Canadian troops during a NATO drill in Ukraine.
Canada will send 1,000 troops to Latvia to join one of NATO’s battalions that are being assembled in Eastern Europe in a show of force against Russia.
The Canadian Defense Ministry said in a statement on Thursday that the country will “establish and lead” a high-readiness brigade that will “contribute to NATO’s enhanced forward presence in Eastern and Central Europe.”
The statement also said that further details regarding the deployment will be provided at the upcoming NATO summit in Poland.
The Canadian soldiers will be part of a 4,000-strong NATO force that will be deployed to the Baltic States and Poland in order to deter what is claimed to be Russian threats.
The US, Germany and Britain will also send soldiers to join NATO’s four battalions in Eastern Europe.
“As a responsible partner in the world, Canada stands side by side with its NATO allies working to deter aggression and assure peace and stability in Europe,” said Canadian Defense Minister Harjit Sajjan.
Canada’s decision reportedly came after US President Barack Obama urged Canada to contribute more to NATO in a speech in the Canadian Parliament on Wednesday.
NATO plans to expand its military presence in Eastern Europe amid the conflict in Ukraine and has held numerous war games recently.
Some 2,000 NATO forces began a large-scale military exercise in western Ukraine earlier this week which will last until July 8.
Last month, NATO held another 10-day military drill, involving some 31,000 troops from Poland, the US and 17 other nations in Poland.
Russia, wary of the increased presence of NATO troops close to its borders, threatened to take unspecified measures to respond to the increased activities by the Western military bloc.
NATO has stepped up its military build-up near Russia’s borders since it suspended all ties with Moscow in April 2014 after the Black Sea Crimean Peninsula re-integrated into the Russian Federation following a referendum.
Moscow has repeatedly repudiated NATO’s expansion near its borders, saying such a move poses a threat to both regional and international peace.
July 1, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Militarism | Canada, NATO, Russia, UK, United States |
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“No one really knows what happens now: the collective imagination leads to dark places.”
The International New York Times, June 25-26 2016
Dublin – By voting for Brexit the English and Welsh have switched on the light. And, as usual, when the light suddenly conquers the dark the cracks become obvious and the cockroaches scatter. It’s a beautiful sight.
The speculators and the hoarders are running for cover. And their liberal apologists are blinded. At the same time their global gunmen feel naked. And what once felt like a palace now looks like a filthy dungeon. However it is a dungeon with a well marked exit.
It is an English and Welsh enlightenment rather than a British one because the British elite in London and their Celtic counterparts in Edinburgh and Belfast voted to remain in the dark.
The critics of Brexit think that switching on the light is an act of madness. It is far better in their eyes to see nothing and to continuously walk into the wars.
Martin Wolf, the main man in the Financial Times, calls Brexit “irrational” and immune to “cold calculations”. And a Die Ziet editor, Jochen Bittner, writing in the New York Times thinks that Brexit is something an “Arab” would do rather than a “rational” European. Ireland’s leading liberal, Fintan O’Toole, in the Irish Times likens the voters for Brexit to a “drunk”. And the King of the liberals, Tony Blair, again in the New York Times, opines that those who voted for exit are controlled by “dangerous impulses”.
This is class war in words – a stab in the dark at the working class who actually decided the outcome of the referendum.
Despite this liberal attempt to assassinate the working class character; despite the accusation of irrationalism, and indeed the racism, directed at the English and Welsh workers: the vote for Brexit was an act of pure reason.
No matter the perspective (political, economic, military or moral) Brexit makes perfect sense for the working class. Has there ever been in the history of England or Wales a better example of rationalism? Probably not.
According to the mainstream media the determining issue in the referendum was immigration. The mainstream however is Murdoch: a man who has built an empire on lies and insults directed at the working class. And contrary to what the “quality” liberal press think: Murdoch doesn’t speak for the working class. And neither do the right-wingers, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, who were and are presented as being the leaders of Brexit.
The vote for Brexit was based on solid ground rather than on a fog of emotion. There was nothing alcoholic about it, nothing fearful nor fantastical nor dangerous. In fact the vote was raw rationalism. And the fact that it was based on “uneducated” workers is brilliantly hopeful.
The empirical reasons for voting for Brexit were as clear as day. The obvious one is that there is no “European Union” to belong to. Germany rules the roost. The “Union” doesn’t exist. But the “Apartheid” does.
The facts have being piling up for all to see in recent years. Only an educated fool could miss them. The financial crisis of 2008 crystallised everything. The subsequent rape of Greece and the generalised attack on workers throughout the EU (Austerity) made the EU feel more like a Banana Republic than a Super State.
And the 2014 coup in Ukraine made this banana feeling unbearable. The USA was doing to Europe what it did to Honduras in 2009. To paraphrase the US Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland, the US was “fucking” Europe. And the response of the EU? Silence. Not a word of complaint. So why would anyone want to belong to an organisation that is being “fucked”?
The fact that damns the EU the most however, in the eyes of “cold calculation”, is the EU’s death wish. The EU’s push for World War III in the East is truly mad. And makes a mockery of the “peaceful” portrayal of the EU.
By allowing NATO to goose-step the EU into the Middle East and up to the borders of Russia completely discredits the EU. Even more so if you’re an English or Welsh worker. Because it is they who are expected to kill and die on the frontline. The fact is that the English and Welsh working class are the EU’s best canon fodder. And in a time of permanent war: why should they continue to be so?
The vote for Brexit was not a vote against immigration but was a vote against the wars of the ruling class – those stemming from neoliberalism and imperialism (class and world war). That is why the ruling class are now panicking.
This is the hard factual ground upon which Brexit stands. But you will not see or feel this in the gutter liberal press and the gutter liberal education that dominates the European mind.
Therefore to grasp EU reality despite EU propaganda is a triumph of human reason. To understand the class hatred that is dressed up as the “educated” liberal norm and to rebel against it is rationalism at work. And to see the real race hatred that is presented as sophisticated EU foreign policy and to reject it is rational logic at it’s best.
In short: to identify the disunity beneath the rhetoric of European unity is today straightforward common sense. And this is what the common people have in abundance. The English and the Welsh have just tapped into it. And by doing so they may have just kick started another enlightenment.
And what about the darkness? The New York Times, the leading liberal daily, is trapped inside it. Read it’s June 27 International editorial:
“Compounding the problem [of Brexit] is Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. Ruthlessly playing a weak hand, he has worked hard to undermine NATO and challenge the post-cold War order by invading Ukraine, funding right-wing groups in France and elsewhere and recklessly brandishing his military power from the Baltics to Syria. European countries have struggled to remain united on issues ranging from NATO’s budget to how best to respond to Mr. Putin.”
Have you ever read anything more sinister and stupid? This no doubt is what the US and EU “elite” see in their dark “places”. Thanks for switching on the light England and Wales.
Aidan O’Brien is a hospital worker in Dublin, Ireland.
July 1, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | BREXIT, European Union, New York Times, UK |
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After the Brexit vote on June 23, no one reading the coverage by liberal media like the U.K.’s Guardian and Independent newspapers, or the New York Times in the U.S., could possibly mistake the fierce anti-democratic, neocolonial metropolis mentality of the attacks against the mainly working class people who voted for Britain to leave the European Union.
That explains a lot about why these newspapers’ coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean has always been hostile to every progressive government in the region. These media outlets’ foreign affairs reporting has consistently attacked progressive governments in Argentina, Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela, despite all the huge achievements of those governments on behalf of the region’s impoverished majority over the last 15 years.
The latest example of this comprehensive psychological warfare campaign is the Guardian’s attack on Nicaragua’s Sandinista government using the same lazy, skewed reporting and dishonest editorial practice Western liberal media routinely apply to Venezuela, Ukraine, Syria or any other foreign news story the Western elites need to misrepresent for propaganda purposes. Nina Lakhani’s June 26 report “Nicaragua suppresses opposition to ensure one-party election, critics say,” is a text book example of malicious innuendo with close to zero factual content, purposefully edited to obscure and confuse rather than clarify and explain. The most pernicious feature of this kind of propaganda attack is that general readers never see a strong fact-based rebuttal and even if they were to do so would find the detail relentlessly boring. Only specialists are likely to take an interest. So in practice, the liberal and progressive minded public, virtual captives of their own media taste, are entirely at the mercy of liberal media psychological warfare unless they have a special interest in seeking out more truthful reporting.
The most important political reality in Nicaragua since 2011 has been the solid and growing popular support for Daniel Ortega and the Sandinista Front for National Liberation. A poll by a center-right polling consultancy, published over the same weekend that the Guardian’s article appeared, confirmed that 60 percent of people in Nicaragua say they support the FSLN and Daniel Ortega. That augurs a total vote of probably around 70 percent for Daniel Ortega in the forthcoming national elections in November this year. Lakhani’s report ends with a quote from a U.S. academic acknowledging this reality, “The opposition are poorly organized, bereft of ideas and spend too much time fighting amongst themselves …. there’s no one in opposition capable of beating Ortega. He’s too popular – it was always going to be one-horse race.”
But that truth is buried at the end of an arbitrary disinformation pot pourri, jumping from one anti-Sandinista falsehood to another. Much more interesting than the routine falsity of the Guardian’s report is the fundamental assumption underlying it, namely that the opinion of a cosseted, self-interested neocolonial managerial class is worth more than the opinion of at least 60 percent of people in Nicaragua.
This reality was roughly stripped of its usual suave cosmetic makeover by the commentary in all the Western liberal media, almost universally attacking what they regarded as the ignorance and lack of education of the voters supporting Britain’s exit from the European Union. The political expression of that duplicity and cynicism has been the attack on Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the British Labour Party by party MPs largely carried over from the dead-end neoliberal era of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, who are talking openly about splitting to form a new political grouping. So at precisely the moment when the governing right-wing Tory Party is at its lowest ebb since the last general election, these avowed social democrats have chosen to attack the most faithful progressive expression of working class people in Britain. They cannot accept the stark challenge to the privileged status quo of which they are beneficiaries that the June 23 Brexit vote represents. There’s a very clear precedent for this moment in British politics and it comes from … Nicaragua.
After the Sandinista Front lost the 1990 election, a strong debate developed between those who believed in staying faithful to the principles of the Sandinista Revolution and those who believed in a move towards European style social democracy. Daniel Ortega lead those who insisted on fighting to defend strong government intervention in a mixed economy and an anti-imperialist foreign policy. The social democrat faction, led by former Vice-President Sergio Ramirez, argued for a shift to a more free market economic policy and an accommodation with the reality of U.S. power in the region. Through 1993 and 1994, Ramirez and his allies organized a parliamentary coup leading a majority of the 39 Sandinista deputies elected in 1990 to work with right-wing factions, railroading through the National Assembly restrictive changes to the 1987 Constitution with zero popular consultation.
In May 1994, the Sandinista Front held a national party congress in which Sergio Ramirez and his sympathizers lost a series of positions in the party structure while Daniel Ortega strengthened his grass roots support to consolidate his leadership. In the subsequent national elections in 1996, Daniel Ortega lead his party to important electoral success in the legislature with 36 out of 93 seats but, amid blatant electoral fraud, failed to win the Presidency. Sergio Ramirez’s Sandinista Renewal Movement polled a negligible vote, winning a solitary seat in the legislature as a result of questionable adjudication by the head of the Supreme Electoral Council, who was also the wife of the candidate in question. Over the subsequent decade, the MRS went into steady decline eventually disappearing as a formally constituted political party after the national elections of 2006.
There may well be a lesson in that history for Britain’s Labour Party. Nicaragua’s economy and society were in deep crisis in 1994 with opinion extremely polarized and a large floating vote desperate for policies to alleviate the crisis. The right wing only won the presidential elections of 1996 and 2001 by ruthless fear-mongering. Daniel Ortega and the Sandinista Front finally won the 2006 presidential election through astute alliances and positive policy proposals, insisting on national unity and reconciliation. In office, Ortega’s team successfully implemented those policy proposals despite being in a minority in the legislature. Their success enabled the Sandinista Front to win the 2011 election with over 63 percent of the vote, while the MRS social democrats by then had disappeared as a national political force. Parallels between Nicaragua in 1994 and Britain now may seem far fetched, but the political logic is strikingly similar. A progressive, relatively radical leader with a massive grassroots mandate faces a rebellion from a privileged social democratic parliamentary clique in a national context dominated by the right wing.
That configuration of forces may well foreshadow, for the social democrat Labour MPs a steady decline into oblivion and, for Jeremy Corbyn, a clear trajectory into office, if not immediate power. The Nicaraguan precedent will not be lost on Corbyn, who for decades has been a strong supporter of progressive movements in Latin America. What is common to both Britain and Nicaragua is the sheer contempt with which social democrat politicians have treated their party and the cynical opportunism of their timing.
The Brexit vote expresses both ordinary voters’ recognition of that cynicism and opportunism and, certainly in England and Wales, their rejection of it. The attitudes of the West’s social democrat political and media class to progressive political movements in Latin America evince the same obtuse, cynical neocolonial arrogance they apply to their own electorate. And that is why it is a waste of time hoping for a coherent, truthful account of events in Latin America and the Caribbean from media disinformation outlets owned and operated by that political and social class, as the Guardian’s latest inaccurate, phony report on Nicaragua demonstrates yet again.
July 1, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | BREXIT, Jeremy Corbyn, Latin America, Nicaragua, The Guardian, UK |
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“The last few days have been seismic and historic for Britain, the greatest political crisis since the second world war with reverberations felt around the world,” wrote Guardian editor-in-chief Katharine Viner in the Graun yesterday, in what amounts to a begging letter to her diminishing readership, imploring them to throw money the Guardian’s way. She goes on to say:
We’ve been working non-stop to try to make sure that the journalism you find in the Guardian and the Observer properly reflects these extraordinary and complicated times.
Let’s note her choice of words – “properly reflects these extraordinary and complicated times.”
Properly.
Not ‘accurately’. Not ‘honestly’. Not ‘responsibly’. Not even ‘fairly’. In fact she notably doesn’t invoke any of these supposedly essential aspects of good journalism anywhere. Instead we get “fast, well-sourced, calm, accessible and intelligent” journalism, that “provide[s] the answers that people desperately need at this time of anxiety and confusion.” Not questions, which can be open-ended and scary. Answers. Packaged and provided for you courtesy of the Graun. Safe, secure, on message, and of course “properly reflect[ing] these …complicated times.”
So, the proper way to reflect Corbyn’s speech on anti-semitism was to grossly misrepresent both the meaning and content? The proper way to reflect the coup against the Labour leadership was to give unlimited space to only one side of the debate? The proper pursuit of journalistic excellence lies in forming unholy alliances with unashamed propaganda outlets such as Interpreter Magazine and the CIA-created Radio Free Europe, and to run an endless and often ignorantly racist smear campaign against the Russian government and nation? The proper position for a serious news outlet is to publish fan write-ups and apologies for avowedly neo-nazi militias? To advocate for illegal wars, and solicit the opinions of a war criminal on the desirability of further war crimes?
This, presumably, is how they sleep at night. Reassuring themselves that answers are more important than questions and “proper” trumps “true” in terms of real journalism. This is fine, I suppose, if that’s their personal choice, but isn’t it a little rich to ask us to fund them to tell us lies? Still, at least there’s one sentence in Viner’s embarrassing begging letter that I think most of us can agree with.
Producing in-depth, thoughtful, well-reported journalism is difficult and expensive. But supporting us isn’t
Good of you to make the distinction, Kath. Saves us the trouble.
July 1, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | The Guardian, UK |
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Apart from the substantive issues for the European elites of the Brexit referendum victory, two ancillary lessons have been thrust upon us, if we were not already wise to them.
One, the contemptible character of the mainstream media. Two, the crucial importance of historical understanding.
The mainstream media
One, the elite mainstream media, especially the financial media, is intolerable. Tabloids of and for the opinion makers. If one has been inclined to put a peg on the nose and tolerate the smell for the odd bit of useful information, the Brexit coverage should surely show that the daily sacrifice is not worth the candle.
Universal hysteria has reigned. It has been a tsunami of shit.
This from the super smug Financial Times :
“Britain takes a leap into the dark. … Britain’s decision to leave the EU is the biggest shock to the continent since the fall of the Berlin Wall.”
The bloody dismantlement of Yugoslavia and the financial coup d’État in Greece were apparently of minor significance.
The Economist, if at times sober, declaimed:
“After the vote, chaos. … June 23rd will be a landmark in British and European history.”
John Lloyd (a contributing editor at the Financial Times no less) blesses Reuters readers with a condescending inconsequential piece titled “… the chaos that will be felt around the world”. Well no it won’t.
Said the Guardian, now running on empty:
“Britain was heading into a period of unprecedented political, constitutional and economic crisis on Saturday night as European leaders stepped up demands for it to quit the EU as soon as possible.”
Beyond ground zero, other countries’ MSM joined in the shock horror clamor.
This from France’s L’Obs (formerly Le Nouvel Observateur), just before the vote:
“Après le Brexit, l’apocalypse?”
And on 24 June:
“Un suicide économique: après le Brexit, la City se réveille en panique”
France’s MSM is now overwhelmingly the plaything of the mega-rich. L’Obs could do well to hone in on the economic suicide perpetrated on its own turf.
Down under, in the colonies, The Sydney Morning Herald (deteriorating by the week with large-scale retrenchment of seasoned staff), dutifully reproduces whatever Anglo-America is saying. Thus the Washington Post appears, with:
“Brexit vote raises global recession fears”
Tabloid-style front page graphics inform us of:
“Anarchy in the UK … Broken Britain as the world reels”
The pot has been simmering, suppressed
Broken Britain indeed. The geographical distribution of the voting patterns highlights a predictable disparity that wasn’t generated the day before yesterday.
The afore-mentioned John Lloyd, from his Oxonian watchtower, declaims (of Scotland and Northern Ireland, but of general application):
“London and the southeast region generate the surplus they help to spend.”
What? As the City funnels its lucre to tax haven satellites (the Channel Islands aptly named), the regions will be appreciative of Lloyd setting the record straight on their mendicancy.
Here is the fundamental problem of the frenzy. The Brexit vote merely reflects a pre-existing condition. Why the supposed shock reaction?
The shock is because ‘the masses are revolting!’ They are supposed to know their place. We, the quality MSM, tell them what’s what, we set the agenda. That we report selectively, that we lie to them as a matter of principle, this is none of their business. It’s their role to take their medicine and be grateful. The universal franchise has been a problem from the beginning; we thought we had it under control, and these wretched people don’t know the rules. Non-stop propaganda not entirely successful, disenfranchisement here we come.
MSM failings have led to the birth of media watch outfits like the British Medialens and the French Acrimed. And now, praise the Lord, we have Off-Guardian, product of the precipitous decline of that once admirable masthead. Off-Guardian nails the MSM’s hysteria:
“You’d be forgiven for thinking that the referendum had been for turning off the sun, banning talking, or killing the first born son of every family in Britain…rather than a return to a state of affairs that has existed for all but the last 40 years of human history. Such is the level of the destruction.”
Thank you and goodnight to the ‘quality’ MSM.
Washington to the rescue?
Before moving on, there appeared an instructive piece emanating from the colonial cringe-worthy political culture in Australia, courtesy of a local academic ‘defense expert’, Stephen Fruehling. We discover that the evil Putin, everybody’s anti-Christ, is the major beneficiary of Brexit: The cad!
“Brexit is a great setback for the security of the Western world … [Fruehling] branded the successful exit vote a victory for Russia, which under Vladimir Putin has been trying to drive wedges into Europe. For Russia, this is a great win as it demonstrates that the institutions that hold together the West are cracking, and can be prised apart … Russia … will be encouraged to step up its corrosive and subversive influence on domestic debates in the EU member states.
Critically for Australia, it would leave Washington less time to focus on its ‘pivot’ to Asia. The turmoil to come can only reinforce the recent tendency of US re-engagement with Europe on the security front. Washington now has yet another crisis to manage in Europe, and will have even less time for allies in Asia.”
‘Washington now has yet another crisis to manage in Europe’? Has our expert let something out of the bag here?
(Real) history matters
But on to issue two – the importance of historical understanding.
Escaping from harsh reality, I was recently watching a re-run of the BBC B-grade copper sitcom, New Tricks, and there was handed down a word of advice from a petty crim to an honest- ex-cop trying to reclaim his integrity from a murky past.
“The past is a foreign country. It’s not a tourist destination. I should leave well enough alone if I were you!”
Quite. And an elitist catechism of general applicability. Leave history to your betters. Control the past and it’s easier to dictate the present.
It’s true that the European Union has been a scapegoat for what Conn Hallinan calls ‘a very British affair’. But the palaver confidently handed down from the MSM over Brexit has universally steered clear of the disaster that is the European Union. A few minor problems, slow to recover after the GFC blah, a refugee tide coming from a whacko sectarian bloodbath nothing to do with us, plebeian xenophobes thrusting for attention, etc.
The strategic myopia, the dishonesty regarding the stench emanating from Brussels is comprehensive. And that’s before TAFTA is promulgated.
The conventional wisdom is that (Inigo Thomas, LRB): “The European Union was formed with the idea of diminishing the power of any country to wage war; the nation state was believed to be part of the problem.” In this regard, Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman are credited as key visionaries and progenitors of economic integration, the ‘fathers’ of the European Union.
The New York Times’ Roger Cohen, long time European correspondent, has been an ardent expositor of this line, allowing him to blithely ignore the trajectory of Europe’s damnable flaws.
But the creation of the European Union didn’t prevent war; it merely pushed it elsewhere, with the connivance of the EU’s leadership. This neglected point has been recently highlighted by Joseph Richardson on this site. Europe’s integration into NATO, and its subservience to US imperatives therein, guarantees the institutional artillery for endless aggression. A collectivity of states can wage war as well as a single nation state, indeed with more intemperance, especially under a belligerent hegemon.
What price the conventional wisdom?
A century down the track from World War I has prompted re-examination of its origins and after-effects. Recent cathartic events within Europe (the debacle of Greece, the refugee influx, Brexit) provide the incentive for a re-examination of the origins of the EU.
By coincidence, I happen to be reading Alexander Werth’s France: 1940-1955 (published in 1956). Werth, a Russian-born English journalist, long-time Moscow correspondent, was by then living in France. He is an unjustly neglected author. Werth’s account of post-War French politics is minutely detailed and iconoclastic.
Monnet’s Plan of December 1945 was designed to engineer faster French re-industrialization. It was integrally dependent on German coal (and incidentally German prisoners of war/peace), which involved simultaneously limiting German re-industrialization. In effect, Versailles redux. The results were paltry, not least because Monnet’s ideas (especially regarding French agriculture) were fanciful.
By mid-1948, the agenda was essentially being set by the US, and Monnet fell into line. The priority was to bring what was to become West Germany into the Western camp – vehicle for the West’s own Iron Curtain. The scene was set with the March 1948 Treaty of Brussels which established the Western European Union (France, Britain, Benelux). France’s attempt to appropriate and/or dominate the German coalfields permanently (the Ruhr, the Saar) could no longer be tolerated.
In mid-1949 the US government instructed Schuman, then French Foreign Secretary, that he had to come up with a plan to deal with the German coal problem. Schuman handed the job to Monnet, who handed it to his bureaucrats. Thus was devised the so-called Schuman Plan, which appeared in ‘bare skeleton’ form in May 1950. This was the beginning of the coal-steel pool, to become the European Coal and Steel Community. There appeared for the first time the idea of a federalist Europe and of the creation of supra-national authorities.
The mis-named ECSC was compromised from the start, as Britain (major coal miner and steel maker) declined to join it. Some French envisaged the creation of a ‘third force’ industrial powerhouse that would balance the US and the Eastern bloc. That idea readily succumbed to US interests and British concerns for its sovereignty.
Schuman and Monnet consulted no-one in the French government, and parliament had no idea. The government, parliament and the public were hostile to the plan. Schuman and Monnet themselves were out of their depth. With the US in Korea, the Schuman Plan soon became integrally linked to US pressure for Western European re-militarization through the creation of a supra-national European army, to include German troops.
In late 1950, the US was even considering incorporating Spain into defense of the ‘free world’. The cynics quipped: “If Syngman Rhee, why not Franco?”.
France was naturally opposed, for economic as well as security reasons. ‘Neutralism’ (the then buzz word) was France’s ‘sound instinct of self-preservation’. West Germany at that stage preferred emphasis on the return of its sovereignty and on re-industrialization. So much for facilitating Franco-German cooperation.
Werth reproduces an excerpt from the French press in April 1948, foreshadowing this trajectory:
“The transformation of the Marshall Plan into a Holy Alliance against Communism means that priority is to be given to military aid, and that the European countries will also be expected to increase their military expenditure, thus adding to their inflation. Secondly, it means the intensification of the Cold War. … What its advocates represented a few months ago as America’s way of saving peace at the lowest possible price has now become one of the greatest war dangers since the Liberation.”
But France was broke, thankful for Marshall Aid, bogged down in Indochina (hoping for American support there), and the US and Britain were relentless. In September 1950, President Truman and Secretary of State Acheson announced that Europe had to have sixty divisions, ten of them German. British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, speaking for Britain, immediately fell into line. Ditto Schuman, speaking for himself.
The Pleven Government buckled in its proposed 1951 budget, with a planned 75 per cent increase in military expenditure, to the detriment of civil infrastructure. The Radical Party deputy Pierre Mendès-France was excoriating of the government. He noted, citing the truncated original Monnet Plan, that industrial robustness was a precondition for military preparedness and to prioritize military spending would entrench France’s then economic fragility.
By 1953, the French leadership thought that the idea of a European army was dead. The Americans thought otherwise. In January Life magazine brutally lampooned French politics (the American media has been doing it ever since). The incoming Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, known on the continent as ‘Europe’s Bully No 1’, exclaimed (Werth):
“The USA had already spent thirty billion dollars in Europe since the war, and this money had been ‘invested’ in the hope that Europe would achieve unity. But if it was found that France, Britain, and Germany were each to go their own way, it would be necessary to ‘give a little re-thinking’ to America’s policy in Europe.”
In October, a speech by Churchill to the Party faithful, drippingly condescending to the French, claimed that Germany would be rearmed, with or without the proposed European Defence Community.
As the French noted, Britain refuses to be integrated in Europe but wants to dictate, with its US masters, the terms on which France has to do so. The clip from Yes Minister currently doing the rounds has substance behind the farce.
De Gaulle responded in a November speech, contemptuous and prescient:
“Since victorious France has an army and defeated Germany has none [he parodied Monnet] let us suppress the French Army. After that we shall make a stateless army of Frenchmen and Germans, and since there must be a government above this army, we shall make a stateless government, a technocracy. As this may not please everybody, we’ll paint a new shop sign and call it ‘community’; it won’t matter, anyway, because the ‘European Army’ will be placed at the entire disposal of the American Commander-in-Chief.”
On the contrary, de Gaulle considered that it was time to revive the Franco-Russian alliance, given that they remained formal allies. That recommendation went down like the proverbial …
At the December 1953 Bermuda Conference, the French Prime Minister Laniel and Foreign Minister Bidault were profoundly humiliated by Churchill. Eisenhower demanded that the EDC be ratified by 15 March. More, just when finally France wanted to sue for peace in Indochina, the US insisted that it was moving in there itself. Following the Bermuda Conference:
“The demand that EDC be ratified without delay became increasingly peremptory. The agitation against EDC in France became correspondingly more violent. …
“… despite assurances, promises and other ways of keeping the United States in an at least relatively good humour, all the French governments from the end of 1950 (Pleven Plan) till the actual rejection of EDC in 1954, knew that at no time was there a majority in the National Assembly or in the country, to sanction EDC.
“If finally, in 1955, German rearmament was agreed to in a different form, it was only because of two years of ever-growing American and especially British pressure and threats, which, it was thought, could no longer be ignored.”
Mendès-France became Prime Minister in June 1954. By now he feared for France’s isolation from the Atlantic Alliance and sought a compromise proposal in August from his Cabinet on the EDC. Bitter conflict resulted in a series of protocols qualifying the original, which Mendès-France took to the Six-Power Conference in Brussels. Mendès-France was confronted by “a general Anglo-American-German gang-up”, supported by the Belgian Conference Chair Paul-Henri Spaak and the Dutch Foreign Minister Johan Beyen. The protocols were laughed out of court. Spaak concluded the conference (at. 2.35 am) with:
“The failure of this conference is a catastrophe. France will be completely isolated. There will be an EDC without her. Western Germany will rearm … We must, must make Europe. The military side isn’t everything. What matters more is the integration of Europe. EDC is only a step in that direction, but if there is no EDC, then everything falls to the ground …”
Mendès-France defied the will of the Conference gang and immediately took the EDC issue to the Assembly, which chucked the whole thing out again “in a stormy and highly emotional debate”.
There was more fury from the foreign press. Churchill told Mendès-France that Germany would be rearmed within NATO if necessary.
Instructive is the fact that the Nazi General Carl Oberg, supreme overseer in France of Jewish deportations and repression of the Resistance, already condemned to death by a British court, was being tried again in October 1954. If the trial’s disclosures reinforced French public hostility to German rearmament, it was of no interest to Britain or to the US. Earlier in 1954 the British Foreign Office, via the Lord Chancellor, had attempted to prevent the publication of Bertrand Russell’s The Scourge of the Swastika. This skirmish was part of a propaganda battle being waged in Britain over official attempts to forge West Germany as an ally amongst civilized nations.
In June the Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz was overthrown by a US-engineered coup. Le Monde, in September, likened Mendès-France to Árbenz and France as a United Fruit Republic.
In October, the Paris agreements were signed over France’s ‘head’, legitimizing the rearmament and sovereignty of West Germany. On Friday 24 December, Mendès-France took the ratification bill authorizing a German army to the Assembly, which the Assembly promptly rejected. With more fury from London and Washington. Noted Werth, the British Foreign Office “had gone off the deep end”. The Assembly’s Foreign Affairs Committee also rejected the bill.
During the next week, the Assembly debated for three days. A wise voice said that rearmament was now by the by; the priority henceforth was to stop the bomb! By that stage, exhaustion and resignation had set in. Mendès-France got his ratification bill passed by a bare margin. Having got France out of Indochina, Mendès-France couldn’t bridge the massive gulf between France and its dictatorial ‘allies’. He was out of office within two months.
The EU a Cold War project
In short, the European Union has its origins not in the mutual thrust for economic cooperation and harmonization of interests but as an American-Anglo Cold War project.
West Germany was to be the core of Cold War Europe, and France was to become frankly irrelevant. West Germany (later a unified Germany) became an Atlantic Alliance satrap but in return obtained carte blanche to become, by whatever means, the industrial and economic powerhouse of the Union. More, it would dictate the terms on which closer economic integration took place. France got, as consolation prize … the Common Agricultural Policy.
And sixty years later? For all its evolution, the EU remains a Cold War project. The ex-Soviet satellites – Eastern Europe and the Baltic states – were incorporated into the Union within that ambit. NATO, the replacement for the ultimately unachievable EDC, dictates military and even foreign policy imperatives. Europe bowed to, facilitated, the dismantlement of Yugoslavia. Europe kowtows to US dictates regarding sanctions on Russia over the Magnitsky Affair and then over the Russian response to the coup in Ukraine.
To European subordination to ongoing American-Anglo Cold War against Russia is added its subordination to American-Anglo (plus Israeli) imperatives in the Middle East. Thus Europe signs up for the sanctions against Iran.
The economic cost to European national economies of these sanctions has been significant. For example, it has been estimated that France’s cancellation of the Mistral carriers that it was building for Russia will cost it ultimately losses of the order of €2 billion. France’s loss of markets (especially for autos) in Iran has been significant.
Then there’s the refugee tidal wave, mostly courtesy of those same imperatives. This is the cost of Europe’s subordination, and it is incalculable. And its leaders have yet to put 2 + 2 together.
Out of the blue, the German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier has broken ranks, and said, ‘enough is enough’. Is there a sign of a rare rationality amongst the European leadership in the wings?
Lessons from Brexit
This story is removed from the Brexit front line, but it is a large elephant in the room.
Which particular European Union does the Remain coalition and its Continental supporters have in mind when they imply that the European status quo is the greatest thing since sliced bread? And with what conception of Europe will they fight to overturn Brexit?
The Brexit catharsis provides the ideal opportunity to re-examine the history and character of the European Union. No whitewashes this time around please. With this prospect, the mainstream media, on its wretched record, has automatically disqualified itself from the job.
Evan Jones is a retired political economist from the University of Sydney. He can be reached at:evan.jones@sydney.edu.au
July 1, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Economics, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | BREXIT, European Union, France, NATO, UK, United States |
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Chagos islanders forcibly removed from their homes by the British government to make way for a US military base have been told they are still barred from returning in a UK Supreme Court ruling.
Britain’s highest court said the islanders could not go back to their homeland because life on the archipelago in the middle of the Indian Ocean is too precarious, despite the fact over 4,000 US and UK military personnel live on the island Diego Garcia.
Since their forced eviction in the 1960s and 1970s, the islanders have campaigned for the right to return to their homes, supported by politicians such as Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.
The Supreme Court ruling is the latest in a protracted legal battle against the UK government.
In 2000, the High Court ruled the Chagos islanders could return to all islands except Diego Garcia, the site of a large US military base. This was overturned in 2008 by a 3/2 majority.
Thursday’s ruling by the same majority is the latest setback in the islanders’ struggle for justice, however they have not been deterred by the decision.
“It is impossible to accept that other people can live and work on our birthplace while we are not able to,” said Chagos Refugee Group leader Louis Olivier Bancoult.
“We will not give up. Chagossians will be on Chagos very soon.
“It’s time for the UK government to put an end to all our suffering. We have not lost all the battle. It’s not the end of the road. Our case is a just case. We are asking for our dignity as people and fundamental rights as human beings.”
July 1, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Militarism | Diego Garcia, Human rights, UK |
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A political beacon is about to be extinguished unless he breaks with the doomed Labour Party and sets up on his own.
Well, I don’t know why I came here tonight
I got the feeling that something ain’t right,
I’m so scared in case I fall off my chair,
And I’m wondering how I’ll get down the stairs,
Clowns to the left of me,
Jokers to the right, here I am,
Stuck in the middle with you.
Yes I’m stuck in the middle with you,
And I’m wondering what it is I should do,
It’s so hard to keep this smile from my face,
Losing control, yeah, I’m all over the place,
Clowns to the left of me, Jokers to the right…
— Lyrics from ‘Stuck in the Middle with You’, a 1972 recording by Stealers Wheel
Only last December I was writing a piece titled ‘You have better things to do than captain a sinking ship – Message to Corbyn: dump the baggage, build from new’.
That message said:
Commiserations, comrade.
Last Wednesday – ‘Let’s Bomb Syria Day’ – was a day of infamy. Tomorrow you’ll need to come to terms with the UK Labour party’s unswerving death-wish.
Its integrity is in tatter, brand image beyond repair, and the very voters it needs to win round regard it as a joke. And the thousands who became your supporters in the heady days of the leadership campaign, exhilarated and inspired by the promise of better politics, are dismayed that their high hopes can never be delivered through such a bitterly divided party machine.
In that debate on bombing Syria senior Labour MPs and shadow ministers supported the Tory warmongers. In particular Hilary Benn (son of the illustrious Tony) played on human fears, ignored operational shortcomings and discounted the risk of reprisals against ‘soft’ targets on our streets. His scare tactics were exactly what the warmongers wanted to hear and his speech was triumphantly applauded by Tory Government benches and praised in the media. The party’s Blairite rump, who had shamed the nation by blindly voting for the Iraq war 12 years earlier, trooped into the lobbies to vote for war in Syria.
In a recent speech to Labour Friends of Israel Benn, the shadow foreign secretary, dishonestly called the rogue state “a vibrant democracy”, talked of shared values and claimed the bonds between it and the Labour party were “strong and run deep”. The puzzle was how Jeremy Corbyn could have appointed such a person to that key post. Earlier this week Corbyn finally sacked him, a move that set off a vengeful chain reaction.
Only 10 months ago Corbyn came from nowhere and panicked the Westminster Establishment by winning the Labour leadership with nearly 60% of first-choice votes. His nearest rival mustered only 19% so he had sufficient mandate to silence plotters who threatened a coup if he won. They have smouldered ever since.
The Conservatives reacted by broadcasting that Corbyn and Labour were “a serious risk to our nation’s security, our economy’s security and your family’s security. Whether it’s weakening our defences, raising taxes on jobs and earnings, racking up more debt and welfare or driving up the cost of living by printing money – Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party will hurt working people.”
So slender was his support in the Parliamentary Labour Party (as opposed to the party membership) that his shadow team inevitably included many critics. Mounting an effective opposition has thus been near impossible with so many colleagues willing him to fail, although he has chalked up a number of successes. Of course, the effectiveness of a leader depends in large measure on the performance of his senior colleagues.
Just lately the pressure on Corbyn to step down has been ratcheted-up, with accusations that he didn’t try hard enough to galvanise the Remain vote in the EU referendum. The official party line is pro-EU but ‘Old Labour’ Corbyn has been opposed to the EU for decades and knew perfectly well that at least one-third of Labour supporters would vote Leave.
This week there were mass resignations from his shadow team, at such regular intervals that they were clearly orchestrated for maximum effect. Replacements were hurriedly appointed. In the House of Commons David Cameron made an unusually good joke of it. Welcoming the newly elected Labour MP for Tooting he advised her to “keep her mobile switched on – you might be in the shadow cabinet by the end of the day”.
On Corbyn’s referendum effort Cameron quipped: “I know he says he put his back into it. All I’d say is, I’d hate to see him when he’s not trying.” That might have been funny except that Cameron, when setting up the referendum, couldn’t be bothered to appoint a team to examine the way forward in the event of a Brexit win. Hence the damaging post-Brexit confusion that will probably go on for months.
Then, very rudely, Cameron turned on Corbyn, telling the House: “It might be in my party’s interest for him to sit there, it’s not in the national interest and I would say, for heaven’s sake man, go!”
To illustrate the depths of silliness to which the campaign to oust Corbyn has sunk, the Labour Party today released a report on antisemitism. In a speech introducing it Corbyn 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.”
Fair comment, you might think. But it was eagerly seized on for wild accusations that he was making direct comparison between the Israeli government and Isis, which calls itself the Islamic State, although several other terrorist groups use the same name. A Labour councillor said on Twitter: “For that alone, he should resign. I am red with fury.”
The Telegraph quoted a statement by Lord Sacks in which the former Chief Rabbi accused the Labour leader of comparing the State of Israel to ISIS and “demonisation of the highest order, an outrage and unacceptable”. He added: “Israel is a democratic state with an independent judiciary, a free press and a diverse population of many cultures, religions and creeds. ISIS is a terrorist entity whose barbarities have been condemned by all those who value our common humanity.”
No, you couldn’t make it up.
And the current Chief Rabbi is reported calling Corbyn’s comments “offensive, and rather than rebuilding trust among the Jewish community, are likely to cause even greater concern”.
On top of everything Ruth Smeeth, a Labour MP, stormed out of the press conference complaining she was verbally abused by a Corbyn supporter who accused her of being part of a ‘media conspiracy’, and Corbyn failed to intervene. “I call on Jeremy Corbyn to resign immediately and make way for someone with the backbone to confront racism and antisemitism in our party and in the country,” she announced. Reports omit to mention that Smeeth is a former director of BICOM, a pro-Israel propaganda organisation.
So the picture is bleak for Jeremy.
Clowns to the left of me,
Jokers to the right, here I am…
That song is possibly running through his mind repeatedly, and won’t go away.
July 1, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | Jeremy Corbyn, UK, Zionism |
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This is way beyond a face-palm moment.
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 reponse 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 rightwing 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-pargraph 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.
June 30, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Israel, Jeremy Corbyn, The Guardian, UK |
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Indications are growing that London could soon decide to drop sanctions to expand its trade with Iran in the wake of the recent vote by the British to quit the European Union.
“Although the US and other European countries can carry out trade with Iran, conducting trade with Britain after it leaves the EU in many ways should be easier because London will not be bound by Brussels,” reported the International Business Times.
“Certain sanctions on Iran implemented by the EU during the past two decades would not necessarily be applicable to Britain after it formally leaves the bloc,” it added.
The International Business Times said Britain would no longer be bound by EU decisions and directives including bans on doing transactions with the Islamic Republic.
It added that a warmer relationship between Britain and Iran could offer both countries solid economic opportunities following Britain’s vote to quit the EU.
The US-based online news publication further emphasized that the effects of American sanctions on Iran will not change with respect to Britain.
“A UK outside the EU would still be able to conduct business with Iran generally, as long as the transactions did not involve US banks, US dollars or US citizens,” the International Business Times quoted lawyers at the New York-based Sheppard Mullin as saying.
The International Business Times further added that Britain is positioned to reach an agreement with Iran in the energy sector.
“With the international deal on Iran’s nuclear program becoming effective early this year, the EU already has begun rolling back its sanctions on Iran, with an eye on new energy opportunities in the country,” it added.
“In January, the prohibition on financial transactions involving Iran was lifted, including the transfer of funds between financial institutions and individuals. Trade in oil and gas between the EU and Iran was rebooted while sanctions relating to shipbuilding, insurance and aviation were lifted.”
June 30, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Wars for Israel | Iran, Sanctions against Iran, UK |
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We can be sure that the British exit from the European Union represents a profound crisis for the global capitalist order. We know this because the Lords of Capital and their political minions and media all over the world are in panic over Brexit. The capitalist order is built on five centuries of European plunder, enslavement, and extermination of the rest of humanity. Blood oozes from every edifice of the European Union – and yet, the victims, and the descendants of the victims of this horrific and ongoing capitalist carnage, often behave as if they have some kind of stake in keeping the old order intact. Like Malcolm X’s house Negroes, their first instinct when they see the master’s house on fire, is to put the fire out. If the master gets sick, they start sneezing. And, when the referendum went against Britain staying in the European Union, house Negroes of all colors on both sides of the Atlantic acted like their own worlds were coming to end.
On Comedy Central’s Daily Show, this week, host Trevor Noah interviewed Cynthia Erivo, who plays Celie in the Broadway production of “The Color Purple.” Noah lampooned those Brits that voted to leave the EU as a bunch of Donald Trumps with Cockney accents. He said nothing about the EU’s pro-corporate, pro-banker austerity policies – maybe because there’s nothing funny about those policies, or maybe because he works for a rich corporation. Noah drew Ms. Erivo into the Brexit discussion. She was born in London to parents who emigrated from Nigeria. She explained her opposition to Brexit, saying, “If my mom didn’t get to the UK, I probably wouldn’t be here right now, on that stage on Broadway.”
Cynthia Erivo is grateful that her West African parents were allowed into Britain, so that she could be born in London and pursue a successful career. Her parents were permitted to settle in Britain because Nigeria was a British colony, and later became part of the British Commonwealth. It actually had nothing to do with the European Union. By Cynthia Erivo’s logic, it was a good thing that Britain invaded, plundered, enslaved, and stole her parent’s homeland. By colonizing Nigeria, the Brits saved her from being born an African. The millions who died in the British conquest of Nigeria, and in the Middle Passage to the America’s, or on the plantations of Virginia or Jamaica, or in forced labor to the British in Nigeria, or who die today in the oil soaked wasteland of the Niger River Delta – all of this past and present suffering and human degradation is balanced out by the fact that a daughter of Nigeria gets to star in a Broadway show. This super-exploitation of Africa made Britain and France and Spain and Belgium and the Netherlands and other members of today’s European Union rich – but Cynthia Erivo and Trevor Noah, the South African, come to the defense of the European Union.
They like the house that slavery and genocide built, and where global capitalism now rules. They fear anything that might create disorder in the House of Europe, just as their counterparts in Black America fear anything that might disturb the tranquility of the U.S. ruling class and its institutions. The House Negroes are truly international, always ready to put out fires in their masters many houses around the globe.
Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
June 30, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | Africa, BREXIT, UK, United States |
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In the wake of the BREXIT vote which has the world reeling after Great Britain decided to abandon the European Union, much has been said about the historical scope, power, and influence of the British Empire throughout history. At its apex the British Empire was the most powerful geopolitical force on earth. What many neglect to realize is that one of the occurrences that helped the United Kingdom rise to such a position was The Haitian Revolution, which thoroughly defeated Britain’s only serious hegemonic competitor, Napoleonic France.
Much is discussed and written about Haiti’s defeat of Napoleon and how it opened the door for the Louisiana Purchase that fostered the expansion of the United States into the nation it has since become. However, few realize how the defeat of Napoleon by the brave former African Slaves in Haiti opened the door for the dominance of the British Empire. Furthermore, as Americans always pride themselves on their Revolutionary accomplishment of defeating the great British Empire and gaining their freedom, few give full acknowledgment to the superior military feat of The Haitian Revolution in its not only vanquishing the French Napoleonic Empire, The Spanish Empire of the time, but also thoroughly defeating the mighty British Empire to the point of leading the United Kingdom to agree to cease the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and any further importation of Africans into the Western Hemisphere officially. So while Americans celebrate their independence victory in defeating the greatest of European Empires, The British, recognize that former African slaves in Haiti did the seemingly impossible and defeated all three of the major European empires of that day to obtain their freedom, including the one beaten by the Americans:
“Yet it cannot be denied that both the government and British public had
learned a lesson from [Britain’s] disastrous attempt to conquer Saint
Domingue/Haiti, restore slavery, and subdue Toussaint L’Ouverture. In 1796
nearly three years after the first British forces landed in Saint
Domingue/Haiti, the [British] administration sent off one of the greatest
expeditionary forces in British history. Before the end of the year Edmond
Burke received news that 10,000 British soldiers had died in less than two
months! It was reported in the House of Commons that almost every Briton
had a personal acquaintance that had perished in the [Haitian]
Campaigns.” – “The Impact of The Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World,”
David P. Geggus.
In the end the British lost over 50,000 soldiers in their attempt to bring slavery back to Haiti. This had a direct influence on the British decision to end the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
June 29, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Timeless or most popular | France, Haiti, Human rights, UK, United States |
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Paris – Unification of Europe has brought about radical new divisions within Europe. The most significant split is between the people and their political leaders.
The June 23 British majority vote to leave the European Union has made strikingly evident the division between the new ruling class that flourishes in the globalized world without borders and all the others who are on the receiving end of policies that destroy jobs, cut social benefits, lower wages and reject as obsolete national customs, not least the custom of democratic choice, all to make the world safe for international investment capital.
Actually, the lines are not quite so clear-cut. Political choices never correspond completely to economic interests, and the ideological factor intervenes to blur the class lines. Globalization is not merely a process of economic integration regulated by flows of capital, which is deepening the polarization between rich and poor in the Western countries. It is also a powerful ideology, basing its moral certitudes on simplistic lessons drawn from twentieth century World Wars: the idea that the root cause of wars is a psychological attitude called “racism” which expresses itself in the nationalism of nation-states. This ideology gains semi-religious conviction by reference to the Holocaust, which is considered to have proven the point. Ergo, for the benefit of humanity, national borders must be torn down, national identities must be diluted by unlimited immigration, in order to achieve a worldwide multicultural society in which differences both coexist and cease to matter.
This is a Utopian notion as unsupported by evidence as the Soviet dream of creating a “new man” who voluntarily works unselfishly for the benefit of all. Similarly, it considers human psychology to be perfectible by economic and institutional arrangements. Especially by promoting immigration, the multicultural mix is supposed to result in people all loving each other; there are even national laws to punish alleged expressions of “hatred”. The European Union is seen as the most advanced experiment in this worldwide Utopia of universal love. It is regarded by its intellectual sponsors such as French political guru Jacques Attali as an irreversible advance of civilization. For its fanatic champions, the very thought of dismantling the European Union is equivalent to returning to the stone age.
A chorus of Europists are screaming to high heaven that the world is about to come to an end thanks to lower class Brits too stupid and too racist to appreciate the glorious globalized world that the European elite is preparing for them. One of the fastest on the draw of his pen was the hysterical propagandist Bernard-Henri Levy, whose venom quickly spilled onto the pages of Le Monde and other obsequious journals. BHL trotted out his entire range of insults to decry the LEAVE vote as the victory of demagogy, xenophobia, the extreme right and the extreme left, hatred of immigrants, stupid nationalism, vicious hatred, the unleashed mob, idiot leftists, drunken hooligans, the forces of darkness against civilization, and even the victory of garden dwarfs over Michelangelo. Many others worked the same theme, with less verbiage.
The main theme of this wailing and gnashing of teeth is the allegation that the LEAVE vote was motivated solely by racism, racism being the only possible reason that people could object to mass unregulated immigration. But there are indeed other reasons.
In reality, for the majority of working class voters, opposition to unlimited immigration can be plainly a matter of economic self-interest. Since the EU’s eastward expansion ended immigration controls with the former communist countries, hundreds of thousands of workers from Poland, Lithuania, and other Eastern European nations have flooded into Britain, adding to the large established immigrant population from the British Commonwealth countries. It is simply a fact that mass immigration brings down wage levels in a country. A Glasgow University study shows statistically that as immigration rises, the level of wages in proportion to profits drops – not to mention the increase in unemployment.
Those who enjoy the pleasure of traveling through Europe without having to stop at borders or change currencies and who relish the luxury level of cultural diversity find it hard to understand the anguish of those who lack advanced degrees, family connections or language skills, and who feel marginalized in their own countries. Yes, some of them probably like garden dwarfs. But you cannot convince millions of people that their only prospect in life must be to sacrifice themselves for the glory of the World Market.
Moreover, whatever their social status, many people in Britain find it unbearable to renounce their traditional parliamentary democracy in order to carry out Directives and Regulations drafted in Brussels without even any public discussion.
The British
The astonishment and indignation of the Europists to see Britons vote to go out is odd considering that most Britons never really felt entirely in. When I worked as press officer at the European Parliament, I observed that the only national press corps really present and interested was the British press corps, all eagerly on the lookout for the latest absurd rule or regulation which the Brussels bureaucracy was foisting on the Member States. British media paid attention to the EU because they hated it. Ridiculing it was fun. The rest of European media were largely ignoring it because it was boring and nobody cared. Main exception: a few earnest Germans doing their job.
In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher forced the EU to twist its rules by demanding “my money back”. The United Kingdom stayed out of the Schengen Treaty on free movement of persons. It refused the euro in favor of keeping the pound sterling. More profoundly, the insular English have always had a strong sense of not belonging to “the continent” as well as a particular sensitivity to the notorious “democratic deficit” of the European Union, which leaves law-making to the Brussels bureaucracy.
Considering the insular nature of Britain and its psychological distance from the continent, it is too soon to expect that other EU Member States will soon follow the British example. Indeed, some of the most Euroskeptical populations today were the most Euroenthusiastic in the past, notably France and Italy, and it is awkward to turn around 180 degrees. For charter Members France, Italy, Benelux and Germany, the break would be much more dramatic. Nevertheless, even in those key Eurozone countries disenchantment with the EU is growing rapidly. Brexit is seen as a warning signal. Thus the Western ruling class will hasten to try to shore up the EU-NATO fortress. The Washington Post quickly called for “strengthening NATO”. This probably means even more strident denunciations of Putin and the “Russian threat”, if such as possible. There is supposedly nothing like an external threat to bring people together.
What Next?
Unfortunately, this referendum did not mark a clean break. Two great difficulties loom. EU rules require a lengthy and complicated process to actually withdraw, a matter of years. And second, there is no viable political force ready to steer Britain through this process. The result is to split the political class still further from the people it should be representing.
The British political landscape is littered with wreckage. Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron called the referendum for internal political reasons, failing to realize that if given the chance, the British would vote to jump ship. His name is now mud all over Europe, condemned for the foolish move of letting people vote on the EU. Cameron has announced his resignation, but his government is dragging its feet in initiating the withdrawal process. Some are even demanding that the referendum be either ignored or held over again until people vote as they should – the procedure that followed previous national referendums that turned out badly for the EU. Meanwhile EU leaders are demanding that London hurry up and get out, so they can get to work strengthening the edifice.
Nigel Farage’s UK Independence Party that campaigned for leaving the EU is a single issue party with no general program and no aspiration to run the government. Former London mayor Boris Johnson has positioned himself to take over Party leadership by advocating Brexit, but he is not taken seriously by most of his own Conservative party and is also stalling on the exit procedure.
The situation of the Labour Party is critical. Jeremy Corbyn, who was elected party leader by a grass roots uprising expressing a strong popular desire to move the party to the left, comparable to the Bernie movement in Democratic Party primaries, has always been opposed by the Blairites who still dominate the party apparatus and parliamentary representation. In this uncomfortable situation the gentle Corbyn has tried to exercise what is meant to be an inclusive sort of leadership, listening to all sides. This softness already led to the mistake of failing to strongly defend party members falsely accused of “anti-Semitism” by pro-Israel zealots. Now the Blairites are blaming Corbyn for what they consider the Brexit catastrophe. It is all supposed to be the fault of Corbyn for having failed to support REMAIN vigorously enough.
Indeed Corbyn’s support of REMAIN was mild, some say because he actually favored LEAVE, but was bowing to the majority in the upper ranks of his party. This concession, if it was one, has not prevented the Blairites from demanding that Corbyn resign as party leader. Petitions are circulating both for and against him.
The trouble is that the mainstream caricature of the Brexit voters as narrow-minded racists, if not protofascists, has not been balanced by any articulation of the strong underlying rejection of the EU as a denial of democracy, as the authoritarian rule by a self-satisfied globalizing elite with total contempt for what the people might really want.
There is no political party in Britain that is at all prepared to turn away from the increasingly discredited and disavowed globalization trend in order to lead the way to a truly democratic alternative.
Diana Johnstone is the author of Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions. Her new book is Queen of Chaos: the Misadventures of Hillary Clinton. She can be reached at diana.johnstone@wanadoo.fr
June 29, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Economics | BREXIT, European Union, Human rights, UK, Washington Post |
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