Today I came across a video slice of a Henry Kissinger interview about the troubled and troubling process of European integration.  The interview was conducted by Peter Robinson for National Review Online, and it’s dated 22nd April 2008.

Kissinger was an academic connected to the Council on Foreign Relations in the late 1950s while the Treaty of Rome was being planned.  His specialism was security, with reference to nuclear weapons.  Obviously, one of the major strands in the European project was the prevention of a third 20th Century war, so he may well have contributed to the CFR’s adumbrations on the subject, and the somewhat royal “We” he employs in the interview is more than likely justified.

In any event, at one minute in, the old thaumaturge relieves himself of the following remark:-

Did we make a mistake?  Probably not, because Europe was strained by two world wars, and the European nation state was no longer in a position to carry out the global responsibilities which used to be characteristic of Europe.  We over-estimated, however, what could be achievable.  We thought you could transfer the loyalties of the nation state to the greater organisation that was being created, and that has turned out to be wrong or not feasible.  So Europe, in a way, is now suspended between its past, which it has partially given up, and it’s future which it hasn’t yet reached - and maybe never reach.

Next Thursday 12th June, the Irish electorate will go to the polls as the only member nation of the EU to vote on the Lisbon Treaty.  Last week the Irish Times published an opinion poll which showed the swashbuckling “No” Campaign ahead for the first time:-

35% No (up 17%)
30% Yes (down 5%)
35% Don’t Know (down 12%)

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As a follow-up to a prior post:

At 3:05 into the above video, the chairman of the Washington State Republican Party (WSRP) Convention mentions “Jim Bowery” as the author of the resolution, that passes the convention, to require the House to formally declare war before committing troops.  That’s the plank passed by the Skamania Convention.  I strengthened the language for the resolution at the State Convention.

You can see the McCain delegates filing back in in response to the passage of that resolution, their gambit to disestablish a quorum having backfired.

I’m on some lists now for sure…

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“During the Cold War, a group of Russian journalists toured the United States. On the final day of their visit, they were asked by their hosts for their impressions.  “I have to tell you,” said their spokesman, “that we were astonished to find, after reading all the newspapers and watching TV, that all the opinions on all the vital issues were, by and large, the same. To get that result in our country we imprison people. We tear out their fingernails. Here, you don’t have that. What’s the secret? How do you do it?”

... During the 1970s, I filmed secretly in Czechoslovakia, then a Stalinist dictatorship. I interviewed members of the dissident group, Charter 77. One of them, the novelist Zdener Urbanek, told me, “We are more fortunate than you in the West, in one respect. We believe nothing of what we read in the newspapers and watch on television, nothing of the official truth. unlike you, we have learned to read between the lines of the media. unlike you, we know that that real truth is always subversive.”  By subversive, he meant that truth comes from the ground up, almost never from the top down.

John Pilger explaining the power of journalism in the West to an audience at Columbia University in April 2006.

Pilger, now 68, has devoted his entire journalistic life to speaking for the (mostly Third World) exploited, degraded or slaughtered victims of the machinery of global power.  The precise targets of his withering fire are the Western governments, the Western political system, his so often supine fellow journalists and, most of all, the rapine corporate and financial elites.

The [US presidential candidates] are as one in their support for America’s true deity, its corporate oligarchs. Despite claiming that his campaign wealth comes from small individual donors, Obama is backed by the biggest Wall Street firms: Goldman Sachs, UBS AG, Lehman Brothers, J P Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, as well as the huge hedge fund Citadel Investment Group. “Seven of the Obama campaign’s top 14 donors,” wrote the investigator Pam Martens, “consisted of officers and employees of the same Wall Street firms charged time and again with looting the public and newly implicated in originating and/or bundling fraudulently made mortgages.”

A report by United for a Fair Economy, a non-profit group, estimates the total loss to poor Americans of colour who took out sub-prime loans as being between $164bn and $213bn: the greatest loss of wealth ever recorded for people of colour in the United States. “Washington lobbyists haven t funded my campaign,” said Obama in January, They won’t run my White House and they will not drown out the voices of working Americans when I am president.” According to files held by the Centre for Responsive Politics, the top five contributors to the Obama campaign are registered corporate lobbyists.

What is Obama’s attraction to big business? Precisely the same as Robert Kennedy’s. By offering a new, young and apparently progressive face of the Democratic Party, with the bonus of being a member of the black elite, he can blunt and divert real opposition. That was Colin Powell’s role as Bush s secretary of state. An Obama victory will bring intense pressure on the US anti-war and social justice movements to accept a Democratic administration for all its faults. If that happens, domestic resistance to rapacious America will fall silent.

This is good stuff, from an essay published last week in the New Statesman.

Of course, Pilger cannot process the case for Western survivalism.  He stands politically, I think, with the global justice movement, which is an outcrop of the post-communist left.  But the older I get the more I realise that dissonance is not a good enough reason to accept the role allotted to us of endlessly quarrelling with the left.  There is no left and right in the harsh light of day.  There is plutocracy and there is victimhood everywhere that plutocrats reign.  There is knowledge and there is ignorance.  There is sleep and there is waking.  There is the capacity to discriminate human values and there is the absence of it (it’s absent in the left).

In so far as the left leaves us alone to state and restate our own values and to pursue our own cause, we should not quarrel with it for desiring to tend to the poor in the Third World.  Ultimately, both our concerns and theirs are just, and both flow from the same hearth of evil.

That’s the lesson I take from reading Pilger’s largely very good material.

Tom Sunic circulated an alert today to the appearance of a fresh volume of some 89 poems by Joe Pryce, titled The Mansions of Irkalla.  Pryce, a New Yorker, is a poet of the Promethean spirit, that long reclusive self of the mythic European past.

Tom wrote:-

In this important book of poems, Joe D. Pryce revives the traditions of 19th century verse of Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire. Very much in the footsteps of the French symbolists, he depicts the horrors of the modern liberal system, thus adding his own poetic flavor to the cultural-political arsenal of modern conservative-revolutionary thought. His poems are an attempt to resuscitate American poetry and to realign it with a Euro-American giant, Ezra Pound. His unsurpassed sense of the English language, teeming with surreal metaphors and strange antediluvian imagery, guides the reader to that primordial quest for the meaning of time and being. Pryce’s poems are an invaluable contribution to the heritage of European Prometheism, which has lain dormant since World War II.

I thought I should reproduce a couple of Pryce poems.  They predate the new collection, but illustrate well what Tom is getting at.

Maidens & Guardians
We sing our lays
Of distant days
Of honeyed springtimes
In an Age of Gold.

But we the warriors work on in shadowy remoteness
Recollecting tragedy whilst forging treasures of the spirit
In a pensive pondering, anigh the maidens caroling
Through noontide’s mellow and yet vibrant gleaming
For an awesome advent is approaching
Gathering its might upon the heavy wings of autumn.

Still this dithyrambic choir of maidens,
Is rehearsing, warbling, for its festival.

An elaborately interwoven and precisely draughted world
Of slow and sweet decline
Its palette slightly muted as to color
Seems in our eyes slowly now to dim
And languish, as if knowing that
These sweet chansons accompany
Their dark avengers
As we forge our racks
And craft our fearsome Iron Maidens.

Sad, yet richly apprehensive
Of the wondrous wizardry of the declining,
Meltingly alluring world advancing ineluctably upon us.

More than merely Autumn slithers up the steep declivity, and so,
We now go off to deal out savage preludes
To unspeakable massacres beyond which we must
Deal out condign pain to many more who sha’n't tell aught of it.
For now is the bright hour of our returning come among us:
And we all are ready.

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The Work Foundation, an NGO at the confluence of internationalism and economism, has issued a press release titled, “UK must attract more highly skilled migrant workers”:-

Katerina Rüdiger, author of a new report, ‘Towards a Global Labour Market?’, says: “Global firms need more global people — not just to fill shortages, but for the sake of enabling firms to innovate.

“... At present, despite the hype, numbers are relatively low — only 167,000 high skilled workers came to this country on official figures from 2005. Politicians need to actively make the case for highly skilled migration. The new points based system in the UK will not be enough on its own. Talented people want career opportunities, the chance to expand knowledge by working with the brightest and best, good salaries, and the creation of diverse and exciting cities.”

This is the enemy in smooth and self-confident action.  Elsewhere on the site, in its advertising blurb to the Rüdiger report, it urges “policymakers” to:-

... do more to ensure the UK remains an attractive place for highly skilled migrants to want to come.In knowledge intensive sectors, human capital is as, if not more, important than labour cost.Highly skilled migrants are vital for organisations to be able to innovate, to gain ‘an international outlook’ and get round the problems of a purely native labour supply.

“The problems of a purely native labour supply.”  Quite outrageous.  I have searched the full report, and the “problem” is described there in the singular, and is an ageing native demographic.  But that’s not really it, because the report plainly states that the cause of skilled labour shortages in “IT, science, healthcare and technology fields” is the government’s success in promoting Britain “as a location for foreign investment”.

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You will find four radical resolutions at the end of this article, all of which were submitted to, and the first two of which were passed by the Washington State Republican Party 2008 Convention to become official Washington State Republican Party positions.

The status of these resolutions and their titles:

Official WSRP Position: Constitutional Declarations of War by the House of Representatives
Official WSRP Position: Repeal the 16th Amendment
Suppressed by the McCain machine: Repeal the Federal Reserve Act
Suppressed by the McCain machine: Repeal the 17th Amendment

The story behind their respective fates is illustrative of how the political process works at the state level.  I’m going to go into some details that may seem self-indulgent but they are also illustrative of what it actually took to get the first two resolutions adopted as official policy by the Washington State Republican Party.  Think of it as a flavor of war story.  The devil is in the details…

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BY Tomislav Sunic, and first published in Chronicles in March 1999

From Italy to France, from Germany to England, the post-World War II generation is now running the show. They have traded in their jeans and sneakers for political power. Thirty years ago, they rocked the boat at Berkeley, in Paris, and in Berlin; they marched against American imperialism in Vietnam, and supported the Yugoslav dictator, Josip Broz Tito, and his “socialism with a human face.” They made pilgrimages to Hanoi, Havana, and Belgrade, and many of them dressed in the Vietcong’s garb, or Mao’s clothes. A certain Bimbo named Jane Fonda even paid a courtesy visit to North Vietnam and posed for a photo-op with her rear on a communist howitzer. This generation protested against their wealthy parents, yet they used their fathers’ money to destroy their own welfare state. A burning joint passed from hand to hand, as Bob Dylan croaked the words that defined a generation: “Everybody must get stoned.”

This was a time which the youth in communist countries experienced quite differently. Prison camps were still alive, deportations were the order of the day from the Baltics to the Balkans, and the communist secret police—the Yugoslav UDBA, the Romanian Securitate, the East German Stasi, and the Soviet KGB—had their hands full. European 68ers did not know anything about their plight, and they simply ignored the communist topography of horror.

Back then, the 68ers had cultural power in their hands, controlling the best universities and spreading their permissive sensibility. Students were obliged to bow down to the unholy trinity of Marx, Freud, and Sartre, and the humanities curriculum showed the first signs of anti-Europeanism. Conservatives concentrated all of their attention on economic growth, naively believing that eliminating poverty and strengthening the middle class would bring about the renaissance of the conservative gospel.

Today, the 68ers (or “neo-liberals” or social democrats”) have grown up, and they have changed not only their name, but also their habitat and their discourse. Their time has come: Now they hold both cultural and political power. From Buenos Aires to Quai d’Orsay, from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to 10 Downing Street, they sit in air-conditioned executive offices or in ministerial cabinets, and they behave as if nothing has changed. Perfectly recycled in stylish Gucci suits, wearing expensive Bally shoes, sporting fine mascara, the 68ers pontificate about the global free market. They have embraced their former foe, capitalist entrepreneurship, and have added to it the fake humanistic facade of socialist philanthropy.

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“I dabbled in politics in the late 1960s and 1970s, more out of guilt than anything. Guilt for being rich and guilt thinking that perhaps love and peace isn’t enough and you have to go and get shot or something, or get punched in the face to prove I’m one of the people.  I was doing it against my instincts.”

John Lennon, quoted just before his death.

At a brief lull during the Who’s performance of Tommy, [Abbie] Hoffman, who had ingested LSD after working the past few hours at the medical tent, abruptly walked onto the stage and began addressing the crowd from Pete Townshend’s microphone.  He shouted, “I think this is a pile of shit! ... While John Sinclair rots in prison ...”  Alerted to the disturbance, Townshend (who apparently had been too distracted to notice Hoffman ambling onto the platform), snarled at Hoffman, “Back off!  Back off my fucking stage!”  He then struck Hoffman with his guitar, sending the interloper tumbling.  As the crowd let out an approving roar, Townshend returned to his microphone to add a sarcastic “I can dig it!”  Following the conclusion of the next song, the short “Do You Think It’s Alright?”, Townshend issued a stern warning to those in attendance: “The next fucking person that walks across this stage is gonna get fucking killed, alright? You can laugh, [but] I mean it!”

From the Wikipedia entry on the Woodstock Festival

During last month, the fortieth anniversary of the Paris student protests, the press was well-populated with articles about the generation of 1968.  I am nearly but not quite one of them and, personally, I’ve found a lot of what was written to suffer from generalisation.  The spirited, no-nonsense attitude of Townshend and the coerced and manufactured gaucheness of Lennon were nowhere mentioned.  But they are both much closer to the world that I encountered as a (very) young man.

One does well to remember that, at heart, the 60s generation as a whole was probably no more interested in left-wing political activism than any other.  Rather, it was caught up in an historical moment in the West so coloured by cultural, religious and political exhaustion, and - something entirely new - so drenched with the images of an inexcusable, far-away war, that millenarianism and rebelliousness were a simple, mechanical response.

Many aspects of it were ineffably silly and lightweight.  But a few managed to turn escapism from the grey reality of our parent’s world into an adventure of self-discovery.  These were a pure intoxication of the spirit, the like of which I have not seen since.

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