Majorityrights Central > Category: World Affairs

Four women and one man, all Norwegians of course, have awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Barrack Obama from a field of 172 individuals and 33 organisations.  The citation reads “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”

I must have missed them.  But, apparently, it’s to do with all the fluff about “change” and the “new era of responsibility” mentioned in his inauguration speech (which was written not by him, of course, but by Jon Favreau).  The committee’s announcement said:

“Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future.  His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.”

I’d like to add my own voice to the Mass for Naivety which is “the world’s attention”, amending the committee’s words of wisdom thus:

“Only when the Big Money and the global media barons act together can an empty suit be raised up into a symbol for anything you like, frankly, including whatever people conceive of as progress.  The raising up of the Obamessiah was so successful, it is practically inconceivable that anyone else could be awarded any prize whatsoever.  Norwegians will never be thought of in the same way again.”

The case of Brandon Huntley, a white South African granted asylum by an Immigration Board in Ottawa, has been in the headlines for a couple of days.  The Canadian’s recognition that black violence and South African governmental dereliction can constitute grounds for asylum for fleeing whites has stung both the aforementioned government and the ANC.  The moral poverty of both is evident in their reflexive ascription of racism to the decision.

But some rather more interesting reactions have surfaced elsewhere … here in the Huffington Post, for example, where Western purveyors of the old anti-apartheid rubric are struggling - and failing - to come to terms with the moral superiority of the white South African victim.  Like “sa-Ireland”:

There are brutal murders, hacking up of whites, slaying pets, and terrorizing and raping. The rule of thumb is to whites.
now if a white is not allowed to get a good job, (those in the good jobs were there for a long time , or are expats), if a white is not allowed a FREE education, because the last 3 years of school will not be paid by the government, if a white can not own property without the risk of it being removed forcibly, If a white has to live behind prison bars on our houses, can not own anything valuable as it WILL be forcibly removed, If we live in fear daily, because we own a car, a TV, or another valuable item then what is persecution?
There is a plan when Mandela dies - Whites are threatened daily with it. Our guns were redistributed to the blacks as well. When he dies, they will massacre us. All know about it and there is constant, daily propaganda, on the news, in TV programs, and everywhere, to PROMOTE white hatred. My kids weren’t even allowed to report a black in school for bullying as it was classed as racism.
There was a small group long LONG LONG-ago who did the apartheid. It was over in 1989. Why must we suffer for THEM?

The fact remains, though, that of the 4 million + South African whites well over three-quarters of them have not fled the country, and a substantial number appear to be willing to trade personal security for the benefit of the climate, the beaches, the bars, the upscale metropolitan white lifestyle.  It’s hardly news that in South Africa the racial question still preoccupies everyone, whites included.  But the old divisions among whites are long gone.  Now they are split between optimists who are prepared to keep their head down and take what’s going on one side and, on the other, pessimists like “sa-Ireland”, for whom getting out is only a matter of time, and the realists who will stay but try to create change.

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By David Hamilton

To attain a goal through ideology you need two things: a vision for a better future but also a vision of terrible evil if the alternative to the vision is followed.  An ideology always benefits some elite groups, and the one-world ideology benefits multi-national corporations that get the mineral rights.  The process is very corrupt: Western governments appropriate tax money paid by their citizens and transfer it to elites in the Third World for the mineral rights to go to multi-national corporations; this also frees populations to be brought to the west as cheap labour and our work to be relocated where people live on subsistence wages.

Having encouraged wage-slaves from the Third World they publicly apologise for historical slavery!

There is racial genocide of the South African Boers taking place as I write and the Western media know all about it because they have agents and reporters there, but keep it from the outside world, presumably to allow it to go on.

It follows on from what was done to French Algerians, the Belgians of Congo, and the Portuguese of Angola and Mozambique, and what is happening in Zimbabwe.  All these peoples were violently forced off lands which their ancestors had occupied for centuries. It was done with the encouragement of the US and British governments and made possible by finance taken from their own taxpayers for the purpose.  What is behind this?  It is what is now called Globalisation, which is a euphemism for the attempt to create a New World Order.

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I am not yet as convinced as Telegraph journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard that the West or, at least, the EU is entering upon some Kali Yuga style end-game of strife, discord, quarrel, and contention.  But his article in today’s Telegraph, titled Greek fighting: the eurozone’s weakest link starts to crack, makes a fair case for it.  It also provides as good an assessment of the situation in Greece as I have yet come across.

I won’t reproduce the whole piece here.  But I will copy the following passage, which concluded it:-

I am a little surpised that the riot phase of this long politico-economic drama known as EMU has kicked off so soon, and that it has done so first in Greece where the post-bubble hangover has barely begun.

The crisis is much further advanced in Spain, which is a year or two ahead of Greece in the crisis cycle.

My old job as Europe correspondent based in Brussels led me to spend a lot of time in cities that struck me as powder kegs - and indeed became powder kegs in the case of Rotterdam following the murder of Pim Fortyn, and Antwerp following the Muslim street riots (both of which I covered as a journalist). Lille, Strasbourg, Marseilles, Amsterdam, Brussels, all seemed inherently unstable, and I do not get the impression that the big cities of Spain and Italy are taking kindly to new immigrants.

The picture is going to get very ugly as Europe slides deeper into recession next year. The IMF expects Spain’s unemployment to reach 15pc. Immigrants are already being paid to leave the country. There will be riots in Spain too (there have been street skirmishes in Barcelona).

Hedge funds, bond vigilantes, and FX traders will be watching closely. In the end, a currency union is no stronger than the political will of the constituent states.

No doubt events will be ugly in Britain as well. My comments are not intended to suggest that British behaviour is better. Far from it. But I am certain that the British people still feel that the authorities who set economic policy are ultimately answerable to Parliament and to the democratic system.

Will the Greeks, the Spanish, the French feel that way about the European Central Bank and the Stability Pact when the chips are really down?

The Telegraph software appears to display only the first twenty of the comments.  There are, apparently, forty-two others on the thread that I cannot get to load on my browser.  However, those twenty are also worth a read.  There are more and more such eye-popping sentiments appearing on newspaper threads.  Dissent is becoming endemic, but it lacks focus ... political form.

What Evans-Pritchard’s piece really tells us is that we are embarking upon if not the revolutionary process exactly then, at the very least, a revolutionary preamble ... a lengthy period of reflection upon what it will really take to destroy the present system.  The “ugliness” to which Evans-Pritchard refers ... the riots, the cynicism, the street politics ... will not do it.  Its all about focus.  Without that, these convulsions will as likely operate as safety valves.

The mainstream media is devoting much front-page coverage to this weekend’s violent leftist/anarchist/student riots in Greece.  At the time of writing the headline on the Guardian website main page reads, Clashes across Greece after police kill teenager.

Thousands of youths armed with stones, batons and firebombs engaged in running battles with riot police, destroying shops, banks and cars in cities across Greece toight in a second night of rioting. The violence, the country’s worst civil disturbances in years, erupted late on Saturday when it emerged that a teenage boy had been killed by police in Exarchia, a district of central Athens long associated with lawlessness and drug abuse. Within hours, the protests had spread to Greece’s northern capital, Thessaloniki, its western port city of Patras and Chania on Crete, as protesters giving vent to a disaffection exacerbated by the economic crisis went on the rampage.

By tonight, several areas, including Athens’ main commercial strip and the streets around its fabled Polytechnic, resembled a battle zone, with glass, rubble and broken mannequins on to the sidewalks. As plumes of smoke filled the capital’s skyline, and shopkeepers rushed to clear up the debris, officials reported that more than 30 people had been injured, including police officers and firefighters and a number of passersby who had got caught up in the chaos. Looting was also rife. Local television stations showed stone-throwing youths erecting barricades in Athens as police responded by firing rounds of tear gas. The rioters in turn sought sanctuary in the grounds of the Polytechnic and Athens University, which traditionally have been off-limits to security forces since the collapse of military rule in 1974.

The chaos deepened today in both Athens and Thessaloniki as thousands of demonstrators marched through the streets shouting anti-government slogans. “Down with the murderers in uniform,” they shouted at the police.

At the foot of the report, the Guardian helpfully provides its readers with a:-

Backstory
Riots are not uncommon in Greece. Self-proclaimed groups of anarchists attack banks, high-end shops and foreign car dealerships. The November 17 parade is a particular flashpoint, when thousands mark the 1974 student uprising at the Polytechnic, an event that led to the collapse of seven years of hated military rule. Few of these attacks, however, cause injuries. Some believe Greece’s anarchist movement has its roots in the resistance to the dictatorship and the left/right divide that the period spawned. A number of anti-globalisation, anti-authoritarian, leftwing groups are also believed to have emerged at that time.

But that isn’t the back story.  It’s a classic piece of burying the bad news - bad for the liberal sensibilities of the mediocracy, that is.  Here is the real back story:-

And here:-

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Geopolitics trumps everything, they say.  That’s a pretty good rule, and pretty apposite in the case of the Russian invasion of Georgia now.  The South Ossetians and Abkhazians are getting what they want, which is freedom from ethnic Georgia.  They will doubtless feel that the military aggression they have wilfully exhibited towards the Georgians has paid off in the most handsome manner imaginable.  But they are only foils for the real objectives of the Russian campaign.  The problem is that no one knows exactly what those objectives are, and how far Russia must go to meet them.  And they ain’t saying.

The possible objectives are:-

1. To prevent Georgia from joining NATO, thereby furthering the latter’s ambition to encircle the bear.

2. To make a gesture in the direction of empire unmistakable to other Western-oriented neighbours, and also to the world community (not coincidental, it seems to me, at the moment when China is announcing to a watching world its own arrival as a major international power).

3. Possibly, if Russia seeks to install a puppet government in a defeated Georgia, to exercise control over the movement of oil and gas supplies across Georgian territory.

Meanwhile, the Western press has moved swiftly to engineer public sympathy for poor little Georgia, notwithstanding the fact that Georgia was an inexplicable aggressor (or almost inexplicable).  Judging from that Telegraph thread not many thinking folk are content to be engineered.

Here’s Stratfor’s somewhat kosher but still worthwhile, current take - not illuminating enough, but as good as I can find at present:-

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Several times over the days since his capture I’ve toyed with putting up a post about Radovan Karadži?.  The angle would have been to speculate on his trial strategy ... on whether there really is forensic evidence for the Srebrenica massacre ... on whether the wider claims of a Bosnian genocide actually stand up ... on whether the issues will remain as clear as the prosecution would want, or whether the realities of Western geopolitics will be forced into the open, to overtake the moral standard.  In a word, will Karadži? do what Miloševi? did prior to his death, and lead the Court by the evidential nose.

But the deeper I got into the researching the issues to a depth sufficient to float the intellectual boat, the more I learned how little I understood, or really have any likelihood of understanding, this extraordinarily dark and challenging event.

I did not understand the region and its peoples and their tremendously complex histories.  I did not adequately understand the Bosnian War itself.  I did not at all understand the legalities and precedent involved in bringing a case before The International Court of the Hague.  I did, I felt, understand the geopolitics of Nato in Bosnia and of the importance to the West’s interests in Serbia of bringing Karadži? and Mladi? to “justice”.  But it wasn’t enough.  Discretion won and I deleted my notes.

Karadži?, however, remains a charismatic and slippery figure, comic in his disguise but also admirable in the roguish but resourceful way he lived.  But he still has that word “Nationalism” attached to him and his, we are told, pitiless, genocidal deeds.  For us it is an unjust attachment because Nationalism is not that, but is something born of love.  Still, those who strive to darken Europe at dawn don’t baulk at such distinctions nor hesitate to use the spectre of Karadži? the War Criminal for their purposes.

We are bound to respond in some way, and this post - a not-post, really - must suffice.  Feel free to broach the issue however you please.

A translation by Fred Scrooby of an article by Prof Robert Steuckers which places the the Serbs’ struggle against national fragmentation in its wider European historical context.

Reflections on Kosovo’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence

The question arises as to whether or not to recognize Kosovo’s independence.  To put it differently:  Can one recognize the right of a population represented by a provincial parliament to declare its independence if most of its representatives are in favor of such a step?

Two principles are involved in this inquiry:

1) The right of peoples to arrange their own affairs, the full right of identity, based on objective criteria and concrete foundations (ethnic, linguistic, historical, etc.), the right of peoples to furnish themselves with their own system of political representation within a given spatio-temporal framework, whether within the framework of a multi-ethnic state (as in the Swiss model) or within a state which envisions a more or less extensive federalism based on alternative models, such as German federalism or the country of autonomous communities that is present-day Spain.  Does this right to autonomy confer the right to independence?  As regards the European context, this question can be debated.

2) The right of European peoples to refuse any Balkanization which weakens the continent as a whole, creating in its midst conflicts which can be exploited by third-party powers foreign to the European continent (in the terminology of Carl Schmitt, “territorially-alien powers” – raumfremde Mächte). 

The first of these principles is a principle of rights; the second, of geopolitics.  Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence presents a contradiction:  because it is unilateral it pits rights against geopolitics, whereas in Europe rights and geopolitics aren’t supposed to be at odds but are supposed to form, together, an indissoluble unit.  Rights should help consolidate the territorial whole, barring the door to all efforts at disruption, and not acquiesce in actions having weakening and fragmentation as their effects.

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