Read: The End Of The European Dream

From: Church & State: Editorials

Date: April, 2014

By: Editorial

The End Of The European Dream

Editorial

The End Of The European Dream
We have seen the end of the European dream—the European delusion of being a Great Power in world affairs.
Europe, having stirred up a demonstration in Kiev, against a change in Government policy, into a virtual insurrection, then negotiated a deal intended to resolve the conflict on a constitutional basis by bringing the two sides together in a Coalition Government. But the Coalition deal was swept away almost before it was made. President Obama wasn't having any of it. He killed it at birth, before the world had a chance to see what it would be like—which is how such things should be done, if they are going to be done. "Fuck the EU", he said in the free American way, in the language which has become almost obligatory since Hollywood freed itself from the curbs of the Hays Office—and he demonstrated that Andrea Dworkin's insight that fucking is rape is valid, at least in the sphere of American foreign policy.
Obama killed off the European scheme, without bothering to comment on it, by giving the go-ahead to the fascists in the Maidan insurrection to enact a coup d'état—to take over the Government by direct action.
The details of that scheme are given by David Morrison in the current issue of Irish Foreign Affairs—the only Irish publication which gave them any consideration. The Irish Foreign Minister—a former socialist revolutionary, like some many of the present generation of reactionaries—didn't bother his head about it. And, when Putin asked what happened to that agreement, nobody in Europe cared to answer him.
Europe knew that it had been fucked American-style, and that there were no police to go to, so it stayed silent—possessing its soul in patience, or realising that it had no soul.

The coup was anti-Russian in purpose. In the circumstances there was no other rational political purpose for it. Russia was to be made to understand that it was small fry in the world. It had acted too ambitiously when it offered the Ukraine a much better deal than the miserly offer from the EU, causing Kiev to change policy, and it needed to be humiliated. So the Ukraine Government, which had turned its back on Europe when offered a very much better deal by Moscow, was overthrown by a coup that was anti-Russian both with relation to the Russian state and to the substantial Russian population of the Ukraine.
The Russian response, however, was not meek acceptance of American will in the European manner—thus demonstrating that it was not European and civilised but Asian and barbarian?

The Russian majority in the easily detachable Crimea voted in a referendum to secede from the Ukraine and join the Russian Federation, and it is evident from the voting figures that a majority of the non-Russian minority in the Ukraine also voted in favour of transferring to the Russian state.
It was stated as a definite fact by the British Prime Minister that the Crimeans had voted at the point of Russian guns. But, even if he had presented evidence of Russian guns in the Crimean situation, that would hardly have accounted for the vote. There were undoubtedly British guns in the Irish situation in the Elections of 1918, 1920, and 1921, yet the electorate each time voted strongly against the policy which those pointing the guns were trying to enforce.
The Ukrainian state, disrupted by coup d'état, and governed by erratic fanatics with an insuppressible urge to make wild statements, was a place that it would be tempting to leave if the means of doing so painlessly were available.

The vote was clear. The transference of the Crimea from the Ukraine to Russia was accomplished without a shot being fired. Western news very briefly reported on a "Ukrainian resistance" in the Crimea, and there was even an ephemeral "hero of the resistance", but it was soon admitted that there was no resistance, and that the military bases of the Ukrainian State in the Crimea melted away peacefully.
Nevertheless President Obama came to Europe on March 26th and made a speech to it about the Russian invasion and annexation of the Crimea. And Europe swallowed it.

Europe is in trauma. It has lost the Crimea. Though it never had it, it has lost it. And it is suffering phantom pains following the amputation of a limb that it never had.
The frenzy of the European left during the weeks of the Maidan Insurrection is described in the current issue of Irish Foreign Affairs in a report by Manus O'Riordan of the goings-on at meetings of the European Economic And Social Committee.

What has happened to the Left? What has happened to Europe? How have both become mindless flotsam in the drift of things set in motion by Washington?
A quarter of a century ago the Soviet system collapsed. The Cold War ended, depriving the European development of its eastern border. The Christian Democracy which had given Europe its post-1945 coherence was destroyed by apparently anarchic anti-corruption agitations. The Left, deprived of a purposeful Centre-Right, lost its bearings. NATO lost its defensive function, when the Soviet/East European Warsaw Pact was dismantled and, by remaining in being, became an expansionist force. The Left which, on the whole, had been against NATO during the Cold War, became NATOist when NATO became expansionist. Washington fed its ideals into Europe and Europe swallowed them Those ideals were designed to make the world a suitable place for the operations of American globalist capitalism. While subordinating itself to American purposes, Europe imagined that what it was doing was establishing itself as an independent Great Power in the world.

In March it negotiated an Agreement between Government and Opposition in the Ukraine which would probably have held the state together, and retained it as a buffer—or link—between the Russian Federation and the EU. If that agreement had been followed through, the EU might have begun to be something more than a market again..But that wasn't what the US wanted, so it ordered the coup d'état against it.
Then Obama came to Europe and made a speech to it, in which he said a number of patently absurd things, daring them to disagree. They didn't. They understood the issue was not the sense of what he said but, as somebody says in Alice in Wonderland: "The question is, who is to be master".
A couple of days before making his Presidential speech to his European constituents (satraps), Obama spoke at the Nuclear Security Summit at the Hague. He said that Russia had not regained Superpower status:

"Russia is a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbours, not out of strength but out of weakness.
"We have considerable influence on our neighbours. We generally don't need to invade them in order to have a strong co-operative relationship with them."

And it's true! The US doesn't always have to invade its neighbours in order to impose good neighbourly relations on them. It only invades them when they won't take a hint.
But who are its neighbours? The old Catechism supplies the answer, "mankind of every description". So: neighbours watch out.
Obama has made the frankest statement ever of the US right of world domination. His statement of US exceptionalism some time ago was tantamount to a global expansion of the Monroe Doctrine.

The United States must act according to its nature. It proclaimed its "manifest destiny" on the American continent a century and a half ago, and then extended it across the Pacific. Its dynamic is such that it cannot rest until it finds itself alone in the world with only its echoes for company.
It has humbled Europe. It has set Islam at war with itself. China has no history of political action in the world. But suddenly Moscow is there again, not understanding that its time has passed.
Tsarist Moscow saw off the French. Communist Moscow saw off the Germans. And now Capitalist Moscow is filling itself out across the Eurasian landmass that the Western Imperialist politicians called the heartland.
So it does not seem that the would-be American solipsists will find themselves alone in the world contentedly listening to themselves for a while yet.

What kind of existence can the EU be said to have after being fucked by Obama?
Maybe it should say, in paraphrase of Tennyson: "We have not made our world, so He that made us what we are must guide it".
European political existence depended on Angela Merkel last month. Merkel is a German Christian Democrat. It was Christian Democracy that kept Germany viable after 1945, and it was on the viability of post-War Germany that the European development was founded. But in March 2014 Merkel let everything slip.
The Christian Democratic plea is that Konrad Adenauer, the effective founder of Christian Democracy and post-War Germany, acted on American instructions, just as Merkel did. Adenauer undoubtedly acted in conjunction with the USA after 1945. But he aligned himself with the USA for the purpose of preventing Britain from doing after 1945 what it had done after 1918. He had, as Mayor of Cologne, experienced British influence on German affairs after 1918, and his primary purpose after 1945 was to negate British influence—which he did very effectively, ensuring autonomous German development in the Western zones.
The similarity between that and the current conduct of German Christian Democracy is not easy to see.

The coup d'état Prime Minister of the Ukraine has declared the strange principle that borders determined by the outcome of World War II are sacred and unalterable, sanctioned by international law, and that everybody complied with this international law until the Crimea seceded from the Ukraine—while at the same time the Ukrainian forces that made the coup have been tearing down the sacred monuments of World War II as symbols of Russian despotism. It is an absurd principle, in conflict not only with the nature of things but with events in recent European history. But the EU did not dispute it.
Adenauer never recognised the borders of his Germany as legitimate. He refused to have any dealings with the East German State.
A later Chancellor did recognise East Germany as legitimate, but after the unification of Germany following the Soviet collapse, the Western authorities prosecuted the personnel of the Eastern State as criminals. Repudiation of the legitimacy of the outcome of World War II could not go much farther than that.
And then there was Yugoslavia—a Communist state that was not part of the Soviet system and did not fall with it. It stood when the others fell, and the EU decided to destroy it by encouraging religious-nationalist antagonisms between the Yugoslav peoples.
The Yugoslav Constitution made provision for orderly secession of regions, but the EU judged it more advantageous to encourage secession by unilateral action outside the Constitution, with the object of destroying the Yugoslav State in an inferno of religious/nationalist war. Whenever a region held a referendum (an illegal referendum?), the army of the state was immediately declared to be an Army of Occupation.
When religious conflict was stirred up, Bosnia divided into three mutually antagonistic parts: Catholic/Croat, Muslim, and Serb/Orthodox. In a referendum the Catholics and Muslims, who between them constituted a majority but not a unity in any other sense, voted for secession. The EU then recognised Bosnia as a nation-state, despite the fact that it consisted of three warring components, and was only a smaller and more venomous version of Yugoslavia.
Up to this point the secessions were of regional components of the Yugoslav state. But then the EU decided that the official Serb component of the Yugoslav state should be broken up—even though the Bosnian component was compelled to remain together. It was decided to take Kosovo, which was in many ways the heartland of Serbia, out of the Serbian state and make it a separate state. This clearly was for the purpose of humiliating and possibly demolishing Serbia.
The Serbians were the demon populace of Europe. In the Great War of 1914-19 they had been the heroic people of Allied propaganda. After the War, the state of Yugoslavia was constructed around them by the Versailles Treaty. In 1941 the Serbians opposed the Germans while others were compliant and a Croat state was established under German protection. In 1945 Yugoslavia was reassembled, again with the Serbs (who had made a state for themselves before 1914) as its centre. The Serbs were a heroic people until it was decided to destroy Yugoslavia. They then became demons, and Kosovo was cut out of Serbia in order to humiliate and disable it.

Obama told his European constituents:

"Russian leaders have… claimed Kosovo as a precedent, an example, they say, of the West interfering in the affairs of a smaller country, just as they're doing now. But NATO only intervened after the people of Kosovo were systematically brutalized and killed for years. And Kosovo only left Serbia after a referendum was organized not outside the boundaries of international law, but in careful cooperation with the United Nations and with Kosovo's neighbours. None of that even came close to happening in Crimea."

The EU leaders seemed happy to have false memory laid on for them as official truth—as Pravda.
A referendum was held in Kosovo in 1991, long before Yugoslavia was broken up. It was not held under the authority of the Yugoslav Government, therefore under Ukrainian rules it was not valid. It was not recognised as legitimate by any Government other than Albania. The Kosovo Liberation Army was declared to be a terrorist organisation by NATO.
Years later the US/EU decided to break the principle they had applied of treating the component republics of the Federal Yugoslav state as irreducible units by cutting Kosovo out of Serbia. They declared that what had hitherto been regarded as suppression of terrorism by the Belgrade authorities was a brutal suppression of freedom. They subjected Belgrade to intensive bombing, and cut Kosovo out of Serbia by brute force.
In June 1999 an agreement was reached which ended NATO bombing of Serbia in return for the granting of substantial autonomy to Kosovo, but not independence. That Agreement was endorsed by a Security Council resolution. Nevertheless, Kosovo did go on to become independent with the active support of the West. No referendum was involved.
Not a bit like the Crimea.
*

The EU displays hostility to capitalist and democratic Russia. It is unthinking—or at least unexplained.
That Russia is capitalist is undeniable. That it is democratic has not been denied at recent elections.
Democracy has no exact meaning. Lincoln's definition is a rhetoric of wartime exaggeration: "government of the people, for the people, by the people". That is no more descriptive of how the states that are called democratic are governed than Lenin's State & Revolution was descriptive of government in the State he formed. Perhaps in Switzerland it could be said that there is government of the people by the people, but in all the major states that are called democratic there is representative government by parties—which in Rousseau's opinion was not democratic at all—and the people have a choice every few years to choose which party will govern.
That is how the present Russian Government was formed. The EU had only one quibble about the last Russian election. It said the outcome of an election should be uncertain and the result of the Russian election was a foregone conclusion. All that meant was that it wished somebody else had won it. It did not suggest that the vote was rigged, or that a party with a chance of beating Putin was prevented from contesting the election.

Though it did not question the validity of the election at the time, the EU now suggests that the Russian Government is a dictatorship.
It recognises Afghanistan and Iraq as democracies—and did not demur at Obama's praise of the US role in Iraq.
But in both Afghanistan and Iraq many parties were prohibited from contesting the elections.
Russia once had a democracy rather like Iraq's. It was a chaos of capitalist anarchy, in which the life expectancy of the mass of the people plummetted. One might say that it was there to be fucked by the US/EU—and that naturally pleased the US/EU.

In those days there were so many parties contesting Russian elections that the electorate had no effective choice. Choice depends on there being a small number of major parties which have continuous existence from one election to the next.
Russia has become more democratic since the days of the Yeltsin anarchy that the US/EU recognised as democratic. The Russian electorate can now choose a national Government, which they could not do in those days.
A senior BBC journalist, given the task of making a democratic case against Putin's Russia, concentrated on human rights violations, which now appear to consist of the prohibition of homosexualist propaganda and the refusal to legislate for homosexual marriage. Britain criminalised homosexual practice a few generations ago, punishing it with imprisonment with hard labour. It was prosecuting homosexuals in the second half of the 20th century. It was prohibiting homosexualist propaganda in education down to the end of the 20th century. It has just now instituted homosexual marriage—and declared it to be a universal human right. Such is the British way.

The institution of homosexual marriage, and the abolition of the distinction between homosexual and heterosexual marriage, is the abolition of marriage.
In the mid-19th century, when Communism was accused of being committed to abolishing marriage, Karl Marx said that it was the working out of capitalism that would abolish it.
The family, which used to be said to be the unit of society, was reduced to a kind of nostalgia in Britain by the beginning of the present century. Marriage, as a privileged institution for the producing and rearing of children, had been abolished de facto. Homosexual marriage only abolished it de jure. The individual is the unit of society and the single--person household is the ideal which is becoming the norm. And the Chair of the Institute of Directors declared twenty years ago that having children is no more than individual lifestyle choice.
It is a long time since Britain reproduced itself biologically. It has long been importing population from backward parts of the world where the family remains the social unit. So it might as well sever the connection between marriage and reproduction and incorporate this new form of marriage into the propaganda of the finance capitalism that made it possible.
But, while that serves as propaganda against Putin, it can hardly be the source of the profound hostility against the Orthodox Christian Russia which has taken the place of Communist Russia...
Could it be that what we are seeing is a revival of the conflict between the Western and Eastern parts of the Roman Empire, and of the different lines of Christianity which they produced?

On March 28th the Irish Times commented editorially on the Erdogan Government in Turkey:

"On Wednesday the courts overturned his attempt to ban Twitter. And yesterday the Turkish authorities shut down Youtube.
"Internationally his authoritarian tendencies have been coming under fire, again raising questions about Turkeys long-term EU accession prospects, while his regional standing has also sunk with the muzzling of key party allies in Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood…"

The Irish Times doesn't mention why Erdogan shut down Twitter. The BBC in a brief comment on the matter said it was because Twitter was circulating reports of private conversations. It didn't say what those conversations were—that they were about a plan to organise a "false flag" Syrian attack on a Turkish shrine in Syria which is under Turkish sovereignty. In other words, Turkey would attack itself using a Syrian flag—as Hitler is said to have organised an attack on Germany under a Polish flag in 1939.
It is doubtful whether Turkey is much concerned these days about being admitted to the EU.
It is a founder member of NATO and is situated in a critical position.

Erdogan's achievement was to make Turkey democratic. Under the Ataturk regime, established in 1922 in the successful defiance of a British attempt to impose a subordinating Treaty, the state was officially secularist. It was liberal in the sense that women were not allowed to wear the headscarf in public institutions and Islamic parties were banned. Secularism in public life was upheld by the Courts and guaranteed by the military. Islamist parties were prevented from winning elections by being declared illegal.
Erdogan broke through that system. He reinforced democracy by a purge of the military. The Courts reluctantly fell into line with the new civil order.
For a number of years Erdogan's foreign policy was to be a peace broker in the Middle East conflict. But, when the US/EU—apparently at the behest of the lynch-pin of the Free World in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia—backed demonstrations against the secularist Assad Government in Syria, and built them up into religious civil war, Erdogan fell into line with this.
The US/EU recognised the Fundamentalist insurgency in Syria as the democratic representative of the Syrian people, and the legitimate authority. But Assad held the line, supported by Russian influence, and the different strands of Fundamentalism in the insurgency began to make war on each other as well as on Assad. Stalemate set in, with the EU actively forgetting that it had recognised the feuding Opposition as the legitimate authority of the Syrian people.

The Turkish scheme for a false flag attack could have changed everything. It would have been represented as an attack on NATO by Damascus, and Syria would have been given the Iraqi treatment.
It is improbable in the extreme that the Turkish authorities would have contemplated this without prior reference to NATO.
The scheme went awry because the West, accustomed to eavesdropping on the world, has not yet adjusted to the fact that there are regions of the world which are now able to eavesdrop on it.
But the domestic news channels of the Western democracies are still under effective control, and they are able to report the Turkish action against Twitter without reporting the reason for it.

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'Common Sense About the War' and other writings (Extracts). George Bernard Shaw
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