Majorityrights News > Category: World Affairs

Road-blocks as party-political publicity

Is the antithesis of globalism’s totalistic vision of Man really only reaction to specific aspects of the globalist programme?  Can the latter ever be enough?

This is the question which lies ahead if and when that reaction gains momentum across the West (or, most likely, in those parts of it which employ some form of electoral proportional representation).  It is the question on which the future of nationalism and of the West would then depend.  But for now, in the wake of the Farmer-Citizen movement [BoerBurgerBeweging or BBB] showing in last Wednesday’s election to the Dutch Senate, the answer is the usual: anything’s better than nothing.  Just be grateful for what few scraps fall from history’s table, it says.

Put most directly, the BBB’s scraps testify to a deep-rooted and emerging conflict between the shameless careerists of the Dutch political machine and the traditionalist spirit of rural Holland.  Electorally, that conflict is pitting the urban liberal elites and the strangulated postmoderns who are the victims of green propaganda against hitherto betrayed and voiceless conservatives.  It sounds revolutionary, but civic nationalist populism is never that.

As of this moment, the external mainstream media have yet to explain that the people over whom the elite’s environmentalism and progressivism ride still retain the power to vote. The BBC reported the election with scarcely a word about the underlying cause:

A farmers’ party has stunned Dutch politics, and is set to be the biggest party in the upper house of parliament after provincial elections.

The Farmer-Citizen movement was only set up in 2019 in the wake of widespread farmers’ protests.

But with most votes counted they are due to win 15 of the Senate’s seats with almost 20% of the vote.

“This isn’t normal, but actually it is! It’s all normal citizens who voted,” said leader Caroline van der Plas.

The BBB aims to fight government plans to slash nitrogen emissions harmful to biodiversity by dramatically reducing livestock numbers and buying out thousands of farms.

But its appeal has spread rapidly beyond its rural heartland, on a populist platform that represents traditional, conservative Dutch social and moral values.

Shocked by the scale of their success, Ms van der Plas told supporters that voters normally stayed at home if they lost faith in politics: “But today people have shown they can’t stay at home any longer. We won’t be ignored any more.”

A left-wing Green-Labour alliance is also on course to win 15 Senate seats, while Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s four-party coalition is poised to fall back to 24 - down eight seats.

Turnout in Wednesday’s vote, estimated at 57.5%, was the highest for years.

For nationalists the election was double-edged.  Nowhere in the West can nationalism both speak its own truths and trim to accommodate mainstream sensibilities.  Where it gains something by the latter it seems destined to lose it when a civic nationalist party comes along.

Accordingly, the growth in BBB’s vote-share has came at a cost to Thierry Baudet’s divided and weakened Forum for Democracy (FvD), which won nearly 15% of the vote in 2019 provincial elections, but collapsed to 3% this time.  The concern, therefore, is that BBB is not expanding into the conservative vote-share as much as it might seem, but hoovering up the votes of the existing dissenters on the basis of another “new way forward”.  Certainly, BBB did not just focus on Mark Rutte’s environmental extremism in the wake of the farmers protests.  It presented itself as a dog-whistle right-wing populist party which was somewhat critical of the EU, likewise critical of immigration, and in favour of banning burkas for Muslims.

In any case, the Re-Set is real and oncoming.  In Holland and, via Reform, in the UK civic nationalism seems set to carry the dissenter’s torch.  One way or another the question of its sufficiency will be answered.

The following quotes are from an interesting (paywalled) article at the Telegraph, and speak to the impact of Putin’s failure in Ukraine and the resurgence of Western confidence.

China has extended the olive branch to Western democracies and global capitalists alike, promising a new era of detente after the coercive “wolf warrior” diplomacy of the last five years.

Vice-premier Liu He, the economic plenipotentiary of Xi Jinping’s China, told a gathering of business leaders and ministers in Davos that China is back inside the tent and eager to restore the money-making bonhomie of the golden years. 

“We must let the market play the fundamental role in the allocation of resources, and let the government play a better role. Some people say China will go for the planned economy. That’s by no means possible,” he said.

“All-round opening-up is the basis of state policy and the key driver of economic progress. China’s national reality dictates that opening up to the world is a must, not an expediency. We must open up wider and make it work better,” he told the World Economic Forum ...

It is a subtle way of telling the world that the neo-Maoist fever of Xi Jinping’s second term has subsided since the 20th Party Congress in October. Xi’s third term is going to be a giant pivot back to international harmony.

China is calling off its ruinous assault on technology companies – the country’s most dynamic entrepreneurs, but also the regime’s most powerful political foes ...

Vice-premier Liu He’s conciliatory pitch is also a signal that China will return to its longstanding position as a stakeholder of the existing Davosian global order rather than a revisionist power determined to overthrow it.

“We need to uphold an effective international economic order. We have to abandon the cold war mentality,” he said, pledging a push for “economic re-globalisation”. There was not a whiff of criticism of the US or the West. No speech of this kind has been delivered by a top Chinese leader for years ...

It goes well beyond the first signs of a tentative thaw at a US-China summit late last year, suggesting that China’s 20th Party Congress marked a watershed moment in Chinese strategic thinking. Whether it is authentic or tactical remains to be seen.

In a sense, the new policy is a recognition by the Communist Party that the democracies are not as weak as they looked a year or two ago. The West still controls the machinery of global finance, technology transfer, and maritime trade. The war in Ukraine has revealed that it can be remarkably unified and has a backbone of steel when seriously provoked.

Xi’s profession of friendship “without limits” for Vladimir Putin is surely an embarrassment he would rather forget – though there are some advantages for Beijing in a dependent Russia with nowhere else to turn. Russia’s military has been exposed as a paper tiger. Its value as an ally is enormously degraded.

Above all, Xi Jinping discovered that the US controls the global supply of advanced semiconductor chips, the primary fuel of the 21st century technological economy.

Without that you are nothing. China’s repeated efforts to close the chip gap have all faltered, and the latest has just been abandoned due to prohibitive costs ...

Deng Xiaoping long pursued a policy of “bide your time and hide your strength”. When Xi Jinping abandoned this restraint and switched suddenly to a posture of impatient menace he revealed what China might be like as the global hegemon.

This reached its apotheosis in pandemic triumphalism. It was not an attractive spectacle. Switching back even more suddenly to global happy talk will be a hard sell.

As to the Western feeling about Xi’s “impatience”, compare the above with the following boilerplate from the Daily Mail, published on 19th October last year:

Get ready for China ‘on steroids’: Xi Jinping will complete his totalitarian spy-state, take on the US and aim to break Western world order if he is given historic third term as leader, experts predict
● Xi Jinping set to become Chinese leader for third term this week, the first since Mao to rule for so long.
● Experts predict he will use term to complete ‘totalitarian’ spy-state using technology to repress all opposition.
● Xi will also take aggressive stance with the West and try to put China on equal footing with the US, they added.
● Ultimate aim is to break Western world order and establish another system with China at the centre, they said.

My immediate take on the change of strategy?  This pivot is almost certainly the result of Putin’s big gambit in Ukraine and the surprise of the West’s unified response to it, allied to the (for Beijing) straitening success of the Western economies in surviving Putin’s energy war.  Since the party’s 20th conference last October, when the threat to Taiwan was at its height, there appears to have been a decision that Putin has failed and there are costs to forging ahead with that “unlimited friendship” which a pragmatic Chinese leadership is unwilling to pay.  Probably at this time.  Probably because formal international support elsewhere for Putin is limited to Iran, North Korea and some fly-blown African place.  Support for Glazyev’s dollar reserve replacement is strong across the southern hemisphere, and probably now includes Lula’s Brazil in addition to Saudi.  But then the Western elites are not at all hostile to it, either.  Quite the contrary.  So Beijing is returning to geo-economics, because it is a stronger suite to play.  I don’t think that the Middle Kingdom goal has or will be dropped.  But the Chinese are good at patience.

Next week, as Breitbart has reminded us, the global movers and shakers will gather at Davos for the 53rd annual meeting of the World Economic Forum.  One quite expects that green virtues will be signalled as never before.  But what was not expected was a very firm contrary statement yesterday from US Federal Reserve chairman, Jerome Powell:

Central banks risk undermining independence by wading into social issues and seeking to tackle climate change, the head of the US Federal Reserve has warned.

Jerome Powell said it was essential that institutions “resist the temptation” to wade into “social issues” that go beyond their remit.

... Mr Powell singled out climate change as an “inappropriate” topic for unelected central bankers to address.

He told the audience in Stockholm: “We should stick to our knitting and not wander off to pursue perceived social benefits that are not tightly linked to our statutory goals.

“We [Federal Reserve] are not and we will not be a climate policymaker.

“Taking on new goals, however worthy, without a clear statutory mandated would undermine the case for our independence.”

Powell is a registered Republican, appointed in 2018 by Donald Trump.  But it is difficult to see Powell’s statement as motivated by anything but the strict fiduciary duty of a financial servant of the American people, and difficult to see strict fiduciary duty as in any way consonant with the new global order which the Washington Establishment and, indeed, the entire Western Establishment is striving to bring into being.  I would like to be able to link this new regard for staying on the financial reservation to the defence of Western national interests which informs support for Ukraine.  But I can’t see the link, and Western national interests are absolutely not on the globalist play-list.

So, a simple question: why is Powell moving away from the Davos agenda?

I didn’t even know that the old Cold War CIA front Radio Free Europe was still active until I came across an interview at its site with a Washington analyst named George Barros.  He said everything that I have been picking up elsewhere about the new generation warfare that Ukraine is developing to frustrate, starve of materiel, and drive out the Russian invader in the south of the country.  The interview is beneath the fold.

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A Yanasa TV video setting out the prospects for extremely serious global food shortages from 2023.  The moral: grow what you can, if you can.

Hat-tip to Wandervogel, commenter at The Current Thing.

The German Chancellor at the delayed Davos shindig, as reported by the DT:

Olaf Scholz has warned that the era of globalisation that powered the German economic miracle is “coming to an inevitable end” after Vladimir Putin’s “thunderbolt”.

The German Chancellor admitted that Europe’s largest economy faces a “very special challenge” as the industrial powerhouse is hit by soaring energy prices.

Mr Scholz launched a defence of globalisation at the World Economic Forum in Davos but admitted that its era is drawing to a close as inflation rises.

He said: “We are experiencing a watershed; history is at a turning point.”

Germany’s huge manufacturing base has benefited from an interconnected world and cheap energy from Russia. However, the war in Ukraine and trade chaos caused by Covid has forced governments and businesses to rethink supply chains and energy security.

Mr Scholz, the only G7 leader to speak at Davos this year, said that Europe had been struck by a “thunderbolt” from the war in Ukraine and a new “multipolar world” is emerging.

He said: “The special phase of globalisation we have experienced in North America and Europe during the last 30 years, with reliable growth, a high level of added value and low inflation is coming to an inevitable end.

“One reason for this is that the low cost producers of the global south are gradually becoming thriving economies with their own demand, which aspire to the same level of prosperity as we have.

He admitted that globalisation had created losers and said it needs to become more “intelligent”.

This is, actually, big news, not because of the scramble to replace Russian gas and oil or because of the other scramble to keep to the international climate dictates.  No, globalisation is the key condition in which Western globalism in its present technocratic form can function.  A contraction to it implies a contraction to Western globalism.  How that will play out is far too early to say.  But such a vast correction cannot be accommodated by the current Davos model.

It is headlined What Ukrainians think about the war, Putin, Russia, NATO, Europe – and Britain. A remarkable poll from Kyiv., and it is revealing.  In the middle of all the pain and chaos of war, the pollster Lord Ashcroft has succeeded in sounding out the thoughts of Kievans.  The results challenge those in the West who don’t much concern themselves with the rights and interests of the folk who actually live under the missiles, shells and bombs, never mind their views.  It is, you seem, just too tempting to attack the neocons and usual suspects in “the West” who, it is said, left Putin no alternative but to launch a full scale war against a peaceful people.

From ConHome’s article:

Ukrainians want to stay and fight

Only 11 per cent of Ukrainians agreed “if I could leave Ukraine safely tomorrow for another country I would.” Nearly seven in 10 (69 per cent) strongly disagreed. Only one in 20 (five per cent) of those aged 65 or over said they would leave if they could.

Indeed, 67 per cent said they would be willing to take up arms to defend the country against Russian troops, with a further seven per cent saying they were already doing so. 85 per cent of men and 63 per cent of women said they had already taken up arms or were willing to do so.

Ninety-three per cent said they were willing to help Ukrainian troops in other ways, such as providing shelter, food or clothing, or were already doing so.

Ninety-two per cent said they had a favourable view of President Zelensky, including 66 per cent whose view was very favourable.

Ukrainians do not expect a long war

More than half (56 per cent) of Ukrainians said they expected the conflict to be over by the end of March, with a further 14 per cent expecting it to last up to three months. Fewer than one in ten (nine per cent) said they thought it would last longer than six months. Women and younger people were more optimistic about an early end to military action.

No part of Ukraine is part of Russia – but Ukrainians don’t see Russians as the enemy.

98 per cent of Ukrainians – including 82 per cent of those of Russian ethnicity – said they did not believe that any part of Ukraine was rightfully part of Russia.

While 97 per cent had an unfavourable view of Vladimir Putin and 94 per cent had an unfavourable view of the Russian military (including only 82 per cent saying “very unfavourable”; 12 per cent generously said their view of Russian forces was only “somewhat unfavourable”), Ukrainians see Russians themselves in a slightly different light.

Only 62 per cent said they had a very unfavourable view of the Russian people, with a further 19 per cent saying it was somewhat unfavourable. Fourteen per cent had a somewhat or very favourable view of the Russian people.

Ukrainians consider their future to be closer to Europe

Nearly 19 in 20 Ukrainians (93 per cent) said they considered their country’s future to be closer to Europe than to Russia. This included 78 per cent of respondents of Russian ethnicity, and 84 per cent of those in the east of the country closest to the Russian border.

Desmond Tutu, Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, has died aged 90.  A Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1984, never an ANC member and in later years not even an ANC voter, he was much despaired by post-Apartheid South Africa’s violence and political corruption.  But he was an idealist, not a realist.  The term “rainbow nation” was his invention.  He evidently expected his country to develop into some world-exemplar of Christian tolerance and racial justice.

So here is the question which Desmond Tutu could not confront.  One might call it the African Question. It’s a bit long!

As enslaving another people ... any people ... is manifestly wrong, and segregation by law is not tolerated by liberals because its practise inevitably leaves the Africans holding the shitty and humiliating end of the socio-economic stick (and by Jews because it doesn’t produce the deracinated, amorphous gentile of the End Time), and if the only permitted basis on which society may be constructed is panmixia and equality in all things while, at the same time, living with the African sociobiology is simply not tolerable for other races, including Europeans, then how but by complete separation is any people to live a fitting and properly satisfying life?

Unfortunately, Europeans in southern Africa (and in America too) wanted the whole land. The Dutch-Flemish wanted to settle the land while the British wanted control of its economic resources - to which end the Raj model couldn’t be made to work owing to the nature of African tribal life.  The military incapacity of Africans likewise invited a full colonisation approach, and the forcing of them into an effective slave-labour status.  It is easy say with hindsight that this was a short-sighted policy led by ambition and greed, which were just the standards of the time.  But such it was and, inevitably, that required the adoption of sub-optimal control measures which, much later, could not indefinitely withstand the pressure from reformists within and grandstanding political elites without. 

Still, it was never a European land.  Africa is not a European continent.  Today, we hold this to be true of our continent, which is for us natives and our children alone, so we must be consistent and say the same of every other native people.  Only total separation on the land can deliver a sustaining settlement.

As for Bishop Desmond, he did right by his people, which we, as nationalists, cannot criticise.