structuralist critique of Transgender Nation
by Newitz (1993), and other
texts at the same site. The new world order could be 'syncretic', a term from the study of
religion (see Colpe, 1987). It
could be a world order of gender pluralism, trans- diaspora cultures, trans-trans hybrids, and
other new combinations of the existing - suppressing change by the volume of diversity.
More probable is, that the parallels between the new politics and the old, will reinforce
classic nationalism. Take this (random) example: a comment on bell hooks from a recent paper
on spaces of citizenship:
In hooks's case these 'homes' entailed her grandparent's house and then the black
neighbourhoods containing this house and also her own, and the implication is that these
houses and neighbourhoods were rather more to her than 'just' sites of belonging, they were
also sites where black people could escape from the antagonism, anger and attacks which
arose when they trespassed on white space (however legitimate in legal terms their presence
in this white space would actually be). In other words, hooks indicates something of how
black people can never be citizens confidently occupying the spaces of white society, but
hints too at how they may find ways of trying to foster alternative locales in which some
sense of being a citizen - this time of a distinctively black world - is made possible. (Painter
& Philo, 1995: pp. 116 - 7)
Change some names and this becomes much less friendly:
In Tudjman's case these 'homes' entailed his grandparent's house and then the Croat
neighbourhoods containing this house and also his own, and the implication is that these
houses and neighbourhoods were rather more to him than 'just' sites of belonging, they were
also sites where Croat people could escape from the antagonism, anger and attacks which
arose when they trespassed on Yugoslav space (however legitimate in legal terms their
presence in this Yugoslav space would actually be). In other words, Tudjman indicates
something of how Croat people can never be citizens confidently occupying the spaces of
Yugoslav society, but hints too at how they may find ways of trying to foster alternative
locales in which some sense of being a citizen - this time of a distinctively Croat world -
is made possible.
There is no need to reinvent nationalism, for nations have not disappeared, but some
people seem determined to reinvent it anyway. The structure of nationalism is being altered,
but its singularity and purpose are not. It remains one structure, one world order excluding
other worlds. The man who more than anyone, was the founding father of modern nationalism,
Johann Gottlieb Herder, wrote
in 1774:
Ist nicht das Gute auf der Erde ausgestreut? Weil eine Gestalt der Menschheit und ein
Erdstrich es nicht fassen konnte, wards geteilt in tausend Gestalten, wandelt - ein ewiger
Proteus! - durch alle Weltteile und Jahrhunderte hin...(Herder,
1990/1774: p. 36)
Nationalism is a Proteus, but it changes only to prevent change. Rewriting Herder in the
negative gives the judgment of nationalism: Only that which is already strewn about the Earth,
is good.
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The US government always subscribed to Al Capone maxim "You can get much farther with a kind word
and a gun than you can with a kind word alone. ". Bu now this allegiance took slightly more sophisticated
form.
Notable quotes:
"... We all need to do what we can to try to make your take on the NY Times into a more mainstream understanding of that capitalist/imperialist propaganda rag. ..."
"... The NYT is only good for the periodic correct quote buried deeply within it's bombastic verbiage. ..."
"... Granted, the NYT does provide a view into the mindset of the Empire, but is otherwise nothing more than a propaganda rag. I find it fascinating that anyone gives it any credence as 'information' ... ..."
"... more light needs to be shone on this topic of 'ngos', 'non profits' and any other sacrimonious name tag the money wants to give to 'regime change'... democracy my ass. ..."
"... U.S. embassies are primarily and above all else organs of espionage and subversion. With modern communications abilities allowing online performance of many traditional ambassadorial functions. If I were Putin, I would clip the wings of hostile powers' embassies by eliminating most attaches and other mischief makers and placing restrictions on the total numbers of staff. ..."
"... Beware of Yanks bringing democracy Have caution of NGO's in general, they may not always be what they appear ..."
"... institutions like the New York Times are essentially organs of authoritarian government, with the clandestine mission of "manufacturing consent" for the government's policies and programs. ..."
"... by Douglas Jehl and David E. Sanger - July 17, 2005 ..."
"... Despite the denials by some Bush administration officials, others who took part in or were briefed on the discussion said they could not rule out the possibility that the United States and its allies might have provided secret aid to augment the broad overt support provided to Iraqi candidates and parties by the State Department, through organizations like the (Inter)national Democratic Institute . ..."
"... IRI was founded in 1983 as the result of a Reagan administration initative to fight Communism by providing government funding to private groups -- most notably the National Endowment for Democracy -- that would promote U.S. policies in ways the government could not undertake directly. In 1991, one of the creators of the NED would be quoted as saying, "a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA" This initiative led to the creation of two organizations, the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute, associated with the two political parties. ..."
"... The CIA used to handle all the subversive activities of the US Government abroad until the Church and Pike commissions opened up that can of worms post-Watergate. The Reagan regime eventually repackaged the US Government's efforts at subversion of foreign governments at the State Department ..."
"... The NYTimes and WaPo are now funny papers, bald propaganda sites posing as newspapers, and have been since the younger, neo-con Sulzberger took over from his 'liberal' dad at the one, and since the Amazonian CIA contractor, Bezos, took over the other. ..."
"... US 'democracy loving' spies out! ..."
"... GNGOs - Government-funded Non-Governmental Organizations - are in every way a contradiction in terms, and those exporting Government-funded Non-Governmental product ought to be turned around at the border of any and every other supposedly independent state to which they are sent, as an obvious infringement of national sovereignty. ..."
"... Next to the NED and the IRI, The Open Society of George Soros must be added to the forefront of Pro Democracy nonprofit group used by The CIA and The deep state and the oligarchs linked to them. ..."
"... Syrian rebels claim to have downed a Syrian air force MiG-21 fighter jet that crashed in Hama Province while bombing militant positions. At least one pilot died, for which conflicting reports blame either fire from the ground or a jet malfunction. "The pilot was ejected and brought to safety in al-Mughayr," a military source told the Syrian Al Masdar News outlet. The same source insisted that the plane was not taken down by militants, but crashed due to a technical failure. ..."
"... Biden Jr's resume is unsurprisingly sprinkled with Ivy-league dust - he is on the Chairman's Advisory Board for the National Democratic Institute , a director for the Center for National Policy and the US Global Leadership Coalition comprising 400 American businesses, NGOs, senior national security and foreign policy experts. ..."
"... Former US President Bill Clinton appointed him an Executive Director of E-Commerce Policy and he was honorary co-chair of the 2008 Obama-Biden Inaugural Committee. ..."
"... perpetuum mobile ..."
"... How any nation could trust American based NGOs in this day and age ..."
"... Yeah the WaPo was trash before Bezos ... they played it straight though, tryied to carry on as a newspaper with a poker face. Now the joker is unmasked. Bezos doesn't even care what people think. He's laughing ... in print ... at the people who read his rag. \ ..."
MOSCOW - A nonprofit group that promotes democracy has become the latest American-linked group
to be banned in Russia under restrictions on "undesirable" organizations signed into law by President
Vladimir V. Putin in May.
The office of Russia's prosecutor general on Thursday outlawed the group, the National Democratic
Institute, claiming in a statement that the it posed "a threat to the foundations of Russia's
constitutional order and national security."
The above quoted NYT piece studiously avoids to describe what the "pro-democracy nonprofit" really
is. There is no mention at all of its sources of money or its relations to non-Russian governments.
The National Democratic Institute, a group promoting democracy and civil society, had operated
in Russia directly since the late 1980s, but it decided to close its offices there in 2012, according
to its website. It has continued to establish programs in Russia through partner organizations,
however. Madeleine K. Albright, an former United States secretary of state, is its chairwoman.
When asked about U.S. sanctions against Iraq Madeleine Albright once
said (vid) that 500,000
killed Iraqi children were "worth it". Any organization led by here must surely be a morally good.
But who pays it? And what for?
To know what exactly this "nonprofit" is, is certainly relevant to understand the Russian position.
But the NYT writer hides from the readers the fact that the NDI is a U.S. government financed organization.
It is a "nonprofit organization" in the same sense that the U.S. Armed Forces are a "nonprofit organization".
The NDI has been involved throughout the years
in dozens of right-wing "regime change" coups . Its direct parent organization
is the U.S. National Endowment of Democracy:
The private, congressionally funded NED has been a controversial tool in U.S. foreign policy because
of its support of efforts to overthrow foreign governments. As the writers Jonah Gindin and Kirsten
Weld remarked in the January/February 2007 NACLA Report on the Americas: "Since [1983], the NED
and other democracy-promoting governmental and nongovernmental institutions have intervened successfully
on behalf of 'democracy'-actually a very particular form of low-intensity democracy chained to
pro-market economics-in countries from Nicaragua to the Philippines, Ukraine to Haiti, overturning
unfriendly 'authoritarian' governments (many of which the United States had previously supported)
and replacing them with handpicked pro-market allies."[2]
NED works principally through four core institutes: the National Democratic Institute for International
Affairs (NDIIA or NDI), the International Republican Institute (IRI), the American Center for
International Labor Solidarity (ACILS), and the Center for International Private Enterprise-representing,
respectively, the country's two major political parties, organized labor, and the business community.
To call the NDI and its brothers and sisters non-government organization is obviously wrong. To
call them "pro-democracy" is only right when one has some fondness for the peculiar kind of "democracy"
in foreign countries that sets U.S. business interests above the interest of its own people.
What the Russian prosecutor general kicked out of Russia is obviously a U.S. government organization.
The NDI was acting clandestinely by secretly financing local groups in Russia which work against
the duly elected Russian government and against the interest of the Russian people.
But the petty-minded NYT, with its slavishly U.S. centric view, can not allow its readers to learn
such facts.
We all need to do what we can to try to make your take on the NY Times into a more mainstream
understanding of that capitalist/imperialist propaganda rag.
The NYT is only good for the periodic correct quote buried deeply within it's bombastic verbiage.
It is often quoted by authors such as this one, PCRoberts, Vltchek, the Saker, etc., to make a
point ... but is otherwise useless as information. Granted, the NYT does provide a view into
the mindset of the Empire, but is otherwise nothing more than a propaganda rag. I find it fascinating
that anyone gives it any credence as 'information' ...
thanks b.. more light needs to be shone on this topic of 'ngos', 'non profits' and any other
sacrimonious name tag the money wants to give to 'regime change'... democracy my ass... we
don't have it here in canada..
plutocracy is encouraged instead.. the russians are smart to not allow this kind of bs to enter
the pic.. take george soros and tie him up.. that would be a better example of democracy in action..
"Nest of spies" is the correct term for all such organizations.
Russia, and any other country interested in preserving its autonomy, would be crazy to permit
any outside funded organization whose raison d'etre is subversion.
In fact the members of such organizations when operating clandestinely through front organizations
should be subject to arrest and prosecution.
Another thing: U.S. embassies are primarily and above all else organs of espionage and
subversion. With modern communications abilities allowing online performance of many traditional
ambassadorial functions. If I were Putin, I would clip the wings of hostile powers' embassies
by eliminating most attaches and other mischief makers and placing restrictions on the total numbers
of staff.
Beware of Greeks bearing gifts (especially if you live in Troy) Beware of Yanks bringing democracy
Have caution of NGO's in general, they may not always be what they appear
Good catch, but I'm not sure I agree with your characterization of the NYT as "petty-minded".
It's a semantic cavil, perhaps. I think that an argument can be made that any pejorative
term applied to the NYT poobahs... er, fits.
But I refer you to the Gospel of Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, who masterfully demonstrated
that institutions like the New York Times are essentially organs of authoritarian government,
with the clandestine mission of "manufacturing consent" for the government's policies and programs.
"Petty-minded" implies that the NYT publisher/editors choose to withhold or distort the truth
out of a sort of personal-- perhaps aristocratic-- pique. It's way worse than that; it's a calculated
"business" decision to further their above-cited consent-manufacturing function.
All that said, you could've gone with "evil-minded".
Despite the denials by some Bush administration officials, others who took part in or were
briefed on the discussion said they could not rule out the possibility that the United States
and its allies might have provided secret aid to augment the broad overt support provided to
Iraqi candidates and parties by the State Department, through organizations like the
(Inter)national Democratic Institute
.
In December 2004, IRI contracted with Tony Marsh and Lance Copsey of the media consulting
firm Marsh, Copsey & Scott to set up a Baghdad Media Center on behalf of the U.S. State
Department. Its stated purpose was to assist Iraqi political parties and candidates in the
upcoming January elections.
Earlier that year, in January 2004, Marsh Copsey & Scott (now Marsh Copsey & Associates)
had registered the domain name crushkerry.com , which was used throughout the 2004 election
for an anti-Kerry blog run by their senior account executive,
Patrick Hynes
. The site was heavily involved in promoting both the SwiftBoat Veterans and
CBS Memos stories . It also encouraged readers to suggest other ways of discrediting John
Kerry, and claimed to have inside sources of information on the Kerry campaign.
Outsourcing regime change
IRI was founded in 1983 as the result of a Reagan administration initative to fight
Communism by providing government funding to private groups -- most notably the National Endowment
for Democracy -- that would promote U.S. policies in ways the government could not undertake
directly. In 1991, one of the creators of the NED would be quoted as saying, "a lot of what
we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA" This initiative led to the creation
of two organizations, the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute,
associated with the two political parties.
Native speakers of English would not say that the New York Propaganda Crimes is not "petty minded"
in the sense of being vindictive but "small minded" in the bland way it makes its report and leaves
it there, in the manner of bureaucrats or those who fulfill the minimum work tasks required of
them and then do no more.
The fact that former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright is a chair of this National Democratic
Institute probably tells most people with a triple-digit IQ all they need to know and then they
can go away and do their own research.
Incidentally that NYT report was filed by Ivan Nechepurenko who writes for The Moscow Times
(a pro-US newspaper) and who has worked with the Carnegie Moscow Center, another NGO that the
Kremlin should be fixing its sights on.
Comment on previous Obama Doctrine Whitewash thread Geoff # 106 Mar 11, 2016 1:56:01 2016 1:56:01
PM
"The only thing good about the political class perhaps, is that on the whole they keep the
rest of us moving, while simultaneously holding back a better future. Without their class, however,
perhaps we would propegate unimpeded and run out of food supplies."
Geoff,
This is the type of dystopian logic that is utilized at West Point and other War Colleges that
allows them to Manchurian Candidate drone pilots so they can mass murder brown people without
blinking an eye.
For many, if they didn't read about it in the NYT or saw it on Fox news then it never happened.
Combine enough of those missing ITS together and one can see what flavor of reality is being fed
to those that believe the myth of the last sentence.
Its the old Faith thingy, it works until it doesn't. Faith in America is not on the upswing
and is quite close to the tipping point on numerous fronts, ME politics, private finance (Fed,
IMF & World Bank), US Manifest Destiny, etc.
I am encouraged to recently hear David Draiman's (Disturbed) cover of 'Sound of Silence'. I
don't care about his background. I just want to note that, IMO, he upped the in your face aspect
of the message.... ".....People bowed and prayed, to the neon Gods THEY made...."
Just like what happened in Chicago yesterday with shutting down the Trump rally, the energy
level of the complacent is rising.
" ...the energy level of the complacent is rising" is an assumption that cuts both directions.
While it certainly is possible that Americans in general want change, I suspect that what many
want is really a return to the 1950's when the assumption was that we were the winners of a recent
war ... despite the fact that only a few hundred thousand Americans lost their lives defeating
the Japanese and Germany while China lost about 15 million, and the Russians lost around 25 Million.
WWII was simply a war between fascists and not a war against fascism.
The carpet bombing of Dresden and Tokyo, or the threat of being "Hiroshima'd" or "Nagasaki'd"
was the only real post WWII threats we had, and there was really no question we would use them
again.
It is really too bad that the best we Americans stand for is to be oblivious to the real issues
faced by the rest of the world so long as our plutocrats and oligarchs allow us to have some of
the benefits of world domination. /a>
The CIA used to handle all the subversive activities of the US Government abroad until the
Church and Pike commissions opened up that can of worms post-Watergate. The Reagan regime eventually
repackaged the US Government's efforts at subversion of foreign governments at the State Department:
These were apparently modeled on the CIA's efforts, organizations it had founded or subverted
in Germany, during the US' administration of West Germany after WW II:
It amazes me that any nation allows such blatant, political organizations, sponsored from abroad,
to operate within its borders, but ... money talks.
The NYTimes and WaPo are now funny papers, bald propaganda sites posing as newspapers,
and have been since the younger, neo-con Sulzberger took over from his 'liberal' dad at the one,
and since the Amazonian CIA contractor, Bezos, took over the other.
But the NYT writer hides from the readers the fact that the NDI is a U.S. government financed
organization. It is a "nonprofit organization" in the same sense that the U.S. Armed Forces are
a "nonprofit organization".
Posted by b on March 12, 2016 at 12:03 PM
Nailed it, b!
The United States Of AmeriKKKa's raison d'ętre in two short sentences. Pure genius & effing
brilliant!
@22 pc ' I know that RLS are pretty social democratic, but do they actually take US state dept
money? '
I don't know. I imagine that by now all the German GNGOs are German-government-funded. Just
as are the German and other NATO contingents. Still 'centrally coordinated' though, aren't they?
RLS was among the German political exporters at wikipedia, so I included it as well. Wikipedia
doesn't list the source of their funding, but I imagine they're government funded? A budget of
€44,391,120 in 2012, according to wp.
GNGOs - Government-funded Non-Governmental Organizations - are in every way a contradiction
in terms, and those exporting Government-funded Non-Governmental product ought to be turned around
at the border of any and every other supposedly independent state to which they are sent, as an
obvious infringement of national sovereignty.
" ...the energy level of the complacent is rising"
ISIS and Al Nusra pose at rebelling against their Saudi/CIA masters, and yet through war and
terror do exactly what Saudi/U.S./Israel want them to do.
Black Lives Matter and other identity politics groups pose at rebelling against their MoveOn
and Democratic Party masters, and yet through creation of chaos and 'FEAR OF TRUMP' do exactly
what the Democratic Party and Hillary 2016 want them to do.
Rg an LG @20
I thought where you were going was ... When the previously complacent but now energized are
tightly restricted in what they think is permissible thought, poorly and politically correctly
'educated', and (therefore) easily manipulated, they are as likely to be placated by 'other hatred',
or by imperialist fear-mongering and "Let's have a war!" as by all the good things we wish they'd
fight for.
Simply put, any and all organization pretending to do "good" has actually been infiltrated and
subverted by the PTB. From local NGO's all the way to HRW, USAID, Red Cross, and even UN agencies
like the Minustah who spread cholera to Haiti post-earthquake. But you dont believe in the NWO,
do you? ;) /a>
As the originator of " ...the energy level of the complacent is rising", please notice that I
didn't say what the result would be. I continue to smoke hopium or I would have offed myself long
ago.
i agree with fairleft/28 and Lozion/29 that all the spreading of Democracy since WWII has been
more about empire building with private finance at the core.
The reason we won't see world wide uprisings in the smaller countries is because our organizations
of empire backed by the MIC/NSA/CIA et. al. have eliminated any potential threats, likely in their
youth for decades now.
Again, the ring that rules them all is private finance and those that own that hidden matrix.
lebretteurfredonnant | Mar 12, 2016 11:10:53 PM |
32
Great article B
Next to the NED and the IRI, The Open Society of George Soros must be added to the forefront
of Pro Democracy nonprofit group used by The CIA and The deep state and the oligarchs linked to
them.
One thing about all this Russo-phobia is that with the new Russia military dominance all this
habit To scream bloody murder every time Russia does something seems Like water off a duck's back.It
is too late and unless Russia get another Yeltsin or Gorbachev after Putin or the united state
catch up on its military technology we are already living in a new world.The US dominance throughout
the world is over.
This action seems more about Putin's paranoia about internal dissent than the effectiveness of
these pseudo NGO's who can be easily monitored. Russia may have a military backed with Nukes but
their economy is about the size of Mexico so I doubt they will be projecting much military might
for very long.
Putin is apparently settling into his President for Life position and informing the weak opposition
that any dissent will be viewed as foreign interference.
article offers a bit more details, yet still unconfirmed whether it was "shot-down" by rebels
...
Syrian rebels claim to have downed a Syrian air force MiG-21 fighter jet that crashed in
Hama Province while bombing militant positions. At least one pilot died, for which conflicting
reports blame either fire from the ground or a jet malfunction. "The pilot was ejected and
brought to safety in al-Mughayr," a military source told the
Syrian Al Masdar News outlet. The same source insisted that the plane was not taken down
by militants, but crashed due to a technical failure.
Biden Jr's resume is unsurprisingly sprinkled with Ivy-league dust - he is on the
Chairman's Advisory Board for the National Democratic Institute , a director for the Center
for National Policy and the US Global Leadership Coalition comprising 400 American businesses,
NGOs, senior national security and foreign policy experts.
Former US President Bill Clinton appointed him an
Executive
Director of E-Commerce Policy and he was honorary co-chair of the 2008 Obama-Biden Inaugural
Committee.
NED and affiliates: a perpetuum mobile for reapimg benefits from US imperialism!
5;You will be very unhappy;Trump says he's gonna put Jesus back in Xmas!We'll be able to say Merry
Christmas wo getting the haters upset.I didn't see that quote in todays Ziorags though.
The lying times also gets yesterdays weather and sports scores correct,so lets be fair now.
Blaming the violence from outside agitators on Trumps "political arson"is hilarious.Who da Nazis?
Bernie quickly denounced Trumps claim of them being Sanders supporters.He has to eschew that commie
label. Move on .Org has been silent throughout the abysmal Obomba reign.There resurrection as
Trump bashers will be a death knell for the Ziohypocrites who run it.Trump is a direct threat
to the Zionist control of America.Their hair is on fire.
I think what is really happening is the that Trump people are not the complacent,as anyone
fighting his words obviously are stuck in the narrative of BS foisted on US by the global monsters,or
have skin in the illegal immigrant game.
Why are there no protesters at the hell bitches rallies?I mean she is directly responsible
for hundreds of thousands of innocents deaths,division and destruction to rival ww2,while Trump
calls to bring back troops,help the working man,protect and expand SS are protest worthy?All things
they protested under the shrub?Hypocrisy writ large.
21;Wapo was just as bad under the previous owners.
How any nation could trust American based NGOs in this day and age reveals the absolutely
perfidy of the leaders of those nations in allowing it. Payoffs.
I just read that The Donald has been invited and is going to make an appearance at the AIPAC
ring-kissing event toward the end of the month. The Hil and Joe Biden will be there too, of course,
kissing ass for all they're worth ... the only 'logical' thing for Trump to do is to let 'er rip
in opposition. Send his critics in both forks of the War Party around the bend, set his 'loyalists'
... and how many others? ... dancin' in the streets. The AIPAC command performance might be interesting
this year ...
Yeah the WaPo was trash before Bezos ... they played it straight though, tryied to carry
on as a newspaper with a poker face. Now the joker is unmasked. Bezos doesn't even care what people
think. He's laughing ... in print ... at the people who read his rag. \
It is a "nonprofit organization" in the same sense that the U.S. Armed Forces are a "nonprofit
organization".
An excellent description of all US/AngloZionist NGOs
@41 Trump has also stated, given the ISIS situation, he would put 20,000-30,000 US troops in
Iraq/Syria. He doesn't say whether they would be fighting with ISIS or against it.
41;Of course the donald will make nice with the framers of the agenda,or else they'll call in
Mossad to kill him off,or invent memes like HE is the fascist.Sheesh.The crimes of the Hell Bitch
leave one, with the lack of arrows at her huge inviting target suspicious,eh?
AIPAC;Talk bout a foreign NGO and its tax exempt!
Trump is not afraid to talk turkey with these clowns,he's dome it already,with his neutrality
comment.
Over the last 40 years or so it has become unfashionable among the intelligentsia to want Merry
Xmas said.It's the generic happy holidays.
Because the Zionists didn't like it. It's ok for the 60% Israelis to have a Jewish State, but
its not ok for 90%Christian America to have a Christian (nominal)state. And do you know who had
prayer (voluntary)t aken out of schools? Zionists from LI.Nazis. Just like the idiots in Chicago
who gave Sanders a black eye. Soros, the Zionist. Helps Shillary?
Their hypocrisy is breathtaking.
I hate organized religion btw, its all personal. Freedom.
And the FF agreed,by keeping religion far from govt.
[... ]
I imagine all the Pakistanis reading your joke are 'laughing' uproariously.
jfl | Mar 13, 2016 7:54:47 PM | 45
I do not know many Pakistanis but I know some. And in that small sample, some do show a sense
of humor and some do not.
By the way, I actually had hard time understanding if the problem of "Happy Holidays" versus
"Merry Christmas" is totally contrived or not. It reminds me when as a "wee lad" someone stopped
me on the street with a simple question "Where is the store?" "What do you mean, the store?" "Liquor
store, of course!" The point is that when you say "Happy Holidays" in Poland it is an obvious
abbreviation of Holiday of the God's Birth.
And after few months another problem. You can wish "Happy Holidays" once more, but more standard
is "Happy Great Night Holidays" and somewhat rare "Happy Holidays of the Lord's Resurection".
So to people who have a choleric attitude to some variations of the greetings I would wish
"Be yourself! Be grumpy if you wish! No need to be happy!".
"... Looking beneath the facade of the color revolutionary movement we also find a desire-based behavioral structure, in particular one that has been built upon historical lessons offered by social movements and periods of political upheaval. ..."
"... It then makes sense that the personnel of such operations include perception managers, PR firms, pollsters and opinion-makers in the social media. Through the operational infrastructure, these entities work in close coordination with intelligence agents, local and foreign activists, strategists and tacticians, tax-exempt foundations, governmental agencies, and a host of non- governmental organizations. ..."
"... Collectively, their job is to make a palace coup (of their sponsorship) seem like a social revolution; to help fill the streets with fearless demonstrators advocating on behalf of a government of their choosing, which then legitimizes the sham governments with the authenticity of popular democracy and revolutionary fervor. ..."
"... Their effectiveness is predicated on their ability to deceive, targeting both local populations and foreign audiences with highly-misleading interpretations of the underlying causes provoking these events. ..."
"... The American people must quickly learn the formula behind color revolutions, destabilizations, and the agendas of the world oligarchy before it becomes too late for us all. They must learn that simply because leaders appear to them, attempt to speak the same language and articulate rage does not mean that these leaders are men of the people. ..."
"... the wanton destruction of communities belonging to you or your neighbors is not only counterproductive, it produces rage that will be aimed back at you, and justifiably so. The entire country is being played like a fiddle. ..."
The relevance of the Soros connection may seem confusing to many. Certainly, however, no
one in their right mind will suggest that a man that has made his fortune bankrupting nations and
impoverishing their peoples lies awake at night wringing his hands over concerns for black people
in America.
Soros is most well-known for playing a major role in the funding and facilitating of the "Bulldozer
Revolution" in Serbia that overthrew Slobodan Milosevic in 2000, Georgia's "Rose Revolution"
of 2003, the 2006 push to move Turkey toward a more Islamist governing structure, and even the Occupy
movement in the United States among a great many others - none of which brought anything other than
greater misery, impoverishment, and police state mechanisms to bear on the general public. The Occupy
movement, being the only exception, still brought nothing to its participants except the opportunity
to burn off excess anger and energy along with a few cracked protester skulls. It was otherwise an
incredible waste of time.
Regardless, the methods being used by the Soros machine in terms of the #blacklivesmatter
and other related campaigns across the country are much the same as those used in Europe to usher
in greater austerity, police states, and fascism through government-coup and social protest
- i.e. a coordinated media campaign to provide the general public with a false perception of events
as well as a false narrative, the use of social media and slogans, and the deployment of "swarming
adolescents" in the streets.
When media campaigns alone are not enough, there are other methods that are able to be implemented
if need be. For instance, a
Mother Jones report revealed the fact that in some areas where rioting began, there appears to
have been a concerted effort on the part of the authorities to create an environment in which riots
would be inevitable. For example, in an instance where it was reported that teens in Baltimore attacked
police by throwing rocks, it was never mentioned that police had corralled these teens - who should
have been on their way home - off the bus and into an area in between the mall and the high school.
According to onlookers, it appeared that both the teens and the police were surprised at the situation
- the police surprised at the lack of violence and the teens surprised that they were kept from going
home. Eventually, rocks and bottles were reportedly thrown at police and the situation deteriorated
from there. Of course, the entire story was never fully reported in the mainstream press. Still,
while the rocks and bottles may have started from those in the crowd, others may justifiably wonder
if there were not provocateurs already placed simply waiting to cause violence as soon as the tension
had reached a boiling point. As it is, it is very likely that protesters and police alike were dupes
in a devious game.
Consider also the fact that the Baltimore authorities, despite implementing heavy-handed tactics
against high schoolers on their way home, allowed criminals, thieves, and violent thugs to prey upon
innocent people, private property, and communities for quite some time without a serious effort to
stop them. In fact, Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake even openly admitted that the looters
were allowed to riot
when she stated that "We also gave those who wish to destroy space to do that as well." The police
were prevented from actually stopping the riots and were kept largely unequipped as well. In other
words, the riots were both allowed and encouraged until they had reached a boiling point
and the National Guard was called in.
Of course, the color revolution and destabilization is not merely some communiqué presented to
a small group of people that organically takes on a life of its own. There is an entire science behind
the application of a movement of destabilization both when it takes place overseas as well as when
it takes place domestically.
As Pottenger and Frieson of Color Revolutions and Geopolitics write,
Many are the professions that utilize this type of understanding, including (but not limited to)
marketing, advertising, public relations, politics and law-making, radio, television, journalism
and news, film, music, general business and salesmanship; each of them selling, branding, promoting,
entertaining, sloganeering, framing, explaining, creating friends and enemies, arguing likes and
dislikes, setting the boundaries of good and evil: in many cases using their talents to circumvent
their audiences' intellect, the real target being emotional, oftentimes even subconscious.
Looking beneath the facade of the color revolutionary movement we also find a desire-based
behavioral structure, in particular one that has been built upon historical lessons offered by
social movements and periods of political upheaval.
It then makes sense that the personnel of such operations include perception managers,
PR firms, pollsters and opinion-makers in the social media. Through the operational infrastructure,
these entities work in close coordination with intelligence agents, local and foreign activists,
strategists and tacticians, tax-exempt foundations, governmental agencies, and a host of non-
governmental organizations.
Collectively, their job is to make a palace coup (of their sponsorship) seem like a social
revolution; to help fill the streets with fearless demonstrators advocating on behalf of a government
of their choosing, which then legitimizes the sham governments with the authenticity of popular
democracy and revolutionary fervor.
Because the operatives perform much of their craft in the open, their effectiveness is heavily
predicated upon their ability to veil the influence backing them, and the long-term intentions
guiding their work.
Their effectiveness is predicated on their ability to deceive, targeting both local populations
and foreign audiences with highly-misleading interpretations of the underlying causes provoking
these events.
With this explanation in mind, consider the description provided by Ian Traynor of the Guardian
regarding the "revolutions" and "mass movements" which was taking place in Ukraine, Serbia, Belarus,
and Georgia in 2004 and the time of the writing of his article. Indeed, Traynor's depiction of the
methodology used by the Foundations, NGOs, and government agencies stirring up dissent and popular
revolt is equally illuminating.
Traynor writes,
In the centre of Belgrade, there is a dingy office staffed by computer-literate youngsters who
call themselves the Centre for Non-violent Resistance. If you want to know how to beat a regime
that controls the mass media, the judges, the courts, the security apparatus and the voting stations,
the young Belgrade activists are for hire.
They emerged from the anti-Milosevic student movement, Otpor, meaning resistance. The catchy,
single-word branding is important. In Georgia last year, the parallel student movement was Khmara.
In Belarus, it was Zubr. In Ukraine, it is Pora, meaning high time. Otpor also had a potent, simple
slogan that appeared everywhere in Serbia in 2000 - the two words "gotov je", meaning "he's finished",
a reference to Milosevic. A logo of a black-and-white clenched fist completed the masterful marketing.
In Ukraine, the equivalent is a ticking clock, also signalling that the Kuchma regime's days
are numbered.
Stickers, spray paint and websites are the young activists' weapons. Irony and street comedy
mocking the regime have been hugely successful in puncturing public fear and enraging the powerful.
These slogans and symbols are the product of mass marketers employed by State Departments and
intelligence agencies for the sole purpose of destabilizing and/or overthrowing a democratically
elected or unfavorable (to the oligarchy)government.
The details and techniques of the manipulation of mass numbers of people have only continued to become
more and more advanced and sophisticated, particularly with the advent of social media.
As Jonathan Mowat wrote,
As in the case of the new communication technologies, the potential effectiveness of angry youth
in postmodern coups has long been under study. As far back as 1967, Dr. Fred Emery, then director
of the Tavistock Institute, and an expert on the "hypnotic effects" of television, specified that
the then new phenomenon of "swarming adolescents" found at rock concerts could be effectively
used to bring down the nation-state by the end of the 1990s. This was particularly the case, as
Dr. Emery reported in "The next thirty years: concepts, methods and anticipations,'' in the group's
"Human Relations," because the phenomena was associated with "rebellious hysteria." The British
military created the Tavistock Institute as its psychological warfare arm following World War
I; it has been the forerunner of such strategic planning ever since. Dr. Emery's concept saw immediate
application in NATO's use of "swarming adolescents" in toppling French President Charles De Gaulle
in 1967.[1]
[...]
In November 1989, Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, Ohio, under the aegis of that university's
"Program for Social Innovations in Global Management," began a series of conferences to review
progress towards that strategic objective, which was reported on in "Human Relations" in 1991.
There, Dr. Howard Perlmutter, a professor of "Social Architecture'' at the Wharton School, and
a follower of Dr. Emery, stressed that "rock video in Kathmandu," was an appropriate image of
how states with traditional cultures could be destabilized, thereby creating the possibility of
a "global civilization." There are two requirements for such a transformation, he added, "building
internationally committed networks of international and locally committed organizations,'' and
"creating global events" through "the transformation of a local event into one having virtually
instantaneous international implications through mass-media."[2]
The American people must quickly learn the formula behind color revolutions,
destabilizations, and the agendas of the world oligarchy before it becomes too late for us all.
They must learn that simply because "leaders" appear to them, attempt to speak the same language
and articulate rage does not mean that these leaders are men of the people.
Protests are necessary. Directed rage may also be necessary. But the wanton destruction of communities
belonging to you or your neighbors is not only counterproductive, it produces rage that will be aimed
back at you, and justifiably so. The entire country is being played like a fiddle. Baltimore is not
an isolated collection of dupes, it is a microcosm. It is time the American people wise up and become
street smart before it is too late.
This is the review of the book of David Talbot's The Devil's Chessboard. Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise
of America's Secret Government by one of Moon of Alabama readers.
Looks like the course on making The USA imperial power (which was related later in Washington consensus and Wolfowitz doctrine)
was taken directly after WWII. Cold War was just a smoke screen under which the USA tried to establish hegemony over the world. Both
documents could well be written by Alan Dulles himself.
Any president who dare to deviate from this is ostracized , impeached or killed. So the political role of intelligence agencies
since their establishment by Truman was to serve as the brain center if USA imperial beuracracy (as well as the tools for projecting
it abroad)
The CIA is a hybrid of an intelligence service that gathers and analyzes foreign intelligence and a clandestine service that
conducts covert operations. Both functions are essential to creating pretexts for wars and for expanding the US influence abroad for
multinationals, and that is what they have done for 70 years (Dulles came from Wall Street). Among other things it
deliberately creates small wars just to demonstrate the US military might. Neoconservative theorist and intelligence operative
Michael Ledeen suggested that every 10 years or so, the United States "pick up some small crappy little country and throw it
against the wall, just to show we mean business."
Another book deserves to mentioned here too here too. Prouty book
The Secret Team: The CIA and its Allies in Control
of the United States and the World (which was suppressed in 1973 when irt was published and did not see shelves before
republishing in 2011) is described like the the U.S.'s aggressive and illegal war policy conducted by CIA has finally provoked
a real military threat to the U.S., albeit one that has emerged only in response to U.S. war plans
U.S. Air Force Colonel Fletcher Prouty was the chief of special operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1955 to 1964,
managing the global military support system for the CIA in Vietnam and around the world. described how the CIA infiltrated the U.S.
military, the State Department, the National Security Council and other government institutions, covertly placing its officers in
critical positions to ensure that its plans are approved and that it has access to whatever forces, weapons, equipment, ammunition
and other resources it needs to carry them out.
Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... We find Dulles attempting to convince his superiors of the need and advantages of dealing with "moderate Nazis" like Reinhard
Gehlen, so today there are personalities in our government following a policy of working with "moderate Islamists" and "moderate ultra-nationalists"
to achieve our goals. ..."
"... Perhaps someone looking for more focus on Dulles the man might be disappointed by this, but for someone like myself interested
in the history and insights of era Dulles lived in. The era covered is approximately the 1930s through the 1969. ..."
"... the ruling elite of the US was deeply split. ..."
"... A large portion of the US elite was sympathetic to the Nazis. Indeed, the pro-Nazi segment of the US elite had built up ties
with Germany during the inter-war period. The bonds were economic, political and even ideological - indeed, these links were so important
that likely Germany would not have been able to rearm itself without the help of these "patriotic" Americans (Talbot makes clear that
in some cases this kinship was evident even during the war itself!). ..."
"... And no one represents the fascist sympathizing segment of the US elite like Allen Dulles. ..."
"... Talbot covers this topic well and makes a very good case for Dulles involvement - including revealing (from his day calendar)
the fact that "fired" and "retired" from the CIA Allen Dulles, spent the weekend - from the time Kennedy was shot and killed Friday
through the hours that Oswald was gunned down - at a CIA command facility in Virginia. ..."
I just finished listening to the audio book of David Talbot's The Devil's Chessboard. Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise
of America's Secret Government . It was very good I think.
I'll spare you a full review, but the Dulles era has some very important and interesting similarities with our own (in fact,
the ties are most certainly those first formed during the Dulles brothers tenure at State and CIA). Talbot doesn't delve deeply
into these more recent aspects, but he does acknowledge them. And the similarities are quite clear. We find Dulles attempting
to convince his superiors of the need and advantages of dealing with "moderate Nazis" like Reinhard Gehlen, so today there are
personalities in our government following a policy of working with "moderate Islamists" and "moderate ultra-nationalists" to achieve
our goals.
Initially I had heard that it was a Allen Dulles biography, and though there is a lot of detail about his personal life, his
marriage, and even his kids, I would say it strays from what one might consider a "standard" biography and is more about Dulles
and his times. For instance, there are a couple of chapters devoted just to the Kennedy Assassination, another on Oswald, and
one on the "Generals' putsch" in France in '61. Perhaps someone looking for more focus on Dulles the man might be disappointed
by this, but for someone like myself interested in the history and insights of era Dulles lived in. The era covered is approximately
the 1930s through the 1969.
Talbot uses Dulles life as the base to build up the important (and to my mind misunderstood and misconstrued) stories in recent
US history. That story is, of course, the following: despite the impression most Americans have of our country fighting the ultimate
"good war" against universally despised enemies - that fact is that the ruling elite of the US was deeply split.
A large portion of the US elite was sympathetic to the Nazis. Indeed, the pro-Nazi segment of the US elite had built up
ties with Germany during the inter-war period. The bonds were economic, political and even ideological - indeed, these links were
so important that likely Germany would not have been able to rearm itself without the help of these "patriotic" Americans (Talbot
makes clear that in some cases this kinship was evident even during the war itself!).
And no one represents the fascist sympathizing segment of the US elite like Allen Dulles. And Talbot tracks this key
figure's fascist ties as he rises in the US power structure from his early years as an OSS man wheeling and dealing with Nazi
generals in Bern, Switzerland and on through Dulles' creation and/or support of fascist governments in Latin America, the Middle
East, and Africa during the Cold War. Talbot covers the events surrounding Dulles life excellently. Especially moving was his
chapter on Guatemala - the tragedy of the Arbenz family as a mirror of the tragedy of Guatemala is covered through the eyes of
the grandson of Arbez.
Talbot covers the horror stories of the results of America working closely with dictators like Trujillo, the Shah, Mobutu Sese
Seko, and Batista (he misses Indonesia though, an operation that caused the death of 1,000,000 Indonesians). But of course, as
an American, the most important question to Talbot is that of Dulles role in the Kennedy assassination. Talbot covers this
topic well and makes a very good case for Dulles involvement - including revealing (from his day calendar) the fact that "fired"
and "retired" from the CIA Allen Dulles, spent the weekend - from the time Kennedy was shot and killed Friday through the hours
that Oswald was gunned down - at a CIA command facility in Virginia.
Allen Dulles papers released by CIA to Princeton are now online
Posted on January 23, 2008 by Dan Linke
The Central Intelligence Agency has released to Princeton University some 7,800 documents covering the career of Allen W.
Dulles, the agency's longest-serving director, which now can be viewed online at
http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/st74cq497
Dulles (1893-1969), a Princeton alumnus who headed the CIA from 1953 to 1961, was renowned for his role in shaping U.S.
intelligence operations during the Cold War. Last March, the CIA released to Princeton a collection of letters, memoranda,
reports and other papers - some still redacted - that the agency had removed from Dulles' papers after his death and before
their transfer to the University in 1974.
"... The USA attacks militarily directly, or by overt other means (economic), or behind the curtain: ..."
"... countries, groups, that have a socialistic bent, try to do well for their citizens, and/or espouse some ideology that appears, *on the face of it*, anti-capitalistic, nationalistic, or pan-national (e.g. Communism in the past, Baath party, Arab nationalism, Cuba.) ..."
"... Energy rich countries who wont open up to US corps, domination. (ex. Venezuela), or wont permit US type banking system in their country, or arent subservient enough on a host of points (ex. Syria, Lybia) or somehow manage to cozy and then resist for a long while (ex. Iraq) ..."
Dan at 2.
There is no single cohesive policy. Only selfishness
The USA attacks militarily directly, or by overt other means (economic), or behind the curtain:
those that challenge it even in the imagination, provided small and pretty powerless
countries, groups, that have a 'socialistic' bent, try to do well for their citizens, and/or
espouse some ideology that appears, *on the face of it*, anti-capitalistic, nationalistic, or pan-national
(e.g. Communism in the past, Baath party, Arab nationalism, Cuba.)
those who try to annul or wash away ethnic, racist, religious, and so on differences in favor
of some kind of 'universality', a citizen status, mandate - this goes against the colonialist model,
abroad and at home, in which ppl are sand niggers, blacks, etc. The US support for equality thus
turns to trivia, gay marriage, quarrels about abortion, etc.
Energy rich countries who won't open up to US corps, domination. (ex. Venezuela), or won't
permit US type banking system in their country, or aren't subservient enough on a host of points
(ex. Syria, Lybia) or somehow manage to cozy and then resist for a long while (ex. Iraq)
Those who are involved massively with illegal and dubious trade - human trafficking, organ
sales, child forced prostitution, drugs, illegal arms, condoned murder of rivals, vicious internal
repression, heavy torture, prisons, etc. are generally supported, but on occasion they rebel or try
for other, which is not to be allowed (ex. Afghanistan)
Anyone that can be attacked on any grounds, opportunistically, to racketeer fines, big sums
of money, such as in the banking sector.
Countries it pretends to admire who are secretely dominated by them and only escape ostracim,
sanctions or bombs or more by subservience, and a 'belonging to a controlled block' (EU.) Sweden
and the Netherlands come to mind.
Other.
That is a lot countries, people, all together. The foreign policy is not cohesive, I agree, it
is simply all over the board, adjusted all the time, based on ad hoc criteria, racist supremacy,
capitalistic short term profiteering, snobby disaproval, empty rage, power plays, sectorial interests,
corporate meddling, personal arm-twisting and blackmail, deals with foreign potentates, arms production
and selling which needs war, and on and on.
"... The author may be too young to know about it. A detailed study of FBI and other infiltrations into various movements through the 50s , 60s, 70s would repay the effort. ..."
"... Perhaps field guides should be written on how to "spot the agent", "spot the plant", "spot the disruptor" etc. ..."
"... "Homeless people make up a significant proportion of participants in the Occupy Movement in cities across the United States, from Los Angeles to Atlanta, where at times they comprise an estimated third of the occupiers… Despite stereotypical beliefs that homeless people are not interested in politics, the homeless actually have perhaps the least to lose and the most to gain from being involved in the Occupy Movement." ..."
"... "[The social composition of the movement is] quite varied. Occupy Oakland, for example, is perhaps 50% black and Latino, whereas occupations in other parts of the country may be mostly white. Some occupations are primarily very poor people, homeless people, etc., others include a lot of white-collar workers. Young 'précaires' [people whose work situation and future prospects are precarious] are certainly among the most numerous participants." ..."
"... Yes, there was a 17-city, coordinated paramilitary crackdown. All in one night. I watched and chronicled the live stream. ..."
"... For about a year I've wondered why NC could be so hard on Syriza while continuing to run that embarrassing Occupy banner at the top of the page. And you're fond of quoting Gandhi, (you lose, you lose, they give up, you win). But while you're losing you're getting beat up. And that's the problem with Americans generally; can't take a punch. Glass jaw. ..."
"... When leadership isn't willing to make that commitment there is no organization. And with no organization we're left with "going postal". Americans are much more adept at that. ..."
"... Unlike the situation in Europe, however, there appears to be little effort among the dispersed elements of the movement in the United States to achieve political power. The stronger effort here is to create a viable alternative to the current corrupt and destructive political/economic system, to step outside it and grow something else again. ..."
"... L'Échaudée: "Would you say that State repression (especially the unified and coordinated raids against the camps) was the main cause of Occupy's decline?" Ken Knabb: "Yes." ..."
"... Yes. And the violent attack on the encampments didn't just disperse the people. Cops destroyed food and food service supplies, shelter, electronic equipment, libraries, and medical and first-aid supplies, much of it likely donated by people not necessarily able to be part of an encampment. For some campers this was maybe most of what they had or, for the homeless and other marginalized people who came to the camps, more than they had. If we do build a movement, if bringing about real change will require people to strike, or boycott, or occupy vacant land or buildings, this kind of community support is crucial. We ought not discount (the "authorities" certainly didn't) the material and psychological impact of this destruction beyond just the local participants; and we need to find more sustainable, less vulnerable ways of providing community support. ..."
"... There is a difference between "color revolution" style events which promote neoliberalism and Occupy style events that oppose it. In case of color revolution style events the participants can rely on all the power of Western embassies, NGO, intelligence agencies and flow of money and equipment. Training of leaders would be provided, "revolutionaries for hire" will emerge, etc. ..."
"... Many of us Professional-Managerial Class (PMC) activists are hampered by having been told implicitly and explicitly for our entire education that we are the leaders of the world when we are at best lieutenants of the 1%. ..."
"... The sort of utopianism on display here is not only callow and tiresome (and precisely why Occupy failed), but also depressing. And if it reflects the level of understanding held by "activists" of the nature of the crisis we face, I am not heartened. ..."
"... I agree completely. This recap is self-absorbed, naive, and absurd - it reminds me in many ways of the business plan of a start-up that has no clear route to actually making money. It's impossible to imagine a movement of people who think like this accomplishing anything, because they have no model for the outcome they want; what they do have is a model for how they want themselves to be. ..."
"... "As a life-long member of the working class I find the suggestion that I need to be schooled in the ways of courageous resistance breathtakingly arrogant" ..."
"... Whatever else you may say about Lenin, his goals, his means, or his beliefs, he had a remarkably clear-eyed and unsentimental view of power and how one goes about getting it and how one goes about holding on to it. ..."
"... From my perspective the Leninist alternative dismisses any interest in a democratically self-organized society. In postulating a disciplined revolutionary party to act in the name of society he completed the final arc in a profoundly undemocratic political trajectory from which the traditional Left has not yet recovered. ..."
"... May be the traditional Left has not yet recovered , but traditional right fully adopted Lenin's methods and organization under color revolution banner. ..."
"... "Occupy" failed because it had no goal, and having no goal, it didn't know how to get there. See: http://goo.gl/m6qmGn ..."
"... It goes on and on, protest after protest. Anti-racial profiling. Anti-union busting. Anti-tuition increases. Anti-school closings. Anti-mortgage fraud. Anti-unsustainable development. Anti-corruption. Anti-this, anti-that, anti-the other thing. ..."
"... For reasons unknown, the Occupy movement seems to take a perverse pride in being leaderless and directionless, preferring to run hither and yon, protesting whatever strikes their fancy. No focus. No plan. No idea. Just protest. ..."
"... The Tea Party has a simple, easily understood focus: Lower taxes. What is Occupy's simple, easily understood focus? ..."
"... The public grows weary of ineffectual, random, aimless protests, and Occupy, which began with such great promise, becomes last week's newspaper. A lost opportunity is a step backward, as people become discouraged and slide into lethargy. ..."
"... Somewhere, in board rooms around the world, the 1% is laughing. ..."
"... Do nothing? I'd be curious to hear what you mean on that. It took incredibly coordinated state action to defuse Occupy, not public weariness. ..."
"... It's unfortunate Occupy was not able to organize in a way to neutralize such action, but at the very least, it pulled back the curtain on the police state specifically and the power of government more generally in a way no one can deny moving forward. That's the spark of hope from the various events of the last few years. The elites want us to believe they are all powerful. But it is actually taking them quite a bit of effort to maintain that illusion. In reality, they are strategically weak and vulnerable. And they know it. ..."
"... Which is why the Democratic party has had to become so blatantly pro-inequality. Even a modest opposition to fascism on their part would ruin the efforts of the past few decades. ..."
Leaderlessness is very different than having many leaders. The strongest movements have
many leaders that each know/feel when/how to lead and follow and cooperate in turn. Many
powerful people, powerful enough to know that power does not mean dominating others in the
movement. Such a movement will be much harder to stop than a leaderless one, where the FBI can
easily insert its own leaders and derail the whole thing.
The author doesn't address it, but I wouldn't be surprised if many of those emotional bullies
he describes were gov't plants. Building a movement full of physically and emotionally
powerful people is how to combat such tactics.
different clue, December 28, 2015 at 3:10 pm
The author may be too young to know about it. A detailed study of FBI and other
infiltrationism into various movements through the 50s , 60s, 70s would repay the effort.
Perhaps field guides should be written on how to "spot the agent", "spot the plant", "spot
the disruptor" etc.
nobody, December 28, 2015 at 10:04 am
Anybody who says, of Occupy, that "everyone went home," doesn't know what the fuck they are
talking about.
cf:
"Homeless people make up a significant proportion of participants in the Occupy Movement in
cities across the United States, from Los Angeles to Atlanta, where at times they comprise an
estimated third of the occupiers… Despite stereotypical beliefs that homeless people are not
interested in politics, the homeless actually have perhaps the least to lose and the most to
gain from being involved in the Occupy Movement."
(Matthew Charles Cardinale, "U.S.: Homeless Play Key Role in Occupy Movement," from December,
2011.)
**
"[The social composition of the movement is] quite varied. Occupy Oakland, for example, is
perhaps 50% black and Latino, whereas occupations in other parts of the country may be mostly
white. Some occupations are primarily very poor people, homeless people, etc., others include
a lot of white-collar workers. Young 'précaires' [people whose work situation and future
prospects are precarious] are certainly among the most numerous participants."
(Ken Knabb, "The Occupy Movement at Its Peak, November 10, 2011)
Yves Smith, December 28, 2015 at 1:45 pm
Yes, there was a 17-city, coordinated paramilitary crackdown. All in one night. I
watched and chronicled the live stream.
Occupy had very much depended on "place" as in the actual occupations. They had a great
deal of difficult regrouping after that.
In NYC some group continue to do good work, most notably Occupy the SEC and Alternative
Banking. Occupy Sandy was VERY important, and some of the many Occupy Homes groups were
effective but not give much credit or even notice in the media.
MarcoPolo, December 28, 2015 at 9:48 am
For about a year I've wondered why NC could be so hard on Syriza while continuing to run
that embarrassing Occupy banner at the top of the page. And you're fond of quoting Gandhi,
(you lose, you lose, they give up, you win). But while you're losing you're getting beat up.
And that's the problem with Americans generally; can't take a punch. Glass jaw.
Jesse published a quote from Fredrick Douglas a couple of weeks ago. I can't find it now. But
it speaks to that; the commitment and preparation necessary to take the kind of punishment you
must. When leadership isn't willing to make that commitment there is no organization. And with
no organization we're left with "going postal". Americans are much more adept at that.
Interesting that I didn't see any recognition that Podemos has won electoral victory in
Spain (May have missed it, long article and all). Podemos grew directly out of the Indignato
movement which was a precursor and model for the Occupy movement in the US and latterly around
the world.
Whether Podemos will go the way of Syriza and basically become the leftish face of neo-fascism
and colonialism remains to be seen. They say they learned from the Greek tragedy and they
won't make the same mistakes Syriza did, but power does strange things to its holders and
implementers.
The occupied squares were cleared by police in Madrid and the rest of Spain, sometimes over
and over again and with as much violence as the police displayed in the United States and
elsewhere, but the movement did not die in Spain. It dispersed and in dispersion, it built a
politically potent element that now has control of the Spanish government - at least in
theory. We'll see what happens when "reality" sets in.
The movement was not destroyed, it was dispersed in the US as well. Hundreds of localized
programs and projects grew out of the dispersal of the Occupy movement, many of which continue
and grow. The dispersal of the movement was akin to the broadcast of seeds over fields.
Unlike the situation in Europe, however, there appears to be little effort among the dispersed
elements of the movement in the United States to achieve political power. The stronger effort
here is to create a viable alternative to the current corrupt and destructive
political/economic system, to step outside it and grow something else again.
That's more in tune with the anarchist roots of the movement than trying to obtain control of
government.
nobody
The secret truth is that Occupy Wall Street was supposed to work.
And this is how it was supposed to work:
"A worldwide shift in revolutionary tactics is underway right now that
bodes well for the future… The beauty of this new formula, and what makes
this novel tactic exciting, is its pragmatic simplicity: we talk to each
other in various physical gatherings and virtual people's assemblies … we
zero in on what our one demand will be, a demand that awakens the
imagination and, if achieved, would propel us toward the radical democracy
of the future … and then we go out and seize a square of singular symbolic
significance and put our asses on the line to make it happen.
"The time has come to deploy this emerging stratagem against the greatest
corrupter of our democracy: Wall Street, the financial Gomorrah of America.
"On September 17, we want to see 20,000 people flood into lower
Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall
Street for a few months. Once there, we shall incessantly repeat one
simple demand in a plurality of voices.
"Tahrir succeeded in large part because the people of Egypt made a
straightforward ultimatum – that Mubarak must go – over and over again
until they won. Following this model, what is our equally uncomplicated
demand?… something all Americans, right and left, yearn for and
can stand behind."
And what happened to that idea? David Graeber and his friends derailed
it:
"Two days later, at the Outreach meeting we were brainstorming what to
put on our first flyer. Adbusters' idea had been that we focus on "one key
demand." [sic] This was a brilliant idea from a marketing
perspective, but from an organizing perspective, it made no sense at all. We
put that one aside almost immediately. There were much more fundamental
questions to be hashed out. Like: who were we? Who did want to appeal to?
Who did we represent?"
Yotam Marom: "But the truth is, it wasn't the state…"
**
L'Échaudée: "Would you say that State repression (especially the unified and
coordinated raids against the camps) was the main cause of Occupy's decline?"
Yes. And the violent attack on the encampments didn't just disperse the
people. Cops destroyed food and food service supplies, shelter, electronic
equipment, libraries, and medical and first-aid supplies, much of it likely
donated by people not necessarily able to be part of an encampment. For some
campers this was maybe most of what they had or, for the homeless and other
marginalized people who came to the camps, more than they had. If we do
build a movement, if bringing about real change will require people to
strike, or boycott, or occupy vacant land or buildings, this kind of
community support is crucial. We ought not discount (the "authorities"
certainly didn't) the material and psychological impact of this destruction
beyond just the local participants; and we need to find more sustainable,
less vulnerable ways of providing community support.
different clue, December 28, 2015 at 2:54 pm
Weren't the very first few days of Occupy Wall Street conducted by semi-spontaneous
contemporary young people in part responding to a slogan written and a call issued by Kalle
Lasn of Adbusters Magazine ( "Occupy Wall Street") called-for to happen on a particular day?
This is just sketchy memory to be sure. And it became worth much more than one day's
involvement.
But after the very first few days, I read somewhere that David Graeber and other
older-generation holdover-anarchist-nostalgiasts crashed the movement and infiltrated the
leadership and degraded it into a live-action display of "this is what Anarchism looks like".
If that is part of the problem of what happened, then younger people will have to analyse that
very carefully and if they have another upsurge, they will have to rigidly exclude and reject
any David Graberoid self-actualizing/validation-seeking aging Anarchist Nostalgiasts from any
contact whatsoever from a genuine upsurge-of-the-young movement.
They might also do some careful thinking about what they actually DO want, and WHY they want
it . . . in actionable specificity.
Jim
So what is the lesson from this type of response by the national
security state?
It may be worthwhile to take a more careful look at successful
occupation strikes.
For example, Solidarity in Poland, after 30 years of average
citizen political defeats, managed, through a carefully thought-out
and premeditated assertion of power to occupy the Lenin Shipyard, in
August of 1980, and to also create an interfactory strike committee
which at the beginning consisted of 20 supporting enterprises that
insured lateral lines of communication between the occupying sites
within the entire Baltic coastal region–in order to ultimately
accomplish was was thought of as impossible–the achievement of a
self-governing trade union independent of the party state.
When the strike was initially announced at the Lenin Shipyard
Walesa said the following:
"I declare an occupation strike. I have been given the trust of the
workers. We are occupying the shipyard. We aren't going anywhere until
we're sure we've gotten what we wanted. We're staying. This is an
occupation strike. I'll be the last one to leave."
They had a single strategic goal with some 20 additional demands
backed by a self-created institutional structure (with significant
leverage) that was able to protect its citizens and leadership within
the shipyard from the State during the time of occupation.
Serious politics with extremely high stakes that managed, for a
time, to shift the balance of power, within Poland–and people who
participated in this success talked about how their personal fear, in
the process of this democratic assertion of power, began to dissipate.
likbez
There is a difference between "color revolution" style events which promote
neoliberalism and Occupy style events that oppose it. In case of color revolution style events the participants can rely on all the power of Western
embassies, NGO, intelligence agencies and flow of money and equipment.
Training of leaders would be provided, "revolutionaries for hire" will emerge, etc.
Occupy was against the most powerful state in the world without any substantial external support.
I would distill my history of activism since the 60's by claiming that the new society will grow
within the cracks of the old. I turned from working on "the revolution" a long time ago and now
focus on small, achievable projects that have a potential for lasting and making a difference – a
progressive forum that brings in speakers to a monthly potluck, a progressive film festival that
encourages wide-ranging political discussion, a small think tank consisting of volunteers
researching local issues (tax increment financing, anyone?).
Many of us Professional-Managerial Class (PMC) activists are hampered by having been told
implicitly and explicitly for our entire education that we are the leaders of the world when we
are at best lieutenants of the 1%. For dealing with the rest of the (non-PMC) world, I recommend
the strategy suggested by Lois Mark Stalvey in The Education of a WASP: (Loosely quoting from
memory) Go to meetings run by minorities (or non PMC-types), do not take over the meeting or
offer advice – just be there and help with whatever project they are working on; develop
relationships.
Experience being the minority. Later, when you have become accepted as a member of
the group, only make suggestions and proposals that promote progressive values and build on the
group's already existing values. Always be respectful of the group and its members. This is the
best training for dealing with the world and building connected centers of resistance.
GlobalMisanthrope, December 28, 2015 at 12:48 pm
Sorry everybody, but I'm going to go against the grain here. Putting to one side the
intolerably wise-whimsical tone, I read this piece as hagiography posing as critique.
(It's mortifying to read, especially the struggle as raison d'ętre trope where he's
totally cribbing and doesn't even seem to know it, even though this has been put forth
as recently as this year to much fanfare and criticism by Ta-Nehisi Coates. No, he
thinks he made it up. Yikes!)
Human history is disheveled, spasmodic attempts by those of us who would really rather
get on with our lives to stop the ruthless from making that impossible. This battle
rages and recedes over and over, sometimes for centuries. Just look how the revolutions
of Christianity and capitalism completely reshaped the world and in both cases for good
and for bad. Good grief, son. Read a book.
What's more, if you need Gestalt therapy to evoke fear in your heart, then you either
aren't paying attention or are on the safe side of the fray. The rest of us are daily
made aware that power and powerlessness are not cosmetic and that those are the forces
that shape our lives while we try to live in them as best we can. And yet we find the
courage to smile at our children. As a life-long member of the working class I find the
suggestion that I need to be schooled in the ways of courageous resistance
breathtakingly arrogant. I am not charmed.
The sort of utopianism on display here is not only callow and tiresome (and precisely
why Occupy failed), but also depressing. And if it reflects the level of understanding
held by "activists" of the nature of the crisis we face, I am not heartened.
SRL, December 28, 2015 at 12:59 pm
I agree. Although I supported Occupy, it really had nothing to teach me.
Nick, December 28, 2015 at 3:40 pm
I agree completely. This recap is self-absorbed, naive, and absurd - it reminds me in
many ways of the business plan of a start-up that has no clear route to actually making
money. It's impossible to imagine a movement of people who think like this accomplishing
anything, because they have no model for the outcome they want; what they do have is a
model for how they want themselves to be. Naturally, it turns out after a while that
they all have different models for how they want themselves to be, and then it breaks up
like an unstable bunch of polyamorists who can't stand the constant negotiating anymore.
I'm trying to imagine a leader of the civil rights movement writing a post-mortem like
this, and simply can't.
animalogic, December 28, 2015 at 6:59 pm
Thank you, GlobalMisanthrope, I agree.
Credit where due, the author has reached out for some knowledge of both self and
circumstances, however, that knowledge is symptomatic of someone lost in the the land of
PC idealism.
Frankly, the "bad conscience" is alive and well in these ones. Callow indeed. In the
face of one of the most vicious oligarchies in history, these amateurs fret and fight
over the simple VALIDITY of leadership.
Perhaps, I should not be unfair: after all, how could people cultivated lifelong in
the playroom of PC/Identity politics ever gain the knowledge, let alone the INSTINCTS.
sufficient to fight our oligarchs ?
Indeed, PC/identity politics has been one of the oligarchs greatest assets over the
last few decades:
1. PC etc has usefully SPLIT workers etc into descrete, often contradictory, even
isolated, movements. Divide and conquer politics.
2. PC etc has DISTRACTED effort away from core economic issues onto social/cultural
ones, which have little to no real bearing on their wealth/power. Or does anyone really
believe that the real elites give a SHIT whether (say) gay people marry or not ?
3. PC etc has given them a wonderful stick with which conservatives can beat their
"liberal" enemies. Can we not admit that PC often slips over into the ludicrous ?
4. And, in some ways best of all, PC encourages a fearful self censoring citizenry.
Indeed, the author is a perfect example of a guilt ridden, confused, trivial modern
citizen…really, anything to fear there ? Lol.
Roll on the crypto (?)fascist state….
Ulysses , December 28, 2015 at 10:39 pm
"As a life-long member of the working class I find the suggestion that I need to
be schooled in the ways of courageous resistance breathtakingly arrogant"
Well said!
sid_finster, December 28, 2015 at 4:53 pm
Y'all really really need to study the works of V.I. Lenin.
Whatever else you may say about Lenin, his goals, his means, or his beliefs, he had a
remarkably clear-eyed and unsentimental view of power and how one goes about getting it
and how one goes about holding on to it.
Jim, December 28, 2015 at 6:40 pm
Sid,
From my perspective the Leninist alternative dismisses any interest in a democratically
self-organized society.
In postulating a disciplined revolutionary party to act in the name of society he
completed the final arc in a profoundly undemocratic political trajectory from which the
traditional Left has not yet recovered.
likbez,
"In postulating a disciplined revolutionary party to act in the name of society he
completed the final arc in a profoundly undemocratic political trajectory from which the
traditional Left has not yet recovered."
May be "the traditional Left has not yet recovered", but traditional right fully
adopted Lenin's methods and organization under "color revolution" banner.
sandra, December 29, 2015 at 12:37 am
We came out of the sixties with the idea that those people who pushed political and
anti-war meetings into internal conflict that was intolerable to sit through were often
undercover government agents. Sorry, it has happened and has been documented from the
sixties and into the present. If it is a natural phenomenon that political movements
move though that stage of participants attacking each other to the detriment of
everyone, it is something that calls out for recognition as an historical phenomenon
that is repeated, and that wider perspective is necessary somewhere in your analysis.
The occupy movement may have been short-lived and crushed by the power of the state. But
it was successful in my experience beyond our imaginings.
Your movement redefined everything that happened afterward. It is absolutely accepted
that we live in an oligarchy, that wall street has destroyed the economy, that the banks
are corrupt and the government is in their orbit. Your visceral reactions to the
corruption that surrounds us made a profound mark upon the country's understanding of
itself. Do not underestimate that. The thinking about what to do next had not yet
evolved.
The corrupt capitalists are still in power and still control the major media, but
they have lost the country. Sorry but there is no constituency there anymore to support
their views. They must lie to us and trick us, as those in power have done. They must
skew the elections. The path ahead was not clear to you or to us when your dramatic
movement sprang up. And it is not clear now that we know these truths. We know how far
away the power structure is from our values. And that is where we stand.
Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
"Occupy" failed because it had no goal, and having no goal, it didn't
know how to get there. See:
http://goo.gl/m6qmGn
Here is a quote from the above June 2012 article:
It goes on and on, protest after protest. Anti-racial profiling.
Anti-union busting. Anti-tuition increases. Anti-school closings.
Anti-mortgage fraud. Anti-unsustainable development. Anti-corruption.
Anti-this, anti-that, anti-the other thing.
For reasons unknown, the Occupy movement seems to take a perverse
pride in being leaderless and directionless, preferring to run hither
and yon, protesting whatever strikes their fancy. No focus. No plan.
No idea. Just protest.
The Tea Party has a simple, easily understood focus: Lower taxes.
What is Occupy's simple, easily understood focus?
The business and political leaders, against whom Occupy protests,
have learned one thing: Do nothing. Occupy will protest and then
they will be gone, and we can resume business as usual.
The public grows weary of ineffectual, random, aimless protests,
and Occupy, which began with such great promise, becomes last week's
newspaper. A lost opportunity is a step backward, as people become
discouraged and slide into lethargy.
Somewhere, in board rooms around the world, the 1% is laughing.
washunate, December 29, 2015 at 10:11 am
Do nothing? I'd be curious to hear what you mean on that. It took incredibly
coordinated state action to defuse Occupy, not public weariness.
It's unfortunate Occupy was not able to organize in a way to neutralize such action, but
at the very least, it pulled back the curtain on the police state specifically and the power
of government more generally in a way no one can deny moving forward. That's the spark of hope
from the various events of the last few years. The elites want us to believe they are all
powerful. But it is actually taking them quite a bit of effort to maintain that illusion. In
reality, they are strategically weak and vulnerable. And they know it.
Which is why the Democratic party has had to become so blatantly pro-inequality. Even a
modest opposition to fascism on their part would ruin the efforts of the past few decades.
"... lawmaker Oleh Barna walked over to him with a bunch of red roses and then grabbed him around the waist and groin, lifting him off his feet and dragging him from the rostrum. ..."
&
Fighting broke out in parliament among members of Ukraine's
ruling coalition on Friday after a member of President Petro
Poroshenko's bloc physically picked up Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk
and pulled him from the podium.
Yatseniuk was defending his embattled
government's record when
lawmaker Oleh Barna walked over to him with a bunch of red roses and then
grabbed him around the waist and groin, lifting him off his feet and
dragging him from the rostrum.
Members of Yatseniuk's People Front party waded in, pushing Barna and throwing punches, sparking a brawl in the assembly.
Ukraine's parliament has indefinitely postponed a vote of
no-confidence in the government of Arseniy Yatseniuk, but not without
highlighting the fragility of the country's pro-western coalition.
Citing a flurry of corruption scandals and the lacklustre pace of
reforms, an increasing number of MPs - even within the ruling majority
- have in recent weeks called for the ousting of Mr Yatseniuk via a
no-confidence vote on Friday.
Ukraine's western backers, namely the US and EU, feared
such a move could plunge the war-torn and recession-ravaged country
into a deep political crisis as it continues to battle
Russian-backed separatists in eastern regions - and jeopardise a $40bn
international bailout led by the International Monetary Fund.
Such concerns are believed to have been expressed by US
vice president Joe Biden in closed door discussions during a
visit to Kiev early this week in which he publicly called for
political unity, swifter reforms and deeper anti-corruption efforts.
Instead, the IMF is backing Ukrainian policy, its
kleptocracy and its Right Sector leading the attacks that
recently cut off Crimea's electricity. The only condition on which the
IMF insists is continued austerity. Ukraine's currency, the hryvnia,
has fallen by a third this years, pensions have been slashed (largely
as a result of being inflated away), while corruption continues
unabated.
Despite this the IMF announced its intention to extend new
loans to finance Ukraine's dependency and payoffs to the oligarchs who
are in control of its parliament and justice departments to block any
real cleanup of corruption.
For over half a year there was a semi-public discussion with U.S.
Treasury advisors and Cold Warriors about how to stiff Russia on the
$3 billion owed by Ukraine to Russia's Sovereign Wealth Fund. There
was some talk of declaring this an "odious debt," but it was decided
that this ploy might backfire against U.S. supported dictatorships.
In the end, the IMF simply lent Ukraine the money.
By doing so, it
announced its new policy: "We only enforce debts owed in US dollars to
US allies." This means that what was simmering as a
Cold War against Russia has now turned into a full-blown division of
the world into the Dollar Bloc (with its satellite Euro and other
pro-U.S. currencies) and the BRICS or other countries not in the U.S.
financial and military orbit.
When most people think of CIA sabotage, they think of coups, assassinations,
proxy wars, armed rebel groups, and even false flags - not strategic stupidity and purposeful bureaucratic ineptitude.
However, according to a
declassified document from 1944,
the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which later became the CIA, used and trained a curious breed of "citizen-saboteurs"
in occupied nations like Norway and France.
The World War II-era document, called Simple Sabotage Field Manual, outlines ways in which operatives can disrupt
and demoralize enemy administrators and police forces. The first section of the document, which can be read in its entirety
here, addresses "Organizations and Conferences" - and how to turn them into a
"dysfunctional mess":
Insist on doing everything through "channels." Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
Make "speeches." Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your "points" by long anecdotes
and accounts of personal experiences.
When possible, refer all matters to committees, for "further study and consideration." Attempt to make the committee as
large as possible - never less than five.
Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability
of that decision.
Advocate "caution." Be "reasonable" and urge your fellow-conferees to be "reasonable" and avoid haste which might result
in embarrassments or difficulties later on.
On its
official webpage, the CIA boasts about finding innovative ways to bring about sabotage, calling their tactics for destabilization
"surprisingly relevant." While they admit that some of the ideas may seem a bit outdated, they claim that "Together
they are a reminder of how easily productivity and order can be undermined."
In a second section targeted at manager-saboteurs, the guide lists the following tactical moves:
In making work assignments, always sign out the unimportant jobs first. See that important jobs are assigned to inefficient
workers.
Insist on perfect work in relatively unimportant products; send back for refinishing those which have the least flaw.
To lower morale and with it, production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions.
Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.
Multiply the procedures and clearances involved in issuing instructions, paychecks, and so on. See that three people have
to approve everything where one would do.
Finally, the guide presents protocol for how saboteur-employees can disrupt enemy operations, too:
Work slowly.
Contrive as many interruptions to your work as you can.
Do your work poorly and blame it on bad tools, machinery, or equipment. Complain that these things are preventing
you from doing your job right.
Never pass on your skill and experience to a new or less skillful worker.
The CIA is proud of its Kafkaesque field manual and evidently still views it as an unorthodox but effective form of destabilizing
enemy operations around the world. Of course, so too might an anarchist or revolutionary look at such tactics and view them
in the context of disrupting certain domestic power structures, many of which are already built like a bureaucratic house of cards.
It seems if any country should refrain from showcasing how easy it is to disrupt inefficient federal agencies, however,
it would be the United States.
"... "A lot of what we do was done 25 years ago covertly by the CIA" Alan Weinstein, one of the founders of the National Endowment
for Democracy. Although it promotes itself as a "non-governmental organization", NED receives at least 90% of its funding from the US
Congress, earmarked to USAID. ..."
"... Around that time, Soros Foundation 'appeared' in our country and started usual advertising and promises how they will give
money to 'promising' projects made by young people. Of course, we had an amazing thing (it was really hard to make a printed computer
magazine while having civil war and sanctions, heh) and were certain that we would easily qualify for grant. We got rejected. A guy
printing black and white A4 pamphlet saying shit about government got the money. ..."
"A lot of what we do was done 25 years ago covertly by the CIA" Alan Weinstein, one of the founders of the National Endowment
for Democracy. Although it promotes itself as a "non-governmental organization", NED receives at least 90% of its funding from
the US Congress, earmarked to USAID.
JRobby
Maybe the USSA will do the same with "The Council On Foriegn Relations"??
What would we call it when a controlling faction of the USSA Government outlawed itself and declared itself a threat to national
security and Constitutional order?
That's an organization that needs to go. I know some of its membership in NYC. . . It's not evil, per se, but it places self-enrichment
above ethics. That, and since they all have fancy degress and like to pass their resumes around the table, they naturally believe
they know better than the little people what's best for the little peons.
nmewn
"In a statement released on Monday, prosecutors said the activities of the Open Society Institute and the Open Society Institute
Assistance Foundation were a threat to the foundations of Russia's Constitutional order and national security. They added that
the Justice Ministry would be duly informed about these conclusions and would add the two groups to Russia's list of undesirable
foreign organizations."
Yet here, somehow, he is still a major donor to the National Socialist Democrat Party and BlackLiesMatter.
The world, as I once knew it, has been completely turned upside down...lol.
#SafePlace!
/////
Now wut little trolls...how could that possibly offend you? I mean outside of me being absolutely correct about this worthless
POS all these years ;-)
conscious being
I'm suprised it took this long.
Quinvarius
Looks like buying Russian politicians is not so easy. The West however is is craven and corrupt. This is huge set back for
Obama's transvestite, looter, gay, racist agenda of destroying civilization.
blentus
So, there I was, 18 years old, and living in a shitty civil war torn country. Not giving a fuck about anything, me and few
of my friends managed to print a computer magazine and keep it going for a while. It was impossible to make money with it, and
we never did it for the money anyway. It was a good 'distraction' from everything around us, and it also helped other curious
kids. This was before Internet became popular/accessible, so good information was not so easy to obtain.
Around that time, Soros Foundation 'appeared' in our country and started usual advertising and promises how they will give
money to 'promising' projects made by young people. Of course, we had an amazing thing (it was really hard to make a printed computer
magazine while having civil war and sanctions, heh) and were certain that we would easily qualify for grant.
We got rejected. A guy printing black and white A4 pamphlet saying shit about government got the money.
I was lucky enough to learn early how these pieces of shit work.
Every time I hear phrase 'NGO' my brain simply translates it to 'cunts'. Can't help it.
smacker
Something tells me that some very smart people in Moscow have been carefully studying who is creating all this global unrest.
Russia's actions to kick out "Soros Open Society" and the "US National Endowment for Democracy" - neither of which have anything
to do with what their names suggest - is to prevent Russia becoming another victim.
"... Imagine a U.S. presidential candidate who met with the Russian government and repeatedly accused them of being too soft on
President Obama. A candidate who told Russias foreign minister of the need to set limits on the White Houses misbehavior, and that the
Russians silence on the abusive mistreatment [Russia] suffered at the hands of the Obama administration had encouraged more of the same.
..."
"... Mauricio Macri, a right-wing businessman from one of the countrys richest families, is running for president in elections this
Sunday. According to leaked documents from the U.S. Embassy, published by WikiLeaks, this is the conversation he had with the U.S. ambassador
and the U.S. State Department official in charge of Latin America. He was very concerned that Washington was too soft on Argentina and
was encouraging abusive treatment of the U.S. at the hands of the Argentine government. ..."
"... From 2003-2015, according to the IMF, the real (inflation-adjusted) Argentine economy grew by about 78 percent. (There is some
dispute over this number, but not enough to change the overall picture.) This is quite a large increase in living standards, one of
the biggest in the Americas. Unemployment fell from more than 17.2 percent to 6.9 percent (IMF). The government created the largest
conditional cash transfer program in the Americas for the poor. From 2003 to the second half of 2013 (the latest independent statistics
available), poverty fell by about 70 percent and extreme poverty by 80 percent. (These numbers are based on independent estimates of
inflation.) ..."
"... In the last four years, growth has slowed, inflation has been higher, and a black market has developed for the dollar. Some
of this has been due to a number of unfavorable external shocks: the regional economy will have negative growth this year (Argentinas
will be slightly positive); ..."
Warning Signs on the Road to "Change" in Argentina
By Mark Weisbrot
Imagine a U.S. presidential candidate who met with the Russian government and repeatedly accused them of being "too soft"
on President Obama. A candidate who told Russia's foreign minister of the "need to set limits" on the White House's "misbehavior,"
and that the Russians' "silence" on the "abusive mistreatment [Russia] suffered" at the hands of the Obama administration "had encouraged
more of the same."
Would Americans trust such a candidate? OK, that's a rhetorical question. But in Argentina, it's real.
Mauricio Macri, a right-wing businessman from one of the country's richest families, is running for president in elections
this Sunday. According to leaked documents from the U.S. Embassy, published by WikiLeaks, this is the conversation he had with the
U.S. ambassador and the U.S. State Department official in charge of Latin America. He was very concerned that Washington was "too
soft" on Argentina and was encouraging "abusive treatment" of the U.S. at the hands of the Argentine government.
The analogy is not perfect, since the current Russian government has never played a major role -- or any role, for that matter
-- in wrecking the U.S. economy and creating a Great Depression here. But the U.S. Treasury Department, which was the International
Monetary Fund's decider during Argentina's severe depression of 1998-2002, did indeed exert an enormous influence on the policies
that prolonged and deepened that depression. Argentines are not holding a grudge, but neither would they want the U.S. to again play
a major role in their politics or economic policy.
But there are other reasons to worry about Macri's intentions that hit closer to home. In his conversations with U.S. officials,
in 2009, he referred to the economic policies of the Kirchners -- Néstor Kirchner, who was president from 2003-2007, and his wife
Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who was elected in 2007 -- as "a failed economic model." He has made similar statements during the
campaign, and although he has often been vague, he has indicated that he wants something very different, and considerably to the
right of current economic policy.
It is worth looking at this much-maligned record of the Kirchners, especially since Daniel Scioli, who is the candidate of Cristina
Fernández de Kirchner and her "Front for Victory" alliance, represents some continuity with "Kirchnerismo." Macri's coalition is
called "Cambiemos," or "Let's Change."
From 2003-2015, according to the IMF, the real (inflation-adjusted) Argentine economy grew by about 78 percent. (There is
some dispute over this number, but not enough to change the overall picture.) This is quite a large increase in living standards,
one of the biggest in the Americas. Unemployment fell from more than 17.2 percent to 6.9 percent (IMF). The government created the
largest conditional cash transfer program in the Americas for the poor. From 2003 to the second half of 2013 (the latest independent
statistics available), poverty fell by about 70 percent and extreme poverty by 80 percent. (These numbers are based on independent
estimates of inflation.)
But these numbers do not describe the full magnitude of the achievement. As I describe in my book, "Failed: What the 'Experts'
Got Wrong About the Global Economy" (Oxford University Press, 2015), Néstor Kirchner took office as the economy was beginning to
recover from a serious depression, and it took great courage and tenacity to stand up to the IMF and its allies, negotiate a sustainable
level of foreign debt (which involved sticking to a large default), and implement a set of macroeconomic policies that would allow
for this remarkable recovery. It was analogous to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's leadership during the U.S. Great Depression,
and like Roosevelt, Kirchner had the majority of the economics profession against him -- as well as the media. Cristina Fernández
de Kirchner also had to fight a number of battles to continue Argentina's economic progress.
In the last four years, growth has slowed, inflation has been higher, and a black market has developed for the dollar. Some
of this has been due to a number of unfavorable external shocks: the regional economy will have negative growth this year (Argentina's
will be slightly positive); Argentina's biggest trading partner, Brazil, is in recession and has seen its currency plummet;
and in 2014 a New York judge of questionable competence made a political decision to block Argentina from making debt payments to
most of its creditors. So, despite the overall track record of 12 years of Kirchnerismo delivering a large increase in living standards
and employment, and successful poverty reduction, there are significant problems that need to be fixed.
In 1980, Ronald Reagan ran for president of the United States in the midst of a recession and inflation passing 13 percent. He,
too, promised change and he delivered it -- and ushered in an era of sharply increased inequality and other social, political, and
economic maladies from which America is still suffering. Just look at his proud progeny in the Republican presidential debates.
Macri probably does not have Reagan's talent as an actor and communicator to radically transform Argentina and reverse most of
the gains of the last 13 years. But it seems likely from the interests that he represents, and his political orientation, that Argentina's
poor and working people will bear the brunt of any economic adjustment. And there is a serious risk that by following right-wing
"fixes" for the economy, he could launch a cycle of self-defeating austerity and recession of the kind that we have seen in Greece
and the eurozone.
The Kirchners also reversed the impunity of military officers responsible for mass murder and torture during the dictatorship,
and hundreds have been tried and convicted for their crimes. Macri has dismissed these unprecedented human rights achievements as
mere political showmanship. His party also voted against marriage equality, which was passed anyway, making Argentina the first country
in Latin America to legalize same-sex marriage.
"Let's Change" is an appealing slogan, but the question is "change to what?"
Lambert here: AKP stands for Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi in Turkish, which translates to Justice
and Freedom Party. I admit that I don't know much about
Turkey's domestic politics - which is why we're very glad to have this very timely post -
but Erdogan's newly built palace (images
here) seems like a fine operational definition of "wretched excess"; Erdogan's making that
Ukrainian dude
with the private zoo in his palace, Viktor Yanukovych, look like a mendicant monk.
The worst terrorist attack in the history of the Republic of Turkey took place on October 10,
2015 in Ankara. The Ankara massacre. Two suicide bombers killed 102 of the participants in a
Peace and Democracy rally and hundreds were wounded.
Why did this happen?
To give some answers, let us go back to 2002.
Turkey's ruling Sunni Islamist party, the Justice and Development Party (AKP), took power in
2002. From 2002 until 2015, it had won four general elections in a row and secured enough seats
in the national assembly to form a single party government in the first three.
Although the AKP won about 50% of the votes in the third of these elections that happened in
2011, it has been in decline since then. And, in the last general election that took place on
June 7, 2015, it failed to secure enough seats to form the government on its own. However, the
AKP is still the ruling party, at least practically, because it is the only party in the caretaker
government until the coming "repeat" election on November 1. The other parties either refused
to join the interim government or left it after a while.
A milestone between the 2011 and 2015 general elections was the presidential election of August
10, 2014. Despite the ongoing decline of the AKP, its leader and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
won 51.8% of the vote in the first round to become the first elected Turkish President. Ekmeleddin
İhsanoğlu, the joint candidate for the opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) and Nationalist
Action Party (MHP) received 38.4% whereas Selahattin Demirtaş, the candidate of the mainly Kurdish
nationalist People's Democracy Party (HDP), received 9.8%.
However, this election was of very low turnout by Turkish standards, essentially because İhsanoğlu
is a known Islamist also. When a devotedly secularist section of the CHP voters resented İhsanoğlu
and boycotted the election, the participation turned out to be a measly 74%. This was the lowest
turnout since the coup d'état of 1980; even lower than the 79% turnout of the 2002 election that
took place after a major economic collapse in 2001.
But the main event of this presidential election was the 9.8% vote the HDP candidate Demirtaş
received. The 10% national threshold imposed by the 1980 military junta has been in place since
the 1983 general election and no Kurdish party had ever been able to cross that threshold until
June 7, 2015.
Indeed, in the 2002 election, that is, when the AKP took power, only three parties (AKP, CHP
and MHP) managed to cross the threshold. With the 2007 election, a fourth party started to appear
in the national assembly because the Kurdish parties and their leftist allies managed to bypass
the threshold through candidates entering the elections as independents and then reassembling
a party in the national assembly. However, despite that they usually secured between 5% and 7%,
this trick always led to their underrepresentation in the assembly, because a big chunk of the
votes on the independents were wasted.
When Demirtaş received 9.8%, indicating a high probability of crossing the 10% threshold, the
HDP entered the 2015 general election as a party rather than as a collection of independent candidates.
The significance of this was that had they crossed the threshold, they would have had a much larger
representation in the national assembly.
And they crossed the threshold in the June 7 general election, receiving an unexpected 13%.
When the HDP got 80 representatives and pushed the AKP below 276 by 18 in a 550 member national
assembly, the AKP rule was over, at least legally.
This was a defining moment in the history of the Republic of Turkey.
Coming out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire in 1923, the Republic of Turkey inherited the
Empire's diverse identities and added a new one.
A major identity divide in the Empire had been along the religious lines: Muslim versus non-Muslim.
However, there has been a conscious cleansing of the country from non-Muslims since the early
20th century and, as a result, this divide is currently about 99% to 1%, although it
was more like 70% to 30% in the beginning.
The new identity the Republic added was that of the secular. So the new and more important
religious divide in the country is the pious versus secular divide created by the founders of
the Republic (although the origins of this goes way back). Of course, the founders were secularists,
and their interest was to engineer a secular, capitalist nation-state along the lines of most
advanced capitalist states of the West. Named after their charismatic leader, and the first president
of the Republic, Mustafa Kemal, their ideology is called Kemalism.
Interestingly, they defined the nation of this nation-state – that is, the Turkish nation –
based on religious identities. Who we call Turkish today – if by that we mean the citizens of
the Republic of Turkey – are essentially the grandchildren of the (mostly Sunni) Muslim subjects
of the Ottoman Empire, many of whom sought refuge in current-day Turkey from other parts of the
Empire to avoid religious persecution. They can be from any of the many ethnicities in the former
Empire as long as their grandparents were or became (preferably Sunni) Muslims.
But, the mostly Sunni Kurds (themselves a collection of many ethnicities) have never bought
this definition. And, despite that Sunni Islam has been the "unofficial" religion of this "secular"
Republic from the beginning, the Alevites – some of whom are Kurdish – remained, although their
number decreased some as percentage.
To sum up, the most notable current identity divides include – but are not limited to – Turkish
versus Kurdish, Sunni versus Alevite and pious versus secular.
Lastly, there is the military, out of which most founders of the Republic including Mustafa
Kemal came. Until recently, the military had been viewed by many as guardian of the secular Republic.
It took power three times: in 1960, 1971 and 1980, although there had been a number of other coup
attempts also. Seen as an arch-rival, the military had been "attacked" by the AKP government as
of 2010 in the courts captured by the Islamists. Many of its high ranking officers got jailed
for a variety of (as recently confessed by President Erdogan, mostly made-up) reasons and the
institution has been weakened. Despite this, however, whether the military is now fully under
the AKP control is debatable for a variety of reasons including that there still are many Kemalists
in its ranks.
Although the conflict between Turks and Kurds goes way before the start of the Republic, the
most recent armed conflict started in 1984. Since then, the Turkish military and Kurdistan Workers'
Party (PKK) have been fighting on and off (most intensely in the early 1990s) and the total death
toll is at the order of tens of thousands. In a nutshell, this is the so-called "Kurdish question"
in Turkey
The PKK (founded in 1978) is an armed organization considered by many including the Turkish
Government to be a terrorist organization. The HDP (founded in 2013), on the other hand, defines
itself as a leftist and anti-nationalist party. Further, there are many non-Kurds in the party.
However, many consider the HDP as the political wing of the PKK and whether this perception is
reality or not is hotly debated in the country.
Enter President Erdoğan and Prime Minister Davutoğlu.
A darling of the West until about three years ago, Erdoğan and the AKP have evidently been
running a programme whose objectives were not so obvious to some. That this had been the case
can easily be deduced from the recent confessions of many nationally prominent figures – mostly
liberal intellectuals – who had been ardent supporters of Erdoğan and the AKP until recently.
Over the last year, it has seemed as though not a single day passed without one such figure coming
out and claiming that he or she had been cheated by Erdoğan and/or the AKP.
The existence of the programme became obvious to all shortly after Erdoğan won the presidential
election. This was because Erdoğan's handpicked heir – former Foreign and current Prime Minister
– Ahmet Davutoğlu publicly named it on August 21, 2014: the "restoration programme." According
to Davutoğlu and his aides, the term does not refer to restoring the Ottoman Empire but to repairing
the republic, democracy, foreign policy and a model of the economy that had been "injured" for
the past 92 years.
But, what did happen 92 years ago?
Well, the Ottoman Empire ended and the Republic of Turkey was founded.
Indeed, in 2001, a year before the AKP took power, the then academic Davutoğlu published a
book, "Strategic Depth," that set out the basics of this programme, so why these liberal intellectuals
feel cheated is difficult to understand.
According to the Davutoğlu doctrine, Turkey is one of those countries which are "central powers."
Because of its Ottoman legacy, Turkey is a Middle Eastern, Mediterranean, Balkan, Caucasian, Caspian,
Central Asian, Gulf and Black Sea country. It can exercise influence in all these regions and
thus become a global strategic player. Or so said Davutoğlu in his "Strategic Depth." And his
now badly failed "zero problem policy with neighbours" was about Turkey's capitalising on its
soft power potential culminating from its historic and cultural links with all these regions,
as well as its "democratic institutions" and "thriving market economy"
Given these and that Davutoğlu appeared to be objecting to the Huntingtonian theory of clash
of civilisations, his doctrine had often been labelled as neo-Ottomanism. But this
label was incorrect because Ottomanism was a nineteenth-century liberal political movement
whose objective was to form a civic Ottoman national identity overarching ethnic, linguistic and
religious identities. Any careful reading of Davutoğlu's book could have revealed that his doctrine
had nothing to do with any form of Ottomanism. Furthermore, his objection to Huntington's theory
was not to that there was a clash of civilisations. He agreed with Huntington there. Where he
differed was that Islam was the better civilisation. Put differently, his doctrine was not neo-Ottomanism
but pan-Islamism.
It now appears clear even to many of his unquestioning former supporters as well as Western
powers such as the United States (US) and the European Union (EU) that not only Davutoğlu but
also Erdoğan agreed with Huntington's clash of civilizations thesis. Except that Erdoğan also
believed in superiority of the Islamic civilization. It now appears clear to them also that becoming
the leader of the Muslim world and (there are even rumours that) caliph of the Sunni Muslims were
two of Erdoğan's three major fantasies.
Of course, these two fantasies have always been beyond Erdoğan's reach, if only for the simple
reason that they are based on a third fantasy that Davutoğlu invented: the unifying character
of the Ottoman Empire. Ask any Arab or Balkan nation who had lived under the Ottoman rule to see
how they feel about the Empire. And there are strong rivals such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran
and even ISIL (the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, also known as ISIS), and Syria, Iraq
and Libya are in shambles, so forth. No doubt, Davutoğlu's "zero problem policy with neighbours"
eventually deformed into his current foreign policy of "honourable loneliness."
Erdoğan's third major fantasy was becoming the sultan of Turkey. This was a potentially realizable
fantasy because, after his presidency, all he needed was to get the constitution changed to introduce
a presidential system which would decorate him with executive powers. Had this happened, he could
have become the effective sultan to continue the restoration process through which Turkey would
become some sort of repressive Islamic state (which would be even more repressive than Turkey
is currently).
For this, the AKP had to win at least 330 deputies in the national assembly.
And Erdoğan had a fear. Had the AKP failed to form a single party government, several legal
cases could have been filed against him at the Supreme Council of Judges for a host of reasons
with severe criminal consequences.
To avoid this, the AKP had to win at least 276 deputies in the national assembly.
Now, I can offer some answers to the first question I asked, that is, why the Ankara massacre
happened. And I will do that in the next part, after the November 1 election.
JTMcPhee, November 1, 2015 at 7:41 am
Sounds like "Neo-Ottomanism" is of the same genera as "Neo-Liberalism."
And given how individual motivations that, for people who actually have the skills and
talents and incentives to be actual Power Players in the world, all resolve to "way more
for me, and as near as possible nothing for the rest of you," no surprise that the "neo"
kleptocratic agenda is everywhere in the ascendant.
Erdoğan's palace, Obama's Presidential Library and Theme Park, the well documented excesses
and thieveries and frauds of the ruling class pretty much everywhere - all of a piece. And
where's the organizing principle and flag, for the 99% to form up and organize around? Our
Betters are all reading out of the same implacable insatiable playbook– where's the book
for people who just seek decency, comity, and a "modest competence" for themselves and
their children, who diligently and intelligently in the Hope of Change, minimize their
"footprints" (so there's more slack for the Few to consume and use up)?
PlutoniumKun, November 1, 2015 at 12:23 pm
There has been a huge boom in Turkey under Erdogan, although its a moot point as to how
much he can take credit for it – certainly Turkey was a major beneficiary of QE, etc. My
understanding is that he and his party was a major facilitator for the construction
industry, including most notoriously of all, pretty much handing over one of the last
public parks in Istanbul to a shopping mall developer.
PlutoniumKun, November 1, 2015 at 1:15 pm
Possibly. But Erdogans political base is rural and small town regular folks – the type
of people who keep their cards close to their chests. Its entirely possible that this was a
classic case of voters being unwilling to admit to pollsters who they will vote for. And
also a case that people may reluctantly feel they should vote for a corrupt strongman over
the alternative of possible chaos. Reminds me a bit of the UK election where pollsters and
commentators got it very badly wrong.
Its interesting though that nobody seems to be alleging fraud (so far) – seems that Turkey
has a pretty robust voting system.
susan the other, November 1, 2015 at 1:48 pm
It is clear that politix in Turkey is chaos. God only knows what the freedom and justice
freaks are looking to gain. Erdogan is on the outs with everyone; NATO, Russia, the Saudis,
the USA and etc. That can only mean one thing: there is no consensus and therefore there is
no government. And Erdogan is just vamping around on the stage until he wears out his
fishnets and high heels.
Sabri Oncu -> Synoia, November 2, 2015 at 5:55 am
Turkey and Saudi Arabia are not rivals for the new Caliphate. They are rivals for
regional hegemony. So, I was combining two things together. Given that Saudi Arabia, Egypt
and Iran are rivals of Turkey, Turkey cannot be the leader of the Muslim world. At least
these three will not accept Turkey's leadership. As for the Caliphate ISIL is the
competitor. But, more importantly, Arabs will not accept a Turkish as their caliph. That
was what I had in mind. But, the article is already quite long even as it is so I was
economizing, I guess.
Synoia, November 1, 2015 at 4:23 pm
It is not clear that Erdogan and the Saudi's are rivals for the new Caliphate.
The Saudi's will aim for the religious capital (Mecca) and the Turks the Legislative
Capital as under the Ottomans, and the Rules will exchange family member in marriage as is
common among royalty.
Ergogan's planace looks like it if fit for a Caliph.
Turkish Observer,
When I read articles online about this recent election people keep
referring to Erdogan as having "savvy" or making some sort of "gambit".
Perhaps you could say this, if it was in any way a fair competition.
But nothing about this election was fair.
Only days before the election, the government appointed trustees to 22
different companies that were part of a holding company that wasn't so
keen on the government. This included two television stations and two
newspapers. Immediately after seizing control of them, in clear violation
of the constitution of Turkey which prohibits the seizing of media
regardless of whether or not it helped enable a crime, they fired all
employees who had refused loyalty to the new trustees. The next editions
of these newspapers did a 180 coming out in full support of AKP and the
ruling party.
The amount of media time spent on covering AKP rallies/political
events was far greater in all state media than that given to the other
three main parties. I believe in previous elections, and most probably
this one as well, the ratio is something like 90% of all campaign airtime
was given to their party.
In addition, President Erdogan repeatedly abused his power as
president. This position is one that is supposed to be unpartisan and
ceremonial, but instead he has turned every public appearance into an
occasion to gain support for the AKP.
The ruling government has continued to systematically dismantle
bastions of opposition: whether they be found in industrial, financial or
media sectors. They have attacked academics, fomented assaults of media
channels and stations by armed groups, and refused to provide adequate
protection for opposition rallies and events.
They continue to spread lies, disinformation and enflame racial hatred
on pro-government media outlets. Several weeks ago, the result of this
were three or four nights of militant-nationalist rallies across
different areas of Turkey including Istanbul. One of the chilling calls
heard by myself and others was "we don't want war, we want genocide"
while they occasionally destroyed a kurdish-looking business or
stabbed/beat a kurdish-looking person to death. These were government
sanctioned outbursts. If the opposition tried to rally for peace, within
30min plain clothes police officers and riot police would stop them. But
rallies for genocide? Completely acceptable in Erdogan's Turkey – you
could even see some of the security forces smiling.
What comes next will be more of the same, but I can only imagine what
will happen when the economy here starts to crumble…
I expect all or some of the following to happen in the next year
politically:
- further attacks on the HDP, perhaps pushing them below 10% and using
this as an opportunity to get to the 330 seat level needed to change the
constitution
- the withering away of the militant nationalist MHP, as supporters
and politicians within this party have fewer differences with the
policies and positions of the AKP. Perhaps a split, with half of the
members crossing the aisle to the AKP.
- attacks on media interests/financial interests of the CHP, so that
any presidential system becomes a two party one, where one party always
wins (guess which). (you can expect some problems to arise with IS Bank,
if they want this outcome)
Financially:
- continued fall in visitor/tourist numbers
- further contraction of industrial production as the sanctity or
property rights a revealed to be a farce
- a complete collapse of the construction sector, if and only if the
FED starts to hike rates
- lira reaching 4 to the dollar by May
Socially:
- exodus of anyone who can get out of Turkey, a significant brain
drain
- greater conservatism within society, the imposition of more
moral/social controls
- a dramatic increase in the breadth and width of the conflict between
the Turkish military and PKK. (if and only if the HDP is dismantled as a
political outlet)
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky gives a press conference at the end of an EU-Ukraine Summit at the European Council in Brussels, Belgium, October 6, 2020. © Reuters/Stephanie Lecocq 21 Follow RT on
Ukraine's top court has ruled that Volodymyr Zelensky must only use the country's state language when exercising his official duties as president, after a citizen claimed he broke the law by speaking Russian at a public event.
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Michael Jabara Carley
March 9, 2018 © Photo: Public domain
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Also by this author Michael Jabara Carley Professor of history at the Université de Montréal. He has published widely on Soviet relations with the West
What Poland Has to Hide About the Origins of World War II
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washunate, December 29, 2015 at 10:11 am