[Majorityrights News] Trump will ‘arm Ukraine to the teeth’ if Putin won’t negotiate ceasefire Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 12 November 2024 16:20.
[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan called Paul Volcker “the most effective chairman in the history of the Federal Reserve.” But while Volcker, who passed away Dec. 8 at age 92, probably did have the greatest historical impact of any Fed chairman, his legacy is, at best, controversial.
Paul Volcker’s Long Shadow
“He restored credibility to the Federal Reserve at a time it had been greatly diminished,” wrote his biographer, William Silber. Volcker’s policies led to what was called “the New Keynesian revolution,” putting the Fed in charge of controlling the amount of money available to consumers and businesses by manipulating the federal funds rate (the interest rate at which banks borrow from each other). All this was because Volcker’s “shock therapy” of the early 1980s – raising the federal funds rate to an unheard of 20% – was credited with reversing the stagflation of the 1970s. But did it? Or was something else going on?
Less discussed was Volcker’s role at the behest of President Richard Nixon in taking the dollar off the gold standard, which he called “the single most important event of his career.” He evidently intended for another form of stable exchange system to replace the Bretton Woods system it destroyed, but that did not happen. Instead, freeing the dollar from gold unleashed an unaccountable central banking system that went wild printing money for the benefit of private Wall Street and London financial interests.
The power to create money can be a good and necessary tool in the hands of benevolent leaders working on behalf of the people and the economy. But like with the Sorcerer’s Apprentice in Disney’s “Fantasia,” if it falls in the wrong hands, it can wreak havoc on the world. Unfortunately for Volcker’s legacy and the well-being of the rest of us, his signature policies led to the devastation of the American working class in the 1980s and ultimately set the stage for the 2008 global financial crisis.
The Official Story and Where It Breaks Down
According to a Dec. 9 obituary in The Washington Post:
Mr. Volcker’s greatest historical mark was in eight years as Fed chairman. When he took the reins of the central bank, the nation was mired in a decade-long period of rapidly rising prices and weak economic growth. Mr. Volcker, overcoming the objections of many of his colleagues, raised interest rates to an unprecedented 20%, drastically reducing the supply of money and credit.
The Post acknowledges that the effect on the economy was devastating, triggering what was then the deepest economic downturn since the Depression of the 1930s, driving thousands of businesses and farms to bankruptcy and propelling the unemployment rate past 10%:
Mr. Volcker was pilloried by industry, labor unions and lawmakers of all ideological stripes. He took the abuse, convinced that this shock therapy would finally break Americans’ expectations that prices would forever rise rapidly and that the result would be a stronger economy over the longer run.
Posted by DanielS on Friday, 29 November 2019 18:16.
Negotiating Moral Orders, European Post Modernity and DNA Nations
Daniel Sienkiewicz
In this stream, I will indulge in a literal stream of consciousness in order to cover the platform of European peoples advocacy that I have cultivated over the years, not particularly concerned with order of the material, as it is of a complete enough system that cris-crossing it from various angles as they emerge to my consciousness will invariably flesh out its stable reference points to provide understanding for those who can be reasoned with.
A more formal presentation can wait for another time.
I do not want to undertake a formal presentation or a pretext of rigorously ordered priority of discussion at this point as that will delay the unfolding and imparting of ideas that already have verifiable systemic coherence beneath and important messages thereby, especially for persons concerned for the defense and well being of European peoples.
...
Comments:
1) I’ll start to note some things that I’d forgotten to mention, one of them being Heidegger’s attendance to our “emergent qualities” - as individuals (and as a genetic group, by inference); which is also an anti Cartesian notion, but looked at from this angle not so much a concern for taking us out of Cartesian estrangement by directing us into interaction through Dasein (there being) but rather an emphasis on resisting Cartesian estrangement by holding fast to our inborn trajectory and following its teleological path for us rather than getting drawn into the inauthentic calling from our path by “the they” ...it would be a correction thus, to an over emphasis on social concern to the detriment of our inherited biological nature. I must credit Guessedworker for taking me to task and holding me to proper account to Heidegger’s concern for emergentism.
2) The next thing that I believe that I forgot to mention - and when you forget something in a situation like this, it tends to be something that you take for granted because its so obviously important - is the marketing campaign circa 2008 that was the Alt Right and Alt lite, as a Gottfried/Regnery NPI Spencer loosely formed political perspective/ angle / agenda - Spencer being a useful right wing elitist reactionary to front the re-branding of “Paleoconservatism”, a Paleoconservatism 2.0, to direct not just a big tent but a tent of tents (a tentosphere) of broader based and younger reactionaries against political correctness (Frankfurt School) whose commonality was some kind of anti-social stigma.
The father of Paleoconservatism was Frank Meyer, a Jewish man, originally a Marxist, whose “paleoconservative concept” was “fusionism”, a fusion of ideas that don’t really go together, that is to say enlightenment/modernist objectivism and Judeo/Christianity. Despite the fact that these ideas don’t really go together, it was a tension of conflicting concerns that was familiar to mainstream America from the onset of the United States and was seen as a life raft for those with conservative values. Frank Meyer became the mentor of sorts to President Ronald Reagan, the first prominent paleo-con, who was joined in this ideology by Pat Buchanan, Paul Gottfried, Joe Sobran and Sam Francis.
By the 1990’s this opportunistic controlled opposition that was Paleoconservatism was out maneuvered by the other side of controlled opposition that is the Neoconservates, to make way for Israeli operation clean break to secure the realm around Israel using American military might - to create Israel friendly regimes starting with ousting Saddam Hussein in Iraq. But I digress.
By 2008 when objectivist “invisible hand” economic program by Randian devote and Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan had run the boom bust cycle to the greatest bust (theft) ever with the mortage and securities meltdown, that was when Gottfried, Horowitz et al recognized a dangerous intersectionality with the Cultural Marxism that their tribesman had been promoting through academia: They needed to make sure that European peoples didn’t make proper use of social organizing strategies via properly understood post modern and leftist socially conscientious ideas to organize as a European ethnonational left, to unionize as a bounded discreet people (forming in and out groups, the opposite of the promoted confusion of left/liberalism, and rather to conserve and and hold accountable what is within the “union”) who would then, in holding members to account, look at elites and see who was betraying them by opening their would be union bounds to scabbery (so to speak) and they would see YKW in tandem with right wing sell outs, encouraged to a no account objectivism, socially unconscientious ‘that’s just the way it is-ness’, along with liberals, incentivized in much the same way to take license to betray “union”, conservative interests, on the basis of no account pseudo objectivist, “that’s just the way it isness.”
As YKW had greater hegemony, power and influence than ever with the 2008 melt down/theft, they sought to get European reactionaries to not only identify as right, far right objectivist Cartesian reactionaries as always, but to identify as an Alternative Right, which would specialize in criticizing “THE Left”, and a characterology thereof (a character with unnatural concepts, such as the call for universal equality that it seeks to apply to nature) that is to say, to chase after the red capes of distorted and just out right anti European political correctness as it had been marshaled to this intersection by YKW interests. - Oh, “those social justice warriors” how unrealistic, we don’t want any of that social justice now that the YKW, right wing sell outs and licentious liberals have more unjust and destructive power and influence than ever!
3) Another red cape (straw man misrepresentation of a good, social organization idea for us to chase after antagonistically, against our own organizational, homeostatic interests) that I’d forgotten to mention in this discussion, is false polemic against the concept of social justice and equality with a disingenuous rebut in the form of a misrepresentative concept of “human bio diversity”, misrepresented as a lateral matter of I.Q. (how convenient for elite betrayal, just the way it is) as opposed to human bio diversity being a horizontal matter of qualitative niche evolutionary differences that ought to be respected as ecologically fitting circumstances and systems, accountable as such, and not subject to false comparisons - rather, by contrast, utilizing the concept of commensurate and incommensurate paradigms, niches that are to be respected within a paradigm as integral part of the system, not to be disparaged as unequal by false comparison on an identical functional criteria. The refrain of “incommensurabilty” would also apply between peoples/paradigms in order to show respect for niche evolutionary differences of peoples, avoiding hubris and antagonism of false comparisons.
4) Yin Yang Scorpion
Sorry I fell asleep during the last part of the stream. It was 3:30 am where I am. Very interesting stream.
Reply from Daniel Sienkiewicz
No Problem Yin Yang ) Glad you found it interesting.
5) Another paradoxic rule of modernity’s performance requirement to value the new: “be different so that you can fit in.”
6) I also should have done a better job of answering Citizen Reporter’s request to clarify what is meant by hermeneutics. It is not merely narrative form, but an interactively engaged process of inquiry which allows participants to move back and forth from broad, more imaginative, historical and systemic perspectives - not only to generate enjoyable, useful and meaningful narrative, but also to generate hypotheses which may then be moved by the circulating process of hermeneutics to more rigorous and focused verification as need be. ..but as a process of inquiry, it allows one to re engage dasein from the Cartesian estrangement.
“I just want to give you a sense for what liberalism is. The United States is a thoroughly liberal country. It is a liberal democracy. Both Republicans, who we sometimes refer to as conservatives, are liberals and Democrats are liberals. I’m using the term liberal in the John Lockean sense of the term.
The Unites States was born as a liberal democracy. The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution, The Bill of Rights, these are thoroughly liberal documents.”
We are a liberal people, okay? But what exactly does that mean? It’s very important that you understand it, because you have to understand what liberalism is to understand liberal hegemony and what went wrong. Then, it’s very important to understand what nationalism is.
John’s argument is very simple here.
Nationalism is the most powerful ideology on the planet.
And in a contest between liberalism and nationalism, nationalism wins every time.
And what I want to do is explain to you what liberalism is, what nationalism is, and why nationalism defeats liberalism. Then what I want to do is talk about what liberal hegemony is. What does it mean to say that The Unites States is interested in remaking the world in its own image? So, I’ll describe that. Then I want to talk about why we pursued liberal hegemony.
...of course I tipped you off by telling you that The United States is a thoroughly liberal country, but there’s more to the story.
Then I want to tell you what our track record is. I want to describe our failures ...in the Middle-East, with regard to NATO expansion, and Russia, and with regard to engagement in China. Lets talk about the evidence that we goofed.
Then I want to talk about why liberal hegemony fails, and this, again, is basically as story about nationalism and realism trumping liberalism. And then I want to make the case for restraint, what I think is a wise foreign policy, okay?
Let me start with what is liberalism…
There are two bedrock assumptions that underpin liberalism:
One is, that it is individualistic at its core.
And number two is that there are real limits to what we can do with our critical faculties.
...to reach agreements about first principles or questions about the good life.
And what exactly am I saying?
You have to decide, when you think about politics, whether you think human beings are first and foremost individuals who form social contracts or if you think that human beings are fundamentally social animals, who carve-out room for their individualism.
Right? This is very very important to think about alright?
Liberalism is all about individualism. Liberal theorists are known as social contract theorists because they believe that individuals come together and form social contracts, so the focus is on the individual.
The assumption underpinning liberalism is not that human beings are social animals from the get-go.
That’s the first point.
The second point is that liberalism assumes that we cannot use our critical faculties - we cannot use reason to come up with truth about first principles (think about issues like abortion, affirmative action - you cannot get universal agreement on those issues, right?). And I’ll talk about this more as we go along.
But the roots of liberalism are traced-back, in my opinion, to the liberal wars of Britain between Catholics and Protestants. And the fact is that you cannot use your critical faculties to determine whether Catholicism is a superior religion to Protestantism or vice a versa, or whether atheism is superior to both of them ..or Judaism or Islam is superior to Catholicism and Protestantism, Who knows? Right? You just can’t reach agreement. You just can’t reach agreement. There are real limits to what we can do with our critical faculties, okay?
So these are the two bedrock assumptions: One, you focus on the individual, and number two, you accept the fact that you can’t reach universal agreement.
Now, central question - how should politics be arranged to deal with this potential for violence?
And you say to yourself, what does he mean, potential for violence?
The fact is that Catholics and Protestants were killing each other in huge numbers, not only in Britain, but all over Europe. People today, Shias and Sunnis, kill each other, because they can’t agree on whether Shi ism or Sunnism is the correct interpretation of Islam ..or communists versus liberals, people can’t agree on first principles. And when they can’t agree on first principles, if they feel really strongly about them, there is potential for violence.
So, when you have all these individuals running around, who, don’t agree, they may agree in some cases but don’t universally agree, there’s tremendous potential for violence.
So, liberalism is basically an ideology that’s based on conflict, and the question is, how do you solve that conflict?
There’s a three part solution:
And this should be dear to all of your hearts.
The first is, you focus on individual rights. Remember, the importance of the individual. You know The Declaration of Independence, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” - those are natural rights, those are inalienable rights.
This means that every person on the planet has a particular set of rights, sometimes defined as freedoms. This is to say, you, if you want to be a Protestant, have the right to practice that religion, and if I want to be a Catholic, I have the freedom, I have the right to be a Catholic.
The name of the game is to recognize that everybody has these freedoms to choose. This makes perfect sense when you think about Catholics killing Protestants, right? Or Jews killing Muslims or whatever group you want, atheists killing believers, communists killing whatever, right?
The point is, you want to focus on the individual and let the individual choose for him or herself what kind of life they want to lead. You want to let them lead, as much as possible, their version of the good life. And, very important, every person on the planet has that right, and let me get ahead of myself here, just put this seed in your brain.
If you focus on individualism and inalienable rights, you go almost automatically from an individualistic ideology to a universalistic ideology, right? Because again, you’re focusing on the individual, you’re saying every individual has a set of rights, every individual on the planet. And that individualistic ideology becomes a universalistic ideology. But we’re talking about the individual here.
The second is, you purvey the norm of tolerance. We talk about tolerance all the time. Universities are really big on tolerance. We’re supposed to tolerate opinions that we don’t like. You bring in speakers, or you allow speakers to come in who say things that you find reprehensible, right? Tolerance really matters.
But the fact is that tolerance only takes you so far. because you’re dealing with people who sometimes are so committed to their beliefs. Somebody who believes that abortion is murder is willing to murder a doctor who practices abortion, alright?
So, you need a state, that’s the third element of the equation.
You need a state that’s effectively a night watchman. That makes sure that those people over there who want to live as Protestants don’t attack those people who want to live as Catholics and vice versa.
This is the liberal solution.
This is what America is all about.
Individualism - we talk about it all the time. We talk about rights, everybody has rights. My kids, over the years, have always reminded me when I tell them that they have to do X, Y and Z that they have rights and I cannot interfere with their rights, right? It’s the way we’re educated from the get go and of course, we’re a remarkably tolerant people as societies go. Not completely, but that’s, of course, why we have a state, right?
You’ve got to have a police force, you’ve got to have a system of courts, right?
So, that’s what liberalism is all about, right? Liberalism focuses on the individual, purveys the norm of tolerance and accepts the fact that you need a nightwatchman state.
Now, let’s talk about nationalism. Different animal…
Nationalism is based on the assumption that human beings are social animals.
We are born and heavily socialized into tribes.
We are not born in the state of nature.
We are not individuals, born and left alone in the woods.
We are born into groups. We are very tribal.
So, you see in terms of starting assumptions, or bedrock assumptions, what underpins nationalism, what underpins liberalism, very very different.
And individualism takes a back seat to group loyalty, right?
Somebody around the world kills an American, ISIS kills an American, it’s fundamentally different than killing a Saudi, or killing a Brit, because you’re killing one of us. This is the tribe, right? You’re an American. Americans look out for other Americans.
We are social animals from the get-go.
And aside from the family, the most important group, remember I said that you are born into and heavily socialized into particular groups ...tutting aside the family, the most important group in today’s world, is the nation (I’ll say more about that in a second).
What’s nationalism?
Here’s my simple definition:
It’s a set of political beliefs which holds that a nation, a nation, a body of individuals with characteristics that purportedly distinguish them from other groups, should have their own state. Think of the word nation-state.
Nation-state. Nation-state embodies what nationalism is all about. It says the world is divided up into all these tribes called nations and each each one of them wants its own state.
If you think about the world today, just look at a map of the world today, it is completely covered with nation-states. Nothing but nation-states.
If you went back to 1450 and looked at a map of Europe, there isn’t even a single state on that map. Over time, the growth of the state, and then the growth of the nation-state, you move to a world that is filled with nothing but nation-states. Look at the Palestinians and Israelis. The Jews who believe in Zionism, what is Zionism all about? It’s all about having your own Jewish state. Theodore Herzel, who is the father of Zionism, his most famous book is called, The Jewish State, Jewish nation-state.
What do the Palestinians want? Two state solution? Palestinians want their own state. Palestinians as a nation, want their own state.
The planet is filled with nations, many of which have their own state, almost all of which want their own state, nation-state, right?
That’s what nationalism is all about.
Take it a step further. Nations place a enormous importance on sovereignty, or self-determination, which is why they want their own state.
The Palestinians don’t want the Israelis deciding what their politics should look like. Palestinians want their own state. Jews want their own state.
Germans want their own state.
Americans want their own state.
..because they believe in sovereignty.
[...]
Liberal hegemony is based on intolerance. It says that everybody has to be liberal…
[...]
Mearsheimer argues against trying to impose liberal democracy, as it is necessarily a failed foreign policy against staunch nationalism, but he defends “liberal democracy” as a good way of life for The US.
However, he does not observe that The U.S. has failed democratic principle in important ways - notably in the open border/ opening of group boundaries policies in exploit of the “civic nationalist” concept that his YKW people have perpetrated through power niches in cahoots with liberals/right wingers to overturn democratic will (for closed borders) ..open borders and boundaries, weakening The United States nationhood and putting The U.S. effectively, on a trajectory of non-nationhood.
Note Mearsheimer’s use of the pejorative word “purportedly” when discussing nationalist claims to distinguish their people in ways (e.g., important biological differences) requiring a nation-state to protect their differences; i.e., that they are only “purportedly” different from other people in significant ways which require national boundaries/borders to protect them.
Nevertheless, in places, Mearsheimer makes the point, quite eloquently, that people are social, very profoundly social, from the start; thus making nationalism as it protects their sociality something they care about more deeply than liberal democracy. They will defend more ardently the security, social order and stability that provides for general fairness and just recourse against the secondary priorities, bullying ‘prerogatives’ of individual liberal choice over the security of group interests. Noting our deep social nature (including Europeans) from the start is correct, and is the point of correction that Whites need to understand and prioritize as opposed to right wing reaction (itself a species of liberalism) reaction to Jewish didacticism.
This article was originally published on Kurier.plus.
European Union – On July 22, French President Emmanuel Macron announced at a press conference in Paris that an agreement had been reached by 14 countries of the European Union on a temporary and voluntary redistribution mechanism for migrants taken on board European ships in the Mediterranean. Macron then once again threatened those countries that refused to take part in this “voluntary” scheme that France would no longer approve their receipt of EU structural funds. Although no specific country was named,the French media had no doubt that Macron was thinking of the Visegrád Four, and Hungary and Poland in particular. “As far as solidarity is concerned”, the French president said, “Europe is not ‘à la carte’. You cannot have countries saying ‘I don’t want your Europe when it is about sharing the burden, but I want it when it is about receiving structural funds’.”
A new Franco-German redistribution plan with similarities to the old compulsory relocation scheme
According to French sources, the temporary agreement reached in Paris is meant to avoid the endless squabbles over who should take charge of how many migrants each time an NGO ship conducts a new operation near the coast of Libya. It is based on the plan proposed earlier by German foreign minister Heiko Maas when he called for a “coalition of the willing” to replace the failed EU compulsory relocation mechanism. “We must now move forward with those member states that are ready to receive refugees – all others remain invited to participate,”Maas had said. On July 18, at an informal meeting of interior and justice ministers in Helsinki, Maas’s plan was proposed by Germany’s interior minister Horst Seehofer and supported by his French counterpart Christophe Castaner. France then organised the July 22 informal meeting in Paris with foreign and interior ministers from the “coalition of the willing”, as well as officials from the European Commission, the United Nations’ refugee agency and the International Organization for Migration (IOM). Maas’s proposal was by then being presented as a joint Franco-German initiative.
However, only eight countries were actually named and said to have agreed to “actively” take part in such a voluntary redistribution mechanism. These are France, Germany, Finland, Luxembourg, Portugal, Lithuania, Croatia and Ireland. Macron said that “in principle, 14 member states, at this stage, have expressed their agreement with the Franco-German document”, but the other six countries who are supposed to have expressed their agreement have not been named and were nowhere to be found in subsequent media reports.
One thing is for sure: Italy was not among them. And this is good news for the Visegrád Group, as Macron’s statement about EU structural funds clearly shows that, in the minds of some European leaders, this so-called “coalition of the willing”, when it is further discussed at European level in September as planned by Paris and Berlin, is meant to become a new version of the former compulsory EU relocation scheme.As soon as Germany’s foreign minister made known his proposal for a “coalition of the willing”, it was dismissed by former Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz. His centre-right ÖVP party being the front-runner to win the election in September, Kurz will probably soon become chancellor again. “The distribution of migrants in Europe has failed,” Kurz said on July 13, “we are once again discussing ideas from 2015 that have long proved impractical.” And he went on to explain that “the order of the day is rather to remove the business case for unscrupulous smugglers and return people after sea rescues to their home or transit countries, as well as creating initiatives for stability and economic development in Africa”, which is exactly what the Visegrád countries have been advocating since the beginning of the current migrant crisis.
In fact, not only would such a scheme take immigration out of the control of participating member states, but the discussions on the subject are sending a new signal to would-be emigrants in Africa and the Middle-East, and also to people smugglers in North Africa, that Europe’s gates are being opened wide once again, thus reinforcing the pull factor created by lenient policies in many European countries – not least in France and Germany, which allow most immigrants to stay and move freely around the Schengen area even after their requests for asylum have been rejected (see here for the figures as of 2018). At a press conference in Helsinki, French interior minister Christophe Castaner himself had to acknowledge that several EU countries fear the proposed voluntary redistribution mechanism will generate a new massive influx of migrants. This impression created by the likes of Maas, Seehofer, Castaner and Macron is further reinforced by the fact that NGO ships are now back in the Mediterranean, trying to force Salvini to reopen Italy’s ports to illegal immigrants, while France and Germany have also been making repeated calls for Italian ports to open up to boats transporting rescued migrants. The Franco-German mechanism which was agreed on in Paris on July 22 is still based on having rescued migrants disembarked in Italian ports and thereafter redistributed among participating countries. Similarly to the now defunct compulsory relocation scheme, the redistribution of migrants would only concern those asylum seekers who are likely to gain refugee status, and who are in fact a small minority of all illegal immigrants trying to cross the Mediterranean. According to the Franco-German plan, the remaining migrants would have to be kept in Italian centres until they could be deported. From the Italian point of view, there is nothing new in that proposal, and such a scheme will probably only increase the pressure on Libyan shores and increase the number of illegal immigrants making it to Europe, as well as the death toll by drowning in the Central Mediterranean.
Italy and Malta came to the summit in Helsinki on July 17–18 with a different proposal. A day after Heiko Maas had first presented his own plan to the German RND media group, namely on July 14, Italy’s foreign minister Esteri Moavero Milanesi described his alternative plan in an interview with Corriere della Sera. What Rome and Valletta proposed was to give people the possibility of applying for refugee status as close as possible to their countries of departure, so that asylum requests could be considered before migrants illegally tried to cross the EU’s external borders. Charter flights would then be organised to safely take to Europe those who really deserved refugee status, thereby weakening the smugglers’ business model and avoiding unnecessary deaths at sea. Since the number of people reaching Europe in such a manner would be smaller and better controlled, a distribution scheme could be more easily agreed among EU member states. For those who nonetheless try to reach Europe illegally by sea, the joint Maltese–Italian plan requires the creation of controlled centres (“hotspots”) in all countries of the EU-28 and common policies to force the countries of departure to take their citizens back. It rejects the idea of having all migrants on the Central Mediterranean route landing in Italy before their relocation to other countries. It also calls for NGO vessels to be kept out of the search & rescue zones of Libya and other third countries.
Salvini to Macron: “Italy will not be France’s refugee camp”
This plan was rejected at Helsinki, as both Germany and France supported Seehofer’s plan. The League’s leader, Matteo Salvini, confirmed in a statement released on the day after a meeting in Helsinki on July 17 between ministers from France, Germany, Italy and Malta that the Franco-German proposal was unacceptable to Italy, as “simply redistributing refugees will leave hard-to-expel illegal immigrants in the first country of arrival”. And while Malta’s Prime Minister Joseph Muscat announced preparations for a new meeting between interior ministers of all four countries in Malta in September, France’s Christophe Castaner announced that he was inviting ministers from the “coalition of the willing” to Paris on July 22 in order to go ahead with the Franco-German scheme.This infuriated Italy’s Matteo Salvini, who refused to take part in the Paris meeting, choosing instead to send a “technical” delegation to block any new joint declaration. On July 19, Salvini wrote his French counterpart a letter in which he expressed his surprise at the fact that only the Franco-German proposal was to be discussed in Paris,pointing out that the Maltese–Italian proposal had “gathered broad support” among EU countries. In that letter, the League’s leader insisted again on the need to review the rules on search and rescue operations in order to put an end to behaviours which encourage illegal and uncontrolled immigration, and to make NGOs comply with both international and national laws. According to Salvini, many at the Justice and Home Affairs Council held in Helsinki had “positions very close to the one expressed by Italy, in particular as regards a strict commitment to a migration policy based on the protection of the EU’s and the Schengen Area’s external borders”.
After the announcement by President Macron of an agreement reached under his auspices and supported by 14 countries (of which only eight, including France, were named and said to be ready to participate “actively”), Italy’s interior minister published a video on his Facebook profile with his own virulent reaction, mocking French leaders and saying directly to Macron, whom he called by his first name, that if he wanted ports open to migrants he should open France’s own ports in Marseilles, Corsica and elsewhere. He added that Italy would not take orders from France and would not be France’s refugee camp, as it is not a French colony.
Italy under pressure from France and Germany to take back illegal immigrants as per the Dublin Regulation
Salvini’s tone was no surprise to observers, who have been witnessing deteriorating relations between France and Italy since those whom the French president contemptuously calls “populists” and “nationalists” formed a coalition government in Rome over a year ago. Salvini’s mockery and verbal attacks have mostly come in response to Macron’s own highly arrogant and undiplomatic criticism of Italy’s leaders, particularly Matteo Salvini, which resembles some of the language he has used against the leaders of Poland and Hungary, as when he publicly asked last autumn in Bratislava: “What are these leaders doing with these crazy minds and lying to their people?”. Salvini’s anger is further fueled by the fact that, while French leaders call for Italy to open its ports to migrants for humanitarian reasons,the French authorities have been enforcing border controls for years between Ventimiglia and Menton on the Mediterranean coast, and they send back illegal immigrants to Italy, including, according to some media reports, when those immigrants are caught at some distance from the Italian border, in which case such ‘hot returns’ are in breach of European rules. The Italians have also accused Germany of breaking the rules when returning migrants to Italy as per the Dublin Regulation (the so-called “Dubliners”). Apart from being asked by Germany and France to reopen its ports to illegal immigrants, as the first country of arrival Italy is under great pressure from other EU member states to take back some 46,000 immigrants. As a consequence of the mass disembarkation which took place under the auspices of Matteo Renzi’s government, the number of asylum seekers sent back to Italy has tripled in just five years, with most of the 188,000 requests for transfer made since 2013 coming from Germany, Switzerland, France and Austria.
To make things worse, on the eve of the Paris meeting of July 22, SOS Méditerranée, an NGO based in the French city of Marseilles, announced the launch of a new joint search and rescue operation together with the Franco-Swiss NGO Doctors Without Borders (MSF), using a new boat said to be larger and faster than the Aquarius, which has remained blocked at the request of Italian prosecutors. The Ocean Viking left the Polish port of Szczecin flying the Norwegian flag and heading towards Libyan shores. SOS Méditerranée and MSF estimate the cost of this operation at around €14,000 per day. In a press release published on July 12, the city of Paris had announced that it would contribute €100,000 to this expensive operation. The grant made by the French capital was announced at the same time as the award of a medal to Carola Rackete and Pia Klemp, two German NGO vessel captains who are facing serious charges in Italy for allegedly aiding illegal immigration, including – in the case of Klemp – through active collusion with smugglers.
France’s responsibility for the situation in Libya
