Majorityrights Central > Category: World Affairs

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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Welf Herfurth’s New Right Australia New Zealand blog is hosting it’s first offering from Troy Southgate.  His subject is the meaning of Putin’s Russia, and its function in the emergence of a new geopolitical dispensation.  Obviously, this is a weighty subject, and Troy has only danced lightly across the surface of it.  He offers no closing prediction, except to note that in the modern context expediency will restrain geopolitical ambition.  That’s true, but one might equally assert that stability is not independent of the second law of thermodoynamics, and things change all the time.

GW

RUSSIA IN 2008: THOUGHTS ON HEGELIAN GEOPOLITICS

by Troy Southgate

Despite the negative image of Russia that is currently being portrayed in the media, it seems pretty feasible that Putin - possibly since his last meeting with Bush in 2007 - was eventually persuaded, albeit covertly, to capitulate to Western demands.

That he’s a loyal friend of Russia’s capitalist ruling class is not even up for debate, even if some people in Right-wing circles do seem to respect him for ousting the Jewish oligarchs several years ago. In reality, however, Russian capitalism is no better than its Jewish-dominated counterpart and Putin’s so-called ‘successor’, Dmitry Medvedev, is little more than a puppet of the same socio-economic regime.

But when you stop to think about the vilification of Russia over the last few months, especially with the well-publicised Litvinenko affair, the systematic construction of what many people are interpreting as a ‘new Cold War’ is, in a sense, rather Hegelian. The reason being, that contradiction, of course, eventually leads to reconciliation and some commentators believe that the thesis-antithesis-synthesis formula is better expressed in the dictum: ‘problem-alternative-solution’.

Perhaps this potential return to a bi-polar world is a shift beyond Samuel Huntingdon’s ‘Clash of Civilisations’ strategy in which there is merely one superpower (United States) fighting against an imagined or manufactured opponent (Islam)? Let’s think seriously for a moment about the relationship between the West and Russia in both a Hegelian (after Fichte) and a geopolitical context:

* thesis or intellectual proposition (Western capitalism)
* antithesis or negation of the proposition (Soviet communism)
* synthesis or reconciliation (a gradual alliance, through perestroika, between the two)
* presentation of a new antithesis (Cold War 2, Russia as the ‘new’ bogeyman)

... and so it goes on ...

Russia has not exactly presented a new antithesis in an ideological sense as Soviet Communism claimed to do, of course, and it was Hegel’s view that no new antithesis can ever arise due to the eventual disappearance of extreme ideological and philosophical positions, but this rather idealistic perspective does not seem to take into consideration the fact that convenience will often outweigh genuine revolutionary fervour. It remains to be seen where Islam will fit into all this.

Food for thought.

Two nights of riots  and counting:-

Thirty police officers have been injured in a second night of violence between youths and officers in the flashpoint suburb of Villiers-le-Bel in Paris.

About 160 riot police came under attack in the notoriously crime-ridden district, 20 miles north of the centre of the French capital.

The violence was sparked on Sunday by the deaths of two young boys, who were killed when their moped collided with a police car.

The boys who died were said by locals to be “aged between 12 and 13”.

Police insisted that their car had not been chasing the boys when the crash occurred soon after dusk.

Two years ago just such an event triggered 20 nights of rioting, and accounted for almost 9,000 torched vehicles and 2,888 arrests.  A state of emergency was declared.  The French media stopped reporting the incidence of burned cars for fear of giving succour to Le Front National.  And in April of this year Nicolas Sarkozy got himself elected, in part by stealing the FN’s clothes.

Now there’s no incentive for Sarko the American to play to white France.  He’ll look to avoid inflaming the situation, and distance himself from it if the unrest continues.