British Racism

George Galloway Supporters R US

Ramzan Alan  · 13u  · 

Rizwan Dar is met Ka My en 

16 anderen

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3 juni 2017  · 

The dangerous Muslims of Britain, who are amongst the most likely, or most common, to commit acts of terrorism; are not from amongst the Muslims of birthright, nor are they from amongst the Muslims who practise their faith wholeheartedly, nor are they from amongst the extreme Muslims either; because 99.9% of all these Muslims, if not more!, who make up the total population of Muslims living in Britain, including the extreme followers, have never committed acts of terrorism, nor have they colluded to! nor have they ever been found guilty of this!; which means, they are not potential terrorists either, because they've never proved to be!

So if 99.9%. of all combined Muslims (including the extreme followers), if not more!, living in Britain, and maybe even in Europe, don't commit acts of terrorism, because as of yet!, they haven't!, then isn't it just stupid to always associate Muslims and their faith with terrorism! (which includes the extremist preachers too), when only a tiny tiny little fraction of all British Muslims( including extremists), have actually committed the act, and almost all of them, haven't!..

So just based on this fact alone, isn't it an injustice to always associate Islam and Muslims, with terrorism!, including the extreme Muslims!, when that's just a pathetic assessment of ratios or percentages, even with the extremists included!..?

Because the extremist believers and preachers, I spoke about before, represent less than 1% of all British Muslims too, and they have only had about 1%, from amongst them!, who have actually committed terrorism on British soil too, or attempted to (I over estimated in my last post); Which then means! only the tiniest fraction of the extremists have also only committed acts of terrorism too!..

So when, from amongst all these Muslims, less than 1% possess the danger of committing acts of terrorism, and the same goes with the extremists, then how can people accuse or associate British Muslims with terrorism, and their faith in creating terrorists too, even if you follow it with extremism when statistics tell you it's ridiculous! and nothing but farcical! to make such a claim!..

Because, when more than 99.9% of them haven't been converted by Islam, towards committing such attacks, then how can you truly make such associations and accusations, against them and their faith!...?

And don't think that these statistics are wrong either, because this is the truth!; there are currently, roughly 120 to 150 Muslims, in Britain, who were found guilty of committing acts of terrorism, which is less than 0.005% of all British Muslims. So Let me just repeat that for you !, it's no more than 0.005 % of the entire British Muslim population, which means 99.9%, or more!, of all other British Muslims haven't committed terrorist acts in Britain, nor have they ever been converted by any elements of their faith either, including the extremists!, to commit these crimes...

So it truly is a joke, when Islam is being accused of creating terrorists, in Britain!, even with the extremists following it; when it doesn't do this to the 99.9% of the rest of them!..

And let me just give you another example to understand this stupidity; If a country always has sunshine for 364 odd days in a year, which is equivalent to 99.9% of the time, in a year, and only produces rain the odd 0.005 of the time, which is maybe a one day in a year, would you associate that country with rain, or would you associate it with sunshine?... Would you tell people that it's a country that produces a lot of sunshine or a country that produces a lot of rain?....

You will of course associate that country with the sun! Because if you said it produces rain, it would be a senseless statement!.. So In using the same example, if 99.9% of British Muslims don't commit terrorism, from following their faith, why would you associate them and their faith with terrorism, or claim their faith creates terrorists when that's the same as associating the wrong whether with the desert country..?.. It means! on this association of terrorism, if that's what you've been claiming, then you've truly been senseless towards this!..

So why are so many people blind to this obvious senselessness? Why do they accuse the religion and its followers of creating terrorists, including extremists, when that's just not the case, and it's a pathetically senseless claim to make.

But that's how people have been made to think; because of how misguiding news can brainwash people... Our news has brainwashed them! even those who think they are clever and can't be brainwashed!.... But a hateful heart won't help you either, it will easily lull you with the misguiding news, and that's what has happened with many Islamaphobes!, including the educated ones!

But let's forget about them, and let's now talk about the 0.005%, who have committed acts of terrorism!, or colluded to!, who I agree are the dangerous Muslims, who I also agree are capable of committing these acts too... So who are they?... and what motivates them to do it too?... And What makes them different from the other 99.9%, who never become terrorists..?

Are they Muslims who follow their faith devotedly, who are also angry at what's happened in the Middle East; because this seems to be what many people also elude to!..

Well, guess what! I reckon 99% of all Muslims, living in Britain, who practice their faith devoutly, are angry at what has happened with Iraq, Afghanistan!, Syria!, and the rest!; so when 99.9% of them have never committed acts of terrorism either, then being religious and angry at the ME doesn't create a British Muslim terrorist either!.. So This is another false assumption!..

This includes the extremist preachers too! who is the most accused of this!. They too have only had about 1%, from amongst them, who committed terrorist attacks on British soil! or colluded to! which is again just a tiny fraction of them too. So to associate their extreme beliefs of Islam, with anger for the ME, as a lethal cocktail that creates terrorists, is another wrongful assumption to make; because it hasn't made terrorists out of the other 99% of them.

This is Because the terrorism we have suffered in this country has got nothing to do with religion! or it's not motivated by religion! as you can clearly now see! it's got to do with another determining factor, which truly needs understanding and needs to be separated from religion; because the inability to separate this, is what's causing further ongoing inflictions, which is also being unjust on Muslims and their faith too...

So what is this other factor that has created them?... And Who are these types of Muslims too!..?

It seems that one type, are those who might practice their faith, or might not!, who are definitely angry at what's happened in the ME, but who are also dysfunctional too!... Who, through their anger over the ME, and their dysfunctionality may act out on their anger!..

So although they are Muslims, who do devoutly follow their faith!, who are also angry at the ME; just like the other 99.9%, who also follow their faith and are also angry but never commit terrorism, they end up becoming this tiny little fraction of the terrorists, through their dysfunctional mentality!, and that's the difference!, between these Muslims, and the rest! who don't commit the terrorism!... Dysfunctionality becomes their determining factor, and that's what has influenced to create the terrorist, not the religion!..

One or two of them may have suffered from some sort of mental breakdown, during their general life, I don't know!, but what I can assure you is that they have definitely become mentally disturbed by the atrocities and despair they have seen and heard, which have taken place in the ME, and that this has played a big part in causing their mental breakdown... It's not to excuse them! it's just to let you know who they truly are, and what's created their mental disorder, which makes them kill in such ways.

Because a lot of this disturbance has come from what they've seen on the Internet, and even from mainstream news, regarding the atrocities committed in the ME, which was also instigated by our government.

Far too much of this disturbing stuff gets shown on the Internet, where even innocent women and children are seen killed, which makes people get consumed with rage, which is a lethal cocktail for an already depressed person to consume, which is why there is now a big fuss about this on the news, and why the authorities want Internet businesses to take responsibility for what they allow to be shown on the Internet, which includes what gets shown on Facebook too!..

Because Some people will just get angry at seeing this and still remain balanced and not commit terrorism, Whereas a tiny little fraction of others will also get angry but they will become unbalanced from it ( Dysfunctional), and the dysfunctional ones become the dangerous ones, and the potential terrorists!..

But the most dangerous ones from them, are those who have been to those lands and seen the atrocities at first hand, or heard about them at first hand too (which our government helped instigate), which is why anybody who has been there, who was not on charitable aid, or maybe even on charitable aid too, who decides to return! are the number one people on anti-terror watch lists!..

And then there are also some, who have gone to these lands, from Britain!, because they believe the war has been declared against Muslims of the Middle East when the West attacked the Middle East!.. They have gone there to fight for the Iraqis and others! and they are now also potentially dangerous too if they return!..

It is estimated that 800 odd have gone to join ISIS, which is still a tiny fraction of British Muslims, which is 0.03 % to be almost exact, who once lived in Britain but have now defected, to join the caliphates, who have declared war on those who attacked their lands.

And because of our attacks on the ME, the people of the ME (which may include the caliphates that got formed, out of the invasions and destabilising we did), have declared war against us; because let's just get a reality check here!; when you invade! bomb! and attack! people in their country, they will declare war against you! It's common sense, and it's what history has always dictated. And this is what's happened there too!..

And a declaration of war, amongst these Muslims, is also called 'Jihad'! because Jihad is also a reference given for 'war'!.(struggle). It doesn't need to be a holy war, or Islamic militancy, it's just 'war'... But It makes no difference what it's called!; the fact is that it's referring to ' being in war', Which is exactly the position we put them in when we attacked them; just like others would put us in too, if we got attacked by them too!..

And a Jihadi!, is a reference given for 'soldier in war'! just like how we had soldiers, during our wars!. And this is what we created when we attacked the Middle East!; We created these Jihadis!..

So to try and associate religion for creating this Jihadi, just because the middle easterners and their sympathisers declared Jihad, is another silly association to make towards Islam creating them; because war is associated with a more practical reason, not just a religious reason! (because having to fight a war against those who attack you, is a practical element of life, not just a religious element of life, even if the war has been given a religious title for it( jihad)), which is how Islam is also wrongfully getting associated with creating these Jihadis...

Because the truth is that it wasn't Islam that created them!, it was our attacks on the ME that created them!.. We created most of these Jihadis!, from our first attacks, who have now declared war against us!..

So if any British Muslim, who has become a Jihadi and gone there to fight with them, decides to return to Britain, they could be returning to us as an enemy of the state; which is why they are the most dangerous to us!...

They could even be returning as soldiers /Jihadi's of this war, to attack our innocent, like how we attacked the innocent people of the ME too!... This is why these types of returning Muslims are now banned from returning, and it's because they can be returning to attack us back!

So understand that these are some of the main types of Brtish Muslim terrorists, who do hold a danger to our society!. There are a few other types, but these are some!... But also understand that they are all just a tiny little fraction of the whole British Muslim population and that none of them was created by religion, they were all created by the attacks of the ME.

So when it all points to the wars and invasions, which we instigated, which our politicians instigated on our behalf, creating these types of people, and it's not Islam that created them!, why does Islam get given the only association to this, when it's clearly the politicians who did it!...?

Because the news and politicians have manipulated the truth. They have confused many people into failing to understand who the real culprits are, by manipulating the truth and putting responsibility on the religion, through silly extremists, who have foolishly helped them to do it! ( as I explained in my last post).

And as I've said before, this is not to excuse these terrorists; because they do wrong!, even according to the Quran!, by killing innocent people!. All I'm doing is to just show you who truly is to blame for all this, and why there is a terrible injustice taking place, which is blaming religion for it, even if it has an extreme element towards it, instead of pointing fingers at the true creators and instigators of this whole mess..

Because Islam, in Britain, has existed for over a hundred years, and no British Muslim, in all this time, has ever committed any acts of terrorism against this country and its people, up until we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. So please try to comprehend this!; 'that the religion of Islam has never created one single terrorist! in Britain!, who attacked Britain in a terrorist method, for all that time! up until then'!.

Also!, Extremism in Britain has existed for many decades too, among hundreds of Muslims, who have lived in Britain, but they never committed terrorism from these beliefs either. I had an uncle who was quite extreme too, in the practising and talking about the faith, and He, unfortunately, has died!, just In case the FBI want to now question him!, but he would never commit acts of terrorism!..

This is why there truly is only one dominating factor, or reason!, for why Britain has suddenly seen a tiny fraction of Muslims become terrorists,, and its because of the actions of these daft plums, seen in the picture, who decided to invade these other lands, which was proven to be motivated by lies, which has now created terrorism against us, and not because Islam created it!..

We all need to start pointing fingers at the true culprits so that we can start putting a stop to it all...

Hoe Oekraïense- en Amerikaanse 'Hofjoden' Gebruikt Worden 18

Tegenover de met privé-jets ingevlogen elite van het World Economic Forum in Davos beweerde op 24 mei 2022 de 92-jarige schatrijke beursspeculant George Soros dat in ‘an open society, the role of the state is to protect the freedom of the individual; in a closed society the role of the individual is to serve the rulers of the state.’ Zijn zwart/wit betoog over een scherp onderscheid tussen enerzijds de ‘gesloten’ Russische Federatie/China en anderzijds de ‘open’ VS/Europa, werd door de aanwezige financiële en economische machthebbers en hun politieke beleidsbepalers, met een vorstelijk applaus beloond, en wel omdat deze woorden meer verhullen dan openbaren, zoals bij nadere beschouwing al snel blijkt. De werkelijkheid liet immers al in 2016 de volgende feiten zien: 

Richest 1 Percent To Own More Than Half Of The World's Wealth… If trends continue, Oxfam predicts that the most-affluent will possess more wealth than the remaining 99 percent by 2016, The New York Times reported. Drill down the numbers even more and you'll learn that the 80 wealthiest people in the world possess $1.9 trillion, which is almost the same amount shared by some 3.5 billion people at the bottom half of the world's income scale.’

https://stanvanhoucke.blogspot.com/search?q=1+percent+of+the+rich+possess  

Bekend is dat de almaar groeiende kloof tussen rijk en arm, nu ook in het neoliberale Westen, onmogelijk het resultaat kan zijn van een ‘open samenleving’ waarin de ‘democratie’ groeit en bloeit. Over welke consequenties die kloof heeft gehad, berichtte The New York Times van 22 April 2020: ‘Instead of Coronavirus, the Hunger Will Kill Us… A Global Food Crisis Looms. The world has never faced a hunger emergency like this, experts say.’ Bovendien concludeerde de prominente Amerikaanse hoogleraar economie Michael Hudson op 28 augustus 2020 dat ‘The U.S. is Saving the Financial Sector, not the Economy,’ om vervolgens aan te tonen dat: 

In sum, money is being created to fuel the financial sector and its stock and bond markets, not to increase the economy’s solvency, employment and living standards. The coronavirus pandemic did not create this shift, but it catalyzed and accelerated the power grab, not least by pushing public-sector budgets into crisis.

https://www.unz.com/mhudson/how-an-act-of-god-pandemic-is-destroying-the-west/ 

Deze feiten demonstreren hoe misleidend George Soros’ bewering is dat in ‘an open society, the role of the state is to protect the freedom of the individual,’ want deze stelling gaat alleen op voor een handjevol parasitaire multimiljardairs die, ten koste van de overgrote meerderheid van de wereldbevolking, zich blijft verrijken. Soros’ vermeende ‘open samenleving’ heeft de bestaande ‘samenleving’ juist vernietigd, door de sociale samenhang, noodzakelijk om een ‘samenleving’ in stand te houden, grotendeels te verwoesten. Om een regime-change mogelijk te maken in ‘samenlevingen’ die nog niet tot het neoliberale geloof werden bekeerd, heeft Soros vele miljarden gespendeerd in een geslaagde  poging zijn ‘greep naar de macht’ te forceren. Zo ook in Oekraïne. Vandaar dat deze hoogbejaarde speculant in Davos van oordeel was dat ‘the best and perhaps only way to preserve our civilization is to defeat Putin as soon as possible. That’s the bottom line.’ Soros' consumptie-beschaving moet desnoods middels een Derde Wereldoorlog met massavernietigingswapens worden 'beschermd,' want een multimiljardair kan alleen in termen van het heden en geld denken en niet in die van moraliteit en de toekomst van het nageslacht. ‘Après moi, le déluge.’ Soros is niet de eerste hoogbejaarde intrigant die zo reageert. De man handelt als een psychopaat dan wel sociopaat, als iemand die, in de woorden van Hannah Arendt, ‘neither perverted nor sadistic’ is, maar ‘terrifyingly normal,’ iemand wiens ‘thoughtlessness’ hem tot een massamoordenaar maakt, omdat hij ‘never realized what he was doing’ door het onvermogen ‘to think from the standpoint of somebody else,’ en die, net als Eichmann, bij gebrek aan ‘this particular cognitive ability,’ grootschalige misdaden begaat zonder te beseffen dat die ‘fout’ zijn. Arendt noemde deze pathologie ‘de banaliteit van het kwaad.’ 

https://www.georgesoros.com/2022/05/24/remarks-delivered-at-the-2022-world-economic-forum-in-davos/ 

Hannah Arendt toont de lezer van haar verslag Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963) dat deze massamoordenaar een technocraat was, nuttig voor de heersende orde omdat hij efficiënt te werk ging, te weten: het oppakken en verplaatsen van individuen naar vernietigings-  en concentratiekampen. Zijn zonde was de ‘gedachteloosheid,’ die zo kenmerkend is voor de technocratische elite, zeker nu politici- en veel militairen oorlogen vanaf een veilige afstand kunnen laten uitvoeren zonder dat het publiek thuis hiertegen in opstand komt, aangezien de doden en verminkten onzichtbaar zijn gemaakt, of afgeschreven worden als ‘collateral damage,’ die nu eenmaal altijd optreedt daar waar gehakt wordt. ‘Bijkomende Schade,’ meer niet. Ook nu is sprake van een weerzinwekkend gebrek aan empathie, het liefst zou de ‘beschaafde’ westerling de Russen zoveel mogelijk laten bloeden voor de door de NAVO uitgelokte oorlog in Oekraïne. Ook de westerse burger, die meent beschaafd te zijn, kan in een oogwenk veranderen in een postmoderne Eichmann. Daar is helemaal niet zoveel voor nodig, een gedegen volgehouden demonisering van de vijand is doorgaans voldoende. Zelfs, of beters nog, juist extremistische Joden in Israel hiervan het bewijs vormen. Zij zijn namelijk in staat om Palestijnse kinderen in hun rug dood te schieten, zonder dat de zelfbenoemde 'Joodse staat' dit bestraft, of het Westen het zionistisch regime ter verantwoording roept, en — misschien wel het allerergste — zonder dat het geweten van de moordenaars noch dat van hun familie en vrienden een rol van betekenis speelt. De Apartheidsstaat stelt het leven van een Jood boven dat van een niet-Jood, en toch wordt dit door het Westen gesteund. Wat dat betreft kan propaganda uiterst effectief blijken, dat wil zeggen in Europa en de VS, maar niet in de rest van de wereld, zoals keer op keer wordt aangetoond. Deze ziekelijke houding van de witte man en vrouw leidt tot een verdere ondermijning van Washington’s gewelddadig streven naar de hegemonie in de wereld. De hoogtijdagen van het westerse kolonialisme en neo-kolonialisme zijn definitief voorbij. Bijna 20 jaar geleden schreef ik voor het tijdschrift de Humanist hoe de almaar geavanceerdere oorlogstechnologie de strategie en tactiek van de oorlogvoerenden ingrijpend heeft veranderd waardoor in de tweede helft van de twintigste eeuw de machtsverhoudingen in de wereld grondig veranderden. Onder de kop ‘Democratisering van het Terrorisme’ zette ik het volgende uiteen:

Wat op het eerste gezicht hooguit een historische voetnoot lijkt, blijkt soms bij nader inzien ineens een gebeurtenis van doorslaggevende betekenis te zijn geweest. Zo'n voetnoot is de Slag bij Omdurman op 2 september 1898, waar voor het eerst in de geschiedenis de zogeheten 'Maxim Gun' operationeel werd, het volautomatische —water gekoelde — machinegeweer. En met een verbluffend resultaat. In ongeveer vijf uur tijd was het Britse leger erin geslaagd naar schatting 20.000 met zwaarden en speren uitgeruste Soedanezen omgebracht en 22.000 ernstig verwond, een 'onvoorstelbaar percentage slachtoffers van 90 procent!' concludeerde de enthousiaste redacteur van Winston Churchills rapportage over dit bloedbad. 

Churchills beeldend verslag is te illustrerend om er niet uit te citeren. Zo schrijft hij over 'de zon die op vele duizenden vijandige speerpunten schitterde' en over 'een groot aantal ongelukkige burgers dat werd gedood en verwond,' over 'vele gruwelijke wraakoefeningen' van het Britse leger, deze 'soldaten van wetenschappelijke oorlogsvoering,' over Europese militairen uitgerust met 'de wapens van de beschaving,' die werden ingezet tegen 'deze grote horde meedogenloze wilden' van meer dan 50.000 krijgers, die over een open vlakte naar de Britse linies renden. Taferelen die hem aan 'de oude afbeeldingen van de kruisvaarders op het tapijt van Bayeux' deden denken. 'Het was een gruwelijk gezicht, want tot nu toe hadden ze ons nog geen enkel letsel toegebracht, en het leek een onrechtvaardig voordeel om zo wreed toe te slaan terwijl ze daarop geen antwoord konden geven. Niettemin keek ik van nabij vanuit een comfortabele positie uiterst zorgvuldig naar het effect van het vuren… en liet het verdere verloop van de strijd over aan de infanterie en de machinegeweren… De Maxim guns verbruikten al het water in hun cilinders, en verschillende moesten bijgevuld worden uit de waterflessen van de Cameron Hooglanders voordat ze hun dodelijk werk konden voortzetten.' Over de aanvoerder van de Soedanezen schrijft Churchill: 'Het aanvalsplan van de kalief leek complex te zijn geweest en ingenieus. Het was echter gebaseerd op een grote misrekening van de macht van moderne wapens,' het vernuft van 'de sterkere rassen,’ en dus 'verdween de laatste hoop van het barbarendom als het schemerduister van de nacht,' maar ook toen 'ze niet in staat bleken op te rukken, waren ze niet bereid zich terug te trekken… onmiddellijk openden de hongerige en oplettende machinegeweren en de alerte infanterie het vuur, hen allen neer maaiend — sommigen van hen dood, anderen in doodsangst… Weer stonden ze op, minder dan voorheen, en renden. Opnieuw spetterden de machinegeweren… De Maxim guns pulseerden koortsachtig. En opnieuw vielen ze. En zo voorts… Slechts enkelen ontsnapten… De veldkijker onthulde details — honderden kleine witte figuren op elkaar liggend of uiteengeslagen; tientallen hinkten, kropen, strompelden weg… Bruine objecten, bijna de kleur van de aarde, als pollen dood gras of mesthopen, lagen her en der verspreid — de lichamen van krijgers,' gedood door 'de geschoolde soldaten van een civiliserend Rijk.' Om halftwaalf 's ochtends was het beschavingsoffensief afgelopen en concludeerde de Britse bevelhebber Lord Kitchener voldaan dat de vijand 'een flink pak slaag' had gekregen. Zijn eigen leger, met 23.000 man veruit in de minderheid, telde slechts 48 doden en 382 gewonden, een percentage slachtoffers van slechts 2 procent, 'waarmee de superioriteit van de moderne vuurkracht werd aangetoond.' 

Hetzelfde jaar nog vatte de dichter Hilaire Belloc het nog eens kort en krachtig samen in de fameuze regels: 'Whatever happens, we have got The Maxim Gun, and they have not.' Om ook bij hun Europese concurrenten in het imperialistisch streven geen enkele twijfel te laten bestaan over wie nu eigenlijk de supermacht bij uitstek was, hadden de Britten baron Von Tiedemann, verbonden aan de Duitse Generale Staf, uitgenodigd om ter plaatse getuige te kunnen zijn van zoveel technologische overmacht. Hoe diep de baron die dag in Soedan onder de indruk moet zijn geweest, bleek zestien jaar later, toen de Duitsers vanuit hun loopgraven met een kopie van de Maxim gun hele divisies Britse infanteristen met evenveel gemak wisten te doden. Richten was niet nodig, ze hoefden slechts de trekker over te halen en bingo. 300 kogels per minuut deden hun vijanden, gelijk Soedanese ‘wilden,' bij duizenden tegelijk neerstorten. Tijdens de Slag bij de Somme in 1916 konden de keizerlijke troepen een gezamenlijk Brits/Franse doorbraak verhinderen dankzij hun Maschinengewehr 08 en dat nota bene met ruim veertig procent minder manschappen. In vierenhalve maand tijd vielen zodoende meer dan een miljoen doden en gewonden. Alleen al op de eerste dag van de slag werden 58.000 Britse soldaten slachtoffer van vooral het spervuur van de machinegeweren, overigens zonder dat het Britse opperbevel daaruit een tactische les trok. Kennelijk beseften zelfs de Britten niet hoe wezenlijk het machinegeweer de oorlogsvoering had veranderd. 

Opnieuw was met overdonderend succes de uitvinding ingezet van de Amerikaan Hiram Maxim, de man die nog in 1881 doelloos in Parijs een tentoonstelling had bezocht en daar toevallig iemand tegen het lijf was gelopen die hem had geadviseerd: 'Als u veel geld wilt maken vindt dan iets uit dat deze Europeanen in staat stelt elkaar met groter gemak om zeep te helpen.' Er kleefde maar één nadeel aan: het gewicht, 62 kilo inclusief statief. Ongeveer een man of zes was nodig om het te verslepen en te bedienen en het kon dus alleen als verdedigingswapen in stelling worden gebracht. Maar dankzij de vindingrijkheid van de Westerse ‘beschaving’ beschikken de mensheid nu over machinegeweren die nog geen vijf kilo wegen en dus als aanvalswapen kunnen dienen, waardoor zelfs kindsoldaten hem kunnen gebruiken. 

Sommige van deze lichtgewichten schieten met een snelheid van 1000 kogels per minuut en zijn tegen uiterst schappelijke prijzen te koop. Intussen wordt de enorme vooruitgang in wapentechnologie alom geprezen door makers en gebruikers ervan, terwijl de ontwikkeling van nog kleiner en nog vernietigender moordtuig is nog lang niet in zicht. Ondanks deze adembenemende ontwikkeling zitten de westerling toch met een probleem opgescheept dat nog niet in zijn volle omvang wordt beseft en dat ik kortweg de 'Wet Van Maxim' zal noemen. Wat bij Omdurman gebeurde was natuurlijk geen slag maar een slachtpartij, machinaal moorden, terrorisme op grote schaal, begaan door een koloniaal rijk dat zijn grondstoffen wilde veilig stellen, in dit geval katoen uit Egypte voor de Engelse textielindustrie. Daarom moesten de bronnen van de Nijl worden veilig gesteld tegen de imperialistische plannen van Duitsland en vooral Frankrijk, dat de Soedan al was binnengedrongen. 

Zelfs de toen 25 jaar oude Churchill leed onder het besef dat het geen heroïsche strijd was geweest tussen twee gelijkwaardige partijen, maar een onvoorstelbaar wreed bloedbad tegen een technologisch inferieur volk. Hij huilde na de slag en schreef vier maanden later in een brief aan zijn moeder: 'Onze overwinning werd onteerd door de onmenselijke slachting van de gewonden en Lord Kitchener was hiervoor verantwoordelijk.' Dezelfde Kitchener die een inktpot wilde laten maken van de schedel van een Soedanese heilige om de vernedering te vervolmaken. Het is deze geavanceerde geweld dat de Europese koloniale rijken vijf eeuwen lang begingen tegen technologisch inferieure volkeren, die de bron van onze welvaart vormden en nog steeds zijn. 

http://home.planet.nl/~houck006/democratisering.html 

De Amerikaanse publicist James Bowman vergeleek in 2003 Churchills lovende rapportage van de Slag bij Omdurman met de wijze waarop het succes van de Amerikaanse wapens tijdens de Golf Oorlog werd beschreven, met als enig verschil dat kruisraketten de Maxim gun hebben vervangen. 'En veronderstelt ook maar iemand dat George W. Bush momenteel over een oorlog in Irak zou spreken als we niet het 21ste eeuwse equivalent van de Maxim gun zouden bezitten? Het is juist vanwege het feit dat "they have not" dat Bush zich voor een oorlog uitspreekt,' aldus Bowman daarbij verwijzend naar Hilaire Bellocs dichtregel. Ook bij de illegale inval in Irak ging het om een vitale grondstof, namelijk olie. Larry Lindsey, economisch adviseur van president Bush, vatte het op 17 september 2002 nog eens kort maar krachtig samen door tegenover de London Telegraph te verklaren: 'Het met succes voeren van de oorlog zal goed zijn voor de economie.' En hoewel vooraf de kosten van het gewapend conflict met Irak op 80 miljard dollar werden geschat, weten we nu, dat de oorlog ruim een biljoen dollars heeft gekost, 1250 keer meer dan gepland, terwijl over het aantal mensenlevens door de ideologen van het neoliberalisme niet werd gesproken, want het gaat per slot van rekening om business. The Washington Post publiceerde op 15 september 2002 onder de niets verhullende kop: 'In het scenario van de Iraakse oorlog is olie de belangrijkste kwestie' het volgende: 

Een door de Amerikanen geleid initiatief om de Iraakse president Saddam Hoessein ten val te brengen kan een rijke oliebron aanboren voor Amerikaanse oliemaatschappijen die al sinds lang uit Irak zijn verbannen, waarbij olie transacties tussen Bagdad en Rusland, Frankrijk en andere landen getorpedeerd zullen worden… Amerikaanse en buitenlandse oliemaatschappijen zijn al begonnen met tactische manoeuvres om een zakelijk belang te verwerven in de bewezen gigantische oliereserves van 112 miljard vaten, buiten Saoedie Arabie de grootste reserves ter wereld… ‘Het is tamelijk simpel,’ zei de voormalige CIA directeur R. James Woolsey, die één van de vooraanstaande pleitbezorgers is geweest van het ten val brengen van Hoessein, ‘Frankrijk en Rusland hebben oliemaatschappijen en belangen in Irak. Ze moeten verteld worden dat als ze willen meewerken bij het aan de macht helpen van een fatsoenlijke regering in Irak, wij onze uiterste best zullen doen om te garanderen dat een nieuwe regering en Amerikaanse maatschappijen nauw met hen zullen samenwerken.’ Maar hij voegde eraan toe: ‘Als ze de kant van Saddam kiezen, zal het moeilijk zo niet onmogelijk worden om de nieuwe Irakese regering ervan te overtuigen met hen samen te werken.' Op de achtergrond speelde mee dat een korte succesvolle oorlog de mogelijkheid zou scheppen om de macht van het OPEC-kartel te breken, zoals het Amerikaanse tijdschrift Fortune eind november schreef. Fadhil Chalabi, een 'gevluchte' Iraakse oud minister van olie verklaarde daarover: 'Het zou niet in Irak's belang zijn met de OPEC samen te werken,' en wel omdat elk vat nodig is voor de wederopbouw van zijn land, waardoor de Iraakse olie 'een alternatief voor Saoedische olie zal worden.' 

Het gevolg zou zijn dat Washington en Wall Street het voor hen onbetrouwbaar gebleken Saoedisch koningshuis weer onder zware druk zouden kunnen zetten. Met andere woorden: het was alles of niets in het machtsspel van politieke en economische chantage. Net als na de Eerste en Tweede Wereldoorlog werden vooraf de buit en de wereld alvast weer verdeeld. En daarom moest er een oorlog gevoerd worden waarvan de Iraakse bevolking collectief de dupe werd. In 1995 zag ik in Irak de gevolgen van de vorige Golfoorlog, waarbij de totale infrastructuur van het land was vernietigd. Ik bezocht in het grote en moderne kinderhospitaal van Bagdad uitgemergelde kleuters die aan kanker stierven als gevolg van de grootschalige inzet van Britse- en Amerikaanse granaten en kogels. De punten ervan waren bekleed met verarmd uranium, een afvalproduct van westerse kerncentrales. Het voordeel van deze giftige en radioactieve munitie is dat ze tweeënhalf keer zo hard is als staal en daardoor elk vijandelijk object moeiteloos kan uitschakelen. Treffen ze doel dan exploderen ze, waarbij zo'n grote hitte vrijkomt dat deze munitie dwars door dik staal heen brandt, en dat tegelijkertijd de binnenkant van een tank ogenblikkelijk in lichterlaaie staat. Op hetzelfde moment ontsnappen er microscopisch kleine radioactieve deeltjes, die indien ze worden ingeademd longkanker veroorzaken. Tijdens de Golfoorlog in van 1991 werden 944.000 verarmd uraniumkogels en rond de 4.000 verarmd uranium granaten afgeschoten. De inzet ervan was zo succesvol dat een expert het vergeleek met de invloed van het machinegeweer op de praktijk van de oorlogsvoering.

Het Pentagon was intussen al geruime tijd op de hoogte van het gevaar, maar pas een week na het staakt-het-vuren waarschuwde het de Amerikaanse eenheden in het Golfgebied dat 'van elk object dat door een verarmd uranium kogel of granaat is geraakt, aangenomen kan worden dat het met verarmd uranium is besmet.' Die boodschap was evenwel niet gericht aan de Iraakse kinderen die in besmet gebied speelden en de neergeslagen radioactieve stofdeeltjes inademden. Hoewel de tv-kijker thuis het beeld kreeg voorgeschoteld van een 'schone oorlog,' gevoerd met 'surgical strikes,' bestond slechts 7 procent uit zogeheten 'smartbombs,' waarvan bovendien, volgens de Amerikaanse strijdkrachten zelf, 20 procent zijn doel miste. Hoeveel burgers precies om het leven zijn gekomen door de in totaal 88,5 miljoen kilo bommen blijft gissen. Wel is bekend dat door de gevolgen van de oorlog en de economische boycot meer dan een miljoen Iraki's, het merendeel kinderen, om het leven is gekomen. Ook hier geldt: dit is geen oorlog maar een terroristische slachtpartij, waarbij in de praktijk geen onderscheid werd gemaakt tussen burgers en militairen, zoals het oorlogsrecht bepaalt.  Desondanks zijn deze wapens niet door Washington afgeschaft, en zullen wederom op grote schaal worden gebruikt. 

De Geneefse Conventies, mensenrechten, humanisme, democratie spelen daarbij geen enkele rol; het gaat alleen om geopolitieke belangen. En dit laatste voert ons als vanzelf naar de 'Wet van Maxim.' Die luidt dat hoog technologisch wapentuig  in een technocratie door de marktwerking steeds goedkoper wordt, waardoor het in toenemende mate binnen het bereik komt van steeds grotere groepen. Het onvermijdelijk proces van kleiner, goedkoper en effectiever neemt een hoge vlucht, met als gevolg dat oorlogsmateriaal zich razendsnel over de wereld verspreidt en elke technologische voorsprong onherroepelijk tenietgaat. Dat is dan ook de voornaamste reden dat sinds 1945 de Verenigde Staten en zijn NAVO geen enkele oorlog heeft gewonnen. Het betekent tegelijkertijd dat het westerse  neo-kolonialisme ten dode is opgeschreven, de NAVO een obsoleet instituut is, en de huidige ‘proxy war’ in Oekraïne, waarbij het Westen door wapenleveranties direct betrokken is, volstrekt zinloos is. Het zal alleen maar leiden tot meer doden en de massale verwoesting van het corrupte Oekraïne dat al geruime tijd door multimiljonairs als Zelensky en multimiljardairs wordt bestuurd en geplunderd, ten koste van de verarmde bevolking, die juist op Zelensky hadden gestemd in de verwachting dat deze komediant als ‘dienaar van het volk’ zou optreden, zoals hij had beloofd, niet wetende dat deze televisie-acteur en CIA-pion honderden miljoenen naar belastingparadijzen had gesluisd om zo de belasting in Oekraïne te kunnen ontduiken.  Volgende keer meer.

The European Union Was Designed to Stifle Democracy

 The European Union Was Designed to Stifle Democracy

By Guest Author -June 1, 2022 

European Parliament sues Commission for failing to hold members accountable over rule of law

BY DAVID JAMIESON

Review of Ever Closer Union? Europe in the West by Perry Anderson (Verso, 2021)

Perry Anderson’s critical analysis of the European Union is a devastating indictment of liberal complacency. The EU is undemocratic by design, and we will have to confront it in order to transform a Europe riddled with inequality and exploitation.

Today, the structures of European capitalism and the transatlantic alliance should be under scrutiny like never before. After more than a decade of intense economic and political crisis, Western European powers and their US sponsor are now facing off against Russia in a brutal proxy war in Ukraine.

Amid the maelstrom, European powers are rearming at an incredible rate. Germany, so long reticent to commit to its full military potential, has broken its long postwar militarist taboo and tripled its defence budget. At the Conference on the Future of Europe in April, leading politicians voted to deepen integration and launch a joint European armed force, indicating the trend toward even less democracy and even more militarism.

Developments are now underway that will shape the future of European and, indeed, world civilization. However, the appreciation of the European Union from much of the Left has been ambivalent, confused, and ultimately self-destructive.

This failure of reckoning has consequences. Many of those who advanced the most overwrought fantasies about the possibility of EU reform have expressed similar confusions (or rather allegiances) in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, though now concerning another pillar of the Western order — NATO.

Today’s Legitimism

What are the intellectual roots of this stupefaction? Ever Closer Union? Europe in the West is the latest book of essays by Perry Anderson about Britain, Europe, and the United States. It seeks to examine the intellectual world of those sympathetic to the prevailing order. Although he completed the book before the February 2022 Russian invasion, the dangers of Euro-American overextension in Eastern Europe were already apparent to Anderson (giving the lie to the idea that the gruesome assault on Ukraine came from nowhere but Vladimir Putin’s black heart).

“EVER CLOSER UNION? IS A DEVASTATING CRITICISM OF THE RULING LIBERAL HEGEMONY IN EUROPEAN SOCIETY.“

What emerges from Ever Closer Union? is a devastating criticism of the ruling liberal hegemony in European society: a chauvinistic worldview with an almost cultic belief in the rights of the powerful and a disdain for democracy. Socialists who want to understand the EU would do well to know the backdrop to this rapidly mutating behemoth.

In a Europe traumatized and exhausted by World War II and then divided by Cold War contestation, capitalism sought a new order. Anderson traces the rise of this order by scrutinizing The Passage to Europe (2009), a celebratory survey of the European Union’s development composed by Dutch historian, sometime EU political operative, and “liberal of the right” Luuk Van Middelaar.

Walter Hallstein

Walter Hallstein Rank: Oberleutnant Nazi Germany Also: First President of the European Commission 1958 – 1967

The passage describes the project’s morphology from the six original founding states which drew together in the 1950s to the succession of treaties which created today’s EU in a way that reveals two characteristic phenomena. The first is the essentially closed and undemocratic nature of the union. Decisions in European institutions, as Anderson writes, are made “behind closed doors, in deliberations of which no minutes are kept, that issue in announcements to the world under the seal of consensus.”

This consensus, which governs institutions like the European Council, implies equality and prudence. In reality, it constitutes a united front of Europe’s rulers. Outside the closed loop of decision-making, the public is a mere spectator. According to Anderson, “the quiet settling of affairs between elites in camera, above the heads of an inert populace below” troubles Van Middelaar not one bit.

In the tradition of European political thought, Anderson compares Van Middelaar not to Niccolò Machiavelli — who valued the republican ethos of citizenship — but rather to Friedrich Gentz, an intellectual of European counterrevolution in the 1800s. Anderson considers the divergences and parallels between today’s EU and the Europe of the post-Napoleonic Restoration:

Composed not of aristocratic monarchies but of electoral democracies, it is in no danger of internecine fighting or revolution. Front lines in the war on terror are on other continents. The commonest arena for nationalism is the football field. Nevertheless, it is equally clear that tension, mostly submerged but sporadically visible, is widespread between the elites and the peoples of Europe, as it was in the days of the Restoration, requiring extra-territorial interventions to keep public order once again. No longer military expeditions of the kind sent to crush Spanish or Italian liberals, these now take economic form: dictates of Berlin, Paris or Frankfurt evicting unsuitable governments in Rome and Athens; commissaries of Brussels invigilating taxes, labour laws, pension systems of other lands for their conformity to neo-liberal principles, today’s legitimise.

Thunderbolts of Integration

The second and related characteristic that emerges from Van Middelaar’s work is what he calls the “coup.” At every great turn in its development, actions that had no license in European treaties and rules promoted the advance of European integration. This began with judicial rulings by the European Court of Justice in 1963 and 1964 that established the primacy of European over national law — “without any warrant in the Treaty of Rome,” as Anderson observes.

Van Middelaar takes special relish in describing a 1985 meeting in Milan of the European Council — which itself became the dominant body of the EU without sanction. Under the guidance of Italian premier Bettino Craxi, the union began to emerge from the European Economic Community through what he cheerfully brands “a coup disguised as a procedural decision.” This sleight of hand opened the way to the Maastricht Treaty of 1992.

For Van Middelaar, the term “coup” does not refer merely to a military seizure of power. It is, as Anderson writes, “an action taken suddenly, by stealth, catching its victims unawares, and confronting them with a fait accompli that cannot be reversed.” As such, it is “not a term associated with any form of democratic politics — just the opposite.” Yet Ever Closer Union? deftly traces an almost occult fascination with the coup in this sense that runs through modern European liberalism. Actions that had no license in European treaties and rules promoted the advance of European integration.

Actions that had no license in European treaties and rules promoted the advance of European integration.

The Dutch philosopher of history Frank Ankersmit was Van Middelaar’s academic mentor; like Van Middelaar, he aligned himself with the Dutch liberal party, the VVD, whose leader, Mark Rutte, has been the country’s prime minister since 2010. Ankersmit cited approvingly the words of a seventeenth-century French political theorist, Gabriel Naudé, who pioneered the concept:

In coup d’états one sees the thunderbolt before one hears it growling in the clouds, it strikes before it flames forth, . . . he receives the stroke who thought to give it, dies who thought himself quite safe, suffers who never dreamt of pain; all is done at night, in obscurity, in fog and darkness.

Gabriel Naudé

For Ankersmit, the elite prerogative for action without popular legitimacy “anticipate[s] in the domain of history and politics the speculation of eighteenth-century philosophers on the sublime . . . in a similar manner the coup d’état transgresses all our moral expectations: the moral world we are living in is shattered to dust.” This prospect does not trouble Ankersmit, since “the well-being of society can sometimes only be achieved by crime.” This perspective supplies the philosophical underpinning for Van Middelaar’s celebration of the coups that have driven European integration forward.

The passivity of the European public encouraged by the very structures of the EU, the mode of consensus decision-making between elites, and the brutality with which those elites put down popular opposition all create the basis for rule by fait accompli. The signs of decay are clear, Anderson observes, in the widespread financial corruption among the EU’s political elites. Bizarrely reimagined by pro-Remain scribes in 2016 as the acme of liberal-democratic good order, the EU is in fact an exemplar of post-political rule — a triumph over the democratic gains of the working class in the twentieth century.

As Europe plunges deeper into war, and state budgets for war, sanctions, espionage, and subterfuge multiply, rule by means of the coup is obviously our future. Our rulers can tolerate little democracy when there is a struggle for the salvation of liberalism in progress.

Member Statehood

b860b8d7 eu empire

Suffering for the cause of self-determination is better than suffering at the hands of a foreign master. Image credits/Blower – Daily Telegraph

The EU is anti-democratic in structure and culture by design. Caricatures of the union as a vast, grey, unyielding bureaucracy do not capture its true character: it is more like a playground for elites who make up the rules as they go along.

What is the relationship between the EU’s bureaucracy and its member states? During and after the 2016 Brexit referendum there was a general consensus on all sides of the debate in Britain. According to this view, the EU represents an attempt at pooling and coordinating European nation-states, with a necessary derogation of nation-state sovereignty as a result. Leading Remainers argued that this situation was progressive, Leavers that it was unacceptable, but they all agreed on the essential nature of the arrangement.

Anderson briefly summarizes the work of scholars who have blown this frame of reference to pieces, the most important of whom is surely Christopher Bickerton, a Cambridge-based political scientist who one feels deserved longer treatment in these pages. Bickerton’s analysis starts by asking the most important question in politics: Who rules?

“THE EU IS ANTIDEMOCRATIC IN STRUCTURE AND CULTURE BY DESIGN.”

First of all, the so-called Eurocrats don’t. Apart from anything else, they are too few in number. The EU employs around 33,000 unelected officials for a population of 447 million citizens, compared to over 400,000 employed by the British state for a population of 67 million. So who is doing all of the EU’s (frequently dirty) work? The national elites of its member states.

Bickerton has described the EU as resembling a desert mirage:

“In the distance it seems very clear, very tangible, you almost feel as if you can touch it. Then you get a bit closer, it starts to tremble, starts to shimmer. When you finally get there, it’s gone.”

When one arrives at the European Quarter in Brussels, the mirage of the EU disappears to reveal our own states, governments, politicians, and officials. The EU is composed of the elites of its member states, who have slipped loose from the democratic trappings of their respective national polities.

This is a penetrating insight. It helps to explain an apparent contradiction in the process of what we call “globalization” — one that has tripped up the Left time and again in its attempts to understand global capitalism. It was nation-state power that drove and consolidated the process of globalization. That process was not, as too many have imagined, the triumph of a supranational world market over the fetters of the nation-state.

This illusory understanding has carried much of the Left through a series of disastrous turns. Far from representing a form of resistance to atavistic nationalism, the rejection of the 2016 Brexit vote was precisely a defence of British state power. A belief in the role of NATO as a “defensive” and voluntary (for whom?) alliance is, likewise, simply the traditional liberal defence of the imperialism of Western states in a new form. As Leandros Fischer has argued, turn-of-the-century delusions of the anti-globalization left, convinced that we were seeing the rise of a post-national world order in which classical imperialism was redundant, have resulted for many in a collapse into that imperialism.

The American Connection

us eu

Behind both the EU and NATO we can find the project of the world’s most powerful nation. It was US empire that made the relative unity of the ruling elites of Western Europe a historical possibility.

Ever Closer Union? contains another lengthy essay on the economic historian Adam Tooze, for whom American power in the world system has been a guiding theme across a succession of highly influential works. As Tooze put it in a lecture published by the London Review of Books:

“For somebody of my disposition, America isn’t subject to gravity; America is gravity: America is the gravitational force that organizes global power in the twentieth century.”

Tooze’s avowed left liberalism makes him a doubly interesting subject for Anderson, since its deficiencies help to explain the present derangements of the Left on the question of transnational institutions. During a silent spring in the 1980s and ’90s, left-liberalism usurped social democracy as the prevailing ideology on the political left. Today, it is so dominant that few feel the need even to declare this disposition: Tooze is a refreshing exception.

He is a little unusual, however, in holding to one of the more outmoded fascinations of his creed: pathological admiration for the United States. Ever Closer Union? detects one running theme through a trilogy of historical works by Tooze, The Wages of Destruction, The Deluge, and Crashed: their author is “star-struck by America. Not uncritical of it; but as it were, mesmerized.”

Anderson remarks that “the politics of left-liberalism require no special reference to America.” While it may be true that American political developments in recent decades — particularly the rise of Donald Trump — have repulsed European liberal opinion, it is worth remembering that many liberal and social democratic politicians did once see the United States as an enlightened alternative to the despots and colonialists of the old continent.

IT WAS THE US EMPIRE THAT MADE THE RELATIVE UNITY OF THE RULING ELITES OF WESTERN EUROPE A HISTORICAL POSSIBILITY.

There were brave attempts to displace this state worship to a new utopia in the form of the EU. Many intellectuals marched with their heads down through the torrid decade of European austerity as we saw a vicious ongoing assault on democracy and working-class rights. Watching a new fetish for NATO develop today, with a comparably determined ignorance of the brutal wars carried out by that alliance, we can discern a return to fashion for the New World — especially with Trump ejected from the White House (for now).

Tooze’s work Crashed was a study of transatlantic finance and its collapse in the 2008 crisis. Anderson finds it to be hobbled by a limitation of the historian’s politics — the bifurcation of economic and political structures. He describes left liberalism as an unstable compound derived from the contradictions of the ruling ideology. Contemporary liberalism, according to Anderson, “comes in two interrelated packages,” the liberal international order underpinned by US power, and neoliberalism, an economic program for weakening the working class at the expense of capital:

“The first has reigned far more unchallenged than the second. Very few liberals have seriously contested the principles of free trade, the primacy of the United States, or the rule of international law as enshrined in a United Nations whose decisions the US has for the most part been able to determine at will. The liberal international order remains a precious icon. Many, on the other hand, have questioned or resisted the full application of neo-liberal measures within their own societies, nowhere implemented in their entirety.”

For Anderson, Tooze largely conforms to this pattern. Although he has been an opponent of recent wars waged in the name of liberal internationalism, by using “the language of ‘global economic governance,’ cleansed of any reference to its most prominent innovation, the proliferation of sanctions to strangle or bludgeon recalcitrant countries into line,” Tooze “offers a route to much the same.”

Geopolitical Emancipation?

In his critique of Luuk Van Middelaar, Anderson also considers his later work Alarums and Excursions, based on his experience working for the Belgian politician Herman Van Rompuy, president of the European Council from 2009 until the end of 2014. Van Middelaar’s account of the 2014 Ukrainian crisis should make the leaders of the European liberal right blush.

Writing from the safe vantage point of 2019, and now enshrined as the EU’s court historian, Van Middelaar accepted that the EU had overplayed its hand in Eastern Europe and misjudged the importance of Ukraine in Russian strategic thought. However, he congratulated European leaders for having secured peace and “geo-political emancipation from America” through their diplomatic initiatives, backed up by a regime of sanctions that would, he insisted, see off Russian territorial ambitions.

Anderson rightly mocks this complacent summary and indicts the union’s leadership for its “stupidity and hypocrisy.” The EU tails the US in its massive global sanctions machine, which naturally means that sanctions are only applied to perceived enemies rather than to the West’s brutal allies, from Israel to Saudi Arabia and beyond:

“Europe has never lifted a finger over the annexation of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights by Israel; South Sahara by Morocco; or the occupation of half of Cyprus by Turkey — though in all these cases seizure was against the will of all or most of the population, enforced by violent repression and ethnic cleansing.”

Sanctions have also become an important form of internal rule for the EU. The deluge of sanctions currently being poured over the heads of the Russian people — and, by extension, workers in Europe and the US already struggling with the cost of living — sets a further dangerous precedent after the economic punishment beating that the Troika doled out to the Greek people. From arms proliferation to surveillance, censorship, and sanctions, Western powers are building up a formidable arsenal that they can deploy at home and abroad.

“MANY INTELLECTUALS MARCHED WITH THEIR HEADS DOWN THROUGH THE TORRID DECADE OF EUROPEAN AUSTERITY.”

The EU and NATO are not meaningfully separable entities, as some on the European left who embraced the first but not the second once liked to claim (a dwindling number now in any case, as many Europhiles are predictably turning NATO-phile). The EU, NATO, the United States, and other parts of the empire’s transnational infrastructure, such as the International Monetary Fund, have moved in tandem across the continent.

All of these institutions invested themselves in Ukrainian society over the course of many years, with increasing intensity after 2014. US loans came with NATO training exercises on Ukrainian soil and the neoliberal restructuring of the Ukrainian economy. The origins of the present conflict lie in the tug-of-war between history’s most powerful empire and a regional power exerting influence on its “near abroad.”

This geostrategic competition will drive more wars, and not only in Europe. The glut of new weapons paid for by increased military budgets will be heading into Africa and Asia, where NATO has fought wars far from the borders of many of its member states. They will also be heading into Latin America through the channels of US power, and who knows where else.

Who Rules?

eu nato flag

The Left’s failure to understand the European question cost it the opportunity to shape the constitutional and political conflicts that gripped the British state during the second half of the 2010s. There has rightly been much criticism of the People’s Vote campaign to overturn the 2016 Leave vote. Its elitist character and contempt for millions of working-class voters, many of whom decamped from Labour in the 2019 election, is hardly in dispute today.

But this critical consensus could obscure more serious failings in the approach of the British and European left to transnational institutions. By 2016, it was already apparent that existential questions about the class nature of the EU, its relationship to the British state, and the place of those structures in the world order were of little interest to many activists and left-wing thinkers.

After the referendum, a stress on electoral calculations for a left-led Labour Party — which turned out to be badly misjudged — and dark warnings about the danger of economic collapse and reactionary violence in the event of Britain’s departure from the EU quickly supplanted reasoned debate. What remains is the strange feeling that, for all the years of rancour, we never really got around to talking about the EU.

Any future mass movement or democratic upsurge of any kind will have to confront the EU, NATO, and US power. This power complex will be an implacable and dangerous enemy. After so many years of repression, chaotic misrule, and now war, there can be no more room for innocence and fantasies.

Perhaps some on the radical left imagine we can have a social transformation devoid of politics, with workplaces and communities as the site of struggle rather than obscure international treaties that few people spend much time thinking about. However, there is no dividing wall between sanctions and the cost of living, arms spending and welfare spending, war propaganda and the rights of speech and assembly.

Most importantly, there can never be any justification for a failure to address that question: Who rules? The answer should never be remote elites who make up rules on the hoof, generals and diplomats operating behind closed doors, and the empire across the Atlantic Ocean.

This article was first published in the Jacobin by David Jamieson a journalist and socialist activist based in Scotland editor of Conter.

https://labourheartlands.com/the-european-union-was-designed-to-stifle-democracy/?fbclid=IwAR1OoiKFBLhkDdGHvSxxXYYMwbrZ0DcwQlZp76WAStZJO1I5vRiEsio91js