Poles taking to the streets against EU Green Deal
By Olivier Bault | Remix News | May 9, 2024
On Friday, May 10, Poles will be taking to the street in a protest organized by the legendary Solidarity trade union. Solidarity, which was the main dissident social movement against communism in Eastern Europe in the 1980s, is now demanding a referendum on the EU Green Deal. Its current leader, Piotr Duda, has even called the EU Green Deal a new “red plague,” in reference to communism.
The protest is supported by Law and Justice (PiS), the main opposition party in Poland, and also by the other parties of its United Right coalition as well as by the Confederation, an alliance of Christian nationalists and libertarians to the right of the United Right. The trade union, however, makes “the whole political class” in Poland responsible for the EU’s climate policy and notes that it warned from the outset of the threats linked to that policy, which means it makes the United Right leaders responsible too, as the EU Green Deal was adopted during their eight years in power.
“The solutions implemented under the Green Deal in the future will translate into, among other things, increases in electricity and heating bills, new taxes on energy and fuel, a ban on heating with fossil fuels, as well as increases in food prices and the country’s food insecurity. NSZZ Solidarity has decided to loudly express its opposition to such policies,” Solidarity’s leaders wrote in a press release published in mid-March.
They also wrote:
“The Solidarity trade union, which won Poland’s freedom in the past and later used it many times for just causes, has again decided to reach for the highest form of direct democracy, which is a nationwide referendum in which citizens will be asked about the continuation of the implementation of the Green Deal. The referendum will be preceded by an information campaign. This will allow for a broad awareness-building public debate on the real effects of the EU’s climate policy so that every citizen of Poland will be able to express his or her opinion on the subject based on reliable knowledge. After all, EU policy should not be determined by officials in Brussels, but based on the consent of the citizens of member states.”
The May 10 protest will start at noon on the Plac Zamkowy Square in central Warsaw, when farmers are expected to turn up en masse as they did on March 6 when a large farmer protest was brutally repressed by Donald Tusk’s left-liberal government.
However, it is not only farmers who are going to be very negatively affected by the EU Green Deal. As the Ordo Iuris legal think tank stresses in an EU-wide petition against the Green Deal it has just launched, not only is European agriculture facing a catastrophe, but car drivers and homeowners will have to pay a high price for plans dictated not by reason and based not on consultations, but driven by ideology.
We can still “Stop the Green Deal” in its current form, we remind people in our petition, as it is a matter of the political decisions made by the heads of state and government in the European Council that can be later translated into new EU law processed through the EU Council (where ministers of the EU-27 meet) and the European Parliament.
This is why we demand not only that there should be a referendum in Poland on the Green Deal, but that an EU summit should be convened to work through the demands of farmers and other actors from across Europe.
We should all have in mind that under the current plans, the production of food and many intermediate and industrial goods will not stop, but will only be transferred outside the European Union, where the EU’s absurd climate regulations do not apply. This will only make matters worse for our planet and it will push millions of Europeans toward poverty and destroy the European Union’s economic competitiveness.
We encourage all citizens of EU countries to sign the petition against the EU Green Deal here.
EU agrees to tap Russian assets to arm Ukraine
RT | May 9, 2024
The European Union has agreed on the expropriation of profits from frozen Russian assets to continue funding and arming Kiev, Brussels announced on Wednesday. The bloc’s ambassadors agreed on the course of action “in principle,” but the legal text is still to be ratified by the EU Council.
The proposal targets proceeds from some €191 billion ($205 billion) in Russian funds currently held immobilized in the Belgian clearing house Euroclear. In total, Western states froze an estimated $300 billion of Moscow’s sovereign capital abroad soon after the escalation of the conflict in Ukraine in February 2022.
“EU ambassadors agreed in principle on measures concerning extraordinary revenues stemming from Russia’s immobilized assets,” the Belgian Presidency announced on X (formerly Twitter) on Wednesday.
Euroclear generates somewhere between €2 billion and €3 billion ($2.15 billion to $3.22 billion) in profits annually from the Russian money, depending on the interest rates, according to CEO Valerie Urbain.
Under the proposal, the EU hopes to send 90% of those profits towards purchasing armaments for Ukraine, and 10% towards non-military aid, with the first tranche expected in July.
In the meantime, Belgium will continue levying a 25% corporate tax on the revenue, while Euroclear would keep 10% before the money is sent to the EU, to provide the clearing house a buffer against ongoing and future litigation by Russia. Euroclear would also keep 0.3% of future profits as an incentive fee.
The move follows months of deliberation among Ukraine’s Western backers on how best to utilize Russia’s frozen funds. The US – Kiev’s biggest war sponsor – had proposed seizing the assets entirely, but had faced pushback from the EU thus far.
Euroclear’s CEO likened the confiscation of frozen Russian funds to “opening Pandora’s box.” Speaking to L’Echo on Tuesday, she warned it could cause “major international investors to turn away from Europe,” as they could no longer trust that their own assets could not be confiscated.
Russia stressed that seizure of its sovereign capital or any similar action would not only amount to theft and violate international law, but undermine trust in both Western currencies and the global financial system, shaking the world economy.
If the frozen Russian capital is seized, Moscow will retaliate in kind, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov warned in February. Total foreign direct investments in the Russian economy by the EU, G7, Australia, and Switzerland were estimated to be around $288 billion at the end of 2022.
Ireland Calls on Tech Giants to Muzzle Election “Misinformation”
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | May 8, 2024
Ireland’s Electoral Commission Chief Executive Art O’Leary is warning tech companies behind major social media platforms to adhere to what he considers their responsibilities in the electoral process.
On the one hand, O’Leary is effectively threatening they could be facing unspecified “reputational consequences” that are “not good” in case they are found to be uncooperative in what appears to be the ultimate goal here – censorship, i.e., “removal of material” that is found to be causing “damage to democracy.”
On the other hand, the Electoral Commission chief seems satisfied that the companies the Irish authorities would like to keep under control during the campaign period are in fact “very conscious” of the circumstances, and will, in other words, “behave.”
This obvious attempt to secure that tech firms censor content of their own accord is necessary since the current laws in Ireland do not allow the Commission to impose such decisions; but O’Leary is optimistic and says that the organization he heads has forged “positive relations” with these companies – all the way to “mechanisms to ensure disinformation is taken down quickly,” say reports.
The elections O’Leary has in mind are local Irish and European Parliament ballots scheduled for early June, and as far as the authorities in that country are concerned, “disinformation” is expected from only one corner of the domestic political spectrum – what they brand as “the far-right.”
That’s because groups allegedly espousing such views are planning protests in Dublin – and despite the fact that their political opponents plan the same, that is, to hold so-called “counter-rallies.”
But only the “far right” is singled out as the potential source of “disinformation,” which has a decent chunk of the state apparatus, (national police security and intelligence department, broadcasting regulator, etc.) mobilized to deal with it and what are considered “online harms.”
Now the Election Commission is also joining these efforts, with O’Leary sharing his thought process in an interview he gave the Irish Examiner.
He admitted that there has been “no real evidence” that foreign countries are trying to interfere in the elections, yet this does not prevent alarmist rhetoric, including around that possibility, and AI generated content.
Another of O’Leary’s ideas is to consider extending the moratorium on election coverage imposed on legacy media to online outlets.
The Climate Cult Reacts As Its Political Position Begins To Slip
By Francis Menton | Manhattan Contrarian | May 05, 2024
For two decades and more, the political position of the climate alarm cult in the U.S. and Europe has only seemed to strengthen with time. In the U.S., the Obama and Biden Administrations have both pushed huge regulatory initiatives to restrict use of fossil fuels (with only some modest roll-backs during Trump’s four years); some of the most sweeping restrictions got pushed through just a week ago. Meanwhile, blue states like California and New York have enacted ever-more-extreme restrictions by statute. In Europe, there has been a near all-party political consensus in favor of the “net zero” agenda, notably including even the mainstream conservative parties in the largest countries like the UK and Germany.
I have long said that sooner or later a combination of physical reality and cost would stop the “net zero” juggernaut in its tracks. Indeed, that has begun to happen, particularly in Europe. Elections for the European Parliament are coming up in about a month, with climate skeptic candidates and parties looking to score substantial gains.
So how is the left reacting? So far, the official talking point seems to be to belittle the resistance to fossil fuel restrictions as some kind of scheme of the “far right.” The “far right,” we are told, are those nefarious people who dare to stand up for maintaining the living standards of the working stiffs against those who would impoverish us all in the quixotic drive to reduce carbon emissions. Somehow, seemingly independent news organizations put out articles using the exact same words and phrases. Here are a couple of recent examples.
In the Washington Post on May 1, the headline is “How car bans and heat pump rules drive voters to the far right.” Subheadline: “Studies show that as energy prices rise, so do right-wing movements against green policies.” Excerpt:
A . . . backlash is happening all over Europe, as far-right parties position themselves in opposition to green policies. In Germany, a law that would have required homeowners to install heat pumps galvanized the far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, giving it a boost. Farmers have rolled tractors into Paris to protest E.U. agricultural rules, and drivers in Italy and Britain have protested attempts to ban gas-guzzling cars from city centers. . . .
Th[e] resurgence of the right could slow down the green transition in Europe, . . . as climate policies increasingly touch citizens’ lives. . . . “This has really expanded the coalition of the far right,” said Erik Voeten, a professor of geopolitics at Georgetown University and the author of the new study on the Netherlands.
The Post’s writer, Shannon Osaka, seems genuinely surprised that the common people of Europe would place any value on maintaining their standard of living:
[C]hanges to driving, home heating and farming are beginning to affect individual Europeans — sparking criticism and anger. “What’s happening as we accelerate the pace of the transition is we’re now starting to get into sectors that inevitably touch on people’s lives,” said Luke Shore, strategy director for Project Tempo, a nonprofit research organization that is assessing how climate policies affect voting patterns in Europe. “We’ve reached the point at which it’s becoming personal — and for that reason, it’s also becoming more political.” The problem, researchers say, occurs when individual consumers feel that the cost of the energy transition is being borne on their shoulders — rather than on governments and corporations.
Who could ever have guessed that this might happen? As an example of crazy “far right” lunacy, the Post cites this line from the manifesto of the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands:
“Energy is a basic need, but climate madness has turned it into a very expensive luxury item.”
I mean, how could you get any more extreme “far right” than that?
In a very similar vein, we have a piece from the Guardian on April 30, with the headline, “How climate policies are becoming focus for far-right attacks in Germany.” Again, the gist is that this is just coming from extremists that you don’t need to pay any attention to. Excerpt:
At the marches held in Görlitz, a stronghold of the far right on the Polish border, and other towns across Germany every Monday night, supporters of [the Alternative for Germany and Free Saxony] parties vent their fury at immigration, coronavirus restrictions and military aid to Ukraine. But one group bears the brunt of the blame. “The Greens are our main enemy,” said Jankus, describing the AfD as a party of freedom and the Greens as a party of bans. “We don’t want to tell people how to heat their homes. We don’t want to tell people what kind of engine should be in their car.”
Freedom — there’s a really lunatic “far right” idea. Rather than trying to explain to the readers why there is something wrong with support of “freedom,” the Guardian instead veers off into characterizing these “far right” demonstrators as really, really bad people:
[Green] party speaker Carolin Renner said she and her colleagues had had death threats screamed in their faces, white-pride stickers stuck to their door and a daily barrage of hateful comments posted on their social media channels. Shortly before Christmas, protesters dumped horse manure in front of the Greens’ office in nearby Zittau.
Despite the characterizations, the article contains no actual example of anything described as a “death threat” or a “hateful comment.” We’ll just have to take the word of the Green Party spokesperson.
Well, the European elections are just about a month away at this point. The climate skeptic parties are expected to make some noticeable gains. However, the actual mandatory requirements for most people to ditch the gas-powered car for an electric one, or to buy a heat pump to heat their home, have not yet kicked in. When that happens, perhaps we will see a real political tornado.
The beast of ideology lifts the lid on transformation
By Alastair Crooke | Strategic Culture Foundation | May 6, 2024
The Transformation is accelerating. The harsh, often violent, police repression of student protests across the U.S. and Europe, in wake of the continuing Palestinian massacres, exposes sheer intolerance towards those voicing condemnation against the violence in Gaza.
The category of ‘hate speech’ enacted into law has become so ubiquitous and fluid that criticism of the conduct of Israel’s behaviour in Gaza and the West Bank is now treated as a category of extremism and as a threat to the state. Confronted by criticism of Israel, the ruling élites respond by angrily lashing out.
Is there a boundary (still) between criticism and anti-semitism? In the West the two increasingly are being made to cohere.
Today’s stifling of any criticism of Israel’s conduct – in blatant contradiction with any western claim to a values-based order – reflects desperation and a touch of panic. Those who still occupy the leadership slots of Institutional Power in the U.S. and Europe are compelled by the logic of those structures to pursue courses of action that are leading to ‘system’ breakdown, both domestically – and concomitantly – provoking the dramatic intensification of international tensions, too.
Mistakes flow from the underlying ideological rigidities in which the ruling strata are trapped: The embrace of a transformed Biblical Israel that long ago separated from today’s U.S. Democratic Party zeitgeist; the inability to accept reality in Ukraine; and the notion that U.S. political coercion alone can revive paradigms in Israel and the Middle East that are long gone.
The notion that a new Israeli Nakba of Palestinians can be forced down the throats of the western and the global public are both delusional and reek of centuries of old Orientalism.
What else can one say when Senator Tom Cotton posts: “These little Gazas are disgusting cesspools of antisemitic hate, full of pro-Hamas sympathisers; fanatics and freaks”?
When order unravels, it unravels quickly and comprehensively. Suddenly, the GOP conference has had its nose rubbed in dirt (over its lack of support for Biden’s $61bn for Ukraine); the U.S. public’s despair at open border immigration is disdainfully ignored; and Gen Z’s expressions of empathy with Gaza is declared an internal ‘enemy’ to be roughly suppressed. All points of strategic inflection and transformation – likely as not.
And the rest of the world now is cast as an enemy too, being perceived as recalcitrants who fail to embrace the western recitation of its ‘Rules Order’ catechism and for failing clearly to toe the line on support for Israel and the proxy war on Russia.
It is a naked bid for unchecked power; one nevertheless that is galvanising a global blow-back. It is pushing China closer to Russia and accelerating the BRICS confluence. Plainly put, the world – faced with massacres in Gaza and West Bank – will not abide by either the Rules or any western hypocritical cherry-picking of International Law. Both systems are collapsing under the leaden weight of western hypocrisy.
Nothing is more obvious than Secretary of State Blinken’s scolding of President Xi for China’s treatment of the Uighurs and his threats of sanctions for Chinas trade with Russia – powering ‘Russia’s assault on Ukraine’, Blinken asserts. Blinken has made an enemy of the one power that can evidently out-compete the U.S.; that has manufacturing and competitive overmatch vs the U.S.
The point here is that these tensions can quickly spiral down into war of ‘Us’ versus ‘Them’ – ranged against not just the China, Russia, Iran “Axis of Evil”, but vs Turkey, India Brazil and all others who dare to criticise the moral correctness of either of the West’s Israel and Ukraine projects. That is, it has the potential to turn into the West versus the Rest.
Again, another own goal.
Crucially, these two conflicts have led to the Transformation of the West from self-styled ‘mediators’ claiming to bring calm to flashpoints, to being active contenders in these wars. And, as active contenders, they can permit no criticism of their actions – either inside, or out; for that would be to hint at appeasement.
Put plainly: this transformation to contenders in war lies at the heart of Europe’s present obsession with militarism. Bruno Maçães relates that a “senior European minister argued to him that: if the U.S. withdrew its support for Ukraine, his country, a Nato member, would have no choice but to fight alongside Ukraine – inside Ukraine. As he put it, why should his country wait for a Ukrainian defeat, followed by [a defeated Ukraine] swelling the ranks of a Russian army bent on new excursions?”
Such a proposition is both stupid and likely would lead to a continent-wide war (a prospect with which the unnamed minister seemed astonishingly at ease). Such insanity is the consequence of the Europeans’ acquiescence to Biden’s attempt at regime change in Moscow. They wanted to become consequential players at the table of the Great Game, but have come to perceive that they sorely lack the means for it. The Brussels Class fear the consequence to this hubris will be the unravelling of the EU.
As Professor John Gray writes:
“At bottom, the liberal assault on free speech [on Gaza and Ukraine] is a bid for unchecked power. By shifting the locus of decision from democratic deliberation to legal procedures, the élites aim to insulate [their neoliberal] cultish programmes from contestation and accountability. The politicisation of law – and the hollowing out of politics go hand in hand”.
Despite these efforts to cancel opposing voices, other perspectives and understandings of history nonetheless are reasserting their primacy: Do Palestinians have a point? Is there a history to their predicament? ‘No, they are a tool used by Iran, by Putin and by Xi Jinping’, Washington and Brussels says.
They say such untruths because the intellectual effort to see Palestinians as human beings, as citizens, endowed with rights, would force many Western states to revise much of their rigid system of thinking. It is simpler and easier for Palestinians to be left ambiguous, or to ‘disappear’.
The future which this approach heralds couldn’t be farther from the democratic, co-operative international order the White House claims to advocate. Rather it leads to the precipice of civil violence in the U.S. and to wider war in Ukraine.
Many of today’s Woke liberals however, would reject the allegation of being anti-free speech, labouring under the misapprehension that their liberalism is not curtailing free speech, but rather is protecting it from ‘falsehoods’ emanating from the enemies of ‘our democracy’ (i.e. the ‘MAGA contingent’). In this way, they falsely perceive themselves as still adhering to the classical liberalism of, say, John Stuart Mill.
Whilst it is true that in On Liberty (1859) Mill argued that free speech must include the freedom to cause offence, in the same essay he also insisted that the value of freedom lay in its collective utility. He specified that “it must be utility in the largest sense – grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being”.
Free speech has little value if it facilitates the discourse of the ‘deplorables’ or the so-called Right.
In other words, “Like many other 19th-century liberals”, Professor Gray argues, “Mill feared the rise of democratic government because he believed it meant empowering an ignorant and tyrannical majority. Time and again, he vilified the torpid masses who were content with traditional ways of living”. One can hear here, the precursor to Mrs Clinton’s utter disdain for the ‘deplorables’ living in ‘fly-over’ U.S. states.
Rousseau too, is often taken as an icon of ‘liberty’ and ‘individualism’ and widely admired. Yet here too, we have language which conceals its’ fundamentally anti-political character.
Rousseau saw human associations rather, as groups to be acted upon, so that all thinking and daily behaviour could be folded into the like-minded units of a unitary state.
The individualism of Rousseau’s thought, therefore, is no libertarian assertion of absolute rights of free speech against the all-consuming state. No raising of the ‘tri-colour’ against oppression.
Quite the reverse! Rousseau’s passionate ‘defence of the individual’ arises out of his opposition to ‘the tyranny’ of social convention; the forms, rituals and ancient myths that bind society – religion, family, history, and social institutions. His ideal may be proclaimed as that of individual freedom, but it is ‘freedom’, however, not in a sense of immunity from control of the state, but in our withdrawal from the supposed oppressions and corruptions of collective society.
Family relationship is thus transmuted subtly into a political relationship; the molecule of the family is broken into the atoms of its individuals. With these atoms today groomed further to shed their biological gender, their cultural identity and ethnicity, they are coalesced afresh into the single unity of the state.
This is the deceit concealed in classical Liberalism’s language of freedom and individualism – ‘freedom’ nonetheless being hailed as the major contribution of the French Revolution to western civilisation.
Yet perversely, behind the language of freedom lay de-civilisation.
The ideological legacy from the French Revolution, however, was radical de-civilisation. The old sense of permanence – of belonging somewhere in space and time – was conjured away, to give place to its very opposite: Transience, temporariness and ephemerality.
Frank Furedi has written,
“Discontinuity of culture coexists with the loss of the sense of the past … The loss of this sensibility has had an unsettling effect on culture itself and has deprived it of moral depth. Today, the anticultural exercises a powerful role in western society. Culture is frequently framed in instrumental and pragmatic terms and rarely perceived as a system of norms that endow human life with meaning. Culture has become a shallow construct to be disposed of – or changed.
“The western cultural elite is distinctively uncomfortable with the narrative of civilisation and has lost its enthusiasm for celebrating it. The contemporary cultural landscape is saturated with a corpus of literature that calls into question the moral authority of civilisation and associates it more with negative qualities.
“De-civilization means that even the most foundational identities – such as that between man and woman – is called into question. At a time when the answer to the question of ‘what it means to be human’ becomes complicated – and where the assumptions of western civilisation lose their salience – the sentiments associated with wokeism can flourish”.
Karl Polyani, in his Great Transformation (published some 80 years ago), held that the massive economic and social transformations that he had witnessed during his lifetime – the end of the century of “relative peace” in Europe from 1815 to 1914, and the subsequent descent into economic turmoil, fascism and war, which was still ongoing at the time of the book’s publication – had but a single, overarching cause:
Prior to the 19th century, he insisted, the human way of being had always been ‘embedded’ in society, and that it was subordinated to local politics, customs, religion and social relations i.e. to a civilisational culture. Life was not treated as separated into distinct particulars, but as parts of an articulate whole – of life itself.
Liberalism turned this logic on its head. It constituted an ontological break with much of human history. Not only did it artificially separate the ‘economic’ from the ‘political’, but liberal economics (its foundational notion) demanded the subordination of society – of life itself – to the abstract logic of the self-regulating market. For Polanyi, this “means no less than the running of society as an adjunct to the market”.
The answer – clearly – was to make society again a distinctly human relationship of community, given meaning through a living culture. In this sense, Polanyi also emphasised the territorial character of sovereignty – the nation-state as the pre-condition to the exercise of democratic politics.
Polanyi would have argued that, absent a return to Life Itself as the pivot to politics, a violent backlash was inevitable. (Though hopefully not as dire as the transformation through which he lived.)
Dr. Ghassan Abu Sitta speaks to Al Mayadeen on EU entry ban
Al Mayadeen | May 5, 2024
Doctor Ghassan Abu Sitta, a renowned Palestinian Plastic and Reconstructive surgeon, detailed to Al Mayadeen his experience in France’s Charles De Gaulle International Airport, where French authorities stopped and turned him back on Saturday.
Dr. Abu Sitta flew to France to speak at the French Senate at the invitation of the Ecologists Party (The Greens), however, he was stopped and interrogated after arriving at Charles De Gaulle airport, to be later put on a flight back home. French authorities told Abu Sitta that he was barred from entering EU member states after German authorities banned him from the Schengen Area.
The surgeon volunteered with Doctors Without Borders in the Gaza Strip, working in the besieged territories hospitals amid a blatant Israeli genocide, which he bore witness to.
He told Al Mayadeen that the main reason why French authorities denied him entry to the country was to deny him access to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. The doctor was also scheduled to speak to authorities in the ICC, which is reportedly exploring issuing arrest warrants for Israeli war criminals, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In the interview, Abu Sitta underlined the political pressure that the ICC is being subjected to from the United States Congress, the Joe Biden administration, and the European governments abetting the Israeli regime’s war on Gaza.
In this context, the humanitarian said that a European political decision has been made, aiming to silence any witnesses of Israeli war crimes in Gaza. This policy comes in parallel with an Israeli decision to assassinate all other witnesses to the war crimes remaining in the Gaza Strip or held in detention, Abu Sitta explained.
Moreover, Abu Sitta pointed to collusion between Israeli and European officials, aimed at restricting the movement of witnesses to the Israeli genocide of Palestinians, specifically to international courts.
Ukraine’s creditors want their money back – WSJ
RT | May 5, 2024
A group of foreign bondholders have taken steps to force Ukraine to begin repaying its debts as soon as next year, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday. If they succeed, Kiev could hemorrhage $500 million every year on interest payments alone.
The group, which includes investment giants Blackrock and Pimco, granted Kiev a two-year debt holiday in 2022, gambling that the conflict with Russia would have concluded by now.
With no end to the fighting in sight, the lenders have now hired lawyers at Weil Gotshal & Manges and bankers from PJT Partners to meet with Ukrainian officials and strike a deal whereby Ukraine would resume making interest payments next year in exchange for having a significant chunk of its debt written off, anonymous sources told the Wall Street Journal.
The group holds around a fifth of Ukraine’s $20 billion in outstanding Eurobonds, the newspaper reported. While this figure represents a fraction of Ukraine’s total external debt of $161.5 billion, servicing the interest on these bonds would cost the country $500 million annually, the bondholders said.
Should the bondholders fail to strike a deal with Kiev by August, Ukraine could default. This would damage the country’s credit rating and restrict its ability to borrow even more money in the future.
According to the newspaper, Ukrainian officials are hoping that the US and other Western governments will take its side during talks with the bondholders. However, a group of these countries have already offered Ukraine a debt holiday on around $4 billion worth of loans until 2027, and are reportedly concerned that any deal with the bondholders would see private lenders being repaid before them.
Ukraine already relies on foreign aid to keep government departments open and state employees paid. The country’s military is almost entirely dependent on foreign funding; officials in Kiev and the West were predicting imminent defeat until the US Congress approved a foreign aid bill last month which included $61 billion for Ukraine and US government agencies involved in the conflict.
The bill provides almost $14 billion to Ukraine for the purchase of weapons, and includes $9 billion in new “forgivable loans.”
According to the Wall Street Journal, some bondholders have suggested that the US and EU could use frozen Russian assets to pay off Ukraine’s debts. While around $300 billion in assets belonging to the Russian central bank have been frozen in American and European banks since 2022, the US only passed legislation allowing for their seizure last month, and no similar legal mechanism exists in Europe, where the vast majority of these assets are held.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and European Central Bank (ECB) have both urged governments not to steal this money, with ECB chief Christine Lagarde warning last month that doing so would risk “breaking the international order that you want to protect.”
The West’s double standards on Georgia’s ‘foreign agents’ bill
By Paul Robinson | Canadian Dimension | May 3, 2024
The Republic of Georgia has not enjoyed a stable life in the 30 years or so since it gained independence from the Soviet Union. In the 1990s, it was wracked by civil war and ethnic conflict, at the end of which it lost control of the autonomous regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. In 2003, the so-called Rose Revolution overthrew the government of President Edvard Shevardnadze, after which Georgia experienced the rather erratic reign of Mikheil Saakashvili, who promised to turn the country permanently towards the West, including membership of NATO and the EU.
Saakashvili, however, overplayed his hand, and in August 2008 launched an attack on South Ossetia in an effort to recapture it by force. The Russian army immediately responded, drove the Georgians out and advanced to within a few kilometers of the Georgian capital Tbilisi before agreeing to a ceasefire and heading home. Saakashvili left Georgia in 2013, discredited both by the 2008 war and revelations of rape and torture in the country’s prisons.
Since Saakashvili’s departure, the ruling party in the country has been Georgian Dream, an organization considered somewhat left-of-centre economically but also quite conservative socially, favouring traditional Christian family values. In terms of foreign policy, it remains committed to joining NATO and the EU, and has signed an association agreement with the latter. But it has resisted sending military aid to Ukraine or imposing sanctions on the Russian Federation lest this provoke Russian retaliation that might harm the Georgian economy. This has led critics to denounce it as ‘pro-Russian.’
The rather paranoid perception that Georgian Dream is a tool of Moscow lies at the heart of protests now rocking Tbilisi and threatening Georgia with yet another ‘colour revolution.’ The cause of this is legislation introduced by Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze that would oblige organizations that receive more than 20 percent of their funds from foreign sources to register as ‘foreign agents’ and submit details of their finances to the government. Organizations that fail to do so would be fined.
Kobakhidze says the law is necessary to increase transparency, an argument much used by advocates of similar laws in Western countries. The obvious target of the legislation is the large number of Georgian NGOs who receive money from Western countries for the purported aim of promoting European integration, ‘Western values,’ and so on, and also to carry out tasks such as election monitoring. Kobakhidze complains that such NGOs have promoted revolution (as in 2003), propagated ‘gay propaganda’ and attacked the Georgian Orthodox Church. It would appear that he wishes to rein them in. It is this that riles the thousands of people who have come out on the streets of Tbilisi this past week to protest against the proposed legislation. Wrapping themselves in EU flags, they claim that Georgian Dream is acting under orders from Moscow with the intent of destroying pro-Western forces in the country. “Everything shows that this government is controlled by Putin,” one protestor told the New York Times, while others shouted “No to the Russian law!”
According to Eto Buziashvili, a former advisor to the National Security Council of Georgia, the law is a method of “political repression,” whose aim is “to exhaust civil society and media, … leaving them with no capacity to defend the elections in October.” She continues: “those of us who desire an independent and free Georgia with a liberal democracy and a Euro-Atlantic future will be faced with the choice of either submitting to Russia-dictated rule or leaving the country. If we do neither, they will imprison us.”
Georgian Dream, however, is standing firm. Its leaders see the protestors as ideological zealots bent on revolution and on provoking conflict with Russia. In a speech on Monday, the party’s founder, billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, accused the ‘Global War Party’ of being behind the protests. According to Ivanishvili, the Global War Party “wields influence over NATO and the EU, stirring conflicts between Georgia and Russia, and exacerbating Ukraine’s situation.” “Foreign agents still aim to restore a cruel dictatorship in Georgia, but Georgian Dream will prevent this, advocating for governance elected by the people, not appointed from outside,” he says.
The ‘outside’ Ivanishvili mentioned is quite obviously the West, whose leaders have been outspoken in their criticism of Georgia’s foreign agent legislation. The EU’s diplomatic service, for instance, declared that, “This is a very concerning development and the final adoption of this legislation would negatively impact Georgia’s progress on its EU path. The law is not in line with EU core norms and values.” Meanwhile, a group of 14 US Senators signed a letter to Prime Minister Kobakhidze, arguing that the law “would be used to silence civil society and media that play a significant role in advancing Georgia’s democratic institutions.” They urged him to abandon his “destructive path” as a result of which “Georgia’s transatlantic aspirations are being undermined.”
The hostile reaction of the West once again raises questions of hypocrisy and double standards. After all, not only does the United States itself have a foreign agent law, but the concept is becoming increasingly popular elsewhere in the West, with an ever growing number of countries, including Canada, either adopting such a law or considering it. It would appear that requiring foreign-funded organizations to register with the government is acceptable as long as it is Western states doing the requiring. But when the tables are turned, and it is Western-funded institutions that are being obliged to register, suddenly foreign agent laws turn out to be threats to democracy that are incompatible with fundamental values.
No doubt, those leading the charge against Georgia’s law would argue that the comparison is a false one—that Western-funded NGOs are promoting human rights, democracy, and other universal values and institutions that are for the good of all, whereas foreign agent laws elsewhere are used to do the opposite. But what is a good objective is all in the eye of the observer. In countries like Georgia, Western-funded organizations openly seek to fundamentally alter the political, economic, and social institutions of their host countries to bring them in line with those of the West, and also to turn those countries into the West’s political and military allies. If you live in such a country and happen to disagree with such a fundamental alteration of your homeland, then indeed you could view this process as threatening.
It’s also not as democratic as we might like to think. Integration with the EU, for instance, requires one to bring one’s country in line with a host of demands from Brussels. Those overseeing the process are often more concerned with doing what the EU says they must do than with doing what their own people want. Moreover, what are nowadays referred to as ‘Western values’ are not universally popular, and the fact that those promoting those values are the beneficiaries of substantial foreign funding while those opposing them have very few resources of their own can be seen as not just unfair but deeply undemocratic.
In short, if Western states have their reasons for being cagey of foreign influences, so too do those in other countries. Moreover, while the push towards Western integration may work in countries that are relatively united in favour, elsewhere it can prove deeply divisive and, as shown by Ukraine, eventually extremely destructive. This is particularly so in cases such as Georgia, where the issue is wrapped up in geopolitical rhetoric that casts it as a struggle of good (the West) against evil (Russia). Contrary to the protestors’ claims, there is no evidence that Moscow is pulling the strings in Tbilisi, but their insistence that it is risks turning a domestic pursuit into something much wider and consequently much more dangerous.
Paul Robinson is a professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy. He is the author of numerous works on Russian and Soviet history, including Russian Conservatism, published by Northern Illinois University Press in 2019.
Orbán calls for Europeans to vote for pro-peace parties in June’s EU parliament elections
Remix News | May 2, 2024
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is warning that only electing conservative candidates to the European Parliament and replacing the EU’s current leadership will lead to peace in Ukraine.
“The whole European community is on a razor’s edge. We are standing on the dividing line between war and peace,” Prime Minister Viktor Orbán wrote on social media.
“The most important thing to do in politics today, even if Brussels seems far away, is to create peace. Peace can be created beyond the warring parties, those who finance the war. And this war is financed by the West, by Brussels’ budget money and by American money.
“But our vote will determine whether there is a pro-war or a pro-peace majority in the European Parliament, in the European Commission, in the European Council. Now we have a pro-war majority. We must change that, and we must change it on June 9! Only peace! Only Fidesz!”
Some of the most pro-war parties in Europe now belong to the left. For instance, the Green party in Germany, which was founded on pro-peace priorities and opposition to NATO, is now arguably the most pro-war party in Germany. The Greens have pushed for more weapons shipments for Ukraine, aligned themselves with war hawks in the United States, and have a membership overwhelmingly in favor of war.
In fact, the Green party’s supporters are the most in favor of additional weapons shipments to Ukraine of all German parties, but also the most likely to say they would not defend Germany if the country were invaded.
Meanwhile, independent polling agency Medián’s latest research showed that Orbán’s party, the conservative Fidesz, which has been in power since 2010, remains the most popular party in Hungary, with 46 percent of decided voters supporting it.
The newcomer centrist Tisza party, led by Fidesz renegade Péter Magyar, estranged husband of former Justice Minister Judit Varga, is second with 24 percent. The party’s sudden surge has completely rearranged the political landscape in Hungary, with the opposition’s previously largest force, the Socialist Democratic Coalition, now polling at 9 percent, followed by the satire party Two-Tailed Dog at 6 percent and Momentum at 5 percent.
Opposition parties slam Macron’s idea to boost European defence with French nuclear weapons
By Ahmed Adel | April 30, 2024
Several opposition parties have attacked the proposal by French President Emmanuel Macron to share French nuclear weapons with the European Union. Macron’s controversy follows another recent one in which the erosion of France’s sovereignty and the legacy of Charles de Gaulle were highlighted in the most ironic way.
During a speech on April 28, Macron stated that the EU needs a common defence strategy and that French nuclear weapons could be a key component. According to him, this would provide the security guarantees that Europe expects and would also allow for neighbourly relations with Russia.
Macron stressed that a “credible European defence” needs to go beyond NATO, which “may mean deploying anti-missile shields” that will “block all missiles and deter the use of nuclear weapons.”
The French president said he was open to giving a more “European dimension” to vital interests, even if France’s doctrine has been to only use nuclear weapons when their own vital interests are threatened.
“I’m in favour of opening this debate, which must therefore include missile defence, long-range weapons and nuclear weapons for those who have them or who have American nuclear weapons on their soil,” he said.
However, his statements were criticised by all political parties.
“It is not appropriate for the head of state to say such things. Macron says he wants to start discussions on sharing nuclear weapons with European countries. This is extremely serious because it touches on the issue of French sovereignty,” said François-Xavier Bellamy, leader of the Republican Party list for the European Parliament elections, to the French channel CNews on April 28.
Thierry Mariani, an MEP from Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (Rassemblement National) party, said on April 28 that Macron had become a “threat to the nation.”
“Nuclear weapons will be followed by France’s place as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, which will also be given to the European Union […] Macron is becoming a threat to the nation!” the MEP wrote on X.
Meanwhile, the left-wing La France Insoumise (LFI) party pointed out that “the head of state has dealt another blow to the credibility of French nuclear weapons. He is lumping everything into a single pile. Share nuclear weapons? Lose our sovereignty. This decision does not belong to the president but to the people.”
Mathilde Panot, leader of the LFI faction in the French National Assembly, said on RTL radio that she “does not believe in a common EU nuclear umbrella.”
“We will not resort to the use of nuclear weapons because of another country,” she said, calling Macron’s proposal madness and irresponsibility as it increases the risk of nuclear war in Europe.
LFI MP Bastien Lachaud also noted on X that Macron “wants to abandon the French nuclear deterrence doctrine.”
In turn, Florian Philippot, the head of the Patriots party, accused Macron of being a “traitor” on X, recalling on April 28 the words of General Charles de Gaulle, who argued in 1959: “The defence of France must be French. […] It is essential that the defence is ours, that France defends itself, for itself and in its own way. If it were otherwise, if it were admitted for a long time that the defence of France stopped being part of the national framework and became confused or merged with something else, it would not be possible for us to maintain a State in our country.”
As Philippot points out, Macron is challenging the legacy of one of France’s most respected statesmen, which very well could lead to the French president’s demise considering his people’s fiercely independent spirit, something he has been eroding, especially after Russia launched its special military operation against Ukraine.
In fact, Moscow described the deployment of the French nuclear aircraft carrier, ironically called Charles de Gaulle, to Souda Bay on the Greek island of Crete for the largest NATO naval exercise in recent times as an “erosion of French sovereignty.”
According to Reuters, placing the Charles de Gaulle under the operational control of the Atlantic Alliance is “highly symbolic, not least because the warship is named after the former president who took France out of the alliance’s US-led command structure in 1966.”
Agreeing with Moscow’s position, “the decision to put the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier under NATO command drew criticism from the French far left and far right, who said it represented a loss of sovereign power,” Reuters reported.
Macron has consistently promoted pan-European defence, but the conversation has never reached the point of compromising French sovereignty. It is likely that this proposal will have negative effects on Macron’s popularity as the fiercely sovereign policies and spirit of Charles de Gaulle are being challenged in an unprecedented manner by the French president.
Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
The Interlocking of Strategic Paradigms
By Alastair Crooke | Strategic Culture Foundation | April 29, 2024
Theodore Postol, Professor of Science, Technology and National Security Policy at MIT, has provided a forensic analysis of the videos and evidence emerging from Iran’s 13th April swarm drone and missile ‘demonstation’ attack into Israel: A ‘message’, rather than an ‘assault’.
The leading Israeli daily, Yediot Ahoronot, has estimated the cost of attempting to down this Iranian flotilla at between $2-3 billion dollars. The implications of this single number are substantial.
Professor Postol writes:
“This indicates that the cost of defending against waves of attacks of this type is very likely to be unsustainable against an adequately armed and determined adversary”.
“The videos show an extremely important fact: All of the targets, whether drones or not, are shot down by air-to-air missiles”, [fired from mostly U.S. aircraft. Some 154 aircraft reportedly were aloft at the time] likely firing AIM-9x Sidewinder air to air missiles. The cost of a single Sidewinder air-to-air missile is about $500,000”.
Furthermore:
“The fact that a very large number of unengaged ballistic missiles could be seen glowing as they reenter the atmosphere to lower altitudes [an indication of hyper-speed], indicates that whatever the effects of [Israel’s] David’s Sling and the Arrow missile defenses, they were not especially effective. Thus, the evidence at this point shows that essentially all or most of the arriving long-range ballistic missiles were not intercepted by any of the Israeli air and missile-defense systems”.
Postel adds, “I have analyzed the situation, and have concluded that commercially available optical and computational technology is more than capable of being adapted to a cruise missile guidance system to give it very high precision homing capability … it is my conclusion that the Iranians have already developed precision guided cruise missiles and drones”.
“The implications of this are clear. The cost of shooting down cruise missiles and drones will be very high and might well be unsustainable unless extremely inexpensive and effective anti-air systems can be implemented. At this time, no one has demonstrated a cost-effective defense system that can intercept ballistic missiles with any reliability”.
Just to be clear, Postol is saying that neither the U.S. nor Israel has more than a partial defence to a potential attack of this nature – especially as Iran has dispersed and buried its ballistic missile silos across the entire terrain of Iran under the control of autonomous units which are capable of continuing a war, even were central command and communications to be completely lost.
This amounts to paradigm change – clearly for Israel, for one. The huge physical expenditure on air defence ordinance – 2-3 billion dollars worth – will not be repeated willy-nilly by the U.S. Netanyahu will not easily persuade the U.S. to engage with Israel in any joint venture against Iran, given these unsustainable air-defence costs.
But also, as a second important implication, these Air Defence assets are not just expensive in dollar terms, they simply are not there: i.e. the store cupboard is near empty! And the U.S. lacks the manufacturing capacity to replace these not particularly effective, high cost platforms speedily.
‘Yes, Ukraine’ … the Middle East paradigm interlinks directly with the Ukraine paradigm where Russia has succeeded in destroying so much of the western supplied, air-defence capabilities in Ukraine, giving Russia near complete air dominance over the skies.
Positioning scarce air defence ‘to save Israel’ therefore, exposes Ukraine (and slows the U.S. pivot to China, too). And given the recent passage of the funding Bill for Ukraine in Congress, clearly air defence assets are a priority for sending to Kiev – where the West looks increasingly trapped and rummaging for a way out that does not lead to humiliation.
But before leaving the Middle East paradigm shift, the implications for Netanyahu are already evident: He must therefore focus back to the ‘near enemy’ – the Palestinian sphere or to Lebanon – to provide Israel with the ‘Great Victory’ that his government craves.
In short, the ‘cost’ for Biden of saving Israel from the Iranian flotilla which had been pre-announced by Iran to be demonstrative and not destructive nor lethal is that the White House must put-up with the corollary – an attack on Rafah. But this implies a different form of cost – an electoral erosion through exacerbating domestic tensions arising from the on-going blatant slaughter of Palestinians.
It is not just Israel that bears the weight of the Iranian paradigm shift. Consider the Sunni Arab States that have been working in various forms of collaboration (normalisation) with Israel.
In the event of wider conflict embracing Iran, clearly Israel cannot protect them – as Professor Postol so clearly shows. And can they count on the U.S.? The U.S. faces competing demands for its scarce Air Defences and (for now) Ukraine, and the pivot to China, are higher on the White House priority ladder.
In September 2019, the Saudi Abqaiq oil facility was hit by cruise missiles, which Postol notes, “had an effective accuracy of perhaps a few feet, much more precise than could be achieved with GPS guidance (suggesting an optical and computational guidance system, giving a very precise homing capability)”.
So, after the Iranian active deterrence paradigm shift, and the subsequent Air Defence depletion paradigm shock, the putative coming western paradigm shift (the Third Paradigm) is similarly interlinked with Ukraine.
For the western proxy war with Russia centred on Ukraine has made one thing abundantly clear: this is that the West’s off-shoring of its manufacturing base has left it uncompetitive, both in simple trade terms, and secondly, in limiting western defence manufacturing capacity. It finds (post-13 April) that it does not have the Air Defence assets to go round: ‘saving Israel’; ‘saving Ukraine’ and preparing for war with China.
The western maximalisation of shareholder returns model has not adapted readily to the logistical needs of the present ‘limited’ Ukraine/Russia war, let alone provided positioning for future wars – with Iran and China.
Put plainly, this ‘late stage’ global imperialism has been living a ‘false dawn’: With the economy shifting from manufacturing ‘things’, to the more lucrative sphere of imagining new financial products (such as derivatives) that make a lot of money quickly, but which destabilise society (through increasing disparities of wealth); and which ultimately, de-stabilise the global system itself (as the World Majority states recoil from the loss of sovereignty and autonomy that financialism entails).
More broadly, the global system is close to massive structural change. As the Financial Times warns,
“the U.S. and EU cannot embrace national-security “infant industry” arguments, seize key value chains to narrow inequality, and break the fiscal and monetary ‘rules’, while also using the IMF and World Bank – and the economics profession– to preach free-market best practice to EM ex-China. And China can’t expect others not to copy what it does”. As the FT concludes, “the shift to a new economic paradigm has begun. Where it will end is very much up for grabs.”
‘Up for grabs’: Well, for the FT the answer may be opaque, but for the Global Majority is plain enough – “We’re going back to basics”: A simpler, largely national economy, protected from foreign competition by customs barriers. Call it ‘old- fashioned’ (the concepts have been written about for the last 200 years); yet it is nothing extreme. The notions simply reflect the flip side of the coin to Adam Smith’s doctrines, and that which Friedrich List advanced in his critique of the laissez-faire individualist approach of the Anglo-Americans.
‘European leaders’, however, see the economic paradigm solution differently:
“The ECB’s Panetta gave a speech echoing Mario Draghi’s call for “radical change”: He stated for the EU to thrive it needs a de facto national-security focused POLITICAL economy centered around: reducing dependence on foreign demand; enhancing energy security (green protectionism); advancing production of technology (industrial policy); rethinking participation in global value chains (tariffs/subsidies); governing migration flows (so higher labour costs); enhancing external security (huge funds for defence); and joint investments in European public goods (via Eurobonds … to be bought by ECB QE)”.
The ‘false dawn’ boom in U.S. financial services began as its industrial base was rotting away, and as new wars began to be promoted.
It is easy to see that the U.S. economy now needs structural change. Its real economy has become globally uncompetitive – hence Yellen’s call on China to curb its over-capacity which is hurting western economies.
But is it realistic to think that Europe can manage a relaunch as a ‘defence and national security-led political economy’, as Draghi and Panetta advocate as a continuation of war with Russia? Launched from near ground zero?
Is it realistic to think that the American Security State will allow Europe to do this, having deliberately reduced Europe to economic vassalage through causing it to abandon its prior business model based on cheap energy and selling high-end engineering products to China?
This Draghi-ECB plan represents a huge structural change; one that would take a decade or two to implement and would cost trillions. It would occur too, at a time of inevitable European fiscal austerity. Is there evidence that ordinary Europeans support such radical structural change?
Why then is Europe pursuing a path that embraces huge risks – one that potentially could drag Europe into a whirlpool of tensions ending in war with Russia?
For one main reason: The EU leadership held hubristic ambitions to turn the EU into a ‘geo-political’ empire – a global actor with the heft to join the U.S. at Top Table. To this end, the EU unreservedly offered itself as the auxiliary of the White House Team for their Ukraine project, and acquiesced to the entry price of emptying their armouries and sanctioning the cheap energy on which the economy depended.
It was this decision that has been de-industrialising Europe; that has made what remains of a real economy uncompetitive and triggered the inflation that is undermining living standards. Falling into line with Washington’s failing Ukraine project has released a cascade of disastrous decisions by the EU.
Were this policy line to change, Europe could revert to what it was: a trading association formed of diverse sovereign states. Many Europeans would settle for that: Placing the focus on making Europe competitive again; making Europe a diplomatic actor, rather than as a military actor.
Do Europeans even want to be at the American ‘top table’?