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jeudi, 27 mars 2014

Le basculement de la Crimée est-il le premier d’une longue série?

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Le basculement de la Crimée est-il le premier d’une longue série?

Auteur : Al Watan (Syrie)
Ex: http://www.zejournal.mobi

Au-delà des pleurs emphatiques de l’Occident face à l’adhésion de la Crimée à la Fédération de Russie, le vrai enjeu est de savoir s’il s’agit d’un événement orphelin ou s’il préfigure le basculement de l’Europe orientale vers Moscou. N’ayant plus que l’asservissement à la bureaucratie bruxelloise à offrir, Bruxelles craint que ses actuels clients soient attirés par la liberté et l’argent de Moscou.

Les Occidentaux s’époumonent à dénoncer l’« annexion militaire » de la Crimée par la Russie. Selon eux, Moscou, revenant à la « doctrine Brejnev », menace la souveraineté de tous les États qui furent membres non seulement de l’ex-URSS, mais aussi du Pacte de Varsovie, et s’apprête à les envahir comme il le fit en Hongrie en 1956 et en Tchécoslovaquie en 1968.

Est-ce bien vrai ? Manifestement, les mêmes Occidentaux ne sont pas convaincus de l’imminence du danger. S’ils assimilent en paroles l’« annexion » de la Crimée par Vladimir Poutine à celle des Sudètes par Adolf Hitler, ils ne pensent pas que l’on se dirige vers une Troisième Guerre mondiale.

Tout au plus ont-ils pris des sanctions théoriques contre quelques dirigeants russes —y compris criméens— en bloquant leurs comptes, au cas ou ils voudraient en ouvrir dans des banques occidentales, ou en leur interdisant d’y voyager, si l’envie leur en prenait. Le Pentagone a bien envoyé 22 avions de combats en Pologne et dans les États baltes, mais il n’a pas l’intention de faire plus que cette gesticulation, pour le moment.

Que se passe t-il au juste ? Depuis la chute du Mur de Berlin, le 9 novembre 1989, et le sommet de Malte qui l’a suivie, les 2 et 3 décembre, les États-Unis n’ont cessé de gagner du terrain et, en violation de leurs promesses, de faire basculer un à un tous les États européens —sauf la Russie— dans l’Otan.

Le processus a débuté quelques jours plus tard, à la Noël 1989, avec le renversement des Ceau?escu en Roumanie et leur remplacement par un autre dignitaire communiste subitement converti au libéralisme, Ion Iliescu. Pour la première fois, la CIA organisait un coup d’État aux yeux de tous, tout en le mettant en scène comme une « révolution » grâce à une nouvelle chaîne de télévision, CNN International. C’était le début d’une longue série.

Une vingtaine d’autres cibles allaient suivre, souvent par des moyens tout aussi frauduleux : l’Albanie, l’Allemagne de l’Est, l’Azerbaïdjan, la Bosnie-Herzégovine, la Bulgarie, la Croatie, l’Estonie, la Géorgie, la Hongrie, le Kosovo, la Lettonie, la Lituanie, la Macédoine, la Moldavie, le Monténégro, la Pologne, la Serbie, la Slovaquie, la Slovénie, la Tchéquie et l’Ukraine.

Aucun document ne fut signé lors du sommet de Malte, mais le président Bush Sr., conseillé par Condoleezza Rice, prit l’engagement oral qu’aucun membre du Pacte de Varsovie ne serait accepté dans l’Otan. En réalité, l’Allemagne de l’Est y entra de facto, par le simple jeu de son adhésion à l’Allemagne de l’Ouest. La porte étant ainsi ouverte, ce sont aujourd’hui 12 États ex-membres de l’URSS ou du Pacte de Varsovie qui y ont adhéré et les autres qui sont en attente de rejoindre l’Alliance.

Cependant, « les meilleures choses ont une fin ». La puissance de l’Otan et de son versant civil, l’Union européenne, vacille. Certes l’Alliance n’a jamais été si nombreuse, mais ses armées sont peu efficaces. Elle excelle sur de petits théâtres d’opération, comme en Afghanistan, mais ne peut plus entrer en guerre contre la Chine, ni contre la Russie, sans la certitude de perdre comme on l’a vu en Syrie cet été.

En définitive, les Occidentaux sont stupéfaits de la rapidité et de l’efficacité russes. Durant les jeux Olympiques de Sotchi, Vladimir Poutine n’a stoïquement livré aucun commentaire sur les événements de la place Maidan. Mais il a réagi dès qu’il a eu les mains libres. Chacun a pu alors constater qu’il abattait des cartes qu’il avait préparées durant son long silence. En quelques heures, des forces pro-russes ont neutralisé les forces pro-Kiev de Crimée tandis qu’une révolution était organisée à Semferopol pour porter au pouvoir une équipe pro-russe. Le nouveau gouvernement a appelé à un référendum d’autodétermination qui a enregistré une immense vague pro-russe, population tatare incluse. Puis, les Forces officielles russes ont fait prisonniers avec leurs matériels les soldats se réclamant encore de Kiev. Tout cela sans tirer un coup de feu, à l’exception d’un sniper ukrainien pro-Otan qui fut arrêté à Semferopol après avoir tué une personne de chaque bord.

Il y a vingt ans, les mêmes Criméens auraient certainement voté contre la Russie. Mais aujourd’hui, leur liberté est bien mieux assurée par Moscou que par Kiev, où un tiers du gouvernement revient aux nazis et les deux autres tiers aux représentants des oligarques. En outre, leur économie en faillite a immédiatement été relevée par la Banque de Russie, tandis que, malgré le FMI et les prêts des États-Unis et de l’UE, Kiev est condamné à une longue période de pauvreté. Il n’était pas nécessaire de parler russe pour faire ce choix et, malgré la propagande occidentale, les musulmans Tatars l’ont fait comme les russophones. C’est également le choix de 88 % des militaires ukrainiens stationnés en Crimée, qui se sont ralliés à Moscou avec la ferme intention de faire venir leurs familles et de leur obtenir la nationalité russe. C’est aussi le choix de 82 % des marins ukrainiens qui se trouvaient en mer, trop heureux de pouvoir devenir Russes, ils se sont ralliés à Moscou avec leurs bâtiments sans y être contraints d’aucune manière.

La liberté et la prospérité, qui ont été les arguments de vente de l’Occident depuis presque 70 ans, ont changé de camp.

Il ne s’agit pas d’affirmer ici que la Russie est parfaite, mais de constater que pour les Criméens et en réalité pour la plupart des Européens, elle est plus attractive que le camp occidental.

C’est pourquoi l’indépendance de la Crimée et son adhésion à la Fédération de Russie marquent le retour du balancier. Pour la première fois, un peuple ex-soviétique décide librement de reconnaître l’autorité de Moscou. Ce que craignent les Occidentaux, c’est que cet événement ait un effet comparable à la chute du Mur de Berlin, mais dans l’autre sens. Pourquoi ne verrait-on pas des États membres de l’Otan —comme la Grèce— ou simplement de l’Union européenne —comme Chypre— suivre le même chemin ? Le camp occidental se déliterait alors et sombrerait dans une très forte récession —comme la Russie d’Eltsine—.

En outre, la question de la survie des États-Unis ne manquerait pas de se poser. La dissolution de l’URSS aurait dû entrainer celle de son ennemi et néanmoins partenaire, ces deux super-puissances n’existant que l’une face à l’autre. Or, il n’en fut rien. Washington étant débarrassé de son compétiteur se lança à la conquête du monde, globalisa l’économie et installa un Nouvel Ordre. Il fallut deux ans et un mois à l’Union soviétique pour se dissoudre après la chute du Mur de Berlin. Verrons-nous bientôt la dissolution des États-Unis et de l’Union européenne en plusieurs entités, ainsi que l’enseigne Igor Panarin à l’Académie diplomatique de Moscou ? L’effondrement sera d’autant plus rapide que Washington réduira ses subventions à ses alliés et Bruxelles ses fonds structurels.

Personne ne doit craindre l’attractivité de la Russie, car c’est une puissance impériale, mais pas impérialiste. Si Moscou a tendance à rabrouer les petits pays qu’il protège, il n’entend pas étendre son hégémonie par la force. Sa stratégie militaire est celle du « déni d’accès » à son territoire. Ses armées sont les premières au monde en termes de défense anti-aérienne et anti-navale. Elles peuvent détruire des flottes de bombardiers et de porte-avions. Mais elles ne sont pas équipées pour partir à la conquête du monde, ni déployées dans quantité de bases extérieures.

Il est particulièrement étrange d’entendre les Occidentaux dénoncer l’adhésion de la Crimée à la Fédération de Russie comme contraire au droit international et à la Constitution ukrainienne. N’est-ce pas eux qui démembrèrent l’URSS et le Pacte de Varsovie ? N’est-ce pas eux qui rompirent l’ordre constitutionnel à Kiev ?

Le ministre allemand des Affaires étrangères, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, déplore une prétendue volonté russe de « couper l’Europe en deux ». Mais la Russie s’est débarrassée de la dictature bureaucratique soviétique et n’entend pas restaurer le Rideau de fer. Ce sont les États-Unis qui veulent couper l’Europe en deux pour éviter l’hémorragie vers l’Est. La nouvelle dictature bureaucratique n’est plus à Moscou, mais à Bruxelles, elle se nomme Union européenne.

D’ores et déjà, Washington tente de fixer ses alliés dans son camp, il développe sa couverture de missiles en Pologne, en Roumanie et en Azerbaïdjan. Il ne fait plus mystère que son « bouclier » n’a jamais été destiné à contrer des missiles iraniens, mais est conçu pour attaquer la Russie. Il tente aussi de pousser ses alliés européens à prendre des sanctions économiques qui paralyseraient le continent et pousseraient les capitaux à fuir… aux États-Unis.

L’ampleur de ces ajustements est telle que le Pentagone examine la possibilité d’interrompre son « pivot vers l’Extrême-Orient », c’est-à-dire le déplacement de ses troupes d’Europe et du Proche-Orient pour les positionner en vue d’une guerre contre la Chine. Quoi qu’il en soit, toute modification de sa stratégie à long terme désorganisera encore plus ses armées sur le court et le moyen terme. Moscou n’en demandait pas autant, qui observe avec volupté les réactions des populations de l’Est de l’Ukraine et, pourquoi pas, de la Transnistrie.

OTAN GO HOME !

OTAN GO HOME !

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Un communiqué du Réseau Identités:

En 1991 l‘Union Soviétique s’effondrait et avec elle la menace militaire qu’elle représentait. En effet, immédiatement, la Russie nouvelle sabordait le Traité de Varsovie: dès lors l’OTAN n’avait plus de raisons d’être. Mais au lieu de jouer le jeu de la réciprocité, les U.S.A. poussaient leurs pions un peu plus profond en Europe. Ce furent les épisodes du démembrement de la Yougoslavie et de la Serbie, puis des “révolutions oranges” téléguidées depuis Washington.  Aujourd’hui, Russie et « Occident » sont à nouveau face à face à l’occasion de la crise Ukrainienne.

Souvenons-nous de ces mains tendues… Gorbatchev et sa « Maison commune », Poutine et sa « Grande Europe »… Autant de plaidoyers pour un partenariat euro-russe enterré par nos dirigeants corrompus inféodés à Washington tels les Hollande, Fabius cornaqués par  l’ineffable Bernard Henri Lévy. Concrètement, l’OTAN divise notre continent alors que nous devrions l’unir. Nous ne pouvons demeurer les complices silencieux de l’OTAN quand elle bombarde une capitale européenne comme Belgrade, quand elle installe des républiques musulmanes comme le Kosovo ou la Bosnie en plein coeur de l’Europe, ou quand elle tente de déstabiliser la Russie comme on l’a vu en Géorgie ou en Ukraine…

C’est pourquoi le Réseau-Identités entreprend aujourd’hui une campagne visant à libérer l’Europe de la tutelle des USA en abrogeant le Traité de l’Atlantique Nord qui ne sert ni le continent européen, ni les nations qui le composent. A la place, nous devons oeuvrer pour une armée européenne au service des intérêts européens et de leur diplomatie. On est en droit de se demander aujourd’hui quelle sera l’attitude de l’OTAN quand les peuples de France ou d’autres pays d’Europe auront décidé de se réapproprier les outils de leur souveraineté et de s’atteler au grand défi de la re-migration. Décidemment, non! Nous ne voulons plus d’une ingérence étrangère dans les affaires de notre continent car nous voulons l’Europe aux Européens…

Alors, comme De gaulle en son temps, disons non à l’OTAN…

OTAN hors de France !!! OTAN hors d’Europe !!! OTAN GO Home !!!

Le ras-le-bol de la politique politicienne

Le ras-le-bol de la politique politicienne

Ex: http://metapoinfos.hautetfort.com

Vous pouvez découvrir ci-dessous un point de vue de François Huguenin, cueilli sur Figarovox et consacré aux résultats du premier tour des élections municipales. Historien des idées, François Huguenin était rédacteur-en-chef, au début des années 90, de l'excellente revue Réaction. Il est l'auteur de plusieurs essais comme Histoire intellectuelle des droites (Perrin, 2013),  L'Action française, Une histoire intellectuelle (Perrin, 2011), Résister au libéralisme - Les Penseurs de la communauté (Éditions du CNRS, 2009) ou Le Conservatisme impossible : libéralisme et réaction en France depuis 1789 (La Table Ronde, 2006).

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Abstention, percée du FN : le ras-le-bol de la politique politicienne

Les résultats du premier tour des élections municipales ont été sans surprise marquées par un double phénomène: l'importance du taux d'abstention et le succès du Front National. Deux manières de manifester une profonde défiance par rapport à la classe politique, dont le Front National, qui n'exerce pas de responsabilités de gouvernement, peut donner l'illusion de ne pas faire partie.

Se lamenter sur l'absence de sens civique de nos concitoyens, s'indigner de la lepénisation des esprits peut être louable. Cela risque pourtant de n'être qu'une incantation supplémentaire qui peut certes donner bonne conscience, mais qui a montré sur la durée son inconsistance et son inefficacité. Ce double mouvement de défiance renvoie à quelque chose de fondamental qui est l'absence de principes de la classe politique, ou tout au moins de sa partie la plus visible, au sommet des appareils partisans, et donc de l'Etat. Comment en est-on arrivé là? Qu'est-ce que cela dit de notre démocratie?

La corruption du personnel politique n'est pas nouvelle. Il suffit de lire l'histoire de l'Antiquité à nos jours pour savoir que le pouvoir corrompt, que l'homme est bien souvent sous l'emprise de ce que saint Augustin appelait la libido dominandi qui le conduit à des pratiques immorales. Quel que soit le type de régime, cette tentation a existé au cœur de l'homme et la démocratie française n'y a pas échappé. On se souvient de la difficulté à s'implanter de la IIIe République, gangrénée par les affaires de corruption (scandales de Panama et des décorations), ou d'atteinte à la liberté d'opinion (affaire des fiches). Pourtant, malgré tout, il restait clair que ces pratiques, lorsqu'elles étaient mises en lumière, pouvaient faire tomber un gouvernement ou un ministre et heurtaient une morale laïque partagée par tous. Qu'elles aient été moins ou aussi fréquentes qu'aujourd'hui, ces pratiques étaient à tout le moins considérées comme anormales et condamnables. Aujourd'hui, un gouvernement ne tombe plus pour une sombre histoire d'écoute et d'atteinte à la liberté ; un parti politique qui finance sa campagne de façon malhonnête garde pignon sur rue ; sans parler des glauques affaires sexuelles d'un ancien candidat à la présidence. Les Français sont-ils choqués? Sans doute. Mais rien ne se passe. Ils en ont pris leur parti. Ces affaires ne sont au demeurant que la partie immergée d'un iceberg qui met en péril le navire de notre démocratie: c'est le sentiment que les hommes politiques ne cherchent qu'à conquérir, garder ou retrouver le pouvoir, en servant les intérêts du camp qui les soutient, sans attention au bien commun ; que les promesses électorales sont systématiquement non tenues et que les électeurs ne sont pas considérés comme des citoyens à qui l'on doit la vérité et le respect.

Pourquoi cet effondrement des principes qui garantissent la légitimité de notre démocratie? C'est là qu'un passage par l'histoire des idées s'impose. Comme l'avait montré Leo Strauss, la fracture de la politique moderne a consisté, avec Machiavel, dans le fait d'abandonner l'exigence de vertu au service du bien commun qui était le but de la politique traditionnelle. Non sans arguments, Machiavel, puis Hobbes, Locke et les Lumières ont considéré que l'écart entre l'objectif des Anciens et leur pratique était trop important. Il a donc fallu abaisser le seuil d'exigence de la conduite politique: remplacer l'objectif de bien gouverner par celui de prendre ou garder le pouvoir, troquer la quête de la vertu pour la recherche de la force et de la ruse (Machiavel) ; chercher la division et la neutralisation des pouvoirs pour garantir la paix civile (Montesquieu). Toutes ces stratégies ont abouti sur le plan des institutions à une démocratie qui a pu fonctionner sur des mécanismes électifs garantissant l'expression des diverses opinions et sur des institutions permettant l'équilibre ou l'alternance des pouvoirs. Mais ces institutions étaient ancrées sur d'anciens réflexes, et notamment sur la création d'une élite, ou pourrait-on dire d'une aristocratie certes non héréditaire, mais encore marquée par le souci d'un bien commun, d'un certain esprit de service, d'un souci d'honnêteté (pensons à de Gaulle payant les factures d'électricité de l'Elysée relatives à sa consommation personnelle!). L'effondrement des principes éthiques, la mise entre parenthèse de la notion de bien commun, la foi en un complet relativisme des conceptions du bien ont réduit à néant cet héritage. Désormais, plus rien ne vient obliger les politiques, rien ne vient transcender leurs objectifs de carrière, leurs accords partisans, leur appétit de pouvoir. La démocratie a oublié ce que Rousseau avait rappelé: elle peut encore moins vivre sans vertu, au sens des qualités requises pour agir en fonction du bien, que l'aristocratie ou la monarchie. Les Anciens le savaient, les Modernes tant qu'ils ont gardé cette mémoire le savaient encore. Les postmodernes que nous sommes l'avons oublié. La démocratie s'est recroquevillée sur un mécanisme purement procédural. Seul compte le sacre de l'élection pour légitimer le pouvoir alors que la politique ancienne savait que, quel que soit le mode de désignation des gouvernants, leur légitimité tenait à leur souci du bien commun. Cette exigence s'est perdue. L'adhésion aux institutions, le sentiment d'appartenance au corps social, risquent de se dissoudre dans le triomphe de l'individualisme, du consumérisme et du relativisme. Retrouver le souci du bien commun est devenu une urgence politique.

François Huguenin (Figarovox, 23 mars 2014)

mercredi, 26 mars 2014

Who Has Been More Aggressive?

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Who Has Been More Aggressive?

Who has been more aggressive, George H.W. Bush in Panama or Vladimir Putin in Crimea? Who has been more aggressive, the U.S. in its actions against Noriega or Russia with respect to Crimea?

These two situations differ but they are comparable in important respects. The U.S. launched a full-scale invasion of Panama. Russia, whatever it did in Crimea, it didn’t launch a full-scale invasion. The U.S. was trying to get rid of Noriega for some years. Russia had not been trying to annex Crimea. It acted in response to Ukraine events in a region it deemed very important just as the U.S. acted in a region it deemed important for reasons of its own. What were they? I won’t go into the detail this invasion deserves. Let’s see what George H.W. Bush’s invasion message said.

“For nearly two years, the United States, nations of Latin America and the Caribbean have worked together to resolve the crisis in Panama. The goals of the United States have been to safeguard the lives of Americans, to defend democracy in Panama, to combat drug trafficking and to protect the integrity of the Panama Canal Treaty. Many attempts have been made to resolve this crisis through diplomacy and negotiations. All were rejected by the dictator of Panama, Gen. Manuel Noriega, an indicted drug trafficker. Last Friday, Noriega declared his military dictatorship to be in a state of war with the United States and publicly threatened the lives of Americans in Panama. The very next day forces under his command shot and killed an unarmed American serviceman, wounded another, arrested and brutally beat a third American serviceman and then brutally interrogated his wife, threatening her with sexual abuse. That was enough.”

The Russians have made the claim too of safeguarding Russians as well as their bases. They too have made the claim of safeguarding democracy and there has been a vote to back that claim up. No drug trafficking is involved in Crimea, but that was a poor excuse for Bush to have used anyway. Russia has made the claim that the coup in Ukraine introduced a rogue government just as the U.S. made claims against Noriega. Bush mentioned the failure of negotiations. Whatever they were or weren’t or how they were handled, let’s note that the Ukrainian government had reached an agreement on Feb. 21 that was soon broken by violent mob activity. This was in Ukraine, not Crimea, but there is a political link and it does provide Russia with a parallel rationale that it has used.

These comparisons suggest, at a minimum and understating the case, that the Russians have not behaved in a way that differs that much from how the U.S. has behaved. But in fact the Russian actions have been much milder. There has been no big invasion. A vote was held. The Russians had standing treaty rights in Crimea.

Bush also claimed that Noriega declared war against the U.S. This claim inverted the truth. Noriega said that the U.S. had declared war on Panama. See author Theodore H. Draper’s work on that claim. I quote Draper:

“As I have now learned, Bush’s statement was, at best, a half-truth, at worst a flagrant distortion. On December 15, Noriega had not simply declared war on the United States. He said, in effect, that the United States had declared war on Panama, and that, therefore, Panama was in a state of war with the United States. Just what Noriega said was known or available in Washington by December 16 at the latest. How Noriega’s words came across as a simple declaration of war is a case history of official management of the news and negligence by the press.

“The key passage in Noriega’s speech on December 15 accused the President of the United States of having ‘invoked the powers of war against Panama’ and ‘through constant psychological and military harassment of having created a state of war in Panama, daily insulting our sovereignty and territorial integrity.’ He appealed for ‘a common front to respond to the aggression,’ and stressed ‘the urgency to unite as one to fight against the aggressor.’

“The resolution on December 15 by the Panama Assembly also took this line—’To declare the Republic of Panama in a state of war for the duration of the aggression unleashed against the Panamanian people by the US Government.’”

This war item may appear to digress from the comparison because the Crimean situation doesn’t involve antagonism between Russia and Crimea, whereas the Panama-U.S. situation did. Its relevance is that the U.S. went considerably further militarily in Panama than Russia did in Crimea, using a false and exaggerated claim as an important reason.

Let us reach a conclusion. If the U.S. could launch a large-scale aggression against the government of Panama for some reasons similar to those invoked by Russia (protection of citizens and democracy) and for one unjustifiable reason (drugs), and also with a lie or half-truth (Noriega unilaterally declaring war on the U.S.), then do not the Russian actions in Crimea, where it has treaty rights for bases and military personnel and where it has a longstanding interest in an adjacent strategic region, appear not to be anything excessive as such things go and far milder than the U.S. action in Panama? This seems to be an inescapable conclusion.

If Russia is the big bad bogeyman in Crimea, what was the U.S. in Panama in 1989? If the U.S. claimed noble aims and getting rid of a criminal in Panama’s government, how far different are the Russian claims that the Crimeans have a right to dissociate from a criminal gang in Kiev and to do so by a peaceful vote? Whose actions are milder, those of the Russians in Crimea or those of the U.S. in Panama? Whose actions are more aggressive, those of the Russians in Crimea or those of the U.S. in Panama? It may be that the Russians will invade Ukraine itself, in which case they will be open to much greater and more severe criticism. For the moment, we are addressing Crimea.

There is a difference between Panama and Crimea in that Crimea has voted to join the Russian Federation whereas Panama was a separate country and remains so. However, the U.S., having once invaded the country, obviously has reserved its option, by violence if necessary, to make and unmake Panama’s government at its will and according to its interests.

Seen against this comparison, the statements being made by top U.S. officials or former officials like Hillary Clinton, that Putin is a new Hitler, are wild exaggerations. If Russia has violated international law through its activities surrounding the Crimean vote, as the warmongers in the U.S. shout, how much more did Bush’s invasion of Panama violate international law? And, by the way, how could Bush invade Panama and then inform Congress when it is Congress that must declare war? And how could Bush invade Panama without a U.N. Security Council Resolution authorizing it? This U.S. invasion was not even a case of applying the already-expansive Monroe Doctrine, for there was no foreign force invading this hemisphere.

I have not explained why Bush invaded Panama or why the U.S. was so concerned about Noriega in the years preceding that invasion. I have limited the discussion to one question, which is this. Who has been more aggressive, George H.W. Bush in Panama or Vladimir Putin in Crimea? I think it’s evident that Bush was far more aggressive.

Before too many U.S. officials get too upset over Putin, before they absorb too much of the neocon warmongering nonsense and exaggerations, before they lead the U.S. into dangerous confrontations for which there is no need, before they shock the world’s economy with armed confrontations, it would pay them on behalf of Americans in this land to study their own history as well as that of Russia and to gain some much needed perspective so that they can behave with at least some degree of maturity and statesman-like wisdom.

The time is long past for those in Washington and throughout this land who understand and despise the neocon ideas to stand up against them and marginalize them. The neocons should be viewed, not as a constraint on appropriate political actions and responses, but as a spent moral force lacking in moral standing that has been wrong time and again in recommending actions that supposedly benefitted Americans but in reality have dragged this country further and further down.

Remaking the world, freeing peoples, playing global saviour, acting as the world’s policeman, and attempting to be the world’s conscience have all got to be seen as bad and wrong for any state. States cannot do any of these things without becoming monsters of power who are creatures of their own interests and their own bureaucracies who oppress the people they rule. The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya and Syria should all attest to that. Even the Vietnam War should attest to that.

A  state that has the power to do supposedly good things will invariably have the power to do very bad things, and it will. This is both basic human nature and the basic outcome of bureaucratic governments. Power corrupts. Of equal importance is that any such state will consist of bureaucracies that do the actual ruling, and they become self-perpetuating and separated from the interests of the people for whom they are supposedly doing good. Instead, they become unjust, out for themselves, corrupt, slow to act, inconsistent in their actions, and impervious to accountability.

The basic neocon idea is that of an expanding U.S. hegemony according to U.S. political ideas and blueprints. The idea is a monopoly of power, a superpower. This is the basic idea of empire, and it is both bad and wrong, practically and morally. A monopoly on power is the wrong way to strive for the good. The good needs to be constantly discovered and re-discovered at a decentralized level, within each person’s mind and conscience. A person’s own life and willing associations with others provide more than ample scope for challenging a person to figure out what is good and bad as well as what is right and wrong. No one person and certainly no one powerful state knows the good or can achieve it. The good is not provided in any blueprint. It is always a work in progress, dependent on local and individual details and conditions that are unknown to state powers. The attempts by states to achieve the abstract good must fail. They are going against the nature of the human condition.

America has a very serious problem, which is that both parties stand for the empire and the neocon ideas are very much tied in with the ideas that ground the empire. Right now, the empire is viewed by far too many people as good and right. As long as those who might separate themselves from neocon ideas and criticize them strenuously remain locked in support of the empire and/or reluctant to take issue with it, both parties are going to be tools of neocon thinking.

Adinolfi à Genève

Gabriele Adinolfi, 14 mars 2014, Genève, cercle Proudhon

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Neocons’ Ukraine-Syria-Iran Gambit

Neocons’ Ukraine-Syria-Iran Gambit

by Robert Parry

Ex: RINF Alternative News

You might think that policymakers with so many bloody fiascos on their résumés as the U.S. neocons, including the catastrophic Iraq War, would admit their incompetence and return home to sell insurance or maybe work in a fast-food restaurant. Anything but directing the geopolitical decisions of the world’s leading superpower.

But Official Washington’s neocons are nothing if not relentless and resilient. They are also well-funded and well-connected. So they won’t do the honorable thing and disappear. They keep hatching new schemes and strategies to keep the world stirred up and to keep their vision of world domination – and particularly “regime change” in the Middle East – alive.

Now, the neocons have stoked a confrontation over Ukraine, involving two nuclear-armed states, the United States and Russia. But – even if nuclear weapons don’t come into play – the neocons have succeeded in estranging U.S. President Barack Obama from Russian President Vladimir Putin and sabotaging the pair’s crucial cooperation on Iran and Syria, which may have been the point all along.

Though the Ukraine crisis has roots going back decades, the chronology of the recent uprising — and the neocon interest in it – meshes neatly with neocon fury over Obama and Putin working together to avert a U.S. military strike against Syria last summer and then brokering an interim nuclear agreement with Iran last fall that effectively took a U.S. bombing campaign against Iran off the table.

With those two top Israeli priorities – U.S. military attacks on Syria and Iran – sidetracked, the American neocons began activating their influential media and political networks to counteract the Obama-Putin teamwork. The neocon wedge to splinter Obama away from Putin was driven into Ukraine.

Operating out of neocon enclaves in the U.S. State Department and at U.S.-funded non-governmental organizations, led by the National Endowment for Democracy, neocon operatives targeted Ukraine even before the recent political unrest began shaking apart the country’s fragile ethnic and ideological cohesion.

Last September, as the prospects for a U.S. military strike against Syria were fading thanks to Putin, NED president Carl Gershman, who is something of a neocon paymaster controlling more than $100 million in congressionally approved funding each year, took to the pages of the neocon-flagship Washington Post and wrote that Ukraine was now “the biggest prize.”

But Gershman added that Ukraine was really only an interim step to an even bigger prize, the removal of the strong-willed and independent-minded Putin, who, Gershman added, “may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad [i.e. Ukraine] but within Russia itself.” In other words, the new hope was for “regime change” in Kiev and Moscow.

Putin had made himself a major annoyance in Neocon World, particularly with his diplomacy on Syria that defused a crisis over a Sarin attack outside Damascus on Aug. 21, 2013. Despite the attack’s mysterious origins – and the absence of any clear evidence proving the Syrian government’s guilt – the U.S. State Department and the U.S. news media rushed to the judgment that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad did it.

Politicians and pundits baited Obama with claims that Assad had brazenly crossed Obama’s “red line” by using chemical weapons and that U.S. “credibility” now demanded military retaliation. A longtime Israeli/neocon goal, “regime change” in Syria, seemed within reach.

But Putin brokered a deal in which Assad agreed to surrender Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal (even as he continued to deny any role in the Sarin attack). The arrangement was a huge letdown for the neocons and Israeli officials who had been drooling over the prospect that a U.S. bombing campaign would bring Assad to his knees and deliver a strategic blow against Iran, Israel’s current chief enemy.

Putin then further offended the neocons and the Israeli government by helping to facilitate an interim nuclear deal with Iran, making another neocon/Israeli priority, a U.S. war against Iran, less likely.

Putting Putin in Play

So, the troublesome Putin had to be put in play. And, NED’s Gershman was quick to note a key Russian vulnerability, neighboring Ukraine, where a democratically elected but corrupt president, Viktor Yanukovych, was struggling with a terrible economy and weighing whether to accept a European aid offer, which came with many austerity strings attached, or work out a more generous deal with Russia.

There was already a strong U.S.-organized political/media apparatus in place for destabilizing Ukraine’s government. Gershman’s NED had 65 projects operating in the country – training “activists,” supporting “journalists” and organizing business groups, according to its latest report. (NED was created in 1983 to do in relative openness what the CIA had long done in secret, nurture pro-U.S. operatives under the umbrella of “promoting democracy.”)

So, when Yanukovych opted for Russia’s more generous $15 billion aid package, the roof fell in on him. In a speech to Ukrainian business leaders last December, Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, Victoria Nuland, a neocon holdover and the wife of prominent neocon Robert Kagan, reminded the group that the U.S. had invested $5 billion in Ukraine’s “European aspirations.”

Then, urged on by Nuland and neocon Sen. John McCain, protests in the capital of Kiev turned increasingly violent with neo-Nazi militias moving to the fore. Unidentified snipers opened fire on protesters and police, touching off fiery clashes that killed some 80 people (including about a dozen police officers).

On Feb. 21, in a desperate attempt to tamp down the violence, Yanukovych signed an agreement brokered by European countries. He agreed to surrender many of his powers, to hold early elections (so he could be voted out of office), and pull back the police. That last step, however, opened the way for the neo-Nazi militias to overrun government buildings and force Yanukovych to flee for his life.

With these modern-day storm troopers controlling key buildings – and brutalizing Yanukovych supporters – a  rump Ukrainian parliament voted, in an extra-constitutional fashion, to remove Yanukovych from office. This coup-installed regime, with far-right parties controlling four ministries including defense, received immediate U.S. and European Union recognition as Ukraine’s “legitimate” government.

As remarkable – and newsworthy – as it was that a government on the European continent included Nazis in the executive branch for the first time since World War II, the U.S. news media performed as it did before the Iraq War and during various other international crises. It essentially presented the neocon-preferred narrative and treated the presence of the neo-Nazis as some kind of urban legend.

Virtually across the board, from Fox News to MSNBC, from the Washington Post to the New York Times, the U.S. press corps fell in line, painting Yanukovych and Putin as the “black-hat” villains and the coup regime as the “white-hat” good guys, which required, of course, whiting out the neo-Nazi “brown shirts.”

Neocon Expediency

Some neocon defenders have challenged my reporting that U.S. neocons played a significant role in the Ukrainian putsch. One argument is that the neocons, who regard the U.S.-Israeli bond as inviolable, would not knowingly collaborate with neo-Nazis given the history of the Holocaust (and indeed the role of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators in extermination campaigns against Poles and Jews).

But the neocons have frequently struck alliances of convenience with some of the most unsavory – and indeed anti-Semitic – forces on earth, dating back to the Reagan administration and its collaboration with Latin American “death squad” regimes, including work with the World Anti-Communist League that included not only neo-Nazis but aging real Nazis.

More recently in Syria, U.S. neocons (and Israeli leaders) are so focused on ousting Assad, an ally of hated Iran, that they have cooperated with Saudi Arabia’s Sunni monarchy (known for its gross anti-Semitism). Israeli officials have even expressed a preference for Saudi-backed Sunni extremists winning in Syria if that is the only way to get rid of Assad and hurt his allies in Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

Last September, Israel’s Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren told the Jerusalem Post that Israel so wanted Assad out and his Iranian backers weakened, that Israel would accept al-Qaeda operatives taking power in Syria.

“The greatest danger to Israel is by the strategic arc that extends from Tehran, to Damascus to Beirut. And we saw the Assad regime as the keystone in that arc,” Oren said in the interview. “We always wanted Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred the bad guys who weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran.”

Oren said that was Israel’s view even if the other “bad guys” were affiliated with al-Qaeda.

Oren, who was Israel’s point man in dealing with Official Washington’s neocons, is considered very close to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and reflects his views. For decades, U.S. neocons have supported Netanyahu and his hardline Likud Party, including as strategists on his 1996 campaign for prime minister when neocons such as Richard Perle and Douglas Feith developed the original “regime change” strategy. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “The Mysterious Why of the Iraq War.”]

In other words, Israel and its U.S. neocon supporters have been willing to collaborate with extreme right-wing and even anti-Semitic forces if that advances their key geopolitical goals, such as maneuvering the U.S. government into military confrontations with Syria and Iran.

So, while it may be fair to assume that neocons like Nuland and McCain would have preferred that the Ukraine coup had been spearheaded by militants who weren’t neo-Nazis – or, for that matter, that the Syrian rebels were not so dominated by al-Qaeda-affiliated extremists – the neocons (and their Israeli allies) see these tactical collaborations as sometimes necessary to achieve overarching strategic priorities.

And, since their current strategic necessity is to scuttle the fragile negotiations over Syria and Iran, which otherwise might negate the possibility of U.S. military strikes against those two countries, the Putin-Obama collaboration had to go.

By spurring on the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s elected president, the neocons helped touch off a cascade of events – now including Crimea’s secession from Ukraine and its annexation by Russia – that have raised tensions and provoked Western retaliation against Russia. The crisis also has made the continued Obama-Putin teamwork on Syria and Iran extremely difficult, if not impossible.

Like other neocon-engineered schemes, there will surely be much collateral damage in this latest one. For instance, if the tit-for-tat economic retaliations escalate – and Russian gas supplies are disrupted – Europe’s fragile recovery could be tipped back into recession, with harmful consequences for the U.S. economy, too.

There’s also the certainty that congressional war hawks and neocon pundits will press for increased U.S. military spending and aggressive tactics elsewhere in the world to punish Putin, meaning even less money and attention for domestic programs or deficit reduction. Obama’s “nation-building at home” will be forgotten.

But the neocons have long made it clear that their vision for the world – one of America’s “full-spectrum dominance” and “regime change” in Middle Eastern countries opposed to Israel – overrides all other national priorities. And as long as the neocons face no accountability for the havoc that they wreak, they will continue working Washington’s corridors of power, not selling insurance or flipping hamburgers.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). For a limited time, you also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here.

Putin’s Triumph

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Putin’s Triumph

Ex: http://orientalreview.org/

By Israel SHAMIR (Israel)

Nobody expected events to move on with such a breath-taking speed. The Russians took their time; they sat on the fence and watched while the Brown storm-troopers conquered Kiev, and they watched while Mrs Victoria Nuland of the State Department and her pal Yatsenyuk (“Yats”) slapped each other’s backs and congratulated themselves on their quick victory. They watched when President Yanukovych escaped to Russia to save his skin. They watched when the Brown bands moved eastwards to threaten the Russian-speaking South East. They patiently listened while Mme Timoshenko, fresh out of gaol, swore to void treaties with Russia and to expel the Russian Black Sea Fleet from its main harbour in Sevastopol. They paid no heed when the new government appointed oligarchs to rule Eastern provinces. Nor did they react when children in Ukrainian schools were ordered to sing “Hang a Russian on a thick branch” and the oligarch-governor’s deputy promised to hang dissatisfied Russians of the East as soon as Crimea is pacified. While these fateful events unravelled, Putin kept silence.

He is a cool cucumber, Mr Putin. Everybody, including this writer, thought he was too nonchalant about Ukraine’s collapse. He waited patiently. The Russians made a few slow and hesitant, almost stealthy moves. The marines Russia had based in Crimea by virtue of an international agreement (just as the US has marines in Bahrain) secured Crimea’s airports and roadblocks, provided necessary support to the volunteers of the Crimean militia (called Self-Defence Forces), but remained under cover. The Crimean parliament asserted its autonomy and promised a plebiscite in a month time. And all of a sudden things started to move real fast!

The poll was moved up to Sunday, March 16. Even before it could take place, the Crimean Parliament declared Crimea’s independence. The poll’s results were spectacular: 96% of the votes were for joining Russia; the level of participation was unusually high – over 84%. Not only ethnic Russians, but ethnic Ukrainians and Tatars voted for reunification with Russia as well. A symmetrical poll in Russia showed over 90% popular support for reunification with Crimea, despite liberals’ fear-mongering (“this will be too costly, the sanctions will destroy Russian economy, the US will bomb Moscow”, they said).

Even then, the majority of experts and talking heads expected the situation to remain suspended for a long while. Some thought Putin would eventually recognise Crimean independence, while stalling on final status, as he did with Ossetia and Abkhazia after the August 2008 war with Tbilisi. Others, especially Russian liberals, were convinced Putin would surrender Crimea in order to save Russian assets in the Ukraine.

 

Vladimir Putin delivering his address on reunification with Crimea. Source: Kremlin.ru

Vladimir Putin delivering his address on reunification with Crimea. Source: Kremlin.ru

But Putin justified the Russian proverb: the Russians take time to saddle their horses, but they ride awfully fast. He recognised Crimea’s independence on Monday, before the ink on the poll’s results dried.  The next day, on Tuesday, he gathered all of Russia’s senior statesmen and parliamentarians (video) in the biggest, most glorious and elegant St George state hall in the Kremlin, lavishly restored to its Imperial glory, and declared Russia’s acceptance of Crimea’s reunification bid. Immediately after his speech, the treaty between Crimea and Russia was signed, and the peninsula reverted to Russia as it was before 1954, when Communist Party leader Khrushchev passed it to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic.

This was an event of supreme elation for the gathered politicians and for people at home watching it live on their tellies. The vast St George Hall applauded Putin as never before. The Russians felt immense pride: they still remember the stinging defeat of 1991, when their country was taken apart. Regaining Crimea was a wonderful reverse for them. There were public festivities in honour of this reunification all over Russia and especially in joyous Crimea.

Historians have compared the event with the restoration of Russian sovereignty over Crimea in 1870, almost twenty years after the Crimean War had ended with Russia’s defeat, when severe limitations on Russian rights in Crimea were imposed by victorious France and Britain. Now the Black Sea Fleet will be able to develop and sail freely again, enabling it to defend Syria in the next round. Though Ukrainians ran down the naval facilities and turned the most advanced submarine harbour of Balaclava into shambles, the potential is there.

Besides the pleasure of getting this lost bit of land back, there was the additional joy of outwitting the adversary. The American neocons arranged the coup in Ukraine and sent the unhappy country crashing down, but the first tangible fruit of this break up went to Russia.

A new Jewish joke was coined at that time:

Israeli President Peres asks the Russian President:

-        Vladimir, are you of Jewish ancestry?

-        Putin: What makes you think so, Shimon?

-        Peres: You made the US pay five billion dollars to deliver Crimea to Russia. Even for a Jew, that is audacious!

Five billion dollars is a reference to Victoria Nuland’s admission of having spent that much for democratisation (read: destabilisation) of the Ukraine. President Putin snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, and US hegemony suffered a set-back.

The US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power screaming at the Russian counterpart Vitaly Churkin after Russia has blocked the US draft resolution "on situation in Ukraine" at the Security Council meeting on March 15, 2014.

The US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power screaming at the Russian counterpart Vitaly Churkin after Russia has blocked the US draft resolution “on situation in Ukraine” at the Security Council meeting on March 15, 2014.

The Russians enjoyed the sight of their UN representative Vitaly Churkin coping with a near-assault by Samantha Power. The Irish-born US rep came close to bodily attacking the elderly grey-headed Russian diplomat telling him that “Russia was defeated (presumably in 1991 – ISH) and should bear the consequences… Russia is blackmailing the US with its nuclear weapons,” while Churkin asked her to keep her hands off him and stop foaming at the mouth. This was not the first hostile encounter between these twain: a month ago, Samantha entertained a Pussy Riot duo, and Churkin said she should join the group and embark on a concert tour.

The US Neocons’ role in the Kiev coup was clarified by two independent exposures. Wonderful Max Blumenthal and Rania Khalek showed that the anti-Russian campaign of recent months (gay protests, Wahl affair, etc.) was organised by the Zionist Neocon PNAC (now renamed FPI) led by Mr Robert Kagan, husband of Victoria “Fuck EC” Nuland. It seems that the Neocons are hell-bent to undermine Russia by all means, while the Europeans are much more flexible. (True, the US troops are still stationed in Europe, and the old continent is not as free to act as it might like).

The second exposé was an interview with Alexander Yakimenko, the head of Ukrainian Secret Services (SBU) who had escaped to Russia like his president. Yakimenko accused Andriy Parubiy, the present security czar, of making a deal with the Americans. On American instructions, he delivered weapons and brought snipers who killed some 70 persons within few hours. They killed the riot police and the protesters as well.

The US Neocon-led conspiracy in Kiev was aimed against the European attempt to reach a compromise with President Yanukovych, said the SBU chief. They almost agreed on all points, but Ms Nuland wanted to derail the agreement, and so she did – with the help of a few snipers.

These snipers were used again in Crimea: a sniper shot and killed a Ukrainian soldier. When the Crimean self-defence forces began their pursuit, the sniper shot at them, killed one and wounded one. It is the same pattern: snipers are used to provoke response and hopefully to jump-start a shootout.

Novorossia

While Crimea was a walkover, the Russians are far from being home and dry. Now, the confrontation moved to the Eastern and South-Eastern provinces of mainland Ukraine, called Novorossia (New Russia) before the Communist Revolution of 1917. Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his later years predicted that Ukraine’s undoing would come from its being overburdened by industrial provinces that never belonged to the Ukraine before Lenin, – by Russian-speaking Novorossia. This prediction is likely to be fulfilled.

Who fights whom over there? It is a great error to consider the conflict a tribal one, between Russians and Ukrainians. Good old Pat Buchanan made this error saying that “Vladimir Putin is a blood-and-soil, altar-and-throne ethno-nationalist who sees himself as Protector of Russia and looks on Russians abroad the way Israelis look upon Jews abroad, as people whose security is his legitimate concern.” Nothing could be farther away from truth: perhaps only the outlandish claim that Putin is keen on restoring the Russian Empire can compete.

Putin is not an empire-builder at all (to great regret of Russia’s communists and nationalists). Even his quick takeover of Crimea was an action forced upon him by the strong-willed people of Crimea and by the brazen aggression of the Kiev regime. I have it on a good authority that Putin hoped he would not have to make this decision. But when he decided he acted.

The ethno-nationalist assertion of Buchanan is even more misleading. Ethno-nationalists of Russia are Putin’s enemies; they support the Ukrainian ethno-nationalists and march together with Jewish liberals on Moscow street demos. Ethno-nationalism is as foreign to Russians as it is foreign to the English. You can expect to meet a Welsh or Scots nationalist, but an English nationalist is an unnatural rarity. Even the English Defence League was set up by a Zionist Jew. Likewise, you can find a Ukrainian or a Belarusian or a Cossack nationalist, but practically never a Russian one.

Putin is a proponent and advocate of non-nationalist Russian world. What is the Russian world?

Russian World

Pavel Ryzhenko "A photo in memoriam" painting (2007) depicting the last Russian Emperor Nikolay II with family visiting a military camp during WWI.

Pavel Ryzhenko “A photo in memoriam” painting (2007) depicting the last Russian Emperor Nikolay II with family visiting a military camp during WWI.

Russians populate their own vast universe embracing many ethnic units of various background, from Mongols and Karels to Jews and Tatars. Until 1991, they populated an even greater land mass (called the Soviet Union, and before that, the Russian Empire) where Russian was the lingua franca and the language of daily usage for majority of citizens. Russians could amass this huge empire because they did not discriminate and did not hog the blanket. Russians are amazingly non-tribal, to an extent unknown in smaller East European countries, but similar to other great Eastern Imperial nations, the Han Chinese and the Turks before the advent of Young Turks and Ataturk. The Russians did not assimilate but partly acculturated their neighbours for whom Russian language and culture became the gateway to the world. The Russians protected and supported local cultures, as well, at their expense, for they enjoy this diversity.

Before 1991, the Russians promoted a universalist humanist world-view; nationalism was practically banned, and first of all, Russian nationalism. No one was persecuted or discriminated because of his ethnic origin (yes, Jews complained, but they always complain). There was some positive discrimination in the Soviet republics, for instance a Tajik would have priority to study medicine in the Tajik republic, before a Russian or a Jew; and he would be able to move faster up the ladder in the Party and politics. Still the gap was small.

After 1991, this universalist world-view was challenged by a parochial and ethno-nationalist one in all ex-Soviet republics save Russia and Belarus. Though Russia ceased to be Soviet, it retained its universalism. In the republics, people of Russian culture were severely discriminated against, often fired from their working places, in worst cases they were expelled or killed. Millions of Russians, natives of the republics, became refugees; together with them, millions of non-Russians who preferred Russian universalist culture to “their own” nationalist and parochial one fled to Russia. That is why modern Russia has millions of Azeris, Armenians, Georgians, Tajiks, Latvians and of smaller ethnic groups from the republics. Still, despite discrimination, millions of Russians and people of Russian culture remained in the republics, where their ancestors lived for generations, and the Russian language became a common ground for all non-nationalist forces.

If one wants to compare with Israel, as Pat Buchanan did, it is the republics, such as Ukraine, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Estonia do follow Israeli model of discriminating and persecuting their “ethnic minorities”, while Russia follows the West European model of equality.

France vs Occitania

In order to understand the Russia-Ukraine problem, compare it with France. Imagine it divided into North and South France, the North retaining the name of France, while the South of France calling itself “Occitania”, and its people “Occitans”, their language “Occitan”. The government of Occitania would force the people to speak Provençal, learn Frederic Mistral’s poems by rote and teach children to hate the French, who had devastated their beautiful land in the Albigensian Crusade of 1220. France would just gnash its teeth. Now imagine that after twenty years, the power in Occitania were violently seized by some romantic southern fascists who were keen to eradicate “800 years of Frank domination” and intend to discriminate against people who prefer to speak the language of Victor Hugo and Albert Camus. Eventually France would be forced to intervene and defend francophones, at least in order to stem the refugee influx. Probably the Southern francophones of Marseilles and Toulon would support the North against “their own” government, though they are not migrants from Normandy.

Putin defends all Russian-speakers, all ethnic minorities, such as Gagauz or Abkhaz, not only ethnic Russians. He defends the Russian World, all those russophones who want and need his protection. This Russian World definitely includes many, perhaps majority of people in the Ukraine, ethnic Russians, Jews, small ethnic groups and ethnic Ukrainians, in Novorossia and in Kiev.

Indeed Russian world was and is attractive. The Jews were happy to forget their schtetl and Yiddish; their best poets Pasternak and Brodsky wrote in Russian and considered themselves Russian. Still, some minor poets used Yiddish for their self-expression. The Ukrainians, as well, used Russian for literature, though they spoke their dialect at home for long time. Nikolai Gogol, the great Russian writer of Ukrainian origin, wrote Russian, and he was dead set against literary usage of the Ukrainian dialect. There were a few minor Romantic figures who used the dialect for creative art, like Taras Shevchenko and Lesya Ukrainka.

Solzhenitsyn wrote: “Even ethnic-Ukrainians do not use and do not know Ukrainian. In order to promote its use, the Ukrainian government bans Russian schools, forbids Russian TV, even librarians are not allowed to speak Russian with their readers. This anti-Russian position of Ukraine is exactly what the US wants in order to weaken Russia.“

Putin in his speech on Crimea stressed that he wants to secure the Russian world – everywhere in the Ukraine. In Novorossia the need is acute, for there are daily confrontations between the people and the gangs sent by the Kiev regime. While Putin does not yet want (as opposed to Solzhenitsyn and against general Russian feeling) to take over Novorossia, he may be forced to it, as he was in Crimea. There is a way to avoid this major shift: the Ukraine must rejoin the Russian world. While keeping its independence, Ukraine must grant full equality to its Russian language speakers. They should be able to have Russian-language schools, newspapers, TV, be entitled to use Russian everywhere. Anti-Russian propaganda must cease. And fantasies of joining NATO, too.

This is not an extraordinary demand: Latinos in the US are allowed to use Spanish. In Europe, equality of languages and cultures is a sine qua non. Only in the ex-Soviet republics are these rights trampled – not only in Ukraine, but in the Baltic republics as well. For twenty years, Russia made do with weak objections, when Russian-speakers (the majority of them are not ethnic Russians) in the Baltic states were discriminated against. This is likely to change. Lithuania and Latvia have already paid for their anti-Russian position by losing their profitable transit trade with Russia. Ukraine is much more important for Russia. Unless the present regime is able to change (not very likely), this illegitimate regime will be changed by people of Ukraine, and Russia will use R2P against the criminal elements in power.

The majority of people of Ukraine would probably agree with Putin, irrespective of their ethnicity. Indeed, in the Crimean referendum, Ukrainians and Tatars voted en masse together with Russians. This is a positive sign: there will be no ethnic strife in the Ukraine’s East, despite US efforts to the contrary. The decision time is coming up fast: some experts presume that by end of May the Ukrainian crisis will be behind us.

Source: CounterPunch

Decadence

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Decadence

By Tito Perdue

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com

Delivered to the H. L. Mencken Club, November 1, 2013

About two years ago, when I was still very young, I bumped into a copy of the abridged version of Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History [2]wherein he tried to establish a taxonomy of civilizations, a successful effort, it seemed to me, that allowed him to delineate the surprisingly few genuine civilizations — some 23 according to him — that have ever actually existed. Inspired by this effort, I wonder if it wouldn’t have been possible to construct a classification system for societies that have experienced decadence.

It’s clear I think that the decadence that accompanied the collapse of the western part of the Roman Empire was not at all like that of Weimar Germany, for instance. Rome had been overwhelmed by alien occupation, whereas Germany seems to have experienced a sort of moral breakdown in the wake of its defeat in the First World War. Both societies were experiencing economic problems, but there have been very many societies that have been through economic disruption without however falling into decadence. The decadence of Rome and of Weimar Germany therefore seem to have had very different causes. We know that viral meningitis is quite unlike the bacterial variety.

The story of Rome is the story of huge success eventuating in an empire that reduced the individual to a grain of sand, relieved him of responsibility, and created a heterogeneous world in which people no longer recognized each other and no longer felt themselves part of an organic society. Alexander was no doubt a remarkable personality, but his empire, like those of Rome, or of Persia, or of the Soviet Union, ended in decadence, as indeed all empires seem to do, provided they endure long enough. Moreover his project of folding Greece into a world-wide empire marked the end of Greece’s cultural importance.

On balance, it may be that poor countries are less available to decadence than rich ones. The United States, for example, are very rich, even today, but that hasn’t thwarted the onset of our own particular form of decadence which is mostly the result, I think, of too much prosperity, and too much good luck extended over too long a period.

Prosperity dissolves self-discipline and makes it possible for people to engage in antinomian behaviors that are not in their own, or their nation’s, best interests. There is nothing especially immoral about plumbers and electricians believing they have the right to live in $500,000 houses, even though that belief may involve great danger to the over-all economy. Today we see millionaire parents demanding tax-supported scholarships for their offspring, the same millionaire parents who don’t hesitate to lay out thousands of dollars for corrective dental surgery for their pet poodles. These are the symptoms of a society that has become “unrealistically” rich, and unrealistically secure, and that has lost any understanding of the real world that lies in wait just on the other side of the hill.

We have become a nation that has made it unnecessary for prosperous people ever to serve in the military and is willing to defend itself with women serving in front-line combat. Whenever you think our country has become as decadent as it is possible for any society to be, just wait till tomorrow. We’re a rich country, and if we don’t wish to perform military service, we can always hire someone else to do the job for us. We are reminded of the time when Romans lost interest in defending themselves, and chose to sub-contract the job out to illegal immigrants. Not that ever we would behave like that.

Prosperity encourages parents to turn decision making over to their children. The ethos and culture of modern America is essentially an adolescent construct. If my grandfather’s children had attempted to preempt his authority, those children would have had to go through life with some very serious physical disabilities.

Prolonged prosperity is an abnormal condition, and tends to produce abnormal people. For most of history, simple survival has been the first concern. Without that challenge, most people have trouble deciding how to make use of their advantages, especially after the pleasures of consumerism, drugs, and women begin to pall, which usually happens rather quickly. Today we have a government that requires health insurance plans to cover the cost of contraceptives while with the other hand providing for fertility treatments.

Fertility is therefore seen as a disease and as a desideratum at the same time. Moving right along, government may soon, or perhaps already has agreed to subsidize the cost of abortion, a generous provision that cancels the onerous need for women to take a little pill in the morning. Conclusion? Abortions must be a lot of fun.

Yet another result of advanced decadence is the emergence of a class of fantastically wealthy people who find themselves in urgent need of psychotropic drugs and weekly visits to the neighborhood psychiatrist. Today the divorce rate is as high as it has ever been, a reflection of the self-indulgence that renders people incapable of the give and take of marriage.

It may be that decadence is inevitable for people who are not in danger. “Live dangerously,” Nietzsche recommends. The Greek city-states were always in danger, both from each other and from barbarian invasion. Elizabethan England was never so culturally productive as when she found herself under imminent attack from Spain.

Small countries, always in danger, seldom fall into decadence. The tiny states of Greece or Renaissance Italy or Colonial America, places where people actually knew each other and actually depended upon each other, lived much more vivid lives, I believe, than the unfortunate subjects of multinational empires who are looked upon as fungible parts of a complicated machine. Life in Republican Rome must have been far more pleasant than under the Empire, and never mind that the Empire was far wealthier than the Republic.

Hellenistic Greece was much richer than Hellenic Greece, and much worse. And so I think that prolonged prosperity is not only the chief cause of our sort of decadence, but also its chief historic characteristic.

Societies that are not prosperous bestow authority on males, as males are more necessary for survival. The male is better equipped to build a log cabin, or kill Indians, or chop down trees. But when a society becomes prosperous, women can play a larger part, and are able to discharge the necessary functions of a settled community. And when a society becomes very rich and stays that way for a long time, those activities in which women are equal or superior come more and more into prominence. Clearly a good society must include the female spirit, and a world without proportionate female participation would be a hell on earth. But in decadence, the tastes and preferences of women may actually come to dominate and to set up quite another kind of hell, the kind we see today in this country, where empathy and niceness and maternalism trump society’s more essential requirements. Nothing can be easier than sitting in a darkened room with a cocktail in one hand while generating compassionate thoughts, a cost-free sort of activity that contrasts poorly with the more masculine virtues of courage, creativity, and intellection. You can read a thousand advice columns today and consult a hundred therapists and never hear any of those words mentioned.

It’s as if you were house hunting, and you’re mostly concerned about the building’s structure while your wife is mostly concerned about the wallpaper. A political candidate who “feels your pain,” and has a sweeter smile than his opponent will sweep the female vote and almost certainly win. This is a symptom of a society that is overly-feminized, overly tenderized, with a condescending view of life in which everyone stands in need of help. Those not in need of help are assumed by liberal women to be almost assuredly evil. They enjoy granting compassion to all living things, but would be humiliated to have it applied to themselves. They harbor tender feelings for certain American Indian tribes that, oddly enough, used women as baggage carriers and articles of trade. Our denatured urban elites have never forgiven the country for refusing affirmative action benefits for the Iroquois. Attitudes are very different among the urban poor, who actually know something about life’s unpleasant features, and who are less susceptible to decadence than to barbarism. It was George Bernard Shaw who is credited with saying that America might be the first society to go from barbarism to decadence without ever passing through civilization. It didn’t seem to occur to him that America could do both decadence and barbarism at the same time.

Without insisting that cultural decline is common to all decadent societies, there’s no doubt that it’s common to ours. A high culture demands an educational platform, and education in America today, with rare exceptions, has become simply a form of egalitarian indoctrination. In the minds of today’s educators, it is far more important for multiracial students to join hands and sing folk songs together than to learn math, or history, or anything else. It wasn’t so terribly long ago that a big city like New York would have a dozen FM radio stations offering classical music around the clock. I’ve been told that no such stations, or very few certainly, still exist. It wasn’t too terribly long ago that publishers were at least partly interested in serious fiction and would try to promote it. Today those publishers have become parts of conglomerates and are interested solely in being able to report good profits to their ownerships. The word “literary” makes a modern publisher groan with exasperation. It sounds so snobbish, that word. I once asked an editor if William Faulkner could be published today, if he weren’t already famous. “Of course not,” she replied. It’s far more profitable to publish mid-brow pulp aimed at well-dressed semi-educated feminist career women domiciled in the big coastal cities. As for the big newspapers, they have just about unanimously fallen into the hands of professional Left-wing agitators, hippies in amber, militating on behalf of political correctness.

Perhaps it’s in common discourse and social behavior that our decadence most readily displays itself. Adults speak like children, and have the same enthusiasms. We have seen fifty-year-old men in short pants and sandals with their shirttails hanging out. Sixty-year olds attending rock concerts. The normalization of gutter speech, the scatological imperative, the coarsening of everything, the replacement of romance by acrobatic sex, the fashion among the young for the most unattractive clothing, tattoos, grotesque haircuts, the demonization, especially among the young, of accomplishment and pride — these are the symptoms of a society in which the young are having a more and more difficult time finding something to rebel against, the crisis of a fissiparous population trying to move in twenty different directions at once.

But these ills fade into complete inconsequentiality when compared to radical egalitarianism, a disastrous philosophy that might very well bring about the collapse of a civilization that, starting from the Greeks, has enhanced human life more than all other civilizations added up together.

In a perfectly egalitarian world, there can be no values of any kind. How could anyone be inspired to achieve anything if his achievement is viewed, perhaps even by himself, as of no more consequence than a cup of tea? Why do cancer research when it’s so much more profitable to be a pornographic actor? How could anyone be so unfair as to imagine that some work of art is superior to any other? Everyone knows that all societies are equal, save possibly for the one that arose in Germany in 1933. Who would wish to attend a football game if the players were all absolutely equal? Because in that case, victory would simply be an accident, granting glory to no one. It infuriates egalitarians that some people have more money than others, but doesn’t seem to trouble them, yet, that some people are more intelligent than others or more personable or better-looking.

To make judgments, according to post-modern thinking, is to be biased, and if a person genuinely wishes to prove how fair-minded he is, then really he ought to select his spouse by lottery. Indeed, it seems clear that a great many people have already resorted to that expedient.

Equality incurs tolerance, and tolerance has become but another word for nihilism. It’s easy to be tolerant, if you don’t believe in anything. A civilization practicing high standards must perforce be highly intolerant, becoming more and more intolerant as it becomes better and better.

Equality is possible only at low levels. A society in which everyone is very bad is entirely feasible, but the opposite is not. To promote equality is to promote a form of mediocrity always falling lower.

Today, the pursuit of wall-to-wall equality has not only very largely succeeded but has actually surpassed itself inasmuch as the worst people are now viewed as the best. If you wish to become a talk show host, it’s highly advisable to have practiced sexual deviancy, or to have a criminal record. For famous people, it’s preferable to have your children outside of marriage. Anyone who believes our leaders ought to have at least some allegiance to principles that are the result of thousands of years of trial and error will be seen as a comic figure, hopelessly obsolete. Truly, we have seen that “transvaluation of all values” that might have seemed so attractive to some of us when we were young. Today, those who believe in the possibility of supernal values are viewed as atavists, credulous people who like to imagine there’s more to life than the pursuit of pleasure. (Such people, by the way, are usually those who don’t know what real pleasure really is.) For them, life is but a hailstorm of molecules, and the only restraint on behavior is whether a person can make a profit out of it, or at least get away with it.

Can a civilization like ours continue for very long? We have seen that the western half of Rome fell in the 5th century, but we also know that the eastern half continued on for another thousand years. My view of America is that it probably will subsist for a long time as a rich and powerful country, but that its civilizational and, if I may used the word, its spiritual quotient will remain in subfreezing territory for as long as it continues on.

 

 


 

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URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2014/03/decadence/

 

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mardi, 25 mars 2014

Rebellion n°63

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Editorial :
La course à la guerre !
Alternative :
Pour un végétarisme de lutte ( 2ème partie) 
Jour de colère, çà va péter ! - A nous de faire que chaque jour devienne un jour de colère ! 
Face à la loi de la finance: Entretien avec P-Y Rougeyron 
Histoire : Harro-Shulze Boysen - un national-Bolchevik dans l'orchestre rouge ( 1er partie) 
La France durcit ses moeurs et enrégimente les idées de Thibault Isabel. 
Culture : Chroniques livres. 
 
Disponible contre 4 euros à notre adresse : 
Rébellion c/o RSE Bp 62124 31020 TOULOUSE cedex 02
http://rebellion.hautetfort.com/
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00:05 Publié dans Revue | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : revue, rebellion, socialisme révolutionnaire, socialisme | |  del.icio.us | | Digg! Digg |  Facebook

Alaska was Russian...

 

De l’Etat Providence à la Commune Providence

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BON COURAGE, MONSIEUR LE MAIRE
 
De l’Etat Providence à la Commune Providence

Michel Lhomme
Ex: http://metamag.fr

Administrer, gérer une collectivité territoriale, aujourd'hui, n’est pas simple. Les problèmes à résoudre sont multiples et souvent inopinés. Pour les maires des villes moyennes, il faut parfois réagir rapidement à un problème survenu dans la nuit, programmer les investissements, maîtriser les dépenses, assurer les services et ce quotidiennement. Chaque jour, toutes ces questions s’imposent à la responsabilité des élus municipaux. Il y a, de fait, de moins en moins de candidats au poste ingrat de maire car, dans les années à venir, la tâche des élus sera encore plus délicate. Les contraintes financières vont croissant, l’urbanisme devient, dans les grandes agglomérations, un vrai casse-tête entre l’obligation de densifier imposée par l’Etat et la nécessité de préserver le cadre de vie par la création de jardins et de parcs.


2014 : un tournant dans la gestion municipale


Trois domaines vont être directement bouleversés par les décisions du gouvernement et les lois adoptées. Premier domaine, l'intercommunalité. La loi Valls crée les intercommunalités qui doivent regrouper un minimum de 200 000 habitants. Ces intercommunalités seront obligatoirement compétentes pour les règles d’urbanisme, la politique du logement, le développement économique. Nombre de petites villes aujourd'hui autonomes vont devoir, lors de ce prochain mandat municipal, être souvent intégrées dans une intercommunalité et perdre ainsi notamment la maîtrise de la définition de leur urbanisme. C’est là un enjeu majeur pour bon nombre de maires. 

Le deuxième domaine affecté, c'est effectivement l'urbanisme par la loi Duflot de janvier 2013. Cette loi impose, pour nombre de villes, la construction d’au moins 25% de logements sociaux d’ici 2025. C'est une loi irréaliste et pernicieuse pour des municipalités tranquilles qui vont se retrouver avec de multiples cas sociaux à gérer. La loi ALUR (Accès au logement et à un urbanisme rénové), ce n'est pas la rumeur de Niort ou du 9-3, c'est pire ! Elle bouleversera réellement les règles de constructibilité de l'habitat municipal avec un objectif clairement affiché : densifier et socialiser. Cette loi est une menace directe pour le caractère résidentiel de bon nombre de villes françaises. 

Enfin, troisième domaine, les recettes et les finances municipales affectées par des prélèvements directs de l’Etat, équivalents souvent à 12 ou 15 points d’impôts supplémentaires (1 point représentant 200 000 €). Or, se rajoutera à cela la baisse programmée de la dotation globale de fonctionnement (DGF), l'augmentation du fonds de péréquation, la modification de la contribution foncière des entreprises, le financement des rythmes scolaires (réforme Peillon 2013), les pénalités pour le manque de logements sociaux. Bon nombre de villes ou de villages relativement bien gérés et encore à taille humaine vont ainsi vite se retrouver dans le rouge car comment assurer à l'avenir le service public quotidien tout en maîtrisant les dépenses ? Pour certains maires, après les élections, ce sera le vrai casse-tête ! 


Les maires ne sont plus maîtres de leurs dépenses où de leurs recettes. Ces recettes seront en diminution en raison des prélèvements constants de l’Etat, de la baisse de la dotation globale de fonctionnement et de la forte augmentation du fonds de péréquation. Pour certaines municipalités qui ne disposent pas du foncier disponible ou des fonds nécessaires pour réaliser des logements sociaux, l'augmentation des pénalités pour le manque de logements impactera leurs ressources. 


La réalité est donc cruelle


Les maires ne seront plus maîtres de leurs budgets. Que vont-ils chercher à faire ? Probablement le plus d'économies possibles, tout en tentant de maintenir les services indispensables. Ils vont différer des investissements ou réduire leur autofinancement. Ils vont hypothéquer l’avenir des villes et par là, l'avenir du pays.


Maîtriser l'urbanisme, c'est une question centrale pour les maires. L’urbanisme fonde le caractère d’une ville et la protège. Grâce à la décentralisation voulue par Gaston Deferre en 1982, les villes françaises ont pu établir leurs propres plans d’occupation des sols (POS) qui leur ont souvent permis de préserver leur caractère propre, résidentiel ou non. La loi Duflot bouleverse ces règles et impose que le plan local d’urbanisme, successeur du POS, soit défini, élaboré au niveau intercommunal par les unités créées par la loi Valls. C'est bien toute la donne qui change. Les maires ne maîtriseront plus rien d'où la protestation d'ailleurs de nombreux élus, tous bords confondus. Devant cette fronde municipale, le gouvernement a d'ailleurs introduit une clause transitoire selon laquelle une ville qui lance son plan local d’urbanisme (PLU) conserve la compétence d’élaboration de ce plan pendant trois ans à compter du transfert des compétences à l’intercommunalité. Mais, trois ans cela passe vite, d'autant que, s'il est exact de dire que certaines villes pourront garder cette compétence transitoire, elles ne la garderont que sous la férule de l’Etat. Les futurs maires devront se battre pour protéger leur cadre de vie. 


Aussi, à tous les maires élus dimanche ou le 30 mars, en reprenant Voltaire nous souhaitons un Macte Animo Generose Puer !

 

La Crimée épicentre d’un séisme mondial… Vers la guerre ?

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La Crimée épicentre d’un séisme mondial… Vers la guerre ?

par Jean-Michel VERNOCHET
Ex.: http://www.bvoltaire.fr

Ex-chef des Services de Renseignement ukrainien, le général Smeshko ne mâche pas ses mots : « Poutine place l’Europe au bord d’une Troisième guerre mondiale ».

Ce n’est pas un quelconque tabloïd qui publie ce propos mais Le Figaro, et le jour du printemps ! N’est-ce pas un peu vite dit ? En tout cas Paris, toujours aussi bien avisé, se propose d’envoyer des avions de combat en Pologne aux abords de la frontière ukrainienne à l’instar du Pentagone qui a déjà acheminé douze F16 et 300 GI’s… au prétexte de manœuvres.

« On » voudrait faire monter la tension que l’on ne s’y prendrait pas autrement. Au demeurant on ne se prive pas de dire que « Poutine ne comprend rien à l’Ukraine » [ibid.Smeshko]. Il n’en demeure pas moins que ce sont les gens de Bruxelles qui ont mis le feu aux poudres en aguichant les Ukrainiens avec un accord de partenariat que l’Union voulait exclusif, cela sans tenir le moindre compte des réalités géopolitiques et historiques.

Bravo donc Catherine Asthon qui a su faire miroiter aux Ukrainiens une manne céleste pourtant aujourd’hui introuvable… mais que distribuait naguère, et avec largesse, les eurocrates aux pays du Sud de l’Europe… ceux qui justement, Grèce, Portugal, Espagne, Italie des Pouilles et de la Calabre, tous à présent dans la plus noire panade.

Bref, n’y avait-il pas là, de la part de du Moloch bruxellois, une sorte d’escroquerie morale qu’il convient d’épingler ? Comment en effet une Europe envasée dans l’actuel marasme structurel qui est le sien, aurait-elle pu utilement venir au secours de Kiev ?

Cependant, ce serait faire une injure trop grande aux technocrates que de leur imputer une erreur aussi grossière consistant à sous-estimer la capacité de réaction du Kremlin. Surtout après l’annexion manquée d’août 2008, celle de l’Ossétie du Sud par la Géorgie.

Il va de soi que nul, en tel domaine, ne refait deux fois les mêmes erreurs. Notons que, suite à leur déconfiture géorgienne, les Européens échaudés – à rebours – par la « crise du gaz » de l’hiver 2008/2009, ont pris dès cette époque des dispositions pour réduire à la fois leur dépendance vis-à-vis des fournitures russes, mais également pour palier toute éventuelle rupture d’approvisionnement en modifiant en conséquence les réseaux de gazoducs en Europe orientale.

Deux autres conflits gaziers russo-ukrainiens – en 2005/2006 et en 2007/2008 – avaient précédé l’épisode de 2009. Épisodes qu’il serait d’ailleurs vain d’interpréter ou d’analyser en faisant abstraction du contexte géopolitique régional et de l’attraction déjà exercée par la sphère occidentaliste sur les Ukrainiens et plus encore sur leurs puissantes oligarchies.

Pendant que la classe dirigeante française joue à la bataille navale et règle leurs comptes dans ce qui ressemble de plus en plus furieusement à une « voyoucratie » politicienne, le séisme dont l’épicentre se situe sur la Péninsule de Crimée, commence ainsi à faire sentir ses inquiétantes répliques un peu partout… à Venise et en Transnistrie tentées à leur tour par l’autodétermination. Cette dernière, entité séparatiste pro-russe de Moldavie – l’État qui n’existe pas – donne des sueurs froides à Kiev, et pas seulement.

Ici la question se pose de savoir si un détramage général de l’Europe n’a pas été enclenché pas sur le Maïdan de Kiev ?

Comment en effet ne pas penser aux Flandres, à la Catalogne, au Pays basque ? Samedi 22 mars des soldats russes investissaient la base aérienne de Belbek en Crimée. Les choses vont vite, très vite. Pour l’heure, l’Union européenne n’a à opposer aux forces qu’elle a libérées que sa mauvaise humeur et sa mauvaise foi.

Tel est pris qui croyait prendre : la ville de Donetsk, capitale économique et industrielle du Donbass et de l’Ukraine, se mobilise, bannières russes flottant au vent. La foule ne demande pour l’instant que le retour du président déchu Viktor Ianoukovitch, mais les choses pourraient aussi ne pas en rester là !

Robert Stark Interviews Keith Preston

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The Stark Truth
Robert Stark Interviews Keith Preston

By Counter-Currents Radio

 

To download the mp3, right-click here [2] and choose “save target or link as.”

To subscribe to our podcasts, click here [3].

Robert Stark welcomes back Keith Preston of Attack the System [4]. Topics include:

  • Keith’s article “Who and I? Left, Right, or Center”: http://attackthesystem.com/2014/02/21/who-am-i-left-right-or-center/ [5]
  • How his anti imperialist views on foreign policy overlap with the far Left as well as Paleoconservative and New Right thinkers
  • How he finds his critique of capitalism often overlaps with both those of the far Left but also those of Catholic distributists and social nationalists on the far Right
  • How he shares some views on social issues with the Left, but swings back to the Right on decentralist, anti-statist or civil libertarian grounds
  • His support for regionalist and ethno-identitarian movements as a bulwark against imperialism and the Leviathan state
  • The cult of guilt by association versus intellectual freedom
  • Making a case against mass immigration to anarchists
  • His podcast “Who Are the Power Elite?”: http://attackthesystem.com/2013/12/30/attack-the-system-who-are-the-power-elite/ [6]
  • The difference between power elite analysis and conspiracy theories
  • Power elite analysis versus theories of democratic pluralism
  • How the power elite uses demographic, cultural, and class conflict to protect its own position of dominance
  • Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone and the concept of social capital
  • His podcast “Creating Alternative Infrastructure”: http://attackthesystem.com/2014/02/15/ats-roundtable-on-creating-alternative-infrastructure/ [7]

 


Article printed from Counter-Currents Publishing: http://www.counter-currents.com

URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2014/03/robert-stark-interviews-keith-preston-3/

URLs in this post:

[1] Image: http://www.counter-currents.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/frogonbeetle.jpg

[2] here: http://cdn.counter-currents.com/radio/StarkTruth-2014-03-19-KeithPreston.mp3

[3] here: http://www.counter-currents.comitpc://feeds.feedburner.com/Counter-Currents

[4] Attack the System: http://attackthesystem.com/

[5] http://attackthesystem.com/2014/02/21/who-am-i-left-right-or-center/: http://attackthesystem.com/2014/02/21/who-am-i-left-right-or-center/

[6] http://attackthesystem.com/2013/12/30/attack-the-system-who-are-the-power-elite/: http://attackthesystem.com/2013/12/30/attack-the-system-who-are-the-power-elite/

[7] http://attackthesystem.com/2014/02/15/ats-roundtable-on-creating-alternative-infrastructure/: http://attackthesystem.com/2014/02/15/ats-roundtable-on-creating-alternative-infrastructure/

lundi, 24 mars 2014

Entretien avec Anne-Marie Le Pourhiet sur l'Union européenne

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L'UE est une hydre technocratique manipulée par les lobbies...

Nous reproduisons ci-dessous un entretien donné par Anne-Marie Le Pourhiet au Cercle Poincaré. Professeur de droit public à l'université de Rennes-I et spécialiste du droit constitutionnel, Anne-Marie Le Pourhiet s'est fait connaître par la publication dans la grande presse de tribunes libres percutantes dans lesquelles elle défend avec talent des positions souverainistes orthodoxes.

 Ex: http://metapoinfos.hautetfort.com

Entretien avec Anne-Marie Le Pourhiet sur l'Union européenne

«Renationaliser le pouvoir de décision pour le repolitiser»

— Les élections des députés européens approchent. Les dernières échéances ont montré un fort désintérêt des citoyens de presque tous les pays pour ce suffrage, et certains sondages annoncent une majorité eurosceptique au Parlement européen. Dans cette hypothèse, quelle influence pourrait avoir cette « chambre introuvable » eurosceptique sur le fonctionnement, voire la réforme, de l'Union européenne ?

    Vous savez, je suis constitutionnaliste et non politologue et encore moins voyante, je serais donc bien incapable de vous dire ce que serait et ferait exactement cette chambre à majorité eurosceptique. Mais la logique voudrait qu’elle refuse d’adopter une grande partie de la législation envahissante que propose la Commission en invoquant systématiquement les principes de proportionnalité et de subsidiarité auxquels est consacré un protocole additif au traité de Lisbonne. Défendre l’autonomie des États et saboter les prétentions fédéralistes de l’Union devrait être le premier souci d’une telle chambre.

— Sauf que la nouveauté des élections européennes de 2014, introduite par le traité de Lisbonne, c'est que les têtes de liste des partis européens sont désormais transnationales, désignées au niveau de l'Union, et celle dont le parti sortira premier du scrutin aura de grandes chances d'être élue, à la majorité absolue de la nouvelle chambre, à la tête de la Commission européenne. Le traité de Lisbonne réalise-t-il ainsi l'aspiration que Jacques Delors exprimait en 1990 - rejetée avec vigueur par Margaret Thatcher à la Chambre des Communes, avec son fameux « No ! No ! No ! » - de créer un régime parlementaire fédéral en Europe, où l'exécutif procéderait du législatif et serait responsable devant lui ?

    Que le traité de Lisbonne ait des prétentions constitutionnelles n’a rien d’étonnant puisqu’il est la copie conforme du traité constitutionnel que les Français avaient rejeté et que Nicolas Sarkozy a cependant fait ratifier par les parlementaires, de gauche et de droite, réunis pour contourner le verdict populaire. Le divorce ne peut que s’accroître entre des institutions à prétention fédérale et des peuples rétifs à la supranationalité. Élire des listes anti-fédéralistes aux européennes est donc une bonne stratégie pour essayer de torpiller le système de l’intérieur.

— Ces élections européennes, instaurées en 1979, ont eu pour vocation de démocratiser le fonctionnement de l'UE, en instaurant un corps représentatif émanant directement des citoyens des États-membres. Or l'idée même de « démocratie européenne » est discutée, notamment par la Cour constitutionnelle de Karlsruhe, en Allemagne, qui, dans sa décision du 30 juin 2009, estime qu'en l'absence de peuple européen, il ne saurait y avoir de démocratie européenne possible. Dépourvue de demos, l'UE n'a-t-elle pas vocation à n'être qu'une organisation internationale ?

    Je vous rappelle que le Conseil constitutionnel lui-même a affirmé clairement, dans sa décision du 30 décembre 1976 (n°76-71 DC) relative à l’élection au suffrage universel direct de ceux que l’on appelait encore à l’époque les  « représentants des peuples des États-membres des communautés européennes », qu’ « aucune disposition de nature constitutionnelle n’autorise des transferts de tout ou partie de la souveraineté nationale à quelque organisation internationale que ce soit », que l’élection des eurodéputés au suffrage universel direct n’est pas « de nature à modifier la nature de cette assemblée qui demeure composée de représentants de chacun des peuples de ces États », que «  la souveraineté qui est définie à l’article 3 de la Constitution de la République française, tant dans son fondement que dans son exercice, ne peut être que nationale et que seuls peuvent être regardés comme participant à l’exercice de cette souveraineté les représentants du peuple français élus dans le cadre des institutions de la République ». Le Conseil conclut que « l’acte du 20 septembre 1976 est relatif à l’élection des membres d’une assemblée qui n’appartient pas à l’ordre institutionnel de la République française et qui ne participe pas à l’exercice de la souveraineté nationale ». Dans sa décision du 19 novembre 2004 (n° 2005-505 DC) relative au traité constitutionnel, il a encore rappelé que le parlement européen « n’est pas l’émanation de la souveraineté nationale ».

 Il n’empêche que les révisions constitutionnelles ad hoc auxquelles nous procédons avant la ratification de chaque nouveau traité obscurcissent la situation juridique et que le Conseil est contraint de rédiger des motivations complexes. Dans la même décision, après avoir constaté que les stipulations du traité constitutionnel concernant son entrée en vigueur, sa révision et sa possibilité de dénonciation lui conservent « le caractère d’un traité international » et que sa dénomination (constitution pour l’Europe) est « sans incidence sur l’existence de la constitution française et sa place au sommet de l’ordre juridique interne », il affirme cependant que « l’article 88-1 de la Constitution française, issu de la révision de 1992, consacre l’existence d’un ordre juridique communautaire intégré à l’ordre juridique interne et distinct de l’ordre juridique international ». C’est peu dire que le raisonnement est confus et que sa cohérence laisse à désirer. La Constitution française reste donc au sommet d’un ordre juridique interne auquel un traité international intègre cependant un ordre juridique externe distinct de l’ordre juridique international mais dont les normes priment sur le droit interne ! Allez comprendre !

En tout état de cause, il eût fallu s’entendre effectivement, depuis longtemps, sur le fait que l’Europe ne devait pas dépasser le stade d’une confédération et d’un marché, mais nul n’a été capable d’arrêter le délire mégalomaniaque qui inspire cette machine infernale.

— À ce propos, les évolutions récentes de la construction européenne laissent transparaître l'ascendant qu'a l'Allemagne sur le fonctionnement présent et futur de l'Union européenne. Pour autant, avec la décision de la Cour de Karlsruhe mentionnée plus haut, le juge constitutionnel allemand a clairement identifié les domaines où tout nouvel approfondissement de l'intégration européenne requerrait préalablement une réforme substantielle – et improbable - de la Loi fondamentale allemande. L'idée de construire les « États-Unis d'Europe », si elle existe encore, est-elle vouée à mourir à Karlsruhe ?

   Par rapport au Conseil constitutionnel français, la Cour constitutionnelle de Karlsruhe est obligée d’être beaucoup plus rigoureuse car les justiciables qui la saisissent produisent des recours rédigés par des juristes pointus, dont les arguments ne peuvent être évacués par des pirouettes. En outre la Constitution allemande consacre une forme de supra-constitutionnalité interdisant de réviser les principes posés à l’article 20, essentiellement le principe démocratique de souveraineté du peuple. La Cour est donc en effet condamnée à se montrer sévère et à déterminer un seuil au-delà duquel il ne serait plus possible de renforcer la supranationalité européenne dans le cadre de la loi fondamentale existante.

— Dès après sa réélection, Angela Merkel annonçait vouloir une réforme des traités européens pour 2015, notamment en faveur d'un renforcement de la gouvernance de la zone euro. David Cameron a quant à lui instauré une forme d'ultimatum à la réforme de l'Union européenne en fixant à 2017 le référendum d'appartenance du Royaume-Uni à l'UE. François Hollande préfère, de son côté, jouer la montre. Face à ces aspirations centrifuges des trois grandes puissances européennes, quelles devraient être, selon vous, les priorités d'une refonte de l'UE ?

    Les aspirations de Hollande et de Merkel ne me semblent pas « centrifuges », contrairement à celles de Cameron. Je dois dire que nous devons une fière chandelle aux conservateurs britanniques et que je ne peux m’empêcher de penser avec satisfaction : « Messieurs les Anglais, tirez-vous les premiers ! ». C’est aussi à eux, et à la conférence de Brighton qu’ils avaient convoquée, que l’on doit le protocole n°15 à la Convention européenne de sauvegarde des droits de l’homme introduisant expressément dans son préambule le respect du « principe de subsidiarité » et de la « marge nationale d’appréciation » que la Cour de Strasbourg a une fâcheuse tendance à piétiner.

    La priorité d’une refonte de l’Union consiste à changer complètement le mode de définition des compétences de l’union en s’inspirant d’un modèle confédéral et d’une répartition centrifuge et  statique à l’américaine plutôt que d’une répartition centripète et dynamique à l’allemande. Il faut impérativement renationaliser le pouvoir de décision pour le repolitiser et faire reculer cette hydre technocratique manipulée par des lobbies.

— Mais les adversaires d'une réforme de l'Union en faveur des États arguent souvent du caractère irréversible de la construction européenne. Le traité de Maastricht était d'ailleurs écrit dans cet esprit, alors que celui de Lisbonne ouvre une brèche avec l'article 50 du Traité sur l'Union européenne (TUE) qui permet le « retrait volontaire » d'un État-membre de l'Union. Que l'on parle de rapatriement de compétences ou d' « Europe à la carte » avec des coopérations renforcées entre certains États, comment pourrait-on concrètement, et juridiquement, mettre en œuvre cet éventuel détricotage de l'UE actuelle ?

    C’est d’une simplicité biblique ! Vous prenez les traités actuels, vous raturez partout et surtout vous réécrivez les dispositions essentielles définissant les « objectifs » de l’Union en des termes filandreux et sans fin, car ce sont partout ces objectifs qui justifient les compétences, rendant par là-même celles-ci illimitées. Il faut revoir tout cela « au karcher ». C’est très facile, il suffit de le vouloir.

— À l'occasion de l'adoption du pacte de stabilité, vous aviez dénoncé un texte qui, par le biais de la « règle d'or » budgétaire que certains voulaient inscrire dans la Constitution, importait en France la préférence allemande pour la règle. Votre position se fondait alors sur les différences de nature qui existent entre les modèles constitutionnels français et allemand ; ce dernier étant centré sur une Loi fondamentale précise et, dans une certaine mesure, exhaustive. Quels risques cette tendance fait-elle courir sur la lettre et l'esprit de la Constitution de la Ve République, et sur l'équilibre institutionnel qu'elle consacre ?

    Hélas, ce risque est depuis longtemps consommé. Voyez les révisions constitutionnelles qui se sont accumulées depuis les années 1990 et qui ont multiplié les dispositions lourdingues et indigestes dont certaines incompréhensibles avec des renvois à un arsenal complémentaire de lois organiques et ordinaires en cascade, c’est un hamburger juridique inspiré des façons de légiférer germaniques et européennes. Ceci s’observe dans des révisions qui ne sont pourtant pas directement « commandées » par l’Europe elle-même, comme celle de 2003 sur l’organisation décentralisée (encore que la Charte européenne de l’autonomie locale ait inspiré l’ensemble)  ou celle de 2008 sur la modernisation des institutions.  C’est une mode, un travers calamiteux, une véritable « addiction » à la norme, un « maldroit »  que je compare volontiers à la « malbouffe » nutritionnelle et qui débouche sur la même obésité. Voyez la proposition de loi constitutionnelle socialiste sur la ratification de la Charte européenne des langues régionales, c’est une parfaite caricature de cette pathologie.

— D'ailleurs, l'Union européenne semble se construire et se légitimer par la norme justement, que ce soit par l'orthodoxie budgétaire dans la gouvernance de la zone euro ou par l'inflation normative qui résulte de l'activisme de la Commission et du Parlement. En quoi est-ce un problème que le projet européen, à défaut d'avoir un objectif et une forme clairs, repose au moins sur un appareil juridique « solide » ?


    Solide ? Ce n’est sûrement pas l’accumulation de normes tatillonnes, envahissantes et illégitimes qui rend un système juridique solide. Envoyez un obèse aux jeux olympiques, vous allez voir son degré de performance et de compétitivité !

— Certes. Mais dans le cas de la France, cette « importation » de la préférence allemande pour la règle n'a-t-elle pas au moins l'intérêt d'être un rempart contre les errements d'une classe politique française accaparée par la compétition politicienne, elle-même permise par diverses évolutions du régime de 1958 ?

    Oh la-la ! Vous m’entraînez dans la sociologie politique. Allez voir le dernier film de Roberto Ando « Viva la libertà » qui ressasse l’éternel problème de la classe politique italienne, sans toutefois faire encore autre chose que de s’indigner et d’en appeler de façon incantatoire à  la repolitisation et au réenchantement… Les belles paroles et les leçons de morale ne suffisent pas à révolutionner les hommes et leurs mœurs ! Les Italiens comme les Français ont sûrement la classe politique qu’ils méritent : elle est sans doute à leur image. Il n’y pas de société politique corrompue sans société civile corruptrice. Mais je ne pense pas  que la solution à cette « catastrophe » (selon le terme du film) consiste à accepter de se soumettre à la schlague allemande. Je n’oublierai jamais la lettre péremptoire adressée en pleine crise financière par le commissaire européen Olli Rehn à Guglio Tremonti (ministre italien de l'économie et des finances de 2008 à 2011) et le priant de répondre « in english »…. L’horreur absolue, une gifle à la démocratie, mais Rome s’est couchée ! Et à quel terrible spectacle avons-nous assisté lorsque le Premier ministre grec a proposé d’organiser un référendum sur la mise sous tutelle de son pays … On venait tuer la démocratie à domicile ! Pierre-André Taguieff a écrit en 2001 sur l’Union une phrase dure mais vraie: «  L’Europe est un empire gouverné par des super-oligarques, caste d’imposteurs suprêmes célébrant le culte de la démocratie après en avoir confisqué le nom et interdit la pratique » (« Les ravages de la mondialisation heureuse », in Peut-on encore débattre en France ? Plon – Le Figaro, 2001).

— Pour terminer l'entretien et élargir le propos, éloignons-nous (quoique) de l'Union européenne et parlons du Conseil de l'Europe, et de sa célèbre charte sur les langues régionales et minoritaires. D'aucuns décrient une atteinte d'une rare gravité contre le modèle républicain français. Qu'en pensez-vous ?


    Je ne peux que vous renvoyer à mon article récemment publié dans Marianne le 31 janvier 2014. Mon point de vue est clair : cette charte et ses promoteurs sont anti-républicains.

— Vous avez parfois dénoncé la dimension anglo-saxonne qui tend à caractériser de plus en plus le droit européen, incompatible selon vous avec le droit continental, et a fortiori avec le droit républicain français. En quoi consiste cette incompatibilité ? Quelles conséquences produit cette différence de nature entre les différents droits applicables en France ?

    Outre les vieilles différences de système juridique entre la common law et le droit continental, il y a surtout une différence culturelle colossale entre le multiculturalisme anglo-saxon et le modèle républicain français. Lorsque nous organisons des colloques juridiques communs entre l'université de Rennes 1, celle de Louvain-la-Neuve en Belgique et celle d'Ottawa, au Canada, je me rends compte que nous sommes tous francophones mais que les Belges et les Canadiens ne raisonnent pas comme nous. C’est frappant. Tous les conflits qui traversent actuellement la société française résultent de cette confrontation entre le modèle républicain et le multiculturalisme (féminisme compris) anglo-saxon. Et vous remarquerez que tous ces conflits atterrissent dans la Constitution puisque c’est elle qui fonde notre contrat social et notre « tradition républicaine » (cf. révisions sur la Nouvelle-Calédonie, l’organisation décentralisée version fédéralisme asymétrique, parité, Europe, langues régionales, etc …). C’est incontestablement notre « identité constitutionnelle » qui est en jeu. 

— Vous avez mentionné plus tôt la Cour européenne des Droits de l'Homme, parlons-en. Ses juges sont réputés pour les controverses politiques que créent leurs jugements dans certains États, et plus généralement pour l'interprétation extensive qu'ils auraient de leur office. La justice ayant pour but de faire appliquer les lois qu'une société se donne, et en l'absence de société européenne, quelle est la légitimité d'une justice européenne s'appliquant uniformément à des pays de cultures et de traditions différentes ? Quelle place et quel crédit accorder à la supranationalité normative ?

    Vous savez, Jean Foyer, quand il était garde des sceaux du général de Gaulle, avait compris que si le texte de la Convention européenne des droits de l’homme ne soulevait aucune objection en lui-même, c’est l’existence d’une Cour chargée de l’interpréter qui allait poser de graves problèmes de souveraineté. Il avait donc mis le général de Gaulle en garde contre le risque qu’il y avait à placer ainsi la France sous tutelle de juges européens. Au Conseil des ministres suivant, après que Couve de Murville eut exposé l’intérêt de ratifier la Convention, le Général conclut, en s’adressant à son garde des Sceaux: « J’ai lu votre note. Vous m’avez convaincu. La Convention ne sera pas ratifiée. La séance est levée ». Il lui avait précédemment enseigné : « Souvenez-vous de ceci : il y a d’abord la France, ensuite l’État, enfin, autant que les intérêts majeurs des deux sont sauvegardés, le droit ». Et il avait raison. Le droit n’est légitime que s’il traduit la volonté populaire, la « supranationalité » normative n’est évidemment pas légitime dès lors qu’elle échappe au contrôle des représentants de la nation.

Anne-Marie Le Pourhiet (Cercle Poincaré, 2 mars 2014)

The NATO Syndrome, the EU’s Eastern Partnership Program, and the EAU

LM_NET - EN BREF opération de l'OTAN en Libye (2013 11 20) FR.jpg

Kto Kogo?*

 

The NATO Syndrome, the EU’s Eastern Partnership Program, and the EAU

By

Ex: http://www.lewrockwell.com

In 2009, Poland and Sweden, ever attentive to the US’s geostrategic goals of isolating Russia and gaining control of China thereafter, initiated the Eastern Partnership program, which its sponsors said was intended to tighten ties with former Soviet Republics, such as Moldova, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, and Ukraine.  A trade pact is a part of the Partnership’s Association Agreement (AA) deal.

What the Russians saw in the EU initiative was a repeat of the “NATO Syndrome,” in that what was promised would soon be betrayed, i.e. no NATO expansion in exchange for a Soviet agreement to the reunification of Germany.

To Russian eyes, NATO’s 1999 expansion throughout Eastern Europe and the subsequent celebratory bombing campaign against Serbia, inaugurated just one month later, and the still later Albanian annexation of Serbia’s heartland province of Kosovo, were altogether the Clinton Administration’s triple-combo opening salvos in an American campaign to recreate the Versailles Treaty’s cordon sanitaire.  And the 2009 Association Agreement is but a Trojan horse whose only practical purpose is to advance US and EU interests at the expense of the former Soviet republics’ naïve hopes and Russian security.

Dangling the Association Agreement’s implied – but not certain – right of eventual EU membership before the economically struggling former Soviet republics was but a means to beguile them into the EU orbit and thus US control with a future as NATO base hosts and IMF lab rats.

When the terms of the AA are examined, Russian skepticism is understandable.  The 350 laws alone that Ukraine would be required to institute over a ten-year period at a cost of twice the nation’s projected GNP in the same time period would overwhelm the struggling country, few of whose industrial and manufacturing products are either wanted or needed in the EU.

But whether or not Ukraine ever managed to fulfill EU conditions for membership would be of no importance to the U.S.  Once bound tight with IMF conditions and saddled with World Bank loans and perpetual debt, thereafter the west could leave the AA’s signatories to rot in limbo for years while their territory, cheap labor and resources were put to other, alien purposes.

The Russians saw as well that both the countries of the former Soviet Union and Russia, sandwiched as they are between large geopolitical units (China and the EU,) are disadvantaged when negotiating trade treaties and other matters.  Thus was born the idea of a new structure, the Eurasian Union (EAU), which began with the establishment of a Customs Union between Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan in 2010.  The Russian plan was to inaugurate the Eurasian Union in 2015 with the inclusion of Armenia, Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine.

It is the Russian EAU initiative which is said to be Putin’s ham-fisted attempt to re-establish the Soviet empire, and not the plan of a man who accepts the world’s current political configuration and is attempting to place his country within that configuration as advantageously as possible.  It’s been a hard sell.

Without Ukraine, a Eurasian Union is at risk of never coalescing usefully, leaving the former republics and Russia vulnerable to neocon and globalist raids and incursions, possibly under cover of staged terrorist events.  In effect, the consequences might not be dissimilar from the days when Russian princes were run ragged repelling Tartar incursions from the south or the east, only having to turn and race westerly to beat back Lithuanian or Polish brigands.

By the week of the EU’s Eastern Partnership’s signing debut at the end of November 2013, Vladimir Putin had told Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich that he could continue flirting with the EU, if he wished.  But if Ukraine wanted a trade agreement with Russia, with whom the lion’s share of Ukraine’s trade actually occurs, $15 billion in the coming year, cut-rate gas prices, industrial co-operation projects, and possible further credits, the country would agree to the EAU.  Compared to the $200 million the EU offered out of a total of $799 million for all eight targeted Association Agreement signers and a certain decade in EU cold storage while the country underwent an IMF-directed mauling, Yanukovich made the prudent choice.

When the Ukrainian president informed the EU that Ukraine’s participation in the AA would require further discussion, a reasonable position considering the AA as drafted, and that the country had agreed to the join the EAU, thousands of misguided and confused protestors appeared in the Maidan.  Once the terms of the Russian offer were made public, the protests began petering out.

But in both the Russians’ EAU game plan and that of the US’s effort to sabotage the EAU, Ukraine is key.  Protest crowds on the Maidan began to grow again amid reports that many in the crowd were working for a daily wage.  Whether paid or unpaid, bussed in from Moldova or fresh off the Kiev city tram, it’s certain Ukrainians were not demonstrating for the establishment of NATO bases or IMF agreements, a number of which have already floundered and failed.

Recent events are not the first time the US has used Ukraine in an attempt to displace Russia as a significant power by piercing its sphere of influence.

In 2004, Putin and then Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich had begun to tackle the politicized supply structure Stalin created to make permanent the Soviet Union.  By changing national borders and spreading key industrial components over two or more republics, Stalin bound the Soviet empire together.  When the 15 constituent republics that made up the Soviet Union became independent nations in 1992, this cross-border supply structure created havoc.

Mighty Soviet aluminum smelters were located in Siberia, but supplies of bauxite were to be had only in Ukraine.  A component an electronics manufacturer in Kharkiv needed could only be obtained from a manufacturer in Vilnius.  Multiplying the complications for obtaining key inputs throughout the industrial and manufacturing sectors of 15 nascent and bankrupt governments gives a fuller understanding of why the former republics have failed to successfully restructure their national economies.

Putin’s and Yanukovich’s initial efforts were beneficial, particularly to eastern Ukraine, in which the republic’s industrial sector is concentrated.  In 2004, Ukraine experienced a 12% increase in GNP, and the national currency, the hryvnia, enjoyed a modest appreciation.

The US-sponsored 2004 Orange Revolution put paid to the Putin-Yanukovich initiatives, and the Ukrainian cycle of state officials’ theft and oligarchical favoritism began anew under US-presidential pick Viktor Yushchenko, a recent tradition of sorts which Yanukovich was eager to honor, as well.

Fast forward to 21 February 2014, the day of the Yanukovich government’s violent ouster.  Earlier that day, Germany, France and Poland had brokered a compromise agreement between the elected Ukrainian government and the protestors’ spokesmen.  Having already agreed and executed much of the protestors’ agenda, the pre-2004 Ukrainian constitution was to be restored and Yanukovich, in turn, would stay in the diminished office of the presidency until new elections could be organized.

Within 12 hours of the agreement’s signing, dozens of corpses of demonstrators and police killed by sniper fire were reported in the Maidan.  On Saturday, in an un-constitutional procedure the Ukrainian parliament impeached Yanukovich, who then fled to Russia in fear of his life.

The Russian Foreign Ministry Russian Foreign Ministry observed that the Friday agreement was used “with the tacit consent of its external sponsors” as a “cover to promote the script of a forced change of power in Ukraine.”  In other words, the Russians smelled a high-stakes trick.

Now that the Ashton-Paet tape has leaked, and despite its being obediently ignored by the mainstream media, one wonders what other actions the west may have known about, but left unremarked on that Friday. Did the EU negotiators know that the opposition they were then championing in accordance with US preferences had possibly directed snipers into the Maidan to murder demonstrators and policemen alike?

Russian warnings to the US and the EU about the rough crowd in Kiev they’d taken up with were ignored. An arrogant Washington, in accord with a famous Leninism regarding the expediency of temporary alliances, sees no problem.  Once Ukrainian hotheads and thugs have been bled of all possible utility, they will be eliminated. Think Egypt.

In response to the coup, Moscow swiftly drew a red line so bright it might as well have been flashing in neon: within a day of Yanukovich’s shambolic impeachment 150,000 Russian soldiers were engaged in military exercises not so very far from Russia’s border with eastern Ukraine, almost overnight Crimea was under Russian military control, a bottled-up Ukrainian navy was registering little alarm at their predicament, and further payments on the remaining $12 billion of the $15 billion cash infusion and cut-rate prices for Russian gas Putin had earlier agreed with the overturned Yanukovich government were shelved.

What the US and the EU immediately claimed was a Russian invasion of Ukraine was a long term leaseholder’s defense of its property right.  Even with 16,000 troops in Ukraine, Russia is not in violation of the terms of its lease on the Sevastopol naval base.  The lease, a treaty in fact, permits the stationing and multiple movements on Crimean territory of as many as 25,000 Russian troops.

The west’s claim of a Russian invasion of Crimea is intended to support Ukrainian control of the Kerch Strait, a waterway at the northern end of the Black Sea which separates Ukraine’s Crimea Peninsula from the coast of Southern Russia and is one of Ukraine’s three potentially oil-producing provinces. Gas reserves lie offshore of the peninsula.

The US believes Ukraine’s long term needs for energy and income can be satisfied by cutting deals with Big Oil to drill for oil and gas, which can then be shipped through Ukrainian pipelines to the EU, and Europe’s dependence on Russian gas a forgotten inconvenience.

Complicating western media scripts, the Crimean parliament voted on 6 March to rejoin the Russian Federation.  A public referendum on Sunday, 16 March, confirmed the parliament’s earlier vote and the 96.7% of the electorate that voted its approval tallies with a 93.2% approval when the same question was put to the electorate in a 1991 referendum.  In the run-up to the recent public vote, 1000s-strong pro-Russian demonstrations erupted in the eastern Ukrainian cities of Donetsk and Lugansk at which possibly western mercenaries hired by wealthy Ukrainian oligarchs played the role of spoilers.

Without foreign largesse, the new Ukrainian coup government can’t even pay the nation’s light bill much less a single Ukrainian soldier’s combat pay.  In fact, the cost of tidying up a Ukraine that has been criminally misgoverned for over two decades in order to accommodate EU standards and procedures is in the neighborhood of a $200 billion, years-long taxpayer liability.

To date, the US has pledged $1 billion and the EU is planning a $1.5 billion emergency transfer to tide the coup government over prior to an IMF agreement and all before the 25 May elections.  Within a week of their elevation-by-mob, interim government leaders embarked on a palms-out Grande Tour of sorts.  A combined sum of $35 billion in promised IMF loans is now the west’s opening bid.

US policy achievements on behalf of American taxpayers for their $5 billion investment to date:  State Department-approved Ukrainian coup government officials have asked for money to finance an “independent Ukraine,” the US and the EU have offered up a promise of $35 billion to insure an “independent Ukraine,” and an “independent Ukraine” has agreed to take the money.

Where are the Pravy Sektor defaulters when you need them?  Hmm?

Over the horizon lies a propaganda campaign devoted to browbeating at least some of the Ukrainians’ requested billions from Russia’s earlier deal with the Yanukovich government on what will be said to be a “humanitarian” basis.  Rather like the ancient practice of the condemned paying the executioner’s fee, it will be an effort to maneuver Russia into paying the initial costs of Ukraine’s first steps towards EU membership.

When the Ukrainian people understand that the price for daydreams of strolling the Champs d’Elysées with a pocketful of euros is an IMF restructuring that entails the devaluation of the hryvnia, cuts in pensions, benefits and salaries to state employees, raising of the retirement age, the removal of subsidies to coal and other underperforming industries, the growth of natural gas prices, and other toxic rules and conditions that will translate into a life harder and colder than it now is, more turmoil is guaranteed.

Turmoil is the very aim of contemporary US statecraft.  In the “divide and rule” political schemata of empire, US blunders are but new opportunities to tighten the screws on what the US policymakers regard not as nations, but as subject territories.

What is extraordinary is that EU officials are persisting in the attempt to squeeze agreement with the IMF and to the Eastern Partnership from Ukraine’s coup government prior to the 25 May elections, and thereby secure their agents’ permanent presence in the country as a thing done.  The EU rush speaks to the insincerity and weakness of any substantial EU commitment to aid Ukraine or her people.

The Russians’ refusal to recognize the coup government is correct; doing so would only work to support the inevitable US effort to trade a Ukrainian agreement to the AA to Russia in return for Ukraine’s acceptance of the loss of Crimea.

In the wake of the Crimean referendum, a hysterical western and specifically US-aligned media has been shouting warnings of a sudden Russian grab for eastern Ukraine.  Stalin could have written the script – for the Americans, who without any foreign influence whatsoever long ago established their own history of provoking attacks.

Confused overnight media reports of the death of a Ukrainian soldier in Crimea, which imply that Russian troops are responsible, but which locals say was a tragic consequence of a dust-up with Crimean self-defense forces and an unknown sniper,  are indicative of the Russians’ concern that the west will create the evidence that compels Putin to make good his promises of protection of Russians in western Ukraine.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that Russian support for an OSCE observer mission in Ukraine is based on the need “of preventing provocations by ultranationalist and radical forces against Russian speakers and our compatriots in southeastern Ukraine and other regions.”

Contrary to western media’s repeated provocations, Russia has no interest in a divided Ukraine.  A divided country would only open Russia to endless enmity from western Ukrainians, and ongoing cross-border violence.  A division would be a tragedy for western Ukraine, which would bring increased economic misery and leave the country subject to a possible Polish annexation.

In truth, US scheming and bellicosity in Ukraine have only worked to drag the world back to the tired rhetoric of the cold war and to that era’s nuclear dangers and destructive tit-for-tat policies of economic sanctions, asset freezes, and boycotts.  The only bit of “new” is the threat of kicking Russia out of the irrelevant G-8’s treehouse.

The experience is rather like watching dinosaurs crashing about in a Steven Spielberg film.

The world is de-centralizing, and neither the rapidly changing times nor the world’s finances favor out-of-date multinational organizations, run-a-muck central banks, or rolling superpower seditions and military aggressions.

If so, then what explains Germany’s support of the US lead?  Since Russia supplies a third of the gas for Germany’s economy, risking Russia’s alienation seems unwise.

The cat western media doesn’t let out of the bag is the fact that Germany has a full tank of gas, and there’s plenty more from where that came from.

Gazprom’s Baltic Sea ‘Nord Stream’ project is complete and is now transporting Russian gas to Germany through a pipeline that transverses the bottom of the Baltic Sea, and the pipe’s capacity is double the amount of gas Germany purchased from Russia in 2012.  Since 2005, the chairman of the supervisory board of the management company of Nord Stream is Gerhard Shröder, the former German chancellor.

Gazprom in conjunction with Italy, France and Germany is building a second pipe, South Stream. The former SPD mayor of Hamburg, Henning Voscherau, plays the same supervisory role at South Stream Transport AG as Shröder does at Nord Stream.

Interestingly, the Financial Times reported that the City’s skittishness in the wake of John Kerry’s idiotic ultimatum to Putin to renounce in advance the results of the referendum in Crimea put ‘half a dozen live deals to fund some of Russia’s biggest companies” in limbo.”  But the FT article highlighted one deal that was not put in limbo:  “South Stream announced that it had signed a contract worth about EUR2 billion with Saipem of Italy to build the offshore stretch of the route under the Black Sea from Russia to Bulgaria. Construction is scheduled to start in June.”

Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller has been quoted as saying that the two projects in combination with the already-existing Belorussian “Beltansgaz” pipe would turn Ukraine’s network of gas pipelines and biggest strategic asset into “scrap.”

In other words, Germany’s verbal support for the west’s initiatives costs Germany exactly nothing.  Any actions beyond the symbolic would cost Germany.  Therefore, there will be no EU sanctions of consequence.  Even were Germany on side for a US-decreed suicide mission, twenty-eight nations’ governments are not going to agree to economic policies that will take the cost out of their own hides. In other words, no State Department neo-con princess is going to ‘’F**k the EU.”

With the Nord and South stream projects in hand, Germany, which has prospered mightily from the euro, but whose taxpayers are weary of bankrolling the sinking Mediterranean countries’ loans made by the prosperous north’s banks, has positioned itself remarkably well; in an EU financial pile-up, exiting the EU wouldn’t amount to much more than a fender bender.

Now that west has adopted Bolshevik political tools, the Russians ought to keep turning the tables and counter with what the west advocates only with words, i.e. freedom and economic competition.

An EAU based on free trade in which there are no tariffs, no quotas, and no favoritism by or for any member and which allowed for associate members would put the Soviet boogieman back in the closet.  A free trade pact would allow Russia and the former republics to reap the benefits of the spontaneous order that the world’s people are building daily on the internet without any state’s direction or even much of an awareness of what they are doing.

There would be costs to Russia for such an arrangement, and a subsidized energy program for certain former republics would have to be included initially, (and would be difficult to retire when no longer needed.)  But those initial costs would be less than the long term ones of state-managed trade agreements at which literally thousands of government lawyers and bureaucrats labor continually in order to first design and then police the treaties, which protect and favor individual nation’s corporate political funders at consumers’ expense.

An unhindered market-driven trade block would quickly rationalize the last vestiges of Stalin’s cross-border supply system at no cost to the Kremlin.  Endemic corruption would diminish since no bribes need be paid for permissions no longer required.  Overall, commerce and enterprise would be favored throughout the EAU.

A trade apparatus in which competing private entities provide reliable and efficient transport, short and intermediate term trade finance, goods insurance, and rapid dispute resolution in private courts would work to swell EAU membership rolls.  An EAU supportive of co-operative and unfettered trade would draw foreign investment, and new applicants for membership both within and outside of the CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States).

Would Russia ever initiate such a system?

The Russian love of everything big rather than the small and the quick argues against.  An unfortunate predilection towards monopoly, a modern manifestation of the legacy of the votchina structure of property rights established in the ancient Kievian state of ‘Rus, also posits a no.  Ditto the exhaustively detailed agreements covering every right and every duty between contracting parties. These elements all boil down to, for instance, Gazprom’s cultural and business preference for signing a single, complex, multi-year contract with Germany’s Ruhrgas, and not many agreements with a plethora of independent suppliers.

Still, the west would be wrong to write off the possibility of having to compete with a lean and mean EAU trade block.  Russia has demonstrated a capability for surprise.

After all, who would have thought in 2001 that the president of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, would liberate the greatest number of people on the planet?

“Say what!?” you ask.

If any reader knows of another leader of a major power, who instituted a flat tax of 13% or less, and thereby liberated his people from the necessity of burdensome record keeping and government tracking, while eliminating from households’ budgets the grievous costs of accountants, tax lawyers, offshore scams, and sparing everyday life the social costs inherent in a society riven by the divisiveness that comes of progressive taxation, then, dear reader, please do email me that name.

_____________________________________________________________

Kto kogo? was one of Vladimir Lenin’s favorite expressions. Literally, the phrase means “Who of whom,” and is perhaps best translated as “Who will triumph (over whom)?”  The ‘g’ in kogo is pronounced as a ‘v’.

 

Lavrov alerte les Algériens et met en garde les Tunisiens

Lavrov alerte les Algériens et met en garde les Tunisiens

Ex: http://www.tunisie-secret.com

La Russie hausse le ton. On ne touchera pas à l'Algérie, avertit Sergueï Lavrov, ministre des Affaires étrangères de la Russie, qui, soit-dit en passant, a été accueilli à Tunis avec le drapeau Serbe, une bourde de la diplomatie tunisienne qui ne sait plus faire la différence entre un drapeau russe et un drapeau serbe. La conspiration contre l’Algérie n’est plus un secret pour personne. Tout est prêt pour déstabiliser ce pays coincé entre une Tunisie sous mandat islamo-atlantiste, un Maroc sous influence israélienne, et une Libye en voie d’afghanisation. A Tunis, les cinq conditions sont réunies pour mener à bien ce plan anti-algérien : la base militaire américaine qui se trouve à un vol d’oiseau des frontières algériennes, le siège de Freedom House qui est la pépinière des cybers-collabos, les rats palestiniens du Hamas qui ont creusé des dizaines de tunnels aux frontières tuniso-algériennes, la mini armée de djihadistes tunisiens, algériens, libyens et tchétchènes disséminés en Tunisie, et les cellules dormantes d’Al-Qaïda. TS.


Lavrov alerte les Algériens et met en garde les Tunisiens
En visite éclair en Tunisie, il y a quelques jours, le ministre russe des Affaires étrangères, Sergueï Lavrov, a soutenu lors de sa visite, il y a quelques jours à Tunis, que des «parties étrangères» veulent mettre l'Algérie à feu et à sang à travers la commercialisation d'un printemps algérien. Sans les nommer, le diplomate russe a ajouté que ces mêmes parties «ont ouvert plusieurs fronts près des frontières algériennes depuis la Libye, la Tunisie et le Mali». Etant des alliés traditionnels, M.Lavrov a notamment réitéré le soutien de son pays à l'Algérie. Le chef de la diplomatie russe a dévoilé, lors de son passage en Tunisie, que l'Algérie est devenue la cible des instigateurs et autres fomenteurs qui insistent pour y écrire le dernier épisode d'un supposé printemps arabe. Aussi, a-t-il mis en garde les autorités algériennes contre les instigateurs de ce qu'on appelle «printemps arabe».

Le ministre russe des AE incrimine directement ceux qui ont été à l'origine des bouleversements provoqués délibérément en Tunisie, en Libye et au Mali, d'où parvient la plus grande menace contre l'Algérie. Il estime que les conspirateurs du nouvel ordre mondial établissent leurs plans à base d'une politique d'influence en misant sur les minorités populaires et les réseaux terroristes.

Cependant, cette menace soulignée par Moscou n'est pas nouvelle pour les services de renseignements algériens, pas une menace qu'ignorent les services de renseignements algériens. Soumis à une très forte pression depuis le début de la guerre civile en Libye, les forces de sécurité algériennes ont misé sur leur expérience acquise sur le terrain de la lutte antiterroriste. En un temps relativement court, des milliers d'informations et de témoignages de première main ont été analysés et recoupés par les services du DRS engagés dans une course contre la montre contre tous genres de menaces, notamment des groupuscules criminels nés à l'ombre d'une crise libyenne qui aura servi de catalyseur au mouvement jihadiste. Un mouvement relativisé et parfois banalisé par l'ensemble des parties entrées en guerre contre le régime d'El Gueddafi, dont la France, la Grande-Bretagne et les USA. Dans leur banque de renseignements les services de sécurité ont réussi à identifier des réseaux nouvellement constitués composés de Marocains et de Libyens.

L'arrestation de plusieurs agents du Mossad en Algérie en est la preuve tangible. Ne jugeant pas nécessaire de dévoiler le véritable scénario programmé contre l'Algérie, des sources très au fait du contexte confient que l'Algérie constitue «un terreau fertile» pour les grands appétits occidentaux. Le rapport du département d'Etat américain sur les droits de l'homme qui épingle paradoxalement l'Algérie et l'analyse du Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) de l'Académie militaire de West Point qui a mis sous la loupe tout ce qui se passe dans le sud de l'Algérie, prétextant que cette région névralgique de l'économie du pays, serait l'épicentre d'un éclatement populaire à cause de la marginalisation des minorités, ne peuvent être considérés que comme une introduction aux véritables visées des Occidentaux.

Une perception initiatrice de ce qui se prépare. «L'Algérie est-elle dans le collimateur des USA?» s'interrogeait L'Expression dans l'une de ses précédentes éditions! La réponse a été révélée dans les colonnes du Los Angeles Times. Le journal rapporte que «des troupes de forces spéciales américaines se sont installées en Tunisie». Cette présence dont nous avons fait foi, mais démentie par les autorités tunisiennes est justifiée, souligne le même organe de presse par le fait «d'entretenir les forces militaires tunisiennes en matière de lutte contre le terrorisme».

Les marines dont le nombre serait d'une cinquantaine ont pris position au sud de la Tunisie à un vol d'oiseau des frontières algériennes depuis le mois de janvier 2014. «Un avion de type hélicoptère s'y est installé aussi», précise encore le Los Angeles Times. Ce n'est que l'aspect visible de l'iceberg et de l'énorme stratégie de guerre annoncée contre l'Algérie.

En effet, depuis la fin de l'année précédente, des informations vérifiées font état d'une forte présence d'agents des services de renseignement américains et d'agents de l'Africom dans le Sud tunisien. Jalouse de sa souveraineté, l'Algérie avait agi en un temps record pour libérer plus de 600 otages tout en sécurisant le périmètre. L'Unité spéciale appelée à mener l'opération avait impressionné le monde entier par son professionnalisme! Même si les USA prétextent leur mobilisation en Afrique pour une coordination de lutte contre le terrorisme et pour préserver leurs intérêts, il est tout de même difficile de ne pas croire que les USA n'ont pas un intérêt pour une partie de l'Algérie dont les réserves de gaz de schiste, de gaz conventionnel et d'autres minéraux comme l'uranium. Des clans complaisants sont déjà sur le terrain pour la mise en marche de la locomotive de déstabilisation.

L’Expression algérien, du 12 mars 2014. 

Corporate Interests Behind Ukraine Putsch

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Corporate Interests Behind Ukraine Putsch

Behind the U.S.-backed coup that ousted the democratically elected president of Ukraine are the economic interests of giant corporations – from Cargill to Chevron – which see the country as a potential “gold mine” of profits from agricultural and energy exploitation, reports JP Sottile.

By JP Sottile

On Jan. 12, a reported 50,000 “pro-Western” Ukrainians descended upon Kiev’s Independence Square to protest against the government of President Viktor Yanukovych. Stoked in part by an attack on opposition leader Yuriy Lutsenko, the protest marked the beginning of the end of Yanukovych’s four year-long government.

That same day, the Financial Times reported a major deal for U.S. agribusiness titan Cargill.

Despite the turmoil within Ukrainian politics after Yanukovych rejected a major trade deal with the European Union just seven weeks earlier, Cargill was confident enough about the future to fork over $200 million to buy a stake in Ukraine’s UkrLandFarming. According to Financial Times, UkrLandFarming is the world’s eighth-largest land cultivator and second biggest egg producer. And those aren’t the only eggs in Cargill’s increasingly-ample basket.

On Dec. 13, Cargill announced the purchase of a stake in a Black Sea port. Cargill’s port at Novorossiysk — to the east of Russia’s strategically significant and historically important Crimean naval base — gives them a major entry-point to Russian markets and adds them to the list of Big Ag companies investing in ports around the Black Sea, both in Russia and Ukraine.

Cargill has been in Ukraine for over two decades, investing in grain elevators and acquiring a major Ukrainian animal feed company in 2011. And, based on its investment in UkrLandFarming, Cargill was decidedly confident amidst the post-EU deal chaos. It’s a stark juxtaposition to the alarm bells ringing out from the U.S. media, bellicose politicians on Capitol Hill and perplexed policymakers in the White House.

It’s even starker when compared to the anxiety expressed by Morgan Williams, President and CEO of the U.S.-Ukraine Business Council — which, according to its website, has been “Promoting U.S.-Ukraine business relations since 1995.” Williams was interviewed by the International Business Times on March 13 and, despite Cargill’s demonstrated willingness to spend, he said, “The instability has forced businesses to just go about their daily business and not make future plans for investment, expansion and hiring more employees.”

In fact, Williams, who does double-duty as Director of Government Affairs at the private equity firm SigmaBleyzer, claimed, “Business plans have been at a standstill.”

Apparently, he wasn’t aware of Cargill’s investment, which is odd given the fact that he could’ve simply called Van A. Yeutter, Vice President for Corporate Affairs at Cargill, and asked him about his company’s quite active business plan. There is little doubt Williams has the phone number because Mr. Yuetter serves on the Executive Committee of the selfsame U.S.-Ukraine Business Council. It’s quite a cozy investment club, too.

According to his SigmaBleyzer profile, Williams “started his work regarding Ukraine in 1992” and has since advised American agribusinesses “investing in the former Soviet Union.” As an experienced fixer for Big Ag, he must be fairly friendly with the folks on the Executive Committee.

Big Ag Luminaries

And what a committee it is — it’s a veritable who’s who of Big Ag. Among the luminaries working tirelessly and no doubt selflessly for a better, freer Ukraine are:

–Melissa Agustin, Director, International Government Affairs & Trade for Monsanto

–Brigitte Dias Ferreira, Counsel, International Affairs for John Deere

–Steven Nadherny, Director, Institutional Relations for agriculture equipment-maker CNH Industrial

–Jeff Rowe, Regional Director for DuPont Pioneer

–John F. Steele, Director, International Affairs for Eli Lilly & Company

And, of course, Cargill’s Van A. Yeutter. But Cargill isn’t alone in their warm feelings toward Ukraine. As Reuters reported in May 2013, Monsanto — the largest seed company in the world — plans to build a $140 million “non-GM (genetically modified) corn seed plant in Ukraine.”

And right after the decision on the EU trade deal, Jesus Madrazo, Monsanto’s Vice President for Corporate Engagement, reaffirmed his company’s “commitment to Ukraine” and “the importance of creating a favorable environment that encourages innovation and fosters the continued development of agriculture.”

Monsanto’s strategy includes a little “hearts and minds” public relations, too. On the heels of Mr. Madrazo’s reaffirmation, Monsanto announced “a social development program titled “Grain Basket of the Future” to help rural villagers in the country improve their quality of life.” The initiative will dole out grants of up to $25,000 to develop programs providing “educational opportunities, community empowerment, or small business development.”

The well-crafted moniker “Grain Basket of the Future” is telling because, once upon a time, Ukraine was known as “the breadbasket” of the Soviet Union. The CIA ranks Soviet-era Ukraine second only to Mother Russia as the “most economically important component of the former Soviet Union.”

In many ways, the farmland of Ukraine was the backbone of the USSR. Its “fertile black soil” generated over a quarter of the USSR’s agriculture. It exported “substantial quantities” of food to other republics and its farms generated four times the output of “the next-ranking republic.”

Although Ukraine’s agricultural output plummeted in the first decade after the break-up of the Soviet Union, the farming sector has been growing spectacularly in recent years. While Europe struggled to shake-off the Great Recession, Ukraine’s agriculture sector grew 13.7% in 2013.

Ukraine’s agriculture economy is hot. Russia’s is not. Hampered by the effects of climate change and 25 million hectares of uncultivated agricultural land, Russia lags behind its former breadbasket.

According to the Centre for Eastern Studies, Ukraine’s agricultural exports rose from $4.3 billion in 2005 to $17.9 billion in 2012 and, harkening the heyday of the USSR, farming currently accounts for 25 percent of its total exports. Ukraine is also the world’s third-largest exporter of wheat and of corn. And corn is not just food. It is also ethanol.

Feeding Europe

But people gotta eat — particularly in Europe. As Frank Holmes of U.S. Global Investors assessed in 2011, Ukraine is poised to become Europe’s butcher. Meat is difficult to ship, but Ukraine is perfectly located to satiate Europe’s hunger.

Just two days after Cargill bought into UkrLandFarming, Global Meat News (yes, “Global Meat News” is a thing) reported a huge forecasted spike in “all kinds” of Ukrainian meat exports, with an increase of  8.1% overall and staggering 71.4% spike in pork exports. No wonder Eli Lilly is represented on the U.S.-Ukraine Business Council’s Executive Committee. Its Elanco Animal Health unit is a major manufacturer of feed supplements.

And it is also notable that Monsanto’s planned seed plant is non-GMO, perhaps anticipating an emerging GMO-unfriendly European market and Europe’s growing appetite for organic foods. When it comes to Big Ag’s profitable future in Europe, the stakes couldn’t be higher.

For Russia and its hampered farming economy, it’s another in a long string of losses to U.S. encroachment — from NATO expansion into Eastern Europe to U.S. military presence to its south and onto a major shale gas development deal recently signed by Chevron in Ukraine.

So, why was Big Ag so bullish on Ukraine, even in the face of so much uncertainty and the predictable reaction by Russia?

The answer is that the seeds of Ukraine’s turn from Russia have been sown for the last two decades by the persistent Cold War alliance between corporations and foreign policy. It’s a version of the “Deep State” that is usually associated with the oil and defense industries, but also exists in America’s other heavily subsidized industry — agriculture.

Morgan Williams is at the nexus of Big Ag’s alliance with U.S. foreign policy. To wit, SigmaBleyzer touts Mr. Williams’ work with “various agencies of the U.S. government, members of Congress, congressional committees, the Embassy of Ukraine to the U.S., international financial institutions, think tanks and other organizations on U.S.-Ukraine business, trade, investment and economic development issues.”

As President of the U.S.-Ukraine Business Council, Williams has access to Council cohort — David Kramer, President of Freedom House. Officially a non-governmental organization, it has been linked with overt and covert “democracy” efforts in places where the door isn’t open to American interests — a.k.a. U.S. corporations.

Freedom House, the National Endowment for Democracy and National Democratic Institute helped fund and support the Ukrainian “Orange Revolution” in 2004. Freedom House is funded directly by the U.S. Government, the National Endowment for Democracy and the U.S. Department of State.

David Kramer is a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs and, according to his Freedom House bio page, formerly a “Senior Fellow at the Project for the New American Century.”

Nuland’s Role

That puts Kramer and, by one degree of separation, Big Ag fixer Morgan Williams in the company of PNAC co-founder Robert Kagan who, as coincidence would have it, is married to Victoria “F*ck the EU” Nuland, the current Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs.

Interestingly enough, Ms. Nuland spoke to the U.S.-Ukrainian Foundation last Dec. 13, extolling the virtues of the Euromaidan movement as the embodiment of “the principles and values that are the cornerstones for all free democracies.”

Nuland also told the group that the United States had invested more than $5 billion in support of Ukraine’s “European aspirations,” meaning pulling Ukraine away from Russia. She made her remarks on a dais featuring a backdrop emblazoned with a Chevron logo.

Also, her colleague and phone call buddy U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt helped Chevron cook up their 50-year shale gas deal right in Russia’s kitchen.

Although Chevron sponsored that event, it is not listed as a supporter of the Foundation. But the Foundation does list the Coca-Cola Company, ExxonMobil and Raytheon as major sponsors. And, to close the circle of influence, the U.S.-Ukraine Business Council is also listed as a supporter.

Which brings the story back to Big Ag’s fixer — Morgan Williams.

Although he was glum about the current state of investment in Ukraine, he’s gotta wear shades when he looks into the future. He told the International Business Times, “The potential here for agriculture/agribusiness is amazing … production here could double.  The world needs the food Ukraine could produce in the future. Ukraine’s agriculture could be a real gold mine.”

Of course, his priority is to ensure that the bread of well-connected businesses gets lavishly buttered in Russia’s former breadbasket. And there is no better connected group of Ukraine-interested corporations than American agribusiness.

Given the extent of U.S. official involvement in Ukrainian politics — including the interesting fact that Ambassador Pyatt pledged U.S. assistance to the new government in investigating and rooting-out corruption — Cargill’s seemingly risky investment strategy probably wasn’t that risky, after all.

JP Sottile is a freelance journalist, radio co-host, documentary filmmaker and former broadcast news producer in Washington, D.C. His weekly show, Inside the Headlines w/ The Newsvandal, co-hosted by James Moore, airs every Friday on KRUU-FM in Fairfield, Iowa and is available online. He blogs at Newsvandal.com or you can follow him on Twitter, http://twitter/newsvandal.

Ethnic & Racial Relations: Ethnic States, Separatism, & Mixing

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Ethnic & Racial Relations:
Ethnic States, Separatism, & Mixing

By Lucian Tudor 

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com

In our previous essay, “Race, Identity, Community [2],”[1] we discussed a number of subjects: most importantly, the varying levels and relations of ethnic and cultural groups, the matter of cultural communication, openness, and closure, the relationship between race and culture, the necessity of resisting miscegenation for the sake of ethno-cultural stability, the error of individualism and the value of social holism, and the importance of the sense of community to ethnic and racial identity.

In the present essay, we will not reiterate the major points which we made before, except those which are relevant to the matters discussed. The purpose of this essay is to serve as an extension of the previous one and to expand upon certain points which were not made sufficiently clear or covered properly, and it thus must be read in the context of the preceding essay. Here we aim to discuss the topic of social, cultural, and political relations between ethnic and racial groups, the problem and varieties of social and biological mixing, and the practices and forms of ethnic and racial separatism.

Identity and Interaction

Particularities and particular identities define human beings; contrary to egalitarian and universalist ideology, one cannot be truly human without a belonging to particular groups, including religious, political, cultural, and racial groups. Of course, belonging to a group and possessing a conscious identification with this belonging are two different things (just as we can say that there is a conscious and unconscious aspect to identity). History and observation show that ethnic, cultural, and racial identities come into being and are awakened by awareness of and interaction with other ethnic and racial groups. As Alain de Benoist wrote: “The group and the individual both need to be confronted by ‘significant others.’ Therefore, it is nonsense to believe that identity would be better preserved without this confrontation; actually, it is the opposite: confrontation makes identity possible. Other subjects make a subject become subject.” [2]

Thus, interaction with other types of human beings is an essential part of human existence, since they draw their very awareness of being who they are by this interaction. Furthermore, as we have already mentioned in our previous work (“Race, Identity, Community”), the various cultures (in terms of both smaller and larger groups) develop and are enriched not only by internal development, but also by interaction with and the exchange of products and ideas with other cultures or peoples. It is for these reasons that it is justified to assert that “the originality and the richness of the human heritages of this world are nourished by their differences and their deviations . . .” [3] as Pierre Krebs stated, similarly to many other New Right authors.

Of course, recognizing the value of diversity and differences, and appreciating these differences in other peoples and learning from them, does not mean that all peoples of the world can or should be appreciated equally. It is, of course, perfectly natural that one people will find certain foreign peoples to be unattractive in some cases, and will distance themselves from them. This is why, although diversity is valuable, the present egalitarian and multiculturalist propaganda that all cultures and ethnic groups must be appreciated and accepted equally, is simply wrong and absurd. No healthy people show equal liking for all others, although it is possible to respect all foreign peoples even if one does not treasure them all. It is, for example, completely natural that a European may be repulsed by the culture of an African tribe but simultaneously feel admiration for East Asian culture, while still according to each people a certain level of respect.

It is also a fact of life that without barriers, without a certain level of separation from other peoples, and without a specific territory on which to live as a distinct and relatively homogeneous people, an ethnic or a racial group would disappear through mixture or assimilation into other groups. The extreme modern liberal-globalist propaganda advocating complete openness and mixing between cultures and peoples, using as its justification historical examples of cultural exchanges, is fallacious because normal cultural dialogue and interaction never involved complete openness but always a limited form of interaction.

Total openness and mixing eliminates identities because peoples do not merely change through such processes, but lose who they are or merge with another people entirely. To quote Benoist, “it is the diversity of the human race which creates its richness, just as it is diversity which makes communication possible and gives it value. Diversity of peoples and cultures exist, however, only because, in the past, these various peoples and cultures were relatively isolated from one another.”[4] Culture transforms over time due to internal creativity and development as well as through communication with other cultures, but contact with other cultures must always be limited and imperfect, otherwise the very integrity of a culture is undermined. Therefore, “Identity is not what never changes, but, on the contrary, it is what allows one to constantly change without giving up who one is.”[5]

The Problem of Mixing

It needs to be recognized that mixing, both the social form (so-called “integration”) as well as the biological form (miscegenation), is a complicated human problem. Mixing has occurred all throughout history in a variety of forms and circumstances, as a result of different forms of close interaction between different ethnic and racial groups. The questions of why mixtures occur and whether this is a normal and acceptable phenomenon therefore naturally present themselves, and they must be answered with the proper level of sophistication in order for us to defeat our opponents.

First, it needs to be recognized that mixture between two different peoples belonging to the same race is a distinct matter from mixture between two different races, and involves different principles and circumstances. Ethnicities belonging to the same racial type share the same biological and spiritual background, which serves as a larger foundation for identity which connects them. In cases where two or more ethnic groups of the same racial type no longer live separately and choose to mix socially (from which intermarriage inevitably follows), it is oftentimes because these groups – within a particular time and conditions – have become closely connected culturally and spiritually or because they no longer feel their distinctions to be significant.

This phenomenon cannot be regarded as abnormal and wrong any more than when two racially related ethnic groups choose to separate instead of mix, because both occurrences are rather frequent in history and do not normally have negative effects to identity (even if identity undergoes some change in this). For example, many European ethnic groups (the English, the French, the Balkan peoples, etc.) are the result of an inter-European mixture that occurred centuries ago, although they also have a right to separate. Thus, within a race, separation and mixing can both be regarded as normal phenomena, depending on the circumstances and the nature of the ethnic groups in question.

On the other hand, between different races, mixing can be argued to be an abnormal phenomenon because the relations and effects are different; the state of normality is to desire racial separation. Contrary to the assertions of many egalitarian multiculturalist (“multiculturalism” here signifying the belief and practice of ethnic mixing) propagandists, racial identity and the concept of race is not a modern phenomenon, for, as Benoist pointed out, “the idea of race is almost as old as humanity itself.”[6] So it is clear that recognizing the importance of race and practicing racial separatism does in fact have a historical and even a universal basis; human beings were never in a condition where they completely lacked racial feelings and mixed freely.

The reasons for racial mixing (social and, following that, biological) throughout history are complex and differ based on the circumstances in question. In some cases, it was due to a powerful, militant people conquering another people and forcefully reproducing with the women of the conquered in order to secure their conquest through breeding. In other cases, as some authors have argued, it is due to the decadence of a people who have lost certain spiritual qualities, their sense of differentiation, and their racial identity, and have as a result chosen to mix with other peoples, even those racially different (these other peoples may be immigrants or conquered peoples who formerly lived separated). Of course, where mixing occurs willingly, both sides have surrendered their unique identity.[7] There may be other causes, and in a sense racial miscegenation is inevitable because it is always bound to occur at certain times and places where different races come into contact (even if only to a small extent).

However, it is always important to recognize and reassert that despite its occurrence throughout history, for whatever reasons or causes, race-mixing is not a rule. It is actually rather abnormal, and that it occurs all throughout history does not invalidate this fact. Because the identity, basic anthropological and psychological features, and character of ethnic groups and cultures are influenced by racial type, and because of the spiritual and sociological dimension of race, race-mixing means a deep and profound change completely transforming a family or, when it occurs on a larger scale, a people. This idea cannot be associated with biological reductionism, which we must reject as fallacious; even though culture, society, and cultural identity cannot be reduced to race, and race is only one factor among many which affects them, racial background is still undoubtedly an important factor.

Thus, since preserving their racial type means maintaining who they are, their identity as a folk, peoples are thus historically compelled to resist race-mixing and to separate from other races. It is not only for the sake of their survival that they are so compelled, but also because of the primal impulse to live with their own people in their communities. As Krebs pointed out, “modern ethology clearly established the innate tendency of man to identify with individuals who resemble him . . .”[8] There is, furthermore, also the fact that, as Evola pointed out, “blood and ethnic purity are factors that are valued in traditional civilizations too,” which means that the maintaining physical racial type is a practice which holds a meta-historical value.[9]

We should note that, of course, a people which goes through minor amounts of race-mixing does not lose its identity or its belonging to its original racial type. For example, the Eastern Slavic peoples and Southern Europeans peoples who have endured some level of miscegenation historically still belong to the White-European race, both in terms of their general anthropological-physical type as well as their racial and ethnic identity. Race is defined not by a strict purity, but by the possession of a general physical form (the general anthropological features associated with a race), the general spiritual form associated with it, and the cultural style and identity which is sociologically linked with race.[10]

It also needs to be mentioned here that resisting race-mixing is not necessarily a “racist” phenomenon (which means racial supremacism), because placing value on racial differences and practicing racial separatism can and has taken on non-racist forms. It is clear that it is extremely naïve and erroneous to associate all forms of racial separatism with racism and inter-racial hostility.[11] As Guillaume Faye once wrote:

In effect, just as it is normal and legitimate for the Arab, the Black African, the Japanese to desire to remain themselves, to recognize that an African is necessarily a black man or an Asian a yellow man, it is legitimate, natural and necessary to recognize the right of the European to reject multiracialism and to affirm himself as white man. To link this position with racism is an inadmissible bluster. The real racists are, on the contrary, those who organize in Europe the establishment of a multiracial society.[12]

400248_549785844060_145900243_31161285_715128554_n-1.jpg

Practices of Separatism

Evidently, racial and ethnic separatism has taken on a variety of forms throughout history. One commonly recognized form is the creation of a class or caste system, separating people into different castes based on their racial background (or, in a typical analogous system, based on ethnic or cultural background). The class structure of racial separation, which is usually the result of conquest, can be seen in numerous cases throughout history, including in Classical civilization, in certain ancient Near Eastern civilizations, in India, and in many parts of Central and South America after European colonization. The most negative feature of this practice is obviously that it involved “racism” and subjugation, although it also had the positive effect of preserving the racial types which have formed, even after miscegenation (the new, mixed racial types; mulattoes and mestizos), due to the fact that it discouraged race-mixing by class separation.[13]

Another form of separatism is what is commonly recognized as ethnic “nationalism,” which has its primary basis in ethno-cultural identity, although it is oftentimes accompanied by racial identity where inter-racial contact exists. Nationalism is defined, in the most simple terms, as the belief that ethnic groups or nationalities (in the cultural sense) are the key category of human beings and that they should live under their own independent states. It implies complete and total separation of ethnic groups into separate nations. Nationalism is oftentimes associated with ethnic chauvinism, inter-ethnic hostility, imperialism, and irredentism, although it is important to remember that there have been certain select forms of nationalism throughout history that were not at all chauvinistic and imperialistic, so it is erroneous to assume that it always takes on these negative features.

However, “nationalism” is a problematic term because it has been defined in different and sometimes contradictory ways. In one, very generic sense, nationalism means simply the desire of a people to live separately from others, under its own state and by rule of leaders of its own ethnic background; in essence, a basic ethnic separatism and desire for independence. In this sense, nationalism is a very ancient idea and practice, since all across history one can find cases where a people of one particular ethnic background desired to be independent from the rule of another different people and fought for this independence. This is not, however, the way nationalism is always defined, and aside from the fact that it is sometimes defined as being necessarily chauvinistic, it is also often defined in a certain manner that makes it particularly an early modern phenomenon.

Many New Right as well as Traditionalist authors have defined nationalism as a form of state in which the “nation” is politically or culturally absolutised, at the expense of smaller local or regional cultural differences, and regarding other nations as completely foreign and of lesser value. This form of “nationalism” is exemplified by the Jacobin nation-state and form of sovereignty (since the French Revolution was a key force in initiating the rise of this state form), and is identified by the elimination of sub-ethnic differences within its borders and the regard for differences with other peoples or nationalities as absolute. Naturally, this form of nationalism has the consequence of creating hostility and conflict between nations because of these ideological and political features.[14]

From the “Radical Traditionalist” perspective, exemplified by Evola’s thought, nationalism is an anomaly, a deviation from valid state forms. It is regarded as negative, firstly, because this form of traditionalism considers ethnicity and nationality as secondary qualities in human beings; although they have some level of importance, they are not valid as primary features around which to organize states and leadership, which should be based solely upon the values of elitism, aristocracy, and spiritual authority. Nationalism also contradicts the practice of the Empire – the imperial state, which is not necessarily imperialistic – since nationalism means the absolutisation of the “nation,” whereas the traditional empire is organized as a supra-national federalistic union with a central spiritual authority.[15] According to Evola,

The scheme of an empire in a true and organic sense (which must clearly be distinguished from every imperialism, a phenomenon that should be regarded as a deplorable extension of nationalism) . . . safeguarded the principles of both unity and multiplicity. In this world, individual States have the character of partial organic units, gravitating around . . . a principle of unity, authority, and sovereignty of a different nature from that which is proper to each particular State . . . due to its super-ordained nature, would be such as to leave wide room for nationalities according to their natural and historical individuality.[16]

In the imperial state, which Evola asserts is the true traditional model of the state, ethnic or national groups are thus separated federally; different peoples live under the same state and serve the same ultimate monarchical authority, but they live in separate parts of the kingdom or empire. To quote one his key works: “the Middle Ages [and also certain ancient civilizations] knew nationalities but not nationalisms. Nationality is a natural factor that encompasses a certain group of common elementary characteristics that are retained both in the hierarchical differentiation and in the hierarchical participation, which they do not oppose.”[17]

Identitarian Separatism

The European New Right and the Identitarian Movement, the latter being closely related to and derived from the New Right,[18] also advocates the practice of federalism, although their thinkers have some disagreements with the claims of “Radical Traditionalists” concerning certain essential principles. The “New Rightist” concept of federalism involves the vision of a federation (or better, confederation, which more clearly expresses this decentralized type of federalism) which is based upon the principles of subsidiarity, of granting autonomy to its regions, and of local and regional political structures holding the power that is due to them, while the central authority rules primarily when decisions affecting the whole state must be made. This form of state and sovereignty “implies plurality, autonomy, and the interlacing of levels of power and authority.”[19] Subsidiarity and allowing decisions to be made at lower levels are also features of the Radical Traditionalist concept of the federalist state, but in contrast they assert the importance of the ultimate authority of the sovereign (the central ruler) far more.

Aside from supporting a partly different conception of sovereignty and authority from Radical Traditionalists, Identitarians and New Rightists also support the practice of a participatory and organic form of democracy as the ideal state form (which, it must be noted, is still compatible with respect for authority and hierarchy). This idea does indeed have a historical basis, for, as Benoist pointed out, “governments with democratic tendencies have appeared throughout history . . . . Whether in Rome, in the Iliad, in Vedic India or among the Hittites, already at a very early date we find the existence of popular assemblies for both military and civil organisation. Moreover, in Indo-European society the King was generally elected . . .”[20]

Furthermore, New Rightists and Identitarians strongly assert the value of ethnic, cultural, and racial differences and identities, and therefore, according to this conception, organic democracy coincides with the recognition of and respect for ethnic differences.[21] Because organic democracy, meaning true democracy, is based off of respect for ethnic differences, Benoist rightly asserts that:

Democracy means the power of the people, which is to say the power of an organic community that has historically developed in the context of one or more given political structures – for instance a city, nation, or empire . . . Every political system which requires the disintegration or levelling of peoples in order to operate – or the erosion of individuals’ awareness of belonging to an organic folk community – is to be regarded as undemocratic.[22]

The New Right advocates the idea of respecting the identities of smaller, local, and regional ethnic or sub-ethnic groups as well as recognizing the importance of larger ethnic and cultural relations and unities. Thus, for example, to be a Breton, a Frenchman, and a White European[23] all have importance, and each level of identity and belonging has value in a hierarchical relationship. Ethno-cultural groups of all levels and types have the right to live with freedom and separately from others in different states and territories. The New Right acknowledges that there are cases where complete state separation for a people is appropriate (akin to the simpler, generic idea of “nationalism”), but there are also cases where the federalist state system in which each people has its own autonomous region in which to live is more practical or desirable.[24]

Arguably, the New Right or Identitarian vision is not only the most desirable, but also the most realistic in the modern world because it offers the most balanced solution to the current problems and ethnic-racial chaos. In a world where democratic feelings have become permanent among most peoples it offers an organic participatory democracy to replace the corrupt liberal democracies presently dominant. Where there are countries composed of multiple ethnicities which are not in a position to divide themselves entirely (complete nationalism) it offers the idea of a federation of autonomous regions. Finally, in a world where ethnic and racial groups are threatened to be disintegrated by “multiculturalist integration” and mixing it offers a peaceful and fair solution of territorial separation, the creation of unmixed ethnic communities, and cooperation between the different races and peoples of the world to achieve this vision.

Notes

[1] Lucian Tudor, “Race, Identity, Community,” 6 August 2013, Counter-Currents Publishing, http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/08/race-identity-community [3].

[2] Alain de Benoist, “On Identity,” Telos, Vol. 2004, No. 128 (Summer 2004), p. 39.

[3] Pierre Krebs, Fighting for the Essence (London: Arktos, 2012), p. 89.

[4] Alain de Benoist, “What is Racism?” Telos, Vol. 1999, No. 114 (Winter 1999), p. 46-47. This work is available online here: http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/what_is_racism.pdf [4]

[5] Benoist, “On Identity,” p. 41.

[6] Alain de Benoist, “What is Racism?” p. 36. It is worth mentioning here that there are certain mainstream historians who have admitted and studied the history of racial feelings since ancient times (in Western and Middle Eastern civilizations, specifically). Among their works include Benjamin Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004) and Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac, & Joseph Ziegler, eds., The Origins of Racism in the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Despite the egalitarian bias and hostility to racialism these authors may reveal in their works, these still have research value for us because of the historical facts they provide.

[7] See for example the chapters “Life and Death of Civilizations” and “The Decline of Superior Races” in Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World (Rochester: Inner Traditions, 1995) and Krebs, Fighting for the Essence, pp. 23 ff. & 79 ff.

[8] Ibid., p. 25.

[9] Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, p. 57. On this matter, see also the chapter “The Beauty and the Beast: Race and Racism in Europe” in Tomislav Sunic, Postmortem Report: Cultural Examinations from Postmodernity (Shamley Green, UK: The Paligenesis Project, 2010).

[10] A number of Right-wing authors have already written much more on this matter. For the White Nationalist perspective in particular, see especially Ted Sallis, “Racial Purity, Ethnic Genetic Interests, & the Cobb Case,” 18 November 2013, Counter-Currents Publishing, http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/11/racial-purity-ethnic-genetic-interests-the-cobb-case [5]. For the New Right perspective, see for example: the entries “Miscegenation” and “Race, Racism, Anti-Racism” in Guillaume Faye, Why We Fight: Manifesto of the European Resistance (London: Arktos, 2011), pp. 194 ff. & 227 ff.; Benoist’s commentaries in his “What is Racism?”; Tomislav Sunic, “Ethnic Identity versus White Identity: Differences between the U.S. and Europe,” The Occidental Quarterly, Vol.12, No.4 (Winter 2012/13), available online here: http://www.tomsunic.com/?p=444 [6].; The articles in Sebastian J. Lorenz, ed., Elementos: Revista de Metapolítica para una Civilización Europea, No. 47, “Elogio de la Diferencia, Diferencialism versus Racismo,” (28 May 2013), http://urkultur-imperium-europa.blogspot.com/2013/05/elementos-n-47-elogio-de-la-diferencia.html [7]

[11] See the citations of Faye, Benoist, Sunic, and Lorenz in the previous note (# 10).

[12] Guillaume Faye, “La Sociedad Multirracial,” 13 Jul y 2007, Guillaume Faye Archive, http://guillaumefayearchive.wordpress.com/2007/07/13/la-sociedad-multirracial [8].  Note that this article was republished in print in Escritos por Europa (Barcelona: Titania, 2008).

[13] On the matter of historical examples, see our previous citations of Isaac’s The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity and The Origins of Racism in the West. Dealing with the racial basis for the Indian caste system, see for example the preface to Arvind Sharma, Classical Hindu Thought: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), and Alain Daniélou, India: A Civilization of Differences: The Ancient Tradition of Universal Tolerance (Rochester: Inner Traditions, 2003), the latter arguing that the caste system is not truly “racist” but a natural racial ordering. On the race-based case/class systems in Central and South America, one classic mainstream resource is Magnus Mörner, Race Mixture in the History of Latin America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967). There are, of course, numerous other academic resources on this subject matter.

[14] See Alain de Benoist, “Nationalism: Phenomenology & Critique,” 16 May 2012, Counter-Currents Publishing, http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/05/nationalism-phenomenology-and-critique [9]; Michael O’Meara, New Culture, New Right: Anti-Liberalism in Postmodern Europe, 2nd edition (London: Arktos, 2013), pp. 228 ff.; Edgar Julius Jung, “People, Race, Reich,” in Europa: German Conservative Foreign Policy 1870–1940, ed. & trans. by Alexander Jacob (Lanham, MD, USA: University Press of America, 2002); the overview of Evola’s position in  the chapter “Nations, Nationalism, Empire and Europe” in Paul Furlong, Social and Political Thought of Julius Evola (Abingdon & New York: Routledge, 2011).

[15] See Alain de Benoist, “The Idea of Empire,” Telos, Vol. 1993, No. 98-99 (December 1993), pp. 81-98, available online here: http://www.gornahoor.net/library/IdeaOfEmpire.pdf [10].

[16] Julius Evola, Men Among the Ruins: Postwar Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist (Rochester: Inner Traditions, 2002), p. 277.

[17] Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, pp. 338-39.

[18] Identitarianism is founded upon the ideas of New Right intellectuals such Alain de Benoist, Guillaume Faye, Tomislav Sunic, Pierre Krebs, Dominique Venner, and Pierre Vial, who themselves are sometimes designated as “Identitarian.” However, we should also note that some of the basic ideas of the Identitarian Movement can be found in We Are Generation Identity (London: Arktos, 2013), although by itself this brief manifesto may be insufficient.

[19] Alain de Benoist, “What is Sovereignty?” Telos, vol. 1999, no. 116 (Summer 1999), p. 114. This work is available online here: http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/what_is_sovereignty.pdf [11] . See also Benoist, “The First Federalist: Johannes Althusius,” Telos, vol. 200, no. 118 (Winter 2000), pp. 25-58, and the articles in Sebastian J. Lorenz, ed., Elementos: Revista de Metapolítica para una Civilización Europea, No. 37, “Federalismo Poliárquico Neoalthusiano,” (28 November 2012), http://urkultur-imperium-europa.blogspot.com/2012/11/elementos-n-37-federalismo-poliarquico.html [12].

[20] Alain de Benoist, The Problem of Democracy (London: Arktos Media, 2011), pp. 14-15. We should note that this book is one of the most essential resources on the matter of democracy, for the idea of an organic and ethnic-based participatory democracy and for defending the idea of democracy as a political system.

[21] See Chapter I. “The Ancients and the Moderns” in Ibid.

[22] Benoist, Problem of Democracy, p. 103.

[23] When we refer to the broader, more encompassing cultural identity of Europeans, it is better to refer to a general “European” culture rather than to “Indo-European” culture because not all White European peoples are entirely Indo-European, and there clearly are and have been non-Indo-European peoples in Europe who are of the same racial and general cultural type as Indo-European peoples (well-known modern examples including the Finns, Hungarians, Estonians, Livonians, and Basques, although there were also numerous white pre-Indo-European peoples in ancient times who had disappeared through mixture with Indo-Europeans).

[24] Along with our previous citations of Benoist’s essays on sovereignty, empire, and federalism, see also Faye’s entries “Empire, Imperial Federation” and “Democracy, Democratism, Organic Democracy” in Why We Fight, pp. 130-32 and 111-14.

 

 


 

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[2] Race, Identity, Community: http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/08/race-identity-community/

[3] http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/08/race-identity-community: http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/08/race-identity-community

[4] http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/what_is_racism.pdf: http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/what_is_racism.pdf

[5] http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/11/racial-purity-ethnic-genetic-interests-the-cobb-case: http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/11/racial-purity-ethnic-genetic-interests-the-cobb-case

[6] http://www.tomsunic.com/?p=444: http://www.tomsunic.com/?p=444

[7] http://urkultur-imperium-europa.blogspot.com/2013/05/elementos-n-47-elogio-de-la-diferencia.html: http://urkultur-imperium-europa.blogspot.com/2013/05/elementos-n-47-elogio-de-la-diferencia.html

[8] http://guillaumefayearchive.wordpress.com/2007/07/13/la-sociedad-multirracial: http://guillaumefayearchive.wordpress.com/2007/07/13/la-sociedad-multirracial

[9] http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/05/nationalism-phenomenology-and-critique: http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/05/nationalism-phenomenology-and-critique

[10] http://www.gornahoor.net/library/IdeaOfEmpire.pdf: http://www.gornahoor.net/library/IdeaOfEmpire.pdf

[11] http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/what_is_sovereignty.pdf: http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/what_is_sovereignty.pdf

[12] http://urkultur-imperium-europa.blogspot.com/2012/11/elementos-n-37-federalismo-poliarquico.html: http://urkultur-imperium-europa.blogspot.com/2012/11/elementos-n-37-federalismo-poliarquico.html