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(52) NATO, a Monstrous Institution (3 June, 2017)

Karel van Wolferen — Tue, 06 Jun 2017 13:02:34 +0000

Their anxiety about the future of NATO, recently on full display again when the American president was in Europe, could not be bettered as a measure of the incapacity of Europe’s top politicians to guide their continent and represent its populations. Through its provocations of Moscow, NATO systematically helps increase the risk of a military confrontation. By thus sabotaging its declared purpose of serving collective security for the countries on either side of the Atlantic, it erases its fundamental reason for being and right to exist.
     Grasping these facts ought be enough to fuel moves aimed at quickly doing away with NATO. But it is terrible for more and easily overlooked reasons.
     NATO’s survival prevents the political entity that is the European Union from becoming a significant global presence for reasons other than its economic weight. If you cannot have a defence policy of your own you also deprive yourself of a foreign policy. Without a substantive foreign policy, Europe does not show anything that anyone might consider ‘a face’ to the world. Without such a face to the outside, the inside cannot come to terms about what it stands for, and substitutes meaningless platitudes for answers to the question as to why it should exist in the first place.
     NATO is an example of an institution that has gotten completely out of hand through European complacency, intellectual laziness, and business opportunism. As a security alliance it requires a threat. When the one that was believed to exist during the Cold War disappeared, a new one had to be found. Forged for defence against what was once believed to be an existential threat, it only began actually deploying its military might after that threat had disappeared, for its illegal war against Serbia. Once it had jumped that hurdle, it was encouraged to continue jumping toward imagined global threats. Its history since the demise of its original adversary has been deplorable, as its European member states were made party to war crimes resulting from actions at Washington’s behest for objectives that have made a dead letter of international law. It has turned some European governments into liars when they told their populations that sending troops to Afghanistan was for the purpose of assorted humanitarian purposes like reconstructing that country, rather than fighting a war against Taleban forces intent on reclaiming their country from American occupation. Afghanistan did not, as was predicted at the time, turn into the graveyard for NATO to come to rest, next to the British Empire, the Soviet Union and – farther back – Alexander the Great. Having survived Afghanistan, NATO continued to play a significant role in the destruction of Gaddafi’s Libya, and in the destruction of parts of Syria through covertly organising, financing, and arming Isis forces for the purpose of overthrowing the Assad government. And it continues to serve as a cover for the war making elements in Britain and France. America’s coup in the Ukraine in 2014, which resulted in a crisis in relations with Russia, gave NATO a new lease on life as it helped create entirely uncalled for hysterical fear of Russia in Poland and the Baltic states.
     NATO repudiates things that we are said to hold dear. It is an agent of corruption of thought and action in both the United States and Europe. Through propaganda that distorts the reality of the situation in the areas where it operates, and perennial deceit about its true objectives, NATO has substituted a now widely shared false picture of geopolitical events and developments for one that, even if haphazard, used to be pieced together by independent reporters for mainstream media whose own tradition and editors encouraged discovery of facts. This propaganda relies to a large extent on incessant repetition for its success. It can generally not be traced to NATO as a source of origin because it is being outsourced to a well-funded network of public relations professionals.
     The Atlantic Council is NATO’s primary PR organization. It is connected with a web of think tanks and NGO’s spread throughout Europe, and very generous to journalists who must cope with a shrinking and insecure job environment. This entity is well-versed in Orwellian language tricks, and for obvious reasons must mischaracterise NATO itself as an alliance instead of a system of vassalage. Alliance presupposes shared purposes, and it cannot be Europe’s purpose to be controlled by the United States, unless we now accept that a treasonous European financial elite must determine the last word on Europe’s future.
     An influential policy deliberation NGO known as the International Crisis Group (ICG), is one of the organizations linked with the Atlantic Council. It operates as a serious and studious outfit, carrying an impressive list of relatively well-known names of associates, which studies areas of the world harbouring conflicts or about-to-be conflicts that could undermine world peace and stability. Sometimes this group does offer information that is germane to a situation, but its purpose has in effect become one of making the mainstream media audience view the situation on the ground in Syria, or the ins and outs of North Korea, or the alleged dictatorship in Venezuela, and so on, through the eyeballs of the consensus creators in American foreign policy.
     NATO repudiates political civilisation. It is disastrous for European intellectual life as it condemns European politicians and the thinking segment of the populations in its member states to be locked up in what may be described as political kindergarten, where reality is taught in terms of the manichean division between bad guys and superheroes. While Europe’s scholars, columnists, TV programmers and sophisticated business commentators rarely pay attention to NATO as an organization, and are generally oblivious to its propaganda function, what it produces condemns them to pay lip service to the silliest geopolitical fantasies.
     NATO is not only terrible for Europe, it is very bad for the United States and the world in general, for it has handed to America’s elites important tools aiding its delusional aim of fully dominating the planet. This is because NATO provides the most solid external support for sets of assumptions that allegedly lend a crucial moral dimension to America’s warmaking. NATO does not exist for the sake of indispensable European military prowess, which mildly described has not been impressive. It exists as legal justification for Washington to keep nuclear weapons and military bases in Europe. It obviously also exists as support for America’s military-industrial complex. But its moral support ought to be considered its most significant contribution. Without NATO, the conceptual structure of a ‘West’ with shared principles and aims would collapse. NATO was once the organisation believed to ensure the continued viability of the Western part what used to be known as the ‘free world’. Such connotations linger, and lend themselves to political exploitation. The ‘free world’ has since the demise of the Soviet Union not been much invoked. But ‘the West’ is still going strong, along with the notion of Western values and shared principles, with ‘the good’ in the form of benevolent motives automatically assumed to be on its side. This gives the powers that be in Washington a terrific claim in the realm of widely imagined moral aspects of geopolitical reality. They have inherited the mantle of the leader of the ‘free world’ and ‘the West’, and since there has not been a peep of dissension about this from the other side of the Atlantic, the claim appears true and legitimate in the eyes of the world and the parties concerned.
     In the meantime the earlier American claim to speak and act on behalf of the free world was broadened and seemingly depoliticised by a substitute claim of speaking and acting on behalf of the ‘international community’. There is of course no such thing, but that doesn’t bother editors who keep invoking it when some countries or the bad guys running them do things that are not to Washington’s liking. Doing away with NATO would pull the rug from under the ‘international community’. Such a development would then reveal the United States, with its current political system and priorities in international affairs, as a criminal power and the major threat to peace in the world. I can hear an objection that without this resonation of moral claims the activities serving the ‘full spectrum dominance’ aim would have been carried out anyway. If you think so, and if you can stand reading again what the neocons were producing between 9/11 and the invasion of Iraqi in 2003, subtract all references to moral clarity and the necessity for the United States to serve as moral beacon for the world from that literature, and you will see that preciously little argument remains for American warmaking that ensued.
     The spinelessness of the average European politician has added up to huge encouragement of the United States in its post-Cold War military adventurism. With forceful reminders from Europe about what those much vaunted supposedly shared political principles actually stood for, American rhetoric could not have been the same. Strong European condemnation of the shredding of the UN Charter, and the jettisoning of the principles adopted at the Nuremberg trials, would have made it much more difficult for George W Bush, Dick Cheney, and the neocons to go where blind fanaticism and hubris, with imagined economic advantage, took them. Perhaps more importantly, it might have given a relatively weak American protest movement the necessary added energy to rise to the level of effectiveness once attained by the anti-Vietnam activists as they imprinted themselves on the political culture of the 60s and 70s. European dissent might not have halted but could have slowed the transformation of much of the mainstream media into neocon propaganda assets.
     As it is, NATO exists today in a realm of discourse in which revered post-World War II liberal conditions and practices are still believed to exist. It is an apolitical and ahistorical realm determined by hubris and misplaced self-confidence, in which powers that have utterly altered these practices and negated its positive aspects are not acknowledged. It is a realm in which America’s pathological condition of requiring an enemy as a source of everlasting profit is not acknowledged. It is a realm in which America’s fatuous designs for complete control over the world is not acknowledged. It is a realm of foreign policy illusions.
     NATO is supposed to guard putative Western values that in punditry observations have something to do with what the Enlightenment has bestowed on Western culture. But it deludes staunch NATO supporters, who cannot bring themselves to contemplate the possibility that what they have long trusted to be an agent of protection, has in fact become a major force that destroys those very qualities and principles.
     There is a further more tangible political/legal reason why NATO is monstrous. It is steered by nonelected powers in Washington, but is not answerable to identifiable entities within the American military system. It is not answerable to any of the governing institutions of the European Union. Its centre in Brussels exists effectively outside the law. Its relations with ‘intelligence agencies’ and their secret operations remain opaque. Who is doing what and where are all questions to which no clear, legally actionable, information is made available.
     NATO has thereby become a tool of intimidation lacking any compatibility with democratic political organisation. An autocrat aspiring to unfettered rule with which to operate anywhere in the world would find in NATO the ideal institutional arrangements. All this should be of our utmost concern. Because all this means that NATO is now one of the world’s most horrible organizations that at the same time has become so politically elusive, apparently, that there is no European agent with enough of a grip on it to make it disappear.

(51) Conspiracy with and without conspirators (4 April 2017)

Karel van Wolferen — Tue, 06 Jun 2017 12:45:03 +0000

     The term ‘Deep State’ has entered established parrot journalism, where it joins ‘the one percent’, the other notion ascended from the internet ‘underground’. You can tell by the way it is now mocked in mainstream publications. I first noticed when one of those informed its readers that it lurked somewhere in the remote internet corners given over to conspiracy theory. And now, quite suddenly, there is a mini avalanche of pieces explaining for example why such a thing may exist in Turkey (where the term was first used) or Egypt, but not the United States where all manner of protections guard against it. David Remnick’s article in the New Yorker reflects considerable confusion in parrot journalism ranks about what to do with this concept that has forced itself on America’s consciousness through the combined maneuvers of state and non-state institutions intending to get rid of the new president.
      Two authors had come with books and articles using the deep state abstraction before all this: the meticulous Canadian scholar and former diplomat Peter Dale Scott and much more recently Mike Lofgren, who for more than a quarter century served as a staff member on the Senate and House Budget committees. Their credentials and seriousness are beyond doubt, but their deep states are not the same. Scott digs into what he calls ‘deep politics’ of a criminal nature, like the Kennedy murder and 9-11, while Lofgren assures us early on that the deep state does not add up to a conspiracy. In fact long passages in the Lofgren book, subtitled The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government, made me feel as if I was reading my own The Enigma of Japanese Power trying to explain a phenomenon for which I coined the label ‘conspiracy without conspirators’.
      Lofgren in particular has created problems for mainstream academics plowing fields of political phenomena and generally believing that they practice a science. He upsets notions that have long been fundamental points of reference. Pundits of a ‘liberal/progressive’ persuasion who themselves have inveighed against the malfunctioning for which Lofgren offers an abundance of evidence are bound to be uncomfortable as well. Their habitual invoking of ‘threats against our democracy’ can now only appear puny and misapplied in the perspective of his deep state; a perspective that at a minimum has caused considerable bewilderment among the columns-producing elite. A poignant example is the posting of Anthony DiMaggio on the recently quite disoriented Counterpunch site. He admires Lofgren, and agrees with practically all of what he says about how American democracy is systematically undermined, but can only deplore the fact that in its totality it is grist for the mills of conspiracy theorists. A regret illustrating once again the damage that the CIA’s move of introducing ‘conspiracy theory’ as a term of ridicule and opprobrium has done to political discourse in the Atlantic basin. Perhaps it is the most effective single vile intervention to protect the core institutions of the deep state.
      Take a step back to bring the possibility of a ‘conspiracy without conspirators’ in view. Unwanted and unexpected phenomena that are terrible but outside our control, like earthquakes or a tsunami, are known in legal language as ‘acts of god’. No person can be held responsible for those. Then there are awful uncontrollable events that have been caused by identifiable human agency: unintended consequences made vivid in our imagination by Goethe’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice and Hollywood’s Frankenstein. The state functions well when its focus is on minimizing unintended consequences. Sadly, such control becomes difficult with monstrous out-of-control situations that have become systemic, but whose original human agents have blended in, anonymously, with the general population, decades or longer ago. A telling example, closely connected with the deep state now under discussion, was convincingly described in James Carroll’s marvelous House of War on the early history of the Pentagon. That institution runs on a mindset justifying a huge budget, which in turn demands permanence of this mindset that would wither without an enemy. Those who built the citadel of American militarism may not have wished for what it became; what emerged just happened as they were swept along by true and imagined crises, by theories of implacable enemies, by the false populism of opportunistic politicians stoking fears, and by the logic of bureaucratic expansionism.
      Its power was made possible by the National Security Act of 1947. The disdainfully labeled ‘national security state’ this initiated has produced much that cannot be distinguished from results of deliberate conspiracies. But can we identify President Truman, who signed the law, as the original conspirator? Or all those officer-bureaucrats who believed they were doing their duty and to whom dirty tricks were, at worst, the only means justified by the all-important cause of protecting a nation believed to be in peril?
      David Chibo supplies a useful taxonomy of deep state literature before the term entered the lexicon in an article about 7 “Blind” men and the US Elephant. He includes several other authors who described both conspiracies with and conspiracies without conspirators. He lists C. Wright Mills’ pioneering study published as The Power Elite, with its few thousand individuals in the political, military and economic hierarchies; Dan Smoot (former FBI agent), who focussed on the Council on Foreign Relations in The Invisible Government and looked at the manner in which the American government was pushed into foreign entanglements by powerful corporate and administrative entites; retired Air Force Col. Fletcher Prouty who traces the development of the security state in The Secret Team, and was particularly incensed by the fact that the CIA’s ‘intelligence gathering’ function is a front for clandestine operations. Michael Glennon, professor of economics, on Chibo’s list also shows with his National Security and Double Government how the network created by President Truman with the National Security Act of 1947 hollowed out the institutions of President, Congress and the courts. Chibo includes the in my view less relevant analyst, the well-known economist Jeffrey Sachs who identifies four corporate interest groups, naming them a ‘corporatocracy’, and shining a light once again on the ‘military-industrial complex’, Eisenhower’s vision of the man-made monster eventually destroying America’s democracy. The Predator State of James Galbraith, in which powerful corporations have simply colonized vital institutions of the American state would have been my choice. Like the blind men with their elephant, these authors have been good on parts of it all, but the deep state in its totality remains to be analysed.
      A dividing line between conspiracies with and without conspirators can usually not clearly be drawn. But we must try to differentiate the two. Doing so is necessary to overcome a conceptual hurdle that blocks acceptance by otherwise smart people of the very notion of a mostly hidden system of uncontrolled power. The category of ‘conspiracy without conspirators’ makes it possible to analyse entirely undesirable operations and outcomes while bypassing the apportioning of not only point-blank blame but also a blanket Chomskyan condemnation of evil intent. The subject is kept out of consideration by many who ought to scrutinize it, because they cannot conceive of the fact that a sizable number of fellow Americans are guilty of continuous criminal conduct.
      A look at what Japanese have wrought, politically, may be of some help by offering useful pointers of how bureaucracies that are not under effective political control can begin to live lives of their own that move away from the purposes for which they were created. In the Japanese case this pretty much determines how power is exercised there. The actual power system operates outside the boundaries of the constitution, although the bureaucrats in it have always endeavored to create legal stipulations they can hide behind. Also, a post-feudal separation of public and private sectors never fully came into being after the coup known as the Meiji Restoration. Hence, practically anyone in Japan understands what you are talking about when you invoke ‘the system’ while discussing prevailing circumstances. Keep this in mind when you think of the lines of responsibility with regard to the dreadful Fukushima nuclear reactor disaster.
      In the end the notion of accountability points at the pivotal factor enabling conspiracies without conspirators. Until 1991 there was no separate Japanese term distinguishing this concept from ‘responsibility’. Corruption inherent in informal political systems that have consolidated through the erosion of checks and countervailing power eventually destroys the means to rub the noses of those responsible for national policies every now and then in the consequences of those policies. When taking a step back and taking in the entirety of the American state we can sum up its malfunctioning by ascertaining that vital institutions for its functioning; the financial system, the military, law inforcement and intelligence, are not under effective political control of the representative bodies that are supposed to determine government. The Pentagon has some time ago begun to live a life of its own to the point where their officials cannot even imagine having their noses rubbed in the consequences of what they have wrought. The same is true for the Federal Reserve, the institution that is supposed to oversee the activities of the financial firms, and guard against their possible excesses. The indications are plentiful that both have entirely lost sight of a perspective that includes the original reasons for their existence. America’s center of political accountability has eroded, while across the Atlantic in half-unified Europe it was never established.

* * *

     To throw more light on the accountability factor we must consider the way in which the agents of public information fit into political systems, something that is also crucially relevant to the political transformation of mainstream media on both sides of the Atlantic. Without a good measure of control over the news and opinion industry a ‘deep state’, the ‘establishment’, or ‘the system’ could not exist. Official censorship will not work. It inspires truth seekers who would in the long term undermine any overtly authoritarian political set up. But self-censorship does work. And it is enforced through varying mixtures of social pressure and indirect intimidation. The political climate enforces this when highly controlled by a ruling elite. Japan has long offered a sublime example of highly organized and seemingly coordinated self-censorship. The big newspapers and NHK (with a role comparable to the BBC) create ‘public opinion’ about matters at hand and subsequently reflect it. If ever there existed a perfect media echo chamber, you may discover this in Japan. Editors from the big five newspapers examine each other’s earliest morning editions (which go to the countryside), and may adjust their later city editions for details in their interpretation and news selection so that one nearly homogeneous national opinion can result; with expected and well-understood small exceptions that give the different papers a bit of individual flavor. Much of the official news is collected through so-called press clubs attached to a ministry or other main news producing entity; and these have rules as to what their members will include and leave out of their dispatches. The system dates from wartime habits. A reporter who breaks those rules is barred from the club for a certain period – I have known several such cases. When a scandal breaks and open season is declared on a person or organization, within less than 24 hours the papers become filled with the smallest details that were known all along.
      The lastmentioned detail illustrates an important aspect of Japan’s self-censorship: the better-informed editors and reporters are fully aware that this is what they do. A considerable number of journalists will at the end of their career produce books with their view on aspects of the ‘system’, and these can all be found in the Diet Library and lesser collections for perusal by those eager to know how Japan is actually put together. What is in the paper is tatemae, official reality, and hiding behind it is the honne, substantial reality, and over drinks journalist colleagues will regale you with lots of honne as will, perhaps a bit more reluctantly, top bureaucrats and politicians over lunch. This dichotomy allows Japanese on the whole to be more honest about their dishonesty than I have found in any other country. Without trumpeting it from the rooftops, they can maintain some perspective on things. It helps guard post-World-War-II Japan against forms of extremism for which it became known from the 1930’s until 1945.
      I do not notice this kind of ameliorating dynamic in the self-censorship that now prevails in the Atlantic basin. There are good reasons to conclude that deep state operations have become transatlantic some time ago. What with intertwined financial and ‘intelligence agency’ interests, NATO machinations, weapon sales, and the general vassalage status of the European Union. There is little that can hold the Brussels bureaucracy to account. The so-called troika collective – consisting of a pseudo central bank, the IMF, and the European Commission – has plucked a mandate out of thin air and has done maximum damage by disguising massive money transfers to German, French and Dutch banks as assistance to Greece. That European story is highly self-censored in European media.
      But the transatlantic deep state self-censorship relating to Russia has become most crucial to political discourse. It has become so bad that the out of control CIA may create the story of official reality in the Ukraine and Syria or about Putin. With assistance of CIA minions in the PR industry this is then passed on to domestic mainstream media and those of the transatlantic world through almost all mainstream publications and current affairs TV; whereupon it will be difficult to find a colleague willing to converse about substantial and observable reality. We have never seen anything like it in the United States and Europe, not even at the height of the Cold War. The rapidity with which Russia and especially its true and effective leader have become bywords for threats to supposed Western ‘values’ bears out the sad loss of any perspective on the vital Atlantic-Russian relationship. The best that we can hope for is represented by a review article I just read in the London Review of Books, one trying hard to produce a ‘balanced’ view of the new Cold War by leaving out its Washington- and Langley-based manufacturers.
      Conspiracy without conspirators is of course extra-legal and inevitably engages in clandestine activity. When you operate outside the law, you may hardly even notice it when you begin to operate in breach of the law. And then there are conspiracies with definitive conspirators engaged in criminal projects, including murder. Out of control bureaucracies, used to a protection from public curiosity by mantels of secrecy and mumbo jumbo explanations, naturally can more easily engage in criminal conduct than if their activities were systematically held up to the light. The CIA in particular has been notorious for it with regime change murders and false flag operations. Wall Street operations that brought us the 2008 credit crisis, and helped a further consolidation of banking power, were also facilitated by large-scale Wall Street fraud.
      Parts of the Japanese system have long relied on Japan’s peculiar form of organized crime – known internationally as the Yakuza. Yakuza syndicates may actually help to maintain a low crime rate, with gangsters keeping an eye on unorganized crime in return for governmental blind eye. But the Japanese case does not come close to the level of criminality of the American variety. Even then, full-fledged American conspiracy with conspirators commonly rely on participants who are at best dimly aware of the extent to which they have been asked to operate outside legal boundaries. The apparatus of the American deep state is a vast system of institutions in which the proverbial right arm does not know what the left one is doing. The CIA, FBI, NSA and the military services are compartmentalized to a point where very few of the bureaucrats in their employ can put their finger precisely on what is going on. Best known examples of that kind of entity are the resistance movements in German occupied Europe of World War II, and the cell system of an expansionist communist movement in the early stages of its development. Movie goers are familiar with the ‘need to know’ limitations on the information given to participants in an operation. The numerous levels of ‘security clearance’ make that clear. They have created labyrinths of hidden policy making over which no effective political control can exist.
      This applies to internal control as well. The institutions of the American deep state are riven by turf battles, schisms, something quite noticeable in their conflict with President Trump and, indeed, eruptions from officials with a conscience. This produces leaks and whistleblowing. These may be seen as emergency actions in the absence of functioning accountability structures.
      Accountability structures have vanished on both sides of the Atlantic rather quickly through multiple causes, including the erasure of the division between private and public sectors (the outsourcing of power), legal labyrinths for mediation, the informal networks and corrupting lobbying so well described as ‘flexions’ by Janine Wedel in Unaccountable and The Shadow Elite, the powerful corporate entities replacing functioning representative bodies between citizens and the state (unions, parties not beholden to sponsors), and the demise of serious journalism.
      Accountability remains something that is assumed in the United States as well as the nations of the European Union. In Japan it is not.
      Accountability, everyone will agree, is good and necessary for democratic transparency and related platitudes. But there is a less immediately obvious but an actual primary reason why you want structures enforcing it in a political system. Its less visible function is that it protects powerholders against madness. When officials and politicians are held to account they are not only kept on their toes, but they themselves are forcefully reminded of what precisely it is that they are doing. If they do not accustom themselves to making a convincing case for their policies to outsiders, they tend to lose the habit of explaining it all to themselves. This dynamic helps clarify why some autocrats whose manner of ruling is not officially questioned in their own country may nevertheless eagerly seize opportunities to elucidate their actions and methods to outsiders; as Singapore’s autocrat Lee Kuan Yew used to do with passing foreign journalists. A power system may develop mechanisms to rein in uncontrolled conduct to which organizations that are not held to account are prone. In Japan such mechanisms exist, in the United States they do not.
Japanese mechanisms ameliorating its accountability problem did not always exist. An analogy useful for comparison with present day American deep state hubris is the hijacking of Japan by the Imperial Army in the 1930s. The demented neocon/Pentagon fantasies of ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’, in which the option of new ‘usable’ nuclear weaponry is ‘on the table’, are reminiscent of the delusions of prewar Japan’s leaders that they could muster forces to take on Britain, the United States, and Russia all at the same time.
      Eliminating a criminal deep state with its ‘deep politics’ other than through losing a war appears to be a hopeless task. It has transformed the institutions that partake in it into well-nigh unassailable strongholds with the weapons of character assassination, and intimidation and blackmail that these institutions can bring to bear on reformists. Optimists who remind us of the self-repair capacities the United States has demonstrated in the past do not take into account the loss of a responsive public realm kept going with independent news media. On the European side of the Atlantic basin no awakening is yet in evidence. London remains a major relay station for Washington’s propaganda. Vassalage, the NATO cage, and incompetent bureaucratic leadership on the European Union level that perpetuates this subordination, stand in its way.
      Repairing American situations that are caused by conspiracies without conspirators – situations that nobody wants to live with, except for a minuscule number of people who profit from other’s misery – faces an obstacle that is rarely recognized, or at least not given the attention it deserves. Such repair is made more difficult by American liberalism that relies heavily on the notions of choice and agency. Seen through that ideological filter, the quality of political life is the result of what the American people have collectively chosen; and, again as seen through that filter, the American people have the wherewithal in the long run to adjust their situation to their liking. It ignores the force of institutionalized unintended consequences. Accepting as a given that one is in control over one’s destiny means that vigilant watchfulness seems not all that urgent, and the point at which a significant number of people sit up to pay attention when things start deteriorating comes at a time when ruinous trends are irreversible.
      Unwillingness among American policy and opinion makers to ponder the possibility that developments may have gotten out of hand on a deep level, and have slipped political control, forms one of the heaviest blinkers from behind which they administer and help guide the country. Mainstream mockery of the deep state notion illustrates this. American ideology, nakedly revealed in ‘‘rational choice’ theory of university ‘political science’, keeps the blinkers firmly fixed. Summing up we could say that evaluation of political reality in American culture is bereft of something that suffuses classical drama. A common theme in Greek tragedies is that of hubris: human arrogance and pride leading to crazed leadership. Human history is replete with cases of inattention, overconfidence and recklessness, all conspiring to create frightful dystopian realities.

(50) Karl Rove’s Prophecy (23 Jan. 2017)

Karel van Wolferen — Tue, 06 Jun 2017 12:36:48 +0000

     In a famous exchange between a high official at the court of George W. Bush and journalist Ron Susskind, the official – later acknowledged to have been Karl Rove – takes the journalist to task for working in “the reality-based community.” He defined that as believing “that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” Rove then asserted that this was no longer the way in which the world worked. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” (Ron Suskind, NYTimes Magazine, Oct. 17, 2004).
     This declaration became popular as an illustration of the hubris of the Bush-Cheney government. But we could also see it as fulfilled prophecy. Fulfilled in a manner that no journalist at that time would have deemed possible. Yes, the neoconservatives brought disrepute upon themselves because of the disaster in Iraq. Sure, opposition to the reality Rove had helped create in that devastated country became a first rung on the ladder that could lead to the presidency, as it did for Barack Obama. But the neocons stayed put in the State Department and other positions closely linked to the Obama White House, where they became allies with the liberal hawks in continuing to ‘spread democracy’ by overthrowing regimes.
      America’s mainstream news and opinion purveyors, without demurring, accommodated the architects of reality production overseen by Dick Cheney. This did not end when Obama became president, but in fact with seemingly ever greater eagerness they gradually made the CIA/neocon-neoliberal created reality appear unshakably substantial in the minds of most newspaper readers and among TV audiences in the Atlantic basin. This was most obvious when attention moved to an imagined existential threat posed by Russia supposedly aimed at the political and ‘Enlightenment’ achievements of the West. Neoconservatives and liberal hawks bent America’s foreign-policy entirely to their ultimate purpose of eliminating a Vladimir Putin who had decided not to dance to Washington’s tune so that he might save the Russian state, which had been disintegrating under his predecessor and Wall Street’s robber barons. With President Obama as a mere spectator, the neocon/liberals could – without being ridiculed – pass off the coup d’état they had fomented in the Ukraine as a popular revolution. And because of an unquestioned Atlanticist faith, which holds that without the policies of the United States the world cannot be safe for people of the Atlantic basin, the European elites that determine policy or comment on it joined their American counterparts in endorsing that reality.
     As blind vassals the Europeans have adopted Washington’s enemies as their own. Hence the ease with which the European Union member states could be roped into a system of baseless economic sanctions against Russia, much to the detriment of their own economic interests. Layers upon layers of anti-Russian propaganda have piled up to bamboozle a largely unsuspecting public on both sides of the Ocean. In the Netherlands, from where I have been watching all this, Putin was held personally responsible in much of the media for the shooting down of a Malaysian airliner flying over the Ukraine, which killed 298 people. No serious investigation was undertaken. The presentation of ‘almost definitive’ findings by the joint investigation team under Dutch leadership has neither included clues supplied by jet fighter cannon holes in the wrecked fuselage nor eyewitness stories, which would make the government in Kiev the prime suspect. Moscow’s challenging the integrity of the investigation, whose agreed-upon rules allowed publication of findings only if Kiev agreed with them, were met with great indignation by the Dutch Foreign and Prime Ministers.
      As the fighting in Syria reached a phase when contradictions in the official Washington/NATO story demanded a stepping back for a fresh look, editors were forced into contortions to make sure that the baddies stayed bad, and that no matter how cruel and murderously they went about their occupation in Aleppo and elsewhere, the jihadi groups fighting to overthrow the secular Assad government in Damascus remained strictly labeled as moderate dissidents worthy of Western support, and the Russians as violators of Western values.
      Architects of an official reality that diverges widely from the facts you thought you knew must rely on faits accompli they achieve through military or police violence and intimidation, in combination with a fitting interpretation or a news blackout delivered by mainstream media. These conditions have been widely obtained in the Atlantic basin through a gradual loss of political accountability at top levels, and through government agencies protected by venerated secrecy that are allowed to live lives of their own. As a result American and European populations have been dropped into a fantasy world, one under constant threat from terrorists and an evil dictator in Moscow. For Americans the never ending war waged by their own government, which leaves them with no choice but to condone mass murder, is supposedly necessary to keep them safe. For Europeans, at least those in the northern half, the numerous NATO tanks rolling up to the border of the Russian Federation and the massing of troops in that area are an extra guarantee, on top of the missiles that were already there, that Vladimir Putin will restrain his urges to grab a European country or two. On a smaller scale, when every May 4th the 1940-45 war dead are remembered in the Netherlands, we must now include the fallen in Afghanistan as if they were a sacrifice to defend us against the Taliban threat from behind the Hindu Kush.
     Ever since the start of this millennium there has been a chain of realities as prophesied by Karl Rove, enhanced by terrorist attacks, which may or may not have been the work of actual terrorists, but whose reality is not questioned without risking one’s reputation. The geopolitical picture that they have helped build in most minds appears fairly consistent if one can keep one’s curiosity on a leash and one’s sense of contradiction sufficiently blunt. After all, the details of the official reality are filled in and smoothed out all the time by crafty campaigns produced in the PR world, with assistance from think tanks and academia. But the question does reappear in one’s thoughts: do the politically prominent and the well-positioned editors, especially those known for having once possessed skeptical minds, actually believe it all? Do those members of the cabinet or parliament, who can get hot under their collar as they decry the latest revelation about one or other outrage committed by Putin, take seriously what they’re saying?
      Not all of them are believers. I know this from off the record conversations. But there appears to be a marked difference between the elite in government, in the media, in prominent social positions, and ordinary people who in these recent times of anguish about populism are sometimes referred to as uneducated. Quite a few among the latter appear to think that something fishy is going on. This could be because in my experience the alert ones have educated themselves, something that is not generally understood by commentators who have made their way through the bureaucracy of standard higher education. A disadvantage of being part of the elite is that you must stick to the accepted story. If you deviate from it, and have your thoughts run rather far away from it, which is quite inevitable once you begin with your deviation, you can no longer be trusted by those around you.
      If you are a journalist and depend for your income on a mainstream newspaper or are hired by a TV company, you run the risk of losing your job if you do not engage in self-censorship. Consequently, publications that used to be rightly known as quality newspapers have turned into unreadable rags. The newspaper that was my employer for a couple of decades used to be edited on the premise that its correspondents rather than authorities were always correct in what they were saying. Today greater loyalty to the reality created in Washington and Langley cannot be imagined. For much of northern Europe the official story that originates in the United States is amplified by the BBC and other once reliable purveyors of news and opinion like the Guardian, the Financial Times and the (always less reliable) Economist.
     Repetition lends an ever greater aura of truth to the nonsense that is relentlessly repeated on the pages of once serious publications. Detailed analyses of developments understood through strings of false clues give the fictions ever more weight in learned heads and debates in parliament. At the time of writing, the grave concern spread across the opinion pages on my side of the Atlantic is about how Putin’s meddling in upcoming European elections can be prevented.
The realities Rove predicted have infantilized parliamentary debates, current affairs discussion and lecture events, and anything of a supposedly serious nature on TV. These now conform to comic book simplicities of evil, heroes and baddies. They have produced a multitude of editorials with facts upside-down. They force even those who advise against provoking Moscow to include a remark or two about Putin being a murderer or tyrant, lest they could be mistaken for traitors to Enlightenment values or even as Russian puppets, as I have been. Layers of unreality have incapacitated learned and serious people to think clearly about the world and how it came to be that way.
     How could Rove’s predictions so totally materialize? There’s a simple answer: ‘they’ got away with momentous lies at an early stage. The more authorities lie successfully the more they are likely to lie again in a big way to serve the purposes of earlier lies. The ‘they’ stands for those individuals and groups in the power system who operate beyond legal limits as a hydra-headed entity, whose coordination depends on the project, campaign, mission, or operation at hand. Those with much power got away with excessive extralegal use of it since the beginning of this century because systems of holding the powerful to account have crumbled on both sides of the Atlantic. Hence, potential opposition to what the reality architects were doing dwindled to almost nothing. At the same time, people whose job or personal inclination leads them to ferret out truth were made to feel guilty for pursuing it.
The best way, I think, to make sense of how this works is to study it as a type of intimidation. Sticking to the official story because you have to may not be quite as bad as forced religious conversion with a gun pointed at your head, but it belongs to the same category. It begins with the triggering of odd feelings of guilt. At least that is how I remember it. Living in Tokyo, I had just read Mark Lane’s Rush To Judgment, the first major demolishing in book form of the Warren Report on the murder of John F. Kennedy, when I became aware that I had begun to belong to an undesirable category of people who were taking the existence of conspiracies seriously. We all owe thanks to writers of Internet-based samizdat literature who’ve recently reminded us that the pejorative use of the conspiracy label stems from one of the greatest misinformation successes of the CIA begun in 1967.
     So the campaign to make journalists feel guilty for their embarrassing questions dates from before Dick Cheney and Rove and Bush. But it has only reached a heavy duty phase after the moment that I see as having triggered the triumph of political untruth.
We have experienced massive systemic intimidation since 9/11. For the wider public we have the absurdities of airport security – initially evidenced by mountains of nail-clippers – reminding everyone of the arbitrary coercive potential that rests with the authorities. Every time people are made to take off their belts and shoes – to stick only to the least inane instances – they are reminded: yes, we can do this to you! Half of Boston or all of France can be placed under undeclared martial law to tell people: yes, we have you under full control! For journalists unexamined guilt feelings still play a major role. The serious ones feel guilty for wanting to ask disturbing questions, and so they reaffirm that they still belong to ‘sane’ humanity rather than the segment with extraterrestrials in flying saucers in its belief system. But there is a confused interaction with another guilty feeling of not having pursued unanswered questions. Its remedy appears to be a doubling down on the official story. Why throw in fairly common lines like “I have no time for truthers” unless you feel that this is where the shoe pinches?
     You will have noticed a fairly common response when the 9/11 massacre enters a discussion. Smart people will say that they “will not go there”, which brings to mind the “here be dragons” warning on uncharted bits of medieval maps. That response is not stupid. It hints at an understanding that there is no way back once you enter that realm. There is simply no denying that if you accept the essential conclusions of the official 9/11 report you must also concede that laws of nature stopped working on that particular day. And, true enough, if you do go there and bear witness publicly to what you see, you may well be devoured; your career in many government positions, the media and even academia is likely to come to an end.
     So, for the time being we are stuck with a considerable chunk of terra incognita relating to recognized political knowledge; which is an indispensable knowledge if you want to get current world affairs and the American role in it into proper perspective.
     Mapping the motives of those who decide “not to go there” may be a way to begin breaking through this disastrous deadlock. Holding onto your job is an honorable motivation when you have a family to maintain. The career motivation is not something to scorn. There is also an entirely reasonable expectation that once you go there you lose your voice publicly to address very important social abuse and political misdeeds. I think it is not difficult to detect authors active on internet samizdat sites who have that foremost in mind. Another possible reason for not going there is the more familiar one, akin to the denial that one has a dreadful disease. Also possible is an honorable position of wishing to preserve social order in the face of a prospect of very dramatic political upheaval caused by revelations about a crime so huge that hardly anything in America’s history can be compared to it. Where could such a thing end – civil war? Martial law?
What I find more difficult to stomach is the position of someone who is worshiped by what used to be the left, and who has been guiding that class of politically interested Americans as to where they can and cannot go. Noam Chomsky does not merely keep quiet about it, but mocks students who raise logical questions prompted by their curiosity, thereby discouraging a whole generation studying at universities and active in civil rights causes. One can only hope that this overrated analyst of the establishment, who helps keep the most embarrassing questions out of the public sphere, trips over the contradictions and preposterousness of his own judgments and crumples in full view of his audience.
     The triumph of political untruth has brought into being a vast system of political intimidation. Remember then that the intimidator does not really care what you believe or not, but impresses you with the fact that you have no choice. That is the essence of the exercise of brute power. With false flag events the circumstantial evidence sometimes appears quite transparently false and, indeed could be interpreted as having been purposeful. Consider the finding of passports or identity papers accidentally left by terrorists, or their almost always having been known to and suspected by the police. And their deaths through police shooting before they can be interrogated. Could these be taunting signals of ultimate power to a doubting public: Now you! Dare contradict us! Are the persons killed by the police the same who committed the crime? Follow-up questions once considered perfectly normal and necessary by news media editors are conspicuous by their absence.
How can anyone quarrel with Rove’s prophecy. He told Susskind that we will forever be studying newly created realities. This is what the mainstream media continue to do. His words made it very clear: you have no choice!
     A question that will be in the minds of perhaps many as they consider the newly sworn in president of the United States, who like John F. Kennedy appears to have understood that “Intelligence” leads a dangerously uncontrolled life of its own: At what point will he give in to the powers of an invisible government, as he is made to reckon that he also has no choice?

(49) The Predators Behind the TPP (14 Oct. 2015)

Karel van Wolferen — Wed, 14 Oct 2015 09:06:22 +0000

A major cause of contemporary political ills in the world is the misnomers that help hide what the strong and rich aspire to and already control. A perfect example of this is the ubiquitous term ‘trade’ in what the media are telling us these days about the TPP and the TPIP – the transpacific and transatlantic treaties that seek to organize business activity under one monumental umbrella of new rules. These have been peddled as trade treaties, and hence as being great for growth and jobs, happiness and social well-being. But neither the TPP, tying the United States, a bit of Latin America and a series of East Asian countries together, nor its TPIP companion that is meant to shape American-European business relations, is primarily about trade, if stimulating genuine trade comes into it at all. It is primarily about power. Two kinds of it.
     One is aimed at creating global disadvantages for China’s industrial power and putting brakes on what the two formerly communist giants on the Eurasian continent are developing together. The other is power of a collectivity of large politically well-connected corporations to engage in conduct unchecked by national rules, which seen by eyes unaffected by neoliberal dogma would be recognized as predation.
     An earlier attempt to accomplish that second purpose, begun in 1997 by the OECD, was more honest by calling itself the Multilateral Agreement on Investments (MAI). Under MAI rules the participating governments would guarantee foreign businesses all the advantages enjoyed by their domestic producers and services. If implemented, foreign investors in these markets could with the superior force they can muster easily have wiped out domestic players altogether, and would once and for all have made the older standard development methods, once known as import substitution industrialization, impossible. Potential competitors would become perennial subcontractors. In other words, the MAI was a most blatant move to implement neocolonialism by treaty.
No surprise then that the MAI turned ‘globalization’ into a controversial project. It triggered mass activism that had never been seen before, as the Internet could for the first time tie together international protest against business power. Anti-MAI events encouraged other anti-globalization protest movements around the world, which peaked in 1999 in Seattle, and seemed to augur a new kind of ‘people power’ element in international affairs.
     Until the eleventh of September 2001. The World Trade Towers and Pentagon attacks utterly changed the political attention of virtually everyone in the world, and calamitously diverted it with another misnomer (since the “war against terrorism” is a political impossibility).
An attempt to re-introduce MAI-like arrangements with the Doha Round of negotations under the auspices of the WTO has remained dead in the water, but with the TPP we may now be on the verge of precedents that will establish mainly American financial and other corporations above the legal systems of whichever country participates.
     In 2006 Singapore, Brunei, New Zealand and Chile wanted to enhance trade cooperation and came up with the initiative for a TPP. That traditional effort for eliminating tariffs appeared laudable and innocuous enough. But Washington, nurturing schemes for regional economic hegemony, saw a chance to capture the initiative. It enticed Australia, Peru, Vietnam and Malaysia to join as well. Once Congress had endorsed related free-trade agreements with Korea, Colombia and Panama, the TPP became the most important component in a scheme for a Pacific–Asian business playground on which, if Japan could be made to join as well, US corporations could be the bullies.
     The most striking aspect of the eight years of TPP negotiations has been their utter secrecy. Only about 600 ‘cleared advisors’ – most of them linked with the businesses that stand to gain – have had access to parts of sub agreements; and critics among them have been sworn to remain silent about what they consider unacceptable. Some former trade officials and clued-in politicians in the United States and elsewhere have publicly noted that this treaty would not have the slightest chance of making it through the legislatures of participating governments if details were out in the open. Only the ‘fast track authority’ that Congress gave President Obama earlier this year (allowing the House and Senate only to vote yes or no, without changes or amendments) gives it an even chance that it will become law in the United States.
     From what we do know American negotiators have concentrated on controlling labor laws, environmental legislation and intellectual property rights, which are not normally considered priorities for improving trade. But, again, the TPP is primarily a political program. More specifically it is about about the power of large, mostly American, business institutions that already have a great deal of power – which they have bought by making politicians dependent on them. It is political because it aims to change the power relations between transnational corporations and foreign governments. It is political because it will create patterns of colonial dependence through agricultural agreements. It is political because it seeks to place the governments of the participating countries under a kind of legal discipline that has nothing to do with the rights of citizens and everything to do with the ability of strong corporations to become even stronger.
TPP details have yet to be divulged, but what we may take away from the MAI experience is that it intended rules that participating governments could violate only at their own great disadvantage. The legal stipulations in effect would have created a new element of corporate groups operating internationally beyond any kind of accountability. Hence, the MAI was not about economic development, but about wholesale power shifts in the world, as the TPP will be.
     These are shifts that suit the colonizing schemes of large American corporations, their sales and production abroad having reached gigantic proportions. Foreign markets are are about the only thing left offering promising prospects for recently evolved methods of profit making in the current phase of American late capitalism, while the domestic economy remains in the doldrums.
     The political class of the Asian participants and the Europeans, who watch from the sidelines with the companion TPIP treaty in the back of their minds, fall back on the lines of seduction first penned some two centuries ago by David Ricardo about unfettered trade being always good for everyone. But Ricardo and his followers were talking about free trade in goods, which rather amazingly still serves as a model to emulate in our times when questions of liberalization are raised – fatefully with regards to the lifting of regulations that kept order in the world of international financial transactions. If genuine markets in goods were to determine profits, American businesses would hardly have a chance internationally, since they do not manufacture that much at home anymore. Hence corporate hopes are vested on two areas opened up in participating countries by the TPP: rents and ‘financial products’. Rent seekers and financial firms are the top predators, and the TPP will massively expand their hunting territory and give them fierce fangs in the bargain.
     Once upon a time copyright was meant to provide protection to authors for a set number of years. Then it was applied in a broader way to works of art in general. This made sense, and was in line with the thinking behind patents for industrial inventions. But it has long since become exploitative. Attracted by an opportunity to make money without production, corporations began to to claim the rights of all manner of artistic merchandise after paying off needy creators, or they claimed the right to something that had theretofore been free, like the extraction of something with medicinal properties from plants and trees used in indigenous forms of medicine. For maximizing rent extraction a new category was created and named ‘Intellectual Property’. It had nothing to do with intellectual pursuits, and everything with property, which under rightwing influence gained an aura of sacredness. Property can be had everywhere: not only of music and films that have earned any original investments many times over, but also Indian Ayurvedic medicine formulas, images of temple paintings in SouthEast Asia – you name it, we are only at the beginning of this.
     Public gullibility under neoliberal regimes can be measured by the ease with which the notion of ‘piracy’ has become widely accepted, along with the moral construction that taking things freely available through the Internet constitutes theft. Under ever more stringent and internationally enforced controls, films that have made their intended profit many times over in general release, on TV and with large DVD editions, are set up to be making money forever.
     The Intellectual Property regime of TPP contain traps of which the countries seduced to join this twentyfirst century ‘unequal treaty’ are unlikely to be aware. Much of the discussion among critics has revolved around the obviously questionable closed-door tribunals to arbitrate investor-state disputes. But other legal entanglements awaiting those who sign have as yet been overlooked. The rules demanded by the United States will create conditions for an even greater American popular culture hegemony. Local producers of popular culture products are likely to find themselves pressed to the margins in their own countries, and bankrupted by very costly litigation in which the Americans are masters. An army of lawyers may be expected to become a parasitical growth on the culture of the participating countries, with a new category of ambulance chasers inspired by the new industry of American lawyers who, on their own, ferret out possible cases of copyright infringement by unsuspecting parties, and then threaten those people with litigation unless they pay a settlement fee.
     The expected Intellectual Property stipulations of the TPP related to medicine have drawn much attention, as these will enlarge the oligopoly power of Pharmaceutical companies. Global public health is likely to suffer from this, because from what is already known the new rules will lengthen the period before the use of generic drugs is permitted; and these are the only affordable medicine for patients in poorer countries. The organization Doctors Without Borders has concluded that “the TPP agreement is on track to become the most harmful trade pact ever for access to medicines in developing countries.”
     It is not difficult to understand that TPP participants who have not guessed the consequences of what they will be signing will bring social misery upon themselves. It is also not difficult to understand how the TPP fits in with Washington’s ‘Asian Pivot’ as part of its Full Spectrum Dominance campaign. (A little detour: the first cabinet of Japan’s DPJ, which ended half a century of factual one-party democracy, was overthrown because its head, Yukio Hatoyama, had sought better relations with China and Russia and would not submit to the kind of bullying inherent in the TPP. Japanese prime ministers after him were scared that they might fall victim to similar Washington-directed regime change manipulation, and halted such overtures to China while facilitating a return of the LDP’s Shinzo Abe who recently had a law adopted re-interpreting the Japanese anti-war constitution to please the United States). Japan in the TPP, something that Abe is eager to bring about, would be the biggest clincher for America’s containment of China tactics. It would push Japan deeper into an American embrace over which it has little control. After intense concentration on export-led developments, the Chinese economy is evolving into a consumer oriented system and its huge middle class has lots of money to spend. Of all the world’s countries Japan is in the best position to benefit from this switch, which is one of several reasons why it ought to treasure every opportunity for improving relations with its neighbor. The TPP would hinder that process, as has precisely been Washington’s intention.
     All this is easily understood. But it still leaves us with the puzzle of why Asians as well as Europeans, whose EU trade commissioners have been mouthing the same job creating nonsense around the TPIP that has come with the TPP, appear unable to tackle intellectually the dominant power aspects of these treaties. Perhaps because they exist in a world of their own that is politically sterilized by current economic suppositions. More generally, the concept of power (not influence with which it is often confused) receives a stepmotherly treatment in popular as well as serious writing, and the social science denizens of academia are entirely at sea with it. Mainstream economics is ahistorcal on purpose and hence has no room for power, which has helped continue the fateful division of political and economic affairs into separate realms for discussion that has long served the interests of power elites.
     Since the political dimension to economic arrangements in the United States remains hidden in most discourse because political and economic reality are routinely treated as separate realms of life, few notice that what is justified in the United States by casting it in terms of the market at work, is frequently the result of heavy political involvement and interference. Politically well-connected American corporations, paying for the election expenses of Congress members who determine their fate, need not fear ‘market forces’. If the banks responsible for the credit crisis of 2008 and the subsequent world-recession that is still with us, had not been lifted out of ‘the market’ by the state, they would no longer exist. Powerful corporations have been allowed to swallow the state; they have as the power sensitive economist James Galbraith calls it, created a ‘predator state’, which they of course exploit for their own expansion. There is no frame of reference with which we can more convincingly define the TPP.

(48) NATO and the Two Central Conflicts of the Ukraine Crisis (13 March 2015)

Karel van Wolferen — Fri, 13 Mar 2015 12:54:17 +0000

Where I live (the Netherlands), if you were to call NATO the world’s most dangerous institution, a consensus would quickly form to conclude that you must have lost your marbles. Yet, without NATO we would not have a Ukraine crisis, and no speculations about the possibility of war with Russia. Taking nuclear war seriously as a policy option should be listed in psychology handbooks as indicative of complete insanity or lethal ignorance. This has not stopped newspaper editors from speculating about it in their headlines, as they fill in the blanks of what a number top officials on both sides of the Atlantic have recently been half-saying or implying. With no NATO they would not have had occasion or reason to do so. Ukraine’s Deputy Foreign Minister Vadym Prystaiko recently said: “Everybody is afraid of fighting with a nuclear state. We are not anymore”. Political insanity can exist independently of NATO, but the least one can say is that it has become a facilitator of that insanity.
     It would therefore be a momentous development for what is still called ‘the West’ if last week’s Der Spiegel signals a relevant German awakening. The weekly magazine published a hard hitting article in which the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, General Breedlove, is accused of undermining Chancellor Merkel’s attempts to find a solution to the Ukraine crisis through diplomacy. The military head of NATO, with his exaggerations and untruths about Russian troop movements, spouts “dangerous propaganda” according to officials in Merkel’s Chancellery, as quoted by the magazine. In other words, he can no longer be trusted.
     Lies coming out of Washington that portray Putin as the grand aggressor are nothing new; for about a year they have formed a constant stream, from the lips of the Vice President, the Secretary of State, and in a milder form from the President himself. As a result the idea of Russian aggression has become close to an article of faith in Northern Europe’s mainstream media. But by singling out Breedlove, the German fingerpointing is directed at NATO, and Obama and Co may draw their own conclusions from it.
     An assortment of conflicts have gone into the Ukraine crisis, but the two that now appear to have become fundamental to it play themselves out far away from that tragic country. One is centered in Washington where an out-of-his-depth president must decide whether to become realistic or give in further to right-wing forces that want to give the Kiev regime the weapons needed to continue its war in Eastern Ukraine. The second conflict is an incipient one about NATO – meaning European subservience to the United States – begun by Angela Merkel’s and Francois Hollande’s recently formed Peace Party, of which their mission to the Kremlin, Merkel’s joint press conference with Obama and the abovementioned German reporting are early signs.
     Until now Obama has given as good as free rein to the liberal hawks and neocons in his own government. The War Party. A prominent member of that group, Victoria Nuland, who played a central role in helping to organize the coup d’état in Kiev last year, is eager to give Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko the means to survive the onslaughts of supernationalists in his own environment and to subdue, finally, the anti-regime troops in South East Ukraine. Nuland works closely with Breedlove, and both have expressed themselves in denigrating terms about European recalcitrance in the face of what they want to accomplish.
     Should Obama choose to become realistic, it would require measures to show the world his re-establishing political control over the State Department, and other institutions where neocons and “responsibility to protect” liberals have nestled. These have been writing America’s foreign policy basics since George W. Bush. It would also have to be accompanied by a genuine change of position vis-à-vis Putin. Obama must be aware that if, instead, he chooses to continue siding with the War Party, he runs the risk of demonstrating to all and sundry NATO’s impotence as military instrument of ‘The West’. The fighting forces of Donetsk and Lubansk wage an existential battle, and have all along been superior against the demoralized and apparently disorganized Kiev military. American intervention could only be effective if the proposed ‘lethal weapons’ have the capacity to turn the Ukraine war into a theatre of full military escalation, with tactical nuclear weapons an ultimate option.
     The newly revealed split in transatlantic purposes may finally decide NATO’s future. As an institution that began living a life of its own with purposes and actions entirely different from, and at odds with, the original purposes for which it was created, NATO has had a much more fateful influence on political Europe than is routinely understood. Set up in 1949 to reassure a demoralized and war devastated Europe that it would help prevent a new war, the European member countries normally do not question the official reason that it exists to protect them. But there has not been a single instance since the demise of the Soviet Union to confirm such a function. It has, instead, forced governments to lie to their populations (we are threatened from behind the Hindu Kush and Saddam Hussein can make mushroom clouds), poisoning the air in which reasoned geopolitical discussion ought to have taken place. It has, moreover, created risks from blowback activity as member countries participated in wars that were none of NATO’s business.
     But NATO’s worst consequence is what it has done to Europe’s prospects to pull itself out of its current muddledom and become a political entity recognizable as such by the rest of the world. It has prevented the European Union from developing a defense policy, and consequently a foreign policy worthy of the term. Since the demise of its original reason for being, it has caused Europe to slip ever further into a relationship vis-à-vis the United States best compared to medieval vassalage. That sad fact could hardly have been more blatantly obvious when in 2014 it succumbed to Washington’s pressure to join punitive economic sanctions against Putin’s Russia, to its own significant economic detriment, and for reasons justified solely by American propaganda.
     The ease with which European Union heads of government fell in line behind misguided American efforts in the demonization of Putin reveals an even deeper problem. Since the end of the Cold War NATO has kept European politicians in a kind of geopolitical kindergarten, encouraging a comic book style vision of world affairs scripted in Washington with bad guys threatening the West and its ‘values’.
     Some of this is of course well-understood in parts of the highest ruling circles of the European Union. Hence the recent suggestion made by EU Commission President Jean Claude Juncker in an interview with Germany’s Die Welt newspaper, that Europe requires its own army to amount to anything on the world stage, and also to impress Russia with what Europe stands for. Juncker is well-known as an enthusiast for a federal Europe.
     One of the reasons to wake European Union up to the fact that is a political entity, and to encourage its development in the direction of a federal superstructure, is that by projecting its own power it could create a much needed counterbalance to the tragic American extremism in world affairs. It would force a militarist United States to stop legimizing its aggression with references and appeals to putative ‘Western values’.
     The European Union missed a chance to establish itself squarely on the world stage when Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder did not clarify why they denied George W. Bush a UN Security Council resolution for his invasion of Iraq. They failed to explain to their own public and to the wider world that Europe continues to uphold the UN Charter as the basis of what we have in the way of fledgling international law. Instead, from that moment onward the world saw an open European display of utter subservience to a tragically out-of-control Washington in Afghanistan and Iraq.
     The much bandied about ‘Western values’ do not now include earlier principles connected with international law, desirable world order, sovereignty or diplomacy. Those have been eclipsed by Atlanticism, which is a peculiar European secular faith. It holds that the United States, while perhaps flawed, is still an indispensable savior, and without its leadership there cannot be good world order. Hence we must all do what Washington demands.
     Since Atlanticism is worshipped most intensely by NATO, we may think of this institution as the Church of this faith. Its texts are slogans about liberty, ‘shared values’, human rights and the need to spread democracy. It has of course derived strength from historical experience and also from deserved gratitude. A weak lingering fear that without American supervision European quarrels could turn nasty – an original additional reason for wanting to have it around – may still enter into it as well. But its resilience is probably most of all due to an utter dearth of imagination among the technocrats and ideologically crippled men and women that form majorities among Europe’s ruling elites.
     “Like no other institution, NATO embodies Atlantic cohesion, something that remains essential for any Western effort to promote a degree of international order. NATO links Europe to the world’s most powerful country and uniquely ties the United States to a common procedure of consultation and cooperation. …European governments, therefore, are crazy not to support NATO. To watch it wither is at best frivolous, at worst dangerous”, so said the well-known NATO advocate Christoph Bertram when in 2004 misgivings about George W. Bush were creating European doubts about its value. The crucial point he and other true believers have missed is that already for some time now genuine consultation is no longer part of the deal and, more importantly, that at the center of their faith is a country addicted to enemies.
     An enemy that others can agree on offers a simple, rudimentary, way of measuring the goodness, badness and seriousness of fellow citizens. Especially for American politicians being ‘tough’ on baddies has become an almost indispensable means to demonstrate their political bona fides. When obvious solutions for substantial political problems affecting everyday life are too controversial, politicians tend to take firm stands on matters that brook no disagreement, like crime or familiar enemies. For a long time one of the worst things that could befall an American candidate for high office was to be called “soft on communism”. President Lyndon Johnson against his own better judgment did not end the Vietnam War because he anticipated massive political attacks from Republican ranks for having caved in to it. Today Obama’s detractors in the Republican Party have the Ukraine crisis as a welcome opportunity to ‘prove’ their repeated claim that he is a weak president, who cannot stand up to the challenges supposedly thrown down by Vladimir Putin. As a result the ‘liberal hawks’ in Obama’s own administration have a field day in pushing anti-Russian hysteria.
     The mandatory enemy has determined much geopolitical reality since the end of the Cold War. Living with one prompts standard behaviour that, in the way of all regular behaviour, itself becomes an institution, which does not simply go away when the enemy vanishes. So after the demise of the Soviet Union there was a sudden desperate need to promote countries to enemy position. Since 2001 the “soft on terrorism” accusation has partially substituted for the political use of the putative communist threat; and before the attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center Towers in Manhattan a fabrication of ‘rogue states’ or ‘failed states’ was introduced to keep all manner of Cold War institutions going.
     When leading Vietnam War official Robert McNamara testified before Congress that with the Soviet Union gone America’s defense budget could be cut in half, the Pentagon and assorted military-related institutions suffered from a collective panic attack. Their answer was a report compiled by Colin Powell, then head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who obligingly created new threats, dictating that in future the United States must be able to fight two wars simultaneously against new enemies. China is held in reserve, radical Islamists are currently serving, and Putin’s Russia has now been added as a huge new but still familiar fake monster to join the list. With NATO membership the Europeans get America’s enemies as a bonus.
     The one genuine threat to NATO, the fact that it is obsolete, has remained mostly hidden. It has been searching for causes that would keep it relevant, hence the involvement of member states in Afghanistan and Iraq and Mali and Libya. Hence its expansion, through absorbing the former Warsaw pact countries; a bureaucracy that increases in size gains new relevance. Ten years after the Berlin Wall came down it sought relevance by changing from a defensive into an offensive alliance, promptly violating the UN Charter, through its war in Kosovo.
     To do away with NATO in one fell swoop, desirable as it may be, is obviously not going to work in the immediate future. But it could be allowed gradually to wither away, as it was doing before the Pentagon dragged it into Afghanistan.
     A bureaucracy is not easily killed once it becomes redundant. Complicating matters in this case is that behind its appeals to ‘common values’, the alliance is an outgrowth of the U.S. military-industrial complex, adding to its military procurements, jobs, astronomical profits, and highly remunerated official positions.
     But there is something more to NATO than this and all the already mentioned other reasons, something less tangible and hence easily overlooked. Its withering will not make the Atlanticist faith go away. That faith, together with NATO are links to political certainty of a kind. They are an extension of a spiritual handrail that existed throughout the Cold War, one helping to counter radical doubt. The post-World-War-II international order that developed in the shadow of United States-Soviet rivalry came, for all its defects, closer to a relatively stable society of states than anything seen in global relations since the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, and with it we could be certain that we knew what was politically good and bad.
     Suddenly that was gone, and we had a post-Cold-War world throwing up massive uncertainties that, as imagined by a generation of concerned Europeans, have eaten into the fabric of moral and political life of the West. One could hardly expect the Cold War generation right away to throw overboard an Atlanticism that had been a political life sustaining faith. Decades later, clinging to that faith and as members of NATO, you get a modicum of certainty along with the American enemies that accompany it.
     Listen to why retired French, German, Dutch, British and American top defense officials, in a book prepared for a 2008 NATO conference, advocated a military response not to physical threats but to foreign ideas that question Western supremacy and power. These NATO thinkers spoke explicitly in terms of a “restoration of its certainties” as a condition for the security of the West. China has the temerity to compete with Western interests in Africa, and Iran wants to wipe out Israel. The foreign ideas to be fought are irrational and aimed at defeating Western values. Implicitly claiming a moral monopoly of the use of violence for the United States and NATO, those former NATO generals came out in favor of using nuclear weapons, if need be, to stop other countries from developing weapons of mass destruction. In the words of Germany’s former chief of Defense, “we cannot survive … confronted with people who do not share our values, who unfortunately are in the majority in terms of numbers, and who are extremely hungry for success”. The massive Western propaganda of last year, demonizing Putin, from the putsch in Kiev onward, breathes the same spirit.
     Neocons and liberal hawks deal in certainties. They have uncovered existential threats to Western values coming from terrorists and islamists. The anomalous fantasy of the ‘war on terrorism’, which cannot exist and is the biggest lie of the twentyfirst century, nevertheless brings the certainty of valiant defenders of Western values.
     But Chancellor Merkel received her political education on the other side of the Iron Curtain. It would appear that her view of the situation has come rather close to that of Putin as expressed in his 2007 Munich Security Conference speech:
     “I am convinced that we have reached that decisive moment when we must seriously think about the architecture of global security. And we must proceed by searching for a reasonable balance between the interests of all participants in the international dialogue … The United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way … And of course this is extremely dangerous. It results in the fact that no one feels safe. I want to emphasize this — no one feels safe.”
     Germany’s foreign minister, the formidable Frank-Walter Steinmeier visits the United States this week to talk with high officials. Writing in the New York Times of 11 March, he came with what can be read as an appeal to realism and formerly held principles – albeit with a sop to prevailing opinion about Russian aggression.
     The potential of a heightened conflict between Washington and a Chancellor Merkel, if she has the courage, the intelligence, and the inclination fully to open her eyes to Europe’s interests, lays bare the all-important question whether the United States is still capable of re-engaging in diplomacy. This is something it abandoned after the end of the Cold War, along with the very principle of respecting the sovereignty of countries that do not do its bidding. As of now, the United States simply will not accept sharing the globe with any other power that has significant political influence in its own part of the world.
     This particular superpower psychosis is a first in history.
     Merkel, and some other top European officials must by now have concluded that there is urgency in the matter, quite aside from avoiding the further provocation of Moscow by arming Poroshenko. Waiting in the wings is Hillary Clinton who, by all relevant commentary and impressions of her past actions and opinions will be an even worse war president than Obama has been, if she makes it to the White House.

(47) Europe’s Accidental Autocrat And Her Two Accidental Missions (6 March 2015)

Karel van Wolferen — Fri, 06 Mar 2015 11:58:11 +0000

The European Union is not a state or a federation of states, it is something not seen before, but is assumed to grow state-like characteristics like a center of political accountability. It does not have a head of state or head of government. But political entities of any kind will at some point, when under pressure, cry out for leadership. Europe’s crises are demanding this, and have thrown up an autocrat.
     Angela Merkel is an accidental autocrat. She was not chosen to be leader of Europe through any democratic method. She was not appointed or anointed. She could hardly be a more unlikely leader of the continent, having received her political education in the sheltered system of the DDR, far removed from plans and beginnings of Europe’s unification. She does not give the impression of having wanted the position, and if she relishes it she does not let on. She has demonstrated to possess great political savvy, with tactical skills first honed when she was leader of a youth division of East Germany’s “Propaganda und Agitation”. Her acumen has lifted her to an apparently invulnerable position above Germany’s political parties. The big question for all of us interested in the world’s future is whether she is becoming the inspired politician for whom many Europeans have been waiting. Can she rise to the occasion?
     Early signs do not prompt a jubilant ‘yes!’. Yes, she did make a late move, eleven months into the Ukraine crisis, to try stop American ‘lethal’ weapon deliveries (with the inevitable ‘advisers’ and in the end well-nigh inevitable tactical nukes) to the Kiev regime. And, yes, she let the Greek Minister of Finance have a tiny slice of a compromise to allow him a Herculean attempt to save his country from total economic ruin. Both moves, though, were the absolute minimum of what the crises required.
     The Ukraine and Greek crises have become existential crises for the European Union, caused by what is most wrong with that political entity. There are two great hindrances that keep the Union from fulfilling its unrealized promise. The promise was much commented upon only two decades ago, when Europe presented itself as a paragon of international virtues worthy of emulation. The hindrances – it cannot be restated often enough – are the secular faith of Atlanticism and the neoliberal capture of the Union’s political structure and processes. The two are, almost needless to say, intertwined.
     The phrase ‘democratic deficit’ used by officials and commentators until a few years ago showed an awareness among Europe’s political elites that the way things are done in the European Union were not quite in keeping with professed principles held up for the world’s admiration. But this criticism revolved around the lack of enthusiasm for, participation in, or even the slightest curiosity about Europe’s political life rather than that they revealed an understanding of the momentous political metamorphosis that was changing things from under the feet of citizens of Europe’s member states without them noticing.
     That change is neatly summed up by the imagery of the transformation of citizens, as far as ruling elites are concerned, into consumers – a transformation more vividly imagined by American critics of late capitalism than their counterparts in Europe, for whom the process was faster and came with less warning.
     No electorate in the European Union voted for a replacement of unions, political parties, churches and other once representative institutions between themselves and their governments by a pack of ever more powerful corporate bodies dictating terms to the Union’s ruling elite. They did not vote for austerity policies masquerading as responsible finance. They did not bring a Brussels lobby of insurers to power, which demanded fundamental overhauls of good working national healthcare systems, limiting physicians in what they could and should perscribe and advise. They did not vote for an elevation of North European banks to become dominant arbiters of policy, and when these were facing technical bankruptcy through their gambling, they did not endorse the compensation of bank losses incurred through predatory lending by means of, again, predatory policies causing large-scale social suffering and ruin in the peripheral member states, Greece foremost among them.
     Traditional safeguards against the arrogation of power by non-representative but politically significant entities to a point where they eliminate the relevance of citizens do not now function in Europe. Angela Merkel demonstrated her political loyalties when, after the credit crisis of 2008, she pointed her fingers at the Greeks and other peripheral populations who reportedly evaded their taxes and did not work hard enough, effectively changing the subject from the question of who instigated the crisis. After that, and up until today, she could hardly inform her electorate that German tax money and IMF financial ‘aid’ was bouncing straight back from Athens to replenish the coffers of Germany’s own banks, along with those of France and The Netherlands.
     Since that time I have wondered whether Chancellor Merkel could perceive what was going on, and whether her tack to blame the Greeks was a momentary expedient, the repercussions of which were beyond her abilities to fathom. With respect to the other big hindrance to European fulfillment, does Chancellor Merkel begin to fathom just how momentous the changes in Washington at the hands of neocon radicals and ‘liberal hawks’ have been? She has appeared, at least until recently, to share with her counterparts in Northern Europe a blindness to how Europe’s erstwhile geopolitical protector, which for all its CIA machinations did help maintain a relatively stable post-World War II international system, has become a tragic case of political malfunctioning and deadly hubris. Does she perceive that the ‘Alliance’ part of Atlanticism has become theory without substance?
     There is no alliance in the generally accepted interpretation of the word. Alliances exist for purposes of shared goals. After the demise of the common enemy, the transatlantic alliance collapsed because of a slide into militarism, and fundamentally altered priorities of its dominant member. Command replaced consultation. Times are long gone when any kind of public conversation between Europeans and Americans about harmful American action has a chance to resonate in American corridors of power. Through continued support for NATO Europe’s member states help encourage Washington’s delusions of unattainable total global control, which will not benefit them in any way, but of which they are likely to become dupes.
     A major article in Der Spiegel, Germany’s weekly with a reputation for seriousness to lose, celebrates a new Merkel. One who has taken the initiative to try stop the fighting in the Ukraine, and “contrary to her preferred modus operandi, has embarked on a mission with an uncertain outcome”. Along with a detailed description of the Minsk negotiations, the magazine speaks of a major change of style. After a history of being critical of Merkel for “dithering in the face of tough decisions” it admires her now for “making moves she would have avoided in the past”, and concludes that she has switched from foreign policy ‘idealism’ (principles) to realpolitik. In this and other Spiegel articles, as well as most articles on the subject all over Europe, the elephant in the room is studiously overlooked. But the Der Spiegel editors do acknowledge who is boss, as they comment on Obama that “he is a president who gives Merkel room, and a chance, to make her own foreign policy, a European foreign policy,” almost as if, under their breath, they thank him for his generosity on this occasion.
     With respect to the looming threat of a proxy war in the Ukraine the leading question is whether the peace party that Merkel has formed with Francois Hollande can outlive any further Washington meddling aimed at preventing a de facto partition of the Ukraine. In feverishly nationalist neocon eyes what is at stake with propping up the Kiev regime, and helping it defeat the separatists, can only loom bigger than before they meddled in the Ukraine. By initiating the crisis and with their containment moves on the Asian side, they themselves have driven the two former communist giants of the Eurasian continent into each other’s arms. There are now new Russian-Chinese trade and mutual assistance commitments, and their joint efforts to establish an alternative to the dollar for global trade and aid purposes have intensified. The new ‘silk road’ projects that will connect China’s coastal cities with European ports by high-speed trains, and which promise to make the heaviest trade traffic in human history possible, can only appear as an ultimate threat to ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’ ambitions. It would be a miracle if the second Minsk ceasefire agreement also ended the recent history of NATO provocations, together with Washington’s sabotaging of Europe-Russian commercial relations. Barack Obama has never shown the kind of presidential control and resolve that made Harry Truman fire General Douglas McArthur.
     We may be witnessing a restoration of significant French-German cooperation, which evidently began over a lengthy dinner at the end of January in Strasbourg. Almost surely relevant as well was that Merkel and Hollande went to the Kremlin without their usual entourage, evidently to minimize the possibility of American eavesdropping. It would seem that the French, more than the Germans have begun to see that the Atlanticism fervently on display in 2014, and unreservedly preached by Europe’s mainstream media, has created a funnel to political suffocation and perhaps fullscale war. For the peace party to succeed in the long term, and for European-Russian relations to be repaired and go towards where they were before waves of Putin vilification poisoned Europe’s public discussion, Merkel will have to paper over her earlier shared general European assumptions of Putin as the aggressor in the Ukraine and her earlier bad misunderstanding of the crisis.
Peace party heroism now masks Merkel’s factual defeat by having to take seriously what Putin had been suggesting all along with his repeated diplomatic proposals ever since the putsch in Kiev last year. Is she now also ready to accept the defeat of her story about lazy Greeks properly punished by an austerity program? The number of Europeans who still believe that original story has dwindled significantly. In spite of continued scornful and belittling mainstream misreporting in Northern Europe’s mainstream media about the attempts by Yanis Varoufakis to break through the rigidity of Europe’s financial apparatchiks, sympathy has grown for the new Greek government trying to save their nation.
     The last time we had anything remotely resembling what the ‘troika’ of European Commission, ECB, and IMF was doing to Greece, was in the days of ‘bleeding’ as medical remedy for various illnesses. That flourished in ancient Greece and medieval Europe when surgeons believed that illnesses were caused by an imbalance of body ‘humors’. It was discontinued just before the twentieth century. A hundred years later the comparable method of starving public sectors, making them as skinny as possible has been conquering the world. For centuries a fainting patient was considered proof that the treatment was working, and the weaker ones naturally died. But the difference between bloodletting in the past and the economic austerity of today, is that bloodletting was frequently not fatal, while starving countries’ public sectors leads inexorably to ever deeper economic tragedy.
     By now the only people who still stick to the unreason of bleeding, at least publicly, are the top officials of Europe’s finance ministries, with Germany’s Minister of Finance Wolfgang Schäuble in the lead. I think they cannot believe in it, but they must be constantly aware of the interests they in fact represent, which have been prospering from Greece’s bleeding. But, surprise, the IMF, whose record of enthusiastic economic bloodletting in South America and Africa brought its continued existence in danger until the Euro countries asked it to come and help, has turned out to be relatively supportive for the aims of the Syriza government. As we know, the American Treasury controls the IMF. For the moment Washington does not want to have to deal with disintegration of the euro or European Union.
     Merkel does not of course want to go down in history as the autocrat who made disintregation happen. A very interesting and telling split in the German top was revealed when in the last phase Germany’s Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel spoke of the Greek final proposal as an acceptable basis for negotiation after Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, had denied this. The next thing that happened was a phone call from Merkel to Alexis Tsipras, her Greek colleague, that changed the atmosphere.
     Did the German chancellor rise to the occasion here, characteristically at a late moment, in a seemingly trivial but factually big way? There are other cases in her political past where her well-known slow-motion decision making speeds up when her physicist-chemist trained mind has collected all available evidence. She also does not seem to mind that a political associate walks into a wall as a result.
     Mainstream media reports on the confrontation between Varoufakis and the European authorities have mostly concealed the fact that Schäuble took a step back, as they made it appear that the Greek government was too sure of itself and invited humiliation. Reporters and analysts can be relied upon unwittingly to fall in line with Merkel’s image-making behind which this, in her domestic setting rather ruthless, politician practices what Der Spiegel now calls ‘realpolitik’.
     The dogmatic rigidity of the troika serves to give this combination of institutions a semblance of legitimacy, which would be undermined if it ended its austerity demands. Their lording it over the nations that fell victim to the misbehavior of the Northern banks does not rest on democratic legitimacy. Neither has it possessed legitimacy rooted in knowledge and capacity or political wisdom. Europe’s populations have been expected to accept that IMF, ECB, and their ministers of finance have profound understanding of economies and know what in the end is good for all. This is no longer widely believed. The rigidity of the ministers of finance on display in Brussels last month must have been inspired, more specifically, by a newly emerging threat to the power of present incumbents.
     If the Syriza government in Athens succeeds in making headway in its promised fight against corruption and tax evasion during the four months extension of a loan agreement it has been given, and if it then manages, gradually and with new negotiations, to extricate itself from austerity doom, Spanish, Portuguese, and perhaps even Irish electorates will have a precedent for a new breed of politicians to invoke. In which case the authorities may begin to see the first outlines of a new spectre to haunt Europe. When Varoufakis kept referring to the fact that what he was doing for Greece, was very much also for Europe as a whole, this man of great intellectual capacity and integrity was not disingeneous.
     Having once almost personified the two big things that are wrong with Europe, Atlanticist submission and austerity policies, does the German Chancellor have it in her to lead Europe away from those? She appears to be the only politician who can win from the ECB, IMF, EU Commission, and possibly even Obama. Circumstances are forcing this accidental autocrat to come to terms with the two great political perversions of our age: the subjection of the mass of the world’s human beings to a life ultimately dictated by the very few – the infamous 1% – and an irrepressible warmaking spirit that seeks fulfillment of fantasies of total global control.
     Is this accidental autocrat aware of how huge, how monumental a difference she could make?

(46) The Havoc and Fantasy of ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’ (26 Sept 2014)

Karel van Wolferen — Fri, 26 Sep 2014 09:56:22 +0000

The American-triggered regime change in Ukraine at the Western end of the Eurasian continent has been widely discussed. Less noticed, if at all, has been the American-triggered change of government in Japan four years ago as part of the so-called ‘pivot’ aimed at holding back China on the Eastern end. The two ought to be considered together, since they share a purpose known as ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’.
A military ambition and agenda, this provides much activist energy among America’s neoconservatives and their fellow travelers, which include sundry financial and commercial interests. Made up of many parts, like the recently established “Africom” (U.S. Africa Command), the comparable effort to contain-isolate-denigrate the two former communist enemy giants, China and Russia, may be considered a central aim.
It does not add up to a feasible strategy for long-term American interests, but few American initiatives have done in the recent past. Since neoconcervatives, ‘liberal hawks’ and neoliberals appear to have captured the State Department and White House, and their activism has already produced significant geopolitical instability, it would be no luxury to dig deeper in developments on the rather neglected Asian side of the globe.
The protracted overthrow in the course of 2010 of the first cabinet formed by the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) does not at first glance resemble what happened in Kiev on January 22nd 2014 – when Victoria Nuland & Co triggered, aided, and abetted an anti–Russian coup d’état. No snipers were involved. No deaths. No civil war against Japanese citizens who had supported a reformist program. It was a gentle overthrow. But an overthrow it was even so. And, importantly, while the Ukraine case served the elevation by consensus of Russia to being the new number one enemy of ‘the West’, the abrupt end to a new Japanese policy of rapprochement was the start of a fairly successful drive to create common imagery of China as a threat to its neighbors.
Back in September of 2009, Japan underwent a politically momentous change when a new ruling party came to power, thereby ending half a century of what had been in fact a ‘one-party democracy’. As the first serious opposition contender for government, the DPJ had won an overwhelming electoral victory with a strongly reformist manifesto. Its original, and at that time still essential, aim was to push for greater political control over a bureaucracy that is in many crucial ways politically unaccountable.
One of this new government’s first moves was to initiate a new China policy. Its main architect, Ichiro Ozawa, had filled several planes with writers, artists, and politicians to visit China for the specified purpose of improving “people to people and party to party” relations. At the same time, the prime minister of this first cabinet, Yukio Hatoyama, was openly declaring his intention to join other East Asian leaders in the formation of an Asean+3 community, consisting of the existing Asean grouping plus Korea, China and Japan. It is highly unlikely that the now diplomatically ruinous and possibly dangerous Sino-Japanese conflict over the Senkaku/Diyaou islands would have come into being if his cabinet had lasted.
As could have been expected, these unexpected Japanese initiatives created collective heartburn among Washington’s ‘Japan handlers’. Some were quoted by reporters as saying that perhaps they had all along been concerned about the wrong country; that Japan and not China ought to have been the focus of their anxieties.
What the DPJ intended to achieve, the creation of an effective center of political accountability capable of implementing truly new policy changes, did not interest the Japan handlers, and Obama never gave the impression that he had a clue of what was happening, or that it should ever be his concern. Japan’s new prime minister made three or four requests for a meeting with the then new president for a discussion on Asian developments, which would appear perfectly reasonable and even imperative, considering an earlier often repeated epithet for U.S.-Japan relations as being “the world’s most important bilateral relationship”. But while the requests for a one-on-one had gone through the proper diplomatic channels, they drew only a reponse in the form of scathing public remarks by an American official that Hatoyama should not think that he could help settle any domestic problems through a meeting with a very busy American president.
To understand what followed, and to make sense of this ‘regime change’ story, one must know a bit more about the intricacies of the Japanese power system, its odd relationship with that of the United States, and how these two interact. Because neither accord comfortably with models produced by various schools of international relations, and because they do not seem to make sense to media editors, these subjects hardly ever receive serious attention outside a small circle of authors who have made it their specialty.
A cardinal point is the odd division of labor between elected and career officials, which in the half century of formal LDP rule settled into a pattern in which the bureaucrats made policy and used the politicians in high office as brokers to settle turf wars or occasionally to administer a slight prodding to drive policy in a bureaucratically desired direction. One can, of course, find exceptions proving the rule. Those who remember the famous BBC comedy series “Yes Minister” and recognize some of this in their own countries, would still find it hard to believe the extent to which such a division of labor can be normalized.
The second cardinal point is that Japan does not function as an independent sovereign state. To find a proper term for the U.S.-Japan relationship is difficult since there has been nothing quite like it in history. Vassal comes to mind, of course, and client state is a useful characterization. Some would prefer protectorate, but the United States has less say over what goes on inside domestic political and economic Japan than is assumed with protectorates. It is in fact rather amazing to see the extent to which the Japanese elite in business, bureaucracy, and financial circles have maintained an economic system that is radically different from what Americans believe an economic system should look like.
But with respect to foreign relations Japan must toe the line. The unequal arrangement used to come with formidable advantages. Like the Europeans with their Atlanticism, the Japanese have not been required for half a century to produce political leaders capable of thinking strategicaly and dealing independently with a transforming world. Noticeably less so, even, than has been true for the Europeans. The readiness with which the United States has extended economic favours to Japan, to the detriment of its own global economic position, has been extraordinary. Japan would not have become the industrial power it remains up till today, had the United States not tolerated its structural protectionism, and allowed full-speed one-way expansion of Japanese market shares in the United States to the considerable disadvantage of American domestic industry. I cannot think of any other instance in history in which one large country has had it so easy in its diplomatic and economic interaction with the world, simply by relying on the power, goodwill and strategic calculations of another country, while at the same time itself remaining politically outside the international system. Other countries gradually became used to Japan’s near invisibility on the world diplomatic stage.
This passsive comportment in world affairs, which over the years drew plenty of criticism from Washington, was a thorn in the side of quite a few Japanese, and Ozawa with Hatoyama were at the forefront of political ranks eager to do something about it.
Throughout the Cold War, Washington’s determination to rely on having an obedient outpost close to the shores of the two huge Communist powers did not require much pleading or pushing, because Tokyo had, as a matter of course, decided that it shared this same Communist enemy with Washington. At the same time, the US-Japan Security Treaty did not constitute an alliance of a kind comparable to what, for instance, the member countries of NATO had entered into. To be precise, it was essentially a base lease agreement; one from which there was, for all practical purposes, no exit for Japan. The ‘status of forces agreement’ has not been reviewed since 1960.
The regime change drama can be said to have been prefigured shortly before the August 2009 elections that brought the DPJ to power. In January of that year Hillary Clinton came to Tokyo on her first mission as Obama’s Secretary of State to sign an agreement with the outgoing LDP administration (which knew it was stumbling on its last legs), reiterating what had been agreed on in October 2005 about a highly controversial planned new base for US Marines on Okinawa – a plan hatched by Donald Rumsfeld – which had earlier been forced down the throat of the LDP. The ruling party of the one-party democracy had applied a preferred method of Japanese politics when something embarrassingly awkward comes up: do nothing, and hope everyone will forget it. Clinton made clear that no matter what kind of government the Japanese electorate would choose, there could be no deviation from earlier arrangements. Her choice of American officials to deal with Japan, Kurt Campbell, Kevin Maher, and Wallace Gregson (all ‘alumni’ from the Pentagon) also indicated that she would not tolerate something that in Washington’s mind would register as Japanese backtracking.
This was a moment of great irony. Japan’s new leaders, who were in the process of establishing political control over a heretofore politically almost impenetrable bureaucracy, were now confronted with an American bureaucratic clique that lives a life of its own and was seemingly oblivious to regional developments in which Japan was bound to become less passive and politically isolated. As noted, the Japan handlers under Hillary Clinton came from the military, and an earlier generation of State Department diplomats with Japan experience appeared to have been squeezed out of the picture completely. As would soon become clear, the policymakers of the Obama administration were highly mistrustful of any ideas, never mind actual courses of action, that seemed in any way to alter the status quo in the region. In autumn 2009 US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates arrived to rub it in some more that Washington would not accept independent Japanese action, or anything that deviated from how the LDP had always handled things. To make that point clear he refused to attend the customary banquet organized in his honor.
Senior editors of Japan’s huge daily newspapers, who in normal unison do more than anyone to create political reality in the country, as well as senior bureaucrats with whom these editors normally cooperate, were ambivalent. One of the editors asked me at the time how long I thought the new government would have to accomplish something he compared to the difficulties faced by the Meiji reformers some 140 years earlier. I answered that it would be up to him and his colleagues. Even while experienced older bureaucrats were aware of the need for drastic institutional renewal, they were not happy with the new or adjusted priorities of their new putative political overseers. This became a particularly poignant issue with regard to relations across the Pacific.
Much of the international Japan coverage at that time was done out of Washington with journalists interviewing the Japan handlers, since the body of regular American correspondents in Tokyo had dwindled to a very few who permanently resided there. Like we have just seen happen with the coverage of the Ukraine crisis in European media, Japan’s newspapers were beginning to reflect the reality as created by American editors. Which meant that before long the large domestic newspapers were adopting the line that prime minister Hatoyama was undermining the U.S.-Japan relationship. At the same time veterans from the LDP, the ‘ruling party’ of the one-party democracy party that had been decisively defeated in the summer of 2009, were briefing their old political friends in Washington about the obvious inexperience and alleged incompetence of the new incumbents. By these means the story about a politically new Japan led to the propaganda line that Prime Minister Hatoyama was mishandling the crucial US-Japan relationship. A perfidious role was played by prominent Japanologists in American academia who appeared to overlook the importance of what Japan’s reformist politicians were attempting to achieve.
It is difficult to find another instance in which official Washington delivered as blatant insults to a country as to Japan under Hatoyama. Aside from his repeated formal requests for a meeting being ignored, the Japan handlers counseled Obama not to give the Japanese prime minister more than 10 minutes of his time during chance encounters at international meetings. Hillary Clinton put the Japanese Ambassador on the carpet with a reprimand addressed to Hatoyama for “lying” when the Japanese prime minister, after having sat next to her at a banquet in Copenhagen, told the Japanese media afterwards that his conversation with her had been positive. Japanese newspapers could not measure these things with their normal frames of reference, and began to copy a general notion of the Washington-inspired American media that Hatoyama was simply bad for transpacific relations.
It took snipers killing some hundred protesters and policemen to end the elected government in Kiev, as neonazis, ambitious oligarchs and thugs used that opportunity to hijack a revolutionary movement. On the other side of the Eurasian continent it took a clueless and cooperative Japanese media and a frustrated bureaucracy, already used to sabotaging DPJ wishes, to end the first cabinet of this reformist party, and with that bring an end to a genuinely different Japanese foreign policy inspired by a reassessment of long-term Japanese interests. Hatoyama did not have to flee like the elected president in Kiev almost 4 years later. He eventually simply stepped down. He did so in line with a custom whereby politicians who wish to accomplish something that is generally understood to be controversial and difficult will stake their political future on the outcome. In this case Hatoyama had walked into a trap. He was given to believe that an acceptable compromise solution was being arranged for the problem of the new Marine basis in Okinawa. As he told me himself about half a year later, with that he made the biggest mistake in his political life.
This is not how the newspapers have reported on it, and not how it has entered commonly understood recent history, but let this sink in: Washington managed, without the use of violence, to manipulate the Japanese political system into discarding a reformist cabinet. The party that had intended to begin clearing up dysfunctional political habits that had evolved over half a century of one-party rule lost its balance and bearings, and never recovered. Hatoyama’s successor, Kan Naoto, did not want the same thing happening to him, and distantiated himself from the foreign policy reformists, and his successor in turn, Yoshihiko Noda, helped realign Japan’s bureaucracy precisely to that of the United States where roughly it had been for half a century. By calling for an unnecessary election, which everyone knew the DPJ would lose, he brought the American-blessed LDP back to power to have Japan slide back into its normal client state condition, essentially answerable, even if only tacitly, to Washington’s wishes.
Where earlier a China policy of friendly relations was being forged was suddenly nothing. A political vacuum is ideal space for political mischief and Japan’s veteran mischief maker is Shintaro Ishihara, generally characterized as a far right politician, whose rise to high position was accelerated and punctuated by publicity stunts. In April 2012, toward the end of his 13 years as governor of Tokyo, he proposed that the metropolis nominally under his charge buy the uninhabited islands in the East China Sea, long the subject of a territorial dispute that was shelved when Japan and China normalized relations. Beijing took that opportunity to organize vehement anti–Japanese demonstrations, and relations predictably foundered. It had frequently gone that route before. Hyping anti-Japanese sentiment is a well-tried Chinese method of channeling domestic protest, diverting it from domestic problems which otherwise cause unrest. South Korea has sometimes done the same.
Top diplomats among the Chinese foreign policy officials were understandably incensed when faced with the fact that the rapprochement initiatives by a new government in Tokyo were simply killed off at a command from the United States. As with previous instances of diplomatic stalemate, the Chinese wonder to what extent they are indirectly talking with Washington, when they share a negotiating table with Japanese.
The last DPJ prime minister, Toshihiko Noda, who had forgotten or never understood the reformist origins of his party, subsequently ignored back channel communication from Beijing about how to solve the row without either country losing face. Since then Chinese conduct has been provocative, with Beijing annoying and offending Tokyo purposely through announcements about Chinese airspace and activities in the vicinity of the disputed islands.
If you begin the story about Sino-Japanese relations at that point you could perhaps endorse the current Prime Minister Abe’s vision of China as a significant problem, which he broadcasted to the world during the most recent Davos meeting. Other governments in the region share part of that vision, because Beijing has also been responding to Washington’s anti-Chinese involvement with especially Vietnam and the Philippines, its other neighbors in the Western Pacific.
The resulting anti–Chinese predisposition in the region perfectly suited the ‘pivot’, which has been Hillary Clinton’s program to develop greater muscle to curtail China’s influence. The American military, which maintains bases all over China’s neighboring soil, is not prepared to share power in the the Western Pacific, and Japan plays an important part in all this, even extending to current Prime Minister Abe’s reinterpretation of the famous pacifist clause in Japan’ constitution.
The countries that are part of what used to be called the free world on both sides of the Eurasian continent ought to be better aware of a political reality illustrated by the above details. They add up to a picture of a self-proclaimed order keeper with the right to ignore sovereignty and the right, or even the duty, to set things straight in other countries that just might in future develop a genuine challenge to its own mastery over the planet. On the European side this has been revealed in this year as a powerful brake on further development of economic relations between Russia and the member states of the European Union. On the Asian-Pacific side Japan was becoming a threat to the purposes of the ‘pivot’ toward Asia as it made openings for better relations with China. Global diplomacy has gone out of the window in the meantime. Neither European countries nor Japan can, under current circumstances, engage properly with their gigantic neighbors. For a variety of reasons the powers that make a difference in the United States have demonstrated that they are comfortable with a reignited Cold War, this time without communism.
One need not delve deeply in the internet to find unequivocal repetition by American officials in positions of power of what has become known as the ‘Wolfowitz Doctrine’, according to which the United States ought not ever allow rivals to emerge to challenge its global dominance. It does not do diplomacy.
In Europe we can detect a certain degree of subconscious nostalgia for the Cold War. After all, it supplied for almost everyone of my generation, and the one after it, a fairly trustworthy handrail to steady oneself in moments of geopolitical turbulence. We grew up with the political epistemology it created; the source of knowledge about what was ultimately good or bad.
Hence it is easy to sit idly by while an even later and even less worldly-wise generation of politicians at the top responds to the seduction of a power that once represented the good guys, and was the main architect of the post-World War II relatively peaceful and relatively stable world order. It is seductive for Europeans to sit back and allow that power to continue taking the lead. Shared values, and all that sort of thing. How can one argue against such a perspective on planetary political reality today?
Think again. What should be pointed out is that those supposedly superior shared values are a crock of nonsense. But most importantly that full spectrum dominance does not constitute a feasible strategy; it is a dangerous fantasy among institutions that are not supervised by a politically effective coordinating center, hence are not on any leash. What they do is of a dangerous silliness rarely seen in history, at least for such an extended period. When we cheer NATO and its new initiatives for a rapid deployment force to be used potentially against the renewed enemy in Moscow, and when we cheer the supposedly great achievement of the European Union unanimously to endorse sanctions against that same new enemy, when we join the choir denouncing an imagined inherently aggressive China, we are encouraging a bunch of incompetent, politically immature zealots as they trigger chains of events whose likely dire consequences we could not possibly desire.

(45) — The Insidious Power of Propaganda (02 Sept 2014)

Karel van Wolferen — Wed, 03 Sep 2014 14:12:09 +0000

To study the effects of political propaganda in what used to be called the ‘free world’ there could hardly be a better time than now. We are living through an instance of insidious propaganda that has clean contours. It fills a common need. In a period of large-scale slaughter and other man-made disaster the morally conscious person can do with some clear categories of good and bad, desirable and despicable. Political certainty, in other words. You can even sell wars using ‘moral clarity’ as a sales pitch, as happened with Iraq and Afghanistan.
Good-evil classification is easy enough when we have imprisoned journalists decapitated by jihadis. Those who “will do something about that” are automatically placed in the ‘good guys’ category. But there is a problem of murkiness in this sample. Syria’s Assad has been listed for years at the top of the bad guy list, and yet he appears to be changing into something of an ally of those who are intent now on setting things straight. On top of which, the fact that the radical islamists out of which ISIS emerged were funded and encouraged by the United States and its Arab allies is not a deep secret, and the fact that none of this mayhem would now exist were it not for the sorcerer’s apprentice effect of the decapitation of the Iraqi state in 2003 has been pretty much agreed on.
The Ukraine sample is more clear-cut. Here we have fighters for democracy and other Western values in Kiev vs a character who is throwing a spanner in the works, who does not respect the sovereignty of neighbors, and whose intransigence does not lessen, no matter what sanctions you throw at him.
The story of the downed plane with 298 dead people is no longer news, and the investigation as to who shot it down? Don’t hold your breath. Last week Dutch viewers of a TV news program were informed about something that had been doing the rounds on internet samizdat: the countries participating in the MH17 investigation have signed a nondisclosure agreement. Any of the participants (which include Kiev) has the right to veto publication of the results without explanation. The truth about the cause of the horrifying fate of the 298 appears to have been already settled by propaganda. That means that although there has been no shred of evidence that the official story of the ‘rebels’ shooting down the plane with Russian involvement, it remains a justification for sanctions against Russia.
After the crisis slogged along for weeks with further bloodshed and bombing devastation, and anxious NATO grumbling about whether Putin’s white trucks with humanitarian relief supplies could possibly amount to a fifth column, interest in the Ukraine crisis has reached another peak in the mainstream media with an alleged Russian invasion to aid the ‘rebels’. On September 1st the NY-Times carried an oped article announcing that “Russia and Ukraine are now at war”. Another propaganda product? It certainly looks like it. Foreign volunteers, even French ones, appear to have joined the ‘rebels’ and most of them are likely to be Russian – don’t forget that the fighters of Donetsk and Lugansk have neighbors and relations just across the border. But as the new Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Donetsk National Republic Alexander Zakharchenko answered a foreign reporter at his press conference: if there were Russian military units fighting beside his forces they could already have moved on Kiev. From sparse information one gets the impression that his forces are doing rather well on their own without the Russians. They are also helped along by deserting Kiev troops who lack enthusiasm for killing their Eastern brethren.
Dispassionate editors have hardly any direct means to find out what may be happening on the ground in Donetsk and Lugansk, because they cannot send experienced reporters to where the fighting takes place. The astronomical insurance costs involved cannot be met by their budgets. So we have little more to go on than what we can glean from some internet sites with good track records.
The propaganda line from the State Department and the White House on the MH17 disaster became less emphatic after US intelligence analysts – leaking opinion to reporters – refused to play ball, but it is back in force on the Russian invasion theme, while the good-evil scheme is still maintained and nurtured by sundry American publications. These include some that have a reputation to uphold, like Foreign Policy, or that once were considered relatively liberal-minded beacons, like The New Republic, whose demise as a relatively reliable source of political knowledge we ought to mourn.
It has only been in the last few days that an exceptional article in Foreign Affairs, by the exceptional scholar of geopolitics, John Mersheimer, is beginning to register. Mersheimer lays most of the responsibility for the Ukraine crisis where it belongs: Washington and its European allies. “U.S. and European leaders blundered in attempting to turn Ukraine into a Western stronghold on Russia’s border. Now that the consequences have been laid bare, it would be an even greater mistake to continue this misbegotten policy.” It will take time before this analysis reaches and convinces some serious European editors. Another sane voice is Stephen Cohen’s, who ought to be the first author anyone hoping to understand Putin’s Russia should read. But ‘patriotic heretics’, as he calls himself, are now very badly treated in print, with he himself being raked over the coals by the New Republic.
The mark of successful propaganda is the manner in which it creeps up on the unsuspecting reader or TV audience. It does that by means of throwaway remarks, expressing relatively fleeting between-the-lines thinking in reviews of books or films, or articles on practically anything. It is all around us, but take one example from the Harvard Business Review, in which its executive editor, Justin Fox, asks: “Why would Russian President Vladimir Putin push his country into a standoff with the West that is almost certain to hurt its economy?” My question to this author – one with sometimes quite apt economic analysis to his name – “how do you know that Putin is doing the pushing?” Fox quotes Daniel Drezner, and says it may be true that Putin “doesn’t care about the same things the West cares about” and is “perfectly happy to sacrifice economic growth for reputation and nationalist glory.” This kind of drivel is everywhere; it says that when dealing with Putin we are dealing with revanchism, with ambition to re-create the Soviet Union without communism, with macho fantasies, and a politician waylaid by totalitarian ambitions.
What makes propaganda effective is the manner in which, through its between-the-lines existence, it inserts itself into the brain as tacit knowledge. Our tacit understanding of things is by definition not focused, it helps us understand other things. The assumptions it entails are settled, no longer subject to discussion. Tacit knowledge is out of reach for new evidence or improved logical analysis. Bringing its assumptions back into focused consciousness is a tiresome process generally avoided with a sigh of “let’s move on”. Tacit knowledge is highly personal knowledge. It is obviously shared, since it has been derived from what is out there in the way of certainties adopted by society, but it has been turned into our very own knowledge, and therefore into something we are inclined to defend, if necessary with tooth and nail. Less curious minds feel they have a ‘right’ to its truth.
The propaganda that originates in Washington, and continues to be faithfully followed by institutions like the BBC and the vast majority of the European mainstream media, has made no room for the question whether the inhabitants of Donetsk and Lugansk have perhaps a perfectly good reason to be fighting a Russophobe regime with an anti-Russian language strategy that replaced the one they had voted for, a good enough reason to risk the bombings of their public buildings, hospitals and dwellings.
The propaganda line is one of simple Russian aggression. Putin has been fomenting the unrest in the Russian-speaking part of the Ukraine. Nowhere in the mainstream media have I seen reporting and images of the devastation wrought by Kiev troops, which eyewitnesses have compared to what the world was shown of Gaza. The implied opinions of CNN or BBC are taken at face value, the ‘social media’ quoted by a spokesperson for the State Department are taken at face value. All information that does not accord with this successful propaganda must be neutralized which can be done, for example, by labeling Russia Today as Moscow’s propaganda organ.
This dominant propaganda thrives because of Atlanticism, a European faith that holds that the world will not run properly if the United States is not accepted as its primary political conductor, and Europe should not get in America’s way. There is unsophisticated Atlanticism noticeable in the Netherlands, with voices on the radio expressing anguish about the Russian enemy at the gates, and there is sophisticated Atlanticism among defenders of NATO who can come up with a multitude of historical reasons for why it should continue to exist. The first is too silly for words, and the second can easily be rebutted. But one does not deal that easily with the intellectually most seductive kind of Atlanticism that comes with an appeal to reasonableness.
When an earlier wave of propaganda hit Europe 11 years ago, before the invasion of Iraq, sober scholars and commentators, appealing to reasonableness appeared from behind their desks in an effort to repair what was at that time a European crisis of confidence in the political wisdom of an American government. It was then that the principle of “without America it will not work” became enshrined. This Atlanticist tenet is quite understandable among a political elite that after more than half a century of relative safe comfort inside an alliance suddenly must begin contemplating the earlier taken-for-granted security of their own countries. But there was more to it than that. The invocation of a higher understanding of the Atlantic Alliance and the plea for renewed understandings to reinvigorate it, amounted to a poignant cry of decent friends who could not face the reality of their loss.
The hurt required ointment, and that was delivered in large dollops. Venerable European public intellectuals and highly placed officials sent joint open letters to George W. Bush, with urgent pleas to repair relations and formulas of how this might be achieved. On lower levels, editorial writers entered the action as proponents of reasonableness. Amid expressions of disgust with America’s new foreign policy, many wrote and spoke about the need to heal rifts, build bridges, renew mutual understanding, and so on. In the summer of 2003, the unambiguous opponents of a hasty invasion of Iraq appeared to be softening the sharp edges of their earlier positions. My favorite example, the Oxford historian and prolific commentator Timothy Garten Ash, widely viewed as the voice of reason, churned out articles and books overflowing with transatlantic balm. New possibilities were discovered, new leafs and pages were turned. It had “to come from both sides”, so ran the general tenor of these pleas and instructive editorials. Europe had to change as well! But how, in this context, remained unclear. There is no doubt that Europe should have changed. But in the context of American militarism that discussion ought to have revolved around the function of NATO, and its becoming a European liability, not around meeting the United States half-way. That did not happen and, as has been shown this past month, energies for European opposition to the propaganda in 2003 appear now to have dissipated almost completely.
Garten Ash is back at it again, writing in the Guardian of 1 August 2014, with the contention that “most western Europeans slept through Putin’s anschluss of Crimea”. ‘Anschluss’? Are we sinking to Hitler metaphors? He does not have to try very hard this time, not rising above the cliches of a newspaper editorial espousing the necessity of sanctions; importantly, he does not apologize this time for any possible American role in the crisis. The propaganda of this year is given a free reign, through an Atlanticist faith that was restored to greater strength by the fount of illusions that is the Obama presidency. It is tacit knowledge, requiring no special defense because it is what all reasonable people know to be reasonable.
Atlanticism is an affliction that blinds Europe. It does this so effectively that in every salon where the hot topics of today are discussed the ever present elephant is consistently left out of consideration. What I read in mainstream news and commentary about Ukraine is about Kiev and the ‘separatists’ and especially about Putin’s motives. The reason for this half-picture is clear, I think: Atlanticism demands the overlooking of the American factor in world events, except if that factor can be construed as positive. If that is not possible you avoid it. Another reason is simple ignorance. Not enough concerned and educated Dutch people appear to have traced the rise and influence of America’s neocons, or have an inkling that Samantha Power believes that Putin must be eliminated. They have no idea how the various institutions of American government relate to each other, and how much they lead lives of their own, without effective supervision of any central entity that is capable of developing a feasible foreign policy that makes sense for the United States itself.
Propaganda reduces everything to comic book simplicity. This has no room for subtleties, such as what will await the people under the government in Kiev as demands of the IMF are followed up. Think of Greece. It has no room for even the not-so-subtle frequently expressed desire by Putin that there ought to be diplomacy with an eye to achieving a kind of federal arrangement whereby East and West Ukraine remain within the same country, but have a significant amount of self government (something that may no longer be acceptable to the Easterners as Kiev goes on bombing them). Comic book imagery does not allow for the bad guys having good and reasonable ideas. And so the primary wish of Putin, the fundamental reason for his involvement in this crisis at all, that the Ukraine will not become part of NATO, cannot be part of the pictures. The rather obvious and only acceptable condition, and one predictably insisted on by any Russian president who wants to stay in power, is a nonaligned neutral Ukraine.
The instigators of the Ukraine crisis work from desks in Washington. They have designed a shift in American attitudes toward Russia with a decision to turn it into (their language) “a pariah state”. Leading up to the February coup they helped anti-Russian, and rightwing forces hijack a protest movement demanding more democracy. The notion that the Kiev controlled population have been given more democracy is of course ludicrous.
There are serious writers on Russia who have become morally indignant and angry with developments in Russian life in recent years under Putin. This is a different subject from the Ukraine crisis, but their influence helps inform lots of propaganda. Ben Judah, who wrote the abovementioned NY Times oped is a good example. I think I understand their indignation, and I sympathize with them to some extent. I’m familiar with this phenomenon as I’ve seen it often enough among journalists writing about China or even Japan. In the case of China and Russia their indignation is prompted by an accumulation of things that in their eyes have gone entirely wrong because of measures by the authorities that appear to be regressive and diverging from what they were supposed to be doing in consonance with liberal ideas. This indignation can overwhelm everything else. It becomes a mist through which these authors cannot discern how powerholders try to cope with dire situations.

In the case of Russia there appears to have been little attention recently to the fact that when Putin inherited a Russia to rule, he inherited a state that was no longer functioning as one, and that demanded first of all a reconcentration of power at the center. Russia was economically ruined under Yeltsin, helped by numerous Western predatory interests and misguided market fundamentalists from Harvard. After abolishing communism, they were seduced to try an instantaneous switch to American style capitalism, while there were no institutions whatsoever to underpin such a thing. They privatized the huge state-owned industries without having a private sector; something you cannot quickly create out of nothing, as is vividly shown by Japanese history. So what they got was kleptocratic capitalism, with stolen state assets, which gave birth to the notorious oligarchs. It as good as destroyed the relatively stable Russian middle class, and made Russian life expectancy plummet.

Of course Putin wants to curtail foreign NGOs. They can do lots of damage by destabilizing his government. Foreign-funded think tanks do not exist for thinking, but for peddling policies in line with the beliefs of the funders that they, not wanting to learn from recent experience, dogmatically assume are good for anyone at any time. It is a subject that at best very tangentially belongs to the current Ukraine story, but it has prepared the intellectual soil for the prevailing propaganda.

Does what I have said make me a Putin fan? I do not know him, and know not enough about him. When I try to remedy this with recent literature, I cannot avoid the impression that I have to wade through a great deal of villification, and in the mainstream media I see no serious attempt to figure out what Putin may be trying to achieve, except for the nonsense about re-establishing a Russian empire. There has been no evidence at all of imperialist ambitions or the fact that he had his sights set on the Crimea before the coup, and before the NATO ambitions of the Russophobes who came out on top, endangered the Russian naval base there.
Does what I have said make me anti-American? Being accorded that label is almost inevitable, I suppose. I think that the United States is living through a seemingly endless tragedy. And I am deeply sympathetic to those concerned Americans, among them many of my friends, who must wrestle with this.

(44) The Ukraine, Corrupted Journalism, and the Atlanticist Faith (9Aug 2014)

Karel van Wolferen — Mon, 11 Aug 2014 10:01:56 +0000

The European Union is not (anymore) guided by politicians with a grasp of history, a sober assesment of global reality, or simple common sense connected with the longterm interests of what they are guiding. If any more evidence was needed, it has certainly been supplied by the sanctions they have agreed on last week aimed at punishing Russia.
     One way to fathom their foolishness is to start with the media, since whatever understanding or concern these politicians may have personally they must be seen to be doing the right thing, which is taken care of by TV and newspapers.
     In much of the European Union the general understanding of global reality since the horrible fate of the people on board the Malaysian Airliner comes from mainstream newspapers and TV which have copied the approach of Anglo-American mainstream media, and have presented ‘news’ in which insinuation and villification substitute for proper reporting. Respected publications, like the Financial Times or the once respected NRC Handelsblad of The Netherlands for which I worked sixteen years as East Asia Correspondent, not only joined in with this corrupted journalism but helped guide it to mad conclusions. The punditry and editorials that have grown out of this have gone further than anything among earlier examples of sustained media hysteria stoked for political purposes that I can remember. The most flagrant example I have come across, an anti-Putin leader in the (July 26) Economist Magazine, had the tone of Shakespeare’s Henry V exhorting his troops before the battle of Agincourt as he invaded France.
     One should keep in mind that there are no European-wide newspapers or publications to sustain a European public sphere, in the sense of a means for politically interested Europeans to ponder and debate with each other big international developments. Because those interested in world affairs usually read the international edition of the New York Times or the Financial Times, questions and answers on geopolitical matters are routinely shaped or strongly influenced by what editors in New York and London have determined as being important. Thinking that may deviate significantly as can now be found in Der Spiegel, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Zeit and Handelsblatt, does not travel across German borders. Hence we do not see anything like a European opinion evolving on global affairs, even when these have a direct impact on the interests of the European Union itself.
     The Dutch population was rudely shaken out of a general complacency with respect to world events that could affect it, through the death of 193 fellow nationals (along with a 105 people of other nationalities) in the downed plane, and its media were hasty in following the American-initiated fingerpointing at Moscow. Explanations that did not in some way involve culpability of the Russian president seemed to be out of bounds. This was at odds right away with statements of a sober Dutch prime minister, who was under considerable pressure to join the fingerpointing but who insisted on waiting for a thorough examination of what precisely had happened.
     The TV news programs I saw in the days immediately afterwards had invited, among other anti–Russian expositors, American neocon-linked talking heads to do the disclosing to a puzzled and truly shaken up audience. A Dutch foreign policy specialist explained that the foreign minister or his deputy could not go to the site of the crash (as Malaysian officials did) to recover the remains of Dutch citizens, because that would amount to an implicit recognition of diplomatic status for the “separatists”. When the European Union en bloc recognizes a regime that has come into existence through an American initiated coup d’état, you are diplomatically stuck with it.
     The inhabitants and anti-Kiev fighters at the crash site were portrayed, with images from youtube, as uncooperative criminals, which for many viewers amounted to a confirmation of their guilt. This changed when later reports from actual journalists showed shocked and deeply concerned villagers, but the discrepancy was not explained, and earlier assumptions of villainy did not make way for any objective analysis of why these people might be fighting at all. Tendentious twitter and youtube ‘news’ had become the basis for official Dutch indignation with the East Ukrainians, and a general opinion arose that something had to be set straight, which was, again in general opinion, accomplished by a grand nationally televised reception of the human remains (released through Malaysian mediation) in a dignified sober martial ceremony.
     Nothing that I have seen or read even intimated that the Ukraine crisis – which led to coup and civil war – was created by neoconservatives and a few R2P (“Responsibility to Protect”) fanatics in the State Department and the White House, apparently given a free hand by President Obama. The Dutch media also appeared unaware that the catastrophe was immediately turned into a political football for White House and State Department purposes. The likelihood that Putin was right when he said that the catastrophe would not have happened if his insistence on a cease-fire had been accepted, was not entertained.
     As it was, Kiev broke the cease-fire – on the 10th of June – in its civil war against Russian speaking East Ukrainians who do not wish to be governed by a collection of thugs, progeny of Ukrainian nazis, and oligarchs enamored of the IMF and the European Union. The supposed ‘rebels’ have been responding to the beginnings of ethnic cleansing operations (systematic terror bombing and atrocities – 30 or more Ukrainians burned alive) committed by Kiev forces, of which little or nothing has penetrated into European news reports.
     It is unlikely that the American NGOs, which by official admission spent 5 billion dollars in political destabilization efforts prior to the February putsch in Kiev, have suddenly disappeared from the Ukraine, or that America’s military advisors and specialized troops have sat idly by as Kiev’s military and militias mapped their civil war strategy; after all, the new thugs are as a regime on financial life-support provided by Washington, the European Union and IMF. What we know is that Washington is encouraging the ongoing killing in the civil war it helped trigger.
     But Washington has constantly had the winning hand in a propaganda war against, entirely contrary to what mainstream media would have us believe, an essentially unwilling opponent. Waves of propaganda come from Washington and are made to fit assumptions of a Putin, driven and assisted by a nationalism heightened by the loss of the Soviet empire, who is trying to expand the Russian Federation up to the borders of that defunct empire. The more adventurous punditry, infected by neocon fever, has Russia threatening to envelop the West. Hence Europeans are made to believe that Putin refuses diplomacy, while he has been urging this all along. Hence prevailing propaganda has had the effect that not Washington’s but Putin’s actions are seen as dangerous and extreme. Anyone with a personal story that places Putin or Russia in a bad light must move right now; Dutch editors seem insatiable at the moment.
There is no doubt that the frequently referred to Moscow propaganda exists. But there are ways for serious journalists to weigh competing propaganda and discern how much veracity or lies and bullshit they contain. Within my field of vision this has only taken place a bit in Germany. For the rest we must piece political reality together relying on the now more than ever indispensable American websites hospitable to whistleblowers and old-fashioned investigative journalism, which especially since the onset of the ‘war on terrorism’ and the Iraq invasion have formed a steady form of samizdat publishing.
     In The Netherlands almost anything that comes from the State Department is taken at face value. America’s history, since the demise of the Soviet Union, of truly breathtaking lies: on Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Venezuela, Libya and North Korea; its record of overthrown governments; its black-op and false flag operations; and its stealthily garrisoning of the planet with some thousand military bases, is conveniently left out of consideration. The near hysteria throughout a week following the downed airliner prevented people with some knowledge of relevant history from opening their mouths. Job security in the current world of journalism is quite shaky, and going against the tide would be almost akin to siding with the devil, as it would damage one’s journalistic ‘credibility’.
What strikes an older generation of serious journalists as questionable about the mainstream media’s credibility is editorial indifference to potential clues that would undermine or destroy the official story line; a story line that has already permeated popular culture as is evident in throwaway remarks embellishing book and film reviews along with much else. In The Netherlands the official story is already carved in stone, which is to be expected when it is repeated ten-thousand times. It cannot be discounted, of course, but it is based on not a shred of evidence.
     The presence of two Ukrainian fighterplanes near the Malaysian airliner on Russian radar would be a potential clue I would be very interested in if I were investigating either as journalist or member of the investigation team that The Netherlands has officially been put in charge of. This appeared to be corroborated by a BBC Report with eyewitness accounts from the ground by villagers who clearly saw another plane, a fighter, close to the airliner, near the time of its crash, and heard explosions coming from the sky. This report has recently drawn attention because it was removed from the BBC’s archive. I would want to talk with Michael Bociurkiw, one of the first inspectors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to reach the crash site who spent more than a week examining the wreckage and has described on CBC World News two or three “really pock-marked” pieces of fuselage. “It almost looks like machine gun fire; very, very strong machine gun fire that has left these unique marks that we haven’t seen anywhere else.”
     I would certainly also want to have a look at the allegedly confiscated radar and voice records of the Kiev Air Control Tower to understand why the Malaysian pilot veered off course and rapidly descended shortly before his plane crashed, and find out whether foreign aircontrollers in Kiev were indeed sent packing immediately after the crash. Like the “Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity”, I would certainly urge the American authorities with access to satellite images to show the evidence they claim to have of BUK missile batteries in ‘rebel’ hands as well as of Russian involvement, and ask them why they have not done so already. Until now Washington has acted like a driver who refuses a breathalyzer test. Since intelligence officials have leaked to some American newspapers their lesser certainty about the American certainties as brought to the world by the Secretary of State, my curiosity would be unrelenting.
     To place European media loyalty to Washington in the Ukraine case as well as the slavish conduct of European politicians in perspective, we must know about and understand Atlanticism. It is a European faith. It has not given rise to an official doctrine, of course, but it functions like one. It is well summed up by the Dutch slogan at the time of the Iraq invasion: “zonder Amerika gaat het niet” (without the United States [things] [it] won’t work). Needless to say, the Cold War gave birth to Atlanticism. Ironically, it gained strength as the threat from the Soviet Union became less persuasive for increasing numbers among European political elites. That probably was a matter of generational change: the farther away from World War II, the less European governments remembered what it means to have an independent foreign policy on global-sized issues. Current heads of government of the European Union are unfamiliar with practical strategic deliberations. Routine thought on international relations and global politics is deeply entrenched in Cold War epistemology.
     This inevitably also informs ‘responsible’ editorial policies. Atlanticism is now a terrible affliction for Europe: it fosters historical amnesia, willful blindness and dangerously misconceived political anger. But it thrives on a mixture of lingering unquestioned Cold War era certainties about protection, Cold War loyalties embedded in popular culture, sheer European ignorance, and an understandable reluctance to concede that one has even for a little bit been brainwashed. Washington can do outrageous things while leaving Atlanticism intact because of everyone’s forgetfulness, which the media do little or nothing to cure. I know Dutch people who have become disgusted with the villification of Putin, but the idea that in the context of Ukraine the fingerpointing should be toward Washington is well-nigh unacceptable. Hence, Dutch publications, along with many others in Europe, cannot bring themselves to place the Ukraine crisis in proper perspective by acknowledging that Washington started it all, and that Washington rather than Putin has the key to its solution. It would impel a renunciation of Atlanticism.
     Atlanticism derives much of its strength through NATO, its institutional embodiment. The reason for NATO’s existence, which disappeard with the demise of the Soviet Union, has been largely forgotten. Formed in 1949, it was based on the idea that transatlantic cooperation for security and defense had become necessary after World War II in the face of a communism, orchestrated by Moscow, intent on taking over the entire planet. Much less talked about was European internal distrust, as the Europeans set off on their first moves towards economic integration. NATO constituted a kind of American guarantee that no power in Europe would ever try to dominate the others.
NATO has for some time now been a liability for the European Union, as it prevents development of concerted European foreign and defense policies, and has forced the member states to become instruments serving American militarism.
     It is also a moral liability because the governments participating in the ‘coalition of the willing’ have had to sell the lie to their citizens that European soldiers dying in Iraq and Afghanistan have been a necessary sacrifice to keep Europe safe from terrorists. Governments that have supplied troops to areas occupied by the United States have generally done this with considerable reluctance, earning the reproach from a succession of American officials that Europeans do too little for the collective purpose of defending democracy and freedom.
As is the mark of an ideology, Atlanticism is ahistorical. As horse medicine against the torment of fundamental political ambiguity it supplies its own history: one that may be rewritten by American mainstream media as they assist in spreading the word from Washington.
     There could hardly be a better demonstration of this than the Dutch experience at the moment. In conversations these past three weeks I have encountered genuine surprise when reminding friends that the Cold War ended through diplomacy with a deal made on Malta between Gorbachev and the elder Bush in December 1989, in which James Baker got Gorbachev to accept the reunification of Germany and withdrawal of Warsaw Pact troops with a promise that NATO would not be extended even one inch to the East. Gorbachev pledged not to use force in Eastern Europe where the Russians had some 350,000 troops in East Germany alone, in return for Bush’s promise that Washington would not take advantage of a Soviet withdrawal from Eastern Europe. Bill Clinton reneged on those American promises when, for purely electoral reasons, he boasted about an enlargement of NATO and in 1999 made the Czech Republic and Hungary full members. Ten years later another nine countries became members, at which point the number of NATO countries was double the number during the Cold War. The famous American specialist on Russia, Ambassador George Kennan, originator of Cold War containment policy, called Clinton’s move “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era.”
     Historical ignorance abetted by Atlanticism is poignantly on display in the contention that the ultimate proof in the case against Vladimir Putin is his invasion of Crimea. Again, political reality here was created by America’s mainstream media. There was no invasion, as the Russian sailors and soldiers were already there since it is home to the ‘warm water’ Black Sea base for the Russian navy. Crimea has been a part of Russia for as long as the United States has existed. In 1954 Khrushchev, who himself came from the Ukraine, gave it to the Ukrainian Socialist Republic, which came down to moving a region to a different province, since Russia and Ukraine still belonged to the same country. The Russian speaking Crimean population was happy enough, as it voted in a referendum first for independence from the Kiev regime that resulted from the coup d’état, and subsequently for reunification with Russia.
     Those who maintain that Putin had no right to do such a thing are unaware of another strand of history in which the United States has been moving (Star Wars) missile defense systems ever closer to Russian borders, supposedly to intercept hostile missiles from Iran, which do not exist. Sanctimonious talk about territorial integrity and sovereignty makes no sense under these circumstances, and coming from a Washington that has done away with the concept of sovereignty in its own foreign policy it is downright ludicrous.
     A detestable Atlanticist move was the exclusion of Putin from the meetings and other events connected with the commemoration of the Normandy landings, for the first time in 17 years. The G8 became the G7 as a result. Amnesia and ignorance have made the Dutch blind to a history that directly concerned them, since the Soviet Union took the heart out of the Nazi war machine (that occupied The Netherlands) at a cost of incomparable and unimaginable mumbers of military dead; without that there would not have been a Normandy invasion.
     Not so long ago, the complete military disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan appeared to be moving NATO to a point where its inevitable demise could not to be too far off. But the Ukraine crisis and Putin’s decisiveness in preventing the Crimea with its Russian Navy base from possibly falling into the hands of the American-owned alliance, has been a godsend to this earlier faltering institution.
NATO leadership has already been moving troops to strengthen their presence in the Baltic states, sending missiles and attack aircraft to Poland and Lithuania, and since the downing of the Malaysian airliner it has been preparing further military moves that may turn into dangerous provocations of Russia. It has become clear that the Polish foreign minister together with the Baltic countries, none of which partook in NATO when its reason for being could still be defended, have become a strong driving force behind it. A mood of mobilisation has spread in the past week. The ventriloquist dummies Anders Fogh Rasmussen and Jaap de Hoop Scheffer can be relied upon to take to TV screens inveighing against NATO memberstate backsliding. Rasmussen, the current Secretary General, declared on August 7 in Kiev that NATO’s “support for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine is unwavering” and that he is looking to strengthen partnership with the country at the Alliance’s summit in Wales in September. That partnership is already strong, so he said, “and in response to Russia’s aggression, NATO is working even more closely with Ukraine to reform its armed forces and defence institutions.”
     In the meantime, in the American Congress 23 Senate Republicans have sponsored legislation, the “Russian Aggression Prevention Act”, which is meant to allow Washington to make the Ukraine a non-NATO ally and could set the stage for a direct military conflict with Russia. We will probably have to wait until after America’s midterm elections to see what will become of it, but it already helps provide a political excuse for those in Washington who want to take next steps in the Ukraine.
     In September last year Putin helped Obama by making it possible for him to stop a bombing campaign against Syria pushed by the neocons, and had also helped in defusing the nuclear dispute with Iran, another neocon project. This led to a neocon commitment to break the Putin-Obama link. It is hardly a secret that the neoconservatives desire the overthrow of Putin and eventual dismemberment of the Russian Federation. Less known in Europe is the existence of numerous NGO’s at work in Russia, which will help them with this. Vladimir Putin could strike now or soon, to preempt NATO and the American Congress, by taking Eastern Ukraine, something he probably should have done right after the Crimean referendum. That would, of course, be proof of his evil intentions in European editorial eyes.
     In the light of all this, one of the most fateful questions to ask in current global affairs is: what has to happen for Europeans to wake up to the fact that Washington is playing with fire and has ceased being the protector they counted on, and is instead now endangering their security? Will the moment come when it becomes clear that the Ukraine crisis is, most of all, about placing Star Wars missile batteries along an extensive stretch of Russian border, which gives Washington – in the insane lingo of nuclear strategists – ‘first strike’ capacity?
     It is beginning to sink in among older Europeans that the United States has enemies who are not Europe’s enemies because it needs them for domestic political reasons; to keep an economically hugely important war industry going and to test by shorthand the political bona fides of contenders for public office. But while using rogue states and terrorists as targets for ‘just wars’ has never been convincing, Putin’s Russia as demonized by a militaristic NATO could help prolong the transatlantic status quo. The truth behind the fate of the Malaysian airliner, I thought from the moment that I heard about it, would be politically determined. Its black boxes are in London. In NATO hands?
     Other hindrances to an awakening remain huge; financialization and neoliberal policies have produced an intimate transatlantic entwining of plutocratic interests. Together with the Atlanticist faith these have helped stymie the political development of the European Union, and with that Europe’s ability to proceed with independent political decisions. Since Tony Blair, Great Britain has been in Washington’s pocket, and since Nicolas Sarkozy one can say more or less the same of France.
     That leaves Germany. Angela Merkel was clearly unhappy with the sanctions, but in the end went along because she wants to remain on the good side of the American president, and the United States as the conqueror in World War II does still have leverage through a variety of agreements. Germany’s foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, quoted in newspapers and appearing on TV, repudiated the sanctions and points at Iraq and Libya as examples of the results brought by escalation and ultimatums, yet he too swings round and in the end goes along with them.
     Der Spiegel is one of the German publications that offer hope. One of its columnists, Jakob Augstein, attacks the “sleepwalkers” who have agreed to sanctions, and censures his colleagues’ fingerpointing at Moscow. Gabor Steingart, who publishes Handelsblatt, inveighs against the “American tendency to verbal and then to military escalation, the isolation, demonization, and attacking of enemies” and concludes that also German journalism “has switched from level-headed to agitated in a matter of weeks. The spectrum of opinions has been narrowed to the field of vision of a sniper scope.” There must be more journalists in other parts of Europe who say things like this, but their voices do not carry through the din of villification.
     History is being made, once again. What may well determine Europe’s fate is that also outside the defenders of the Atlanticist faith, decent Europeans cannot bring themselves to believe in the dysfunction and utter irresponsibility of the American state.

(43) – Europe’s Subservience to the United States and Neoliberalism (25 Oct 2013)

Karel van Wolferen — Mon, 28 Oct 2013 20:46:18 +0000

The Montesquieu Institute in The Hague gave me an opportunity, last Friday October 25th, to draw attention in The Netherlands to the dreadful European subservience to the United States. In this perhaps most Atlanticist country of Europe, remarks of the kind I make in this context are normally labelled in Dutch as “swearing in church”. But as it happened, in fact in a real church packed with over 600 listeners, the reception was surprisingly welcoming.
Former South African president Frederik Willem de Klerk, who was the other speaker for the “Europe Lecture”, is an engaging person whose demonstrated great political courage is matched with a political intelligence of the kind that allows him quickly to diagnose the state of health of political institutions and their relationships. It was an honour to share the stage with him.

* * *

What does the world think of Europe? It does not much dwell on it, I am afraid.
Our continent is not doing much that makes it an entity about which one should have an opinion at all, except for its undeniable significance as an enormous market. Diplomatically it is virtually invisible; it is not a powerbroker, and it does not offer ideas about good international living that reverberate in other continents. When Japanese, Chinese, Americans, and I suppose people from Africa and South America think about it at all, they do so as an area they may want to visit because of its sublime concentration of tourist attractions; in that respect there is no place quite like it.
When serious observers of international affairs think of Europe they most likely regard it as a realm of unrealized promise. In the earlier stages of European unification, the unifiers and their supporters conceived of their union as something that could and would become nothing less than a good example, something to look up to and for the rest of the world to emulate. There was talk of a “new European century”; of Europe as a paragon of international virtues. One of Europe’s foremost philosophers, Jürgen Habermas, wrote that after solving the problems of welfare systems and government beyond the nation-state, Europe was in a position to defend and promote a cosmopolitan order on the basis of international law.

This kind of optimism used to be fairly widespread, and some of the assumptions that went into it are still taken for granted, as I discovered at the University of Amsterdam. The claim to superior political virtue and other self-congratulation have, in fact, produced rather supercilious attitudes even now, which understandably irritate non-Europeans.

The thinking of outsiders contrasting reality with earlier expectations is not much different, then, to what a vast number of people inside the Union think. With Europeans themselves the reality comes across as consisting more sharply of broken promises with respect to everyday matters, when they see welfare provisions dwindle, job security eroded, and proliferating nonsensical rules coming out of Brussels. The central technocracy, moreover, has helped create a smoke-screen behind which national governments may hide, and escape accountability.
In the Southen nations and Ireland, things are of course much worse.
Which brings us right away to what the euro crisis demonstrates: a basic failure at the root of most of Europe’s other failures. It is, by now, fairly well-known that the architects of the euro understood perfectly well that the political underpinnings for the common currency were not there. We also know that these pioneers were confident that this gaping hole where a political fundament ought to have been would be repaired, when necessity forced their successors to get going on that.
Optimism of these architects of European unification was at the time not cancelled by the simplistic thinking of those who had convinced themselves that you can have an economically integrated Europe, an ever-growing, huge, market without political borders, where trade could flourish unimpeded, without such a thing requiring political institutions for solving the political problems that would inevitably follow from integration. Most prominent among them was Mrs. Thatcher. I had one brief opportunity, by the way, to talk with Mrs. Thatcher personally at a symposium where this very issue had been raised, but it meant nothing to her and she gave no inkling of having any thoughts consonant with the gravity of the subject.
How can such blindness exist? One reason is the disastrous habit of separating economic and political thought. The two subjects live their own unconnected lives at universities and editorial offices. So, while the euro crisis is a political matter, it has been dumped in the laps of mainstream economists who are notoriously uninterested in historical perspective. Furthermore, and connected, is the stepmotherly treatment of everything that has a bearing on power. Economists are scared of the phenomenon. It upsets their models because power does not lend itself to quantification, and because it threatens their belief that they are engaged in a universal science that tells truths independent of time and place. Political scientists, although they have their noses rubbed in it all the time, also prefer to turn their backs on facts of power, for similar reasons, and because they do not want to sound like Marxists. They often use the term ‘power’ when they mean ‘influence’.

There is of course no question that the European Union is a political entity, it cannot be anything less, but through the neglect of political necessities it is a weak and ineffective one.

In discussions about what has gone wrong in social life, the arguments are often cast in moral terms, and so it has been with the failures of Europe. When such an approach leads to a comparison of the caliber of heads of government today with the caliber of political figures in whose footsteps they follow, we may learn something. A moral investigation into motives and priorities helps explain the rather obvious fact that politicians who could make a difference today do not measure up.
But it is unhelpful to put populations under a moral magnifying glass. The frequently heard explanation that an integrated Europe does not have much of a political future since the people in the member countries cannot be expected to get on with each other because of deviating habits or lingering hostility, does not address the core of our problem.
It is more useful to look at structural factors that have helped block the European Union to deliver on expectations and promises.
I want to go into two of them: they are known as Atlanticism and Neoliberalism.

* * *

The quality of a political entity is recognized on the outside by its cohesion and integrity; by its ability to deal with and act upon other political entities; in other words, by its presence in the world besides being a tourist destination and commercial giant.
What is the source of the obvious European debility as a political entity? Well, the countries who have signed up to be a part of the Union have other loyalties. And those loyalties have seriously begun to undermine the original European effort to build excellent political civilization.
The member states do what Washington tells them. Perhaps grudgingly and with distaste, but on global matters they are subservient. This passes for proper conduct among allies. But covered up is the fact that there is no alliance, at least not in the accepted definition of the term. An alliance exists for the purpose of shared goals. There was one once during the Cold War. But after the demise of the common enemy – the communist Soviet Union – the alliance collapsed because of the tranformation into militarism, and the fundamentally altered priorities of its dominant member.
The United States is not the ally Europeans used to have. Command has replaced consultation. Times are long gone when any kind of public conversation between Europeans and Americans about harmful American action has a chance to resonate in American corridors of power. Europe’s erstwhile geopolitical protector, the main architect of the relatively stable post-World War II international system, has become a tragic case of domestic malfunctioning and delusions of unattainable international grandeur.

America’s transformed sets of purposes and methods are, to say the least, inimical to what an integrated Europe was supposed to stand for. Unfortunately European political elites have, epistemologically speaking, remained stuck in the Cold War. We are faced with an American tragedy and a blind free world.
To substitute for the erstwhile alliance are relations of vassalage, of servitude. They have of course not been formally identified for what they are. The transatlantic political arrangement would collapse if reality were acknowledged. But as it looks at the European Union, Washington sees not one political entity, but a collection of vassals; needy subjects who, with varying degrees of reluctance, do as they are told. The Lisbon Treaty has reinforced the vassalage by not substituting a European defense system for NATO.
NATO with its subservient personnel, joint military operations, and strategic outlook is a liability for Europe. After the Cold War it has served as a reservoir of reserve troops for America’s wars that are illegal by the tenets of international law, to which the European Union subscribes. Attempts to substitute new enemies for keeping NATO together have not been credible. The ‘war on terrorism’ is an impossibility. You cannot have a war if you cannot sit down with enemies to negotiate a peace treaty.
I am aware that the Netherlands has probably the highest concentration of Atlanticists, so it would not surprise me if I am standing before a skeptical audience here. But if what I say strikes you as exaggerated and unrealistic, this may be due to the fact that the majority in European populations are only very haphazardly informed by a press that after the Cold War has become shy of exploring to any depth changes in power relations that determine how our democracies are nowadays organized. Neither editorial bureaux nor political elite circles are questioning fundamental “free world” assumptions. More people in high positions than you might think see this clearly enough but they will not say it out loud. Honesty would endanger their future prospects. They are rather a lot like journalists, who worry about their jobs and do not want to be marginalized.
As long as Europe continues to be a composite of separate vassals the hindrance to its further political integration will remain enormous. Again, a political entity takes shape as it responds to other powers. Effective response requires a center capable of strategic thought and action; call it a sense of political accountability. All we see now is a huge emptiness in the heart of Europe.
Europe’s lamentable status is most obvious when we look at global diplomacy. The European Union is not an arbiter of global anything. It is relatively naked, diplomatically speaking, in the face of ever increasing Chinese power, and of a Russia that without question will play a role in all our future. It treats other parts of the world in a manner that suits current Washington preconceptions.
If this were different Europeans would have tuned in with the Bolivarian revolution taking place in Latin America; they would have accepted the Chinese initiative for strategic cooperation; they probably would change their attitudes toward IMF insistence on structural adjustments in keeping with the so-called Washington consensus that have worsened African poverty.

Remember when Schroeder and Chirac denied George W. Bush a Security Council endorsement for the invasion of Iraq? If at that time they had clearly explained to their own citizens and the world that the UN Charter was too valuable for the world to violate, they would by one stroke have established Europe as a primary player on the world’s stage. At the moment, ten years later, Europe’s global influence is, if anything, negative as it helps encourage the United States to hang on to its fantasies.
Anti-Americanism, long a European tradition, has unfortunately made things murkier than necessary. It has helped prevent honest discussion on transatlantic relations by a companion tradition of dismissing critical assesments with the charge that they are inspired by hostile sentiments. Anti-Americanism diverts attention from the tragic metamorphosis that I am talking about.

* * *

One way of gaining perspective on your own situation is to imagine what would happen if you try to extricate yourself from it. Well, it is not easy to escape from the neo-feudalist transatlantic embrace because of the intimidation mechanisms available to Washington, and member states allow themselves to be intimidated. If you think I may have lost a sense of proportion here, please consider the manner in which in Japan the first cabinet formed by a new ruling party, which by the way ended half a century of a virtual one-party system, was in fact overthrown by Washington.
This is not generally known – except in Japanese circles who hope to achieve true national independence – but it was triggered by serious attempts of the new Japanese government to improve relations with next-door China. What you have heard about the Japanese-Chinese quarrel since then has primarily been caused by rightwing political mischief made possible because of the sudden vacuum where a new China policy was being developed. The overthrown Japanese cabinet was getting in the way of Washington’s so-called pivot toward Asia. This recently adopted approach is generally taken to be a set of policies aimed at containing or isolating China. And that, in turn, is part of a paramount aim, inherited from the neoconservatives and known as ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’, which drives American international actions. They are in nobody’s interest, least of all that of the United States itself.
‘Full Spectrum Dominance’ is fantasy. It must substitute for a feasible strategy with which Washington can approach the rest of the world with positive results. Part of the American metamorphosis is a situation in which two of the most important instruments of the state, the military and the financial system, cannot be used effectively by an American government because they are not under political control. It greatly worried President Eisenhower that this might come to pass with the military, when he addressed the nation on TV with his farewell speech and coined the expression military-industrial complex. The reality today is a great deal worse than what Eisenhower imagined.

The connection between an uncontrolled military and an uncontrolled financial system has not been obvious to all, because of that fateful separation of political and economic frames of reference I mentioned earlier. But we need not pursue this at length to see that rather than the state controlling the financial system, things in the United States have turned upside down as bankers and their allies determine policy. And, lo and behold, thanks to a developing transatlantic plutocracy, that phenomenon has crossed the Atlantic as well.

* * *

Which brings us to the other big reason for Europe’s unfulfilled promises that I mentioned – neoliberalism.
Once again, as a result of their reluctance to think about these things in power terms, economists and others who are regarded as professional explainers have not served us well. Post World War II capitalism, the kind almost all of us grew up with, has in recent decades undergone a revolution. One that has changed relations between the citizen and the state.
If on the outside a cohesive stable political entity is known by how it conducts itself among other political entities, on the inside it is known by how it treats its own people. And if it claims to be democratic the question is whether it recognizes them as citizens who matter politically. In other words, does the political entity in question see a public, and understand its responsibility for keeping public facilities in good health?

The term democratic deficit is well-known in European circles. What has had most attention is the inability of the citizens of member states to influence policies developing on the Union level. The European Parliament in Strasbourg is a fledgling institution never given a thought by most Europeans. Because national economic policies of the member states are largely supervised by Brussels, and nationally elected politicians have discovered the convenience of hiding behind European directives, European citizens have become more scathing when referring to democracy at home.
But there is something else, something actually much bigger, that ought to have attention. This is what has happened in between the level where citizens exist and the level of government. In normal states there have, of course, long been politically significant entities between the two that in some way regulate communication between these highest and the lowest political levels of the state, political parties foremost among them. And there have long been institutions in between that are theoretically nonpolitical, in the form of business organisations, which nevertheless have in varying degrees had a significant influence on how policies are arrived at and what form they may take.
It has long been understood that there must be safeguards to make sure that these non-representative but politically significant entities do not arrogate power to a point where it eliminates the relevance of citizens on the political scene. Because too little attention was paid to the necessary political underpinnings for ensuring orderly free-market capitalism, the European Union created a huge space for corporate power to run rampant. Hence in Europe the capitalist revolution has in some respects been pushed along further than even in the United States. Lots of arrangements that accompanied the expansion of the Union were lobbied for, inspired by, and sometimes forced through by the power of politically well-positioned corporations, which made huge profits for example through the privatization of state-owned sectors of formerly communist countries.
An immensely important development, the financialization of large parts of business, must be understood to grasp the full story. It made the rise to high political power of bankers possible, and the intertwining of their tribe with the tribe of politicians, to a point where it sometimes becomes difficult to tell them apart.

* * *

The Greeks, Portuguese, Irish, Spanish and Italians are not guilty of creating the euro crisis. What actually happened is that Europe’s northern Banks had gorged on the so-called poisonous assets created by their counterparts in the United States, which rendered them technically bankrupt. Those of Germany foremost among them. The Merkel government did what governments often do when faced with unspeakable reality: it changed the subject. As a result, in no time North Europeans imagined that those Southerners had something to do with the crisis, especially Greeks who did not work hard and did not pay their taxes.

Let us place the so-called troika that has been put in charge of the crisis, in its proper neoliberal perspective. A prominent role was given to the IMF, an institution with a dismal neocolonial track record of ruining economies in Africa and South America. It had almost been pronounced dead as Latin Americans wanted to have nothing to do with it anymore. But Europe gave it new importance and with that particular move imported the American Treasury as a controlling agent. Look at the ECB, which is forbidden to function as a genuine Central Bank. And while we are at it, look at the most notorious of investment banks, Goldman Sachs. What you will see is their connecting revolving door through which the top people move on their way to new jobs.
How did all this come to be? Aside from the earlier-mentioned intellectual failures, the current situation serves a plutocracy that has emerged unhindered as social-democratic parties all over Europe believed that they had to move with the times and make common cause with financialization, while critical journalism, more and more beholden to corporate power, simply faded away. The evolving situation is very welcome to quite a few individuals and entities that are raking in lots of money.
When the credit crisis hit European shores, the transatlantic plutocracy began to determine what would happen to the euro-zone and with that the European Union. A critical mass of European politicians had been misled to take for granted that the success of Europe’s economies revolved around the continued existence of the present banking system, and it was abundantly clear from the outset that the insolvent banks would be given privileged treatment at the expense of Europe’s citizens.
On to current financial crisis policies that have made many, all over the world, wonder whether the politicians in charge are rational creatures. What is being rescued, or rather what is the target of the rescue attempt, are not the economies of the member states, which is what a mostly credulous European public is made to think, but the insolvent banks in France, in the Netherlands, and most of all in Germany. When German citizens complain that their tax money is wasted on helping the Greeks, they are for the most part unaware that it is actually used for the sake of the balance sheets of their own banks. And to keep this particular set of policies going, everyone in Europe has fallen under the dictates of austerity issued by the masters of finance.

You have, no doubt, heard the expression “marketplace of ideas”. It is a misconceived metaphor, popular because of the notion that markets are the ideal arbiters of what is valuable and what not. Ideas are not traded, they are not scarce, they can be multiplied at no cost to allow millions of people to swallow them, and they are rarely judged by their worth. For a proper metaphor we ought to imagine ideas as capable of creating fevers and epidemics. The notion of necessary austerity to make an economy run better is a virus. It has spread from the United States to everywhere in Europe. It has created an epidemic that has made economies very sick. It could end the European Union if no medication of powerful sound common sense is applied in time.
Starving the public sector as a recipe for economic healing has never worked, aside from isolated cases with very special circumstances. The last time we had something resembling it was in the days of ‘bleeding’ or ‘blood-letting’ as a medical remedy for lots of illnesses. Surgeons in ancient Greece and medieval Europe believed that illness might be caused by an imbalance of ‘humors’ in the body, something to be cured by extracting large amounts of blood from their patients. A fainting patient was considered proof that the treatment was working. The weaker ones naturally died from this. Now, the difference between bloodletting of bygone times and the economic austerity now in vogue – and most gruesomely applied to Greece – is that bloodletting was frequently not fatal, while starving countries’ public sectors leads inexorably to recession and depression.

* * *
This in short is the situation in a Europe where commentators and policymakers have been holding their breath waiting for Angela Merkel to get an election result enabling her to form a coalition that continues to combat non-existent inflation, and continues to hide the rotten state of German banks behind an opinion mist of rhetoric that blames others for what has gone wrong.
The crisis of the European Union is, in the end, a conceptual crisis. One that is being treated by officials who are intellectually crippled through presuppositions derived from ideology and made rigid by opportunism. The medicine-men and women of Europe operate within a universe of thought that has become useful to them, but that is charted with no longer valid mental maps on which revolutionary transmutations have not been registered. In the same way that the Atlantic Alliance that we grew up with is no longer, the post-World-War-II capitalism we grew up with has changed beyond recognition as well. It is the failure of Europe’s politicians to acknowledge this and act accordingly that is wrecking what was once proclaimed as the most interesting and hopeful experiment in modern political history.
Europe as envisaged by its post-World-War-II pioneers is disintegrating. The solidarity that officials invoke is not there. Skeptics are likely to say that it never existed. I disagree. It was destroyed.