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hjemne · 7 months ago

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On any given day France is only about two steps away from sliding straight back into imperialist nationalism istg

So much goes back to how protective the powers that be are over the French language, and how they constantly construct enemies who are out to destroy their language and colonial heritage.

I've been reading various decrees from my most hated and despised enemy l'Académie française and its absolutely mind-boggling how they wrote about how they could "defend" and "save" French through the standardisation of English. They say standardisation would create a new language (a global English) which is no longer a "language of culture" (and so no longer a threat to their precious french i guess???). And then they IMMEDIATELY turn around and go 'and we must return to the "purity" (yuck) of French, and so l'Académie française needs to dictate and control how French is used.' My guys... how is that not reinforcing the standardisation of language which you think will kill English??? Oh wait I forgot it's because the french language* is the "unique instrument" which can bring world peace and is the most specialest of languages. *the French of France

The future of the French language is in Africa, no matter how much the Académie wants to pretend they can maintain control over it. In the words of Ahmadou Kourouma, 'the French have their language. They have violated many peoples but they would like their language to remain pure. This is not possible.' The Académie's insistence on 'preserving the purity of French' blablabla because its oh so important that it can be used to express (Western) art & science is a deeply conservative and imperialist stance that serves to reinforce France's power over its former colonies. What good does the language serve if it won't allow its speakers to express themselves, their cultures, and their lived realities? African religions cannot be accurately expressed in 'standard/proper' French, and gender queer people (& women tbh) simply cannot exist within the French language when the Académie continues to call gender-inclusive language an "aberration" which puts French in "mortal danger" from other languages which will 'prevail' at French's expense. Which really shows that institutionalising and promoting la Francophonie isn't actually about facilitating inter-group exchange via a shared language; it's about giving France's cultural, political and economic control over former colonies the façade of being something other than neocolonialism.

And I really cannot stress enough how much of France's cultural identity is based around its imagined superiority and exceptionality (which is literally baked into French law!!). Like so much of French political rhetoric is based around this need to fight back against some existential threat posed by The Other. You've got the extreme right Reconquête party (REconquest, jfc) calling mass 'remigration' & has the backing of 7-8% of voters (and the far-right FN party getting another 30%). And then ''''''centrist''''' Macron calls for 'demographic rearming' (not via easing immigration rules, but by pushing for more French babies to be born) and talking about the need to create a 'society of vigilance' against the 'Islamist hydra' and ceding to the far right in order to pass his immigration bill (1/3 of which was deemed unconstitutional or legislative riders, including a section which would've required foreigners to live in France for 10 years (!) before becoming naturalised citizens.

This is a country where every single child is taught to internalise that 'the masculine takes precedence over the feminine' and is 'neutral'. Where a national sporting hero is loudly denounced as a reverse racist for pointing out that there is a cultural belief of white superiority in France, meanwhile 9/10 black people in France say they've faced racial discrimination.

France uses the rhetoric of 'not following republicain values' as a cudgel against those who are inherently excluded from its white, bourgeois, male & catho-laïque* conception of 'universalism'. If you don't - or can't - conform, or dare to speak out against the unyielding assimilationism, it's labelled a sign of communautarisme, which according to the right, is basically the same as being an organised, hostile, separatist faction working to destroy the pure and noble Enlightenment values and heritage of the République. There is no room for multiculturalism. In france, you have the freedom to conform to its narrow definition of universalism. And if you don't follow along, well, clearly you're too uncivilised to know how to use your freedom properly, because there's no way you'd use it to criticise France, a country which is perfect.

The rhetoric being used and the policies being implemented in France are incredibly concerning, as is the massive support for extremely far right political parties. I don't know what's going to happen in French politics in the next few years, and in all honesty, I'm scared to find out. What I do know, is that the process of fully decolonising if a long, long way from being complete, and we need to be ready to think critically about things we feel attached to or assume are politically neutral.

*laïcité = secularism. In theory it's about separation of church and state, but it relegates all 'ostentatious' symbols of religion to 'private' life, so in practice it's used as an excuse to increasingly exclude religious minorities (especially young muslim women) from public spaces. You're not allowed to wear in public schools religious head coverings (e.g. hijab, kippah) or long skirts (only if the school thinks you're wearing it for religious reasons. you can for fashion reasons. France is valiantly protecting young women from ;;;;misogynistic radical islamist extremism;;;; which tells them what to wear, by telling them what to wear, don't you see).

I'm using catho-laïque to mean that, despite the emphasis on laïcité, secularism in France is effectively secular Catholicism. Catholicism underpins French culture and is taken for granted as being the neutral default. 6/11 of their national public holidays are Catholic religious days of observance/celebration, meaning the whole country shuts down for a week each year so the Catholics can observe their religious calendar, and it's never brought up as a potential conflict with secular politics.

The French language itself also has this same Catholic cultural bias too, making it hard, for example, to discuss African religions or cultures in Académie-approved 'proper' French language. Ahmadou Kourouma (from the Ivory Coast) wrote an essay about the difficulties of expressing his reality in written French when there's no word that truly encapsulates his God, religious practices, and the oral culture of his native language malinké. He called for an open, multicultural and equal francophone world, which can only be done by accepting 'africanised' or other non-standard uses of French, but this is firmly rejected by the western arbiters of French who very much do not want to decolonise and decentralise the French language. I wonder why.

I love this quote from Kourouma because it summarises everything so succinctly: 'We cannot be totally free if we do not possess the language which allows us to express ourselves completely.' It should be fairly clear at this point that 'liberté, égalité, fraternité' all take on very specific and restricted meanings in the context of the French state, but I still think it's worth pointing out the hypocracy and neocolonial implications of the French ideals vs how they're used in practice.

I'd definitely recommend his novels, which you can find here in both English and French.

I'd also definitely recommend checking out the icon that is Lilian Thuram who has suffered more than any tumblr user at being accused of pissing on the poor by people who misread the title of his book La pensée blanche and call him an anti-white racist. He also wrote Mes étoiles noires which is also a good read.

Thuram is just such an incredibly interesting guy. He talks a lot about how he wasn't born black, but became black aged 9 when he moved to Paris from Guadeloupe (a French territory in the Carribean), and became aware that other people had assigned him a category based on his skin colour which marked him as lesser. He uses Simone de Beauvoir's framework of how she wasn't born a woman, but became one through socialisation to talk about race which is super interesting. Also, it's why he told the biggest figure in the French far-right, Jean-Marie Le Pen, "personally, I'm not black" when Le Pen was bitching about the French national football team not being white enough. King shit, even if it went over people's heads. He's so cool, go read his interviews. He is fighting an uphill battle, but oh boy is he fighting. (here's his anti-racism foundation's site in French).

You can read an incredible discussion about race, politics and football in this book (p.177-194). When I tell you that a footballer getting a red card for headbutting someone had real implications for the discussion of race & immigration in France, I'm being dead serious.

This is the sort of reaction that Thuram gets btw

"oh wouldn't Africa have been better off if it kept you [i.e. 'you should have stayed in Africa if you hate white people so much'], what a shame..."

He's literally french!! from the caribbean!! oh my fucking god how do you not see this is literally the type of racist thinking that he's talking about ahhhhhhhhgghhhgg

"he was praised in 1998 [after he won the world cup] by all of France, and no one made any reference to the colour of his skin. He's ruining this beautiful memory with his racist ideas."

OH MY GOD THIS IS SO FACTUALLY INACCURATE. i think they said this just to piss me off in particular. What do you mean that no one talked about the 1998 French team's skin colour? That's all they talked about for years. You mean to tell me that the incredibly famous slogan 'black-blanc-beur' [black-white-arab] was not about ethnicities??? And Thuram is only now bringing up the topic of race? Get so fucking forreal. Boohoo your memories of the 98 victory are being ruined by racism? You know who else's were? Thuram's.

And you know how i can be so so certain that it wasn't just leftist academics who were talking about la France black-blanc-beur? You know who cannot stop bringing up the French team's skin colour? Jean-Marie Le Pen [OG far-right racist politician]. You know who else goes on about how the media would not stop telling you about the racial diversity of the team and how everyone in France was talking about the team's skin colour? Eric fuckin Zemmour [current extreme-right political shithead]

(no translation, it's all just racist bullshit. It is funny how close he gets at times tho. 'lots of young, aspiring football players after 1998 felt like they'd experienced social exclusion, and football was an area which they felt they could thrive in and escape the misery of growing up in the banlieu.' YEAH MY DUDE. he's so close to putting the cause & effect together for why marginalised ethnicities from disadvantaged areas are overrepresented in professional football. but no, he has to go on about how these new plays weren't like Zidane (the golden boy of assimilation via football), they sucked because they rejected all authority by eating... halal....hmm....) (Zemmour also takes the time to bitch about how 1998 was also when the anglicism 'coach' entered popular use in France, because he has to really emphasise how the world cup victory was part of the 'suicide' of the French nation in any and all ways possible. It's honestly just pathetic more than anything at this point. He just cycles through the same 4 scapegoats overe and over (I can only assume it's because he's allergic to all forms of diversity) )

Like..... absolutely everyone is in agreement that the ethnic diversity of the 1998 team was a huge talking point. This is the one thing that everyone across the political spectrum can agree on. So WHY would you make it your argument that 'no one made any reference to his skin colour uwu'. The team was THE example of the successes of French integration. And yeah, it sucks to realise things weren't as good as you thought they were, but Thuram has every right to turn around and ask why the acceptance of his 'frenchness' by society was conditional on the team's success. Why whether he (& other non-white players) was 'worthy' of representing France (which he has done in more matches than all but one player ever in French history) was not just a question of football abilities, but also about whether he was 'dignified' enough to be French. And why talking out against inequality and injustice made him less deserving.

There are definitely other , smarter ways of fighting against the stupidity/foolishness of certain spectaters [referencing the fact that Thuram discussed the many many times that spectators made monkey noises at him & others during football matches]."

Ohhhhhhh my god Thuram is literally examining at the systems in society that led people to make such blatantly racist gestures. Does this guy think he should go to racist football fans one by one and tell them nicely to stop?? The description of it as 'bêtise' is also driving me up the wall because its so dismissive of how serious and horrific these overt and public displays of racial hatred are. 'J'ai fait une bêtise' is I did a whoopsie, I did a dumb thing. Also the fact it's qualified with 'certain' spectators. 'Oui okay something bad did happen, but it wasn't that many people, it wasn't that big of a deal, and you should be dealing with it in a different way because talking about structural racism makes me uncomfortable.' Killing you with my death ray. Do more introspection and less historical revisionism.

Also Thuram has literally addressed this

« J'ai l'impression que l'on parle du racisme avec superficialité. Comme si c'était un phénomène individualisé, de personnes "pas gentilles". Non, c'est une idéologie politique qui a une profondeur historique ! »

Anyway.... long long rant over. there was a documentary on netflix about french football and black blanc beur back in 2017 ish and if anyone knows how to track it down i'd love to rewatch it. Also here’s a link to some articles on the topic if you want to read some more.

#jesus christ i've been doing this all day #france #decolonization #l'academie francaise my worstie i hope u blow up and die #rambles #lilian thuram #ahmadou kourouma #emmanuel macron

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thebusylilbee · 3 years ago

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When the world's leading conservation congress kicks off Friday in the French port city of Marseille it will aim to deliver one key message: protecting wildlife must not be seen as a noble gesture but an absolute necessity -- for people and the planet. Loss of biodiversity, climate change, pollution, diseases spreading from the wild have become existential threats that cannot be "understood or addressed in isolation," the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) said ahead of the meeting in a vision statement endorsed by its 1,400 members. [...]

Mass extinction

The creatures with which we share the planet are at high risk too --- from us. As the human population climbs toward nine billion by mid-century, many creatures are being crowded, eaten, snared, poisoned, poached, hawked and hunted out of existence.

Current extinction rates are 100 to 1,000 times greater than the normal 'background' rate. (pic by Eric Conroy)

Craig Hilton-Taylor, head of the IUCN's Red List Unit, said that if species' destruction continues on its current trajectory, "we'll be facing a major crisis soon". [...] In each of the previous mass die-offs over the last half-billion years, at least three-quarters of all species were wiped out.

The IUCN has assessed nearly 135,000 species over the last half-century for its Red List of Threatened Species, the gold standard for measuring how close animal and plant life are to vanishing forever. Nearly 28 percent are currently at risk of extinction, with habitat loss, overexploitation and illegal trade driving the loss. Big cats, for example, have lost more than 90 percent of their historic range and population, with only 20,000 lions, 7,000 cheetahs, 4,000 tigers and a few dozen Amur leopards left in the wild. [...] Invasive species are also taking a toll, especially in island ecosystems where unique species of birds have already fallen prey to rodents, snakes and disease-bearing mosquitos that hitched rides from explorers, cargo ships or passenger planes. An update of the Red List on September 4 is likely to show a deepening crisis.

Our right to exist

For the first time in the IUCN's seven-decade history, indigenous peoples will share their deep knowledge on how best to heal the natural world as voting members. (pic by Carl de Souza)

One proposal calls for a global pact to protect 80 percent of Amazonia by 2025. "We are demanding from the world our right to exist as peoples, to live with dignity in our territories," said Jose Gregorio Diaz Mirabal, lead coordinator for COICA, which represents indigenous groups in nine Amazon-basin nations.

Recent research has warned that unbridled deforestation and climate change are pushing the Amazon towards a disastrous "regime change" which would see tropical forests give way to savannah-like landscapes. Rates of tree loss drop sharply in the forests where native peoples live, especially if they hold some degree of title -- legal or customary -- over land.

"Indigenous peoples have long stewarded and protected the world's forests, a crucial bulwark against climate change," said Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, UN Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples.

An ocean of plastic pollution

Other motions offer a lifeline to ailing oceans, including one calling for an end to plastic pollution by 2030. Plastic debris causes the deaths of more than a million seabirds every year, as well as more than 100,000 marine mammals, from otters to whales.

Current global extinction risk in different species groups, according to the IUCN (pic by Erin Conroy)

And then there's the question of money, and the fact that so little of it has been earmarked for nature. Current global spending of about $80 billion a year needs to be increased 10-fold, said Sebastien Moncorps, director of France's IUCN committee. "That's about one percent of global GDP, but when you realise that half of all economic activity depends on nature being healthy, that's a good return on investment."

#world conservation congress #IUCN #ecology #climate emergency #endangered species #indigenous rights #bee tries to talk

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eretzyisrael · 4 years ago

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How the international community sought to create an endless Israel-Palestinian war

By SETH J. FRANTZMAN

One of the remarkable outcomes of the recent Hamas war on Israel was the use of terminology that illustrates a larger goal designed to create conditions that justify Hamas “resistance” and claim Israel is a “settler” state. These terms, similar to the chants of “from the river to the sea” that span the far-left and far-right Hamas supporters are designed to assert that Israel should be destroyed as a country. They have origins in the international community’s attempt to undermine Israel from the first days of the state.

In no other place in the world has the international community worked so hard to try to erode the foundations of an internationally recognized state. It’s worth looking at the broader context of this. For instance when Israel was created in 1948 it was immediately attacked by several other countries. This was an illegal invasion and attack on a state whose creation had been backed by the United Nations. When Israel succeeded in defeating these countries the immediate response from the international community was not to help broker peace and aid the refugees that fled, but rather to create a situation in which Israel’s borders were called into question so as to create the conditions of excusing war against Israel.

There would be “cease fire agreements” which by their nature meant the war was not over, just waiting for the next round. At the same time the hundreds of thousands of Arabs who had fled the fighting were housed in refugee camps and a narrative created telling them they would soon return to their homes. This “right of return” which does not apply to other refugees everywhere, of which there have been hundreds of millions in the last century, was created to force Israel to take back refugees. If Israel didn’t, international organizations would create numerous groups to support the refugees until such time this took place.

Next began the terrorism against Israel, no condemnation by the UN or others for countries hosting “armed struggle” against Israel which provoked wars in 1956, 1982 and at other times. Israel was subjected to an illegal military blockade at this time to and non-recognition by most states in the region.

When that had largely failed to destroy Israel the next step was arming of Egypt, Syria and other countries to fight Israel. The same countries arming these states also claimed that the “conflict” and solving it would solve all the region’s problems, but pouring arms into the region for endless wars against Israel was not seen as a problem. Israel’s defensive actions were condemned, including the raid on the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981, a reactor supplied by France. Instead of preventing countries like Iraq from pursuing existential threats to Israel, it was encouraged.

At the same time the Palestinian “liberation” organizations that vowed to reconquer all of Israel were given praise at the UN even as Israel was routinely subjected to one sided critique and barred from various regional bodies, isolated and then its national movement called “racist.” Countries in the region were encouraged to use the excuse of fighting Israel to roll back democracy, crush dissidents and minorities, develop and import weapons and start various wars. At each turn whichever extremist regime, from Iran to Nasser’s Egypt, was able to use the Israel excuse as a crutch. The most outlandish comments from Saddam’s regime, firing Scuds illegally at Israel in 1991, to Iran’s comments about Israel go uncondemned in the international community.

What is extraordinary is how at each juncture the international community did not play a positive role trying to foster peace. Instead when there were peace talks there were. Purposeful roadblocks put up to derail them. Talks always said that the “refugees” and “right of return” would be the last issue on the agenda, guaranteeing failure. Also Jerusalem would need to be divided. Meanwhile everything that came to Israel always was removed from international norms. Countries like Iran could target Jews in South America, terrorists targeted Israelis at the Olympics, Hamas was permitted to produce and stockpile missiles illegally and so was Hezbollah. At each turn it was always an excuse that so long as these groups targeted Israel their illegal arsenals could increase. The Palestinian Authority wasn’t even expected to have elections. Israel was kept out of CENTCOM and regional bodies to appease the regional states up until recently.

Ridiculous obsession with Israel at the UN led everything to be warped just to attack Israel from the WHO to Women and Human Rights groups, to UNESCO. Every rule that applies to every country in the world was shifted regarding Israel being singled out. And now human rights groups have done the same regarding accusations of “apartheid.” There is no commonality between Israel’s system and apartheid, but the term had to be changed just to attack Israel. The term “settler state” was shifted from its original meaning relating to the New World states to apply to Israel, a country that is not made up of “settlers.” The supposed “two state” solution has now been tossed aside in favor of what the anti-Israel voices call “one state” and “from the river to the sea.” The accusations that all of Israel is “apartheid” is designed to cater to this alliance of Hamas and the progressive left against Israel. It doesn’t matter what Israel does, just defending itself with Iron Dome is now considered a reason to attack it. Similarly the use of the term “settler” to describe Israel, asserting that this gives it less rights, when numerous other states in North America and other places were created by “settlers.” Only in Israel’s case are migrants and refugees called “settlers.”

Even when Israel tried to do what the international community has asked, withdraw from Gaza, the same community that made sure that failed chaotic Palestinian Authority elections would enable Hamas to take over Gaza. Then they say that Israel still “occupies” Gaza, when Israel left. Hamas is said to have a “right” to “resist occupation” and attack Israel with rockets, and if Israel blockades Hamas then it is said to be evidence of “occupation.” Similarly even though Israel left Lebanon in 2000, Hezbollah is permitted to claim it must keep a massive arsenal to “resist” Israel because Israel “occupies” Lebanon, even though it doesn’t. This shows no matter how much Israel withdraws from the “occupation” will never end and the need for “resistance” will never end. The doctrine is “one state” and a “binational” state. Under no circumstance to international organizations say they won’t fund Palestinian groups that use maps showing all of historic Palestine as theirs, and no Israel. Even terms like “’48 Arabs” or “48 lands” are used. To deny the existence of Israel. No other country is subjected to this. No one says that India is “48 lands”.

Only Israel is subjected to non-recognition by numerous countries, based often on religious hatred. Even as the Cold War ended and other disputes ended there was no push by the international community to recognize Israel. It is a conflict that began in 1948 and which many in the international community will use forever. Iran’s regime uses the conflict to excuse spreading chaos in the region and arming illegal extrajudicial groups. Why does Iran threaten Israel? That question is never asked. Why does the regime get to continually use the Palestinian issue to threaten? No other country randomly adopts a cause far away to threaten to destroy some other other country. For instance Burma may be accused of suppressing Rohingya, but Iran or Turkey don’t threaten the country’s destruction. Only with Israel.

The international community has done nothing to try to create peace in the Middle East and prevent the stockpiling of rockets by Hezbollah, Iran’s brazen nuclear program and other issues. As long as these countries say they will “destroy” Israel, they get a pass. If they threaten any other country they are held to account. Even Jewish history is neatly removed, UNESCO declaring Hebron a heritage site but purposely focusing on the Mamluk and Ottoman period to remove any need to mention Jewish heritage in Hebron. The whole of world history changed just to ignore Jewish rights and role in historic Israel.

This is not about Palestinian rights and a state. Because the nature of the argument, the “river to the sea” talk now said at western Universities, it all about ethnic cleansing of Israel. It is the only state in the world the western left leaning progressive will seek to ethnically-cleanse of its diverse population. It’s the only state they say that it has to provide full and equal rights to “all its citizens” and change its flag and anthem, but no other state in the Middle East must do so. It’s the only state where 4,000 rockets can be fired at it without condemnation or even mention of Hamas. It’s the only state where when there is a war there is a huge rise in attacks on Jews all around the world by the same people who claim “anti-Zionism” is not antisemitism. This is the reality in the wake of the Hamas war.

Regardless of Israel’s mistakes, the international community’s failure to rein in extremist groups and to continue to enable the excuses about why there is a war is one of the root problems. Had the international community done more to say that groups like Hamas and Hezbollah shouldn’t have a de facto “right to resist” there might have been more peace long ago.

#international community #israel-palestinian war #history #united nations #obsession #seth j frantzman

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apenitentialprayer · 4 years ago

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The Coordinate

Attack on Titan and the Metaphysics of Fascism

(x) tl;dr: Religious fascists believe in a mystical connection existing between members of the same racial-national group; Christians also believe in a mystical connection existing between members of their Church; how does a Christian avoid the fascist potential of this idea? One of the ideas that are introduced in the third season of Attack on Titan is the Coordinate; the race of people that the main characters belong to are all connected in a way that transcends space and time, sharing a power that other peoples do not possess. This is the Ymir Spirit, the “Coordinate” to which every Eldian is connected, and through which the souls of all Eldians are intertwined. Through this connection, Eldians are capable of inheriting the Power of the Titans, which will spontaneously appear in another Eldian should the Titan die in a way that prevents them from passing the power onto someone else. Now, we must understand that race is a social construct. This is not to say that real physical difference between people don’t exist; what it does mean, however, is that physical traits exist along several continuums (eye color, shade of skin, height, facial structure, etc), and that recognizing a specific configuration of traits as a ‘race’ is determined by social and historical factors. Medieval Arab understandings of race allowed for people who would be considered black today to be considered “white” (white, in this context, meaning Arab and not European), while the multivalent meaning of race in the 18th century meant the exclusion of some people who would be considered white today from the whiteness of 18th Century Europe and its narrower definition. Race may be based partly on appearance, but it is constructed through social categories. Attack on Titan takes on an essentialized view of race, where race is not merely a social category, but an innate characteristic; whether or not you are a True Eldian is simply a matter of whether or not you are connected to the Ymir spirit. The world can be divided into “insiders” and “outsiders” based on this criterion; though the idea that there are “racial spirits,” an inner metaphysical reality that certain people are in tune with by virtue of birth, may seem alien to those who see race as a social construct. But starting in the 1870s and stretching well into the twentieth century, we see just that kind of thought. In German thinkers in particular, we see this racialized national mysticism developed in the context of the “Jewish problem.” The development of nationalism, the belief that the government is legitimized through the fact that it represents a nation of people, led to an awkward situation throughout most of Western Europe; if France is for the French nation, how are the Jews in France (who have been defined for most of French history as not French) to participate in French civic life? How are Jews in Germany, who have been defined for most of German history as foreigners, to participate in German civic life? Many thinkers at first believed that the mass conversion of Jews to Christendom was the answer; that Jews could become Germans or Frenchmen if only they were to abandon Judaism, seen as a vile set of cultural norms that kept people from truly becoming part of the modern nation. That changed, though. While German thinkers were trying to find ways of converting Jews to Christianity as late as the 1820s, we see a noticeable shift with Karl Duehring’s 1881 The Question of the Jew is a Question of Race; this work actually describes the conversion of Jews to Christianity as a catastrophe, because the corrupting nature of the “racial Jew” (Racenjude) is now uninhibited by the laws put in place that limited the participation of religious Jews in civic life. In other words, it’s not religion or ideology that makes the dreaded Jew dangerous; in the mind of Duehring, it is something “deeper” than religion, something intrinsically part of the “primal nature” of Jews. This increased interaction with ethnic Jews leads to the corruption of “[the German’s] best impulses.” Two years earlier, Wilheim Marr wrote The Victory of Judaism over Germandom, speaks of the Jew people as a conqueror, having already ruined France and in the middle of ruining Germany; a Christian culture that tolerates Jews is ultimately a culture that brings death to all that is inherently German. This opposition between the supposed German and Jewish natures goes back at least as far as 1815, where Friedrich Ruehs argues that the German and Jewish peoples constitute mutually exclusive and hostile nations. The concept of the völk, the people as a mystical body, a Communion of Germans expressing the true Aryan spirit, became essential to the fascist nationalism of Nazi Germany. It is also the metaphysical underpinning of Eldian identity, a Communion of Titans bound together through their connection with Ymir, the “Coordinate” where all Eldian spirits meet. The individual Eldian may be weak, but each one houses within themselves the possibility of becoming a vessel of immense power. The Eldian and the Nazi can both call upon that reservoir of spiritual strength and pride, while at the same time looking at the enemy that is jealous of this power (the Marleyan and the Jew). (At the same time, the völk ideology of Attack on Titan isn’t the same as the German conception. In the German conception, race mingling damages and ultimately severs the offspring’s connection to the Aryan spirit; like American conceptions of race and the one-drop rule, one’s Aryan blood is diluted into something non-Aryan when interbreeding occurs. The Eldians, meanwhile, basically raped and pillaged the continent in order to increase the number of those connected to the Ymir spirit; in this sense, their völk ideology is more similar to South Asian fascisms like the one expressed in V.D. Savarkar’s Hindutva, where the children of ethnic Hindu and non-Hindu children are ethnic Hindus) Now, I used the phrase “Communion of X” when describing Eldian and Nazi racial mysticism on purpose; to the religious reader, especially belonging to the Catholic and Orthodox communities, I wanted “Communion of Saints” to come to mind. After all, the Catholic and Orthodox communities believe that each and every member of their communities are interconnected, their fates intertwined through a Coordinate of their own, Jesus Christ. A concept that I have just said is popular among fascist circles. We have an “in-group” of our own, the saints in Heaven to whom we are attached and the fellow believers who we share a common baptism with. If you look at the post that I linked at the very beginning of this post, I mentioned that “fascism” is more a collection of ideas and mindsets than an actual ideology. When an ideology has some of those ideas, that doesn’t necessarily make them fascist; it just means that adherents of those ideologies need to be careful, because they can potentially become fascist. And that is true here. So let’s look at völk ideology again to see what pitfalls must be avoided if one is to hold onto the belief that they are bound to a mystical community that transcends time and space. First, völk ideology affirms the natural innateness of this communion; you are born with it. You are special because you were born with your connection to the Race-Spirit, it is a birthright that cannot be taken away. Second, völk ideology is exclusionary; if you are not born with a connection to a particular Race-Spirit, then you can never have a connection. You are an outsider, and will forever be an outsider. You are cut off from the people you are surrounded by on a metaphysical level. Third, every concession you give to someone who does not belong to your Race-Spirit is a weakening of your Race-Spirit. Aryan-ness is threatened by a rich Jew; Hindu-ness is threatened by a Muslim with a large family; Eldian-ness is threatened by a Marleyan state existing across the sea. A Christian must thus remind themselves that their communion is not innate; it is a gift and not a birthright, a source of spiritual humility and not of racial pride. A Christian must remind themselves that even while the Communion separates those who are part of it from those who are not, this Communion is meant to be inclusive, accepting of anyone who desires it. A Christian must remind themselves that aiding an outsider, even an outsider that is an ideological enemy, does not weaken the Communion; rather, it glorifies that Communion. Ultimately, the religious fascist sees himself as part of a mystical bond that includes his nation and excludes everyone else; nations are inherently at odds with one another, because the existence of other nations sets a limit to how much one’s own nation can grow; even worse, contact with members of other nations threatens the very connection your nation has within itself. Those corrupted by other nations must be expelled for the health of the Nation-Spirit. In season 3, Eren and his friends finally see the ocean for the first time. There is a moment of freedom, of childlike adventure, of real accomplishment for the first time since their miserable adventure started. They look out in wonder, they splash around in the waves, they taste salt water for the first time. Everyone but Eren; Eren is too busy looking at the horizon, knowing that Marley exists somewhere on the other side. Eren cannot enjoy this victorious moment of simplicity; the unseen enemy exists somewhere on the other side, an existential threat to his own people simply by virtue of existing. As long as there is a Marley, there can be no peace. Because fascist nations cannot embrace the idea of peace between separate nations.

#Attack on Titan #fascism #racism #antisemitism #tribalism #Nazi #Hindutva #Catholicism #race #Orthodox Christianity #long post

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begratefultogod · 4 years ago

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The Effects of Macron's Campaign

What is the real threat to France (and indeed to all Western countries) when it comes to 'radical Islam'? How many religious fanatics are actually going to go around killing and terrorizing others? France has close to six million Muslims (slightly less than 10 % of its population) - if a few of them tragically go mental and harm or kill some people, they need to be dealt with in accordance with the law. Those statistics are no worse than other ethnicities or groups of people harming civilians.

Tragic? Yes. A national problem? Definitely not.

The future of France itself is not fundamentally at stake because of a few crazed individuals; there is no existential threat to the character and existence of that nation because of a handful of people acting emotionally.

However, what *will* impact the future of France, and fundamentally change its discourse, is the reaction of Macron and his supporters. Policies are already being enacted across the country: many masjids have been shut down, random people (including the elderly grandfather of the perpetrator) have been arrested, and speech that should be protected is now becoming punishable by fines, or worse. The bulk of the French population is now being fed the lie that there is a 'Muslim problem' (which will require a 'solution' eventually, by the way...).

A leader who politicizes such acts, like Macron (and Trump in America, or Modi in India, or Bolsonaro in Brazil...) allows for the entire character of a nation to be hijacked, and causes his own citizens to be pitted against one another. Tensions rise because of such politicians and their antics, and not because of a random act of violence. The Far Right is able to pass draconian laws; minorities are harassed and intimidated; people who aren't qualified to be elected win landslide victories because of their messages of hate and the positioning of themselves as Messiah figures against the threat of 'the other'.

The real threat to the future of Western democracy is not a small handful of crazed radical individuals. It's leaders who use these individuals to further their own popularity at the expense of the civil order of their own society.

How easily history repeats itself! The Nazi party barely a century ago rose to power by taking advantage of the demonizing of another group, and a few random actions performed by the minority (such as the bombing of a parliament building and the assassination of a diplomat, allegedly by people of a Jewish background) were used to create mass hysteria amongst the population. The Nazi party positioned itself as the strong party that would protect the 'German peoples' against this group. The rest, as they say, is history.

A few hours ago, two hijabi ladies with their children were stabbed under the symbol of French freedom, the Eiffel Tower, and called 'dirty Arabs' and told to 'go home'. What's tragic isn't just the incident itself, but the clear and obvious double standards in how this incident is being treated, reported and received by the French population.

Allah protect us, I fear the worst is yet to come. And not just in France either. Both World Wars were sparked in regional areas and then spread around the globe. The situation globally is terrifying, and Allah's help is sought.

سلّم اللهم سلّم...

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i-want-it-all-or-nothing-at-all · 5 years ago

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The geo-political struggle and arms race with the communist world known as the Cold War lasted so long (1945–1991), and was so fraught with existential danger to human civilization, that it is often forgotten that the United States and Soviet Union had been allies against Nazi Germany. Strategic as it was, this alliance came down to a marriage of expediency and no sooner had the dust of war settled than the erstwhile confederates confronted each other over the spoils of victory. At war’s end the United States’ continental territory was untouched and it was by far the wealthiest and most powerful nation on the planet. The Soviet Union, where most of the European fighting had been waged, lay in ashes with 30 million dead. With their common enemies prostrate the two allies briefly had a positive opportunity for a workable compromise over military and economic issues, and thus for a more peaceful future. But peace was not on the horizon.

After World War II anti-communism became the watchword of the day and the Soviets were demonized as entirely responsible for the state of tension that unfolded dangerously and rapidly. Neither side was blameless but the record clearly shows more effort at conciliation by Moscow than by Washington. Unwilling to acknowledge that the USSR had vital national security issues far more pressing than their own, advocates of a permanent military establishment and Open Door to the markets of Eastern Europe and East Asia claimed that the Soviets and Chinese communists had replaced the Nazis and imperial Japan as the threats to the ‘American way of life’. On the basis of this claim they militarized American society as never before.

Atwood, P. L. (2010). War and Empire: The American Way of Life. Chapter 9: Cold War: The Clash of Ideology or of Empires? Pluto Press. [bold and italisized emphasis added by me] Rest of the chapter below the break.

SOVIETS INDISPENSABLE TO DEFEAT OF HITLER

In American popular culture World War II is seen as the victory of democracy over German and Japanese dictatorship, with the United States playing the major role. There is no denying that US military fi repower defeated Japan. Indeed, American war planners never doubted victory. Americans have been loath, however, to accept less than full credit for triumph over Nazi Germany. Certainly the American Lend-Lease program provided Britain and the Soviet Union with essential resources, including arms, and the massive American and British aerial bombardment of German factories and cities contributed to Hitler’s downfall. But in terms of ground combat and the defeat of millions of Nazi soldiers, the Soviet Red Army was indisputably central. The war on Europe’s eastern front was far more destructive and savage than in the west and millions of soldiers and civilians on both sides perished. More than two-thirds of Hitler’s legions were concentrated against the Soviets, where they fought a desperate and losing effort to keep the Red Army at bay. When German forces entered the Soviet Union in 1941 they committed atrocities on a colossal scale, including the roundup and systematic extermination of Jews, and the slaughter of many other civilians. By late 1942 the Red Army had reversed Germany’s fortunes and in 1945 broke through into Germany itself and began to exact an equally atrocious retribution.

It is often forgotten too, deliberately omitted, that when the Nazis conquered states in Eastern Europe they subordinated their governments and forged military alliances with these puppet regimes. The result was that Hungarian, Ukrainian, Romanian and other pro-Nazi troops invaded Soviet Russia alongside the Germans as partners. Thus, it was on the basis that these regimes had waged war against the USSR that the Red Army occupied these nations after driving the Nazis back, eventually to total defeat. In the popular view of the Cold War the Reds had occupied innocent nations illegitimately. But this was false. The Soviets planted themselves in Eastern Europe for much the same reasons that the US occupied western Germany and Japan. It is true that the smaller nations of Eastern Europe were pawns but they were bargaining chips to each side. Both the US and USSR wished Europe to be reconstructed along lines benefi cial to their specifi c economic and security interests. In terms of physical security there was no doubt as to which nation had the greater claim.

The overwhelming majority of Hitler’s best troops had been locked in mortal struggle in the east. Thus, when the US fi nally, in the last year of war, was able to employ its vast wealth of resources to mount the largest seaborne invasion force in history on the north coast of France, the effort succeeded only because the least combat experienced, and fewest, Nazi troops were there as defenders. Had the bulk of Nazi forces not been bogged down in the east they would have been on the beaches of France and therefore no such invasion would have been possible or even considered. Hitler could not have been defeated without the Soviet Union. Had he confi ned his effort to conquering western Europe, and not attacked Russia, Europe’s recent history would be very different.

But Hitler had made it supremely clear in his book Mein Kampf that he intended to extend German living space (lebensraum) to the Slavic east and to defeat communism once and for all. The Soviet system had only recently been stabilized after years of civil war and internal communist party purges. Stalin feared that the western European powers might align with Germany against him. Since he desired no such war he allied with Hitler in 1939. This certainly disappointed the British and US bitterly. But then in the late summer of 1941 Hitler reneged on his pact with Stalin and invaded the USSR. By this time the US was in an undeclared but de facto naval war with Germany. Once full-scale declared war broke out both Britain and the United States understood that Germany could only be defeated with the aid of the Soviets. This posed a very difficult problem for American goals. If US foreign policy was predicated upon keeping an Open Door for American business enterprise to the resources, markets and labor power of Europe as a whole, and the Nazis had to be prevented from shutting that portal, this goal could only be achieved with the indispensable assistance of a regime that had been equally hostile to the Open Door. At best only half the loaf of American war aims could be attained. Instead of Nazi autarky throughout Eastern Europe, Soviet communism would prevail, and whatever access American corporations might have to trade with this bloc it would not be on American terms. The cold hard fact was that at war’s end the Russians occupied the same territory in Europe’s east as had the Nazis.

Some historians argue that if Roosevelt had been younger, healthier and able to continue he might have arranged a favorable agreement with Stalin that may have benefited both nations. FDR would have faced the same bitter opposition his successor faced domestically, but he was far more sophisticated a politician and more of a realist. The Soviets had been portrayed in heroic terms by the US press and Hollywood while the war was still ongoing, but rightists and anti-communists in the US were already in 1945 accusing Roosevelt of having lost Eastern Europe to the hated Reds, though the region was hardly America’s to lose. In any case Roosevelt died just as the war was ending and his place was taken by an inexperienced and easily manipulated, at least initially, Harry S. Truman, who was himself reflexively anti-communist and who almost immediately went on the political and ideological offensive against yesterday’s ally.

YESTERDAY’S ESSENTIAL ALLY BECOMES THE NEW THREAT

In short order the Truman Administration claimed that the Soviets had now replaced the Nazis as the principal threat to global order and American national security. Less than three months after Japan’s surrender on 2 September 1945 the enormously influential Life magazine startled readers with graphic depictions of a Soviet atomic missile attack on US cities, though pointedly the Soviets did not possess an atomic bomb, and intercontinental missiles did not exist and would not until 1957. Most mainstream publications followed suit with lurid depictions of what the USSR could do to the US despite its obvious weakness. In 1946 Admiral Chester Nimitz, hero of the Pacific War, declared, with no evidence whatever, that the Soviets were preparing to bomb England and launch submarine attacks against American coastal cities. Presidential adviser Clark Clifford claimed that the communist threat was so dire ‘the United States must be prepared to wage atomic and biological warfare’. Only five months after Germany surrendered, the Joint Chiefs of Staff issued a report calling for the atomic bombing of 20 cities in the USSR if that country ‘developed either a means of defense against our attack or the capacity for an eventual attack on the United States’ (author’s emphasis).

All this despite the fact that the USSR had suffered the greatest devastation to its national territory of any belligerent, worse even than atomically desolated Japan, and had not the remotest possibility of attacking the United States. Nor did it have such an intention.All of European Russia’s major cities and towns, estimated at 70,000, were destroyed, its roads, and railways in ruins, its crops and livestock dead or stolen, and at least 30 million of its soldiers and civilians dead. Though the Red Army was immense, and its soldiers extremely combat-hardened, it showed no signs of moving beyond the territories it had wrested from the Nazis with so much blood. Nor did it seek territorial gains in Western Europe or the Middle East. Yet, the American public was indoctrinated to believe that Soviet-led communism was on the march with the goal of ‘world conquest’. This was exactly the propaganda employed about the Nazis and Japanese. The permanent enemy required for a permanent war economy had miraculously materialized.

This is not to say that Soviet communism lived up to its promises, or functioned as a benevolent regime. Far from it. Russia was behaving as Russia had always behaved, and still does. The Soviet victory enabled Stalin to re-extend control over some of what had been lost to Russia’s empire during World War I and what he deemed Tsarist Russia’s natural sphere. After two devastating invasions in a quarter century the Soviet general staff obsessed over territorial security. The Yalta Accords of 1945 reflected the realities of war. The Soviet Union occupied Eastern Europe as a result of its overwhelming victory over the Nazis. This enormous contribution to Nazi defeat had to be acknowledged. Yalta also accorded the Soviets territories in East Asia, some of which had been forcibly taken from Russia in its war against Japan from 1904 to 1905. At the time the accords were signed then Secretary of War Henry Stimson acknowledged they recognized the USSR’s vital concerns for future security. The same Joint Chiefs who planned a sneak attack on Russia out of fear of its military power also said in another position paper that the USSR’s policy was defensive in nature and aimed merely ‘to establish a Soviet Monroe Doctrine for the area under her shadow, primarily and urgently for security’.

Harry S. Truman’s ascension to the presidency on the sudden death of FDR in April 1945 brought about a sea change in the US’s relationship with the USSR. Demonizing the Soviets quickly became the major component in the campaign to assert the newfound power in Washington’s hand to reconstruct and stabilize the global capitalist economy. Therefore, in order to gain the American people’s support for the remilitarization and increased tax burden that would be required to confront this new enemy, the highly positive image of the Soviets, that portrayed Stalin and the Red Army as noble allies in the war against Nazism induced by American propaganda, had to be reversed.

A hopeful moment thus became a tragic one, yet entirely in keeping with the historical thrust of American development and foreign policy. Though the seeds of both world wars were planted in Europe, the United States entered each war knowing that European empires and Japan would be sapped, if not finished. By 1940 a golden opening had arisen for Washington to intervene at the right moment, replace many of its rivals at the pinnacle of global power and reconfi gure global order. Already, the phrase ‘American century’ had entered the public vocabulary.

The major problem for American post-war plans was that though the war had been a pyrrhic victory for Russia it still remained a great power, and it straddled much of Europe. Despite no navy to speak of and no airforce capable of crossing oceans, the USSR had the largest, most-bloodied, most combat experienced army on earth. Even so, though it occupied much of the very region the US had wanted freed from German rule and opened to American enterprise, it was not capable, nor did it desire, to occupy Western Europe.

Uppermost on Stalin’s agenda was rebuilding an utterly devastated nation and ensuring that invasion by a foreign enemy could never take place again. For Soviet foreign policy maintaining control of Eastern Europe as a bulwark, a cordon sanitaire, was indispensable against any possibility of incursion from the west. To safeguard their country and their rule the Soviets were more than willing to modify the doctrines of communism and world revolution. Had the Truman Administration been willing to acknowledge this profound need on the part of the Soviets, and to work with them to guarantee their security, the possibilities for subsequent cooperation might have proved invaluable to both nations. Genuinely frightened by American actions in the early Cold War, the Russians were goaded to intensify their own acquisition of atomic weapons, thereby ensuring that Soviet nuclear capabilities would become the very threat, and the only such threat, to American national security that propaganda had claimed but which had been utterly false (author’s emphasis).

THE ATOMIC ARMS RACE BEGINS

As American officials intended, the atomic bombings of Japan had badly unnerved the Soviets. Not only were the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki a warning that such destruction of entire cities and ruthlessness against helpless civilians could be visited elsewhere, they also ended the war abruptly on American terms, forestalling the USSR’s occupation of Japan, to prevent any repeat of the problems inherent in the division of Germany.

The future of atomic weapons thus lay at the center of both nations’ critical concerns. Many Americans, including leading atomic scientists who developed the bomb, had worried that nuclear weapons in the hands of one nation would induce a terrifying arms race that portended the annihilation of human civilization. The Soviets demanded the destruction of all existing atomic weapons, though no American offi cial believed they would stop their own program. To mollify domestic critics the Truman Administration created a special committee headed by Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson to advance policies for the control of such armaments and atomic energy in general. When this committee’s proposals were deemed too soft, its recommendations were replaced by those of Wall Street baron, Barnard Baruch. The Baruch Plan demanded that the Soviets submit to international inspections and end their A-bomb project, then in its early stage, while the US would retain its atomic monopoly until satisfi ed no Soviet bomb would or could be created. Then, and only then, would the US reconsider whether or not to destroy its own bomb making capacity. It was, as a Baruch staff member conceded, ‘obviously unacceptable to the Soviets with the full realization that they would reject it’. Acheson himself said that the Baruch Plan would guarantee the failure of international control of atomic weapons. The Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted only one dimension of control. ‘The bomb should continue to be at the heart of America’s arsenal, and a system of controls should be established that would prevent the Russians from developing the weapon.’ The nuclear arms race, that on more than one occasion would bring the world to the brink of Armageddon, was on.

SOVIETS WITHDRAW VOLUNTARILY FROM CONQUERED AREAS

In early 1946 Winston Churchill made his famous ‘Iron Curtain’ speech in the US in which he described what he termed the barbaric and illegitimate domination of Eastern Europe by the Soviets. Yet, as prime minister of Britain, and Stalin’s ally, he had cut a bargain with the Soviet dictator himself by which Britain would recognize Soviet mastery throughout the east in return for Stalin’s acknowl-edgement of Britain’s continued sphere in Greece, a bargain Stalin kept. The real record of Soviet actions in the immediate post-war period demonstrated a genuine willingness to cooperate with the US and its allies. Austria had been annexed by Germany in 1938 and so had also participated in the invasion of Russia. At war’s end the Red Army occupied about half of Austria, but it withdrew voluntarily.

Similarly, the Soviets also withdrew from Chinese territory occupied when the Red Army declared war on Japan in 1945. In 1947 Truman issued his famous doctrine in which he accused the Soviets of intervening in Greece’s civil war waged between native Greek communists and right-wing forces that had collaborated with the Nazis, and who were then also supported by Britain. But Stalin kept his word with Churchill and gave no aid to the Greek communists. That is precisely why the Greek communists were defeated.

In yet another case both Russia and Britain had occupied Iran and Azerbaijan in order to keep immense reserves of oil from Nazi control. FDR had assured Stalin that Russia could obtain Iranian oil for necessary reconstruction after the war. The Soviets agreed to withdraw from this area by March 1946, yet when the time came they balked; not because they wished to annex the region but to ensure that Iran would provide the USSR with oil. Initially the Truman Administration urged the Iranians to broker such an oil deal. At this early stage of American power Washington was already maneuvering to create a buffer between the USSR and Middle East oil, and saw Iran as pivotal. So, after the Soviets did withdraw Washington then told Iran to renege.

In every one of these cases there was nothing the US could have done had Russia actually behaved in the manner that American propaganda falsely claimed, that is, with military force. In the case of Iran even the A-bomb was useless since that would have irradiated and poisoned (or utterly destroyed) the oil wells. In fact, Russian actions belied the claim that they were relentlessly pursuing new conquests. No evidence existed of any Soviet desire to move militarily beyond the areas occupied during the rout of Nazi Germany. By contrast Britain still had its imperial armies all over the globe, as did the US. None of this meant that Stalin did not remain a despot; it meant that the Soviet leadership was committed to traditional Russian concerns of security and dominance within its perceived sphere. To ensure their security the Soviets were willing to meet the US approximately half way. George F. Kennan of the State Department, the very architect of early American Cold War policy of containing the Soviet Union, nevertheless continued to insist that ‘Our first aim with respect to Russia in time of peace, is to encourage and promote by means short of war the retraction of undue Russian power and influence from the present satellite area.’

Ever the pragmatist and realist FDR recognized that the Red Army occupied Eastern Europe and could not be removed, as did Churchill despite his later hypocrisy. The Yalta Accords, agreed in April 1945 between the US, Britain, and the Soviet Union, not only reflected the real balance of power at that moment but affi rmed the division of Europe with the possibility for future mutual cooperation. Months later the balance of power would be altered exponentially by the American atomic bomb.

It is true that communist parties in western Europe, especially in France and Italy, were very strong and posed an electoral threat to the American reconstruction agenda in that region. Communists could rise to power there democratically and showed every sign of doing so, owing to widespread dissatisfaction with the regimes that had brought on war and ruin. Certainly the Soviets aided such political movements where they could, but given the Soviets’ own domestic problems such assistance was minimal. The American response was to deploy the newly established Central Intelligence Agency to areas where electoral communist success was possible, there to employ every dirty trick available, including bribery, vote fraud and even assassination to prevent communist electoral success. In both France and Italy the CIA worked openly with organized crime to intimidate organized labor. Ironically the US accused the Soviets of thuggery. If democracy was to result in communist gains then democracy had to be jettisoned.

CAPITALISM AND COMMUNISM VIE FOR THE LOYALTIES OF THE DEFEATED EMPIRES’ COLONIES

Americans are educated to take capitalism for granted as the only rational system of social and economic organization. The brutal and unjust history of capitalist evolution is all but censored. Indeed, while communist nations were usually derided as slave states, the fact that slavery and mass slaughter were indispensable ingredients of western capitalism’s rise is not open for discussion, at least in mainstream forums. When communist ideas began to percolate into society they were both an intellectual and grass roots response to the very real depredations of capitalism. Clearly communist revolutions did not succeed in creating better societies for their peoples, as capitalist societies claim they do for their own. Soviet rule over its satellites was brutal. But if the capitalist west prospers greatly today it does so directly as an historical legacy of the early western conquest of much of the planet, a system erected as a result of genocide and slavery at its dawn and maintained by exploitation and war to this day. The west can and does vilify communist crimes. But there is nothing in the communist record not matched by capitalist societies in terms of crimes against humanity. The record of capitalist larceny is why so many colonized peoples struggling for independence from western rule turned toward communist and socialist ideas in the aftermath of World War II; that, and their recognition that the European empires, and Japan, were finished. As victims they had first hand knowledge of the west’s hypocrisy and its claims to bring the benefits of civilization to the benighted denizens of what was condescendingly termed the ‘Third World’. They knew that western nations prospered at their expense. Nationalists like Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh had seen first hand the beneficence of French capitalism and rejected it utterly. European colonizers employed noble rhetoric and platitudes but the realities involved plantations and mines that paid slave wages, a system backed by prisons and executions. The widely held notion that the US opposed communism on moral grounds is flatly contradicted by the fact that throughout the Cold War Washington overthrew numerous democracies because they pursued policies in opposition to US intentions. In many cases the US filled these power vacuums with bloody dictatorships every bit as brutish and criminal as anything to be found in the communist world.

American policy-makers understood that World War II’s costs in lives and treasure would all but bankrupt western Europe’s empires, and Japan’s, presenting the long anticipated opening to replace them, if not in exactly the same way. So the stage was set for a titanic struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union for the loyalties of the former colonial subjects. This contest was one of the cardinal issues at the heart of American opposition to the communist world. Throughout the post-war era, until the collapse of the USSR in 1991, both sides would square off and on too many occasions would stand at the brink of nuclear war. At other times the two opponents would arm proxies such as Koreans, Vietnamese, Cubans, Angolans, Ethiopians and many others, and foster wars all over the planet such that by the end of the twentieth century almost as many people would die of these so-called ‘savage wars of peace’ as had been killed in World War II.

The Great Depression in the US had been caused by speculation in stock markets, overproduction, restriction of credit, collapsed purchasing power and the closure of overseas markets by countries reverting to economic nationalism, or autarky, especially Britain, Germany and Japan. The USSR already impeded capitalist penetration on American terms. In the decade before the war most foreign markets were off limits to American goods and services. Then the war itself shattered the global capitalist system. This was the deepest crisis facing American political, social and economic stability at home immediately in the post-war years. There was absolutely no military threat from any corner of the globe. American analysts reasoned that the only way to avert a return to stagnation was through the economic and financial reconstruction of the global order on American terms.

THE THREAT OF A CLOSED WORLD REMAINS: GERMANY BECOMES A NEW AXIS

American policy faced a four-pronged threat: the ruined nations of Europe and Asia – both friends and former foes – might revert to the economic nationalism and closure of markets that had characterized the pre-war years. Post-war impoverishment in these regions might lead populations toward communism and socialism. Ruined nations could not buy American goods owing to their lack of dollars. Finally, the colonies were in revolt, threatening to align themselves with Moscow, or in nationalist directions otherwise independent of US desires.

So the key to post-war American strategy focused fundamentally on economic security, not the claimed military threat from communism. The ‘closed world’ that had preceded the war, with restrictions on market access and discriminatory trade practices such as tariffs, was a major factor in the depth of the Great Depression. In order ‘to maintain a world economic order based on free trade and currency convertibility’ the US hosted the Bretton Woods conference of 1944 at which the American dollar was pegged as the standard, backed by the world’s greatest gold reserves, against which all other currencies would exchange. This gave the US economy preponderant leverage over the evolution of the new global system.

Germany was the key to reconstruction strategy as the new ‘axis’ of an integrated European market. At the end of the war Germany had been co-occupied by the US, Britain and the USSR. The issue of the shape of Germany’s reunification had been left open by the big three powers. Russia occupied about one-third of the nation, the largely agricultural eastern sector, while the US and Britain ruled the industrial west. This posed an immediate problem for US–Soviet cooperation since Russia wanted to carry off Germany’s remaining industrial plants as part of the exacting indemnity it desired and as a measure to cripple any future re-industrialization that could lead to Germany’s remilitarization. This came directly into conflict with American goals. As Stalin saw matters, the issue revolved around Russian need for security versus American desire for gain. The question of Germany’s future would ultimately be the root of Washington’s decision to militarize the Cold War.

US ambassador to the newly created United Nations, John Foster Dulles, said ‘a healthy Europe’ could not be ‘divided into small compartments’. It had to be organized into ‘an integrated market big enough to justify modern methods of mass production for mass consumption’. An early draft of the Truman Doctrine had declared that:

Two great wars and an intervening world depression have weakened the system almost everywhere except in the United States...if, by default, we permit free enterprise to disappear in other countries of the world, the very existence of our democracy will be gravely threatened.

Envisioning a global ‘America, Inc.’ Washington policy-makers would anoint defeated Germany and Japan as junior partners with management rights over many of the areas formerly comprising the very empires they had sought to rule. In order to renew capitalist prosperity the US would ally with its former enemies to thwart the opposition of both communists and any economic nationalists (any who put their national economic interests before American corporate interests) on the scene. What Truman, a Democrat, and Dulles, a Republican, feared above all was any return to self-contained economic blocs that would freeze American enterprise out. Whether this took the form of Stalinism, Chinese communism, state socialism or Arab nationalism, any type of economic autarky anywhere was unacceptable to official Washington. In 1904 Teddy Roosevelt had extended the Monroe Doctrine and American dominance throughout the western hemisphere; now Truman, in his famous doctrine of 1947, would extend it to the planet.

CONTROL OF OIL BECOMES THE LINCHPIN OF AMERICAN POLICY

Fundamental to American management of capitalist economies, and the military power to back it up, was control of the resource necessary to fuel the system. In the words of the US State Department oil had become ‘a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history’. James Forrestal, who had directed the Navy Department during the war and would soon become the nation’s first Secretary of Defense, put matters quite baldly. ‘Whoever sits on the valve of Middle East oil may control the destiny of Europe.’ George Kennan, architect of early anti-communist policy, wrote that ‘US control over Japanese oil imports would help provide “veto power” over Japan’s military and industrial policies.’ In another position paper the State Department declared:

Our petroleum policy is predicated on a mutual recognition of a very extensive joint interest and upon control...of the great bulk of the petroleum resources of the world...US–UK agreement upon the broad, forward-looking pattern of the development and utilization of petroleum resources under the control of the two countries is of the highest strategic and commercial importance. [author’s emphasis]

The inclusion of the British government in this proposed condominium was quite disingenuous, since American policy all along had been to displace Britain at the top of the system, to remake it on American terms: to play Rome to Britain’s Athens.

As we have seen, the Middle East had been cynically carved up and occupied by Britain and France after World War I. Owing to the shock and cost of World War II both nations were losing their empires. Having ascended to the pinnacle of the system that had evolved by conquest, the US would shortly, in the name of countering communists but really in order to maintain its new position, be forced to intervene in the Middle East for strategic reasons and to ensure its access to and control over the disposition of vital oil. Solving these problems would require outlays of US tax revenues that would dwarf the costs incurred by the war itself, and if not managed tightly could lead back to depression.

The Truman Doctrine of 1947 committed the US to provide assistance to any nation at risk from communist movements or insurgencies, but it was also a major response to the economic uncertainties facing reconstruction of the global system. The capitalist British Empire had been the greatest impediment to American hegemony in the pre-war system. In another of history’s ironies Prime Minister Churchill had allied with the US in order to save his nation’s empire, only to see it bankrupted by victory. Britain had succumbed to classic ‘imperial overstretch’, and the main beneficiary of this precipitous decline was its ally and rival. In desperate need of loans from the only nation with funds, London agreed to convert its currency, the pound sterling, to dollars, thereby transferring economic management at home and economic control of its dominions to the US. The imperial roles had been reversed, a goal sought by Washington and Wall Street for half a century. But the US had also now adopted Britain’s role as enforcer in the empire she was losing. The first stop was Greece, formerly London’s satellite, now in danger of succumbing to home-grown communists.

The anti-communist propaganda of the Truman Doctrine also prepared the American public and Congress for even greater outlays of American dollars. Truman’s message emphasized the communist threat to Greece, Turkey and the oil of the Middle East, but this was not entirely honest. Its deeper goal was to overcome political reluctance to extend massive loans for European recovery. As noted, Stalin was not interfering in the Greek civil war between communists and rightists. The aid thus extended by Truman defeated the Greek communists and lined the US up with a reactionary and dictatorial regime. There was no evidence that the Soviets were interfering in Turkey and that Muslim nations’ communists were a weak minority in any case. As Chairman Arthur Vandenburg of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee told Truman, if he wanted Congress to put up the money he would have ‘to scare hell out of the American people’. Thus an equally massive distortion and deception campaign about Russia’s proclaimed threat was set in motion to match the enormous outlays of funds that would be necessary to rebuild Europe’s shattered economies to suit the American agenda of a world open to American corporate penetration. Communism was on the march the public was told; only the United States stood in its path.

THE ‘MARTIAL PLAN’

Named after Secretary of State George C. Marshall, the European Recovery Program is often presented as an impeccable example of American generosity towards war-ruined nations, including former enemies. But the plan was crafted primarily as a measure to resolve the ‘dollar gap’ crisis and restore the US economy and international trade. Prior to the depression and war, Europe and Japan had exported their products to the US and been paid in dollars, which these nations then used to import American products. In the post-war period European currencies and the Japanese yen were essentially worthless. In the absence of dollars to buy American goods, global trade could not be re-established and the US was in danger of falling back into depression, mass unemployment and social instability. The plan envisioned ultimately an integrated European Common Market, with a re-industrialized Germany at its core and a common currency easily converted into dollars. Billions of tax dollars would be pumped into ruined Europe (with a similar plan for Japan) and then be re-circulated back into the US to purchase reconstruction services and materials from American companies. The war-devastated nations would be rebuilt and American prosperity would return.

The key to European recovery, said American analysts, was Germany. Secretary Marshall declared that ‘the restoration of Europe required the restoration of Germany. Without a revival of Germany’s production there can be no revival of Europe’s economy.’ The chairman of General Motors, then the largest corporation in the world, said that without German integration into a common European market ‘there is nothing that could convince us in General Motors that it was either sound or desirable or worthwhile to undertake an operation of any consequence in a country like France’.

France itself was adamantly opposed to re-industrializing the neighbor that had invaded it twice that century but was induced to accept the plan when it realized that the enormous reparations it desired from Germany could only be obtained if German industry was resurrected. France also fervently wanted to hold on to its empire, especially in North Africa and Indochina. To have any hope of success it would have to depend on the United States and would therefore be required to go along with the Marshall Plan.

Russia, however, was a very different case. Under no circumstances could the Soviet Union accept a reunified Germany reconstructed along the lines that had enabled its rise as a military power in the first place. Germany had also twice invaded Russian territory in one generation, with consequences far more extreme than for France. The USSR desperately needed aid, even more than the nations of western Europe, and at the final allied conference at Potsdam had asked Truman for a $10 billion loan, having previously been promised $6 billion by FDR. Stalin took measures to cooperate with the US, such as allowing non-communists to share rule in strategic Poland and Czechoslovakia, by withdrawing troops from Austria, Manchuria and Iran, and by refraining to support communist movements in China, Greece and elsewhere. Washington had continued to dangle the possibility of the loan to Moscow without making any concrete guarantees. It never did extend the money.

In 1948 the US offered Marshall Plan aid to Czechoslovakia which had fallen under Nazi rule during the war when its puppet government had allied with Hitler. Nevertheless, that nation was allowed by Stalin to have elections in which non-communists shared power. Czechoslovakia straddled east and west and sought good relations with both sides. But it was clear that acceptance of Marshall Plan aid would tie the small nation’s economy to the west and erode the cordon sanitaire that Soviet foreign policy saw as key to its national security. Rather than allow Czechoslovakia out of its orbit the Soviets ruthlessly toppled the non-communist government of Edward Benes and occupied the country. This was the first military foray conducted by the Soviets after World War II, and it occurred in a nation that had been an enemy, and had previously been occupied by the Red Army. This move against the Czechs hardly portended the global conquest that Washington’s propaganda insisted was the Soviet goal.

Had Italy at the time elected a communist government and showed signs of lining up with the USSR the United States would have overthrown that government (actually it would never have allowed any communists, elected or not, in the first place). Nevertheless, Washington seized upon the Czech overthrow as perfect evidence of its own propaganda. The Reds were relentlessly seeking world conquest and would have to be ‘contained’. The die was cast. The USSR would be denied reconstruction aid, it would be banned from the renewed global economic system and its proclaimed menace would be employed to justify rearmament in the US and Western Europe.

Critics of the European Recovery Plan in the US, like FDR’s former vice-president Henry Wallace, dubbed it the ‘Martial Plan’. Wallace, who was running for president in the 1948 election, argued strenuously that Truman’s policies were deliberately fostering mistrust, a dangerous arms race and potential future war. Like FDR he believed that mutual cooperation between Washington and Moscow could be worked out favorably to both nations, if only the US would take seriously Russia’s genuine security concerns. He and many others doubted Truman’s professed humanitarian motives for the plan, believing it was calculated primarily to profit large corporations, especially many war industries that had grown to gargantuan proportions as a result of wartime contracts with guaranteed profits. What would the workforce’s share be? If a new war should come who would do the dying?

In response to the dispute over the Marshall Plan big business established the Committee for the Marshall Plan. Massively funded by concerns like Chase Bank, General Motors, Westinghouse, Standard Oil and numerous Wall Street law firms and brokerage houses, the public was saturated with media ads touting the benefits the economy would reap. Simultaneously, critics were portrayed as communists or communist sympathizers. New epithets entered the political vocabulary. Opponents of the plan, or of Truman’s anti-communist policies in general, were now derided as ‘stalinoids’, ‘parlor pinkos’ and communist ‘fellow travelers’. The most conservative elements in the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) were enlisted to line the unions up with corporate America. The Truman Administration also mandated the Federal Employee Loyalty Program requiring millions of federal employees to take a loyalty oath. This energized the extreme right wing in American politics since it more than implied that the administration had allowed itself to be infi ltrated by ‘subversives’ and fed the witch hunt against any critics of US foreign policy that followed. Wallace himself, whom FDR had trusted as he had never trusted Truman, was depicted in the popular press as Stalin’s ‘stooge’. The former Vice-President’s interest in eastern religions was ridiculed and condemned as a betrayal of America’s ‘Christian heritage’. The strongest political link to FDR’s New Deal, Wallace and his bid for the presidency, was derailed by such caricatures. An age of irrationality, intolerance, censorship and militarized anti-communism had dawned and would dominate American domestic politics almost for half a century.

HE FUTURE OF GERMANY FURTHER POLARIZES THE COLD WARThe years 1948–1950 were critical to the evolution of American Cold War policies and the future of American democracy. The crucial issue of Germany heated nearly to atomic warfare over the capital city of Berlin; the Chinese communists overthrew the regime the US had propped up against Japan; the Soviets exploded their fi rst atomic bomb; war in Korea broke out suddenly, and across the globe the colonies were in open revolt. Panic gripped the Truman Administration while its right-wing opponents mounted a hysterical condemnation of the government’s policies. Owing to its unpopularity, the draft laws of World War II had been allowed to lapse but on 24 June 1948 Congress instituted a new Selective Service Act that would conscript able-bodied males for compulsory military service, not to defend American shores but once again to be deployed thousands of miles from home.27 The militarization of the Cold War and the creation of the ‘permanent war economy’ was now becoming law. The National Security State, what President Dwight Eisenhower would later call the ‘military-industrial complex’, was now unremittingly fastened on to American life, adding new branches to the republican form of government, neither elected nor seemingly subordinate to the original three prescribed by the Constitution. (The Constitution prescribes a legislative branch, an executive and a judicial. The new National Security State involved the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council which effectively acted as new branches unelected by anyone.) Coupled with the rising power of the Central Intelligence Agency this ‘secret government’, operating behind the scenes and in the shadows of American political life, would maneuver ceaselessly to reduce government ‘by the people’ to political theater once and for all.The fate of Germany, split between the capitalist west and Soviet east, polarized the issues between the US and USSR. By 1948 it was clear that no compromise on Germany’s reunifi cation could be reached that satisfi ed either side. When the US announced that it had created a separate currency for West Germany the Soviets decided to close the border between their zone, East Germany, and the West, halting any progress toward reunifi cation. The American intent was to foster re-industrialization and economic stability in West Germany such that it could begin importing American and western European products. This fl atly rendered null the agreement made at Yalta for Russian reparations from the wealthier, industri

APA (American Psychological Assoc.) Atwood, P. L. (2010). War and Empire : The American Way of Life. Pluto Press.

#world war ii #world war 2 #wwii #ww2 #united states #us #soviet union #russia #cold war #communism #ussr #open door policy #militarism #military industrial complex #us aggression

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alexsmitposts · 4 years ago

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NATO’s Collapse Draws Nearer Politicians and experts have been discussing the presence of a deep crisis within North Atlantic Alliance for many decades. It may seem purely symbolic, however France has pointed out the existence of a crisis on multiple occasions: first in 1966, when Charles de Gaulle decided to withdraw France from the military integrated structures of NATO, and then when the alliance’s headquarters were transferred from Paris to Brussels. Now the French President, Emmanuel Macron, has given his objective assessment of NATO’s “brain-death” in both an interview with the Economist in November 2019, and then recently in a joint press conference with his Tunisian counterpart, Kais Saied, after a dangerous incident involving war ships of two NATO members (France and Turkey) off the Libyan coast. According to Macron, Europe today finds itself “on the precipice”, as members of the Alliance have clearly not been coordinated in their recent actions and the United States is increasingly turning away from the Old World. All of this means that the time has come for Europe to wake up, to start building up its own strength, and to think of itself as an independent geopolitical pole of power, otherwise it “will not control its own fate.” The French leader has realized that, under the United States’ leadership, the NATO bloc is not able to protect Europe’s interests in the era of China’s ascent and the West’s strained relations with Russia and Turkey. The French President has therefore expressed his frustration on Europe’s dependence on Washington’s whims, at a time where the American President is “turning his back on Europe” and does not “subscribe to the European idea”. As an example of this, he pointed to Trump’s sudden decision to withdraw some of his troops from the North-Eastern region of Syria, leaving his Kurdish allies to fend for themselves, without consulting his NATO partners first. In this context, Macron believes that NATO can only survive if the United States agrees to maintain its status as the Alliance’s main bastion of security. However, how long Washington can play this role for is unclear. On November 15, the United States Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, whilst addressing the Baker Institute in Houston, commented on Macron’s assessment of NATO’s “brain-death”, noting that there have never been perfect relations within the Alliance. “We ought not to think the moment is new or fresh. The nations that comprise NATO have different interests. We saw what Turkey did these past few weeks,” said Pompeo. Today, a crisis is brewing between the United States and Germany, which Donald Trump is continuing to stoke, whether with automobile duties, sanctions for cooperating with Russia (in particular for “Nord Stream 2”), or the withdrawal of NATO troops, as the German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel reports. “The United States President’s decision to withdraw part of the American military contingent from Germany is evidence of the wider issues within NATO,” announced retired General Ben Hodges the other day, who previously served as commander of the US military contingent in Europe. It is interesting to note that America had originally explained that their presence in Germany was not due to the North Atlantic partnership, but to “protect [Germany] against Russia”. This announcement led to ironic ridicule in German society. “Trump is saying that he is protecting Germany’s safety. But from what? Germany has become both a target and a hostage in any military conflict,” announced Waldemar Herdt, a member of the Bundestag. “I welcome Trump’s decision to start the demilitarization of Germany, because he is using NATO to provide for the economic needs of the United States against the interests of other Alliance members. In light of this, the German elites must learn to start thinking as a sovereign state, rather than as a vassal state of the United States,” emphasized Herdt. A representative of the “Green” party in Germany and a member of the foreign affairs committee, Jürgen Trittin, has also recently discussed the idea that NATO is undergoing an existential crisis and is only a shadow of an alliance. In Der Spiegel, he called for a sober evaluation of the situation and to recognize that NATO has become threadbare. The politician has called on Europe to solve the current issues independently and to resolve disputes within NATO, especially regarding its relationship with Russia and the Iranian nuclear deal, which the United States recently scrapped unilaterally without prior agreement with its partners. Trittin is convinced that Europe should stop feeling nostalgic for NATO and start consolidating its own strengths, backing the horse of sustainable sovereignty. Many politicians and experts have already spoken about a crisis within NATO. Washington-lead operations in Afghanistan and Libya, which are outside the formal area of the Alliance’s responsibility, have been going on for many years without great success, despite bold statements from Washington and Brussels. As NATO is still a bloc in which the United States dominates militarily and imposes its policies on other member states, many European NATO countries are now raising their concerns about the possibility of the United States switching its attention to the Pacific region, and hence there being further unwarranted expansion of the Alliance’s operation zones. As we can see, NATO is ill-equipped in the combat against terrorism. It is difficult to implement the decision about the increase of defense spending by member states: in 2014 it was agreed that each state should increase defense contributions to at least 2% of GDP by 2024. However, according to NATO’s statistical data, only two countries reached the 2% threshold in 2019, Poland and Latvia, while Lithuania, Romania, Estonia, Great Britain and Greece all already spend slightly more than 2%. Only two countries allocate more than 3% of GDP on defense spending – the United States and Bulgaria. There is not a great deal of time before the deadline, and there is no certainty that 20 of the 29 member states will “boost” their spending. In many European countries, more than 50% of defense spending goes on staff. Small European armies now live in comfort and do not want to fight. There is also no European country which could simultaneously be part of NATO and a potential European army. Last December, the NATO summit was held in London, and it was perhaps the most scandalous and controversial in the Alliance’s 70-year history, which is why the West’s military and political observers and experts were united in saying that the Alliance is experiencing the most serious crisis in its existence. The American President, Donald Trump, has already spoken about the “uselessness of NATO” and the fact that “Europe should look after itself” in fairly harsh terms, and indeed Trump simply walked out of the final press conference in London. The American editor of Defense One has said that “NATO’s biggest threat is not from external enemies, but from within.” Following Washington’s directives, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg is using NATO to clamp down on the “threat policy”, at times pointing to the growing threat from Russia, or now looking at China, who “want to use the current coronavirus pandemic to strengthen their confrontation with NATO.” The formation of four NATO battalion groups has only recently been completed, strengthening grouping in the Baltic and Black seas. The Alliance’s infrastructure is continuing to be developed, and almost every day there are reports that Eastern European countries are starting or completing the construction of some facility or another. Recently, particular attention has been paid to strengthening the southern flank: American and British forces have sprung up in Romania, and multinational brigades are being formed there. Today, European security has taken a turn for the worse: for the first time in many years the security of the region is again being defined not by measures of restraint, not by efforts to ensure security without resorting to military force, but by maintaining a sort of “balance of threats”. This is leading to an even greater military concentration and confrontation in Europe. In doing this, and blinkered by his Russophobic prejudice, Jens Stoltenberg is not even listening to the Supreme Commander of NATO in Europe, Tod Wolters, who officially announced in a March 20, 2020 briefing that “Russia won’t be using the current international crisis for the advancing of its interests.” Linked with this, it is worth recalling what the previous German Minister of foreign affairs, Joschka Fischer, said, underlining the fact that, “NATO’s future is more uncertain now than at any time in its history… Europeans should not harbor any illusions about what defense autonomy will require. For the European Union, which has only ever seen itself as an economic rather than a military power, it implies a deep rupture with the status quo. To be sure, NATO still exists, and there are still US troops deployed in Europe. But the operative word is “still”. Now that traditional institutions and transatlantic security and commitments have been cast into doubt, the alliance’s unravelling has become less a matter of “if” than “when”.”

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wolfofansbach · 6 years ago

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“Warsaw will be red,

and all the cities of the world!”

Got bored in class and made this map of another timeline where the Bolsheviks’ hopes for world revolution go a whole lot better.

In 1918, General Lavr Kornilov’s famed ‘Ice March’ in the south of Russia ends in dismal failure. Ataman Krasnov, in a fit of either pride or Cossack nationalist fervor, declines to lend his help to the burgeoning anti-Bolshevik forces. Kornilov and the nucleus of the ‘White Army are surrounded by the Red Guards outside Kuban, and promptly disarmed. Enlisted ranks desert en masse to the Bolsheviks, while the officers, Kornilov and General Denikin included, are summarily shot. Thus the Volunteer Army which so vexed the Soviet government in our world is never formed, and the Red Army seizes control of all Ukraine by the early spring of 1919.

With both the heart of industrial Russia and the agricultural ‘breadbasket’ of Europe firmly under its control, Lenin finds his position much less precarious than he did in our world. Admiral Kolchak’s pitiful attempt to raise an anti-Communist army in the Urals is soundly trounced, with the well-fed, well-equipped Red Army making short work of his demoralized, disorganized troops.

The Baltic is secured months later, General Yudenich driven into the sea.

In Hungary, where Bela Kun’s Soviet Republic in our timeline ended in a bloody victory for reaction, fortune again smiles on the forces of revolution. With Soviet Russia unhampered by counterrevolutionary forces within her own borders, she is free to help her nascent socialist ally in central Europe. The Red Army pours into Hungary over the Carpathians, saving Bela Kun’s unstable government from collapse and driving back the Allied-Romanian forces pushing on towards Budapest. The existence of communist Hungary is secured. In February of 1920, Kun submits the Hungarian Supreme Soviet’s application to join the Soviet Union. Of course, it is accepted.

The western world looks on with horror as Bolshevism moves undaunted from victory to victory in the east. There is no time in this world, as there was in ours, for squabbling over shattered empires or grandiose schemes for everlasting peace, when the very existence of the capitalist world order is in peril. In Germany, the formation of a new Republic is arrested as the old army General Staff under Ludendorff, in conjunction with Prussian Junkers and great industrialists, take control of the country with the single-minded expression of stamping out anything that smells of Bolshevism between the Rhine and the Baltic. The Allies, far more afraid of revolution than of the Germans, acquiesce.

It soon becomes to both Lenin and his comrades in Moscow, and to their mortal foes across the continent, that Poland under Marshal Pilsudski has become the hinge of fate. She is the bridge, in Soviet General Tukachevsky’s words, over which the Red Army will have to cross to ignite the world revolution.

To the shivering statesmen in London and Paris, she is the last guard of Europe against the communist onslaught.

German and Franco-British arms flood into Pilsudski’s Poland, on the condition that he check the Red tide by any means necessary.

In early 1920, the soldiers of the new Polish state, on the flimsy pretext of a pretended Soviet border raid, march eastwards with intention of driving the Bolsheviks back at least to Minsk, and if possible, to Moscow itself.

It is a disaster.

In Paris and London, radicalized stevedores and railwaymen refuse to load munitions and arms for ‘reactionary white Poland’, and instead drink toasts to their ‘proletarian brothers’ in the Red Army.

The Red Army forces the Polish forces back onto the Bug, and then further, towards Warsaw. Sporadic rebellions by Polish workers and peasants paralyze Pilsudski in the rear.

The Polish troops lose their nerve on the Vistula in the 1920s and dissolve. The Red Army seizes Warsaw. From there, Polish resistance dissolves and Pilsudski and his ministers flee to Germany (and from there to Great Britain).

The Polish Provisional Revolutionary Committee, a sort of Bolshevik-approved government in waiting, (Polrewkom) enters into Warsaw in the first week of September, formally proclaims a Polish Soviet Republic. Pass another week, and the PSR applies for membership in the International Soviet Union, an application that is duly accepted by an overjoyed Sovnarkom.

While Trotsky, Bukharin, Stalin, and a few others in Moscow urge Lenin to continue the victorious march “onto Berlin, and then onto Rome and Paris”, the Bolshevik leader urges caution. The whirlwind of victories have left the young Soviet Union drunk with glory. It is, he says, unwise to assume the revolution invincible. The victory of the world proletariat is inevitable, but for now, it is prudent to make a peace with the western capitalist nations.

Not that they’re given the opportunity.

With a Red Poland on the Oder, Ludendorff’s military government summarily declares war on the Bolsheviks. Germany cannot abide a Communist threat mere miles away, especially not with Moscow’s stated intention of turning all the world red. France and Britain rally alongside their old foe. The vanities and contests of nations are insignificant in comparison to the existential threat that Soviet Russia and the Third International pose to the old order.

But the armies of the Great Powers, bled white by the Great War, have little more stomach for fight, especially when their counterparts in the Red Army regale them night after day with leaflets and speeches exhorting them to “abandon their coward officers” and not to “shed their blood for the gold and silver of the landlord and the industrialist”.

“Join your brother workers in the ranks of the Red Army! Upon our bayonets we bring peace and liberty to the toiling peoples of the earth!”

And many an Allied soldier does so. Even those with little time for Bolshevism are all too-eager to desert.

The Red Army smashes a cobbled together Franco-German force outside Konigsberg, and then drives west, towards Pomerania and then towards Berlin.

The Irish war for independence, deeply impressed by the seemingly invincible Red Army becomes less and less a respectable struggle for national liberation and more and more a bolshevist revolution. Britain, divided between her crumbling Empire, the red calamity in the east, and now the troubles on the Emerald Isle, is powerless to stop a newly formed Irish Revolutionary Army from driving out what’s left of the British Garrisons and RIC. The Irish Revolution rapidly purges itself of more moderate elements, and in early 1921, an Irish Soviet Republic is proclaimed in Dublin. Of course, admission to the Third International and then to the Soviet Union is forthcoming.

In Italy, the radical factory workers of Turin and Milan occupy their places of work, daub hammers and sickles on the walls, and proclaim Soviets. In late 1920, an Italian Soviet Republic is proclaimed, to be challenged by counterrevolutionary royalist forces marshaling in the south.

In Finland, the reds win a handy victory in that country’s civil war, thanks to the firm and unwavering support of Lenin’s government.

The old order everywhere is dying.

The world watches in stupefied awe.

In the industrial centers of the Ruhr and in Berlin, radical laborers and miners follow the advance of the Red Army with hope. When the Bolsheviks arrive at the gates, the sympathizers within will be all too ready to throw them open.

In Paris, there are rumblings of 1871 and 1793.

Even in Britain, Red Ireland and the continental exploits of the Russians have struck terror into the hearts of the lords and the bosses, and heartened the less compromising elements of organized labor.

The Red Army marches on. Everywhere there is revolution in the air and on the wind.

Ludendorff’s government fortifies Berlin as a city has never been fortified, and the reds draw nearer.

Either Bolshevism will be turned back at Berlin, at the gate to western Europe, or else indeed, as the old anthem swore, the Internationale shall be the human race.

There’s also some fuckery going on in the old Ottoman Empire, but it’s not quite as important. With all of the Imperial Empires trying their damndest to keep the Bolsheviks contained, a whole lot of ethnic and national groups have seized the moment to...seize their independence.

#history #alternate history #soviet russia #bolshevik revolution #i have homework to do lmao #my stuff

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xtruss · 2 years ago

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‘Unity of the North Atlantic Terrorist Organization (NATO)’ a Disguise of Its Existential Crisis

— Global Times | June 29, 2022

Cartoon: Vitaly Podvitski

Not surprisingly, Turkey on Tuesday lifted its veto of Finland and Sweden's bid to join NATO after the three countries signed an agreement. In his speech after arriving in Madrid for the NATO Summit, US President Joe Biden stressed the unity of the organization, saying NATO was "as galvanized as I believe it's ever been."

The accession of these two neutral countries to NATO will increase the organization's membership to 32 countries. NATO was never meant to be a so-called regional security organization, but rather an aggressive military bloc and political instrument set up in Europe to help maintain US global hegemony.

Despite what the US would like, Europe essentially believes that NATO should be a defensive group of its own security. In American hands, NATO is the spear; in European eyes, it should serve as the shield. As NATO continues to expand, the gradually exposed differences in the interests of NATO members will result in more disputes and conflicts within the alliance.

And the expansion raises the problem of a security dilemma, in which the uneasiness of NATO's neighbor countries increases, in turn leading the entire region and even the world into an arms race and seriously changing the geopolitical landscape. Mistrust and the risk of war are on the rise, making the region and the world less secure. Song Zhongping, a Chinese military expert and TV commentator, told the Global Times that NATO is just an outdated Cold War organization that has long lost its so-called unity or cohesion.

The U-turn in Turkey's attitude was due to a deal that was more satisfactory to all parties. Turkey wants to receive assurances that the Nordic countries were willing to address support for the Kurdish groups Turkey designates as terrorist organizations, in particular the Kurdistan Workers' Party. And the memorandum says Finland and Sweden "extend their full support to Turkey against threats to its national security," making sure they will not provide support to those groups. The Nordic countries also affirmed there were no national arms embargoes relating to Turkey, and the three countries would work together on extradition requests.

According to Song, this is a huge victory for Turkey, which has been demanding major power status since Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan came to power. And it can even be said that Turkey is the only winner in Finland and Sweden's accession to NATO. "Turkey confirms that it has a voice in NATO, while the two Nordic countries are more insecure after joining the alliance," Song noted.

NATO’s steering wheel in the wrong hands of Washington. Global Times, June 29, 2022

Erdogan achieved his political goals with this move, and the fact that NATO is internally scattered has come to the fore. The divisions within NATO grow as more countries are dragged in. The US hopes to bridge the divisions within NATO, but it's difficult to cater to all needs.

On the issue of the Russia-Ukraine conflict alone, there are different demands among Western countries, as Germany, France and Italy want to stop the war as soon as possible, and the US is calling on all NATO countries to make a common cause against Russia. Wang Shuo, a professor at the School of International Relations of Beijing Foreign Studies University, believes that in this situation, many European countries are questioning whether NATO can solve the crisis in Ukraine. If it cannot work, what's the point of NATO's existence? At the moment when Europeans believe that NATO needs to play a role, it proved itself disunited and incompetent, another sign of NATO's existential crisis.

Russia will probably have to swallow the bitter fruit - NATO's further expansion. But the two Nordic countries' joining NATO is a provocation and humiliation to Russia, and new enmity will be deeply sowed. Europe will not become safer with this significant expansion.

Wang pointed out that joining NATO is like buying medical insurance for serious illnesses, which is a psychological comfort for many European countries: the insurance may be useful, but everyone wants to avoid it coming in handy. Joining NATO is not a no-cost benefit; countries may be "extorted" by NATO, the "insurance company," as the latter brings far more trouble than benefits.

Whether it is the hype of the "Russia threat" or the emphasis of the agreement between Turkey and the two Nordic countries, it has nothing to do with the so-called "unity" of NATO, but only a life-saving straw to prolong NATO's life.

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raftaar24 · 4 years ago

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France Sees an Existential Threat from American Campuses

France Sees an Existential Threat from American Campuses Paris – The threat is said to exist. It fires separatism. Fraud on national unity Follows Islam. Attracts the intellectual and cultural heritage of France. to risk? “Some Social Science Principles Fully Imported from the United States, ‘” Said President Emanuel Macron. French politicians, high-profile intellectuals and journalists have…

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sciencespies · 4 years ago

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To avoid an 'era of pandemics,' we must protect nature, UN warns

https://sciencespies.com/nature/to-avoid-an-era-of-pandemics-we-must-protect-nature-un-warns/

To avoid an 'era of pandemics,' we must protect nature, UN warns

Future pandemics will happen more often, kill more people, and wreak even worse damage to the global economy than COVID-19 without a fundamental shift in how humans treat nature, the United Nations’ biodiversity panel said Thursday.

Warning that there are up to 850,000 viruses which, like the novel coronavirus, exist in animals and may be able to infect people, the panel known as IPBES (Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services) said pandemics represented an “existential threat” to humanity.

Authors of the special report on biodiversity and pandemics said that habitat destruction and insatiable consumption made animal-borne diseases far more likely to make the jump to people in future.

“There is no great mystery about the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic – or any modern pandemic,” said Peter Daszak, president of the Ecohealth Alliance and chair of the IPBES workshop that drafted the report.

“The same human activities that drive climate change and biodiversity loss also drive pandemic risk through their impacts on our agriculture.”

The panel said that COVID-19 was the sixth pandemic since the influenza outbreak of 1918 – all of which had been “entirely driven by human activities.”

These include unsustainable exploitation of the environment through deforestation, agricultural expansion, wildlife trade, and consumption – all of which put humans in increasingly close contact with wild and farmed animals and the diseases they harbour.

Seventy percent of emerging diseases – such as Ebola, Zika, and HIV/AIDS – are zoonotic in origin, meaning they circulate in animals before jumping to humans.

Around five new diseases break out among humans every single year, any one of which has the potential to become a pandemic, the panel warned.

Land use

IPBES said in its periodic assessment on the state of nature last year that more than three-quarters of land on Earth had already been severely degraded by human activity.

One-third of land surface and three-quarters of fresh water on the planet is currently taken up by farming, and humanity’s resource use has rocketed up 80 percent in just three decades, it said.

IPBES conducted a virtual workshop with 22 leading experts to come up with a list of options that governments could take to lower the risk of repeat pandemics.

It acknowledged the difficulty in counting the full economic cost of COVID-19.

But the assessment pointed to estimated costs as high as $16 trillion as of July 2020.

The experts said that the cost of preventing future pandemics was likely to be 100 times cheaper than responding to them, “providing strong economic incentives for transformative change.”

“Our approach has effectively stagnated,” Daszak said.

“We still rely on attempts to contain and control diseases after they emerge, through vaccines and therapeutics.”

‘Withering reminder’

The IPBES suggested a global, coordinated pandemic response, and for countries to agree upon targets to prevent biodiversity loss within an international accord similar to the Paris agreement on climate change.

Among the options for policymakers to reduce the likelihood of a COVID-19 re-run are taxes or levies on meat consumption, livestock production, and other forms of “high pandemic-risk activities.”

The assessment also suggested better regulation of international wildlife trade and empowering indigenous communities to better preserve wild habitats.

Nick Ostle, a researcher at the CEH Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University, said the IPBES’ assessment should serve as a “withering reminder” of how reliant humanity is on nature.

“Our health, wealth, and wellbeing relies on the health, wealth, and wellbeing of our environment,” said Ostle, who was not involved in the research process.

“The challenges of this pandemic have highlighted the importance of protecting and restoring our globally important and shared environmental ‘life-support’ systems.”

#Nature

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newstfionline · 7 years ago

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Where Brexit Hurts: The Nurses and Doctors Leaving London

By Katrin Bennhold, NY Times, Nov. 21, 2017

LONDON--Tanja Pardela is leaving London. Her last day is Nov. 26. She wells up talking about it. She will miss jacket potatoes, and Sunday roasts, and her morning commute--past playing fields, small children in school uniforms and a red telephone box--to the hospital where she has been a pediatric nurse for 11 years.

Ms. Pardela does not want to leave the country she came to over a decade ago. But that country no longer exists. On June 24 last year, she said, “We all woke up in a different country.”

Seventeen months after Britain voted to leave the European Union, many Europeans are voting to leave Britain--with their feet. Some 122,000 of them packed their bags in the year through March, according to the latest figures available, while the stream of new arrivals has slowed.

In London, a city long sustained by European bankers, builders and baristas--”a place that makes you dream,�� Ms. Pardela said--the departures are beginning to hurt. Construction companies and coffee shops are struggling to recruit. Top universities worry about retaining talent. And nowhere are the concerns more elemental than in Britain’s treasured and already overstretched National Health Service.

Long before Brexit, the N.H.S. suffered from chronic staffing shortages, and today the country has 40,000 nursing vacancies. But recruiting nurses from the European Union had helped plug the gap--especially in London, where the share of nurses from the Continent is about 14 percent, or twice the national average. King’s College Hospital, the massive institution where Ms. Pardela works, is short of 528 nurses and midwives, and 318 doctors.

Brexit seems certain to make it harder and costlier to recruit from the Continent, assuming that people will still want to come from there. Even the legal status of European Union citizens already living in Britain remains unclear, entangled in the stalled Brexit talks between Brussels and London. Many fear they could lose rights, job security, pensions and access to free health care.

This uncertainty is one reason that some European health care professionals are either leaving, or thinking about leaving. In the year following the referendum, almost 10,000 quit the N.H.S. The number of nurses from other European Union countries registering to practice in Britain has dropped by almost 90 percent.

As yet, there is no mass exodus back to the Continent--the number of European Union staff in the health service even grew slightly in the year after the referendum. But the trends are unmistakable: The number of Europeans leaving the system is rising, and the number joining it is falling.

“With London in the grip of its worst ever staffing crisis, nurses are being pushed to breaking point on understaffed wards,” said Tom Colclough, regional spokesman for the Royal College of Nursing in London. “If those E.U. colleagues who have not yet left are not given an unequivocal right to remain, the very safety of the capital’s care settings will be under threat.”

The N.H.S., with its philosophy of free universal health care, is a pillar of postwar British identity, once described by a former minister as the closest thing the English had to a national religion. When London hosted the 2012 Olympics, a highlight of the opening ceremony was a dance performance by real nurses whose bodies eventually coalesced into three giant letters: N.H.S.

During the Brexit campaign, an argument about the N.H.S. helped tip a tight vote. Brexit advocates said leaving the European Union would allow the government to repatriate 350 million pounds a week from Brussels--about $463 million at current exchange rates--and spend it on health care. It was a powerful promise, plastered in bold across the side of a campaign bus--but it was false: Britain pays only about £166 million a week net into the European budget and there was little chance that even a lesser amount would go solely to the N.H.S.

“It was clearly the most effective argument not only with the crucial swing fifth but with almost every demographic,” the chief strategist of Vote Leave, Dominic Cummings, wrote in The Spectator earlier this year. “Would we have won without immigration? No. Would we have won without £350m/NHS? All our research and the close result strongly suggests No.”

Founded in 1840, King’s treated shell shock victims during World War I and victims of German air raids during World War II. More recently, survivors of London’s terror attacks and the Grenfell Tower fire were treated here.

The hospital is a complex of two dozen buildings in southeast London with Europe coursing through its circulatory system. Dutch workers built the state-of-the-art helipad on the roof. Eastern Europeans are helping to build a new intensive care wing and serving cappuccino as baristas in the four coffee shops. Of the 9,300 clinical staff, one in seven holds a non-British European passport.

Brexit is forcing a stark reassessment in every department. In the emergency room, Cyril Noël, a French doctor, is wrestling with how a country he loved rejected him. He describes the grieving process as the Five Stages of Brexit. In critical care, Georg Auzinger, an Austrian physician, has built a world-class facility but now worries about finding enough doctors and nurses.

Many worry that a health service they cherish may be existentially at risk. During a recent Sunday service in the hospital chapel, the priest said a prayer to guard against the “effects of Brexit.”

“The N.H.S. is in Britain’s DNA,” said Shelley Dolan, chief nurse and executive director of midwifery at King’s. “Europe is in the DNA of the N.H.S.”

When Dr. Noël, the French emergency doctor, started his shift early one recent afternoon, the department was already two dozen beds short. He surveyed the scene: seven stroke patients, two casualties from traffic accidents and a couple of stabbing victims. An elderly lady had been run over by her own car after forgetting to put on the hand brake. A toddler had swallowed a fridge magnet. A man had almost died after being punched in the face.

And the emergency room was four nurses down.

“Just a regular Friday,” said Dr. Noël, 45, as someone behind him mopped up the blood stains in Bay 4.

Working with Dr. Noël that Friday night were a Czech doctor and nurses from Ireland, Poland, Spain and Portugal. Several had spent their summer vacations scouting job opportunities in their home countries. “Everyone is nervous,” said Alexandra Cunderlikova, a senior nurse from Slovakia.

Ms. Cunderlikova came to Britain in 2003, a year before her country joined the European Union. She remembers lining up outside the Home Office at 4 a.m. for her work visa.

“I wonder,” she said. “Will it go back to that?”

Dr. Noël grew up as an Anglophile in eastern France, near the German border, in a family badly scarred by two world wars. When he was 5, he paraded across the local market, pretending to speak English. At 30, he fell in love with a British student who had come to France on the Erasmus program, the European Union’s university exchange scheme. Twelve years ago, they moved to Britain and Dr. Noël instantly felt “at home.”

But now, when he works outside London in places where people voted for Brexit, resentment rises in his throat.

“I’ve had very torn feelings about helping people who expressed the wish to get rid of us,” Dr. Noël said.

“Psychologically Brexit has had a huge impact,” he said. “You feel rejected as a group.”

Brexit has made many European employees reconsider. If anger was the third stage of Brexit, and depression was the fourth, Dr. Noël said he had now reached the final stage, acceptance.

For him, that means leaving Britain early next year. He has a new job at a hospital in Dubai.

#Britain #Brexit #National Health Service #King’s College Hospital #British nurse shortage

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peterdiamandis · 7 years ago

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Fixing Climate Change...

Earlier this month, 13 U.S. government agencies (NOAA, NASA, DOE, etc.) concluded that climate change is real and caused mainly by human activity.

There is no question that this is happening...

The only question now is: what do we do about it?

This blog looks at four options:

Pass government legislation that incentivizes carbon abatement

Drive mass adoption of solar energy and battery technology

Adapt ourselves and our civilization to the changing climate

Invest in geoscale engineering projects

Let’s dive in.

1. Government Regulation and Top-Down Incentives

We’ve seen many government debates, laws passed and treaties signed. We’ve heard a lot about the efficacy of cap and trade, taxing carbon, and other regulations that incentivize carbon abatement.

While we should rally behind policies that can assist in slowing the rise of global temperatures, forgive me if I don’t depend on this option to handle the problem.

Many special interests and scientifically ignorant members of the electorate make this option unlikely and risky to baseline as our primary strategy.

The time for radical action is now.

2. Make Renewables so Cheap that they KILL Fossil Fuels

Society faced a similar environmental crisis 120 years ago...

At the end of the 19th century, London was becoming uninhabitable because of the accumulation of horse manure.

As citizens moved from the rural countryside to the urban cities, they brought with them their motive force, the horse, and the piles of horse manure piled up rapidly, bringing disease. People were absolutely panicked. Because of their anchoring bias, they couldn’t imagine any other possible solutions. No one had any idea that a disruptive technology — the automobile — was coming.

What is today’s equivalent transformative technology? Clearly, it’s the mass adoption of renewal energy: solar, wind, geothermal and nuclear.

Let’s look at solar alone. Few people have any idea that 8,000x more energy from the sun hits the surface of the Earth in a day than we consume as a human race.

All the energy we could ever need is literally raining down from above. A squanderable abundance of energy.

These staggering numbers, in combination with an exponential decline in photovoltaic solar energy costs ($ per watt price of solar cells), put us on track to meet between 50 percent and 100 percent of the world’s energy production from solar (and other renewables) in the next 20 years.

Even better, the poorest countries in the world are the sunniest.

At the same time that renewable energy sources are on the rise, the demise of the internal combustion car is synergistically bringing about the end of the era of fossil fuels.

India, France, Britain and Norway have already completely ditched gas and diesel cars in favor of cleaner electric vehicles. At least 10 other countries (including China and India) have set sales targets for electric cars.

In the last year alone, every manufacturer has announced aggressive plans for electric vehicles. Ford Motor Company, for example, is investing $4.5 billion in electric cars, adding 13 electric cars and hybrids by 2020, making more than 40 percent of its lines electrified.

An EV market of two models in 2010 has climbed to more than 25 models today.

At the same time, many automotive companies (e.g. Volvo) have announced the end of the internal combustion car altogether.

Batteries: It’s next reasonable to ask whether the required battery technology will advance fast enough to give us the storage capacity needed for an “all-electric economy.”

The following chart shows that the battery performance pricing ($/kWh) is dropping 2x faster than even the optimists projected.

The bottom line: Our second option for combating climate change is to make renewable energy so cheap, such a ‘no-brainer’, that fossil fuels disappear for the same reason the Stone Age vanished: Not for a lack of stones, but for a 10x better option.

Abundance-minded entrepreneurs have the option to make solar and renewables easier, cheaper, and better, putting the petroleum, natural gas and coal industries out of business.

3. Adapting to a Warmer World

The Earth’s environment has been continuously changing for more than 4 billion years.

When life first emerged on Earth, our atmosphere was a deadly combination of carbon dioxide, ammonia and methane. Then, about 3 billion years ago, a poisonous and corrosive gas called oxygen came about from a process called “photosynthesis,” a process that transformed the climate and killed much of the existing life forms.

Ultimately life, whether it is microbial or homo sapiens, changes the environment. Our challenge today is the speed with which humanity’s use of fossil fuels has destabilized our ecosystem.

So, the question is, in parallel with items 1, 2 and 4 in this blog, do we accelerate our efforts to adopt to these changes as well?

One such example comes from China, where a team of scientists have successfully modified rice to grow in saltwater, which will allow them to feed their populace as sea levels rise. Cornell University projects that 2 billion people – around 20% of the world’s population – are at risk of being displaced by rising sea levels.

4. Geoscale Engineering: A Solution in Space

I recently had a conversation with a billionaire friend of mine from Silicon Valley who is committing his wealth and intellect to solving our climate problem. He’s tired of all the inaction and sees the climate crisis as one of humanity’s greatest existential threats today.

One solution that I discussed with him that I find compelling and elegant is called a “sunshade.”

Imagine a large, deployable mega-structure that sits between the Earth and the Sun, and blocks out very small (<0.1 percent) (variable) fraction of the photons coming from the sun to the Earth.

The preferred location for such a sunshade is near the Earth-Sun inner Lagrange point (L1) in an orbit with the same 1-year period as the Earth, and in-line with the Sun at a distance ≥ 1,500,000 kilometers from Earth.

While researching the idea, I found three well documented write-ups:

In 1989, James Early (from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) proposed putting a giant, 2000 km-wide glass deflector at L1.

A 1992 NASA report suggested lifting 55,000 “solar sails” into orbit at L1, each with an area of 100 km2, blocking about 1 percent of sunlight.

In 2007, Roger Angel (an astronomer from the University of Arizona), suggested creating a “cloud” of tiny sunshades at L1, each weighing about 1.2g and measuring 60cm in diameter.

All of these proposals have their respective limitations, whether it be cost, technical feasibility, and so on.

Roger Angel’s solution, which proposed millions of micro-shades rather than one large, expensive structure, has various pros and cons. It’s estimated that his concept could be developed and deployed in 25 years at a cost of a few trillion dollars, <0.5 percent of the world’s GDP over that time.

This is just one example of many geoscale engineering projects worth exploring.

Others (which I don’t like as much, because they may not be as easily reversible and controllable) include documented ideas like seeding our oceans with iron to increase the growth of plankton, or deliberately injecting the stratosphere with sulphur compounds to increase the Earth's reflectivity.

Clearly, I can’t put forth this option without acknowledging that we can’t fully know the secondary effects of these efforts. As Jim Haywood, professor of Atmospheric Science at University of Exeter said in an interview, “…there’s a healthy fear surrounding a technique that, without being hyperbolic, would aim to hack the planet’s climate and block out the sun.”

Final Thoughts

We can either wait for climate change to continue to decimate elements of our society, or we can begin focusing aggressively on solutions.

Given our access to exponential technologies, I am far more hopeful about our ability to address the climate crisis today, rather than 50, or even 20, years ago.

We can fix the problem — we just need to focus our intellect, resources and technology, and focus it fast.

Over the next decade, as climate change becomes more devastating and visible, great thinkers and entrepreneurs will emerge with even more surprising solutions to help tackle this grand challenge.

As I have often said, the world’s biggest problems are the world’s biggest business opportunities.

Join Me

1. A360 Executive Mastermind: This is the sort of conversation I explore at my Executive Mastermind group called Abundance 360. The program is highly selective, for 360 abundance and exponentially minded CEOs (running $10M to $10B companies). If you’d like to be considered, apply here.

Share this with your friends, especially if they are interested in any of the areas outlined above.

2. Abundance-Digital Online Community: I’ve also created a Digital/Online community of bold, abundance-minded entrepreneurs called Abundance-Digital.

Abundance-Digital is my ‘onramp’ for exponential entrepreneurs – those who want to get involved and play at a higher level. Click here to learn more.

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heavyarethecrowns · 7 years ago

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A rather interesting op-ed about the UK media vs the royal family

On November 8th, shortly after news broke that Prince Harry was in a romantic relationship with American TV actress and celebrity lifestyle entrepreneur, Meghan Markle, Harry put out a pretty incendiary public statement blasting the press.

While he confirmed that the story was true, he also made it clear that he thought it was absolutely none of our business. Blaming “sections of the English media” he thundered at the Sun for “…the smear on the front page of a national newspaper” and lashed out across the board at “the nightly battles to keep defamatory stories out of the papers”, “the racial undertones of comment pieces” and the intrusion that Meghan’s family was suffering, with “her mother having to struggle past photographers”.

Then, ending with this carefully-phrased stinger, Harry left them to chew on this: ”Those in the press who have been driving this story can pause and reflect before any further damage is done.”

You don’t need to be an English professor to understand the subtext here, nor can you particularly blame Harry for wishing ill of the industry that was more than somewhat responsible for the early death of his mother.

But, despite what it might look like at first glance, Harry’s statement wasn’t just a bit of hot-headed ranting. There’s a very subtle powerplay going on here.

The dynamics between the ruling class, celebrities and the press is shifting under our feet. Legislation influence by Royal Charter is about six weeks from potentially changing the face of press reporting for good.

And Harry might well have just set the press up to score a massively damaging own goal.

Royal History

The British Royal Family have a strange place in today’s culture. The Queen is our longest serving Head of State – a serious constitutional position, even in 2016 – and yet the Royals seem to exist mainly as Britain’s biggest tourist attraction. That, or a high-end soap opera for Americans.

The Queen aside though (and her immediate successors to the throne – Charles and William) you do have to wonder exactly what purpose the rest of the clan serves, if not for general public amusement?

Beyond a very small handful of other Brits (Wayne Rooney, David Beckham, Adele, possibly Benedict Cumberbatch?) they are far and away our most recognisable celebrities on the global stage at the moment. What’s more, they have been at the forefront of gossip and media coverage for decades now. Crowds of thousands turn up just to see them wave. Their weddings are international television events. All we ask – in exchange for a luxurious taxpayer-funded lifestyle of travel, banquets, jewels, parties and palaces – is to be kept up to speed on what they’re up to.

There’s no doubt that that can be annoying at times. And we don’t wish to trivialise something that ended in a fatality back in 1997 but – despite what Prince Harry’s fiery rhetoric implies (or what Hacked Off will tell you, or what the Leveson Inquiry investigated) – the press have largely been running scared of the Royals in recent years.

Diana’s passing caused even the most hardened of tabloid editors to take pause. Many paparazzi were cut loose after that. Even as recently as 2007, News International (Rupert Murdoch’s media group) agreed that all their properties wouldn’t buy any pap shots of Kate Middleton.

The coverage of William and Kate has been nothing short of fawning. When those topless tit shots of Kate were published in France, they were roundly condemned in the UK. The bikini pictures of pregnant Kate on a Mustique beach were published by an Italian mag and a few Australian ones, but not in UK. And since two perfectly cherubic royal babies came on the scene Kate has been close to being beatified.

Harry’s experience has been different. Those nude shots after a Las Vegas pool party in 2012, while leaked originally by American gossip site, TMZ were later republished on the front page of the Sun (which possibly explains why he’s now quicker to anger with the British press…)

Still, even though the press have lightened up a lot on the Royal Family since 1997, it’s clear (and understandable) why Harry would harbour such animus for them. So his damning statement about the shittiness of our press didn’t seem wildly out of character. However, it turns out that that was just a bit of party talk.

For on the very same day that Harry put out that statement, newspaper editors all over the country received a letter. That letter was from the press regulatory body, IPSO, and it contained a rather stark message from his girlfriend Meghan Markle’s London lawyers.

And that was the real warning shot.

Regulators, Mount Up

The Independent Press Standards Organisation (or IPSO, as it’s commonly known) is the regulatory body that the press set up in response to the Leveson Inquiry’s savaging of its previous incarnation, the Press Complaints Commission.

The PCC – which was pretty much run by newspapers themselves – was often accused of being completely toothless. Whenever they were asked to adjudicate on serious complaints about their conduct, unsurprisingly, they tended to find that newspapers had done nothing wrong.

Those years of phone-hacking? Nope. Paying public officials? Nothing to see there. Multiple complaints of unwarranted intrusion? Meh.

So, in the face of severe criticism, IPSO was created to replace it.

IPSO was hastily whipped together in 2012 before Parliament had a chance to enact any of the recommendations that Lord Leveson suggested, or come up with its own regime. It’s kind of based on the same principles that the PCC ran on before it (that of industry self-regulation) but in appointing Sir Alan Moses as its chair, and having some non-media types serve as members of its board, it does have at least a touch more independence than the PCC ever did.

Consequently, most of the industry signed up to it (except for the Financial Times, the Guardian and the Lebedevs’ stable, who all decided to set up their own individual complaints systems).

How is this connected to Prince Harry?

On the same day that Harry made his statement about the press, his girlfriend, Meghan Markle, had some lawyers write to IPSO on her behalf, asking them to tell their members to back off. Her lawyers also warned that, in taking an interest in her life and her fledgling relationship, the Editor’s Code was in serious danger of being breached.

They claimed that the UK media: – “…is unfairly and wrongly creating a market for coverage and intrusive speculation about our client’s private life” – “…should not publish material obtained as a consequence of harassment (anywhere) whether outside the jurisdiction of UK” – “…should not under any circumstances harass our client if and on any occasion she is visiting the United Kingdom”

Reading between the lines here, it seems that not only are the English media being held accountable for any harassment that Meghan and her family suffer when they’re in the UK, they’re being held accountable for any harassment they endure anywhere.

Basically this was a warning that if any photographer or publication anywhere in the world writes anything bad about her, or attempts to photograph her, then the UK is going to be blamed – so it’s up to them to make sure it doesn’t happen.

It’s a smart, if slightly mafia-flavoured, move. You can’t go after the US media because of that pesky First Amendment, so you head to Europe (where Article 8 of the ECHR protects a person’s right to privacy) and you shake them down instead. You make the US media their problem. Rein them in, you say, or we’ll hold you responsible for it.

But there’s more to it than just that. This threat comes at a time when the British press is slap bang in the middle of a political battle.

One that could prove to be existential.

Hard To Impress

IPSO aren’t the final word on press regulation in the UK.

The press created IPSO in an attempt to ward off the threat of stronger state regulation being brought in at the recommendation of Lord Leveson – but this plan didn’t quite work out.

What came out of the Leveson Inquiry was the idea that there should be a Royal Charter. Something which, in theory, would give politicians oversight of the press. That was set up in 2012.

The Royal Charter then created something called the Press Recognition Panel, for the express purpose of formally appointing a “recognised self-regulator”. That was set up in November 2014. In all the time since, it has largely done nothing – but that all changed last month.

After two years of laying essentially dormant, about one week before the story about Harry and Meghan broke, the PRP finally swung into action. It had made its decision about the regulator it wanted and it gave its formal approval, not to IPSO, but to another body, Impress, to be the UK’s official press regulator.

The only problem with this decision is that almost everybody has signed up to be regulated by IPSO; and virtually no-one has agreed to be regulated by Impress. Moreover, no-one wants to be.

Why?

Well, aside from the ‘state-sponsored’ regulatory element it now has, there’s something else about Impress that the media industry doesn’t trust.

While IPSO was set up by those who come from (and broadly approve of) the newspaper industry, Impress is funded by one of its sworn enemies. Max Mosley.

You might remember Max from a famous News of the World front page, which showed him at a sadomasocistic orgy.

Mosley was awarded damages by the UK courts for that particular story, but that wasn’t enough for him. He took the case further, right the way up to the European Court of Human Rights, to attempt to change the law so that newspapers would be forced to warn anyone before they run a story on their private life.

The court rejected it, saying a “pre-notification requirement would inevitably affect political reporting and serious journalism” (and Mosley hasn’t stopped fuming about it since).

That’s only part of why the industry is mistrustful of Impress, but there’s one other thing you need to know about the Royal Charter and the significance of its choice.

There is a piece of legislation known as the Crime and Courts Act 2013. Section 40 of that act was designed specifically to incentivise newspapers to join the Royal Charter’s recognised regulator. And it carries quite a sting in the tail.

What Section 40 says is that publishers who are not a member of the recognised self-regulator can win any relevant media case in court, but still have to pay the losing side’s costs as well as their own.

To make that absolutely clear: if they are not signed up to Impress, any newspaper or magazine that has a court case brought against them has to pay the costs of the people who brought the case – regardless of whether they win or lose.

Only by joining the state’s preferred regulator can you avoid this.

Now, you could argue that there’s a good reason for doing this. This sort of system means that anyone who felt they’d been treated unfairly by the press could bring a case against a publication, even if they weren’t rich enough to afford QCs – and that’s an important element of press accountability to consider.

The reality of the situation, however, is that it’s entirely open for abuse. Anyone rich and powerful with something to hide could bring whatever case they wanted against a newspaper or magazine that isn’t signed up to Impress (and, remember, practically everyone signed up to IPSO or abstained) knowing that, whichever way the case went, the publication would still have to pay costs.

It wouldn’t take long to bankrupt smaller publications by taking a few punts on this, and those big enough to withstand the financial hit would undoubtedly have to think twice about undertaking any tricky investigations. (After all, they have shareholders or benefactors to consider.)

Now that Impress has been recognised as the official PRP regulator, Section 40 is primed to come into effect. Meaning that the publications which signed up for IPSO are – for want of a better phrase – royally fucked.

Who signed up for IPSO? Over 1,500 print and 1,100 online titles. Roughly 90% of the UK’s media.

Who signed up for Impress? Somewhere between 30-40 “niche and local publications”. And, erm… that’s it.

Great news if you’re the Brixton Bugle, the Caerphilly Observer, the Port Talbot Magnet or Shropshire Live.

If you’re anyone else, not so much.

Thankfully, there’s been something of a reprieve. Section 40 should have come into effect when Impress was granted Royal Charter status – but on 1st November the government, aware that this could have major implications for freedom of the press, announced that it will be subject to a ten-week consultation period while they decide if it’s something they really want to do.

No doubt by complete coincidence, precisely one week into this ten-week period, Prince Harry (the grandson of the woman whose name and title is all over this charter) chose November 8th to lash out at the press.

November 8th is also the date on the letter from Meghan Markle’s lawyers to the IPSO members.

It was nice of Harry to give the press a full week to enjoy this probation period. For make no mistake, anyone who fucks up in the next nine weeks could be fucking it up for everyone. Meghan’s lawyers made it very clear to IPSO that they wouldn’t look kindly on anything that breached the Editor’s Code. So keeping everyone reined in right now is not just essential for IPSO’s own existence, it’s essential for that of a continued free press.

A Blue Bloodbath

The press’s right to photograph an American actress who happens to be dating a minor British royal doesn’t necessarily look like something that any of us should get too hot under the collar about.

But let’s look at Culture Secretary Karen Bradley’s 1st November statement. “The press should tell the truth without fear or favour and hold the powerful to account.”

The Royal Family is still a powerful institution. Taxpayer funded, its members represent British commercial and political interests around the world. As role models they can have a profound influence. They should 100% be classed as part of “the powerful” that the press should hold to account.

A pushback on ability to cover the Royals – no matter how frivolous this looks – is a pushback on the ability to scrutinise, and it’s not as if the Royals are above shifty behaviour.

Recent years have seen various members of the family try and exploit their connections for money. Take Sarah Ferguson and Sophie Wessex, for example. Married to Prince Andrew and Prince Edward respectively, both of them were caught up in cash for access scandals.

Prince Andrew himself was discovered to have links to murky Kazakhstani money and politics. Prince Charles was accused of attempting to meddle in government business with the Black Spider letters. Or – and we’re loath to bring him up again, but – Prince Harry wore a Nazi uniform to a costume party at Highgrove House.

Royal privacy is a difficult thing to quantify. Prince Harry expects the press to turn up and cover his duties. The Invictus Games, which he started, owe their existence to the fact that he’s mediaworthy and can therefore secure interest in it. Dating an actress, who has a big public profile, will make him even more mediaworthy. Particularly as Meghan Markle isn’t shy about putting her own private life out there – especially when there’s a payday to be had.

At the same time as Meghan’s lawyers were making the statement that “Our client has no intention of talking to anyone about her private life”, everyone could read her long feature in Elle magazine detailing her family and private life.

Once you’ve finished that, maybe you’d like to read a brand new piece she’s just written about how fame brings responsibilty as a role model – and showing her as a UN Advocate.

As for Meghan’s claim that the UK media is “creating a market for coverage” – they should perhaps defer to her expert knowledge. She knows all about how to market coverage. With the world hanging on her every word, waiting for her to confirm that she is in fact in a relationship with a member of the British Royal Family, her first move is to send out an inspirational Gandhi quote on social media – all branded up with the logo from her professional aspirational LA lifestyle website and business, The Tig.

Though this doesn’t constitute a huge conflict of interest, this is exactly the sort of thing that a responsible press should be monitoring.

Is it enough of a reason to give the press carte blanche to harass her family, and pepper them with paparazzi? No. Does her blogging business mean that reporters need to shadow the new couple so closely that they never have a private moment alone? Of course not.

But the press also shouldn’t have to swallow this dangerous piece of wider legislation – which could have devastating consequences for freedom of reporting – just because a few bad apples get over-obsessive with the Royals.

Still, so long as the press don’t overstep the mark for the next few months, everything should be fine. The fact that there is now a Royal sword of state regulation dangling over their heads isn’t ideal, but so long as they don’t do anything stupid and deliberately try to antagonise Prince Harry and his girlfriend, then there may still be a chance that the British press manages to retain its freedom…

Ah, well.

At least we’re looking a little safer than America…

http://popbitch.com/2016/12/part-iii-battle-royal/

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#media #prince harry #meghan markle #submission

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